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Title: Pretty creatures
Author: William Alexander Gerhardie
Release date: December 18, 2025 [eBook #77496]
Language: English
Original publication: new york: Duffield and Company, 1927
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRETTY CREATURES ***
PRETTY CREATURES
PRETTY
CREATURES
_By_
WILLIAM GERHARDI
[Illustration]
_1927_
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY
_New York City_
Copyright 1927 by
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
_Printed in The United States of America
By The Cornwall Press_
CONTENTS
_The Vanity-Bag_ _Page 3_
_The Big Drum_ _Page 69_
_A Bad End_ _Page 85_
_In The Wood_ _Page 135_
_Tristan Und Isolde_ _Page 153_
_Other Books by William Gerhardi_:
ANTON CHEHOV, _a critical study_.
THE POLYGLOTS, _a novel_.
FUTILITY, _a novel_.
THE VANITY-BAG
PRETTY CREATURES
THE VANITY-BAG
I
It was not that _he_ thought her beautiful; but other people thought so,
which made him think of her as such. And when these others came in
swarms to wrest the prize from him which he had looked on as his own, he
fell in love with her. During his first week in Salzburg, he received a
card from Frau von Kranich: “_As you whish to be introduced to
interesting people, I would like to bring you on Monday next on the 15
February inst. to Professor Hollmann-Blum where there will be a pretty
large party. Please komme to me at a quarter to five o’klock_ P.M. _We
will go together or better still, in the tram car. With my kind regards
yours truly,--Emmy von Kranich._”
Calling, he beheld in the drawing-room with Frau von Kranich a young
girl with clean-cut regularly chiselled features--he remembered
later--of a quite extraordinary beauty. After introducing them: “Mr.
Mackintosh Beck, of America;--Miss Schulz,” Frau von Kranich suddenly
excused herself and went out. There was a pause. “What the devil can I
say?” he thought.
“Do you dance a great deal?” He felt this was a happy shot.
“No,” said the girl.
“I notice that you Austrians dance very differently from us, and I have,
so as not to feel provincial” (he smiled: the girl did not), “gone in
for dancing lessons at Herr Pfleger’s--despite my middle age!” (Again
she did not smile.) “I am told, on good authority, that he is better
than Herr Loewe.”
“No,” said the girl. “Loewe is better than Pfleger.”
“But I think Herr Pfleger dances better then Herr Loewe,” he proffered
tentatively.
The girl smiled a faint smile, as if of compassion for Mr. Beck’s poor
understanding. “No,” she said. “Loewe dances better than Pfleger.”
There was an end of it. Mr. Beck was silent. Frau von Kranich came back
with an enigmatic look on her face which implied: “Well, have you two
young people hit it off?” And Mr. Beck felt sensitive for Fräulein
Schulz, for, beside her, he was no longer young. But Frau von Kranich
was so old that from the vantage-ground of her years the ages of both
Mr. Beck and Fräulein Schulz seemed quantities so small as to appear to
have no visible differentiation. She overtly began the matchmaking. “You
must take long walks together in the spring as soon as the snow begins
to thaw. She must show you round the lakes and up the hills.” Now that
Frau von Kranich, who had no illusions about the hearts of young girls,
was back, Fräulein Schulz ceased to be assertive and became the shy and
diffident young maiden Frau von Kranich must have thought her. When
called upon to speak, she blushed and lowered her lashes. They put on
their coats. Frau von Kranich, very small and old, and carrying a little
pot of flowers in pink tissue-paper, crawled into the tramcar, Mr. Beck
after her; and Fräulein Schulz, murmuring “Kiss the hand,” went her way.
“She’s a beautiful girl--he, he,” said Frau von Kranich. The trolley
rattled on. “She is a Cindrella who is waiting for the golden coach to
halt at her door and for the Prince Charming to alight and offer her the
shoe.” And she pierced him searchingly with her sharp watery old eyes,
as if considering whether he might conceivably pass off as the desired
Prince Charming, and laughed--“He, he, he!”
When they had crawled out of the tram and crawled upstairs into the
flat, they made their way into a hall overcrowded by people’s overcoats,
and added to the huge stack, with the aid of a bewildered parlour-maid,
their own particular contribution. Frau von Kranich crawled towards the
festive birthday table heaped with flowers and deposited thereon the pot
in the pink tissue-paper.
“Ah! ah! Herr Direktor Schulz!” A tall massive man of sixty-five, with
long silver locks, stood in the doorway and now sat down by Frau von
Kranich and talked to her, his big hands moving all the while in little
gestures. Mr. Beck, amid the hum of conversation, was grateful for such
fragments as his ear could catch. “This invidious meanness ...
this--this ... mean invidiousness ... this--how shall I say?” Herr
Schulz was saying, when Frau von Kranich introduced them. “Sit down,”
she said. “He-he-he; you are so tall!”
Mr. Mackintosh Beck _was_ tall. He was not handsome, but he thought he
was; and when at home in Philadelphia the shop-girls stared at him
behind the counter he thought they were admiring his features. From time
to time, when, trying on a new suit at his tailor’s, for example, he
beheld his face in the three mirrors simultaneously from all four
sides, he would experience a mild shock of revelation. But as a rule he
would forget about his looks and go on figuring himself as he should
have been instead of as he really was. “You can speak French with Mr.
Mackintosh,” Frau von Kranich told Herr Schulz.
“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Beck rejoined, smiling shyly through his
horn-rimmed spectacles, “I am here to learn the German language, and I
should esteem it a privilege to have the opportunity of exercising my
poor knowledge if you have the patience to talk it slowly to me.”
But Frau von Kranich looked as though she had something more important
up her sleeve and was not to be deflected from her course. “French,” she
said, “is the most wonderful language that I know for telling one _des
plaisanteries_. I remember how, while my father was Bavarian Minister at
Rome, the French Ambassador and I talked airy nothings for an hour and a
half--he, he, he!” And she looked round at Mr. Beck to see if he had
noticed it. But Mr. Beck was looking at Herr Schulz and thinking of his
daughter. He thought of the last girl he should have married and
reflected, with a twinge of melancholy, that it was always girls who
were to blame for the deflections in his career. He had wanted to remain
at Haverford and prepare for a professorship, then a girl came in sight
and he had to think of making money quickly. He left the University and
took to banking. Then she left him, he ceased banking and went back to
the University. And--strange, he thought--every time he was engaged it
always happened that the cause of their estrangement was a male
relative, a brother, father or an uncle whom, as a human being, he liked
better than the girl. He was just thinking now, as he looked at Herr
Direktor Schulz, how really strange it was that he should always like
the fathers or the brothers best, when the host came up to him: “You
come from Philadelphia? Which University? And what is your particular
faculty?”
“Well--my home town is Haverford, but I live in Philadelphia. My
university----”
But Professor Hollmann Blum, with a little nod and smile, was already
off and round the corner, his coat tails flying in the air, and talking
to another guest.
After coffee, the Professor gave a little lecture and passed on pictures
of Tut-An-Khaman; after which each of the more learned guests was
expected to contribute his intellectual quota.
“I am a lonely soul here,” said Herr Schulz.
“I felt that,” Mr. Beck rejoined, and glanced significantly at Herr
Schulz, who looked as if he did not quite take it in; though when later
he discoursed again, he turned with deference to the foreigner, and
praised America. He spoke haltingly, with little gestures, little
pauses, as if fumbling for the right word, and a number of people had
gathered round him, but Herr Schulz turned more and more towards Mr.
Beck. “When we are alone I should like to develop” (he threw out
illuminative little gestures) “before you the whole idea, so to speak.”
“And who is the greatest living writer of the German-speaking world
to-day?” presently asked Mr. Beck.
Herr Schulz smiled, a little mischievously. “With my exception” (and
Frau Kranich also smiled) “it’s Gerhart Hauptmann.”
“The Herr Direktor is a poet,” she explained.
“Oh?”
“I will present you with a copy of my book when next we have the
opportunity of meeting.”
The Professor suddenly bobbed up from round the corner, and turning
deferentially towards his host, the Herr Direktor, said: “The Herr
Geheimrat will be able to reply to your question, Herr Doktor
Mackintosh, with an authority greatly in excess of that which I
command.”
“What’s that? What’s that?” asked the Professor, joining them as if for
a long stay.
“We were talking of----”
But the Professor, with a nod and a smile, had already dashed off to the
table in the other corner of the room and was fussing with a fork over
the apricot cake.
Mr. Beck escorted the old lady home. “I like Herr Schulz,” he said.
“He’s very nice to you because you are a new man, a foreigner at that,
and listen to him--and that flatters him. While we have all heard it
endless times before and are sick and tired of it; and he knows it. But
I will bring his daughter, Irmgard Schulz, for you to the Baroness
Hauch’s dance on Thursday afternoon. Baroness Hauch has the finest china
set in Salzburg.”
“Must I dress?”
“Yes.”
“Dinner-jacket?”
“No--cut-away.”
II
The trouble was that Mr. Beck possessed no “cut-away.” Accordingly, he
had one made, and standing facing the three glasses at the front, with
his back against three more, he suddenly perceived that he was very
ugly. The tailor looked at him with glee, “American? Ah! ah! Dollar! A
lot of dollar--he, he, he!” and recommended the most expensive stuff
available, while Mr. Beck reflected with discomfort that not the least
of his reasons in coming over to Austria was the resolve drastically to
reduce expenditure. “Have the honour--kiss the hand--my
compliment--greet God--commend myself,” the tailor bowed him out. In the
afternoon Mr. Beck dropped cards on Baroness Hauch, on the door of whose
apartment he read: “Baron Karl Franz Egon Gaestner zu Hauch
Wolf-Kadelburg von Hofmannsthal,” and on Thursday, as arranged, he
called on Frau von Kranich. Irmgard came. In her brown hat which covered
her exquisitely moulded forehead she did not look quite so lovely, and
he noticed that she had the small burning eyes of her father. At the
Hauchs’ Irmgard appeared a little shy. She wore a blue dress with white
lapels and American brown shoes, and all the young men fell in love with
her at first sight and danced with her uninterruptedly. Mr. Beck found
himself seated far away from the table, with a cup of tea in his hand.
There was no sugar in the tea, but the cup was too full and too hot: he
knew he could never get up without spilling it--and he suffered in
silence. Moreover, he remembered being told that the Baronin Hauch
possessed the finest china set in Salzburg and he was tormented by the
thought that at any moment he might drop the cup and smash the precious
thing to smithereens! And what then----? The hostess spoke agitatingly,
with her mouth full of crumbs, and every now and then a crumb would be
shot out of her mouth to fly like a bullet into the middle of the cakes
and pies. “What a beautiful girl,” she remarked, watching Irmgard dance
with her son Franz Egon Rudolf Ferdinand.
“She’s just like a Cindrella,” answered Frau von Kranich, “waiting for
Prince Charming to claim her.”
“But I hear,” breathed a nondescript lady, “that her father is not liked
because of his intolerable conceit. I am told that when someone asked
him recently about German authors, Herr Direktor Schulz had the
indiscretion to reply that he was by far the greatest writer living! And
he looks as though he thought it--walking round in that old-fashioned
bowler and the astrakhan coat, looking like an English lord.”
Frau von Kranich wrinkled her nose. “He is a little bit of a _parvenu_,”
she said.
“I haven’t noticed that,” rejoined the Baroness, while a crumb shot from
her mouth right into the sugar-basin.
“Still--a little.”
They were beginning to play bridge--the princes seated in one room; the
counts in another; the barons in a third, Mr. Beck among the barons, who
spoke to him of the high purchasing power of the U.S. dollar and urged
him to subscribe to various aristocratic charities. Frau von Kranich had
long since gone away. When the gathering at last dispersed, he went
with Irmgard to the tram, but she suggested walking home together to the
castle. “I like walking after a dance.”
Mr. Beck considered. “I like walking--with you.” He thought this very
daring. And he reflected, with inward satisfaction, that he was actually
making love in German--for the first time in his uneventful life. It
wasn’t ... “half bad!”
She paused. “I like--walking,” she said.
This was cautious. And Mr. Beck put out feelers. “I don’t want to impose
myself on you, and please tell me when you’ve had enough of me.”
“I’ll tell you.”
“I mentioned it because it seems to me that Frau von Kranich is rather
inflicting my heavy company upon your slender shoulders. Needless to
say, for my own part I like it. At the same time, I feel I may be boring
you with my imperfect German, and I’d do anything in the world rather
than be a nuisance to you.”
“She means well,” said Irmgard; and they walked along in silence
through the frosty streets.
“Have you always lived in Salzburg, then?”
“Always--since my birth.”
“Do you like it?”
“I hate it.”
“But the people here are good people.”
“I hate them.”
“You ought to go abroad where the people might be more to your liking,”
suggested Mr. Beck. “You’d like America.”
“I hate Americans.”
“Why?”
She thought hard. “Because they wear such ugly knickerbockers--the
tourists here.”
“The child!” he thought. “The touching innocence!”
They were now going by a long country lane that stretched across a
lonely field of snow. Far away an engine whistled. The snow hung heavy
on the trees. Mr. Beck conceived the plan of approach by way of her
father. “I do love the way your father speaks--these little movements of
the hands, this fumbling pause, this seeking after the right word. He
is by far the most considerable intellectual in the city.”
“Yes, Papa is very clever.”
They came out into an open space at the mouth of the river which
extended wide into the distance, chained in ice. “This is our castle.”
At the top of a hill surrounded by a fence stood the castle--looking
rather less than a mere house. Irmgard quickly vanished up the steps.
Mr. Beck stood still a while. The ice-chained river was bathed in
moonlight.
There was an added warmth that winter evening about the sky and moon as
he walked home to his _pension_.
III
The night after, he met the Schulzes at the concert in the City Hall.
Herr Schulz always sat in the first row and championed foreign artists
and blamed his own. That night the Russian Cossacks, visiting the city
for two days, were giving a concert, and he presented them with an
autograph copy of his book, _The God Triumphant_, and made a speech to
them, sprinkling it with words that came most readily and, as he
thought, appropriately to his lips: “Gorki ... Tolstoy ... Dostoevski
... the great Russian soul....” During the first interval they all sat
down to refreshments. Herr Schulz held out his glass without a word. His
daughter filled it.
After the concert they walked together down the slippery street,
drifting along with a crowd of Herr Schulz’s admirers, in particular two
middle-aged ladies, to whom Herr Schulz took the opportunity of
presenting the new arrival from America. They seemed to hang upon every
word that issued from the master--the master expatiating on the concert
with his customary little gestures and taking off his hat and waving it
to right and left, in acknowledgment of innumerable greetings.
“You have a lot of acquaintances,” Mr. Beck remarked.
“Yes, a lot of acquaintances, but not a single friend!--I come out with
such aphorisms quite spontaneously, you know. _Ach_, if, like Goethe, I
had an Eckermann to take them down! As it is, they are not taken down
and are forgotten. Ah, wait a bit: the other day a splendid aphorism
occurred to me: ‘The only decent people nowadays are to be found among
the Jews.’”
“Come, try another!” the American commented to himself.
“Or this morning--‘What we call morality is merely envy.’”
“H’m.” There was a pause. “He was a great man--Goethe,” uttered Mr.
Beck.
“Goethe was--I once put it so well--Goethe was the illegitimate child of
the gods.”
“And Schiller?”
“Schiller was a fallen angel who, through a faultless life on earth, has
redeemed his fall and secured his amnesty.”
“And Shakespeare?”
“Shakespeare--Shakespeare----” the Director fumbled. “Shakespeare----”
It was clear that he was forced this time to make it up on the spot.
“Shakespeare is a huge black angel.”
“Try another!” the American reflected.
“Shakespeare----!” Herr Schulz suddenly became excited. “It’s
incredible.” He walked up and down. He waved his hat high in the air as
if acknowledging the greetings of acquaintances (who were not there),
then stopped dead. “It’s--it’s--it’s beyond words. _King Lear._ _Antony
and Cleopatra._ _Hamlet._ It’s--it’s--it’s----”
“And Goethe too,” the American took up gratefully.
“Yes, Goethe! What a life the fellow had, long, rich, and complete. And
he was understood. Goethe had Schiller. But I am alone: I have nobody.”
In bed, Mr. Beck pictured the wedding. Her dad showing off to advantage.
What a splendid old fellow! Then the honeymoon, the bridal night, the
return to her parents, the departure for the United States. Their
married life when she would get used to him and find in him a vessel for
her tenderest outpourings: when she would take him by the hand and,
looking frankly in his eyes, would say:
“Mackintosh, I love you.”
Through his mind flashed pictures of travel, hotels in the hills, of
evenings together, and kisses, caresses and love. And life seemed
wonderful and miraculous and full of exquisite anticipations.
IV
When next day he went to Gmunden, he was stopped in the street by a lady
whom he recognised as one of the two middle-aged disciples of Herr
Schulz, to whom he had been presented after the concert. “Have you, Herr
von Mackintosh, come to see the Herr Direktor Schulz?” she asked.
Mr. Beck had come to have a quiet view of Gmunden. But he did not deem
it polite to say so, and answered, haltingly, “M-yes--I think I have.”
“Splendid! The Herr Direktor is now taking his after-dinner nap, but he
will be up for coffee at a quarter past four o’clock and would be
delighted to have you take a cup with him.”
“Curse him!” he thought. But at a quarter past four Mr. Beck was at the
green, freshly painted gate of a beautiful white villa, trying hard to
open the latch from inside, and Herr Schulz, just up from his nap, was
coming smilingly down the steps in his pale-yellow boots to Mr. Beck’s
assistance. He wore a coloured jersey with a plain back to it, and no
coat, so that if you looked at him from behind, his shoulders appeared
like gigantic epaulets, and there was something which suggested a
fieldmarshal in his colossal bulk. They settled down to coffee in the
over-heated glass veranda, the two ladies watching every movement of his
brow. “Have you had a good sleep, Herr Direktor?” they inquired in
unison.
“Yes.”
There was a pause.
“Yes,” he repeated, “I have had a good sleep.”
“That’s good.”
Herr Schulz sighed. “Creative work is very exhausting. It’s not the same
as giving a lecture. It’s work of the spirit and must be spun out of
your own soul’s substance, so to speak. That’s what I keep telling the
professors here--he, he!” he laughed maliciously.
“Entirely so,” agreed Mr. Beck. Odd: all the time that the other was
talking he could see through his pretense and laugh inwardly; yet Mr.
Beck’s replies were sincerely respectful.
“I don’t mince words. I tell the professors here straight what I think
of them--he, he! They don’t like me.”
“No wonder,” said the guest, instinctively falling into line with the
commanding personality of the other.
“At the heat of creative work I can’t write, and so I dictate my
thoughts to this lady here. I wish to goodness, Grete,” he turned
towards the younger of the ladies, “that you would learn to use a
typewriter.” He held out his cup: the lady filled it. “To attempt to
read your hand is insufferable. How do you, Herr Doktor Mackintosh, do
your work--Ethnology is your subject, I think you told me?--do you use a
typewriter?”
“I’ve an Underwood Portable--it’s quite small.”
“H’m. I don’t think I could ever use a small typewriter. I should want
something big and solid by way of a typewriter.”
“Yes! Yes!” the two sisters exclaimed ecstatically. “You must have
everything big and solid, Herr Direktor, to express your personality.”
“He, he!” he laughed, and turning to the guest--“These ladies are
hero-worshippers,” he explained.
“The Herr Direktor is always making fun of us,” they said, and looked at
him adoringly.
“Perhaps if you will kindly follow me upstairs it might be of interest
to you to see the room where some of the more significant strands of
thought occur to me of a morning. Sophie and Grete come in and draw the
blinds open for me when I ring. I let the sun shine in my eyes, and as I
lie in bed all the morning, I think--God! the wonderful things that
come into one’s head at these times. _Ach!_ ... My family are jealous of
these ladies because I spend so much time here. But I can’t work at
home, with my wife and fourteen children in the house and the telephone
going, doors banging. As I said to my wife when I left the house the
other day, in protest: ‘It’s not the _fact_ of the door banging that
upsets me. No: it’s the brazen thoughtlessness _behind_ the act, the
invidious ignorance of the effect of such a bang upon an intellectual
worker.’ That’s what drives me away from home to seek my real ‘I’ in
solitude amid nature. Here I have peace. The ladies are so kind and
thoughtful. It costs me nothing. They are only too glad to have me, and
my company, they say, amply compensates them for whatever food I may
consume here. Here I feel I can work. The sun shines in my window till I
get up for dinner at two o’clock. After dinner I take a little nap on
this tiny balcony till about a quarter past four, when I go down to
coffee. After coffee--this reminds me--I take a little walk--you must
come with me--till suppertime. H’m. We might as well go now.”
They went down the steps, Herr Schulz breathing heavily upon the nape of
the visitor’s neck, who, turning round, asked, “Do you do most of your
work after supper then?”
“No. I turn in early. Creative work is very exhausting. After supper we
have a little game of chess--and then we all turn in.”
“I see. You do your writing in the morning, in bed?”
There was a pause. “I have ideas buzzing in my head for a novel, a
play--a philosophical work. But what I lack is the _inner_ freedom. I am
upset by the invidious perversity of the people around me, by the
perfidious, shameless, iniquitous meanness of mankind!”
Grete met them at the foot of the stairs. “I suppose, Herr von
Mackintosh, that you’re an American journalist who has come over to
Europe to acquaint himself with the life and works of Herr Direktor
Schulz?”
“Well--perhaps--yes--though of course----” mumbled the visitor.
Herr Schulz now stood half turned away from them, with his hands behind
his back, brooding.
“I should be glad,” said he, turning back to them suddenly, “if you,
Herr Doktor Mackintosh, would acquaint the people of America--for whom,
I assure you, I cherish the warmest regard (their achievements in
technical knowledge are most valuable, I am sure, and are a significant
contribution to mechanical progress)--if you would acquaint them with my
writings and works and ... if you would be so kind,” he concluded.
“Gladly.”
“For I must confess that I do not expect much recognition at the hands
of my own people--the professors especially. I have even coined a good
aphorism about these gentlemen--‘science officials,’ I call them--he,
he! They don’t like me. It’s nothing new, of course. There is even the
proverb: ‘No man is a hero to his own valet’--I rather meant another
proverb: ‘No man is a prophet in his own country.’”
“Pardon me, Herr Direktor, but will you be good enough to acquaint me
with the titles of your works.”
Herr Schulz suddenly grew earnest. “There is that--_God Triumphant_--you
know that. Or--I beg your pardon--I will send you a copy of it when I
get home. Then--then there are one or two little--well, youthful
attempts--school essays. Since I left the Bank two years ago I have not
been able to do anything at all. I lack the inner freedom.”
“No matter. With us it’s not so much the work as the personality that
counts. And that, I can assure you, you have in ample measure. You even,
if you will pardon me for saying so, remind me of Henrik Ibsen.”
“Of Björnson,” corrected Herr Schulz. “Ibsen was
small--insignificant-looking. But Björnson was a man after my own face
and stature--he, he!”
“Yes! Yes!” chimed in the ladies. “The image of Björnson!”
“Though some people say I look rather like an English lord--he, he!”
Mr. Beck had never seen an English lord and did not know what a lord
exactly looked like; but he knew he did not look like Herr Direktor
Schulz. He gazed at the Director as he stood there with the “epaulets.”
He _was_ a great man; there was no doubt about it when you looked at
him--six feet and a half high and two full spans between the shoulders!
“I shall now leave the two gentlemen to themselves,” said Grete. “They
have doubtless important matters to discuss which are not for a woman’s
poor mind.”
“We shall be back for supper, Grete,” rejoined Herr Schulz, “which I
trust we shall enjoy the better after our walk.”
“I will do my best that it may come up to your expectation, Herr
Direktor.” And the two men went through the garden into the adjacent
wood, Herr Schulz breaking off dead branches (an easy enough job, the
visitor reflected) as if to bear out the impression that he was, in
every respect, a colossus. “You are lucky,” he said. “You’re still
young, independent, can do your work without interruption. But I--I try
to keep it down, but bitterness--bitterness rises here in my breast
against--against people--debts, petty tyrannies--the invidious meanness,
the iniquitous perfidy of mankind!” Herr Schulz broke off a dead branch.
“If I had some great sorrow, I would rise to the occasion, like a tragic
hero--a King Lear, let us say--with credit and glory. But no! These
petty, senseless little pinpricks--the telephone ringing while I am
composing a lyric, the door slamming away--these pinpricks ...
these--these dirty little setbacks....”
Mr. Beck looked sympathetic. “I understand. Even Tartarin de Tarascon
used to say: _Des coups d’épee, des coups d’épee, messieurs, mais pas
des coups d’épingle!_”
“Don’t know. Haven’t read him.” He stopped, and suddenly, from habit,
though no one was about, took off and waved his hat high in the air, as
if acknowledging the greeting of somebody behind the trunk of the tree,
then put it back on his head. “While I am trying hard to mount Pegasus
I am pulled down ignominiously by the breeches, so to speak, because
they come to tell me that baby has choked himself with orange pips. My
wife has given birth to fourteen children. I ask: “What can a poet do?”
“Exactly. On that ground I am in favour of Eugenics.”
“What!” Herr Schulz broke off a dead branch. “You are in favour of
that--that invidious--that--that infamous practice. You----”
“I am. I have a nightmare: over-population.”
Herr Schulz pooh-poohed this statement. “Nonsense! Look,”--his eye was
searching forward past the densely growing trees; he pointed to an empty
meadow,--“Look: plenty of standing room.”
“I am thinking,” the American pursued, “of the poor women who bear child
after child without respite.”
“It’s their business.”
“But surely, Herr Direktor, there is many a wife who does not want any
children. What are you to do with such a woman?”
“Fling her out of the window,” was the advice. “No, no, Herr Doktor
Mackintosh, it’s no good arguing. My wife has had eleven children by me
and three by my predecessor. I have no money. Being honest, I retired a
poor man. I am creaking under a burden of debt. But I won’t stop. I will
not contradict the will of God. And my old woman knows better than to
show signs of unnatural reluctance. She knows her man--he, he!”
“But don’t the children get to be weaklings?”
“Not a bit of it. My youngest boy, who is only two, is the cleverest of
the lot. I can talk to him as I do to you. Though naturally,” the
Director hastened, “he hasn’t got your knowledge. Ethnology, is your
subject, is it not?”
“Quite so.”
“Of course.”
“And your daughters, Herr Direktor?” Mr. Beck thought this might be the
chance to ask Herr Schulz for the hand of Irmgard, though, on second
thoughts, he resolved that it would be wiser to approach the daughter
first.
“My daughters are not quite so clever. But then what can you expect of
mere women? Though, Irmgard is awakening. She has vague unfocussed
longings....”
“That reminds me,” chimed in the guest. “I have been reading recently
the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. There is a passage where
Goethe speaks of Spring: ‘I have an objectless sorrow in Spring....’”
“I too,” said Herr Schulz. “_Ach!_ when I look at the hills and the
lakes and the breaking rigour of the sky, I want--I want to go _praying_
through the world!”
“Entirely so,” said the other.
They were returning to the villa, and Grete was waiting for them on the
steps. “All’s ready,” she smiled dotingly.
V
And now Frau von Kranich began inviting him: “_Please komme on Fryday
next at 4 o’klock p.m. We will go together to Wolfs._” Or, “_Please
komme on Thursday at 3 o’klock p.m. We will go to Schmidts._” Presently
he had another letter:
“_Miss Schulz is just staying with me und whishes me to invite you for
next Thursday to komme to the castle at 4 o’klock p.m. Then she advises
you further to take dansing lessons by Herr Loewe to learn Wienerwalzer.
I hope you don’t think me forward. If so, I beg your pardon. With her
und my best compliments, Yours truly, Emmy von Kranich._”
Next morning there was another missive. Across a visiting card on which
stood “Emmy von Kranich, née von Kolbe,” she wrote: “_You are geting
with this an invitation for a closed society fancy dress to which Miss
Schulz will also komme. She is kounting on you beeing there because you
are to accompany her home. Yours truly._”
When on Thursday he set out for the Schulz’s, he walked as it seemed to
him a deuced long way, until at last the river spread wide before him
and he perceived the castle on the hill, looking more than ever less
than a mere house. He went up the winding path, till in the annexe on
the second floor (the castle had been commandeered during the war and
ever since the Schulz’s could not get the lodgers out) he rang the bell
and waited, while his heart thumped loud within him. It was Irmgard
herself who opened the door for him--Irmgard in a dark-blue velvet dress
which she might have worn when she was only fifteen, and her hair, he
noticed, was put up for the first time. As he entered the drawing-room
(which, for lack of space, served also as a dining-room, and, in fact,
as a study for the Herr Direktor at such rare times as he was at home:
to-day he wasn’t) the mother of the fourteen children rose to greet
him--a woman remarkably fresh for her achievement. On a pedestal stood a
huge bronze bust of Herr Schulz, and on the shelf behind, two small
busts--of Goethe and Schiller. There was a moment of confused silence.
Mr. Beck surveyed the view through the window and expressed ravishment
in no measured terms. A tiny little boy of two came in. “This is Karl,
our youngest,” said Frau Schulz. And Irmgard, to give herself something
to do--for she seemed very shy, Mr. Beck felt, at this overt arrival of
the first grown man who had come expressly for her sake--took her little
brother on her lap and screened her face with him from the visitor. But
tight as she held him, he managed to crawl off and whispered something
into his mother’s ear.
“No, the Herr Doktor is not interested to see your horse,” she rejoined
aloud.
“Oh, but I am!” And by the mother’s pleasant smile he felt that he had
thus commended himself to her heart.
“Well, fetch it then,” she said to Karl, who vanished; and presently
there came a scratching, squealing noise from the adjoining room, and
Karl dragged in on a long string a cadaverous moth-eaten rocking horse
and began taking off the saddle in front of the visitor, who patted it
to gain time, while thinking hard of what he might say next. He had an
agreeable feeling of being taken straight into the heart of the family.
Mother and daughter had fixed their eyes on Karl and Mr. Beck, who as it
were made a tableau together, and the guest ransacked his mind for
something at once appropriate and amusing to say to Karl. But--“Can you
strap the saddle to the head?” was all he could produce. The little boy,
evidently not amused, gravely repudiated the suggestion. Irmgard got up
and busied herself with the tea-things. Her mother’s glance followed her
fondly. “You can’t guess, Herr Doktor, what Irmgard will be wearing at
the fancy-dress ball?”
“No, no!” cried the girl. “You mustn’t tell or he’ll recognise me!”
On the piano lid stood a family group which attracted Mr. Beck’s
attention--_padre_, _madre_, and fourteen _bambini_: twelve girls, two
boys. “This is Hellmuth, our grown-up brother. He is twenty-nine.”
“H’m. A good-looking youth,” commented the visitor.
“He used to be good-looking. But a year ago in tobogganing down the hill
he banged with his nose into a tree, and ever since his nose is twice
its former size. I always tease him about his double nose.”
“How very funny!”
The hours flashed by like lightning. The window grew dim. The maid came
in, lit the lamp and drew the curtains. The hostess looked as though she
thought that Mr. Beck ought to go now. But Mr. Beck sat still, and did
not move.
“Irmgard is going to town now to a dancing lesson at Herr Loewe’s. She
feels a little out-of-date and wants to regain confidence before the
dance to-morrow,” Frau Schulz imparted to the lingering guest.
“You can come with me,” said Irmgard, “and arrange with Loewe about your
_Wienerwalzer_ lessons.”
They went down the endless road, Irmgard smiling to herself. She called
in at several shops--“Just wait outside, will you?” He noticed through
the glass door how the men behind the counter stared at her with
rapture, and he felt proud of being--even if compelled to wait
outside--her immediate companion. “Now we can go to Loewe’s,” she
said--and sighed. And at that sigh, consummative of their arduous day’s
work, he felt a thrill--and also sighed. “Now I should ask her,” he told
himself, but they were crossing the main street and dodging vehicles,
and now already they were at Herr Loewe’s door. He watched her take her
lesson, Herr Loewe, as he held her in his practised arms, smiling all
the while into her eyes. And when she left Herr Loewe exercised him for
an hour and a half in the whirling motions of the _Wienerwalzer_,
charged him a hundred thousand crowns and instructed him to come again
to-morrow.
On the way to Herr Loewe’s next day he called on Frau von Kranich. “Mind
the lamp,” she drawled. But Mr. Beck had already knocked his scalp
against the pike of the brass fitting, and so sat down, feeling a
little stunned, facing the old dame. “He, he, he--you are so tall,” she
laughed, and looked at him in a strange way, as if to ask: “Is it coming
off all right?” Mr. Beck responded with a look of joyous confidence. And
she said, “We may soon be able to congratulate you?--he, he, he!”
“I hope so,” he responded, rising and once more knocking his head
against the lamp.
“Mind!” said Frau von Kranich. She sat there in a soft armchair, with
feet resting on a cushion, and smiled before her faintly--an old, old,
white-haired woman with one foot already in the grave.
“What’s this?” he asked, striding over to the wall.
“A miniature of my mother as a young woman at the time my father was
Bavarian Minister at Rome.”
Herr Loewe that day had hired two girls to spin Mr. Beck round, and,
clad in his new cut-away, with his tails in the air, he went round and
round, till one girl was fagged out and the other took him on and
whirled on with him till he felt faint and the blood rushed to his eyes.
“Come now, beat the time with the right heel,” Herr Loewe admonished
relentlessly. Mr. Beck spun round in a pink faint and reflected that his
suffering must be endured for love’s sake.
“Now you’re all right,” Herr Loewe absolved him, more kindly, pocketing
another hundred-thousand-crown note. “The secret remember, lies in
beating the time with the right heel.”
On his way home, his heart thumping irregularly after the lesson, he
thought: “Am I too old for her? Can girls like Irmgard really begin to
love middle-aged men like myself?” The tailor had brought the new
dinner-jacket and retired: “Have the honour--kiss the hand--greet
God--commend myself--my compliment,” and as he was putting on his new
clothes he whistled: “I, Mackintosh J. Beck, am taking out the prettiest
girl in Europe!” He shaved with especial care, and beheld his face and
his entire figure in the looking-glass with genuine satisfaction.
Walking through the sloppy streets--it seemed that spring was already
beginning--he remembered a bet with a college chum at home. The first of
them to be engaged was to send the other a cheque for fifty dollars. He
imagined his chum opening the envelope. He pictured how he would arrive
in America with his young wife, how he would spite the dark-eyed Susy
who had broken with him just because he happened to prefer the company
of her intellectual brother to her own.
Schindler at last. All shake hands and introduce themselves, the
Secretary in addition presenting Mr. Beck right and left as “Mister
Captain Mackintosh.” He waits at the door. She comes in at last, dressed
as a butterfly and wearing a black mask with a tilted nose. It was cold
in the room and she twitched her nude girlish shoulders.
“I recognised you straight away.”
She looked a little sulky. Or was it the black mask that made her look
so? The mother smiled sorrowfully. “I said he’d recognise you straight
away if we went in together.”
“I’m afraid this is not a very good table,” said the cavalier, escorting
them.
“It will do,” said the girl.
“Why so sulky?”
“I was so before we left.”
“Why?”
“Oh, never mind.”
The waiter came up. “What will you have?”
“Nothing yet.”
Remembering what Frau von Kranich said,--“You ought to have come not as
a butterfly, but as Cindrella,” he ventured.
Her mouth smiled behind the mask, but the eyes still looked defiant.
“Oh, yes, while I remember----” The mother was fumbling in her bag, and
presently produced from there a copy of _The God Triumphant_ with a huge
brown man with a broken nose upon the cover, and duly autographed
inside. “My husband sends you this, with his respectful compliments.”
“Oh, thanks--” Mr. Beck was peeping furtively into the pages, and--“It’s
a great book,” he gave his grateful verdict.
“Yes, not everyone can understand it,” agreed the author’s wife.
Through her black mask with the unbecoming tilted nose Irmgard’s eyes
glared angrily, defiantly, and he wondered what precisely was the
matter. When the waiter came again, she would have nothing. When he came
a third time, she would have nothing. When he came a fourth time,
Irmgard said, abruptly, that she would have lemonade. Mr. Beck suggested
wine, and she said she would have none, and Mr. Beck, thinking she was
sorry for his pocket, hastened to suggest lightheartedly that Tokai wine
was very nice and sweet. “I know Tokai wine,” she said, in a tone
implying that it was certainly as familiar to her as to himself. “But I
don’t want it.”
After that Mr. Beck sat silent for a while. And the waiter brought the
lemonade. She sipped at it once, and then did not touch it again. The
waitress came along with the cakes. “Will you have some?” he ventured.
But she shook her head and sighed. He looked at the mother, and the
mother cast a sympathetic look at her. “Cheer up. He may come yet.”
The girl did not answer. Mr. Beck thought that he must on no account
whatever miss the moment of proposing to her. “Shall I now?” But at the
sight of her defiant eyes he let his head drop on his chest: and,
behold! he noticed with dismay, that he had dropped pieces of the sticky
chocolate-cream cake upon his trousers, and thinking this was possibly
the reason why she was angry, he began to scratch it off, tentatively
with his finger-nail. She averted her glance, still looking angry; and
thinking that _this_ was then why she was angry, he stopped scratching.
Mother and daughter exchanged vague glances. “But to-morrow he is sure
to come.”
“Yes, I think he’ll come to-morrow,” said the girl--and looked more
friendly.
Mr. Beck rose. “May I have this dance?” She got up, without answering
him, and adjusting her butterfly wings which hung down from her wrists,
came into his arms, and they glided away cautiously and not too
confidently. “Shall I now?” But he had to concentrate his attention on
manœuvring her past other couples, while she seemed very frightened of
making a mistake, and it was a relief to them both when the music
stopped and they returned to the mother. “A bad floor,” said Mr. Beck.
“Yes, the floor is not good.”
“Do take off your mask.”
She shook her head.
Mr. Beck did not dance the next dance, nor the one after. Nor did a
single cavalier come up to her.
“Oh, come, take off that mask!” her mother urged at last.
Irmgard shook her head. A minute elapsed; and she took off the mask.
No sooner had she done so than a cavalier was at her side, then a
second, a third, a fourth, a tenth. Introductions--Herr Baron----, Herr
Graf----. All the impecunious aristocracy of Austria was wooing her
virginal charms. Irmgard brightened up. She danced. “What a beautiful
girl!” “What an exquisite face!” said the old fogeys surveying her. They
wished they could dance too, but their dancing was of the old school:
alas! they were ignorant of the jazz.
But at last the conductor held up his _baton_ more defiantly--and it
went off, the old ever-popular waltz _To the Beautiful Blue Danube_. All
the old fogeys, who had so far languished in obscure corners, crawled
out, like beetles, at the sound of the first bars, and went spinning
round on their axes, to the large, deliberate rhythm. Mr. Beck wanted to
try his luck, but before he could open his mouth Irmgard was off,
whirling round with Baron Karl Franz Egon Gaestner zu Hauch
Wolf-Kadelburg von Hofmannsthal. Mr. Beck looked at her complexion. It
was perfect as in a child, and the nose shone slightly. Clearly she
hadn’t even begun to use powder.
Elated by her sudden success, Irmgard wanted to go to Herr Loewe’s dance
next door. She was impatient--could not wait for the cloak-room
ticket--could not wait till Mr. Beck had got back his change. She danced
with him, excited by the stares which she received from every side,
drunk with success. “Now let’s walk,” she said, taking his arm.
“This is the time,” he thought. “Still one can’t very well barge into it
like that. One ought to tell her something about oneself,” he argued
with himself; and opportunely said: “You hardly know anything about my
life and work. I must seem a stranger to you--a blank signifying
nothing. And yet I’ve written some standard works in Ethnology and am of
some account in that branch of science.”
“You must write in German if I am to read them,” she replied. “Now we
must rush back.”
At that “we” he felt unusually intimate, and he said as he helped her on
with her coat, “Turn up your collar,” and even turned it up for her, at
which she frowned. “Now for it!” he thought.
“I want to tell you something.”
“Afterwards,” she said, and rushed away from him back to her mother.
He walked with them to the castle. At the injunction of the mother
Irmgard did not speak and held her shawl close to the chin. When he went
to bed it was past five o’clock.
VI
The night after, he joined them at the dance in the City Hall. It seemed
that the entrance ticket had already been provided for him by the girl.
But when, pocket-book in hand, he was about to give her the money, she
flared up--“Don’t give it me here!”
And he smarted. When he came up to her in the ball-room he saw that she
was red and angry, standing with her brother Hellmuth with the double
nose, who was also red and angry. They could not secure an empty table
and stood in the drafty doorway, jammed by the crowd. “Will you put
this into your pocket?” She handed him her little vanity-bag. The band
struck up a _Wienerwalzer_, and he asked her. It didn’t go as well as it
should have done, after two lessons. “Beat the time with the right
heel,” he remembered Herr Loewe’s injunction. And he _did_ beat it, and
with the right heel. Only he could not get it exactly in time, and the
left heel came down of itself just as the right one was due, every time.
They had only done a few paces. “No, that won’t do,” she said, releasing
him.
Two lessons gone for naught! However that may be, he must not miss the
chance--perhaps the last--of proposing to her: “Shall I now?”
But she looked angry. Her (father’s) small eyes looked angry, as if at
the perfidious meanness, the invidious perversity of mankind. Her sister
Elsa’s fiancé, a young man employed at the local circus, was making
funny little signs to Irmgard, to amuse her. But she never looked. Mr.
Beck gave up talking to her.
“Ah! Mister Captain Mackintosh!” A man whom he had met the night before
came up to him and, taking him by the arm, imparted to him that he was
looking for a certain Dr. Schmidt. And for an hour Mr. Beck was dragged
about all round the rooms and through the vestibule and down the
restaurant and up the stairs all round the gallery, in search of the
elusive Dr. Schmidt whom he had never seen nor even wished to see. They
did not find Dr. Schmidt; and it is to be presumed that Mr. Beck died
without seeing him; but he killed, however disagreeably and
unprofitably, one hour of his mental agony.
Exhausted, he sat down in the gallery and watched the crowded ball-room
heave in whirling couples to the mighty rhythm of the _Danube Waltz_.
The big orchestra put a dashing emphasis into the mighty regularly
whirling rhythm. “For you the hesitant irregularities of jazz: for us
the regular abandon of the _Wienerwalzer_,” these whirling sounds and
faces seemed to sing aloft. And behold, a military figure holding in his
martial arms a slim fair lady went round and round, tapping the time
with his right heel. And there again--an elderly couple: they had placed
their hands on each other’s shoulders at arms’ length and went round,
the man tapping his heel. A postal official whirled round with his girl,
his face all of a smile. These multitudinous couples did not bang into
one another as often as one might expect. Like so many spinning-tops,
they each turned on their particular axis, just clearing each other,
while the music lashed them on into a frenzied passion of regular
rhythm. Mr. Beck leaned forward, watching down into the vulgar opulence
of the gilded ball-room--stunned, fallen into a trance or reverie. And
the conglomeration for some reason recalled to him those crowded
frescoes packed with human figures that one sees in Botticelli. Away,
away was the postal official. And there, nearing his end of the room,
was Irmgard, the beautiful girl!
When at length he returned to the joint table, Irmgard was not there; it
seemed as if she avoided him. Mr. Beck caught a sentence which had
passed between Elsa and her fiancé: “It’s too late--he won’t come now.
Poor Irmgard!” The betrothed young couple took pity on the lonely Mr.
Beck and, with the aid of another young couple, got him to join in a
complicated dance in which Mr. Beck had to describe elaborate, intricate
figures with his tired legs--and felt like a fool. Irmgard, with an
angry frown, danced with a pale young man with a pinched look. Mr. Beck
paced round alone, pulling out his watch and rehearsing mentally how, in
parting, he would thank the betrothed young couple for their kindness to
him and hand Irmgard back her vanity-bag, without a word--and go. They
talked of wanting to go on to a coffee-house to drink coffee till eight
in the morning, by way of doing justice to the Carnival, but Mr. Beck
only wanted to get into bed and to calm his poor nerves. The hours
dragged. It was four; then it was five--but still the dancing went on.
At last he buttonholed the circus man. “I want to go home,” he pleaded
wearily.
“No, no! We’re staying on till six. Surely, Herr von Mackintosh, you
don’t want to be guilty of ruining our little Carnival party?”
Mr. Beck did not want to ruin anything and as a cultivated man in
foreign parts, deemed it only right not to do anything which might cause
them, in their own poor light, to think him ill-mannered. So he paced on
by himself round and round (he was afraid that if he sat down he might
fall asleep), now and then pulling out his watch and yawning into his
white-cuffed hand. The clock struck half-past seven. It struck eight
o’clock. Somebody was making a collection for the band, and spoke: “If
we pay them they’ll play on till nine.” A sleepy waiter looked angrily
at Mr. Beck. “All d-ham foolishness!” said he, evidently recognising an
American in him. “All d-ham foolishness! The lights are only paid for
till half-past eight.” He was falling over from fatigue; his eyes were
closing of themselves. He was a tottering figure in the corner. Mr. Beck
was still pacing about, waiting eagerly for the Schulz’s to make a
start--when suddenly he ran into the circus man. “The ladies have just
gone home with their brother Hellmuth and asked me to say good-bye for
them.”
“What! They’ve gone?”
He was staggered by the news--his heart all weeping tears. In the large
vestibule there was a draught, and as he pressed his way through the
crowd, Mr. Mackintosh Beck felt all nasty inside--as if he had just
arrived at the Hook of Holland after a particularly vile crossing from
Harwich. While waiting for his coat and hat in the icy cloak-room with
the doors swinging to and fro, he had a chilly feeling in his bosom, as
though some improvident maid had left open all windows and doors and a
tremendous draught was sweeping the length and breadth of his inner
rooms. When he came out of the City Hall it was morning, and a round
white mist stood on the sharp mountain edge, like an enormous balloon.
The snow fell in heaps; it seemed as though a new winter spell were
beginning. He shivered in his coat and felt a dull ache in the pit of
his stomach. As he walked home it was bitterly cold, and a sharp wind
blew from across the river. And suddenly it seemed as if the mountains
pressed their awful weight upon his chest, stifling his breath, so that
he could have screamed in anguish--rapped his heart....
He could feel the vanity-bag in his side-pocket, and thought: “That girl
ought to be whipped!” And to be treated like that by a mere _Backfish_!
It came over him--the urgent wish to press all of his latent claims to
renown upon her. Impudent nincompoop! The tears in his throat rolled
back at this rebellious thought. He shaped in his mind the letter he
would write to Frau von Kranich: “I return the vanity-bag which---- I am
sorry that your good intentions have involved me----” No, that would
never do. “Of all the rude girls that I have ever met----” No, no, that
might lead to unpleasantness, who knows? Suddenly her brother Hellmuth
with the swollen double nose rose before him, threatening. Mr. Beck did
not know for a fact whether Hellmuth had been a student and so was a
ready hand at sword-duelling. He assumed, nevertheless, that Herr
Direktor Schulz, despite his record, had not begrudged his son a
university education, seeing how extraordinarily cheap it was on the
continent of Europe. He could not remember having seen any sword-cuts on
Hellmuth’s face. But he recalled the swollen double nose, which, though
no direct indication of unusual ferocity, yet did argue a certain
dare-devilry, a love of courting danger--which well might mean danger
for Mr. Mackintosh Beck. “Damn!” he thought, “blast the whole bally crew
of them!”
He pictured the duel, the rising in the cold early morning--a sword in
his vitals--his death. “No,” he thought, “the blooming girl isn’t worth
it!”
Suddenly he felt old, too old to take on such risks. He understood that
young girls like Irmgard could not love men like himself. He crossed the
bridge, and slowly began the ascent to his _pension_. It was still
snowing, and the sky looked bleak, solitary, senseless. And he thought:
“I am glad; I am glad.”
Going back to his room--all upside down from the erewhile ardour of
dressing--he remembered how he had looked forward to both nights and had
dressed with particular care. It had seemed to him then that he looked
very smart. Now the new dinner-jacket looked loose, the shirt crumpled,
the new patent leather shoes cracked. He sat down at the table and saw
his face in the glass: it was sallow, haggard--as though he had been
travelling for three nights on end without a sleeper. What mental
suffering could do! And the powder on the upper lip had melted away and
revealed the red patches from the scraping blade. He noticed that
whenever he shaved with particular care it always came out worse. His
hair was turning very grey--there was a bald patch on the crown. He
remembered how ugly he had looked in the glass at the tailor’s--and
understood.
And now, with fluttering heart, he opened the vanity-bag--a plain
little wallet of pink chiffon--and beheld its contents: a pinch of
greased powder, sweet-smelling, in a scrap of crumpled paper. And he
thought she never powdered! Two white spotless maiden handkerchiefs with
the initial “I” and three little flowers around embroidered in blue
silk. In another pocket, a crumpled bit of white paper containing rouge.
How touching! And behold! a long hair--Irmgard’s. He took it up between
his fingers and pressed it tight, and it seemed to coil, like a snake,
as if alive. And in that cruel, treacherous movement also was Irmgard.
But what was this? A photo of a young good-looking student. Another
photo--Irmgard and the student. A third photo--Irmgard, Elsa, Hellmuth,
and the student. It dawned upon him suddenly how during both nights she
had been strangely distracted; he recalled the words and looks that
passed between her and her family. He understood: he perfectly
understood....
And the whole vanity-bag smelled sweetly--like her sweet seventeen. By
a simple flash of intuition into her being, he understood how she had
moods and a life independent of his, and that it was right that it was
so. In this her first Carnival dance, long since prepared for, she had
been disappointed, and not the least disappointed in him, and perhaps
also was crying now. And suddenly his sight was blurred. He took off his
horn-rimmed spectacles and wiped the glass with his big handkerchief....
VII
Next morning he despatched the vanity-bag, with a note, to Frau von
Kranich, requesting her to hand it to the proper owner, and having done
that he felt relieved, and even whistled. When he came back to lunch, he
was informed that in his absence Herr Direktor Schulz had telephoned no
less than half-a-dozen times, and that Frau von Kranich had also
telephoned. “Aha!” he thought “They’ve smelt a rat! They’ve got the wind
up!” He remembered the attitude of Frau von Kranich right from the
beginning. He recalled the glib, glossy manner of Herr Schulz. A bag of
vanity! What was he after? What was this indeed? An attempt at the
eleventh hour to enmesh him, an American, into matrimonial
entanglements. He pictured how they had prevailed on her, the dollars
looming largely in their mind, to give up the student and to accept him
before too late. Like a good American, he was afraid of being drawn into
the dark jungles and tangles of European affairs--family affairs most of
all--and, for the first time in his life, he perceived the deep
significance, the traditional sacrosanctity of the Monroe Doctrine of
uncompromising isolation and entrenchment. As he finished his soup, the
maid came in to say that Herr Direktor Schulz was at the telephone and
had also sent up his son with a message of an urgent kind. The blood
rushed to his temples. “A plot!” he thought. “A finely laid snare!” Mr.
Mackintosh Beck became that most scared of all things--a middle-aged
gentleman afraid of being seduced. But he conquered these insidious
thoughts. He held fast to his chair and spoke:
“My head is bloody, but unbowed.”
He packed in a frenzy, strapping up his bags before he was quite ready,
and at the last shoving things into his pockets, and set off to the
station, and as he crossed the bridge chucked _The God Triumphant_,
unread, into the river. He was pacing the platform, muttering through
his teeth--
“It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll;
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul,”
when he heard a heavy puffing at his back, and turning, he perceived
Herr Schulz in the square bowler hat and astrakhan coat (looking like an
English lord), striding up to him in his pale-yellow boots. “Herr Doktor
Mackintosh!” The man was holding out his arms. “_Ach!_ how incredibly
glad I am to have caught you!”
“Now he’ll begin throwing the girl at me when I don’t want her,” the
American reflected, and steeled his heart, and bowed his head as if to
meet the attack. Herr Schulz breathed heavily and wiped his brow.
“It’s ... awful! On the one hand, this lovely weather--these
mountains--lakes--the breaking rigour in the sky--when I look at nature
I feel--I feel I want to go _praying_ through the world! On the other
hand, this other life, immediate, extravagant, calls on my nervous
force.” He spoke on, with little wavy movements of the hand. “If I had
some great sorrow, by God I would bear it--like a Lucifer, I would bear
it! But these petty, senseless, dirty little pinpricks ... setbacks,
bills, petty tyrannies, telephone calls, interruptions. At last, I could
stand it no longer, I opened the door. When I’m angry I’m like a raging
elephant. I’m a big man, and my family know that at such moments I am
capable of anything; they are then like frightened mice--he, he! ‘I want
Herr Doktor Mackintosh!’ I shouted. I felt that I must have a kindred
soul to talk to--immediately, that very moment--if I was not to
suffocate of rage and bitterness which rises--rises and boils here in my
breast! My wife began undoing trunks and boxes, looking, if you please,
for my old waterproof! I lost my temper. It’s not the act, the absurdity
of looking for a raincoat when you crave the presence of a human soul:
it’s the thought _behind_ the act--or rather this sheer thoughtlessness
and inattentiveness, this--this invidious meanness and perversity latent
in mankind that stabs me. I said: _Herr Doktor_ Mackintosh. There was no
possible chance of misapprehension. Well, I had them telephone to you
all morning--to Frau von Kranich. They couldn’t get you. They can never
get anything. I slammed the door and went. Hellmuth ran up against me
and said they’d told him you had gone straight to the station. And now
I’m here. Well, how are you? Where are you going?”
“At first to Vienna. Then to Venice, Florence, Rome, Paris, London, and
so home _via_ New York.”
Herr Schulz looked at him, and down at his own pale-yellow boots, but
with a vacant stare, obviously not perceiving either. “We poets need
friends. Goethe had Schiller. I have nobody. I am alone, and the divine
gift in me is dribbling to no purpose. There are no real people here.
The professors--I tell them straight what I think of them--he, he! They
don’t like me. Yes, we need friends. Even little poets,” Herr Schulz
added, unexpectedly.
He listened to Herr Schulz. And he experienced an agreeable feeling of
elation at his self-control. That he was able, for the time, to shelve
his love and give attention to those other matters proved to him that he
was stronger than his love, not then suspecting that, perhaps, his love
itself had temporarily abated. “Been doing any work?” he asked.
“My head is full of ideas--for a novel--a philosophical work--a series
of short stories--an epic--a drama--and a comedy. But what I lack is
peace. Peace and the opportunity to collect my mood and spirits.”
Mr. Beck stood speechless, thinking hard what he could say. “Your book
was wonderful,” he said at length.
“It was very well received.”
The guards were already slamming the doors, and Mr. Beck stepped inside,
and let down the window and shook hands with Herr Schulz. The whistle
went. The train moved. And Herr Schulz, waving his hat in the air, his
long silver locks flying grotesquely in the wind, receded and glided
away.
“_She_ had not stirred at all then....” He felt a mild pang for his
pride. He had adjusted his things on the rack. It was hot in the
compartment, but he had not yet taken off his coat because the old lady
next him was sitting on his coat buttons. Past glided the long yellow
building, the barracks, the hills, the Café Schindler, the City Hall,
the river--towers and pinnacles. “All the same,” he reflected, “I think
I like the old duffer best.”
THE BIG DRUM
The brass band played _Im Köpfle zwei Augle_, and it seemed to her that
the souls of these men were like notes of this music, crying for
something elusive, for something in vain. To blare forth one’s love on a
brass trumpet! An earnest of one’s high endeavour fallen short through
the inadequate matter of brass; but withal in these abortive notes one
felt the presence of the heights the instrument would reach, alas, if it
but could!
It touched her to the heart. She would have liked her Otto to play the
trumpet instead of the big drum. It seemed more romantic. Otto was not a
bit romantic. He was a soldier all right, but he looked more like a man
who had started life as a shoemaker’s apprentice, had grown old, and was
still a shoemaker’s apprentice. The band played well--a compact
synthetic body--but Otto was a forlorn figure who watched the
proceedings with sustained and patient interest and was suffered by
them, every now and then, to raise his drumstick and to give a solitary,
judicious “Bang!” And he--a tall gaunt man--seemed as though he were
ashamed of his small part. And as she watched him she felt a pang of
pity for herself: wedded to him, she would be forgotten, while life,
indifferent, strode by; and no one in the world would care whether she
had her share of happiness before she died. And the music brought this
out acutely, as if along the hard stone-paved indifference of life it
dragged, dragged on excruciating its living bleeding soul. It spoke of
loneliness, of laughter, of the pathos, pity and futility of life.
She watched them. The bayonets at their side. The military badges of
rank. The hard discipline. And the music seemed to say, “Stop! What are
you doing? Why are you doing this?” And thoughts flowed into her mind.
Of soldiers dreaming on a Sunday afternoon. A fierce old corporal, of
whom everyone was afraid, talking to her of children and of daisies.
Soldiers who, too, had dreams in long waves--of what? she did not
know--but not this. And the men who stood up and blew the brass trumpets
seemed to say, and the shining trumpets themselves seemed to say: “We
were not born for the Army; we were born for something better--though
Heaven only knows what it is!”
That was so. Undeniably so. Yet she wished it were otherwise. It helped
to make allowances for Otto. Whatever else he lacked, it made her think
at least he had a soul. But to be wedded for life to the big drum! She
did not fancy the idea. It didn’t seem a proper career. But Otto showed
no sign of _wanting_ to “get on”--even in the orchestra. The most
exasperating thing about it all was that Otto showed no sign of even
_trying_! She had asked him if he would not, in time, “move on” and take
over--say, the double-bass. He did not seem to think it either feasible
or necessary. Or _necessary_! He had been with the big drum for close
on twelve years. “It’s a good drum,” he had said. And that was all.
There was no ... “go” in him. That was it: no go. It was no use denying
it. As she watched him--gaunt and spectacled--she wished Otto were more
of a man and less of an old maid. The conductor, a boozer with a fat red
face full of pimples, some dead and dried up, others still flourishing,
was a gallant--every inch a man. He had the elasticity and suppleness
and military alertness of the continental military man. She could not
tell his rank from the stripes on his sleeves, but thought he must be a
major. His heels were high and tipped with indiarubber, and so were
straight and smart, but his trousers lacked the footstrap to keep them
in position--poor dilapidated Austrian Army! How low it had sunk!
Nevertheless they were tight and narrow and showed off the major’s
calves to advantage. He wore a pince-nez, but a rimless kind, through
which gazed a pair of not altogether innocent eyes. But a man and a
leader of men. While Otto had no rubber on his heels. His heels looked
eaten away. He wore a pair of spectacles through which he peered from
afar at his neighbour’s music-stand, and at the appointed time--not
one-tenth of a second too late or to early--down came the drumstick with
the long-awaited “Bang!” So incidental, so contemptible was Otto’s part
that, in addition to handling the drum, he had to turn the pages for the
man who played the cymbals. It seemed to her humiliating. It was very
wrong that Otto had no music-stand of his own.
He smiled shyly, and she turned away, annoyed. The little modiste walked
on, meeting the stream of people who promenaded the path surrounding the
bandstand; a man on high heels, three girls with a pinched look, a
famous Tyrolese basso with a long ruddy beard, a _jeune premier_ with
whiskers and hair like a wig, whose look appeared to imply: “Here am I.”
Innsbruck looked morose that Sunday morning, and the military band in
the park executed music that was tattered, gross, a little common, yet
compelling, even like the daily fare of life. Oh, why were there no
heroes? Of course she would have loved to be dominated. That’s what men
were for. She was a womanly woman. From Vienna. Exalted, brimming over
with life. These men of the Tyrol! And as for Otto? Why, she could have
only waved her hand!
She began to wonder whether she had not really better break it off with
him. If men would but realise how little was required from them. Only an
outward gesture of romance: a touch sufficed, the rest would be supplied
by woman’s powerful imagination. Not even so much. A mere abstention
from the cruder forms of clumsiness, a surface effort to conceal one’s
feeblest worst. A mere semblance of mastery, a glimpse of a will. In
short, anything at all that would provide the least excuse for loving
him as she so wished to do. A minute she stood, thinking. “A minimum.
Hardly as much.” There passed along the man on high heels, the three
girls with the pinched look, the Tyrolese basso with the long ruddy
beard, the _jeune premier_ with whiskers and hair like a wig, whose
look seemed to say, “Here am I”; then again the man on high heels, the
three girls with the pinched look, the Tyrolese singer, and again the
“jeune premier” whose look implied, “Here am I.” They walked round and
round as if the park were a cage and there was nothing to do but walk
round--with heads bent, lifeless, sullenly resolute. And again there
came along the man on high heels. “The minimum of a minimum....”
The music resumed. She consulted her programme. Item 7. Potpourri from
the operette _Die Fledermaus_ by Johann Strauss. She returned to the
stand, prepared to give her fiancé another chance. Otto’s part, as
before, was contemptible, more contemptible than before. He was
inactive. He smiled shyly. She coloured. And, looking at him, she knew.
She knew it was no use, her love could not bridge the chasm. He was
despised by the rest of the band. A stick-in-the-mud. Not a man. A poor
fish. Not for her....
The potpourri, as if suddenly turning the corner, broke out into a
resounding march, and behold, the big drum now led the way. Bang! bang!
bang! bang! Clearly he whacked, never once missing the chance; and the
man with the cymbals, as if one heart and brain operated their limbs,
clashed the cymbals in astounding unison, the big drum pounding away,
pounding away, without cease or respite. And the trumpeters smiled, as
who might say: “Good old big drum! You have come into your own at last!”
Bang! bang! bang! bang! The big drum had got loud and excited. And all
the people standing around looked as though a great joy had come into
their lives; and if they had not been a little shy of each other they
would have set out and marched in step with the music, taken up any
cause and, if only because the music implied that all men were brothers,
gone forth if need be and butchered another body of brothers, to the
tearing, gladdening strains of the march, (since it is not known from
what rational cause men could have marched to the war). And if in the
park of the neighbouring town there were just such a band with just
such a drum which played this same music, the people of the neighbouring
town would have marched to this music and exterminated this town. The
conductor, like a driver who, having urged his horse over the hill,
leans back and leaves the rest to the horse, conceded the enterprise to
the drummer, as if the hard, intricate work were now over and he was
taking it easy; his baton moved perfunctorily in the wake of the drum,
he looked round and acknowledged the greetings of friends with gay,
informal salutes of the left hand, his bland smile freely admitting to
all that it was no longer himself but the drum which led them to
victory. Or rather, the hard fight had already been won and these,
behold, were the happy results! Bang! bang! bang! bang! Strangers passed
smiles of intimate recognition, old men nodded reminiscently, small boys
gazed with rapt eyes, women looked sweet and bright-eyed, ready to
oblige with a kiss; while the big drum, conscious of his splendid
initiative, pounded away without cease or respite.
“Wonderful! Beautiful!” said the public surrounding them. And thought:
“Noise is a good thing.”
The band had described the first circle and was repeating it with added
gusto and deliberation. The drum and the cymbals were pounding, pounding
their due through the wholly inadequate blazing of brass. But these did
not mind: “Every dog has his day”--and they followed the lead of the
drum. He led them. He--Otto! Her Otto was leading them. God! Merciful
Virgin! What had she done to deserve such happiness? Otto!... And she
had doubted him, thought there was no “go” in him. No _go_! She burnt
red with shame at the mere thought of it. He was all “go.” And didn’t he
make them go, too, the whole lot of them? How he led them! Puffing, the
sweat streaming down their purple faces, they blazed away till their
cheeks seemed ready to burst, but Otto out-drummed them--annihilated
their efforts. He--Otto! O, God! Watching him, people could hardly keep
still. But that none of them stirred and all of them wanted to, added
piquancy to the illusion of motion. They stood rooted--while the drum
carried on for them: Bang! bang! bang! bang!
“Marvelous!” sighed the public around them.
Her Otto--cock of the walk! She could scarcely believe her eyes.
Standing in front of the crowd, only a few paces from his side and
raising herself on her toes ever so gently in rhythm with the music, so
that by the very tininess of her movements she seemed to be sending
added impetus into the band, as if, indeed, she were pressing with her
little feet some invisible pump, she scanned his face with tenderness,
in dumb adoration. And Otto at the drum must have felt it, for, at this
turn, he put new life into his thundering whacks: _Bang! bang! bang!
bang!_ he toiled, and the conductor, as if divining what was afoot, at
that moment accelerated the pace of the march.
“Bravo, bravo!” said the people surrounding them.
There was no doubt about it. This was Art. The unerring precision. The
wonderful touch. Otto!... Otto, as never before, whacked the big drum,
whacked it in excitement, in a frenzy, in transcending exaltation.
Thundering bangs! And now she knew--what she couldn’t have dreamed--she
knew it by his face. Otto was a hero. A leader of men. Something
fluttered in her breast, as though a bird had flown in, ready to fly
out.
“Now it’s all over,” thought the people, “and we are going home to
lunch.” And everyone smiled and felt very happy and gay. A sort of
prolonged accelerated thundering of the big drum, and then one
tremendous BANG!
The thing was over. The conductor raised a bent hand to the peak of his
cap, acknowledging the applause. The bird in her fluttered more wildly
than ever. She wanted to cry out, but her throat would not obey. She
clutched at her heaving breast with trembling fingers. “My love,” she
thought. “My king! My captain!----”
A BAD END
“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; and that
means that it is not the Lord Chief Justice’s.”
--_Bernard Shaw._
It all began by their talking of love and hate, as they set out on a
Sunday afternoon excursion to the moors. Mr. Proudfoot advocated love
and forgiveness; Weaver maintained his faith in a good man’s hate. And
Proudfoot hated Weaver and could not forgive him because Weaver would
not love and forgive. On the way to the tramcar terminus Mr. Proudfoot
called in at the grocer’s (it was Sunday, but the shop was
surreptitiously open, and Betty, the twelve-year-old girl of the grocer,
was reading assiduously a three-penny novelette, entitled--he strained
forward to look--_Only a Mill Girl_). Having bought his usual
cigarettes, “Get away with you!” rejoined Mr. Proudfoot, continuing the
argument.
“Undoubtedly!” said Weaver stubbornly. He envied the other his command
of the pen, but doubted if the author knew “life” as well as he, Weaver,
knew it. “_I_ could give you material enough to fill a dozen novels if
you asked me,” he would say, and tell him of a thirty-stone man eating
enough for three; of a hangman in the neighbourhood who in his off-duty
hours was an innkeeper. “I want you to meet him. A character for you.
Bites off the heads of live rats if a customer will stand beer all
round.” Mr. Weaver was a dentist. There was something provocative about
all the dentists of Mr. Proudfoot’s experience. They all pretended to
ambitions outside their profession. They had all wished to be writers,
artists, poets, composers or statesmen, and now handled their surgical
tools, extracted teeth, with a kind of embittered “_Tant pis!_” The very
first day on which Mr. Proudfoot had called on Mr. Weaver in Gilbert
Street, Pedlar-with-Thresham, and inquired if it hurt to have a tooth
out, Weaver had said, “No. A second, and it’s out,” and holding it
between his pincers (while his client rinsed his mouth with warm water
and spat out blood), the dentist was already discoursing: “Now I’ve been
reading about this Einstein fellow, you know, and I’ve me own ideas
about this ’ere relativity business, if you know what I mean. I look at
meself in the glass--and am satisfied with meself, metaphorically, don’t
you know. But it does not follow, cosmically speaking like, that I
present the same satisfactory appearance. In the same way, following the
deductions of my--he, he--rather cynical philosophy, you’ll think,
flies, I say, may be as trivial and at the same time as important units
in the cosmos as ourselves, and in the end their souls go back to the
world-soul from which they sprang. Open your mouth.”
“Is there a world-soul?”
“_Undoubtedly!_” A rotund little body, smartly arrayed, Mr. Weaver went
on: “This afternoon was a bit slack. Lately I haven’t been feeling very
well. And middle age is upon me. I thought of my past achievements. I
had a look at my old medals--the one I got as a lad for swimming a
race, and that other one for cycling, don’t you know, and those other
two for amateur boxing. My mother, aye, she was proud of ’em! There.” He
sprinkled them out of a tin box on to his palm. “And I thought--how
shall I say?--it didn’t somehow seem as if it was ‘enough,’ if you know
what I mean. Come, open your mouth.”
“You’re a cheerful old pessimist, aren’t you?” said Mr. Proudfoot, and
opened his mouth.
“A cheerful pessimist? That’s what I call a contradiction in terms.”
Mr. Proudfoot smiled, and thought (because he could not speak) that
Weaver was rather like a man who, having grasped with difficulty the
four simple rules of arithmetic, is bewildered at being told that he can
waive them utterly in Algebra. He was fond of using difficult words
unnecessarily, and would trot out a _cliché_ on the slightest pretext.
Mr. Proudfoot might say that he preferred horses to motor-cars, only to
hear Weaver ejaculate: “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Or
Mr. Proudfoot might say that he had served in the cavalry during the
War, for Weaver to remark, with lingering relish, “_Cavalleria
Rusticana_.” Or Mr. Proudfoot, perhaps in reference to the heavy rain,
had only to let fall the word “deluge” for Weaver to comment: “_Après
nous le déluge_, what?” looking at him with a self-complacent smile, to
see if he had noticed his culture. “I had a Frenchy here as an assistant
once, but had to kick him out: his gift of the gab was too much for me.
But I’ve picked up things, and I think I’ve got the hang of the lingo
all right, what?” But they had at once become friends, and in the
evening Weaver would invite him to his house, push out his wife--a thin
complacent woman with a long aquiline nose which Weaver thought
aristocratic, and whose contribution to any conversation did not extend
beyond the invariable affirmative: “That’s right.” “Out you go,” he
would say, “we’re an old bachelor party to-night.--Now then,” rubbing
his hands. “Now for it! I’ve been reading about this ’ere fellow
Spinoza, you know....”
And so on till after midnight. Mr. Proudfoot remembered these nights
afterwards: Weaver, tottering slightly after the beer, coming out into
the open and standing hatless in the middle of the street and saying (in
reply to Mr. Proudfoot desirous of making a professional appointment
with him on the morrow), “Any day, old chap! any day!”
Arguing, they had reached the tramcar terminus and boarded the train
which was to take them on their picnic out on to the moors. The world
seemed transfigured that wet but happy afternoon. It seemed to Mr.
Proudfoot that everything certainly was for the best in this best of all
possible worlds. The tramcars were running smoothly and efficiently. The
gay, handsome conductor performed his duty as if it were a pleasure. The
policeman looked well fed, well paid, well satisfied. Even the rain fell
satisfactorily from a dull but sober sky, and everybody was duly
provided either with raincoat or umbrella--all was undoubtedly just as
it should be. The world was well oiled and ran smoothly; everything was
a wheel turning round easily on its axle, and God the Mechanic walked
about his machinery and was well pleased.
And Mr. Proudfoot stood at once right inside and outside this
astonishing world. He had a pointed beard, long hands, and shy manners.
His name was said to have been “Proud-bottom.” There is a theory that an
ancestor of his applied for royal permission to annul the unpalatable
name, and the Sovereign had been graciously pleased to amend the
“bottom” to “foot.” Now Weaver had felt from the first that Mr.
Proudfoot was “different.” And he was right. Mr. Proudfoot was an author
of standing. And as for his being immortal, who can tell? He wrote
private letters with an eye to their post-humous publication, keeping a
copy of each, in case his friends should lose or mislay them. He was a
student of the old giants of literature, and he walked in their wake. He
did not throw away his old sponge, for example, recalling that Goethe’s
was on exhibition at his famous house in Weimar, and accordingly gave
his own to his sister to put away. As for the critics, whenever Mr.
Proudfoot published a new book, they wrote: “Very suggestive ... never a
dull page ... the interest sustained to the end. Nevertheless, one
wishes that the author would break new ground, express life from a new
angle....” But if he did leap over the fence and explore new tracks, “Go
back, go back,” they wrote in the newspapers, “get you back to the
simple delights of your earlier books and we will listen to you till the
crack of doom....” Mr. Proudfoot had arrived four months earlier in
Pedlar-with-Thresham. And why, in God’s name? you will ask. And indeed
it would be difficult to imagine why anyone should arrive there, if he
were not cursed by having to be there from the beginning. At the last
General Election a local magnate in welcoming the Liberal candidate to
Pedlar-with-Thresham from the dais raised outside the town hall,
exclaimed with patriotic emotion: “In Pedlar-with-Thresham we spin well
and vote well!”
“Aye--and starve well!” came a voice from the audience.
Such a place was Pedlar-with-Thresham. Mr. Proudfoot went there to get
“local colour” for a Lancashire novel he was then writing. Nor was this
the only reason. He had read in the newspapers of the low deathrate of
Pedlar-with-Thresham and so, as he was afraid of dying young, he went to
live there.
The sun had come out as the two men walked up on to the moors, arguing
heatedly, till Weaver, still maintaining his belief in hate, suggested
good-naturedly, “Let’s sit down here and have a go at what we’ve brought
with us, what? Open that basket. Come on, look out what you’re doing!
See, you can’t handle your tools properly. Oh my! Watch me. That reminds
me. I once captained a working men’s football team up North, and had to
take the blighters to London, where they were being entertained--mighty
lavishly too! They were the scum of the earth--no idea how to hold a
tool or to behave in decent society. So I said to them, ‘Look here, you
old blokes, watch me in everything, do just as I do, follow me, see? and
you’ll be all right.’ And I took the serviette--or what you fellows
would call the table-napkin, I s’pose--placed it carefully on me seat
and sat down on it. And they all--the whole blinkin’ crew of ’em--got
up, you know, placed their serviettes on their seats carefully and sat
down on ’em. Makes me roar even now when I think of it. Have another
beer. Look here, old chap, shall we run up and see the hangman I told
you about who bites off the heads of live rats--eh? He has his inn down
the road further up on the moors. Good material for you, what?”
“I wouldn’t go near one.”
“Why? he’s a necessary institution.”
“I question that. If it is impossible to prevent homicidal maniacs from
killing their fellows, then by all means let them forfeit their lives
painlessly at the hands of a doctor. So much mercy is shown to mad
dogs.”
“You need a hangman to frighten folk with.”
“Get away with you!”
“Undoubtedly!” said Weaver passionately.
“Nonsense. It’s suffering to no purpose.”
“It contributes in a way to the experience of the world-soul,” said
Weaver philosophically.
“Damn your world-soul! Damn your fanatical readiness to sacrifice real
suffering units for the sake of God knows what misty and unfeeling
generalities. You’ll burn human beings in furnaces as sacrifices for
what-not tin gods. You’ll plunge into war for what-not shaky
nationalist, imperialist, religious ideals. This fanatical _laisser
faire_, this hapless surrender of the only vital feeling
thing--individual human life--for an abstraction! It’s just here that
you let in Beelzebub, in the name of what-not vague and void
resplendence!”
“But there are compensations. Think of the pleasure a condemned man
enjoys in knowing that the entire world is talking of him. They enjoy
the vanity of it, without a doubt.”
“Get away with you!”
“_Undoubtedly!_” said Weaver, with tremendous emphasis, as he was wont
to do when feeling his opponent to be full of scepticism and doubt.
“When I say you are a fool, Weaver, I really don’t mean to insult you: I
merely wish to illustrate the word.”
“When I am landing you one on the chin, I do so entirely without malice.
There,” he said.
Proudfoot blinked. “You are right. I congratulate you on admirably
illustrating the incommensurable qualities of our respective weapons of
offence. Still, allow me to doubt the amount of a condemned man’s
enjoyment. An ex-warder told me once how out of ninety-eight executions
he had witnessed there was not one case when the victim did not either
collapse or was dragged fighting and screaming to the gallows. And the
women, they cry and kick their heels as they are carried there. But the
Press prints the official version that the prisoner ‘walked firmly to
the scaffold’ and that it was all over in less than twenty-five
seconds.”
“Still, I am in favour of hanging,” Weaver said, thoughtfully.
“No man has any right to be in favour of something the full horror of
which he is, through his own defective imagination, incapable of
realising.”
“Abolish capital punishment, and nobody’s life will be safe.”
“Stupidity,” said Mr. Proudfoot, “is in itself a hollow term: it is
people like yourself who lend it meaning. Nobody’s life will be safe!”
he mimicked derisively.
“Undoubtedly!”
“This is what they said of sheep-stealing at the time. ‘Abolish the
death penalty for stealing sheep, and not a sheep will be left in this
fair England of ours!’ And all those little boys and girls who, in Queen
Victoria’s golden reign, were hanged for stealing a spoon. ‘Abolish
hanging,’ the people said, ‘and there will not be left a single silver
spoon in England.’ Oh, my God! I’m ashamed of humanity.... Little boys
and girls ... in the condemned cell ... dragged out in the morning and
hanged ... in Victoria’s complacent time--when Englishmen were ‘good.’”
“Serve ’em right, the brats! Teach ’em a lesson! We had a case
recently----”
“Devil!” he said. “Devil!” Mr. Proudfoot clutched the stick in his
shaking fist--he was not to blame that the other end of it shook at a
far greater tangent--and thus shaking it at one end touched Weaver’s
neck with the other. Even as he did so he had a feeling that he had
overstepped the mark, and he was about to crave his friend’s
pardon--when he saw that he had indeed overstepped it. Weaver leaned
back and turned his face to his friend as who might say, “Hello, old
chap, what’s up?” But the singular thing was that Weaver remained
sitting there with just the same astonished look in his face. Only blood
was now trickling from the corner of his mouth down his new light-grey
suit.
* * * * *
Proudfoot remembered how distinctly his senses registered the details of
subsequent events. As he walked home one little boy out of a group of
little boys and girls asked him for a cigarette card. He said he hadn’t
any and passed along, but the little boy ran after him and shouted,
“Give me a cigarette card!”
“_Haven’t got any!_” he bellowed in reply.
And the little boy, frightened, began to cry softly.
“You shouldn’t ask like that,” he was consoled by his little sisters.
“You should ask properly.”
And suddenly Mr. Proudfoot felt that he was not the man to bellow now.
The tramcar was nearly empty. He would have preferred to have it full. A
fat old woman was holding forth to the conductor, who punctuated her
flowing narrative with periodical “Aye--aye”’s: “’Ad a real good time.
Forty of us went to Blackpool in a sharry. It cost us ten bob a ’ead.
Ee! but we did ’ave a fine h’outing. An’ such a dinner! We started wi’
lamb and green peas and fresh potatoes; after that we ’ed potato-pie,
an’ ’alf a chicken for each one of us, and pop to drink. After dinner we
went for a picnic and took us tea wi’ us. Eh, _’twas_ a treat! We ’ad
three fine tongues all cut up an’ ready like and plenty o’ bread an’
butter. But th’ pity was as I was off me h’appetite an’ couldn’t manage
me share. When we was coming w’home we called at a pub or two, as we was
very dry. Ee! but it _was_ a fine outing!”
Wasn’t life wonderful!
And suddenly Proudfoot remembered.
As he went down a narrow lane, a little girl said to a smaller one who
had fallen on a stone, “Now ye’ve made a ’ole in yer leg.” And he felt
that, in other circumstances, he might have smiled. Passing the
grocer’s, where Betty was still reading _Only a Mill Girl_, he wondered
whether he should go in as if nothing had occurred and buy his usual
packet of cigarettes. Or better not be seen. One less witness at court.
What had he better do? Now he was back in Pedlar-with-Thresham, and
passing the familiar brass plate with “Gilbert French, Solicitor,” he
wondered whether he should go in, remembering the pun he used to make
that Gilbert was a French solicitor. He somehow wished he was. He wished
he himself were away in France. But they would extradite him on a
warrant. Oh, God! was there really no escape?
Then things moved very quickly. He went home. The sun was still shining.
His father was sitting in the garden which gave upon the street. The two
men lived silently beside each other. They had never had much to say to
each other. The father, when the boy first showed signs of an
independent mind and temper and of wanting to adopt an unconventional
career, warned him solemnly: “You’ll come to a bad end, young
feller-me-lad!” Now the old man was very old: so old that his
thoughts--let alone his body--stirred with difficulty. He sat all day
long in the sun and at intervals would make remarks such as: “Aye, she
is a strong wench she is,” or “Aye, he is a big man he is that.” Then he
would sit very still, staring ahead with his watery old eyes, munching
with his empty loose mouth. Suddenly he would fall asleep, his mouth
hanging wide open. One day when he would thus fall asleep they would
nail him up in a coffin and drive him at great speed to the graveyard,
and put him into a wet black hole and cover him up altogether with
earth, and plant a great heavy stone on the top of him--and then come
home and take tea.
“Just as well,” Proudfoot reflected. “Just as well now.”
The sun had gone; it was just beginning to drizzle. His father turned
in. He sat by him and stared into the fire, waiting for the police to
come and arrest him. They did not come, and unable to bear the suspense
any longer he went out in order to give himself up at the police
station. It was beginning to get dark and chilly out-of-doors; the
polluted rain fell out of a soot-infested sky; and close to the door his
courage failed him and he went away again. What could he do? Where
could he go? It seemed all one. Mrs. Weaver knew that they had gone out
together and even knew the place. Was it really possible that such a
thing had befallen him? If it had befallen another man, if he had read
about it in the papers, it would seem natural enough; but that it should
have befallen _him_! It seemed impossible. The uncanny thing was that
the others would not know how impossible it seemed to him and would
require an intelligent account of it from him. Tired of walking,
frustration on all sides staring him in the face, he turned home and was
arrested by the two policemen who were already waiting for him.
The court next morning had no hesitation in charging him with wilful
murder, and, in charge of two men, he was taken to Liverpool, where a
grand jury brought in a true bill against him, and he was taken away to
await trial at the Assizes. Here the matter was put elaborately before a
grand jury, and he listened, bedraggled and bewildered, to his heinous
deed being recounted in the hearing of the public and ably handled by
the learned advocates; and he had a sense of clumsy unreality, as he had
had when attending the performance of his plays or reading in a printed
notice the reviewer’s brief narration of the plot of his own novel. All
this, attributed to him, did not seem his, was not of his own making.
But he was hopeful: there was time enough for despair later on. He
watched the prosecution unbend itself. A sly old fox counsel for the
Crown. He put it to them that the circumstances were most suspicious.
Prisoner had decoyed his victim into a lonely wood away up on the moors.
The wound witnessed that the blow had been inflicted with a blunt and
heavy weapon. Prisoner confessed as much. What more proof was needed of
his murderous intent? Mr. Proudfoot’s faith was in his counsel, as once
upon a time when he visited the races it had been in his jockey. He had
a reputation for an unbroken record of acquittals to sustain. He would
fight for them both to the last breath. And the judge seemed a
gentleman. Mr. Proudfoot had the same feeling of confidence in that
presiding wigged figure as in the umpire when, as a boy, he took part in
a lawn tennis tournament. But what was strange and uncanny was the
smooth procedure of it: the deference and kindness shown to him on all
sides. He was afraid that with that suave politeness, that unfailing
legal gloss, in those beautifully modulated Oxford accents, they might
bring him theoretically to within an inch of death, and then get the
common churl to carry out the messy business.
The judge was really nice--and so witty. Mr. Proudfoot smiled
good-naturedly at his remarks. He would have laughed, too, but that
might seem uncanny, irresponsible; might be considered as bravado on his
part; might even strike the judge as bordering on contempt of court. But
the judge must know that Mr. Proudfoot was an author and critic of
standing and might be flattered if he saw that his witticisms were
appreciated by the critic even at a trying time. The judge was detached
by virtue of his training. He pictured him as an elderly cultured
bachelor who had an ancient library and tender nieces who adored him.
Mr. Proudfoot and the judge would get on very well together. It was the
jurymen he was afraid of. God only knew in what wise the particular
machinery in their skulls manipulated thought. Counsel for the Crown was
a little ratty, to say the least of it. He would ask incriminating
questions: Who killed him? The devil killed him. He did not kill him. As
if he, Joseph Proudfoot, would ever do such a thing. He had merely
shaken his stick at him: the devil had operated the other end of it. But
if he had now told them that it was the devil who had killed Weaver, the
jury, being of the type who prided themselves on not being born
yesterday, would all the sooner come to a conclusion of his guilt. But
murder him, he didn’t--because murder had indeed never crossed his mind.
But counsel for the Crown thought otherwise. He could see no trace of
provocation to manslaughter, in the absence of which he saw murder, the
possibility of self-defence not even being mentioned by the other side.
And he suggested Mr. Proudfoot had murdered his friend for money.
“I suggest,” he said, “that you murdered him for his money and took it.”
“I repudiate your suggestion,” Mr. Proudfoot said, very pale.
Counsel for the defence was stipulating for manslaughter under
provocation, the provocation being Weaver’s inhuman attitude to those
poor children who, in Victoria’s crass time, had been suffered by a
callous public to forfeit their young lives at the hands of the hangman,
a dastardly crime which Weaver had offensively condoned; and this
general attitude to juvenile capital punishment raised a tremendous
controversy between the two sides, involving the merits of capital
punishment as a whole, the defence representing it as a barbarous relic
of a bygone age still lingering among us, and to which indeed his client
may fall a ready victim if the jury did not do their duty by him; till
the judge, resenting such round-about intimidation of the jury, said
that they were not here to debate whether the death penalty was right
or wrong in principle, but that the question which the jury had to keep
before them was whether prisoner had murdered Weaver or killed him under
justifiable provocation, in which latter case it might be said it was
manslaughter. Whereupon counsel for the defence respectfully
submitted to his lordship that the degree of provocation would
seem to be intimately bound up with his client’s sensitive and
all-too-human--perhaps over-sensitive, but he would hesitate to call it
over-human--attitude to a practice which to-day all right-thinking
people (“Hear, hear!” from the audience, the judge interrupting to say
that at the repetition of outside comments he would clear the
court)--yes, he repeated it advisedly, all right-thinking people could
but recall with a shudder of horror and disgust; and the learned judge
(the point at issue having crystallised itself by now) allowed the
argument to stand, limiting it strictly to the merits of the death
penalty as applied to children for stealing silver spoons at a
particular period in social history. Prosecuting counsel, in his turn,
submitted that if there was any provocation at all, even of a kind that
some people--though he himself was far from doing so--might find, if not
a ground, at least an extenuating circumstance for taking the life of
another human being, they had only the prisoner’s word for it. It was a
matter of credulity. He repeated the assertion of the learned counsel
for the defence in a faintly ironic tone, and added that he would ask
the jury to please declare the prisoner innocent of murder--if they
could honestly believe it. (He implied by a shade of sarcasm, if they
were really simple enough to believe such a wild thing.) Mr. Proudfoot
cast a quick glance at the jury. Two jurymen, looking singularly like
Messrs. Asquith and Lloyd George, he thought, mingled their locks in
contemptuous mirth. They seemed men with “no nonsense about them,” men
who would ask, “Do you see any green in my eye?” men who were prone to
believe that “there is no smoke without fire,” men who had sent saints
to the stake; men of whom Mr. Proudfoot all of a sudden had become
immoderately afraid. If they could believe such a thing, the prosecution
argued, there was an end of it and he had nothing further to say. But if
they did not, indeed _could_ not believe it, and there was no
provocation, he said (suddenly jumping one peg), then, he submitted, it
was murder pure and simple.
The proceedings made a web of rather illiberal quibbles, difficult for
any but a trained mind to unravel, but through all the crude, inaccurate
and intellectually dishonest cross-examinations there ran two threads:
the black thread of the prosecution and the white thread of the defence,
which the jury hoped the judge would disentangle for them in his
summing-up. Unable to sustain the charge that prisoner had taken any of
the victim’s money (though producing witnesses to show that Proudfoot
was in financial embarrassment), prosecuting counsel modified it to
saying that he _would_ have taken it, but in the horror of the crime
itself forgot the object of the crime. The defence thereon came forward
with a challenge to the prosecution either to substantiate the charge or
to withdraw it--a challenge which the prosecution met with a subversive
question: Indeed what other rational cause could have prompted prisoner
to commit the murder? A question retorted to by the defence with the
suggestion that the absence of all rational motive precisely pointed to
the view that apparently it was not murder, but manslaughter under some
sharp and instantaneous provocation, which tallied with his client’s
story. But prosecuting counsel knew his jurymen, and questioning whether
the expression of a contradictory opinion on some event in history could
be described as provocation, and questioning further whether prisoner
could be believed to tell the truth, he wound up his case with a
pseudo-generous invitation to the jury to exercise their credulity, if
they possessed enough of it, in believing the case for the defence.
Again Mr. Proudfoot glanced at the jury: hard-faced business men all,
“with no nonsense about them,” and one meagre “emancipated” woman who
looked as though she would not lag behind the men. “My God, my God, why
hast Thou forsaken me?”
He stared in front of him. Now they seemed very near, and now they
seemed very far, as if he were looking at them through the other end of
a pair of binocular glasses. He started from his trance: Good God! he
was actually in court, being tried, in fact, for his life!
He found the final speech for the defence inadequate. These lawyers were
all so suave and satisfied with one another: his man, while fighting for
his life, seemed so mindful of the prosecution, so gentlemanly, so aware
of his opponent’s high character and diverse gifts that Mr. Proudfoot
felt his barrister might easily betray him to his foe out of gracious
deference and general drawing-room politeness. So on the declaration of
a war, the signal for the indiscriminate butchery all round of human
flesh, ambassadors who had demanded the return of their credentials
will cordially shake hands with the immaculate kid-gloved Foreign
Secretary, before departing to the country with which the realm is “in a
state of war.” “This,” said Sir Frederick, laying down his brief,
“concludes the case for the defence.”
And now he felt there was only God between him and his doom.
Among men, who was his friend? Not the judge, you would think any more,
if you followed the hostile tone of his summing-up: the arguments
themselves were far too intricate for any layman not specially versed in
legal ways to follow. And Proudfoot wondered which of all his friends he
would want to help him in his present plight; and he thought that of all
men he wanted the good, fat, cheery, smiling Weaver. And a laugh broke
from his mouth and tears came to his eyes as he remembered that all the
present trouble hinged on Weaver.
There was a moment during the judge’s summing-up when something in
Proudfoot protested. What right had they to sit in judgment on him? “I
have understanding as well as you. I am not inferior to you. Yea, who
knoweth not such things as these?” That ridiculous wigged figure, immune
from insult, sitting aloft impersonating the divine justice. He felt
like telling it, “You old cuckoo, you wouldn’t be sitting there if it
weren’t that you are only half a man.”
The jury retired. How very long! It seemed as though they would never
come to a unanimous decision. He had hopes of disagreement,
procrastination, a new trial. But at last they came back, headed by the
foreman. He heard the clerk’s fateful question. He heard the answering
“Guilty.” There was no recommendation for mercy. Before he could take it
in he saw the “black cap” on the judge’s wig. “ ... hanged by the neck
until you are dead....” The judge and all of them seemed very far off in
the electric light, as if at the far end of a long hall. He could not
believe it, he did not believe it. Absurd! They were wanting to despatch
him, to liquidate his existence: whereas he was the world spirit
itself, the world spirit that descends into each living creature whole
and unsplit: as if each creature only mattered by itself and no other
creature. To be told that you are to be killed is therefore like being
told that the end of the world has come: impossible to fathom. They must
be under some error. They had forgotten that he was the world spirit
incapable of being quenched by a judge of that kind. The judge’s slender
hand moving up, the clerk removed the piece of black cloth from his
lordship’s wig. It seemed that all was over. The judge was thanking the
jury for the commendable manner in which they had carried out their
duties and was absolving them from further service for the next fifteen
years. He felt the warder’s hand on his shoulder; they led him down to
the cells; afterwards out into a taxi, the two warders inside with him.
He looked out of the window as they were wafted down busy streets; past
door porters at picture palaces who looked like major-generals; then
through shabbier streets. He still looked out. An auctioneer was
holding forth with gusto outside his shop, talking vociferously but
apparently to himself.
Then the bath at the prison. The kindness of the warders. It was like a
working men’s hotel. He could smile--and there was plenty of time--two
weeks yet or more. He now lived in the hope that the High Court of
Criminal Appeal would revoke the sentence. But the day came, and the
Lord Chief Justice gave it out as his opinion that he could find no
fault with the proceedings at the trial, and, speaking _ex cathedra_,
added some mordant comments of his own upon the class of novelists now
generally perverting the public. The friend who brought this news to him
consoled him with the lame remark that it was better to be hanged once
than to be imprisoned for a period of twenty years. After all, hanging
was more merciful.
“If it is,” exclaimed Mr. Proudfoot, feeling chilly at his friend’s
taking his death so philosophically, “if it is, and they are so
solicitous as to what is better for me, why don’t they let me make my
choice? I know what I would choose.”
“What?”
“Life imprisonment, of course. I am locked up, but I can still think, my
thoughts can still roam, my mind is still free and unfettered.”
“That is the cowardly choice, not the good choice.”
“I am only human,” said Proudfoot--and faltered.
There came a time, after the High Court had dismissed his appeal, when
he felt quite light and cheery in the confident anticipation of the Home
Secretary’s intervention. He thought of the Home Secretary as a man with
a soft grey moustache and kind eyes. But just as he had feared the suave
punctilio of the trial, he began to fear the sensitive, kindhearted men,
who, wincing in their sensibilities, would turn aside and leave it to
the other men to deal with the raw places. He read of the Home Secretary
going off for his customary week-end; he learnt of his solicitor
travelling to him with a batch of signatures, and coming back,
ambiguous in the extreme, only saying that the Home Secretary’s decision
would be duly published after his return to London from his week-end
holiday. Then he saw it in the morning papers. The Home Secretary could
see no ground for advising his Majesty to intervene with the normal
course of the sentence, and the papers further stated that the sheriff
had arranged for the execution to take place on the 22nd of this month,
and that on the morning of the 21st Hanbury, the executioner, would
travel to Liverpool to put up the gallows.
And then he asked--it was a desperate afterthought--that they should let
him finish his new novel. It was all but ready; he only asked two weeks’
respite. Secretly he hoped that it might be found so good that all the
writers and critics in the world and the Great British (Reading) Public
would see to it that he was granted life. It was an application truly
without precedent. But there was nothing lost by trying. There was still
time, and his solicitor got busy. The petition was drawn up and had
appended to it a long list of signatures from all the leading lights in
letters, music, art and science, some from the dramatic stage, and not a
few illustrious foreigners from France and Italy, even one from Poland
and Czecho-Slovakia. A German writer’s name was intentionally omitted
from the list, as it was feared that a certain daily paper would be sure
to cry out that opinion in this country was being dictated from Berlin,
and that the convalescent mind of our post-war public might echo the
cry, and the Government would find it difficult to grant the
application.
However, the respite was granted. It was his first success after a long
series of reverses. He had another two weeks clear to finish his book
in. Some newspapers, of the howling kind, duly howled against it. “What
Can Murders Teach Us?” was the headline of a certain Sunday paper. “Why,
to murder,” he could almost hear the responding voice of certain
readers. “Writers are worse than some other folk,” he could just hear
them saying it in Pedlar-with-Thresham. “Aye, they are a bad lot.” And
Mrs. Weaver answering, “That’s right.”
He remembered how she had sat in court, saying in reply to a question
put to her by counsel, “That’s right,” and never once looked up at him.
The book was got out with all haste. Three days before the execution it
was published, and his publisher sent him the first batch of reviews.
The stimulus given to it by his impending execution was tremendous. His
publisher recognised it as an invaluable advertisement and rose to the
occasion. For the first time in his life Mr. Proudfoot was a rich man,
and he made generous provisions for his father, for the few years that
he could yet be expected to survive. But the integrity of the British
reviewer is proverbial. The mere fact of Proudfoot’s impending death
could not influence their critical opinion of his work one way or
another. One critic wrote: “This book, while quite pleasant and
readable, is in no way remarkable.” And another critic, ignorant, it
would seem, of the fate involved, pleaded: “Go back, get you back to
your former style, and we shall listen to you till the crack of doom.”
He _had_ gone back; he had deliberately gone back on the advice of that
same critic, and in any case there was no looking forward now. But still
another critic wrote: “One would wish the author had begun to break new
ground, express life from a new angle....” The Great British Public was
silent as the grave.
The last hope had gone, and the last full day of his remaining life was
beginning to unfold itself. The warders, like old friends, played cards
with him all day to take off his mind from the event. In the little
intervals he wondered whether Hanbury who was to hang him on the morrow
was not perchance the man who bit off the heads of live rats whom he and
Weaver should have visited that fatal Sunday. Weaver had not disclosed
his name. But there were few hangmen, he knew, and this might very well
be the man in question. “Where does Hanbury, the hangman, come from?”
he inquired from the warder.
“Up Manchester way.”
It _was_ the man!
What emotions, what a multitude of moods he experienced in those few
brief hours. Till twelve he was sprightly and not very nervous. The
hangman, peeping at him through the observation hole, to decide what
“drop” to give him, saw him pacing up and down in the cell, puffing
calmly at a cigarette. But as, at midnight, the prison clock boomed out
the hours, he got agitated, threw away the cigarette and began counting
the remaining hours on his fingers. He tried to think of the noble souls
who went before him:--of Anton Chehov, who, after gravely saying to the
doctor who had been called to him during the night, “I am dying,”
drinking the glass of champagne prescribed to him to the bottom and
remarking, with a smile, to his wife, “It’s a long while since I have
had champagne,” turning over on one side, and presently being quiet for
ever;--of Goethe asking that the window might be opened to admit of
more air and more light, and the faithful Eckermann coming to look at
him, lying dead. “And I turned aside,” he records, “to give a free run
to my tears.” And with a shudder he recalled that _his_ body would fall
into lime to be instantly consumed like a foul thing. He must go not
knowing why he lived, and nobody in those bleak immensities would know
or care: no father, no mother, no love in the world would intervene on
his behalf; not even memory would be left him to recall his single spell
of life, as if he never had been, as if indeed he was never meant to
matter. There was but to “curse God and die.”
And suddenly his soul stirred within him, as if it had wings. “It’s the
end here,” he thought. “But it’s not the end there.” Weaver believed in
the world-soul--which meant that in a while he and Weaver would be one.
It was night, but he could not sleep. Perhaps now, all over the world,
there were people who could not sleep on his account and lay thinking of
him. As by imponderable wireless waves he, alone in the dark cell with
the gallows adjoining, felt himself linked to all compassionate souls;
and to them he sent greetings--his desperate greetings.... At last he
slept.
His sleep was troubled. He dreamt he had shrunk back from the pale gate
of death, a bleak coldness in his chest and limbs, and was going past a
park where there were children playing and people lounging wearily after
their strenuous day’s work. And he thought that the trivialities of
living were manna compared with death. But by the faces of the people
who came out of the park he knew that they, not realising it, could not
enjoy the gift of life. He walked on, and suddenly found himself in a
beautiful, totally unfamiliar part of the town, the existence of which
he had not even suspected. And he told himself how he would come home
and tell his father of it. He woke--and there was nothing to tell but
that he had dreamt it. And at once an incredible coldness invaded his
heart.
Besides, it was cold in the cell. Our courage is at its lowest ebb in
the early morning: it is wicked to hang people at dawn, he reflected.
The warder came in. “Get up. Here is your suit.” His old suit that knew
him in different circumstances. No collar to-day. “I’ll go and fetch you
yer breakfast now.”
Perhaps at the last minute the Home Secretary might ...? He remembered
seeing a film where also at the last moment, also the Home Secretary....
How cold. They wouldn’t tell his father. Or would they? The warder
brought in a tray with some cocoa and porridge and an apple. He could
not eat. He nibbled at the apple, and the savoury juice reminded him of
some utopian land of fruit and flowers, like Italy, which he had never
known. And he thought that when they had done their worst, and he was
left in peace, perhaps in dreamland he would fly to such a land.
He looked strangely at the warder. “Is it very bad? Does it ... hurt?”
he asked uneasily.
“No. A second--and it’s all over. Like having yer tooth out--no more.
All over in a wink.”
The chaplain, a young man, was more confused than he--and more
miserable. “Perhaps some spiritual consolation?” he stammered.
“I don’t understand,” said Mr. Proudfoot. “The indivisible universe
speaks and lives only through each separate creature, as if no other
creature existed at all. But it is the same indivisible universe which
so expresses itself. And they--absurd--they want to do away with
me--that means with the universe.”
“Perhaps a last communion....”
“Why?”
“Or a confession? After all, you’ve killed a human being.”
He thought of Weaver, and would have felt sorry for him if he did not
feel so overwhelmingly sorry for himself. If they’d let him off now he’d
put back what he had taken, put back into the spiritual cosmos what he’d
taken from it. If they would leave it to him, he’d see that humanity
did not lose.
He was brave, resigned. But a quarter of an hour before time, suddenly
he felt he wanted to live, love, breathe in through these nostrils the
fresh air of, not this, but other, future mornings, when _he_ would be
no more.... He remembered a windy day when the big chestnuts swayed and
lashed their branches like drunken things, and nuts and sticks fell off
like missiles aimed at passers-by. A little boy had turned round to his
mother, hiding his eyes from the dust and the wind in the folds of her
skirt. This had moved him then somehow. And now an intolerable thought
obsessed him that, when, in a few minutes from now, he would be buried
in a pool of lime, he would feel the wind no more. And he thought that
if this life he was leaving was the only life in a bleak universe, then
he could not face the anguish of leaving it. But if there was another
life, he wanted to hide his face in the lap of his Maker, hide from the
missiles that fell all about him and hurt him, weep on His breast, and
be quiet for ever....
But perhaps--two minutes yet--perhaps the Home Secretary ...? And before
he could realise it the hangman stood in the cell. Was this it? Was it
this? Was _this_, then, what he had to come to? Could mother but have
known! But the warder, who up to this had been like a friend and
confidant, suddenly began to shout at the executioner, “Come on, you
there, get a move on and get about it quick!” (as though anxious to get
the nasty job over). And Mr. Proudfoot felt almost as though his friend
the warder had betrayed him to that other man. That other man had a
soft, drooping, yellow moustache and glassy eyes, and seemed slow and
good-natured. You wouldn’t think by the mild look of him that he bit off
the heads of live rats. Somehow Mr. Proudfoot wanted to claim
acquaintance: to tell him about Weaver: that Weaver and himself were
about to call on him that fatal Sunday: if they had called he would not
now be here. But the man with his assistants and the warder were
resolutely coming up to him as if they were intent on making a swift end
of him, the governor, the chaplain and the doctor looking on. Yes, yes,
he would die--if they would leave him alone, or do it--handsomely. He
killed Weaver--however inadvertently, he killed him, and he would
forfeit his life, on his word of honour he would. But not so---- The
hangman and his assistant were trying to pinion him; and suddenly he put
up a fight for his life. What right had they? All nonsense apart, what
right? A glimpse of the jurymen all back in their homes, and at
breakfast, flashed through his brain. What right? Where he got the
strength from he did not know, but the prison bell was already tolling
for the soul departing, and its last stroke had boomed its melancholy
message across the yard into the streets, but Mr. Proudfoot was still
alive and struggling desperately with the executioner and three warders,
who only knew that they had to despatch him: he should have been
liquidated ten minutes ago: there was no document to account for his
unwarranted existence after 8 a.m. They were shocked: it was improper in
the extreme. “Don’t! Oh!” He wanted to tell them--if they would only
stop to listen--he wanted to tell them that--yes--he was a soul, a
universe with things in it which had nothing to do with that devil in
him they were intent on destroying. It was unjust. A whole universe.
“Stop! Think: what are you doing?... _No!_” he cried, struggling in
their grip and realising that nothing save his poor physical exertion
now stood between him and their grim determination to do away with him.
“No! You _mustn’t_!” he pleaded, his soul filled with a sickening animal
fear. But they dragged him on without respite, the chaplain leading the
way, reading words from the Bible. And if--he thought--there was a God
in heaven, why did He stand aside? What God was He to stand aside? “No!
No!... _Oh!_ ...” But they were dragging him on none the less, dragging
him on to his doom. Swiftly he looked at each of them, for a spark of
compassion. But they were all men who valued their duty before
everything else. He was in the open. And suddenly a wave of awe came
over him, standing as he did on the brink of eternity or extinction: so
that the hangman at his neck seemed like a friend who was assisting at a
parting, and those others, too, seemed as if they’d come to see him off
at the railway station as he was about to step into the train on his
awful journey; and he clung to them with fraternal, desperate farewell.
But they only looked as though they had no time for that, but wanted to
get the nasty business, long overdue, over at last. It seemed minutes
before he toed the chalk line on the drop--when suddenly he fell, it
seemed minutes, he expected it with drawn breath, the pulling up--when
_snap!_ it came!
And all was darkness.
* * * * *
The great harbour was awakening in the cold fog. From the terminus a
tramcar set off half empty. The conductor strode inside and began
collecting the fare. Then newspapers appeared on the street corners,
and posters announced in red and black letters:
“SPECIAL EDITION.
“PROUDFOOT EXECUTED.”
They were eagerly snapped up by busy hurrying people, who stopped and
read:
“Proudfoot had a quiet night and is believed to have been greatly
relieved at the end by confessing his crime to the chaplain. The
condemned man breakfasted lightly and walked with a firm step to
the scaffold. From the moment of prisoner leaving his cell to the
execution of the sentence there barely elapsed twenty-five
seconds.”
IN THE WOOD
Lieutenant Barahmeiev, late of the Hussars, was making amorous advances
to his landlord’s wife, a Jewish lady of about thirty. “Your lips are
saying No! No! No! whereas your eyes are saying Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Vera Solomonovna looked at him with her golden eyes and shook her
handsome head and said to him,
“Boris Nikolàech, you’re thirty-eight, and you have no more sense than a
boy of twelve.”
Lieutenant Barahmeiev looked more self-confident than ever. It was a
fixed idea with him that no woman could refuse his amorous advances, and
that no landlord really meant him, seriously, to pay his rent. To
whatever women said in proof of their refusal, to whatever landlords
said in confirmation of their claims, Lieutenant Barahmeiev had a
simple answer. He called it “bluff.” Some English words like “bluff”
and “gentleman” have passed into the Russian tongue in the original. He
wasn’t born yesterday, he said.
And fully confident of the result, the Russian officer continued, “Why
this pretence, this hypocritical reluctance? Why not be frank about it?
To-night,” he whispered. “In my room....”
“Go to the devil!” she said, but her eyes seemed to say, “Go on
talking.”
“You say ‘Go to the devil!’ But what do you mean? I know what you mean.
Wasn’t born yesterday. Why not be honest about it?”
Odessa had been changing hands from Bolshevik to anti-Bolshevik in turn;
but the habit of love-making persists through such irrelevancies as wars
and revolutions. Life in the flat of Finkelstein, where Lieutenant
Barahmeiev occupied a bedroom, went on essentially as it had gone on
before the war. I liked my hosts. She, a woman of considerable beauty,
greedy for admiration. He, a successful broker, tall, handsome,
prepossessing, inordinately proud of being a Jew and always selling
foreign currencies to his guests at table. I liked the free and easy
manner in the household, the total absence of suspicion on the part of
Finkelstein as regards his handsome wife. No doubt he also had no small
opinion of himself, and thought that as compared with the Lieutenant he
was the better specimen of male all round. And I think that perhaps he
was.
At lunch he was saying to Lieutenant Barahmeiev, “Yes, Boris Nikolàech,
you Christians like to run us down. You say that we are swindlers, and
‘Never trust a Jew.’ But the fact is that we Jews can trust each other,
but I am dashed if we are often given an opportunity to trust a
Christian. Take yourself. You call yourself a ‘paying guest.’ But what
right have you to the adjective? If it comes to that, what right have
you to the noun? Have I asked you to come and stay with us, and
overlooking that point, is it a usual thing for guests to stay
indefinitely? But your conscience doesn’t seem to trouble you a bit.
You eat and sleep, and there! you even seem to have designs on my wife.
Ah, you’re a funny fellow, Boris Nikolàech, but, at any rate, it’s some
good to us that you are an officer; it will keep them from commandeering
our flat while you are here. But what was I saying? Ah, yes, does any
one want to buy Romanov roubles? Or I can sell you francs.”
But the Lieutenant went on talking to the hostess. “What I can’t get
over is this utter want of frankness in you, Vera Solomonovna. Your
soul, your eyes cry out, ‘Take me! I am yours!’ whereas your lying lips
pretend to say, ‘Go to the devil.’ Bluff! All bluff, all bluff!”
She turned to her husband and looking at her guest with compassion,
said:
“What _can_ I do with him, Lyova? He doesn’t understand. He _can’t_. He
really thinks he’s irresistible to women. I’ve never seen anything so
brazen in my life. To be quite frank, Boris Nikolàech, you’re not the
least bit attractive. I wonder who put that idea into your head?”
“Vera Solomonovna,” he implored her, “be frank for once. You know you
are in love with me; why all this hypocritical nonsense about my being
‘not the least bit attractive’? Why all this bluff? I wasn’t born
yesterday!”
“In matters of love you’re a school boy.”
“Yes, when I was a school boy I had the innocence to take a woman’s No
for No. But now, I need hardly say, I believe it no longer.”
“You wise old man then,” she said ironically, rising.
We followed her into the drawing-room. The window panes were blurred
with rain. The sea, the sky, was one grey mass, doleful and monotonous.
Below, in the street, one could see the shining hoods of passing cabs;
the muffled sound of hoofs reached our windows. In the indoor twilight
of the flat one felt at rest, one’s limbs were seized with languor.
Finkelstein and his stock-exchange associates retired to his study to
play cards.
“The rain reminds me, Vera Solomonovna,” said the Lieutenant, “of an
incident in my youth. The woman--oh, she had the self-same psychology,
if I may say so, as yourself, and in the end, and in the end ...
complete capitulation.”
“I am tired of you,” said she, looking languorous rather than tired.
“Vera Solomonovna,” he said, bending over her; then in a whisper: “Don’t
forget to-night ... my room.”
She shook her head.
“How blatantly deceitful women really are,” he said. “You shake your
head. Why? Why, when I know----”
She flushed. “This is really getting idiotic!”
“Ha! ha! ha! That is exactly what Zina used to say: ‘idiotic.’ I was
going to tell you about Zina when you interrupted me. This was a long
time ago--let me see--yes, twenty-one years ago, to be exact. I was
seventeen then. I was a cadet at the X---- Military School and I was
spending the summer vacation with my aunt at S----, a sea side resort
some twenty miles from Petersburg. It was an evening in early June, and
we were sitting on the open balcony of the pavilion at the local tennis
club. We were discussing something--literature I think, and then, quite
relevantly, we switched off on to love. There was this Zina I am telling
you about, a beautifully developed girl of twenty-five, who was quite
vehement in her denunciation of everything relating to the attraction
between the sexes, and as she spoke it was urged upon her that for a
person with her views the convent was the only proper place. It was a
lovely night, but we sat there and exchanged inanities. Gradually some
of us dispersed.
“I was standing by a street stall, buying cigarettes, when I noticed
Zina coming up. She bought herself some chocolate. We sauntered away
from the stall together.”
“Where are you going?” I asked her.
“Nowhere in particular.”
We went along the big road leading to the sea. Our shoulders touched
occasionally as we stumbled over the uneven ground.
“They’re so absurd with their revolting sentimentality,” I said.
“Why talk about them? Look at the clouds,” she said. “How they chase
each other. We couldn’t keep pace with them if we ran. And the moon!
Gone--and out again!”
We made our way together along a narrow lane. The wooden _datchas_ had
been left behind.
“Is this ‘The Alley of Kisses’?”
“No, this is ‘The Alley of Sighs.’”
We went on.
“The moon again!”
“Yes.”
“This is ‘The Alley of Kisses,’” she said, as we turned to our left.
Beyond I could hear the sound of the sea.
“Let us sit down here.”
It was an old bench considerably disfigured by a penknife; it bore
initials, monograms and names of lovers probably who had sat there in
former times.
“So this is ‘The Alley of Kisses,’” I repeated. One seizes with
gratitude on such openings.
“Yes.” She looked at me strangely. “And the fools at the tennis club
talking rubbish!”
“Yes.”
“The sea and the air! and--as I was saying--this ‘Alley of Kisses.’ Can
you feel it?”
I moved closer to her. “May I kiss you?” I said.
“Why do you ask?” she whispered.
“What?” said I. (I am slightly deaf, as you know.)
She waited, and I, being timid, added, “After all, we are ‘allies’ in a
sort of way....”
She repeated softly: “Why do you ask?”
She had soft, warm lips; I held my breath back; it was long before I
released it; and I wasn’t thinking of the night. “My hand----”
Vera Solomonovna became fidgety with excitement. “Lyova! Lyova!” she
cried out; and when Finkelstein appeared, she said, “Come here, all of
you. Boris Nikolàech is telling of a romantic episode from his life.
It’s most attractive, I assure you, most _piquant_.”
Finkelstein and his stock-exchange associates, abandoning their game of
cards, sauntered into the drawing-room, and, still smoking, sank into
chairs and stretched out their legs, ready to listen.
“Well, go on,” said Vera Solomonovna.
“My hand, I think I said, was round her waist----”
“Whose waist?” said Finkelstein.
“Zina’s,” explained his wife.
“Who’s Zina, anyhow?”
“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. Go on, Boris Nikolàech.”
“My hand was round her waist. She pressed it to her bosom. I looked
round. There was not a soul around, not a sound abroad but for the waves
that broke on the sea shore. Dark clouds ran swiftly across the sky.
“Let us go there,” she said, pointing to the wood. We made our way
across the shrubbery. I held her in my arms; she began to breathe in a
queer, panting way.
“What is it?” I asked ignorantly.
“It’s ... good,” she whispered.
The moon showed between the tall trees; in a few yards’ distance the sea
roared before us. Then a big, heavy drop of rain fell on my face--it was
warm; and then another.
I sat on the moss, dazed, completely overtaken by the wonder of it all.
Suddenly, I heard the rustle of her movements; she had disappeared
behind a bush.
“What are you doing?”
There was no answer. I was rather shy about it all, for I was only
seventeen. “Don’t!”
She stood behind a shrub and I could hear the rustle of the twigs, the
rustle of silk linen, the hollow sound of press-studs. “Don’t,” I said.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“But why? Why?” I said confusedly. “I don’t want to.”
Unveiled, she stood behind me. The big pale moon looked down upon her,
but she didn’t mind it. The dark blue wood leered from behind at her;
and the roaring sea rushed to her--and receded, rushed and receded. Drop
after drop, at long interval, the soft warm rain fell from the dark
gathering clouds. “I want, I want you to remember me,” she said softly,
“_always_, and now you can’t forget ... that the first woman you have
ever seen like that ... was _me_.” Then she crouched to the ground. She
began to sob and laugh at the same time. “What am I doing? Oh, I’m mad,
mad.... I couldn’t help it. I’ve been reading--all day long I’ve been
reading ... such a wicked book. It was awful, unbearable. These silly
people on the veranda talked such nonsense, but it wouldn’t have really
mattered what they’d said; I would’ve disagreed with them all the same.
I couldn’t bear it any longer. And then I felt I wanted--I wanted to do
as she, the woman in the book, had done to him. Besides,” she added,
“you really are rather attractive, aren’t you? Oh, do you think it’s
going to rain properly? It didn’t in the book.”
The Lieutenant ceased.
“Well?” we said. “Go on.”
“That’s all,” said the Lieutenant.
“But what happened afterwards?” asked Vera Solomonovna.
“Nothing happened.”
“But _how_?” she said in a tone as though she had been wronged.
“Well, that’s all there is to tell.”
“But--it’s no proper story even.”
“I can’t help that,” he answered almost angrily. “This is what happened,
and this is where it ended. I can’t falsify the facts to suit your
taste. We don’t, my dear Vera Solomonovna, live our lives to provide
plots for stories.”
“Well, I _am_ disappointed in you, Boris Nikolàech. Really! To begin so
well, so fascinatingly, and then, suddenly, to break off ... so
shamelessly! Well, really, you’re just like a boy of twelve. You have no
sense of proportion, Boris Nikolàech. None whatever! The whole thing,
as it stands, is silly....”
“You are a hopeless washout!” Finkelstein was teasing him. “Miss your
opportunity like that! My goodness! And call yourself a Don Juan at
that!”
“If that’s the end of it,” said Vera Solomonovna, “there was no need to
tell the story. You had no business to begin, Boris Nikolàech. It’s
simply disappointing.”
“Well,” said Lieutenant Barahmeiev, who seemed hurt, “if it comes to
disappointment, I think I have been disappointed more than anyone.”
“The more fool you,” said Finkelstein.
“Nothing to do with me. Didn’t I tell you it was raining?”
“Raining?”
“Pouring! It came on suddenly, burst upon us through the sky. A flood.
The revenge of heaven on us.”
“But what’s the point of your story, anyhow?” asked Finkelstein.
“The point?”
“Yes, the moral? Why have you been telling it?”
“Oh, well, I told it to Vera Solomonovna by way of illustrating the
psychology of women, because, like Zina, she affects derision of human
passion, calls my amorous advances ‘idiotic’; but just you wait and
before the day is up---- There you are!”
Vera Solomonovna rose and left the room in protest.
“There,” said Finkelstein, “you’ve disgusted Vera.”
“Disgusted her! Ha! ha! Don’t you believe it. Bluff! my dear fellow. All
bluff. You don’t know women.”
“You’re a funny fellow, Boris Nikolàech. One can’t say you’re altogether
stupid, but there are things you simply cannot understand. Impossible to
penetrate yon marble brow of yours; it’s just like throwing a rubber
ball at a stone wall: jumps back at you every time. And you don’t know
women. To take my wife, for instance. She’s had enough of you already;
she’s gone back to her bedroom in disgust.”
“To _her_ bedroom?” questioned the Lieutenant in a derisive tone of
voice.
“You don’t expect her to go to yours, do you!”
“Why.... Oh, well, really, my dear fellow, I can see that you don’t know
women--although you’ve got a wife. Believe me, I know a thing or two
about them. Wasn’t born yesterday. Disgusted! Ha, ha, ha! You wait till
I finish my cigarette and retire to my bedroom. You may be sure
she’s----”
“Boris Nikolàech,” said Finkelstein, looking at him tranquilly through
the smoke from his cigar, “you are an optimist.”
And, looking dignified and prepossessing, he sauntered over to his study
where his stock-exchange associates were already waiting for him to
resume their game of cards.
“Just a moment ...” muttered the Lieutenant, “ ...finish my
cigarette....”
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
He met her at one of those numerous little dancing clubs of Vienna which
assemble regularly once a week at a particular café, where the
facilities for introduction are only equalled by the ease of admission.
When he asked where they could meet again, she told him, smiling
sweetly, where to call her up next day, and he noticed that, besides
having beautiful grey eyes with lashes like black needles and luxuriant
black hair, she had an even, gapless semi-circle of white teeth and, at
the corners of her mouth, the foreshadowing of a moustache in after
years. “And what name?”
“Ask for Fräulein Isolde.”
“Isolde! How romantic! Will you dance?”
“I do not dance.” She smiled divinely.
“Well, it’s a relief, if anything. I am tired of jazz music, tired of
having to prance about every night on my flat feet on the dubious chance
of meeting a nice girl.”
“I like,” she said, “to sit at home with a book.”
“I can’t tell you how glad, how--”
“Are you fond of Art?”
“Love it!”
“I will take you to the Art-Historical Museum.”
“Good?”
She closed the eyes with the long lashes and nodded rapidly in response.
Her brows twitched. And he loved her.
Next day they met at a café in the Ring. She turned up three-quarters of
an hour after the appointed time in a black coat, black hat, and a black
frock buttoned to the neck. With dark abundant locks and pale powdered
face she sat, mysterious, smoking innumerable cigarettes. And only
asked, “What is it like in America?”
“Very nice,” he said.
“Are you studying here?”
He nodded. She smoked on.
A dingy pox-marked poet came in and sat down beside them and opened the
portfolio he carried stuffed with his writings. She laid a tender hand
on his shoulder, scanning the while the pages of a story. “Yes,” she
commended. “You have hit it off all right.”
They motored to the castle of Schönbrunn and sat in a summer-house by
the water, romantically, and walked in the park. He took her arm
tenderly. She was sad. “Why?” he asked.
“Memories.” They walked on in silence. “We shouldn’t have come here,” he
said. She pressed his arm in mute recognition. He helped her into the
motor. “You’re so kind and tender to me. I am not used to it,” she said.
He kissed her hand in dumb adoration. “I woke up this morning and
smiled. I wondered why I was smiling, and then remembered I had met a
nice man.”
“When I leave Vienna you must come abroad with me,” he said jestingly.
“It’s not out of the question,” she answered seriously.
He talked glibly about the dearth of intellectual satisfactions. “You’re
so different from other girls. Your nature is artistic.”
“I will show you round the gallery,” she said.
When they went--“This is a picture over which I wept,” she told him.
“This is not bad,” he said, stopping at a Rembrandt.
“Yes, he has hit it off.” Her eyes filled.
“What is it?”
“We used to come here, Hans and I.”
“And where is he now?”
“Dead.”
“Long?”
“Nine months. We had been engaged three years. And then, suddenly, he
died--for no reason--of a mere cold. So young--twenty-two.”
“But you too are so young, you have your life to live.”
“It’s all in the past.”
“No, no! And you’re so beautiful.”
“I will show you my big picture.”
He waited in the motor while she ran upstairs to the apartment to fetch
it.
“Wonderful!” he commented.
“Now I must rush back, father is waiting. And you can have the picture
of me till we meet again to-morrow.”
But she stepped inside and they went for another ride with the picture.
“Where to?” asked the man.
“Round and round,” she said. She crossed her legs, the skirt slipping up
above her knees, and lit a cigarette. And suddenly he leaned over to her
and kissed her on the mouth.
“Tut-tut-tut--You mustn’t kiss. Wait till I kiss you.”
“I _have_ waited,” he answered, “and I’m still waiting, and, by God! I
can’t wait any longer” (with the taxi-meter piling up, he thought,
piling up all the time while we wait, and the chauffeur the only one to
gain by it.)
“This is the Prater,” she said.
“Where to?” asked the taxi-man.
“Round and round,” he said dismally.
She burst out laughing. “You said this so funnily!” She gave him a
furtive kiss on the lips. “What is your name?”
“I have a silly name. I’m called Ebenezer.”
“It is--rather silly.”
“Well, you needn’t call me by it. You can invent another name for me.”
She considered. “Peter,” she said.
“All right--Peter.”
When she fell ill he sent her flowers, and every day she sent a
message--that she was a little better, or a little worse. Then she came
again to the café. “Beautiful, beautiful flowers! I was breathless when
I saw them. And so much!”
He buried his face in her hands, “Beautiful girl ... beautiful flowers.
Wonderful when I think: I’ve been seeking, all these months, all these
years I’ve been seeking, and now I have found.”
“I too. For nine months I was alone. Now when I come to the café, the
waiter says confidentially: ‘The gentleman is already here.’ One feels
one has somebody.”
“While you were ill, when I used to come here by myself, the waitress
looked at me with sad eyes, as if she thought you’d left me or we had
broken it off. I notice we’ve become privileged guests and are treated
accordingly.”
She smiled--so sweetly and intimately, and, watching him, laughed. He
looked up from his cup. “I must laugh,” she said, “at the way you
scratch the last drop of sugar out of the cup.” He laughed too. She was
delightful. “I’ve just come back from Adolf’s bedside,” she remarked.
“And who is Adolf?”
“My fiancé.”
“This is new to me.”
“At least he thinks he is my fiancé.”
“And you don’t think so.”
“No.”
“This is a relief.”
“He is dying now.”
“Oh--is he?” And secretly he thought: This is a relief. “What does he
do?”
“He is a doctor--venereal and skin diseases. But he is very tender and
aesthetic and plays the piano wonderfully--Schumann and Chopin. He says
he will let me live as I like and love whom I like, that he will never
touch me, and only wants to be allowed to marry me and to live by my
side.”
When they came out of the café, it was a sunny afternoon. “Come, I’ll
show you where I live,” he said, and they made their way to Am Hof--the
old-fashioned square of Vienna where he had rooms. She took off her hat
and used his comb and sat down at his writing-table. “It must be nice to
live like that. If I were you I would give myself up to my work, and
never tie myself up with any woman.”
“How you understand me! Other women are so conventional and
self-seeking. But you--you are so delightfully free and easy, so unusual
and romantic!”
She sat in his chair, and suddenly sleep overcame her. “I want to lie
down.” She lay down on his bed, and he sat down beside her. “I feel like
a faithful old dog sitting at your feet and seeing that you come to no
harm.” She gave him her hand, which he pressed to his lips. He looked at
her legs in the glossy silk stockings, the seductive shoe. Warm,
yielding curves, unexplored mysteries. And he said, “After all this
seeking, to feel you have found ... at last. It’s not--no, not your
face; it’s....” He was gently pressing her knee; she made an involuntary
attempt to disengage it. “ ... your soul,” he said--and she left it.
“I’m content: I really need nothing. Not by a word would I suggest or
precipitate the moment.... Not till you yourself ... an offering, a
priceless gift.” She pressed his hand to her heart. “Not even then. I’m
content, I need nothing.” She touched his brow silently with her lips.
“Yes?” he asked, suddenly crushing her in his arms. “Yes?”
She closed her eyes with the lashes like black needles, nodding rapidly
several times. “Pull down the blinds.”
“Oh, I am grateful! Tristan and Isolde.... _Nacht der Liebe_....” He was
whistling.
“Is the door locked?”
“I’ll lock it for you--do anything for you.” Of sheer relief, he felt
like cracking cheap jokes.
“What is the time?”
“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon--the time people here take their 5
o’clock tea.” The yellow blinds drew to and fro in the breeze. Outside
in the sunny square the women were selling oranges and flowers. Upstairs
somebody began playing the piano. “This is Schumann,” she said. “Adolf
plays this.” The blinds still swayed gently, gently, and they could feel
the breeze on their burning cheeks. She knitted her brows. “What are you
thinking?” he asked.
“Adolf is waiting for me. I’ve neglected supper for father.”
He turned on the switch. “No, no, I am ashamed of the light.”
It was black night when they went out. Stepping into the taxicab at the
door, she gave her address. “You shouldn’t have told him where you live
before that old caretaker woman. You never can tell.”
“I take full responsibility for what I do and I am prepared to face the
consequences of my acts, and I have nothing to be ashamed of,” she said.
He remembered the prudish cowardly attitude of his own forget-me-not
eyed sisters, his mother, his maidenly aunts. “You wonderful girl!” he
exclaimed. He felt grateful, so that he did not even mind how much he
had to pay for the taxi. She scanned his face and his figure, and he
instantly looked at his gloves. “They are filthy, I know.”
“Give them to me, I will wash them for you.”
“No, no, why should you?”
“The maid will wash them.”
“Very well, then.”
The taxicab pulled up at her house door. “Just see me upstairs. It’s so
dark.” She took hold of his arm and with a sure quick step ran up the
stairs, while he fumbled uncertainly with his feet. She gave him a kiss
in the dark, which missed the mark, handed him the house door key,
begged him for the sake of love not to make a noise--and was gone. He
felt his way carefully by the chalk walk, dirtying his coat and
hands--and presently lost himself. For an hour he fumbled about in the
dark, groping his way down the steps time without end, only to find
himself at the end of each attempt in the coal cellar. Now I’ve made a
noise, he thought, the caretaker will come out, call the police and have
me arrested. I’m a lost man. When, having given up all hope, suddenly he
saw a shimmering of light, then a new turning, the real stairs--and he
was saved. The Votive Church as he went home seemed made of lace: the
tall twin towers, like a prayer, strained heavenward in the blue night.
He sat down on a bench and thought of her.
He was more than usually courteous to the old caretaker woman. “A
pretty girl, I call her,” she said, opening the heavy outer door for
him, while he paid the customary “lockout money.” “Is she your bride?”
He nodded.
“Ah, well, young men have luck. But I’m not one to let the cat out of
the bag.”
He fumbled in his pockets.
“Thank you.--I am known to be discreet. Baron Waldmeyer who lived here
nine months ago also used to bring his bride up to his rooms, regularly
three times a week you might say. A pretty girl she was, too, Lina
Holz--you know the chemist’s daughter across the way. The white house
opposite. That’s right. Never a word to anybody. God beware! They were
very satisfied with me. ‘Frau Krampf,’ he used to say to me, ‘I can rely
on you.’”
Next day they were hurrying in the train into the country. “I too am
glad we’re friends,” she said. “My family is nothing to me. Mother died
when I was fourteen. She was so small I used to take her on my lap. My
sister married rich, but she can’t do anything decently. She is such a
snob--hides the fact that we are Jews. She will give father a new
suit--or rather says she will--and all so haughtily, you know, so
condescendingly, will talk so much about it and in the long run won’t
buy him anything and will even borrow money from him in the end. She
gives me things occasionally, or rather says she will and doesn’t. But
that which is inside one she doesn’t know.”
“Quite so.”
Yet he had discovered that Isolde, despite her intellectual pretensions,
was as fond of cabarets and dancing halls as any other child of
pleasure-loving Vienna. And she was not content with going to one
cabaret during a night, but from the one immediately wanted to go on to
another, and from that to a third--in all respects similar to the first.
“I’m different,” she said. “Already as a child we had no points of
contact. My sister would go out on the Korso to be stared at by men,
while I sought my friends among writers and artists, or went off by
myself to the Opera and tried to find my real ‘I’ in the _Walküre_, the
_Ring_, the _Meistersinger_, in _Tristan und Isolde_.”
“Very becoming for one named Isolde! If one didn’t know you were above
such cheap romanticism, one would almost suspect you gave yourself that
name.”
She laughed faintly.
“Why--_did_ you?”
She closed her eyes and nodded rapidly.
“How clever of you!” He kissed her hand.
“My real name is Rebecca.”
“Let’s forget that it is. We’ll go to the Opera together--to _Tristan_.
A good performance here, isn’t it?”
She closed her eyes and nodded rapidly, significantly. “I’ll bring the
complete musical score. I have the entire _partitura_ and we can follow
it.”
“By God! we’ll follow it!” said he, though he was quite unable to read
music.
At the Opera, all the liveried attendants seemed to know her. “Ah,
Fräulein Isolde, it’s good to see you again!”
“It’s the first time that I am here since (her eyes filled)--his death.”
And she ushered him upstairs through drafty corridors with the air of a
proprietress showing a visitor round the premises. “Here Hans and I used
to sit. Or, when we had little money, we stood over there or sat on the
steps.”
“A fine Opera House.”
“Yes, this is my temple.”
She carried an enormous book--the complete musical score of the piece,
and they sat down and he read the biographical note, while the orchestra
enclosure gradually filled and the executants began tuning up their
instruments.
“Because I have never known love in real life I want now to realise it
in music.” Thus Wagner one day wrote to Liszt. “I have jotted down in my
head a _Tristan und Isolde_, the simplest but the most full-blooded of
musical conceptions: with the black flag which flies at the end I then
want to cover myself and to--die.”
There was a meagre trickling of applause: the conductor threaded his way
to his seat, passed his hand over the page under the green-shaded lamp,
raised the _bâton_, and began. They sat close together, the Prelude with
its high-stepping, long-striding sinuous tentacles groping after new
resting-places, far out of reach, yet working out its salvation surely
and steadily, swelling and widening, till--the conductor shaking his
locks and his fists--the brass blared its compelling response; and, in a
tide of regaining tranquillity, the Prelude gradually evened itself out
to the level at which it began, and the curtains parted, revealing the
ship. She followed the score with a preoccupied air, now and then
nodding her head with that significant look of critical recognition; but
when he asked for the place they were at she never could find it and
began turning the pages backward and forward, six at a time and in vain.
And when, in the second act, King Marke’s hunting horns died away and
the cast-down torch went out, to a heart-sinking, intolerably dulcet
cadence, and the night was all astir, and Tristan staggered to Isolde,
and the great theatre plunged into the most passionately voluptuous
music that has ever been, then they pressed each other’s fingers more
tightly and their nerves throbbed in unison--until King Marke, returning
at a moment least desired from the hunt, surprised the twain. In this
passionate music, more truly voluptuous than the grosser senses of man
can divine, there lies concealed a certain pledge: a foretaste, maybe,
of a reality awaiting us, or one we needs must forego, wrenched from a
far world by a genius, for us to partake of before we go under.
In the interval he read more of the biography. Wagner, while working on
_Siegfried_, wrote to a friend: “My musical sensibility already sways
far beyond it--thither where my mood belongs: into the realm of
melancholy.” It was his love for Mathilde Wesendonck--a love of denial
for both--which determined the work. “That I have written Tristan I
thank you out of my deepest soul into all eternity.” Thus he writes to
her three years after completion. It has been said that the musical
drama is unreal because the love in it is the artificial outcome of the
love potion given to Tristan and Isolde during the voyage instead of the
death drink they bargained for. But the potion, of course, is a symbol.
Love was latent in them, but could not face the light of day: it is the
belief in the certainty of their death held for them in the cup which
works the love miracle. Only in death can they give each other. But of
that “realm of stilled longings” they had been cheated. He was
there--_Der öde Tag!_ And now the third and last act--the empty sea, the
hollow day, the dreary convalescence, with the black flag already flying
over their destinies. They sat and listened to the sundown glow now
sensible in the familiar bars of this greatest of love-tragedies--as it
had always been.
The measured strains of the _Liebestod_ had grown quicker and more
passionate; Isolde, wrenching her hands, was racing along with the
orchestra which, at this turn, was taking the melody from her, easily,
in rapidly rising voluptuous strains, climbing, slipping, climbing anew,
rapidly, rapidly, to a climax, now, now.... The conductor, forgetting
his quasi-reticent attitude, rose in his seat and with a sweep of his
stick commanding one hundred and twenty-six instruments, drowned her top
notes in a mighty volume of rapturous sound. But she did not mind. Nor
did any one mind. On that plane of emotion one does not mind: one felt
one wanted to go home, cover oneself with the black flag--and die....
They made their way past the drafty swinging doors into the lighted
streets and stood a while in the crowded Opernring, Peter taking her
arm. He was elated. He tried to whistle bits he remembered, but she
stopped him with a frown. In the café she seemed moody and irritable.
“_Must_ you always scratch the cup out?”
“I feel I am wasting my life if I don’t.”
“Why don’t you lick it out with your tongue?”
“What is the matter?”
“I must talk to you very seriously.”
“Well?”
“Another day--to-morrow.”
He would have died of anxiety if he had to wait till to-morrow.
“To-night or not at all.”
“About our--relation. I want to have it out with you. I don’t want you
to be merely playing with me and then, when it suits you, drop me.” They
were going down the teeming Kärntnerstrasse and bent their way into the
Graben, walking up the famous Korso. “Here is father’s jeweller’s shop.”
“What’s all this nonsense?” he asked peremptorily.
“Father’s been bullying me. No money to give me. Business going to ruin.
No one buying jewelry nowadays. ‘_Ein Skandal!_ You’re twenty-two and I,
a man of eighty-six, have to go on supporting you!’ and so on, and so
forth. My brother-in-law sits and talks to my father and tells him I
ought to get married. And father curses me: ‘Again you’ve been out all
night. A good bride and no mistake, Adolf sitting and waiting for you
here all the evening!’ Of course, he is right in a way. But I never
promised definitely to Adolf. I tell him, ‘Adolf, I value your feeling
for me, and if no one better crops up I will marry you in the end.’ So
he sits in our drawing-room all evening after leaving the venereal
disease hospital, waiting for me and playing Chopin.”
Peter thought of what he might say, but couldn’t say much. “Damn him!”
he said.
“And I mean--I don’t want to be playing ducks and drakes with Adolf, who
is a man of fine feeling--”
“But hasn’t he died? He was going to.”
“He wasn’t a bit. He only put himself to bed so as to get me to come and
sit at his bedside and hold his hand. And what I mean is, a man has a
love affair, then another, a third, a fourth, and is only looked up to,
even by women. But a girl has to think.”
“Is there--is there--well, you know what I mean?”
“No, there isn’t. All the same--”
“But why say it like that?”
“You should have thought of saying it yourself. I waited long enough.”
“But why in the world did you make out you were
unconventional--romantic--God knows what--unlike other women? Why did
you?”
“I thought you expected it.”
Damned shameless lie, he thought; and said aloud:
“This would not appear to correspond with the facts. Secretly you were
out for marriage from the start and only pretended--don’t I see it
now!--but all the time you were on the hunt for a husband.”
“You needn’t flatter yourself. I’m good-looking enough to marry any time
I want to. And such birds as you I can find on every bush.”
“Thank you.”
They had reached her house. “Well, am I to ring you up to-morrow as
usual?” Her voice was not friendly.
“As usual,” he said, and thought: As per usual, business as usual. But
the irony of using such decrepit war slang would be lost on her. That
was the worst of it all: they hadn’t really many points of contact. And
making the most of the few they had, he pressed forward to kiss her.
“No.”
He shrugged his shoulders, raised his hat and went. He went by the
familiar Kolowatring that he had paced no end of times before--in other,
happier days. How far away they seemed now!
Next day at two she did not call him up. At three she had not called him
up. By five his anxiety had reached seething point. She would not call
him up. She would never call him up. He was lost--damned. In all Vienna
he could not find a place for himself. He sat and waited, hoping,
doubting. And then, together with her friends, she came, as if not
noticing him, and was about to sit down at a table, when he went after
her and spoke. She turned round, abashed. “You are deadly pale,” he
said. “Are you frightened, or what?”
“No. But I didn’t expect to meet you here.”
“And I waited--five hours. God, how I suffered!”
She looked round at him to see if it was true. His face was haggard. She
was not unkind to him, yet took little notice of him, only now and then,
after the performance of an item turning to him with a--“Quite good,
wasn’t it?”
“Very good!” He was happy--come what might--for the abating of his
erewhile suffering. He begged for an appointment next day and obtained
one, and they lunched together at a freshly painted table of the
restaurant in the Volksgarten. The foliage was breaking out and
everywhere along the Ring the cafés were putting out their little
“gardens.” He glanced at her legs in the flesh-coloured stockings. How
romantically realistic--as if straight from Maupassant! he thought. And
took her hand. She withdrew it. He took it again. “Don’t touch me.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t.”
He remembered a cabaret singer in Vienna who sang in a feeble hoarse
voice: “I can’t, I can’t, I’m weak on the chest,” and then immediately
after in a voice that would put brass trumpets to shame, a voice so
powerful that it made the window panes rattle--“I CAN’T, I CAN’T, I’M
WEAK ON THE CHEST!!!” And he asked, “What do you mean ‘I can’t’? You’re
not weak on the chest?”
She did not laugh. “Something has broken within me--and I don’t know if
it can ever be put right.”
“Then we must set about mending it.”
“There is a gulf, the bridge has been broken. I can never come back. I
can’t help it. I’ve lost all feeling for you.”
“But, my darling, we’re mending it, aren’t we?”
“It can never be mended.”
How charmingly she walked, with feet a little outward and swaying
slightly from the hips. There was something of the awkward school girl
about her. Would she ever come back?
But one day, as the scent of jasmine hovered in the air and he gently
passed his hand over her own and said, “My love, come back to me,” she
closed her eyes with the lashes like black needles and nodded rapidly.
The bridge was mended.
His emotion of gratitude ran to kissing. “Can’t you sit still?” she
admonished him.
“But you are mine. Don’t you want to be?”
“Not in that way.” _Her_ love ran to emotion.
“In that way. Or I feel I am wasting my time.”
“Ach!” she waived him aside like a fly. Then angrily, wearily: “Pull
down the blinds!” She began to unhook her high collar at the neck. “Is
the door locked at least?”
He smiled reassuringly. “I’ve taken requisite steps against the
possibility of King Marke appearing when he is least wanted.”
He held her in his arms, and sang: “You Tristan, I Isolde, no more
Tristan!...”
“Shut up!”
“There is little poetry in you.”
“And you are a beast.”
“Thank you.” And looking at her, drinking her in with his eyes, he
thought, “Poor Richard Wagner! Who had never known such love as this!”
He thought so. He thought so a long time, when she attracted his
attention. “What do you want to do?”
“Go home.”
“No-o.”
“No-o!” she mimicked him angrily. “You’re like that--never enough of a
good thing--lick the sugar out of the bottom of the cup when there’s
nothing left.”
“Ha-ha!”
“Nothing to laugh at.”
He sang: “_Der öde Tag!_”
He went to the adjoining room. When he returned she had her coat on and
was powdering her face before the mirror. As they were leaving, “Put the
light out,” she said. At the café she read the paper and hardly spoke to
him. He looked at his associate in sin. Her face was still beautiful.
Sin sat lightly upon her. He remembered afterward how they sat in the
taxicab--how it rained outside. She only said, “Oh, yes, I’ve still got
your gloves. You will get them to-morrow.” At the gate she gave him her
hand, looked into his eyes, very kindly, he noticed, and said--“Peter,
farewell.”
“Good-bye. Matches!” he cried after her.
“Don’t want any.”
Walking home, he remembered her words and the strangeness of the
“farewell” dawned upon him. Returning, he found a note on the table
which he had not perceived as they went out. On the back of a slip
“Rimless Stockings. Best Quality” he read: “We shall never see each
other again. I _cannot_. Isolde.”
And then came a letter.
“Peter, I have not much to tell you, but I have the feeling that
you are still waiting for something. Somehow a cleft has arisen
between us, which can never be bridged. Is it the fulfilment in us,
was this giving one’s self also the end? I do not know, but it may
well be so.
“In me there is no mourning, not a shimmer of disappointment, no
reproach either for you or for me. And now I know why so long I
could not find any words for you.
“And so farewell, Peter, I wish you the best of luck in all the
coming years.
“ISOLDE.”
It was Easter. He strolled about by himself. When he perceived a black
hat and flesh-coloured stockings, he invariably thought it was she. And
the town was setting itself for the spring; the gardens, the freshly
painted tables and chairs beckoned invitingly. He remembered how he had
felt lost and damned when she had not telephoned to him one day, and now
felt doubly lost--doubly damned. What sort of thing was life? What sort
of creature was man? Daunted by tiny reverses, already squirming like a
worm at a woman’s feet. There he was, just like Adolf, he who had been
so sure of himself, supplicating for mercy, begging her for a morsel of
bread. He strolled all alone about the town, waited at her gate, sat in
the garden where (he remembered her telling him, though it had scarcely
interested him at the time) she had played as a child. There were rows
of seats lined with mothers and nurses. A little boy in the park was
kicking a ball. A nice little fellow, he thought, but he’ll probably
grow up to be a blackguard. Suddenly he saw her sitting with her
friends. A hot pang shot through his heart. She spoke to him pleasantly
but dispassionately. “How are you, Peter? How is life treating you?”
“Rottenly.”
When he had a chance to speak to her alone he supplicated for an
interview.
“Child, it’s no use,” she said wearily.
“Yes, yes, a quarter of an hour--eye to eye--to discuss matters--to talk
things over.”
“All right then, to-night at 8.30.”
When they did meet--at 9.30--he found that he had nothing to discuss,
nothing to talk over. He only wanted her, craved for her physical beauty
with all the strength of his physical being. She knew a subtler passion
that hovered in her breast and was more like music, that went out in
long curves and found no resting-places. And to her he had been part of
that elusive dream. “Forgive me, Isolde, but really it’s your fault. You
put it all so clumsily. Marriage. Yes. Even so, what can I do now?”
At the word marriage her eyes lit up and a smile played on her face.
“What can I say now? I can’t say: Isolde, marry me. I perfectly
understand you can’t say--your pride won’t allow you to say, yes.”
“I’ll go back to my memories. I knew I should have to be alone. I will
never have another like Hans.”
“I know it’s the bitter lot of those to follow him to fare badly by
comparison. Alas! no live virtue stands the ghost of a chance at the
side of retrospective illusion.”
She looked at him sharply. “The comparison does not arise. I didn’t
_love_ you.”
“But then why, may I ask--yes, precisely, why--?”
“Because I thought you expected it.”
“Look here. Listen. I want to tell you something.”
“Better hold your tongue.”
“I expect--” it was a desperate step--“yes, I expect you to marry me.”
Her face lit up at the word. She played with the idea. “I don’t
deny”--she puffed at a cigarette--“that it would have certain immediate
advantages. Father was carrying on again this morning. ‘_Ein Skandal!_
I, an old man with one foot in the grave, have to keep you.’ ‘What do
you want me to do?’ I cried at last. ‘You never taught me a thing. All
the shops and offices are reducing their staff. Do you want me to go on
the streets?’ He slapped my face. I went to my room and cried. Later he
came to me. He was sorry. ‘I’d like to see you settled before I close my
eyes.’ He’d be glad, and I’d be glad to make him happy. Let me see, I’d
have a little money if I married--not much, still a trifle.”
“Who from?”
“My brother-in-law promised. Then there are silver things--knives and
forks, solid silver--not much, but still something.”
_Der öde Tag!_
“Father might be prevailed upon to give something from his shop. Then
furniture--a bedstead--two chairs. My sister has taken the mattress,
though it didn’t belong to her. My mother left it to me.”
The vulgarity of it--things--cupboards--carpets--meddling relations. How
dismal was our human fate! He felt that one had but to set one’s ship
towards romance, to realise how fruitless were one’s hopes and how soon
frustrated! She thought of her father, of the end of squalor and deceit,
the joy of her brother-in-law, her own home, children, wealth. “But--”
she scarcely meant it--“but I can’t. It’s not honest towards you for me
to accept a solution for reasons of convenience only.”
“So you can’t?” He was almost relieved.
“I can’t.”
All the misery and anguish of his loneliness, his intolerable loneliness
dawned upon him. He had spent a week without her. He knew what it was
like. “Come, it really looks as though you didn’t want to make me happy
for my own sake!”
“Well, if you are sure that it will make you happy.”
He was not sure. (He was sure of the contrary.) He drank his cup to the
bottom and then took the spoon and licked off the sugar, while she
watched him critically. And he thought: She won’t let me drink my coffee
as I like. She won’t let me do anything as I like. I’m a lost man.
She said, “We must look at it sensibly. We both will have our
advantages. You will be proud of showing me to your people and friends,
while I shall be doing things for you at home.” He looked at her: she
was too small and when she walked she waddled like a duck. Indeed, what
would his sisters think of it? He pictured her at forty, at fifty,
sixty and seventy, while he pictured himself all the while at
twenty-five. She complained a good deal of her father, but if the old
man found fault with her it was, of course, with good cause. “I’ll mend
this for you,” she would say--and never did. “I must visit Hans’s grave
to-morrow”--but she went to a dance instead. He recalled that she had
not yet returned his gloves--after keeping them two months!
“But why are you looking so wretchedly sad? I’ve not accepted you yet.”
“Not a bit.” He imagined his arrival with his dark bride in the United
States, their appearing before his proud “one hundred per cent.
American” mother, the astonishment of his slim forget-me-not eyed
sisters, the curve of their raised brows.
“If I married--” and she looked at him out of the corner of the eye to
see how he took it, “we’d have separate bedrooms.”
He smiled faintly. It was past a joke.
“Cheer up. You look as though somebody has done you out of your money.
I can see it won’t do. You’re so cold, so calculating, so concentrated
on yourself. I am sure I could never marry you. I was merely joking.”
“No joke, I meant it. It’s settled--you’re my bride now and I’m your
blooming bridegroom.”
“Your first experience?”
“Yes. I feel like a fool.”
“Thank you,” she smiled. “It’s my second.” She looked at her hands. “May
I keep Hans’s ring?”
“Yes,” he said gloomily. Hans. Fritz. Grete. Nauseating relations.
They’ll want to congratulate him, see the ring, touch it, maybe--all the
dark Jewish brood, dentists, skin-disease doctors, stock-exchange
frequenters. A nosing father--perhaps suggesting purchasing the
engagement ring at his own shop, offering a wedding ring “cheap” in
advance, or questioning the value of it if bought elsewhere--belittling
the outlay--pooh-poohing expense. It was unbearable.
“Do your people speak German?”
He shook his head abjectly.
“Then you must teach me English.”
“I’ll try.” He pictured her dumbness, her being tied to him night and
day, his mother and sisters asking her easy simple questions:
“How--do--you--like--America?” and her asking back: “Please?” every
time. A bewildered aunt of his struggling with a dictionary to make
herself understood. Isolde smiling propitiatorily at his mother, trying
to curry favour with her, to appear the tender wife; and he the heavy
father to their common children.
“You needn’t look so unhappy. I haven’t accepted you yet.”
“It’s one o’clock, the café’s closing,” he said peremptorily, and called
to the waiter: “Herr Ober! Zalen!--Yes or no?”
She did not answer, but smiled shyly. He took an empty cigarette box,
unscrewed his fountain-pen, and wrote:
“?”
She took the fountain-pen from him and wrote:
“!”
He quibbled: “Is that an affirmative or perhaps an equally determined
negative?”
She did not answer. He helped her on with her coat and while he was
putting on his own, slowly, pensively she was collecting her things into
the bag: the powder-puff, the lip stick, the remaining cigarettes. He
watched her eagerly. If she took the cigarette box with his “?” and her
“!” it meant--he knew what it meant. It meant that in after years she
would be saying: “On this empty cigarette box my husband once proposed
marriage to me.” She would say it, a grey-haired gouty old woman, with a
deep black moustache and a beard, lying in bed with one complaint or
another, in a bonnet, her teeth in the glass at her side. She would say
it to their children, little hairy black Jews creeping about everywhere:
to her children’s children; and all those long years he’d be tied to
her. Her gaze lingered on the cigarette box, and her thoughts, from this
chance _memento_ of a romantic proposal swayed to that which it meant,
her new life in America, her newly-gained freedom, the long-awaited
salvation. But she noticed his searching critical look and did not take
the _memento_.
“Yes or no, for the last time?”
They were moving to the door into the street, where the rain was
beginning to dribble, and stood still on the pavement.
She shook her head, and he made a movement to go. She wanted to say
something to hold him back. “Here are your--your gloves, Peter.” And
tears seemed to come to her eyes.
He took them as a sign, pressed her hand and went his way hurriedly. At
the corner a gust of wind blew the rain against his face and tried for
his hat. He did not know what he had done, why he had done it, or what
had been done to him. He only knew he wanted to go home, cover himself
with the black flag--and die.
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