believe—— I mean everything when I say everything—you’ll think I mean
some one thing—won’t you?” she went on hurriedly. She felt that she was
becoming hysterical.
“It doesn’t matter,” he rejoined, walking on beside her, his heart
beating violently. “Down, you dog,” he said aloud.
“What is that?” She raised her eyes and he looked into them, and they
both smiled.
“That’s better. I wish I were God.”
“A desire for a vocation.”
“Not true, and horrid, as usual,” she answered, and she was hot and
angry all at once.
He pulled at his moustache and sniffed. “I can smell the hedges—ah, the
country is a gay deceiver—it smells pleasant enough, but it’s
treacherous. The country, my dear Emma, has done more to corrupt man, to
drag him down, to turn him loose upon his lower instincts, than
morphine, alcohol and women. That’s why I like it, that’s why it’s the
perfect place for women. They are devils and should be driven out, and
as there’s more room in the country and consequently less likelihood of
driving them out in too much of a hurry, there is more time for
amusement.” He watched her out of the corner of his eye as he said these
things to note if they were ill advised. They seemed to leave her cold,
but tense.
A little later they passed the barns again.
“What was that?” Emma asked suddenly.
“I heard nothing.”
But she had heard something, and her heart beat fearfully. She
recognized Oscar’s voice. She reached up signing Straussmann to be
quiet. She did not want him to hear; she wished that the ground would
yawn, would swallow him up.
“See that yellow flower down there,” she said, pointing toward the end
of the path they had just come. “I want it, I must have it, please.” He
did as he was bid, amiably enough.
She listened—she heard the voice of Oscar’s little sweetheart:
“It seems as if we were one already.”... It was high, resolute,
unflagging, without emotion, a childish parroting of some novel. Oscar’s
voice came back, half smothered:
“Do you really care—more than you like Berkeley?”
“Yes, I do,” she answered in the same false treble, “lots more.”
“Come here,” he said softly—the hay rustled.
“I don’t want to—the rye gets into my hair and spoils it.”
“Dolly, do you like the country?”
“Yes, I do,”—without conviction.
“We will go to the city,” he answered.
“Oh, Oscar, you’re so strong,” she giggled, and it sent a cold shudder
through Emma’s being.
Then presently, “What’s the matter, Oscar—why, you’re crying.”
“I’m not—well, then yes, I am—what of it?—you’ll understand, too, some
day.”
She was evidently frightened, because she said in a somewhat loosened
key, “No one would ever believe that we were as much in love as we are,
would they, Oscar?”
“No, why do you ask that?”
“It’s a great pity,” she said again with the false sound, and sighed.
“Do you care? Why do you care?”
Straussmann was coming back with the yellow flower between thumb and
forefinger. Emma ran a little way to meet him.
“Come, let us go home the other way.”
“Rather, let us not go home,” he said, boldly, and took her wrist,
hurting her.
“Ah,” she said. “Vous m’avez blessée d’amour”—ironically.
“Yes, speak French, it helps women like you at such moments,” he said,
brutally, and kissed her.
But kissing him back, she thought, “The fool, why does Oscar take her so
seriously when they are both children, and she is torturing him.”
“My love, my sweet, my little love,” he was babbling.
She tried to quench this, trembling a little. “But tell me, my
friend—no, not so hasty—what do you think of immortality?” He had pushed
her so far back that there was no regaining her composure. “My God, in
other words, what of the will to retribution!”
But she could not go on. “I’ve tried to,” she thought.
Later, when the dawn was almost upon them, he said: “How sad to be
drunk, only to die. For the end of all man is Fate, in other words, the
end of all man is vulgar.”
She felt the need of something that had not been.
“I’m not God, you see, after all.”
“So I see, madam,” he said. “But you’re a damned clever little woman.”
When she came in, she found Kahn lying flat on his back, his eyes wide
open.
“Couldn’t you sleep?”
“No, I could not sleep.”
She was angry. “I’m sorry—you suffer.”
“Yes, a little.”
“Kahn,” she cried in anguish, flinging herself on her knees beside him.
“What should I have done, what shall I do?”
He put his hand on her cheek. “My dear, my dear,” he said, and sighed.
“I perhaps was wrong.”
She listened.
“Very wrong, I see it all now; I am an evil man, an old and an evil
being.”
“No, no!”
“Yes, yes,” he said gently, softly, contradicting her. “Yes, evil, and
pitiful, and weak”; he seemed to be trying to remember something. “What
is it that I have overlooked?” He asked the question in such a confused
voice that she was startled.
“Is it hate?” she asked.
“I guess so, yes, I guess that’s it.”
“Kahn, try to think—there must be something else.”
“Madness.”
She began to shiver.
“Are you cold?”
“No, it’s not cold.”
“No, it’s not cold,” he repeated after her. “You are not cold, Emma, you
are a child.”
Tears began to roll down her cheeks.
“Yes,” he continued sadly. “You too will hear: remorse is the medium
through which the evil spirit takes possession.”
And again he cried out in anguish. “But I’m _not_ superficial—I may have
been wanton, but I’ve not been superficial. I wanted to give up
everything, to abandon myself to whatever IT demanded, to do whatever IT
directed and willed. But the terrible thing is I don’t know what abandon
is. I don’t know when it’s abandon and when it’s just a case of minor
calculation.
“The real abandon is not to know whether one throws oneself off a cliff
or not, and not to care. But I can’t do it, because I must know, because
I’m afraid if I did cast myself off, I should find that I had thrown
myself off the lesser thing after all, and that,” he said in a horrified
voice, “I could never outlive, I could never have faith again. And so it
is that I shall never know, Emma; only children and the naïve know, and
I am too sophisticated to accomplish the divine descent.”
“But you must tell me,” she said, hurriedly. “What am I to do, what am I
to think? My whole future depends on that, on your answer—on knowing
whether I do an injustice not to hate, not to strike, not to kill—well,
you must tell me—I swear it is my life—my entire life.”
“Don’t ask me, I can’t know, I can’t tell. I who could not lead one
small sheep, what could I do with a soul, and what still more could I do
with you? No,” he continued, “I’m so incapable. I am so mystified. Death
would be a release, but it wouldn’t settle anything. It never settles
anything, it simply wipes the slate, it’s merely a way of putting the
sum out of mind, yet I wish I might die. How do I know now but that
everything I have thought, and said, and done, has not been false, a
little abyss from which I shall crawl laughing at the evil of my own
limitation.”
“But the child—what have I been telling Oscar—to love with an
everlasting love——”
“That’s true,” he said.
“Kahn, listen. What have I done to him, what have I done to myself?
What are we all doing here—are we all mad—or are we merely
excited—overwrought, hysterical? I must know, I must know.” She took
his hand and he felt her tears upon it.
“Kahn, is it an everlasting but a changing love—what kind of love is
that?”
“Perhaps that’s it,” he cried, jumping up, and with a gesture tore his
shirt open at the throat. “Look, I want you to see, I run upon the world
with a bared breast—but never find the blade—ah, the civility of our own
damnation—that’s the horror. A few years ago, surely this could not have
happened. Do you know,” he said, turning his eyes all hot and burning
upon her, “the most terrible thing in the world is to bare the breast
and never to feel the blade enter!” He buried his face in his hands.
“But, Kahn, you must think, you must give me an answer. All this
indecision is all very well for us, for all of us who are too old to
change, for all of us who can reach God through some plaything we have
used as a symbol, but there’s my son, what is he to think, to feel, he
has no jester’s stick to shake, nor stool to stand on. Am I responsible
for him? Why,” she cried frantically, “must I be responsible for him? I
tell you I won’t be, I can’t. I won’t take it upon myself. But I have, I
have. Is there something that can make me immune to my own blood? Tell
me—I must wipe the slate—the fingers are driving me mad—can’t he stand
alone now? Oh, Kahn, Kahn!” she cried, kissing his hands. “See, I kiss
your hands, I am doing so much. You must be the prophet—you can’t do
less for the sign I give you—I must know, I must receive an answer, I
_will_ receive it.”
He shook her off suddenly, a look of fear came into his eyes.
“Are you trying to frighten me?” he whispered. She went into the hall,
into the dark, and did not know why, or understand anything. Her mind
was on fire, and it was consuming things that were strange and merciful
and precious.
Finally she went into her son’s room and stood before his bed. He lay
with one feverish cheek against a dirty hand, his knees drawn up; his
mouth had a peculiar look of surprise about it.
She bent down, called to him, not knowing what she was doing. “Wrong,
wrong,” she whispered, and she shook him by the shoulders. “Listen,
Oscar, get up. Listen to me!”
He awoke and cried out as one of her tears, forgotten, cold, struck
against his cheek. An ague shook his limbs. She brought her face close
to his.
“Son, hate too, that is inevitable—irrevocable——”
He put out his two hands and pushed them against her breast and in a
subdued voice said, “Go away, go away,” and he looked as if he were
about to cry, but he did not cry.
She turned and fled into the hall.
However, in the morning, at breakfast, there was nothing unusual about
her, but a tired softness and yielding of spirit; and at dinner, which
was always late, she felt only a weary indifference when she saw
Straussmann coming up the walk. He had a red and white handkerchief
about his throat, and she thought, “How comic he looks.”
“Good evening,” he said.
“Good evening,” she answered, and a touch of her old gaiety came into
her voice. Kahn was already seated, and now she motioned Straussmann to
follow. She began slicing the cold potted beef and asked them about
sugar in their tea, adding, “Oscar will be here soon.” To Kahn she
showed only a very little trace of coldness, of indecision.
“No,” Straussmann said, still standing, legs apart: “If you’ll excuse
me, I’d like a word or two with Kahn.” They stepped off the porch
together.
“Kahn,” he said, going directly to the point, “listen,” he took hold of
Kahn’s coat by the lapel. “You have known Emma longer than I have,
you’ve got to break it to her.” He flourished a large key under Kahn’s
nose, as he spoke.
“I’ve got him locked up in the out-house safe enough for the present,
but we must do something immediately.”
“What’s the matter?” A strange, pleasant but cold sweat broke out upon
Kahn’s forehead.
“I found Oscar sitting beside the body of his sweetheart,
what’s-her-name; he had cut her throat with a kitchen knife, yes, with a
kitchen knife—he seemed calm, but he would say nothing. What shall we
do?”
“They’ll say he was a degenerate from the start——”
“Those who live by the flesh—eh?”
“No,” Kahn said, in a confused voice, “that’s not it.”
They stood and stared at each other so long that presently Emma grew
nervous and came down the garden path to hear what it was all about.
[Illustration]
ANTIQUE
A lady in a cowl of lawn
With straight bound tabs and muted eyes,
And lips fair thin and deftly drawn
And oddly wise.
A cameo, a ruff of lace,
A neck cut square with corners laid;
A thin Greek nose and near the face
A polished braid.
Low, sideways looped, of amber stain
The pale ears caught within its snare.
A profile like a dagger lain
Between the hair.
KATRINA SILVERSTAFF
“We have eaten a great deal, my friend, against the day of God.”
She was a fine woman, hard, magnificent, cold, Russian, married to a
Jew, a doctor on the East Side.
You know that kind of woman, pale, large, with a heavy oval face.
A woman of ‘material’—a lasting personality, in other words, a
‘fashionable’ woman, a woman who, had she lived to the age of forty odd,
would have sat for long fine hours by some window, overlooking some
desolate park, thinking of a beautiful but lazy means to an end.
She always wore large and stylish hats, and beneath them her mouth took
on a look of pain at once proud, aristocratic and lonely.
She had studied medicine—but medicine in the interest of animals; she
was a good horse doctor—an excellent surgeon on the major injuries to
birds and dogs.
In fact she and her husband had met in a medical college in Russia—she
had been the only woman in the class, the only one of the lot of them
who smiled in a strange, hurt and sarcastic way when dissecting.
The men treated her like one of them, that is, they had no cringing
mannerliness about their approach, they lost no poise before her, and
tried no tricks as one might say.
The Silverstaffs had come to America, they had settled on the East Side,
among ‘their own people’ as he would say; she never said anything when
he talked like this, she sat passive, her hands in her lap, but her
nostrils quivered, and somewhere under the skin of her cheek something
trembled.
Her husband was the typical Jewish intellectual, a man with stiff,
short, greying hair, prominent intelligent and kindly eyes, rather
short, rather round, always smelling of Greek salad and carbolic acid,
and always intensely interested in new medical journals, theories,
discoveries.
He was a little dusty, a little careless, a little timid, but always
gentle.
They had been in America scarcely eight months before the first child
was born, a girl, and then following on her heels a boy, and then no
more children.
Katrina Silverstaff stopped having her children as abruptly as she had
begun having them; something complicated had entered her mind, and where
there are definite complications of the kind that she suffered, there
are no more children.
“We have eaten a great deal, my friend, against the day of God,” she had
said that.
She had said that one night, sitting in the dusk of their office. There
was something inexpressibly funny in their sitting together in this
office, with its globe of the world, its lung charts, its weighing
machine, its surgical chair, and its bowl of ineffectual goldfish.
Something inexpressibly funny and inexpressibly fecund, a fecundity
suppressed by coldness, and a terrible determination—more terrible in
that her husband Otto felt nothing of it.
He was very fond of her, and had he been a little more sensitive he
would have been very glad to be proud of her. She never became
confidential with him, and he never tried to overstep this, partly
because he was unaware of it, and partly because he felt little need of
a closer companionship.
She was a fine woman, he knew that; he never thought to question
anything she did, because it was little, nor what she said, because it
was less; there was an economy about her existence that simply forbade
questioning. He felt in some dim way, that to criticize at all would be
to stop everything.
Their life was typical of the East Side doctor’s life. Patients all day
for him, and the children for her, with an occasional call from someone
who had a sick bird. In the evening they would sit around a table with
just sufficient food, with just sufficient silver and linen, and one
luxury: Katrina’s glass of white wine.
Or sometimes they would go out to dine, to some kosher place, where
everyone was too friendly and too ugly and too warm, and here he would
talk of the day’s diseases while she listened to the music and tried not
to hear what her daughter was crying for.
He had always been a ‘liberal,’ from the first turn of the cradle. In
the freedom of the people, in the betterment of conditions, he took the
interest a doctor takes in seeing a wound heal.
As for Katrina Silverstaff, she never said anything about it, he never
knew what she really thought, if she thought at all; it did not seem
necessary for her to do or say anything, she was fine as she was, where
she was. On the other hand it never occurred to him that she would not
hear, with calmness at least, his long dissertations on capital.
At the opening of this story, Katrina’s daughter was a little girl of
ten, who was devoted to dancing, and who lay awake at nights worrying
about the shape of her legs, which had already begun to swell with a
dancer’s muscles.
The boy was nine, thin, and wore spectacles.
And of course what happened was quite unaccountable.
A man, calling himself Castillion Rodkin, passed through one Summer,
selling Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” Among the houses where he had
left a copy was the house of Otto Silverstaff.
Katrina had opened the door, the maid was down with the measles, and the
doctor was busy with a patient, a Jew much revered for his poetry.
She never bought anything of peddlers, and she seldom said more than
“No, thank you.” In this case she neither said “Thank you,” nor closed
the door—instead she held it open, standing a little aside for him to
pass, and, utterly astonished, he did pass, waiting behind her in the
hall for orders.
“We will go into the study,” she said, “my husband is busy.”
“I was selling Bibles last year,” he remarked, “but they do not go down
in this section.”
“Yes,” she answered, “I see,” and she moved before him into the heavy
damp parlour which was never unshuttered and which was never used. She
reached up and turned on one solitary electric light.
Castillion Rodkin might have been of any nationality in the world; this
was partly from having travelled in all countries, and also from a fluid
temperament—little was fixed or firm in him, a necessary quality in a
salesman.
Castillion Rodkin was below medium height, thin and bearded with a pale,
almost white growth of hair. He was peculiarly colourless, his eyes were
only a shade darker than his temples, and very restless.
She said simply, “We must talk about religion.”
And with an awkwardness unusual to him he asked “Why?”
“Because,” she said in a strained voice, making a hurt gesture, “it is
so far from me.”
He did not know what to say, of course, and lifting one thin leg in its
white trousers he placed it carefully over the other.
She was sitting opposite him, her head turned a little to one side, not
looking at anything. “You see,” she said presently, “I want religion to
become out of the reach of the few.”
“Become’s a queer word,” he said.
“It is the only word,” she answered, and there was a slight irritation
in her voice, “because it is so irrevocably for the many.”
“Yes,” he said mechanically, and reached up to his beard, leaving his
hand there under a few strands of hair.
“You see,” she went on simply, “I can come to the point. For me,
everything is a lie—I am not telling this to you because I need your
help, I shall never need help,” she said, turning her eyes on his,
“understand that from the beginning——”
“Beginning,” he said in a loud voice suddenly.
“From the beginning,” she repeated calmly, “right from the very start,
not help but hindrance, I need enough hindrance, a total obstacle,
otherwise I cannot accomplish it.”
“Accomplish what, madame?” he asked and took his hand from under his
beard.
“That is my affair, mine alone, that you must not question, it has
nothing to do with you, you are only a means to an end.”
He said, “What can I do for you?”
She smiled, a sudden smile, and under her cheek something flickered.
“You can do nothing,” she said and stood up. “I must always do it
all—yes, I shall be your mistress—wait,” she said raising her hand, and
there was anger and pride in her. “Do not intrude now by word or sign,
but tomorrow you will come to me—that is enough—that is all you can do,”
and in this word “all” he felt a limit on himself that he had never
known before, and he was frightened and disquieted and unhappy.
He came the next day, cringing a little, fawning, uneasy, and she would
not see him—she sent word “I do not need you yet,” and he called again
the next day and learned that she was out of town, then one Sunday she
was in to him.
She said quietly to him, as if she were preparing him for a great
disappointment, “I have deliberately, very deliberately, removed remorse
from the forbidden fruit,” and he was abject suddenly and trembling.
“There will be no thorns for you,” she went on in a cold abrupt voice.
“You will miss that, but do not presume to show it in my presence.”
“Also my floor is not the floor on which you may crawl,” she continued,
“and I do not permit you to suffer while I am in the room—and,” she
added, unfastening her brooch slowly and precisely, “I dislike all
spiritual odours.”
“Are we all strange?” he whispered.
“It takes more than will to attain to madness.”
“Yes.”
Then she was silent for a while, thinking.
“I want to suffer,” he murmured, and trembled again.
“We are all gross at times, but this is not your time.”
“I could follow you into the wilderness.”
“I would not miss you.”
And it was said in a terrible forbidding voice.
“I suffer as a birthright—I want it to be something more my own than
that.”
“What are you going to do?” he said.
“Does one ever destroy oneself who is utterly disinterested?”
“I don’t know.”
Presently she said, “I love my husband—I want you to know that, it
doesn’t matter, but I want you to know that, and that I am content with
him, and quite happy——”
“Yes,” Castillion Rodkin answered and began trembling again, holding on
to the sides of the bed.
“But there is something in me,” she continued, “that is very mournful
because it is being.”
He could not answer and tears came to his eyes.
“There is another thing,” she said with abrupt roughness, “that I must
insist on, that is that you will not insult me by your presence while
you are in this room.”
He tried to stop his weeping now, and his body grew tense, abject.
“You see,” she continued, “some people drink poison, some take a knife,
and others drown; I take you.”
In the very early dawn, she sat up with a strange smile. “Will you
smoke?” she said, and lit him a cigarette. Then she withdrew into
herself, sitting on the edge of the mahogany boards, her hands in her
lap.
And there was a little ease, and a little comfort in Castillion Rodkin,
and he turned, drawing up one foot, thrusting his hand beneath his
beard, slowly smoking his cigarette.
“Does one regret?” he asked, and the figure of Katrina never moved, nor
did she seem to hear.
“You know, you frightened me—last night,” he went on, lying on his back
now and looking at the ceiling. “I almost became something—something.”
There was a long silence.
“Shall the beasts of the field and the birds of the air forsake thee?”
he said gloomily, then brightly. “Shall any man forsake thee?”
Katrina Silverstaff remained as she was, but under her cheek something
quivered.
The dawn was very near and the street lamps had gone out; a milk cart
rattled across the square, and passed up a side street.
“One out of many, or only one?”
He put his cigarette out, he was beginning to breathe with difficulty,
he was beginning to shiver.
“Well——”
He turned over, got up, stood on the floor.
“Is there nothing I can say?” he began, and went a little away and put
his things on.
“When shall I see you again?”
And now a cold sweat broke out on him, and his chin trembled.
“Tomorrow?”
He tried to come toward her, but he found himself near the door instead.
“I’m nothing,” he said, and turned toward her, bent slightly; he wanted
to kiss her feet—but nothing helped him.
“You’ve taken everything now, now I cannot feel, I do not suffer——” He
tried to look at her—and succeeded finally after a long time.
He could see that she did not know he was in the room.
Then something like horror entered him, and with a soft, swift running
gait he reached the door, turned the handle and was gone.
A few days later, at dusk, for his heart was the heart of a dog, he came
into Katrina’s street, and looked at the house.
A single length of crape, bowed, hung at the door.
From that day he began to drink heavily, he got to be quite a nuisance
in the cafés, he seldom had money to pay, he was a fearless beggar,
almost insolent, and once when he saw Otto Silverstaff sitting alone in
a corner, with his two children, he laughed a loud laugh and burst into
tears.
HUSH BEFORE LOVE