_Fliesse, fliesse, lieber Fluss!_
_Nimmer werd’ ich froh;_
_So verrauschte Scherz und Kuss_
_Und die Treue so._
_Goethe._
Everything went wrong with Frank; he could succeed in nothing. He had no
luck in anything--but he won steadily at ping-pong. He was rapidly
losing his hair. But on that score he was optimistic. As his hair fell
out more and more, he lost neither courage nor faith, but interpreted
this as a process preparatory to new growth. The new hair which was to
make its appearance must, he argued, have room; and the old hair was
making room for it--with alacrity. When, after a time, it had entirely
disappeared, he judged that now at last the field was clear for a fresh
crop. And, as if to compensate him for his premature bereavement on the
top, dispassionate nature started a particularly bristling, pushful
growth out of his nostrils. Even so, his faith in the value of human
striving had not deserted him. All other remedies having failed, he
determined to grow hair by sheer strength of will. And he was
succeeding--succeeding....
Lord Ottercove devoted more and more time to reading. He had always been
a great reader, but now, since his marriage to Eva, he spent all the
day with her reading a book to himself. He had always been bored, but
now, married to her, he seemed more bored than ever before.
The haze and hurry, the dreamy unreality of modern life. Frank was
bewildered rather than bored with it. He was thrown like flotsam into
the stream and was swept along. But he would step out--and life would be
timeless. He could not tell how passionately he craved to step out of
life in time, while he was with de Jones, Mrs. Kerr, and Ottercove.
The scrambling on the part of the three men for the favours of Eva, as
the yacht made its way towards Rome, was too much for Frank, and he left
them at Genoa, travelling north by rail.
And now, as he looked back, the bleak hours he once spent with Eva
seemed coloured beads wetted in light and translucent with a meaning.
The actual giving at the time was crude and like a pain. The remembrance
of it, as it grew more distant, was as the faint perfume of roses, a
romance far off. Dead, perhaps, we see these things completely. He
remembered how in that first kiss she had pressed herself, a pliant
plant, against him, and closed her eyes, as if to shut in the vision:
there was something in her movement half instinctive which thrilled him
in one so young; half naïve, as though she had only read of it in books
and now, for the first time, was tasting love, and staging it, in actual
life! He remembered how at his dentist’s one day, they had sat together
side by side on the narrow sofa in the waiting-room, and as the
attendant turned his back on them, he had touched her thigh and knee
(oh, thigh! oh, knee!), and at once when they were out, and in the taxi,
she had kissed him on his dentisted mouth. He remembered too, how she
had written to him once about a Cambridge “student,” alleged to have
given her circumstantial proof of his, Ferdinand’s, unfaithfulness, and
when he wrote to her demanding that she substantiate the charge, and
challenged her to identify the Cambridge “student,” her writing back:
“Let us drop the subject, as the matter is muddling.” Or how, after
saying to him: “You must absolutely send me roses for my birthday
to-morrow, Ferdinand!” she telegraphed next day: “Please don’t send
flowers;” and the basket of flowers he sent her in gallant disregard of
her wire crossed her letter to him containing a bill for £5 for a
costume she could not resist acquiring, and which she lent forthwith to
a friend who did not come back with it. At the time he resented this
overture. Now, in retrospect, it moved him: did it not show a touching
solicitude not to lead him into needless expense in the face of an
already existing bill--when she might so easily have asked for both! He
now thought of her feelings when one day he had spoken to her like a
boor, and barely tried to conceal his tedium in her presence. He
remembered the moistened look in her eye, the curve of her brow, the
twitch of her lashes. And these metaphors of love stirred and racked his
soul.
In Milan, cold, sparse, and unfriendly, where at nightfall woeful
figures dotted the wide, deserted, wind-swept streets, his heart, grown
tender through memory, constricted in sombre anguish. “Poor women!” he
thought.
Getting into the Vienna express at midnight, into a coupé in which the
blinds were drawn and the passengers asleep, his mood darkened and
deepened. A siren at his side, opening her eyes at his intrusion,
resumed a desultory conversation with another, a pale coughing girl,
with whom she was travelling north where “trade” was deemed to be
better. “On arrival,” she flustered, “I must buy myself some new hair,
and then you will wait for me downstairs while I go up and see Francesca
about giving us a room.” The girl close to him addressed him in Italian.
“I do not speak Italian,” Frank said. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes,” she said, articulating deliberately: “we have no b-hananas; we
have no b-hananas to--day.”
Was that all she knew of English? No, there were other words she knew.
“Love”--“kiss”--“cheque-book.” Did he have a cheque-book? Englishmen,
she said, always had a cheque-book. It was, she thought, their
distinguishing characteristic. Where were they going? To Budapest--where
they had once lived with their parents. “At the time when we were still
honest,” she added.
“Fallen women! Lost women! Poor lost women!”
“In this world we are all lost men and women,” echoed a voice in him to
the shattering rhythm of the train.
All lost men and women. Lost. Some more luxuriously lost than others,
but all, all lost. Lost and damned. No escape!
He closed his eyes. Lost, lost, lost ... lost, lost, lost....
A long, wide, endless road stretched before him. He is walking down that
road, the road to Purgatory. What is the crowd outside that house? He
stops and watches. They are carrying out an open coffin with a young
girl in it. The old harpies in the crowd shake their heads. “She took
her life.” “What, took her life?” “She has been betrayed by a young
good-for-nothing.” “No, she died in childbirth.”
“Let me! Let me!” He rushes to her. “I was the first to cause her fall.
Oh, wait! Don’t close the lid! O, Eva! Dearest heart. She died for love
... like Fräulein Else.”
He sheds hot tears as he kneels on her cold tomb which hides her and her
young white purity. But as he rises and leaves the cemetery, she follows
silently behind him to the gate, where, sensing something, he turns
round. “Eva!”
“I don’t want to be buried. I am yours,” she says, coming to him in her
long white shroud. “Take me away with you.”
They kiss. He is forgiven....
“What’s this?” He opens his eyes, heavy with tears.
“Verona. A stop of forty minutes,” imparts his vis-à-vis, “and there is
a cold buffet.”
Another dream, another life!