To be sure, one can't stand eternally in a gateway. Finally the knight
deserted his post and vanished into a sausage shop. The hour had come
when even the most glowing passion of revenge fades gently into a
passion for supper.
Niebeldingk who had waited behind his curtain, half-amused,
half-bored--for in the silent, distinguished street where everyone
knew him a scandal was to be avoided at any cost--Niebeldingk hastened
to make up for his neglect at once.
The dark fell. Here and there the street-lamps flickered through the
purple air of the summer dusk....
The maid who opened the door looked at him with cool astonishment as
though he were half a stranger who had the audacity to pay a call at
this intimate hour.
"That means a scolding," he thought.
But he was mistaken.
Smiling quietly, Alice arose from the couch where she had been sitting
by the light of a shaded lamp and stretched out her hand with all her
old kindliness. The absence of the otherwise inevitable book was the
only change that struck him.
"We haven't seen each other for a long time," he said, making a
wretched attempt at an explanation.
"Is it so long?" she asked frankly.
"Thank you for your gentle punishment." He kissed her hand. Then he
chatted, more or less at random, of disagreeable business matters, of
preparations for a journey, and so forth.
"So you are going away?" she asked tensely.
The word had escaped him, he scarcely knew how. Now that he had
uttered it, however, he saw very clearly that nothing better remained
for him to do than to carry the casual thought into action.... Here he
passed a fruitless, enervating life, slothful, restless and
humiliating; at home there awaited him light, useful work, dreamless
sleep, and the tonic sense of being the master.
All that, in other days, held him in Berlin, namely, this modest,
clever, flexible woman had almost passed from his life. Steady neglect
had done its work. If he went now, scarcely the smallest gap would be
torn into the fabric of his life.
Or did it only seem so? Was she more deeply rooted in his heart than
he had ever confessed even to himself? They were both silent. She
stood very near him and sought to read the answer to her question in
his eyes. A kind of anxious joy appeared upon her slightly
worn features.
"I'm needed at home," he said at last. "It is high time for me. If you
desire I'll look after your affairs too."
"Mine? Where?"
"Well, I thought we were neighbours there--more than here. Or have you
forgotten the estate?"
"Let us leave aside the matter of being neighbours," she answered,
"and I don't suppose that I have much voice in the management of the
estate as long as--he lives. The guardians will see to that."
"But you could run down there once in a while ... in the summer for
instance. Your place is always ready for you. I saw to that."
"Ah, yes, you saw to that." The wistful irony that he had so often
noted was visible again.
For the first time he understood its meaning.
"She has made things too easy for me," he reflected. "I should have
felt my chains. Then, too, I would have realised what I possessed
in her."
But did he not still possess her? What, after all, had changed since
those days of quiet companionship? Why should he think of her as
lost to him?
He could not answer this question. But he felt a dull restlessness. A
sense of estrangement told him: All is not here as it was.
"Since when do you live in dreams, Alice?" he asked, surveying the
empty table by which he had found her.
His question had been innocent, but it seemed to carry a sting. She
blushed and looked past him.
"How do you mean?"
"Good heavens, to sit all evening without books and let the light burn
in vain--that was not your wont heretofore."
"Oh, that's it. Ah well, one can't be poking in books all the time.
And for the past few days my eyes have been aching."
"With secret tears?" he teased.
She gave him a wide, serious look.
"With secret tears," she repeated.
"_Ah perfido_!" he trilled, in order to avoid the scene which he
feared ... But he was on the wrong scent. She herself interrupted him
with the question whether he would stay to supper.
He was curious to find the causes of the changes that he felt here.
For that reason and also because he was not without compunction, he
consented to stay.
She rang and ordered a second cover to be laid.
Louise looked at her mistress with a disapproving glance and went.
"Dear me," he laughed, "the servants are against me ... I am lost."
"You have taken to noticing such things very recently." She gave a
perceptible shrug.
"When a wife tells a husband of his newly acquired habits, he is
doubly lost," he answered and gave her his arm.
The silver gleamed on the table ... the tea-kettle puffed out delicate
clouds ... exquisitely tinted apples, firm as in Autumn, smiled
at him.
A word of admiration escaped him. And then, once more, he saw that
tragic smile on her lips--sad, wistful, almost compassionate.
"My darling," he said with sudden tenderness and caressed her
shoulder.
She nodded and smiled. That was all.
At table her mood was an habitual one. Perhaps she was a trifle
gentler. He attributed that to his approaching departure.
She drank a glass of Madeira at the beginning of the meal, the light
Rhine wine she took in long, thirsty draughts, she even touched the
brandy at the meal's end.
An inner fire flared in her. He suspected that, he felt it. She had
touched no food. But she permitted nothing to appear on the surface.
On the contrary, the emotional warmth that she had shown earlier
disappeared. The play of her thoughts grew cooler, clearer, more
cutting, the longer she talked.
Twice or thrice quotations from Goethe were about to escape her, but
she did not utter them. Smiling she tapped her own lips.
When he observed that she was really restraining a genuine impulse he
begged her to consider the protest he had once uttered as merely a
jest, perhaps even an ill-considered one. But she said: "Let be, it
is as well."
They conversed, as they had often done, of the perished days of their
old love. They spoke like two beings who have long conquered all the
struggles of the heart and who, in the calm harbour of friendship,
regard with equanimity the storms which they have weathered.
This way of speaking had gradually, and with a kind of jocular
moroseness, crept into their intercourse. The exciting thing about it
was the silent reservation felt by both: We know how different things
could be, so soon as we desired. To-day, for the first time, this
game at renunciation seemed to become serious.
"How strange!" he thought. "Here we sit who are dearest to each other
in all the world and a kind of futile arrogance drives us farther and
farther apart."
Alice arose.
He kissed her, as was his wont, upon hand and forehead and noted how
she turned aside with a slight shiver. Then suddenly she took his head
in both her hands and kissed him full on the lips with a kind of
desperate eagerness.
"Ah," he cried, "what is that? It's more than I have a right to
expect."
"Forgive me," she said, withdrawing herself at once. "We're poverty
stricken folk and haven't much to give each other."
"After what I have just experienced, I'm inclined to believe the
contrary."
But she seemed little inclined to draw the logical consequences of her
action. Quietly she gave him his wonted cigarette, lit her own, and
sat down in her old place. With rounded lips she blew little clouds of
smoke against the table-cover.
"Whenever I regard you in this manner," he said, carefully feeling his
way, "it always seems to me that you have some silent reservation, as
though you were waiting for something." "It may be," she answered,
blushing anew, "I sit by the way-side, like the man in the story, and
think of the coming of my fate."
"Fate? What fate?"
"Ah, who can tell, dear friend? That which one foresees is no longer
one's fate!"
"Perhaps it's just the other way."
She drew back sharply and looked past him in tense thoughtfulness.
"Perhaps you are right," she said, with a little mysterious sigh. "It
may be as you say."
He was no wiser than he had been. But since he held it beneath his
dignity to assume the part of the jealous master, he abandoned the
search for her secrets with a shrug. The secrets could be of no great
importance. No one knew better than himself the moderateness of her
desires, no lover, in calm possession of his beloved, had so little to
fear as he....
They discussed their plans for the Summer. He intended to go to the
North Sea in Autumn, an old affection attracted her to Thuringia. The
possibility of their meeting was touched only in so far as courtesy
demanded it.
And once more silence fell upon the little drawing-room. Through the
twilight an old, phantastic Empire clock announced the hurrying
minutes with a hoarse tick.
In other days a magical mood had often filled this room--the presage
of an exquisite flame and its happy death. All that had vibrated here.
Nothing remained. They had little to say to each other. That was what
time had left.
He played thoughtfully with his cigarette. She stared into nothingness
with great, dreamy eyes.
And suddenly she began to weep ...
He almost doubted his own perception, but the great glittering tears
ran softly down her smiling face.
But he was satiated with women's tears. In the fleeting amatory
adventures of the past weeks and months, he had seen so many--some
genuine, some sham, all superfluous. And so instead of consoling her,
he conceived a feeling of sarcasm and nausea: "Now even she
carries on!"....
The idea did indeed flash into his mind that this moment might be
decisive and pregnant with the fate of the future, but his horror of
scenes and explanations restrained him.
Wearily he assumed the attitude of one above the storms of the soul
and sought a jest with which to recall her to herself. But before he
found it she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes and slipped from
the room.
"So much the better," he thought and lit a fresh cigarette, "If she
lets her passion spend itself in silence it will pass the
more swiftly."
Walking up and down he indulged in philosophic reflections concerning
the useless emotionality of woman, and the duty of man not to be
infected by it ... He grew quite warm in the proud consciousness of
his heart's coldness.
Then suddenly--from the depth of the silence that was about
him--resounded in a long-drawn, shrill, whirring voice that he had
never heard--his own name.
"Rrricharrd!" it shrilled, stern and hard as the command of some
paternal martinet. The voice seemed to come from subterranean depths.
He shivered and looked about. Nothing moved. There was no living soul
in the next room.
"Richard!" the voice sounded a second time. This time the sound seemed
but a few paces from him, but it arose from the ground as though a
teasing goblin lay under his chair.
He bent over and peered into dark corners.
The mystery was solved: Joko, Alice's parrot, having secretly stolen
from his quarters, sat on the rung of a chair and played the evil
conscience of the house.
The tame animal stepped with dignity upon his outstretched hand and
permitted itself to be lifted into the light.... Its glittering
neck-feathers stood up, and while it whetted its beak on Niebeldingk's
cuff-links, it repeated in a most subterranean voice: "Richard!"
And suddenly the dear feeling of belonging here, of being at home came
over Niebeldingk. He had all but lost it. But its gentle power drew
him on and refreshed him.
It was his right and his duty to be at home here where a dear woman
lived so exclusively for him that the voice of her yearning sounded
even from the tongue of the brute beast that she possessed! There was
no possibility of feeling free and alien here.
"I must find her!" he thought quickly, "I musn't leave her alone
another second."
He set Joko carefully on the table and sought to reach her bed-room
which he had never entered by this approach.
In the door that led to the rear hall she met him. Her demeanour had
its accustomed calm, her eyes were clear and dry.
"My poor, dear darling!" he cried and wanted to take her in his arms.
A strange, repelling glance met him and interrupted his beautiful
emotion. Something hardened in him and he felt a new inclination
to sarcasm.
"Forgive me for leaving you," she said, "one must have patience with
the folly of my sex. You know that well."
And she preceded him to his old place.
Screaming with pleasure Joko flew forward to meet her, and Niebeldingk
remained standing to take his leave.
She did not hold him back.
Outside it occurred to him that he hadn't told her the anecdote of
Fritz and the Indian lilies.
"It's a pity," he thought, "it might have cheered her." ...