IX

In her sleep Myra heard a violent ringing. Then she woke up: doors were

slamming, steps approaching, there were many excited voices.

She opened her eyes and saw Olga standing beside the bed, already fully

dressed. She was very pale, her eyes dark and blazing. “Get up, Myra,”

she commanded in a voice that was breathless with excitement, “get up

for God’s sake and dress!”

Myra threw on her things in mad haste. Meanwhile they were pounding on

the door. Olga immediately went over to it, unbolted and opened it a

crack.

“Who is there?”

Loud excited voices in the hall: excited faces trying to force

themselves through the crack.

“I’m sorry, I can’t permit you in my room at this moment,” Olga said

with icy courtesy.

Some voices began to shout louder than the others, Aunt Emily and Uncle

George. Also the girl who had admitted Myra that night.

Myra’s hands were trembling as in a nightmare. She could not button her

dress. She was aware only of a dreadful desire to be invisible or to

jump out of the window or to sink into some vast unconsciousness.

Olga’s voice rose above the clamor, deep and calm, but as cold and sharp

as polished steel.

“Does this conversation have to take place in the hall?”

Then suddenly, a soft, gentle voice: “May I offer the use of my room.

I’ll be glad to step out.”

The voices withdrew next door and a few moments later—Myra had thrown on

her dress—Peterkin stole into the room.

“Can I help you, Myra?” he whispered. His eyes were troubled.

At the same moment, there came a sound from next door as if a stick had

been smashed across a table.

“I’ll have you thrown into jail!” thundered Uncle George.

Myra wanted to rush in, but Peterkin restrained her, imploring her not

to go. “Don’t, don’t!” he begged. “Fix your hair quickly! Put on your

shoes!” While she smoothed her hair, he knelt before her and buttoned

her shoes. She let him. She could not dash next door in her

stocking-feet, with her hair unkempt, to the immense pleasure of all the

people peeping through the cracks in their doors.

When Myra did go down the hall to the next room, she was quite calm,

quite erect, and sustained by a strong, brave, hot and almost joyous

determination.

At the bottom of the hall stood a strange man with his hat and overcoat

on. He looked her over with a piercing glance.

“Straight from her father’s dead body!” whimpered Aunt Emily with high

pathos.

“The criminal police in a decent house!” screamed Frau Flesch. “Never in

all my life have I had anything to do with the police!”

Myra pressed down hard on the latch. Her pulse was throbbing in her

neck. For an instant the thought flashed through her mind: Perhaps it

was best that this happened. Perhaps it was a good thing that she must

now have the courage to take her place beside Olga and say, “I belong to

her and will never leave her, even if you tear her and me into little

pieces! If you have the courage and the right, use force on me, for I’ll

never go one step with you of my own free will.”

Olga was standing, leaning against the table, her arms crossed on her

breast, the fingers clasping her elbows.

As Myra opened the door, Aunt Emily rushed to her with a choking cry,

“Here is the unfortunate child!”

Myra stood for an instant as though numbed. For a moment she felt as if

she were among lunatics or had gone mad herself. With a hasty glance,

she thought how very becoming to Uncle George were his stern manner, his

steel-blue eyes and his iron-gray mustache against a face crimson with

rage.

He came up to her and said in a deep, rough voice that trembled with

something like emotion, “Myra, my child, what are you doing here? We’re

burying your poor father tomorrow and you’re here!”

He laid his heavy hand on her shoulder.

Myra did not look at him. She was looking at Olga.

“This is my home,” she said. She meant her voice to sound vibrant and

firm, but she could not manage it, and it sounded soft and tremulous.

“If you think you have the right, go ahead and use force on me, for I’ll

never go one step with you of my own free will.”

It was hard, very hard, to say that. Very hard to say it under Uncle

George’s honest gaze while his face was distorted with rage and sorrow,

under Aunt Emily’s little blinking bird-eyes, or Frau Flesch’s spongy

face that seemed fixed in a repulsively avid grin. Hard to say it in

front of the strange man and the maid, who were listening in the hall.

But now it was said. And now everything would be all right. Now Olga

would come and take her in her arms, would press Myra’s head against her

breast so that she need not hear or see anything more, would, with one

of her haughty and imperious gestures, show all these strange and

horrible faces the door, would point her revolver at these intruders and

drive them out with a single word....

Olga turned her head without changing her position, and looked at Myra.

Everybody thought she was looking at Myra and gave an involuntary start.

But actually her eyes were merely resting on Myra’s forehead, eyebrows

and hair.

Myra strove to intercept her gaze, but could not. It was fixed on her

forehead, her eyebrows, her hair—on a line above her eyes.

“My dear child,” said Olga with a gentleness that was icy-cold, “your

sense of dependence on me is touching, but I have done nothing to merit

it. If you feel about me as you say, you ought to go with your

relatives, behave like a rational creature and spare me your visits in

the future. You must see that they occasion me nothing but

unpleasantness!”

Myra hesitated for a moment. “Something must happen,” she thought, “she

must look at me, she must give me some sign, a glance, a gesture, that

this is all comedy, that I must trust her, believe in her, wait for an

explanation....”

But nothing did happen.

Myra racked her brain for something terrible with which to shatter that

stony mask. Could she not say, “You made me come, lured me, forced me

and now you deny me”? No, she had no right to do that. But could she not

think of some abusive word, something that would pierce, would wound,

something cruel?

She turned over various silly childish epithets in her mind: they were

as heavy as blocks of stone.

“Canaille!” she thought. “Harlot!” That was not what she was seeking. It

seemed to her as if she must shove the blocks of stone this way and that

in feverish search for the one sharp word she must fling.

Suddenly, she felt as if she had stood there an endless time, with arms

hanging, and vacant eyes and open mouth.

She drew herself up and attempted a smile that would be at once proud

and affable. But she felt as she was doing it, as if madness were

twitching the distorted muscles of her face.

“Will you telephone for a taxi, Uncle George?” she said. “I am too tired

to walk.”

She went to the door. “I just want to gather up my things. I won’t be a

moment.”

She went into the next room, put on her hat before the mirror very

carefully, threw on her coat and looked for her bag. She did not hurry

at all. She still had some mad feeling that Olga must steal in and

whisper something to her—where they could meet, where she should write,

when she could explain it all to her. But no Olga came.

As Myra opened her bag, she noticed a little wad of tightly pressed

bills.—What was left from their trip. She took them out, laughing

bitterly. Probably she would no longer be in any way tempted to steal.

Probably she would never again need money as long as she lived.

She raised her hand and opened it, letting the bills flutter down on the

disordered bed.

Then she went out, past the strange man, past the maid, downstairs and

out of the house, without once looking back.

* * * * *

In the street she got into the taxi with her relatives.

Uncle George remained for a while in the city. His behavior was really

curious. He was quiet and kind, and always fixed upon Myra a pair of

honest, anxious blue eyes, and always spoke to her in a slightly

emotional tone. But there was never a word about the money or her

flight.

When Myra pondered this behavior—she did not do so very often—she found

only one explanation for it. She did not think it might be remorse

because his vehement letter had occasioned her unhappy father’s death.

Nor did it ever occur to her that he was striving to win her affection

through love and kindness. No, probably she was a source of irritation

to him. But he had seen Olga Radó. Had heard her voice. Had experienced

something of her power. When Myra thought of that, she almost loved him.

He had heard how Olga denied, betrayed and humiliated her. And he

sympathized with her. When Myra thought of that, she hated him.

Even Aunt Emily was singularly gentle. Myra thought later that it would

have been better if they had tormented and wounded her at that time, and

thereby made her strong through steely hate.

Aunt Emily and the entire family were all for expressing the depth of

one’s grief by the length of one’s veil. Nobody was going to say that

Myra, the depraved daughter, the unruly offspring, did not mourn her

father’s death.

The first time Myra saw herself in a mirror, black crêpe from head to

toe, slender and pale, with lifeless eyes and a mouth distorted with

grief, she thought, “Like a widow!” Her heart contracted painfully.

When they drove to the interment, they sat side by side. Aunt Emily’s

black-gloved right hand held a white handkerchief to her quivering lips;

her left held Myra’s hand. And Uncle George stared out the window while

from time to time a tear rolled from his blue eye and into his mustache.

Myra felt as if she had been a mountain: her stony invulnerability had

turned aside every shot. But now an explosion had torn a crater in her.

She was hollow inside, a deep, dark, precipitous chasm. The savage wound

lay exposed to view, and everything fell into it without let or

hindrance, lay in her like heavy stones, tortured her—everything,

glances, words, tears, gestures.

“Woe to those who have torn me asunder!” she thought bitterly.

Then her fingers clasped Aunt Emily’s a little tighter for a moment. “We

belong together,” she thought. “Forsaken, loveless, unhappy people who

have grown hard and bitter—we belong together. There are two great

families in this world—the rich and the poor, the sound and the sick,

the laughers and the weepers.... Olga Radó belongs among the happy: she

has triumphed, she has justified herself, she has rid herself of me—now

she can go, laughing, to the next adventure.”

Myra did not always think such thoughts. She was a prey to the most

conflicting feelings. There were sleepless nights when she thought that

everything would be all right if only she could hold Olga’s hand and

ask, “How did you come to do it, child? How could such a thing happen?

What were you thinking of at the time?”

The next day she would pace up and down Motz Street and stare at the

house across the way—but always in vain.

Then there were days when Aunt Emily displayed a loathsomely friendly

sympathy and let fall insinuations concerning the ingratitude of the

world in general and in particular, and how lonely Myra now was because

she had given all her affection to such a person.

Then Myra hated them both—Aunt Emily and Olga—with a terrible hatred.

But she hated Olga the more—Olga who had thrown her down where Aunt

Emily could trample her, Olga who had torn that wound which Aunt Emily’s

foul fingers could probe.

Sometimes she resolved to die, but more often to flee, to pack up a

bundle and run down the highroad, to pass the night in meadows and

hollows with nothing over her but the eternal starry skies.

At other times, it seemed to her as if that sort of life, particularly

that sort of life, would be merely a constant torment without Olga—but a

treasure without end, an inconceivable happiness if only Olga were

there.

She strove to reconcile herself to the thought that Olga no longer loved

her. But it was impossible that she actually hated her. She had simply

sacrificed her, surrendered her without second thought in order to

shield her reputation, in order to protect herself from

unpleasantnesses. It is true, she did not love her. That was why her

words had been lies. She had simply been glad when Myra came. Always.

And she would be glad again if she returned.

It was becoming clearer and clearer to Myra every day how rich she was.

Franz Rudloff had been no miser, but there was nothing for which he

really cared to spend money. And Aunt Emily was much too much of a model

not to economize, even in the pettiest ways.

Myra had no very clear understanding of money or the value of money. But

she knew that the sums mentioned to her, guaranteed her freedom,

promised her that in a few months she could live her life where she

wished and as she wished.

A life without Olga?

Myra finally resolved to write to Olga. Not how she felt, nothing about

her longing, her love—God forbid! But a line or two, quite businesslike,

if one might use the expression—lines whose purpose would simply be to

bring about an explanation.

With much effort she composed a letter which she amended and improved

and copied; she felt quite satisfied with her handiwork. No one could

find in it a trace of affection or humility of any kind.

Rather it was sharp, ironic and somewhat challenging in tone. She mailed

the letter and awaited the answer. None came.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Aunt Emily decided to inform Myra of the “facts of life.” To

be sure, she chose a rather remarkable method.

Aunt Emily was too much of a model to discuss morally offensive matters

with a young girl. Besides, she was probably afraid of Myra’s outbursts

of temper, though otherwise she was not cowardly.

Myra had fallen into the habit of sitting in her father’s study. She

would sit and read the whole day through, the most difficult and

abstruse things, simply in order not to think. Here she had all the

books within reach. It was more convenient to sit down at the

writing-table with them, than to lug the sometimes heavy folios into

another room.

On his desk she now found from time to time pamphlets, brochures,

apparently of a quite varied character, novels, medical works, daily

papers with passages underlined—but all treating of one theme.

There were strange and weird stories of countesses who dressed in men’s

attire and frequented various dives until they were lured into a trap

and brutally murdered.

Or accounts of sickening orgies in well-known clubs where hundreds of

women dressed and disported themselves like men, and men were dolled up

with false curls with open-work silk stockings, and with their bare arms

and shoulders powdered.

There were statistics showing all the unfortunates who fell victim to

softening of the brain, lunacy, tuberculosis of the spine and other

diseases as a result of unnatural practices.

Or descriptions of the soul life of sexual inverts which led one to

suppose that these thousands of human beings constituted a vast

community, a community bound together by no ties of common interest, no

similarity of education, origin, taste or attitude toward life, and

never by love, but by a common lust for a common form of excess.

There was the biography of a famous man who was miserably murdered by a

blackmailing waiter with whom he had had intimate relations—whom he had

_loved_.

Myra shuddered when she thought of the word love in this connection.

Sometimes it seemed to her as if she would be stifled by so much filth.

She became physically ill simply from touching the books. Then she would

not read them—for quite a while. She would read historical, philosophic

and scientific works. But there were long periods when she was not

conscious what she was reading. Her eyes ran along the lines and

reflected the words. But her thoughts struggled with the dreadful things

that had been flung at her, like blocks of stone, to kill her. Then she

would pick up the other books again, the bad ones, and look for

enlightenment and draw conclusions and make comparisons.

Whenever masculine women were discussed, mention was made of their

superior intelligence, their thirst for knowledge and their desire for

culture, coupled with an abnormal tendency to spendthriftness, a

passionate desire for luxury, and an unnatural predilection for

beautiful foot-gear. Mention was made, too, of weird Don Juan natures

who passed with insatiable lust from one adventure to another.

As a result of such readings, Myra was left in the most dreadful

bewilderment. These books should have taught her to understand the

person who, of all others, had been closest to her. She had said to

herself a hundred times in the past months, “This woman is a riddle that

cannot be guessed, a mystery that cannot be solved, forever strange and

remote, not to be grasped or comprehended. And each time she had felt

with every fibre of her being, ‘such and such is the solution; now

everything is clear, everything is all right, nothing can ever arise to

divide us again.’”

But now, now?

Now Myra felt an anguished need to pack up these books and take them to

Olga Radó! “Tell me, are there such people? Are you one of them? Am I?

What do you know about it?”

Olga had had to express an opinion about everything that Myra had heard

or read in the last year. And Olga’s opinion had nearly always been

Myra’s, or had aroused, strengthened, clarified another opinion in her.

Now, for the first time, she had to settle such monstrous matters

single-handed and she groped about blindly in the dark. Where she

thought to find a light, a way out, she merely strayed deeper into the

maze. She could neither make headway nor go back.

So Myra wrote a second letter. This time, too, there was not a word

about love or longing—simply an urgent appeal for help, a good deal of

complaining about what was happening inside her and a certain

reproachfulness: you have brought me so far, you must take my hand and

lead me out of this swamp.

No answer came.

Spring came, however. Warm, caressing winds came, and broad flashing

rays of sunlight and a veil of buds shrouding every branch, and

snow-bells and crocuses, forcing their way with difficulty through dark

purple, rotting leaves.

Myra could not bear the heavy, soft air. She could not sleep and

suffered from headaches day and night. Reading no longer sufficed to

distract her mind. She sat bowed over her books and stared out the

window. The same page would lie in front of her for hours without her

ever turning it.

She began to read novels. She could not forget she was reading them as

easily as she could dry scientific works because they stirred her

imagination and evoked certain pictures.

But those pictures were a torture to her.

There were always people in love with one another. They struggled with

one another, discovered one another, came together or parted, destroyed

one another, died or abandoned one another. It hurt her to read of love.

She read of riches, of luxury, of automobiles dashing along highways, of

white hotels beside blue waters, of balls and banquets and yachts and

journeys by sledge. Then she would begin to calculate her fortune and

think, “Olga Radó could have led just such a life if she had remained

with me.”

The cherries blossomed. Olga Radó was no doubt going by steamer with

some lovely woman, over the blue waters of the Havel. And all about her

was a world of beauty and sunshine and light.

Myra was seized with a mad desire to be where Olga was, to lead Olga’s

life. Pride dropped away from her like a burned rag. She stood naked to

herself and cried out with the pain.

She wrote her third letter to Olga Radó. She wrote that she could no

longer live and breathe without her. That she wanted nothing from her,

not love, or affection or friendship. That she wanted nothing but to

serve her with all her strength, and in payment she would let herself be

beaten and kicked. That she would feel no jealousy, no craving, no lust

of possession. That she would serve anyone, man or woman, whom Olga

loved, and that she would chain and immure her love so deep within her

that never, never, never would anyone suspect its existence, not even

Olga.

Again she waited for an answer. Again none came.

Suddenly it occurred to her that Olga might not have received her

letters, certainly had not received them.

She went to Motz Street and every step made her feel as if she were

walking on red hot coals. The same maid answered her ring who had

admitted her that night. Myra could not bring herself to utter Olga’s

name, so she asked for Peterkin.

He had moved—address unknown.

She lived through ten more days of torture. Then she went again. A new

maid opened the door. “I’m in luck,” thought Myra and she was dizzied

for a moment as the idea flashed through her mind that the next instant

she might be standing face to face with Olga in her room. What might

happen afterwards was of no moment.

Miss Radó had moved—address unknown.

Myra went to the bureau of registry. She filled out the prescribed blank

and gave it to the gray-haired official while her heart throbbed wildly.

The friendly old gentleman rose, went searching, returned and asked if

the lady lived in her own house. No? Unfortunately, they did not

register people who lived in lodging-houses.

Then Myra made her last and most difficult attempt. She went to the

Moebiuses. The girls grinned in her face, impudently, when she asked

about Olga Radó.

No, they didn’t know anything about her. Naturally, she had not put in

her appearance here again, and father would probably have very politely

given her the air if she had. But they would be _delighted_ to find

things out. Ablaze with curiosity and pruriency, they began to ply her

with questions, whether it was true that....

Myra blushed and paled, turned hot and cold. She might have murdered one

of them if she had not been so tired. “I don’t know,” she said. She

answered all their questions with “I don’t know.”

Perhaps she should have become indignant and defended Olga Radó. Perhaps

she should have let them slander her and have made all kinds of

mysterious insinuations. Perhaps she should have laughed and led the

girls a merry chase. She supported herself against her chair with both

hands, and said, “I don’t know!”

As she left the house she realized that she would never enter it again.

A senseless expression kept running through her mind as in a

delirium—“To be on everybody’s tongue....”

It had never before had any meaning for her. Now she felt, actually in a

physical way, as if she had been chewed over and spat out on the

sidewalk. She shuddered with nausea.

* * * * *

From time to time, but at ever shorter intervals, a dull racking hatred

began to tarnish the surface of her feeling for Olga Radó. That woman

was to blame for all that she was now suffering—heedlessly,

cold-heartedly and quite unscrupulously to blame.

During this period, Myra was very unjust to Olga Radó. For it seemed to

her as if she had been torn by her from a happy shielded youth, as if a

profound and placid peace had been destroyed in her, some marvellous

equilibrium shattered.

The be-all and end-all of her desire seemed to her to be a return to

what she had once been. Her one wish was to strike the last year out of

her life, to expunge, to forget it.

Then she would take up those evil books again and deliberately read the

things which had most nauseated her. She thus artificially intensified

her hate and anger and fear.

There were days when she said to herself, “At last I am free! It’s as if

I had recovered from a severe illness; I feel that my blood is pure

again. From now on I shall live as other people do, without pain and

without joy, without desire and without fulfillment.”

And there were nights when she felt as if a burning poison were eating

at her veins, when fear of an unutterly horrible future made her

shudder. Nights when she felt she must succumb to her unbridled

appetites, must give herself unresistingly to every loose woman who for

criminal reasons chose to arouse her passion. She saw herself victimized

by blackmailers, tracked by the police, sick, insane, in prison or

murdered.

In one such period of abysmal despair she permitted herself to become

engaged. Some decent, solid man or other came courting her.

She knew nothing about him. She did not know when or where she had seen

him for the first time, knew hardly anything of his character or his

inclinations. She simply became aware one day that for some time there

had been some person around her who had made an effort to be kind to

her. Someone who helped her on most carefully with her coat, stooped

when she dropped something, brought her flowers, and tried to tell her

cheerful stories in order to brighten her face a little.

The man knew as agreeably little about her. In his presence Aunt Emily

bubbled over with gentle, motherly solicitude. She could just as well

have made biting observations or cutting innuendoes about him, but he

fitted into her program.

He pitied Myra tremendously because she was an orphan. He ascribed all

the suffering in her pale face to grief for her father. Sometimes he

ventured to take her cold fingers in both his hands and gently stroke

them. At such moments Myra would close her eyes and scrutinize her

feelings in terror. Warmth and peace flowed from his big strong hands.

His gentle tenderness was pleasant rather than abhorrent. Then Myra

would say to herself with a burst of hope, “Perhaps everything will be

all right, after all. Perhaps I shall have somebody near who is good to

me, I’ll have children and a home, I’ll always have something to

do—perhaps it is still possible for a life like that to be bearable.”

She felt, too, an irrepressible desire for revenge. It might wound Olga

Radó’s vanity somewhat, if she learned how quickly she had been

forgotten.

The man was rich. That suited Aunt Emily and incidentally suited Myra.

She pictured herself in the loge at the opera, flashing with jewels,

beside this man, a very attractive and stately man—it would never occur

to anyone that she had not married him for love—and suddenly Olga Radó

would appear from somewhere. Or she saw herself driving past Olga Radó

in a de luxe car. Or best of all, she saw them meeting when she was

walking with her fair-haired children dressed neatly in white. Then she

would draw the children away from Olga as if from a venomous snake. That

was the way, yes, indeed, that was the way to wound Olga most cruelly.

As the man was persistent, Myra said yes. She had had sufficient time to

accustom herself and took good care that it appeared in various

newspapers.

On her twenty-first birthday, there was a little garden party at the

villa of her parents-in-law. It was a very hot day in summer, the

nineteenth of June, and on Aunt Emily’s advice, Myra again put on a

white dress trimmed with black.

As she strolled past a mirror in that strange house with all the strange

people about her, she did not recognize herself. She was shocked and

could not rid herself of the idea that she was not the pretty girl

dressed in white, who smiled at her from the mirror, on the arm of that

strange man.

She tried to find herself and could not imagine where she could be. But

it seemed to her as if she saw herself, thin and dark, like a specter,

wandering through great, dark, empty rooms. Again, it seemed to her as

if she really was the reflection in the glass, and that that other Myra,

who was so identically like her, was the stranger. Dream and reality

began to merge inextricably; all her nerves seemed to thrill like

snapped chords. In mortal fear she longed for complete unconsciousness

or for sudden complete clarity, feeling as if she were blinded by fog or

a prey to vertigo. A moment later, she could not understand exactly what

had happened to her, or give any answer to her fiancé who anxiously

inquired the cause of her paleness.

But the singular feeling persisted all evening that all this was simply

a dream, a game. The whole business of the engagement was simply a joke,

a comedy. Each moment might step forward like a stage-manager and cry,

“Enough! Let reality resume!”

* * * * *

On the twentieth of June, in the morning, Myra was called to the

telephone. A light masculine voice spoke from the receiver, curiously

restrained and hesitant.

“Is this Miss Rudloff herself? Myra, is that you? Forgive me for

disturbing you—I wanted to speak to you!”

Myra felt her heart tear itself loose and plunge into an unfathomable

dark abyss.

“Peterkin?” she said and tried to suppress her smile without stopping to

think that no one could see her face. Nor could anyone have heard that

smile in the trembling of her voice.

“May I speak with you, Myra? I mean....” Again that timid hesitation in

his voice. “If you care to, you understand. Of course, I don’t know how

interested you are in your old friends now.”

“It goes without saying,” said Myra firmly, “that you can see me any

time, where and when you wish.”

She did not ask what had happened. She did not want to ask.

“It can’t come very well.” Again that timid tone. “And I’d rather not go

on the street ... or to a coffee-house.... It really wouldn’t do....”

“I’ll come to you,” said Myra quickly. “Tell me where you live!”

“Yes—but—is that all right either? Particularly—if anything unpleasant

should happen.... You’re engaged....”

“Nonsense!” said Myra roughly.

* * * * *

As she hurried down the street she did not try to picture what might

actually have happened. She did not want to. “Perhaps Olga is sick and

wants to see me,” she thought. “Perhaps she doesn’t know anything about

it, and Peterkin simply called me of his own accord.”

She simply thought that she would see Olga, that she would take her

hand. At the same time she thought, “I tell myself these things as we

tell a feverish child stories, I paint them in the brightest colors, and

believe them no more than we believe in fairies and sorcerers.”

But it was better to tell herself stories, better to sing herself

cradle-songs, than to listen to the voice that cried the truth deep

within her.

It was strange how, without a moment’s hesitation, she found the house

and the street as if she had been there a hundred times.

When she rang, Peterkin was already at the door. That spared her any

interrogation. And she felt, looking at the maid, the first human face

she noticed, that she was in no condition to answer questions.

Peterkin took Myra by the hand and, without a word, led her past the

astonished maid and into his room. He shut the door, and without looking

at her, said, “Sit down, Myra.”

The first thing that Myra noticed in the room was the gold cigarette

case on the black surface of the table. A ray of sunlight was flashing

on it.

She made an effort to restrain herself. It was as if she tugged at the

reins with both hands in order to check herself. But when Peterkin

turned to her, and she saw how his hands, how his small white face

quivered, with what an effort he was struggling for control—she lost

control herself. She began to cry.

“Cry, cry,” he said at last, his chin quivering, while the tears started

from his eyes. “Cry, for she was worthy of tears, you can believe

me....”

“Believe you?” said Myra with heart-rending bitterness. She laid the

handkerchief over her eyes and supported her head in her hand. Her other

hand stroked his nervously.

“Now tell me everything, Peterkin. You see that I’m quite calm again,

quite, quite calm. When did it happen? How? And why? Tell me everything,

everything you know!”

“I could not tell you, Myra—not before your twenty-first birthday. That

was yesterday, wasn’t it? I’ve marked it here on the calendar—for

another reason—I’ll have to tell you all about that, too. I had a

message to deliver to you. But of course, I had no suspicion—sometimes

it is as if we were struck blind....”

Myra glanced up for a moment. “Did she do it herself?” There was nothing

interrogatory in her tone.

“Yes.”

“Did she shoot herself?”

She covered her eyes again with her handkerchief.

“Go on.”

“She was sick during the spring, a light case of influenza. She had some

fever and I used to sit beside the bed while she talked of death and

burial, quite cheerfully and unconcernedly, as she always did. You know

very well that nobody ever knew whether she was jesting or in earnest.

She said to me at that time, ‘If I die now, Peterkin, take good care to

keep it quiet. Don’t let it get into any of the papers, and don’t let

anybody know about it, not even Myra. I’d like to strew my ashes on the

sea or at least on the Wannsee. But the State won’t permit that, I

believe. So simply make haste and have my remains cremated. I will have

no traffic with my corpse. I won’t be inside it, you can be sure of

that. Not for one moment longer than necessary will I remain inside my

corpse.’”

To Myra it seemed as if she were hearing Olga speak. So clearly did she

hear her voice, that her heart was filled with an inner joy and she

smiled.

“I smiled, too, at the time,” said Peterkin sorrowfully. “But she became

quite serious and sat up and looked at me. You know how she could look

at one out of her intense eyes. ‘It is my sacred wish,’ she said.

‘Promise me you’ll do it, give me your word of honor!’ I promised her,

but I said, ‘You’re crazy, in three days you’ll be well again.’ And she

was well again in three days.” He stopped. Somewhere a clock was ticking

and flies were buzzing against the window-pane.

Something filled Myra with a few moments of joy and tranquillity. An

obscure feeling—how good that Olga was well again in three days. There

was so much vigorous life in that beautiful body.

Then the present struck at her heart like a clenched fist. And now? And

now? She had to wait a few moments before she could bring herself to

utter the terrible word.

“Did you bury her at once?” she asked in a very low voice.

“She was cremated. The urn was sent to Vienna. Her sister lives

there....”

“Did she live here toward the end?”

“Two doors away, around the corner.”

“And it happened there?”

“Yes.”

“Can one ...” Myra swallowed hard, “can one see the room?”

Peterkin shrugged his shoulders slowly. “What is the use? Everything is

changed. Nothing of hers is left. It has been rented again.”

She had a peculiar feeling; it seemed to her as a curiously happy fact

that every pattern which this spirit had created was now destroyed.

There was not even a room left in the world which those hands, that

mind, had arranged, and in which a trace of her being might have

survived. Half unconsciously, Myra felt as if the shifting of a few

pieces of furniture had broken the stones from a prison wall.

Now Olga Radó was wholly free.

A gentle breeze stirred the curtains at the open window. A sweet, cool

breeze blew over Myra’s burning eyes. She smiled.

“It is best that way!” she said again.

Suddenly she understood that Olga had not received her letters. There

was no need to inquire about it. But Peterkin was the only person of

whose opinion she was a little afraid. She felt that she must justify

herself.

“I wrote Olga three times!” she said.

“I had an idea that you did,” said Peterkin with a gloomy smile.

“She never received a line.”

“But you knew it anyway?”

“Of course. We talked often enough about you.”

While Peterkin was speaking, Myra had a curious feeling that she was

living over in a few minutes and with the most powerful intensity, the

last six months of her life. It seemed to her as if on that unhappy

morning the woof-thread had been broken and day by day had labored at a

make-shift pattern that was false. Now that false woof had suddenly been

unravelled as the shuttle plied backwards like lightning. The thread was

knotted where it had been broken and the true pattern was resumed, a

little curtailed, perhaps, a little fainter in color, but there it was,

woven for the present and for all days to come.

“What did you say about me?”

“Oh, a great many things. I urged her so often to write to you, to

establish some sort of contact with you. But she was convinced that she

must not do it. Sometimes I thought I would telephone you, or I’d waylay

you somewhere against her will. Once I suggested it to her. She glared

at me out of her big eyes. ‘If you ever do any such thing,’ she said,

‘our friendship is over with for all time! Do you want to destroy the

poor child?’ She was always of the opinion that you were happy and that

things were going well with you. But I was sure you must divine what was

going on. I tried so hard, you’ll never know how hard. Once I promenaded

under your windows for a whole hour. I always thought that if I could

only speak to you, we would find some way out. I always thought that

everything would be all right in the end. Then you became engaged. Yes,

then I had to admit at last that she was right.”

“Oh, you idiot!” said Myra, laughing through her tears.

“I remember the day so well. Olga came up to my room early in the

morning. She sat huddled over in the easy-chair, smoking one cigarette

after another. For half an hour she did not utter a word. I sat here at

the desk, pretending I was working. I had tossed aside my paper when I

heard her coming. But from the way she sat there, I thought, ‘She knows

already!’ She knew I knew it, but neither of us wanted to begin the

conversation. When she finally did, she kept saying ‘I’m so happy, I’m

so glad!’ And she demanded that I celebrate with her, too. In the

evening we went to have a bottle of wine together. She made me do it. I

can still see her as she sat at the table, turning the wine-glass in her

hand. She had such a curious smile all that day. Again she said to me,

‘So little Myra is going to be married. That’s fine, fine. Our little

Myra will have children, real lads who will never know a trouble in

life.’ Then she kept demanding that I say how happy it made me. And I

had to say so—as matters then stood it was the best thing to do—but from

that day on she lived in morbid dread of meeting you somewhere on the

street. Sometimes when she needed something, she would ask me to get it.

She would sit here, pale, with her hands folded, and say, ‘Please,

please, Peterkin, I can’t go to the store.’ For the last eight or ten

days she hardly left her room. She used to telephone me to come over,

she did not want to go on the street. But of course, there was another

reason for that as well....”

“What was that?” asked Myra after staring silently out of the window for

a long time.

He cast a quick and searching glance at her. “So you don’t know?” he

asked as if relieved. “You really know nothing about it? I was sure you

didn’t. But they had her shadowed—your people, you know. No matter where

she went there was always a detective after her. Oh, she suffered so

cruelly because of that!”

“But why?” asked Myra. “Why should they do that? They had me where they

wanted me. They knew just where I spent every hour of the day.”

“Probably they were afraid. They may have thought, before your

engagement at any rate, that you might waver in your resolves, or that

she might try to influence you again; they may have wanted to catch her

at something so that they could have her deported as an undesirable

alien. Your Uncle bought up all her debts. You did not know that either,

I believe. So they had her cornered. Every day there were letters from

attorneys, from the courts.... Later on she simply refused to open them.

She used to let them pile up on her desk. I said to her sometimes, ‘You

can’t do that, you must answer them, you must go, you must make

promises.’ Then she would smile an infinitely melancholy smile. ‘I’ve

lost my sense of humor, Peterkin,’ she would say, ‘I’m old and tired. It

isn’t a hunt as far as I’m concerned’—and she indicated the pile of

papers with a wave of her hand.

“Then there were threatening letters—I can’t tell you how vulgar. Filled

with expressions that one simply can’t repeat. From your Aunt Emily, I

think. But they were sent as if they came from you. They said you knew

now the sort she was and wanted her to drop every attempt to get in

touch with you and to stop blackmailing you. It was sufficient that she

had seduced you into stealing and breaking open people’s desks, that she

had undermined your health, that she had caused your father’s death—ah,

I don’t know all that was in them. And then, things you were supposed to

have said—they must have been horrible, for she would never tell me what

they were or let me read them.

“She used to sit here in front of me, her face perfectly white and her

eyes blazing, while she gripped my wrist so that I thought she would

snap the bone. ‘Myra doesn’t know anything of this, does she, Peterkin?’

she kept repeating, ‘Myra doesn’t know about this?’

“There were times when I did not like that tone of voice. But now, when

it is ringing in my ears again, I don’t see how I could have failed to

understand it. From that time forth, she began frequently to speak of

the journey. ‘I’m going home on the twenty-second of June.’ She was

always saying it. Once I asked her why she had chosen that particular

day. She laughed and said, ‘Because it is three days after the

nineteenth.’ I pondered over it considerably. But at that time the

connection was not clear to me....

“But after your engagement everything was different. Suddenly she began

to say ‘When I go away—next week—or the day after tomorrow,’ I teased

her about it, ‘So you’ve turned traitor to your plans? I thought you

weren’t going away until three days after the nineteenth?’ Then she

looked at me mysteriously and shook her head. ‘Ah, no, Peterkin, I have

no reason for waiting now!’”

* * * * *

“On the evening of the ... on Monday evening, she appeared here suddenly

in what I thought was a very cheerful state of mind. She laid the

cigarette case on my desk just where it’s lying now, and asked me to do

her the favor of placing it in your hands. She intended to go away and

was already packing. If she sent the case to you, it would probably be

taken as an attempt at blackmail!

“I was to give it to you after she had gone—on your birthday. And she

insisted that I mark the date on my calendar. I said I could remember it

without that. But she opened my calendar to the date and marked it

herself.”

With an almost devout gesture, he turned back the last leaf and pushed

the calendar toward Myra. In the white space, under the nineteenth of

June, which had been carefully circled, was written in Olga’s bold,

beautiful hand, “Myra’s birthday. Don’t forget, Peterkin!” Underneath

were three crosses, playful little crosses marked in black ink.

Myra said nothing. She laid the palm of her hand on the paper and did

not remove it.

Peterkin cleared his throat a few times and continued. “Before she left,

we arranged everything for the next day. We would inquire about the

trains in the morning; in the evening, I would take her to the station.

But when she had gone, I grew terribly nervous. Something struck me as

wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. I tried to telephone her, but

there was no answer. I sat here at my desk in a quite indescribable

state of nerves. This thing was lying before me,” he picked up the

cigarette case. “I picked it up quite without thinking. Suddenly it

occurred to me—pardon, Myra, if it was not discreet, but I felt such

dreadful anxiety—suddenly it occurred to me to open it. I did so half in

fun, half with the notion that I might find something in it which would

tell me something. When I opened it, I found this note.”

He handed it to Myra. Under the clasps that were to hold the cigarettes

against the case, was a slip of paper. On it was written in Olga’s

unmistakable hand:

“_Qui vivens laedit, morte medetur!_”

“_Qui vivens laedit, morte medetur!_” repeated Peterkin. “I read it

several times like a drunken man without understanding. Then I rushed

down. Without my hat, without my keys. The lower house was locked. I

rang for the doorman. He did not come at once. I rushed upstairs again

to get my keys. It took me ages to unlock the house, to run around the

corner and ring for their doorman—ages. On the stairs I met the maid,

screaming and sobbing. It had already happened.”

Myra laid her forehead against the edge of the desk. Not a sound was to

be heard. Peterkin stroked Myra’s hair once or twice, with trembling

fingers.

“There is something else that I must tell you,” he said in a low voice.

“She was completely covered with your flowers. Perhaps that will make

you happy. You know, when you parted that time—you ran downstairs with

your people after you—I half heard what was said between you. After

quite a long while I went back to my room—there was Olga still standing

in the middle of the room, supporting herself against the table. When I

entered, she looked at me as if I were awaking her from sleep. I took

her by both arms and shook her. ‘What’s happened, Olga? What have you

done to Myra?’ She looked distractedly at me and kept repeating

‘Something terrible, Oh, God, Peterkin, something terrible!’ She showed

you the door quite formally, did she not? She said that you shouldn’t

bother her again, or something like that, didn’t she?

“Then she seized my hand and said very quietly, ‘I’m lying, Peterkin,

I’m simply lying. It was nothing but my miserable cowardice. But Myra

must know that, she understands me. I would have jumped in front of a

train for her, I’d have jumped out a window, but I can’t let the clothes

be torn off my body in front of such people, I can’t, I can’t. I know,

I’m a miserable, contemptible creature, but I can’t, I can’t.’ I asked

her what you had answered. She turned quite pale and said, ‘Nothing. Not

a word. That’s the terrible part. She was so defenseless against my

commonness.’

“Then she had another discussion with Miss Flesch. You have no idea how

that woman acted. Olga would not remain in the house another hour. For

which I could hardly blame her. Then she went to pack her things. In a

few moments she came back, and seizing me by the wrist, drew me into her

room.

“‘That is her answer,’ she said and showed me the money on the bed. ‘She

is articulate,’ she said. ‘We underestimated her powers.’ Oh, Myra, why

did you do that? To be quite frank, I was dreadfully angry with you

myself at the time. She kept saying ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’

I said ‘Put the money in an envelope and send it back without any

message.’ But she shook her head. ‘I deserved the blow,’ she said at

last, ‘I will have to take it and smile.’ She gathered the bills almost

lovingly, saying several times in a low voice, ‘What a child! What a

child! She did not know what she was doing! She did not know what she

was doing!’ Then she gave me the roll of bills. ‘Keep it for me,

Peterkin, the time may come when I shall need it, and when it will be a

joy to me to know that it comes from Myra.’

“I mentioned it to her often before the end, when she literally did not

know which way to turn for troubles. But she always shook her head and

said, ‘Not yet, not yet!’

“After she—was dead,” his voice broke, “I bought white orchids for her,

I spent the whole sum: she looked beautiful.”

He could get no further. His lips quivered, the tears rolled down his

cheeks. After a long, long pause, Myra sat up: her eyes were dry.

Beside the cigarette case, on the desk, lay a revolver.

“Is that the revolver?” asked Myra and reached for it.

“Yes.”

“Give it to me.” She clasped the butt in her fingers.

Peterkin made a gesture of terror. But Myra slowly shook her head.

Peterkin looked into her eyes, then he reluctantly drew back his hand.

“I do not want to keep it,” he said, “it is too much of a constant

temptation. And not everyone has as steady a hand as Olga Radó. You have

a right to it. Of course. But I should not like you to keep it either.

Promise me something, Myra—promise me you will give it to the man you

love. Then it will be in the best hands.”

She had risen. “I promise you,” she said almost solemnly, “I will give

it to the man I love.”

“Promise that you won’t do anything silly with it, that you won’t carry

it carelessly or foolishly.”

“I promise you,” said Myra, “with this proviso. I have no right yet to

swear on my life that I won’t shoot myself. But I will swear by my

eternal salvation. I will swear by Olga Radó’s ten thousand times sacred

memory.”

Something struck him in her tone. He rose slowly from his chair as if

trying to search her eyes with his own. “Tell me, Myra,” he said, “I

hope you are not angry with me. I should not like anything that I have

said to influence your decisions in any way.”

Myra held his fingers in a short firm clasp. From the swift gesture with

which she drew herself up and ran her hand over his hips, it was

apparent that she was at the utmost limit of her powers.

“I swear,” she said, “that from this hour forth nothing and nobody can

ever again influence my decisions.”

* * * * *

Myra did not return home at once. In a few seconds she had made plans

which instantly became decisions. There was no wavering as they took

form; it all advanced with one stride from darkness into light and

remained there irrevocably.

She visited a shipping-agency and the landlord of the house in which she

had spent so many years. There was a time when she would have dreaded

such tasks. Now she felt that never as long as she lived should anyone

relieve her of such unpleasantnesses.

It made her feel good, to be determined, to manage her affairs prudently

and deliberately. When she entered her room and laid her hat in the

closet, her hand touched the black dress that she had worn to her

father’s burial. For a moment, she felt a desire to put it on, to see

herself in gloomy crêpe. But she drew herself up. “Nonsense!” she

muttered, gritted her teeth and shut the closet.

She went to her father’s study, seated herself at the desk and wrote

various letters, to the attorney, to the bank.

After a while the maid entered. “Your Aunt, my mistress, requests you to

come to dinner.”

Myra did not raise her head. “Tell your mistress, my Aunt, that I have

already eaten. And request my Aunt, your mistress, to come here after

dinner.”

The maid stood in the door for a moment, her mouth wide open. But as

Myra did not stir, adding nothing and retracting nothing, simply

scratching her pen hurriedly over the paper, she trotted off.

Presently, Aunt Emily appeared, visibly undecided as to whether to be

indignant or affable.

“Sit down, please,” said Myra in a tone, so businesslike, so short, so

firm and unimpeachably polite that it threw Aunt Emily into confusion

and deprived her of all power of speech. “Pardon me, if I shorten your

afternoon nap a little, but I have something to say to you and time is

pressing.”

Myra picked up the paper-knife, turned it over and over, bent it, rapped

her outstretched fingers with it, and stared intently at it while she

spoke.

“You will have to decide quickly where you are going—I am about to

travel....”

“You?”

“I am about to travel. We are going to break up the household. The house

will be rented. Newes has agreed to let me break the lease. The

furniture will be put in storage. Within the next few days. I’m

beginning today. The moving-men will be here tomorrow. You will

certainly want to get out of the way of the commotion. I suggest that

you go to a hotel or a pension until you have definitely made up your

mind. If you need the maid this afternoon to help you pack, she will be

at your service. And then—I should not like you to suffer in a pecuniary

way on my account. I should prefer if you were to state your wishes in

writing and hand them to Rosenbaum. I have already written him in this

connection.”

Myra laid down the paper-knife.

“That’s about all!” She rose and supported herself with her hands behind

her, against the desk. “But if we should not see one another again,

God’s will be done, and well done by you.”

Aunt Emily also rose, her knees trembling, while her face turned all

shades of color from citron yellow to ash gray.

“And—and Alfred?” she asked with a vain effort to inject a touching

gentleness into her sharp voice.

“What? Who?” Myra knitted her brow. “Oh, yes—no thank you. You don’t

have to notify him. I will take care of everything necessary myself.”

“Myra!” said Aunt Emily solemnly, “what would your dear father say! I

have cared for and shielded you from the day you were born, and for

thanks I am shown the door....”

Myra seized the paper-knife again.

“I have already written Rosenbaum that he is to transfer fifty thousand

marks of my fortune to you. With what you have and what is coming to you

from father, you can live very comfortably indeed. I will go tomorrow

morning and give him the necessary authorizations.”

“Myra,” said Aunt Emily with mounting pathos. “I shielded you from an

awful fate. You ought to go down on your knees and thank me!”

“All right, all right,” said Myra and made a rather wry mouth. “I’ll

tell Rosenbaum a hundred thousand.”

Then Aunt Emily turned and rushed out.

Myra packed her things in feverish haste as if for flight. She worked

all day and night, permitting no one to help her, not even the maid, not

even Peterkin.

But on the evening, when she was departing, Peterkin came to fetch her

from the house and accompany her to the depot.

The house was dark and empty. All the furniture had been removed. The

chandeliers were down and the windows curtainless. Here and there a

picture hook projected disconsolately from the bare wall, or a square on

the paper showed that a picture had hung there for years. A big suitcase

and a small bag stood in the middle of the empty room. Myra had stuck a

lit taper on the window-sill. It gave a strange, flickering half-light.

Their shadows glided, huge and bent along the walls and ceiling.

Peterkin kept glancing at his watch. “Isn’t it time for me to call the

taxi?” he asked uneasily.

Myra raised her hand. “Stop it! We have oceans of time. What would we do

at the station? And what difference does it make if I miss the train?

I’ll simply leave in the early morning.”

“Ah,” said Peterkin relieved, “I’d much prefer that. I don’t understand

how anybody can travel at night.”

“I’ll travel in the morning,” said Myra. “In a few hours the dawn will

come. But I love the night. Whoever loves the stars must love the night.

Tell me, Peterkin, have you really never thought that they’re up there

in the daytime, too—just as remote and just as near as at night?

Sometimes I try to see them when the sun is shining—and I feel quite

certain—that such and such a one is here, and another there, and I can

hardly wait for twilight to make them visible.”

“You get that from her, too,” said Peterkin sadly, “that insane love of

the stars.”

“Yes,” said Myra and her deep voice was like a bell, “what have I that I

didn’t get from her? Everything! Certainly all love. The earth and sky

are full of things she loved. And her love streams back to me again from

all those things. Good God, how many things she loved. Mountains and

seas and flowers and spiders and little children and leather and silk

and crystal and Günderode and the blessed St. Francis of Assisi—and—me.

“Truly, she taught me love. Good heavens, if Aunt Emily were to hear

that she would certainly read a wrong meaning into it.

“Once she said something to me, Olga, I mean, it was when we were on our

trip and were talking about our future, and I said that I did not want

to be separated from her until I came of age. Then she grew quite

impatient and said, ‘Good heavens, what a dreadful attitude, never to be

able to love what you aren’t holding in your own two hands!’

“Wasn’t she right, too? Why shouldn’t one love the dead and those who

are arriving and those who are far away, whose existence we can only

surmise or whose creation wafts us a breath of their souls? And why only

one, why not thousands—those for whom we yearn and those who yearn for

us—those who have died with longing for us unfulfilled, and those who

will live with longing unfulfilled after us, when we have long been

dead. Sometimes I feel as if I should stretch both my arms into space

and call, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you!’”

“It is strange,” said Peterkin timidly, shaking his head as he gazed up

at Myra who stood, weirdly tall and slender in the spectral light, “it

is strange how like her you sometimes are.”

“It is much stranger how _unlike_ her I was,” said Myra, with a smile.

“Remote, strange, unrelated. So horribly unlike her that I really did

not understand her at all. I think I tormented her to death with

jealousy and distrust.”

“And now?” asked Peterkin. “Would you be jealous and distrustful now?

Who knows, if you had remained together, perhaps in a few months you

would have had cause to be.”

Myra shook her head slowly. “You’re just trying to comfort me, Peterkin.

But you don’t succeed. My delight in her was so uncontrollable. Even

though her form were destroyed a thousand times, my delight in her will

always remain. I see now that I should not have been so greedy as to rob

heaven and earth of her love. But Olga never deceived me. Never, never,

never!”

“The train, Myra,” warned Peterkin.

Myra glanced at her wrist-watch. “Yes, we must go.”

Peterkin went to call a taxi. The chauffeur carried down the luggage.

“And look there,” she rose with a strange rapture on her face and

pointed to the starry sky, “there’s Antares! The heart of the Scorpion!

I’ll follow it, farther and farther south. We may remain together, or I

may wait until it appears again, for it is the most trustworthy of

friends.”

“Nevertheless,” said Peterkin, “I have a feeling that it will be very

little protection or friendship for you. When I think that in a few

nights you will be sleeping in a strange city, in a strange bed....”

“Splendid!” said Myra. “That is the one thing that can give me peace. A

room that I’ve never set eyes on before. And what if that room is

already there and another person occupies it and fills it with his

sorrows and joys and worries and thoughts? Must one always lie down in a

strange bed with a feeling of aversion? There are no strange microbes

and bacteria in a freshly made hotel bed.

“In the morning the strange bed will tell me everything it has ever

experienced. That’s also a fairy gift, you know. I’m no longer afraid

because things begin to talk to me. It is always the lucky children in

the fairy tales or the wise men in the stories—King Solomon conversing

with the birds—to whom things and animals and trees tell their secrets.

You don’t know what that means. The whole world was so dreadfully mute.

And now everywhere I hear beloved, familiar, inaudible voices. You can’t

imagine with what joy and pride that fills one. See, Peterkin, that is

something else that I learned from her, from Olga.”

“I am grateful to her for what hours of pleasure I may again find in

this masked ball of life, but if the effort seems worthless to me, then

I shall be grateful to her for showing me the exit.”

“Yes,” said Peterkin somewhat bitterly, “a loaded revolver.”

“Oh, more than that,” said Myra, “it isn’t done with that alone. Don’t

you remember what the little mermaid yearned for, why she let them cut

off her tongue, why she suffered a thousand agonies at every step she

took—what only a great, a truly great love could give her? Well, Olga

gave me that. Olga has given me everything one needs to confront the

future with imperturbable calm—a loaded revolver and an immortal soul!”

X

Myra locked and bolted the door. She heard the footsteps of the maid

grow fainter, a click as the electric lights were turned on and off, a

latch lifted somewhere in the distance, the creaking of a hinge—more

steps, probably on the next floor—and a slowly repeated, irregular sound

as if an open window were banging. Then silence. Vast, overarching,

empty, cool, dark, unmoving silence.

Myra had to make up her mind at last to take her hand from the lock and

go to the electric button, although she was afraid of the sound of her

footsteps and the rustling of her own skirt. She turned on all the

lights, even the little lamps beside the bed and on the desk. In the

overilluminated room, she stole along the walls, opening and closing the

closets, raising the curtains and drawing them again.

She was not afraid that there might be a murderer hidden in the room,

but she wished to familiarize herself with every detail of her strange

surroundings. She was merely afraid that something might surprise, and

thereby terrify, her. The unfamiliar furniture might assume the form of

a phantom figure in the dark room, a draft might twist the curtains into

human shape. She also examined the pictures very carefully. She

recollected from feverish nights in her childhood that even well-known

pictures, when seen in the dusk or in the penumbra of the night-lamp by

the bed, can transform themselves into terrifying faces.

When she had examined the room in this fashion, she again turned out all

the bulbs except one that shed only a very diffuse light. But there was

no longer anything to terrify her in this twilight: Myra knew that that

crouching shadow was the curved commode, and that unaccountable ray of

light came from the edge of the mirror above the wash-basin, reflecting

the reflection of the electric light in the mirror on the bureau.

She opened her suitcase and took out various articles she needed—a

night-dress, which she spread on the bed, a couple of bottles and

brushes, which she carried to the wash-basin. Then she brought the box

from the night-table and laid a piece of soft white silk on the

bottom—as carefully as if she were smoothing her lover’s couch, or

preparing for a priestly service. With cautious movements, as if she

were handling living objects, she laid the revolver and the

cigarette-case with the scorpion inside. She shut the box with a

determined gesture, for, as always, the sight of the revolver aroused in

her an almost passionate desire to set its cool, smooth, metallic mouth

to her temple. She was afraid to give way to this desire, for she was

not sure that some sudden impulse might not make her pull the trigger,

and thus, lead her, rather by accident than from necessity, to destroy

herself, and thereby extinguish thought, feeling, memory, anticipation.

She did not wish to die. Or rather, she would gladly have died, if it

had not involved being dead. She would gladly have died the same death

as Olga, if only to be able to know with her last thought that she was

suffering all that Olga had suffered, and that it was not so unbearable,

so terrible, as inexperience imagined it.

On the other hand, she felt a fierce desire for life of which she knew

so little. Not that she promised herself any great joys, any fine

raptures therefrom. But she felt so well armed against the beautiful and

terrifying monster that it would have been a pity to give up the

struggle. It seemed to her as if Olga’s blood had bathed her soul in

that invulnerability that Siegfried found in the dragon’s blood. She was

convinced that she had surmounted the most beautiful, the most

difficult, the most significant part of her life. In the tragedy or

comedy in which birth compelled her to participate, she had had to play

her part only in the first act. She had expended all her strength and

feeling—and now she mingled with the supers, still eager, but exhausted

by the shocks which she had undergone: half curiously, half wearily, she

watched the others act.

In reality, her curiosity was stronger than she knew, and although she

thought, or wished to think, that she was no longer capable of any

powerful emotion, either joy or pain, although she felt that her peace

of mind was steeled against impacts of every sort, she felt moved to try

the invulnerability of her armor, to seek out new impressions, and

expose herself to them. She would plunge into the thickest of the fray,

pressing the bristling spear-heads to her breast.

The first to which she so eagerly offered herself and whose wounds she

had certainly not suffered before, were strangeness of surroundings and

solitude.

As a result of the feeling that in her new freedom she had herself

elected strangeness and solitude, and as a result, too, of the thought

that nothing more could hurt her, nothing more must hurt her since her

separation from Olga Radó, she felt the cold and almost hostile silence

as a kind of beneficent release.

One thing she knew—she could endure solitude. But tomorrow she would be

compelled to take her meals in a room containing ten or twenty strange

people. The idea almost took away her breath. She felt curious eyes

pricking her skin like pin-points. But she would endure that, too.

Somewhere below a door slammed, with a dull, heavy sound that shook all

the walls. The elevator rose with a humming noise as if the huge body of

the house were drawing a labored breath. In the stillness of the night

she could hear quite clearly the click as it passed the first, then the

second, floor.

She heard, too, the opening of doors, the clinking of keys and grinding

of locks, the snapping of electric buttons, footsteps moving carefully

over muffling carpets or pounding on the bare floor. A suppressed laugh,

a whispered good night.

Myra tried to decide whether these voices which she could barely hear

were pleasant or unpleasant. She arrived at no very definite decision.

The door opened in the adjoining room. Again she heard the softest

rustling, the click of the electric light, the drawing of curtains.

Myra knew nothing of the man in the next room, nothing. Not even his

name, not even his age, not even as much as can be read in any face that

hastily passes one by in a dark street. And yet she knew that her

neighbor did not care to be waked up early, for she heard the window

shut with considerable care. That he was a considerate person, for he

took pains to make no noise, pulled off his shoes quietly and stole

about in soft slippers so that she could no longer hear him walking, and

sensed his presence only by a slight vibration. He was a cleanly person,

too, for despite the lateness of the hour, he brushed his teeth at some

length.

It made Myra laugh. Perhaps it would be best to make the acquaintance of

all one’s fellow humans in this fashion. What good did it do to learn a

stranger’s name, or his occupation, or his father’s position? What use

was it to talk with someone and know no more about him in the end than

where he spent last summer or what he thought of the latest operetta?

But what use was it, either, to live with only a wall dividing you from

someone so that you could hear every breath he drew—and still know

nothing about him?

Ah, of what use was it to be of one blood with someone, and spend your

life with him from the day you were born? Of what use was it to love

someone, to love him with every fibre of your body and soul—if in the

last analysis you really knew nothing about one another?

Myra went to the window and leaned out. She scanned the heavens for

Antares, her star. But the brick walls of the houses hid it. She leaned

out a little farther, peering down into the air-shaft. She felt a

strange dizziness. If she were to fall down there, no one would notice

it. If they found her body there in the morning, nobody would know what

to do, whom to notify, whom to send for.

Myra was indeed free. So free that it sent a little shiver down her

spine. Not the trace of a chain left, but no bond of any kind, either;

no walls to circumscribe her, but also no sheltering roof.

The persons to whom love or obligation had bound her were dead. Her

father was dead, Olga was dead. From the others she had severed herself

with one sharp slash.

“Dear stars,” thought Myra, “how good it is that you are up there!

Always the same, after tens of thousands of years, the same as when Olga

and I lay by the Wannsee. There is no such thing as chance, there can be

no such thing as chance. Why do not the stars collide and plunge with a

trail of sparks through the night? Eternal, immutable laws keep their

huge bodies floating in space and guide them with as vast composure

along their courses as if it were the easiest thing in the world to rule

the stars. At some point I, too, am subject to those laws and cannot

resist—nor do I want to. I am afraid when I must decide to go right or

left, and yet all roads are closed to me except that single one which I

shall and must take because it is mine, the one immutably predestined

road which will lead me to my goal. To what goal? That I do not know.

But since I am alive there is probably something in store for me

somewhere, and the best course is to await it in patience.”

* * * * *

In the large dining-room of the pension, Myra had her table in the

darkest corner. The friendly hostess had felt obliged to apologize

because all the places near the window were occupied by prior guests. It

quite suited Myra. She sat with her back to the wall and the little

table before her like a bastion. Usually she appeared when the first

gong struck so that she could watch the others pass by and would not

have to weave her way between the crowded tables. Once she was late, and

the short walk across the room had been a torture to her. She felt

herself racked and impeded by all the shamelessly inquisitive, and even

the indifferent, glances. Although she always looked into the mirror

before she left her room, she thought that her hair must be disordered

if a glance rested on it, or that she had a hole in her stocking if

someone stared at her legs. Then she would have to struggle sternly

against the impulse to put her hand to her head, or to glance at her

feet. She would press her elbows against her body, and endeavor to

assume an impenetrable expression, and to move cautiously—she was

plagued by the idea that she would overturn a chair or upset a plate.

She tried to walk so quickly that no one could observe how precisely she

navigated. Once seated, she felt as if she had reached a haven.

Generally, she took a newspaper with her, in order to screen herself

behind it while she was waiting. She was not afraid that someone might

accost her—talking was much less terrifying to her than walking—she was

afraid of looking as if she were expecting to be accosted, so

unoccupied, so solitary, so hungry for a charitable word.

Actually, she was nothing of the kind. The less she had occasion to

speak, the less she missed speaking. But while it caused her no

unhappiness, it did require a certain resolution before she could bring

herself to say something to the maid. When, in the evening, she went to

her room, and bolted the door after the last, “That will be all, thank

you, Bertha,” the feeling that now she could be silent, now she was

permitted to be silent, was like a deliverance to her. At times it

seemed to her as if her tongue had become atrophied like any other

disused muscle. And she wasted no further pity on the Trappists because

she perceived quite clearly that it requires but a few weeks so to

accustom one’s self to silence that the utterance of a word presents

tremendous difficulties.

Myra’s yearning for Olga almost drove her mad—but that was by no means

the worst of it. The worst was that her yearning was the cry of a human

soul, not for love, not for companionship or understanding, but for the

warmth of a body, for the pressure of encircling arms and tender lips.

At such times, Myra would tear the pillow with her nails and teeth, and

shake as if in fever. At such moments, too, she felt certain that she

really must be a wicked creature, the most damning evidence being that

she could never succeed in feeling repentant or in making good

resolutions. On the contrary, if she were very unhappy, she resolved at

once to be wicked. Her desire to study and improve herself was only for

the sake of acquiring more power over people, to beguile, to seduce

them. Then she would enjoy whatever stirred her desire or her curiosity,

were it only for an hour; she would merely skim the chalice, squeeze the

juices from the fruit, and pass quickly from one sensation to another,

never boring herself, never tying herself to anything, never creating

from the depths.

Some such resolution impelled her to mingle with people. She meant to

plunge head first into the stream, because she felt within herself the

power to master the current. She determined to start an acquaintance the

next day, to place herself on speaking terms with someone. Like a stone

cast in the waters, a word can spread wider and wider ripples. In a few

weeks she might find herself the center of a circle.

But next day when she reviewed all the faces, they seemed to her

suddenly vacuous and boresome, or false and sinister, and she drew into

herself like a frightened hedgehog, timid and hostile. She made a new

resolution—not to speak, never, never to say a word, never to utter more

than was absolutely essential, to erect barricades and walls of silence

between herself and the world.

Things might have gone along in this fashion for weeks and months, had

not Gisela Werkenthin arrived at the pension one day, to visit the

painted young lady. She attracted Myra the instant that she entered the

dining hall. Not that she was especially beautiful. She was built on the

slim, slight, boyish scheme. Her narrow face seemed even narrower

because of her dark hair, which was cut in page fashion and concealed

half of her cheeks. Her mouth was all but lipless, simply a delicate,

pale red, proud, severe curved line. Her dark eyes with their strikingly

wide lids lay in great, deep ashen-gray hollows.

That night Myra did not rise from table immediately after supper as

usual. She ordered a cup of tea and in order to have a pretext,

pretended to be stirring the tea impatiently, to cool it while she

watched the table at which sat the pale girl with the bobbed hair.

She laughed with the others, drank and smoked innumerable cigarettes.

But she had a trick of withdrawing completely into herself in the midst

of the noisy conversation. Her slender hand with its lit cigarette would

remain as if petrified in the air, while her eyes bored through the fog

of tobacco smoke and steam as if they were beholding something

indescribably horrible.

The next day Myra visited Mrs. Meidinger, the hostess. There was a small

matter she had to discuss with her which ordinarily she would have

conveyed by the maid. But during the night, she determined irrevocably

to make her leap into “life.” It was for this reason that she

constrained herself for the first time to pay a personal call. The

hostess, blond, rotund, coiffured and as amiable as ever, received her

in her comfortable living-room, enthroned behind a well-covered

tea-table.

She seemed quite enchanted to see Myra. She teased so long that at last

Myra accepted a cup of tea, while she began to ply the girl with

questions in which curiosity and friendliness were equally commingled,

and which Myra answered because she saw no reason not to answer them.

But she smiled slightly and thought, “If I really wanted to hide

something from you, my dear, I would do it so well that you would never

even suspect it.”

She readily admitted that she was an orphan. Yes, she believed that the

mourning she was now wearing for her father did explain her pale and

sorrowful expression. Thus the good-natured and inquisitive woman would

never think of any secret grief or probe its causes.

Myra’s story was soon told. She was an orphan, had neither brothers nor

sisters nor grandparents, and had visited this strange city in order to

dispel her sad memories in a new environment. The hostess was satisfied

with that explanation, or appeared to be. She confessed to Myra—what

surprised her very much—that all the guests had inquired concerning her,

and that each had assumed some romantic history behind the silent young

lady in mourning. Miss Luigi—no doubt Myra knew who Miss Luigi

was—worked at a cabaret and had enjoyed a great success, a really

extraordinary success. Yes, the little lady with the beautiful red

hair—dyed, quite obviously, as perhaps Myra had already remarked? Anyway

Miss Luigi was always teasing her to introduce her to Myra. But when

Mrs. Meidinger had told Miss Peters, the latter had said—Miss Peters was

always very outspoken—and sometimes even a little broad—she had said,

“What, you mean to introduce that delicate, tender, unborn babe to

those....” Well, she would rather not repeat what Miss Peters had said.

Miss Peters was sometimes a little broad. But little Miss Luigi was by

no means as bad as that. Of course, she was no angel from heaven—but

whose business was that? She, Mrs. Meidinger, was not her sister’s

keeper—and the most important thing was that her house remained honest;

that was her business and nobody could say anything against it. If a

young woman has to earn her bread these days like a man, she wants to

take her fun like a man, too. Of course, she liked respectable people,

that went without saying. But, ah, who was respectable in these days?

Some did one thing, some another. Had Myra noticed Gisela yesterday?

Myra assumed a forgetful expression, but felt as if she had blushed.

“One of the girls who visited Miss Luigi?”

“Yes, the dark one. Oh, you must have noticed her, Miss Rudloff! She

looks so unhappy, so dreadfully unhappy! Didn’t it strike you? Of

course, you wouldn’t notice such a thing, but it’s easy for anybody who

knows, to see that she’s a dope-fiend. It certainly is no indiscretion

on my part to tell you what the whole town is talking about. And such a

talented person! It’s a terrible pity, but she’s going to pieces,

literally going to pieces, over another woman!”

An artistic pause. Mrs. Meidinger looked at Myra expectantly. Myra felt

that the glance demanded some comment from her.

“How dreadful!” she said in the tone of a child to whom someone has just

told something incredibly horrible.

“Yes, my dear little girl,” said the hostess with an almost

commiserating condescension, “in your big innocent eyes it is easy to

read the question: ‘Are such things possible?’ My child, have you any

idea of all that goes on! We live in an appalling age, really! But what

can one do about it? We can no more escape our times than we can jump

out of our own skins. If I had had my way, I’d have lived among

respectable people where things are decent. Or have sat at the feet of

Goethe. But where is one to find a Goethe today?”

Myra frankly regretted her inability to assist Mrs. Meidinger to this

longed-for situation. She pictured it very amusingly to herself, and

took her leave as soon as possible.

Even while she was traversing the long, feebly lighted corridor that led

to her room, her thoughts returned to poor Gisela, and did not leave her

again.

Poor Gisela, going to pieces over a woman! Ah, how well Myra understood

that! Just as Gisela would understand Myra. Would understand all that

Myra had been through, her struggles, her sorrow, her love.

Myra felt as if she must seek out this strange girl with the burning,

tormented eyes, must follow her, must seize her hand and say, “We

understand each other, we belong to each other, because we are the most

unfortunate souls in the world! We must become friends because no one

except ourselves can ever understand what we have suffered.”

* * * * *

The next evening the conversation between the tables concerned some

story in the newspapers. Some had read it, others not, and since Myra

had a paper in her hand she offered it to her neighbor. Little Miss

Luigi also asked if she might glance over it, a request which Myra

granted with great cordiality, and in five minutes a general

conversation was in swing.

Next day it seemed perfectly natural to Miss Luigi to say a few friendly

words to Myra. In the evening when she was inviting her usual crowd to

“sample” a glass of brandy in her room, she walked over to Myra’s table

and asked her to come up, too, for a quarter of an hour—nothing

“formal,” just “sociable.”

Myra gave herself a mental push, and rose to go. She had to pass the

table at which were sitting Luisa Peters and her companions. Myra held

her head high as she walked by, but she thought she could feel their

surprised and scornful looks along her spine. Defiance welled up within

her, and she linked her arm in little Mara Luigi’s. “I belong with

these,” it was meant to say to the others, “with these whom you despise

but who sympathize with me. I don’t belong with you hardened saints. You

never gave a thought to me before, now it serves you right if I am

lost!”

As she became conscious of this feeling, it struck her as the height of

absurdity. What had these utter strangers to do with her? In what way

were they responsible for her? Then she felt darkly—“That crowd who are

staring after me, scornfully and pityingly—are my kind. We have ties in

common, I belong to them. But I am cutting those ties and going with

these others, with these strangers with whom I also have something in

common. But it is a common destiny, not merely a common existence. For

they understand not merely suffering but passionate grief and passionate

love. They are not merely ardent, but jealous, not merely active, but

impetuous. No, I do not belong to you! I hate you, I despise you! You

and your kind! Olga Radó has killed you for me. I no longer belong to

you. But since I must belong somewhere, I shall try to belong with these

others.”

She entered Mara Luigi’s room as tensely and determinedly as if she were

entering a new life.

* * * * *

Mara Luigi had to snatch something from nearly all the chairs before she

could offer her visitors a seat. She tossed an armful of all kinds of

articles on the bed and said, “There you are, my children, be seated!”

Miss Lorenz, a slender, well-dressed, blondined girl with a pretty,

expressionless doll’s face threw herself among the cushions on the divan

and took a big teddy bear affectionately in her arms. A chap named

Kramer, a slight, fair-haired young fellow, with the face of a child who

has known too much too soon, struggled for a place on the divan. But

pretty Miss Lorenz opposed him so vigorously that her slim kicking legs

in their thin silk stockings were visible above her knees.

A grave and sickly looking man, who was not, strictly speaking, a member

of this circle, since Myra had often observed him in friendly

conversation with the other party, silently moved up a chair for Myra.

She was standing irresolutely in the middle of the room.

Myra smiled her thanks to him, somewhat confused, and sat down.

Meanwhile young Kramer had encountered so powerful a blow that he

scrambled down from the divan with a howl of pain and sat on the carpet

where he remained, refusing to be elevated by force or entreaty.

Mrs. Breslauer, a buxom lady, with strikingly painted eyebrows, had

discovered a corset of white tricot under a heap of other things on the

bed, and she must absolutely know whether it was made in mass production

or whether the famous Fischer had “created” it and how much it had cost.

Giesbert, a young painter, a slender, good-looking fellow, wrenched the

corset from the lady’s hands and danced through the room with it. Mara

Luigi rushed after him. She had caught up her short little skirt in her

left hand, her right was clutching after the artist. When Giesbert held

the corset on high, she jumped on a chair to reach it. When he hopped

back and forth on the far side of the table, prepared to change his

direction any moment, she did the same on the other side. Her comb

clattered to the floor; curls and strands of hair danced around her

face.

Myra grasped the arms of her chair tightly and shut her eyes for a

moment because she felt herself becoming dizzy.

“So this is ‘life,’” she thought. “I must accustom myself to it.”

The ugly, sickly looking man, who had been standing behind her chair,

said in an uncommonly gentle and pleasant voice, “You are a stranger

here, are you not?”

“Yes,” said Myra with a helpless sort of smile, “rather.”

She scolded herself for being petty and narrow-minded, but she could not

help feeling that it was easier to get along in one of those stiff and

conventional gatherings where the hostess felt obliged to look after a

strange guest. She did not wish to be noticed, did not wish to play a

part. She would gladly have attended this promiscuous gathering of the

clans as a nonparticipating spectator—but a quite invisible one.

For—quite mistakenly—she felt that everybody was staring at her and

thinking rather uncomfortably that this serious, embarrassed and silent

young lady did not belong. She was very grateful, therefore, when the

strange and not very congenial looking man spoke to her, grateful that

she could turn to him occasionally, if only so that the others might not

think that she was waiting stiffly for somebody to befriend her.

The ugly man bent forward slightly. “My name is Eccarius,” he said.

“We’ve been invited here very kindly, but unfortunately they’ve

neglected to introduce us to one another.”

He smiled, and his smile was so kind, so indulgent that it captivated

Myra at once.

“You shouldn’t say that,” she said, prepared to be indulgent on her

side, too. “We can get along somehow this way.”

She mentioned her own name.

“May I?” He drew up a chair beside her. “Of course, we can get along, my

dear Miss Rudloff! We are hidebound by too many outworn conventions. I

envy these children their ease. They skip and frisk about, speak

familiarly to one another, sharing all their secrets, and never dreaming

how difficult it is for one of us to bridge the gap from individual to

individual.”

By the word “us” Myra felt she had been recognized. No matter what pains

she took, they realized that she was a stranger to this circle. She was

not quite sure whether it was for better or for worse.

The pretty Giesbert was dancing before the large mirror. He had put on

the corset over his gray jacket and was trying to pull it shut.

“My best corset!” screamed Mara Luigi in a rage. “You’re going to ruin

it! You’re a beast! Take it off, I say, take it off!”

“You don’t need it,” said Giesbert laughing, “don’t try to act as if

you’d ever worn one!”

He pinched her sides which caused her to squeak loudly.

Myra would not have admitted even to herself that she felt offended by

his tone.

“How splendidly young these people are,” she said smiling at Eccarius.

“I feel quite old and sour beside such children.”

“Children ...” repeated Eccarius with a strangely reserved expression as

if his eyes were turned inward, “yes, perhaps—children....” Then he

glanced at Myra again with his frank expression and his kindly smile.

“You must have had a very happy childhood.”

“Yes,” said Myra with complete conviction.

Myra recalled that she had learned to know struggle, unhappiness and

suffering very young, that she had felt real hatred for Aunt Emily who

had managed her upbringing with so much righteousness and so little

understanding, that she was aware at an early age what it means to be

jealous. And it seemed to her as if that period, a period when she was

not yet quite ten years of age, no longer belonged to her childhood.

Childhood had been those few years when a stream of happy love had

bubbled up from her heart and had flowed forth without distinction

toward whatever trees, animals, persons or dolls happened within range

of her feelings.

At the moment when this stream of love had had to force its way over

obstacles, when it was dried up in places which it had formerly

enriched, leaving nothing but arid indifference or a swamp of hate—at

that moment the idea of childhood seemed ended for Myra.

“Yes,” she said, again fastening her gaze on Eccarius, “a very happy

childhood, but not a very long one. I have a feeling that I was awakened

before most children—not that I was mature, I don’t want you to

misunderstand me—I am not mature even today....”

“Who is?” asked Eccarius with his gentle smile.

“But I believe that I was awakened earlier than other children from the

bliss of unconsciousness.”

“That is too bad.” Over his grave and clear gray eyes a veil, as of

profound grief, seemed to be drawn. “It is a great pity, a great, great

pity.”

Involuntarily Myra looked surprised, but he made an effort to explain

his sympathy.

“You know whenever I see happy children, I always want to build walls

and ramparts around them, so that they will remain as they are, will

remain so for a long, long time. It is dreadful to think that one

poisonous breath can change all the happiness of these little creatures

into horrible pain.”

“Let him keep them,” cried little Kramer from his place on the floor,

“let him keep them, if he can’t bear to part with the corsets! Every man

has his passion, and there must be people who find corsets quite

diverting.”

“You swine!” said Miss Lorenz and kicked his shoulder.

Giesbert had picked up a tulle hat with egret feathers and clapped it on

his head. With one hand he held the corsets together across his stomach,

with the other he clutched anxiously at the hat with every step, to keep

it balanced.

“I’m going to wear this to the artists’ ball,” he announced in a tone of

triumph, “I’ll be a sensation!” Suddenly he passed into falsetto. “Oh,

no! I’ll be the fairest maid of all! Sugar-daddy will give me an

education. If only I knew what for! I have so frightfully many talents!”

“Yes, yes,” cried little Miss Luigi meanwhile and skipped into the air,

“the artists’ ball at Sophus’! Stand still a minute, you loathsome

little darling! Tell me seriously, what are you going to wear? A costume

or what? Come, put those things down, Giesbert, else you certainly won’t

get a single glass of brandy!” She stamped on the floor for emphasis.

Giesbert pretended a terrified trembling and quaking while his knees

shook as he put the articles on the bed.

Mara laughed and brought the bottle of brandy from the closet.

“I have only two glasses! Ring, will you, Erich?” she commanded.

“Oh, what’s the use,” said Miss Lorenz indifferently, without rising,

“we’ll drink one after the other. If Emma brings glasses in here, she’ll

report that we’re holding an orgy.”

“All right.” Mara Luigi rinsed the glasses in the wash-basin. She

reached for a hand-towel, and Myra was somewhat shocked, thinking she

was about to dry the glasses with it, but she merely wiped her

finger-tips. She filled the glasses to the brim, and offered the first

to Myra.

“Do you know what, Miss Rudloff?” she asked as she stood before her,

“you must come with us tomorrow night, you really must.”

“I?” asked Myra frightened. “Where?”

“To the artists’ ball, of course! Probably you’ve never been to a really

truly artists’ ball in all your life. But you must see one.” Myra did

not feel the slightest inclination to accept. She even regretted having

accepted the first invitation, instead of remaining in her room where

she could shut out every disturbing sound, and take refuge from her own

thoughts in quiet and clever books.

“But I don’t know the persons who are giving it at all,” she said

helplessly. “Isn’t it strange?” she thought. “At home I should certainly

have said, ‘The people,’ and have been sharply reprimanded by Aunt

Emily. And here where ‘persons’ will be sure to strike everybody as

affected, Aunt Emily’s good teachings burst forth for the first time in

full flower.”

“Don’t know whom? Sophus and Nora?” asked Giesbert, checking his crazy

behavior for a moment and speaking like a rational human being while,

still out of breath, he smoothed his hair. “You don’t know them? Then

you certainly will have to go there tomorrow for it’s high time that you

did know them! A pair of splendid women, two of the most remarkable

people I know! Would anybody like to take exception to that? If so, I

challenge him to put on the gloves immediately.”

He rolled up his sleeves, drew his head between his shoulders, and bared

his teeth.

“You need have no qualms about going,” said buxom Mrs. Breslauer in her

somewhat unctuous voice. “I was lugged up there the first time

positively _sans façon_, and was received charmingly, isn’t it true,

Marakin, they were really perfectly charming.”

“Yes,” laughed little Kramer, “I really believe they never meet anybody

except as their guest!”

“Is Gisela coming for us, or shall we see her there?” asked Miss Lorenz.

“Gisela,” thought Myra, “so she’s going to be there, too. I’ll really

have to do it. The only alternatives I have are to bury myself like a

hermit, or to take advantage of every opportunity to meet people and

learn to know the world and human beings. Gisela! Here I sit trying in

some way to meet her, and when I’m asked to make her acquaintance in the

easiest way in the world, I haven’t the slightest desire, but only fear

and shyness and aversion and a feeling that I’d like to creep away

somewhere and be quiet.”

Eccarius must have read the inner struggle on her face. He bent forward

slightly. “I think you can venture it,” he said in his very soothing

way. “You will find a rare bouquet of people there. They will certainly

distract and may even interest you. There are some really worthwhile

characters among them. And if it becomes too lively for you, I shall

undertake to bring you home at any time you wish.”

“So you will be there, too?” asked Myra, relieved.

He nodded.

“Yes, then I believe I can ‘venture it.’”