While Myra was dressing to go to the artists’ ball, she was not
conscious of any effort to beautify herself in order to attract
attention, to please, to cause sensation. Indeed, she desired to attract
as little attention as possible, and would have given a good deal to be
invisible, or to watch the hubbub from a gallery or a darkened adjoining
room.
She selected a very simple black taffeta dress quite void of color or
boldness of line. Nevertheless, she could not prevent something striking
in her appearance. Perhaps it was caused by the anticipation which
flamed up in the depths of her lifeless eyes and which was in such sharp
contrast to the gentle, almost colorless composure of her pale face.
* * * * *
As Myra took off her coat in the vestibule of the little villa and was
at once surrounded by a throng of persons in fantastic costumes, and a
throng of noises, her immediate thought was of escaping. She looked for
little Mara Luigi who was raising waves of people about her. Perhaps no
one would notice if she asked for her coat again and slipped quietly out
the door. She glanced about, weighing the chances of flight, and
encountered the eyes of Eccarius who stood directly behind her.
“Look around a bit first,” he said soothingly as if he had divined her
thoughts, “and if it’s too much for you, give me a sign and I’ll take
you home. I have no intention of staying here till daybreak myself.”
The rooms were large and bright, and so full of noisy people that Myra
grew dizzy. A thin, bluish pall of smoke hung over the groups and spun
in rings around the lamps. Faces stood out, impressed themselves on
Myra’s mind, sharp and yet unreal, like visions in a fever—then
disappeared again.
Eccarius remained at her side, pointing occasionally to someone whom she
could not discover in the throng, or mentioning some name that she did
not understand or could not catch because it had no meaning for her.
A tall, slender, beautiful girl passed them in a sort of page’s costume.
Eccarius called to her and she stopped and greeted him. Myra had an
opportunity to observe her. She wore black silk knee-breeches, white
stockings, a jacket with lace cuffs, and had secured her dark, curling
hair in a great black knot at her neck. Her features were clear and
regular, a high and beautifully modelled forehead, and an almost
challenging, free and bold expression which captivated Myra at first
glance. She seemed to perceive that Myra did not feel quite at home in
that tumult. She took her by the hand like a child.
“Come,” she said, half to Myra, half to Eccarius, “I’ll take this little
girl to Nora. She is always ‘the pole of repose in the flux of
appearances.’ You’ll feel much better with her. Good Lord!” She took
Myra’s chin in her hand and turned her face to Eccarius. “Doesn’t she
look like a little child on its first day at school? Come, baby; you
shall have a place of honor.”
She forced her way through chattering, noisy groups. Everywhere the
beautiful woman was called to, stopped, embraced, greeted, questioned.
With a patience and affability that never altered she always managed to
release herself again, but it took a quarter of an hour for Myra and her
to cross two rooms.
At the end of the second room was a raised alcove on which, towering
above the other chairs and a table with a charming cover, stood a
Renaissance easy-chair, with high and very beautifully carved arms. In
this arm-chair, standing out against its strawberry-red brocade as
against a painted background, sat a very fair woman, dressed in white,
softly flowing white veils over her shoulders, a soft white covering
over her knees.
Myra was astounded at first sight by the beauty of this vision. On
closer inspection she perceived that the woman in the chair had passed
her fortieth birthday, that she was too buxom to be beautiful, that age
and sickness had ravaged and obscured the once pure lines of her face.
But the next moment, as Myra held her warm, matronly hand, and felt a
smile of indescribably warming cordiality and kindness envelop her, she
forgot all about beauty or ugliness, and surrendered without reserve to
the mild fascination of this personality.
“Here, Norina.” The slender page laid her arm lightly across Myra’s
shoulder. “Take this little girl under your protecting wings. Else
she’ll be lost in the hubbub.”
Something in the words, the solicitude concealed by a gentle irony,
recalled Olga so vividly that Myra wanted to howl like a whipped dog.
She no longer seemed to see the bright room with its throngs of people
and strange faces as through panes of glass. They seemed to crowd in
upon her, somehow to break through those glass casements which she had
set about her life. It was all too much after the silence and solitude
of the last few weeks. She felt herself in a condition not unlike a
violent attack of fever.
Myra had to smile when she saw a shade of concern pass over the fair
face of the woman while the room seemed whirling about her. She felt a
chair moved against her legs while she was forced to her seat by gentle
but firm hands.
She was sitting on a low chair close beside the high arm-chair.
“There,” said the dark-toned voice behind her. “Now if it’s too bright,
or too loud, or too gay for you, just lay your little head against the
arm of my chair and creep under my veil. That’s what I always do.”
Obediently, Myra nestled her cheek against the arm of the high chair and
felt the veil being drawn over her head. A gentle scent of mignonette
emanated from the soft, filmy silk.
Nora turned to Myra. “You mustn’t imagine that it’s always as gay here
as it is tonight. You must come sometime when we are more intimate, more
quiet. We have a nice little garden which is our real joy. Just as long
as it is possible, we take tea out there and love to have someone keep
us company.”
“Yes, when the flag is up!” laughed the young person on the step,
turning with a jerk. “You ought to know that we do here as at court.
When their majesties are at home, the flag is hoisted!”
“You ought to explain, Will,” Nora amended, “just how it is done. On the
roof of the arbor there is something like a little flag-staff _en
miniature_, with a gay little pennant on it. You can see it from all
sides, even in front, if you are passing the house.
“But if Sophie has to work very hard, or I am not feeling particularly
well, we haul in the little flag. Then no one, at least none of the
initiates, needs trouble to come to the door simply to be turned away.
For, of course, that’s always painful to both sides. For those who have
to interrupt their work or control their illness, and are disagreeable
hostesses anyway; or for those who feel like disturbers of the peace. If
they are really turned away, they usually think, ‘Well, they might have
made an exception in my case,’ or, ‘They did not have to have the maid
tell me.’ Most of them are habituated to the lie they tell themselves:
There is no one at home. That someone should be working never seems a
sufficient excuse for them.
“But all our friends know that I never leave the house and Sophie very
rarely. So the little flag is there to avoid any unpleasantness. When it
is unfurled that means, ‘Please come in, we’re expecting you.’ Then
there’s no need even to come through the house, for everyone who wishes
can enter by the garden-gate, or if it should be locked can jump the
hedge, eh, Will?”
But Will had sprung up and motioned with his hand without even glancing
back, for he was staring intently into the room where a circle was
gathering around a dancing couple.
“Fiametta is dancing,” he called back, with a hasty turn of his head,
“the woman is marvellous! You must see her!”
Quite youthful in his impetuousness, he seized Myra by the elbow and
dragged her from her chair to the step.
“I ask you, have you ever seen anything like that in all your life?
Isn’t she dazzling? Isn’t she perfect?”
In the rather narrow circle which the crowding spectators had left free,
a slender, well-built young man was dancing with a woman of refined
beauty and great charm. She was so perfectly at one with the music that
its tones seemed to emanate from her supple body.
She had a manner of dancing such as Myra had never before seen. Her
movements were gentle, cool, subdued, noble and almost solemn. At the
same time it seemed as if the beautiful girl consumed a vast reserve of
strength in compelling her symmetrical body to maintain its dignified
repose, as if it would have required only a moment’s forgetfulness for
that bridled temperament to leap up like a flame, for those soft,
relaxed muscles to turn to steel and impel her sinewy body through the
air, like a wild beast springing on its prey.
Myra felt a kind of painful, burning sensation at the sight of her, and
when she sought, with her habitual honesty, to account for it, she
decided that it was envy. A thousand appraising glances could never
embarrass this woman: it would have been no task for her to cross a
crowded dining-room to her table.
“Isn’t she marvellous?” said the young man beside Myra, aglow with
enthusiasm, “isn’t she fascinating? Isn’t it just as if she stepped out
of another century? Out of a century when there were still beautiful
women, beautiful women who left the stamp of their personality on their
environment, the courts, the city, the arts!”
Myra nodded silently. She would have been glad had he kept silent, too,
for she wanted to know what was being said behind her. She could hear
Nora’s quiet, gentle voice.
“Certainly, she is very beautiful, Ulrich. She has breeding, temperament
and culture, everything one could wish, but she is a little strange to
me, and a little strange she will always remain. Perhaps it will sound
very silly and sentimental to you if I say that she has no heart. But I
really believe that she has not even the most elementary sort of
kindliness....”
Myra could not catch what Ulrich might have objected. But she heard
Nora’s reply.
“No, Ulrich, I cannot agree with you. A woman without kindliness is
something without charm, without fragrance for me, no matter if she is
as beautiful as your Fiametta. Oh, yes, I know you have a foible for
her, and forgive in her everything that you would never forgive in
another. Of course, no one is obliged to love simply because she is
loved by another. But then one should not arouse feelings in others if
one has no use for them....”
“Oh, that! Yes, she does do that! And not in one case only—in hundreds
of cases. And she keeps right on doing it! She completely ruined poor
little Miss Bernhardt, she drove Erwin half mad, and she’s destroying
Gisela now—for the mere diversion!”
At the name of Gisela Myra started. So this was the woman for whose sake
Gisela’s life was being destroyed—poor Gisela! Oh, Myra knew only too
well that it is possible to be destroyed for a woman’s sake! Her heart
burned with anger and pity, with painful recollection and a desire to
help, to alleviate, to save.
She had not another glance to spare for the beautiful woman. Her eyes
sought Gisela, and found her on the opposite side of the room, her
shoulders hunched over, the inevitable cigarette between her lips,
staring into space with an expression of complete abstraction. Myra
chose a moment when Mara Luigi was approaching Gisela, to turn to Nora
and excuse herself.
“If you will pardon me, I should like to say a word to Miss Luigi.”
Nora’s tone seemed to veil a mild astonishment. “Ah, you know her? Are
you friends?”
Myra felt a sudden redness invade her cheeks and forehead.
“Yes.... No ... that is, we stay at the same pension,” she said somewhat
embarrassed.
She forced a path for herself along the walls, fearing all the while
that little Mara would have stopped talking to Gisela by the time she
reached her. She felt that she was committing a deed of great daring.
She had a feeling, almost of homesickness, for the low seat beside the
soft, concealing veil; she thought of herself as a half-fledged bird
that has abandoned its nest to make a flight into the world.
But a fierce impulse drove her forward.
“I must not be a coward,” she thought, “I will have my destiny and I
will go forward to meet it. I will open my arms and bear with joy
everything that is meted out to me. I will love life no matter what it
brings.”
The sweet, hot dance melodies quivered through the air. They seemed to
force Myra’s steps to fall into their light and fiery rhythms, while her
thoughts kept iterating like the refrain of a song, “I will love life, I
will love life.”
When Myra stood before Gisela and Mara had mentioned names and made a
gesture of presentation, there was that strange feeling again—“What is
the purpose of it all? What will happen now? We have been introduced,
that is, we know one another’s names, the series of letters whereby we
are listed in official registers, and that gives us the right to talk to
one another. But nothing gives me the right to utter what I am thinking.
If I were to say, ‘I wanted to know you because you make me feel so
dreadfully sorry, because Mrs. Meidinger has told me that you take
morphine in order to deaden your grief, your sorrow over a woman, and
because I understand you so well and would like to try to help you, or
at least be unhappy with you’—if I said that to her, they would shut me
up in a lunatic asylum. And quite rightly, for if I were in a normal
state of mind I could never bring myself to say such things.”
“I believe that I have seen you before,” said Myra with a reserved
smile, half to Gisela, half to Mara Luigi. “Weren’t you at the pension
recently?”
“Yes, of course,” Gisela’s dark eyes were fastened on Myra. “That’s
where I saw you, too. That’s why your face looked so familiar to me.
Come on and sit down beside me, there’s still room.”
“Thanks,” said Myra and smoothed her taffeta dress before she sat down.
Again she felt a slight anxiety because she thought that it was her duty
to say something, something, too, that would lift her above the
average—but she couldn’t think of anything.
Gisela was not so easily embarrassed in beginning a conversation. “You
know little Luigi from the pension, don’t you?”
Myra nodded.
“She brought you here, didn’t she? You haven’t got anything to do with
art and such awful things, have you?”
“Unfortunately, no,” said Myra.
“Unfortunately? Thank God and your most honorable parents that you have
a decent occupation.”
“But I haven’t any.”
“Haven’t any? That’s the most decent of all.”
“Are you serious? I think it’s dreadful not to have any occupation.”
“Why dreadful? Having an occupation means being paid for work. Taking
money from somebody, that means being subservient to somebody, whether
it’s an individual, or a company, or the public. Being at the public’s
beck and call is the worst of all! If you have no occupation and don’t
need to have one, then you’re your own master! That is to say, you’re
not anybody else’s servant. Why is that dreadful?”
“I don’t know.” Myra wrung her hands with a gesture of helplessness.
“Perhaps because then we don’t belong anywhere. Home has no meaning for
us any more. I was born and brought up in the city. But does that give
me any feeling of home? Yes, perhaps, if I were in Tokio and heard
someone from the city talking I might discover some such feeling in
myself, and might even become sentimental with him, when we thought of
Potsdam or Linden. But just think how ridiculous it would be if we
addressed somebody in Lucerne or Baden-Baden with ‘I believe you come
from my native city!’
“We have no families any more either! Or we have no use for them.
Sometimes I envy the old noble houses with their hundreds of branches,
each linked by name. But above all I envy people who have an occupation,
for every cobbler has connections with every other cobbler, cabmen have
something in common with all other cabmen, physicians have their
colleagues to help them in almost every village on the earth. The
artists are like one big family, especially theatrical people. And
sometimes—I don’t know if you will understand the feeling—it seems to me
that it must be good to be chained quite firmly to something—so that one
will not plunge into the abyss.”
“Oh, I understand it all right.... Have a cigarette?” She offered a
narrow birchen case. “Only, I don’t altogether believe in this
fellow-feeling of fellow-workers. No more than I believe in blood
relationships. The greatest stranger in the world to me is my own
sister. No, no, the same kind of education, the same kind of
interests—they have about as much to do with people’s feeling for one
another as the same kind of incomes.”
“But one must feel one belongs somewhere,” Myra objected, bewildered.
Gisela shrugged her shoulders wearily. “Yes, if you want to feel happy,
to feel secure. But our best emotion is probably a fellow-feeling for
our fellow man. Only, it is in very rare cases that we ever discover who
he is. And what else is there? Sometime I think that people who have
suffered the same misfortune, the same sickness should band together.
The blind, the lame, the hunchbacked.”
This was approximately what Myra herself had previously thought. But
when she heard it uttered by someone else, it roused her opposition.
“I don’t think,” she said reflectively, “that I would like to see myself
surrounded by my own infirmities, especially if they were exaggerated or
distorted, any more than I’d like to see myself in a mirror if I were a
leper. At bottom it always pleases people more to hide their infirmities
and keep them as inconspicuous as possible. And I don’t believe either
that the ailing are especially sympathetic to one another! Everyone says
to himself, ‘He’s a much worse case than I am!’”
A young man came up to Gisela and embraced her with a girlishly gentle
and fawning gesture.
“You must sing something for us, Gisela,” he pleaded, “please, please,
be nice!”
She shook her head without answering, knitting her brows a little.
But he did not release her and begged like a child. “Oh, please! Do be
nice! Only for a few of us, one tiny little song!”
“My lute isn’t here, John.”
“Oh, you can use Sophus’, but come!”
With gentle coercion John tugged her from her place. His narrow face,
sensitive features and delicate bloom of color were almost angelic in
their beauty. His fair, gently waving hair was a little too long, his
big dark blue eyes too soft, almost ardent in their expression.
Despite his surprising beauty, Myra thought his exterior almost
repellent. But after a few moments she decided that it was really his
costume which disturbed her, because it suited him so little. In a white
tunic, in a silk doublet with puff sleeves, even in a gold embroidered
rococo jacket he would have been a perfect picture.
Gisela, still tightly embraced by his arm, held out her hand to Myra.
“Come with us, little girl,” she said. “I can’t promise you any great
enjoyment, but I’ll be flattered if you’ll listen to my croakings.”
Myra seized the outstretched hand, letting it draw her along. It was a
slender, feverishly hot, ruinously thin hand that clasped her fingers in
a loose, but tenacious grip.
Somewhere in the distance she saw Eccarius’ face emerge. He did not even
glance at her, and yet his grave and worried face seemed a reproach to
her.
“I suppose I ought to pay some attention to him.” A slight feeling of
fear, then her defiance blazed high. “But why should I? Why must I
always be talking obligations into myself which really aren’t mine? From
now on I’ll have regard for no one, I’ll go where I feel attracted—and
only where I feel attracted!”
In the small adjoining room a dozen people were sitting, lying and
crouching in the most varied postures. Sophie was there in her becoming
page’s costume. Beside her was the young man called Will who had sat on
the top of the alcove step, little Mara Luigi and the painter Giesbert,
who was wearing a kind of cowboy costume, and Ulrich, the man with the
grave, haggard face, and deep minor voice.
Someone lifted Gisela’s slight, light figure and set it on a table. John
took the lute from Sophie and laid it in Gisela’s arms.
A young person in a silk Pierrot’s costume who was dashing about with a
tray of glasses, offered one to Myra. Myra drank down the sweet and
fiery wine at a draught, in order to be rid of the glass, and found
herself searching for a seat.
Sophie extended her hand to her. “Come here to me, little lost bird,”
she said. “No one will hurt you here.”
“I’m not afraid,” said Myra smiling.
And she really was not. She felt quite content and well concealed in the
deep, soft silk cushions between two faces that did not seem strange or
unpleasant to her.
Little John with his page-like grace seated himself at her feet. And
although she felt no particular liking for him, she enjoyed his slightly
cuddling touch.
Gisela tuned the strings, her head bent low. Her loose black hair fell
about her cheeks. With a sudden toss she raised her head, shook back her
hair, and after a few opening chords began to sing.
Somewhere
A voice is calling through the dark night,
A voice that makes me tremble.
Somewhere,
On their hot couch, hot hands incite
My longing hands to tremble.
Somewhere
A heart weeps quietly for the right
Against my own to tremble.
Her voice was small as if muffled by a veil, but the deeper tones
especially had a passionate, enthralling ring. Myra felt as if she were
caught in the web of a sweet, dreamy happiness that was, nevertheless, a
painful longing.
Sophie had put her arm around her, and now and again her hand kept time
to the music by stroking Myra’s shoulder gently and soothingly.
Sometimes Gisela’s eyes sought out Myra while she was singing. Their
glances met, were fixed one upon another, and it seemed to Myra as if
Gisela were singing every word to her. “Sweet life,” she thought,
“beautiful, beloved life!”
She felt a feverish longing that filled her heart to overflowing. It was
a longing without name or object. It was a longing for distant lands, a
longing for affection. It was a longing for glittering fame, for heroic
deeds, and a longing, too, for grandmother’s quiet garden, for the
meadow over which the bees hummed.
Your sad and silvern soul
Draws its last gasp in blood.
Alas, that it stands sole,
Alone, by me unfound.
For your soul will be drowned,
Will plunge beyond control,
Sink, drown in burning blood—
Since my cool hand has never found
Your brow to still the fevered flood.
A shade of almost sorrowful gravity passed over Sophie’s beautiful,
cheerful features. She smiled, but it seemed as if her smile were
steeped in melancholy.
“Wait a moment.” She motioned to Gisela with her hand. “I want to get
Nora. You know how much she loves to listen to you.”
She rose abruptly. John sprang up at the same moment. “Can I help you?”
he asked, it was a plea.
Myra thought his words sounded mysterious.
Sophie and John did not enter the large hall-like room from which they
had come. Sophie opened a glass-door behind a curtain which gave upon
the night-darkened garden.
“Leave it open a moment,” she begged. “It is so warm outside. We’ll be
back this way.”
Gisela hesitated. Some interior struggle was reflected in her mobile
features.
“Sophie,” she called, springing down from the high table, “would you
rather that I came with you? I can sing in the next room just as well.”
“No, no,” said Sophie. She was standing on the step and had lifted the
two parts of the curtain so that they framed her slender figure for a
moment. “It is so crowded and smoky in there, and dusty from the
dancing, and one can’t make the whole crowd listen quietly. Besides, I’m
glad to have a good reason for enticing Nora out for a while. She’d
never decide to come herself, and if she doesn’t, the evening will be
too much for her.”
She nodded gratefully to Gisela and vanished in the darkness. Through
the half-open door, streamed the manifold fragrances of the night and
its flowers.
Over the little circle lay an expectant silence. Those who were sitting
side by side made observations in hushed voices. Gisela strummed her
lute without raising her eyes.
The murmured conversation presently grew louder and somewhat more
lively, only to subside entirely when heavy steps were heard crunching
the gravel in the garden. Then the most intimate friends of the
household began to talk rapidly again in a fashion that seemed to say:
“We were not waiting for you, we shall pay no particular notice to you
when you come.”
Involuntarily Myra glanced at the garden-door, and though she instantly
controlled herself, she started and felt that she had turned pale.
They were leading, they were dragging Nora in.
Sophie was supporting her on one side, John on the other. But they could
not raise her heavy upper body; it sagged forward as if it were bent,
broken. With an effort Nora raised her head, and her soft brown eyes,
filled with silent suffering, like those of an injured animal, met
Myra’s for a second.
Ulrich moved up a chair, Will set down cushions for her feet; an instant
later she was sitting in her easy-chair, her hands laid upon its arms,
her knees, which were drawn up a little higher than most people’s,
covered by the lightly flowing folds of her silken veils, her fair head
laid back upon a violet-colored cushion. Again a picture of almost
queenly beauty.
Not unless one observed closely, was a slight twitching discernible
around her mouth and cheeks—from pain or the unusually violent exertion.
Myra’s heart was quite filled with contradictory feelings. She felt a
terror that verged on horror and even aversion; an anguish of sympathy,
but at the same time, a fear as of dark veils falling, of a slowly
settling, unbearable burden.
Had not life been simply bright and gay and alluring? Had she not loved
it with a hot, longing, ardent, sacrificing love? And was it not now as
if a fiery and flexible dancer, the swaying of whose arms had
intoxicated her, suddenly had torn the mask from his face, and with a
mocking grin pointed to a fleshless death’s head?
What was there in the world after all? What could one expect from life?
Misery and affliction, sickness and death, and bitter, freezing
solitude....
Gisela plucked several chords and began to sing.
Somewhere
The alarm rings dull and heavily.
Somewhere,
It says, home-going tolls for me.
Somewhere
The long white roads lead well away;
Somewhere
Will lead me home to earth, some day.
She bowed her head lower over her instrument. It was strange how the
tones found their way out of her restricted breast.
Everyone was silent when she had finished.
Will was the first to speak. “More, more,” he cried. “Another, another!”
Others shouted after him. Gisela slipped down from the table and laid
the lute in a corner. Her weary movements were those of a child, but her
face, which was always narrow, had become old and small.
“I believe I cannot sing any more,” she said, as if asking forgiveness.
Her voice was no more than a hoarse whisper.
Through the door of the adjoining room came an elderly fat man with an
ugly, bloated face. Inside, someone was thumping the piano, but it could
hardly be heard for the noise and laughter and the shuffling of dragging
feet.
The fat man seized little John around the body with a firm grip. “Come,
Johnnie boy, we’ll dance,” he cried and pulled him about in a circle.
John swayed from his hips like a coquettish girl. Myra observed for the
first time that above his small and narrow foot in its low-cut
patent-leather pumps, he was wearing open-work silk stockings.
Suddenly she loathed him. She loathed the fat man. She loathed Gisela
because her face looked old and sick and worn out. She loathed Will
because he spattered wine down Mara Luigi’s low-neck dress, and then ran
his hand down her back on the pretext that he was drying her. She
loathed Mara Luigi because she was pleased by the performance although
she shrieked and kicked and struggled.
Myra felt a terrible longing for the peaceful solitude of her own room.
Giesbert was standing before her, asking her to dance with him. She
pressed with both hands against his arms which were seeking to clasp her
and carry her away.
“Please, don’t,” she said, impatient but pleading. “Don’t, don’t,
please, I don’t like it!”
Suddenly, after she had released herself and was swaying a little
dizzily, her glance came to rest on Eccarius’ face. He approached her
with a gentle smile, and involuntarily she extended her hand to him.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she would have liked to say. “I want to go
home!”
Then it occurred to her that she had no right to command him as she
would a servant, when she had not given him a thought the whole evening.
But before she had found anything to say, he spoke himself. “You look
tired, Miss Rudloff. I don’t want to hurry you, if you still wish to
stay here. But if you would like to go, simply say so.”
Myra was heartily grateful to him, although she had again been almost
shocked by his ugliness as he suddenly appeared before her.
She was not entirely satisfied with herself. It must be her own fault
that she was always seeing ugly and pathetic things everywhere. Probably
she was not strong enough for life, not healthy enough, not stupid, or
perhaps not wise, enough.
Everywhere life had angles and edges, points and sharp corners. Wherever
one groped among the rosy, shimmering clouds that so beautifully
enveloped them, one was struck and hurt. One had to be a cobble-stone or
a diamond not to be shattered by their hardness.
She walked after Eccarius in an almost stony silence. Let him think what
he would of her! She was tired and upset, angry and dispirited. She had
no desire to torment herself further with a laboredly indifferent
conversation.
Eccarius allowed her time to cool her feverishly hot forehead in the
night air. She gazed up at the bright flames of the stars and again, as
always, felt the need to spread her folded wings, to launch herself at
last, at last into the infinite; so impatient was she that her heart was
depressed, her breathing labored, and there was an aching against her
ribs.
Finally, after a long time, she heard a quiet voice beside her utter
what seemed to be the last link in a long chain of thought.
“You will do me a great favor, Miss Rudloff, if you do not pass judgment
upon your hostesses and their house because of this evening’s rather”—he
hesitated—“rather turbulent festivities. You must sit out there in their
garden with them some quiet afternoon and talk with both ladies. I am
quite certain that you might gain much by it, and it would be a pity if
tonight’s performance had spoiled your taste for it.”
Myra felt as if she had been looked through and through and was a little
ashamed.
“Oh, of course not,” she said with some embarrassment. “I was really
very charmed by both ladies. I am simply not accustomed to such noisy
society. Ah, I am really not accustomed to sociability at all, and there
were simply too many and too varied impressions for me. I am suffering a
little from a _carrousel feeling_, if you can imagine what that is.”
“Oh, yes,” Eccarius laughed softly. “I imagine that it is mostly
dizziness and nausea.”
“Not only,” said Myra, “but music too, music that keeps droning on, and
a lot of gaiety and a lot of light, a mysterious and fascinating
gaiety—pearl-bespangled, dazzling decorations behind which mysterious,
alluring, weird things are concealed—the driving power, the machinery,
the engine. And out of the darkness appear single brightly illuminated
faces that keep vanishing and reappearing. But above all, above all is
the impression of a longed-for pleasure that has been tasted till one is
sick and tired of it.”
“That’s all right then.” Eccarius smiled as if his thoughts were already
somewhere else. “You did not know that Nora is an invalid?” he inquired
after a pause.
“No,” said Myra. Then, half involuntarily, as if driven by a sense of
guilt for which she somehow hoped to atone, she said, “Oh, she made me
feel so terribly bad!”
“She has had a very sad life,” said Eccarius, rather reluctantly, “but
in spite of that, I would not say that she makes me feel bad. Somehow I
wouldn’t dare say that. It would seem almost presumptuous of me. There
is so much about the woman that compels one’s admiration, so much that
is superior to us, so much that one can almost envy, that pity, in my
opinion, hardly enters into the case.”
Myra felt that his remark was worded very discreetly in order that she
might understand, though not too harshly or emphatically, that she had
said something stupid. She was grateful to him for his considerateness,
for it hurt her dreadfully to be corrected by anyone.
“At any rate, I will make every effort to know her better,” she said
with a hearty determination. “I believe that there is much to be learned
from her, and there is nothing I need more in this world than to learn.”
“It is already a great deal simply to know that,” said Eccarius with a
smile. “Most young people of twenty think they know enough. If you
always pick your instructresses with as sure an instinct, you can’t go
far wrong.”
“I hope so.” Myra knitted her brows. Fear again cast its shadow on her
like a cloud, fear of making a misstep, of becoming bewildered, of
straying into treacherous morasses, of walking into an abyss—courting
disaster in some form or other.
“In any case, I won’t have to suffer any long-drawn death,” she thought,
“when my shattered limbs are lying at the bottom of the abyss. Then
there will be nothing left for me but Olga’s bequest—my friend, the
revolver!”