Myra was glad to get out on the street. The keen east wind and the rain
mixed with hail cut her face and felt good to her. She walked so fast
that Gisela found it too difficult to keep up.
She felt as if she were being grievously insulted on all sides, and as
if she might avenge herself by letting the rain lash her as she hurried
through the cold dark night.
* * * * *
Myra and Eccarius walked down a street that echoed with the cold and was
feathered with a fine frost.
“Did you wonder,” asked Eccarius, “why I spoke so ostentatiously about
my friends at the table? It was because I have had a little dispute with
Miss Peters. Miss Peters is really a splendid person, but somewhat
strict in her judgments. Or I should rather say, is somewhat limited in
her understanding of things. What she doesn’t understand she tosses all
together into one pot and damns eternally. And among such understandable
things, of course, is included a friendship like that of Sophie and
Nora. She flung about words like abnormal and perverse and unnatural,
and intimated that it was no place for you!”
“For me?” Myra was astonished. “How on earth did you come to be talking
of me?”
“To be quite frank, we began with you,” Eccarius explained with a laugh
that pleaded for forgiveness. “Yes, yes, one never knows how important
one is to others or what interesting conversation one makes. Seriously,
we never know who our enemies are or who is going to pick us to pieces
next. Conversely, we don’t know our friends either or who is looking out
for our weal and woe.
“Miss Peters has a heart of gold and she is concerned about you. She was
explaining to me today that it is my duty to open your eyes for you. But
if I were to open your eyes about Sophie and Nora, with the best will in
the world I could only tell you that they are splendid people.”
“Nora told me recently that she had known you a long time,” said Myra
with a gently insistent effort to turn the conversation from herself.
“A very long time.” She sighed with relief as Eccarius changed the
subject. “I knew her when she was still the beautiful Nora Zeyern, the
most popular of dancers, the most daring of riders! She had hundreds of
suitors, and, out of those hundreds, of course, she had to pick
Hersfeld!”
He stopped for a moment with a bitter laugh.
“He was diseased, wasn’t he?” asked Myra.
“Oh, if you know that much, there’s no indiscretion in my telling you
more. He was ‘cured’ so-called, as he used proudly to relate to anyone
who wanted or did not want to listen to him. But not to his wife and her
family.”
“Hersfeld was an oldest son and he wanted an heir. And an heir did
arrive, but it was covered with pimples from the day it was born. What
that most maternal of women suffered with that child can never be told.
And all of us, his so-called friends, we looked at the child and looked
at one another and knew that it would never be anything else but a
child. But not one of us dared say a word to the young mother. Meanwhile
she hoped and hoped and cherished the unhappy little worm, rejoicing at
the tiniest sign of progress. There wasn’t much progress to rejoice at.
“At an age when other children were running around, shouting and
crowing, he would lie on his pillow, hardly turning his head when
someone shook something bright before his eyes. ‘He’ll be a thinker,’
Nora said then, and smiled, a heart-rending smile. But when at four
years he could not speak a word, and would merely utter an incoherent
babble, she hid him and hid herself from the world. She never left her
own house, she received no one. She shut herself and her child in the
most impenetrable solitude. She still cherished him, played with him,
strove tirelessly and futilely to make something human out of him.
“But Mr. Hersfeld needed an heir. In another six months, the unhappy
woman was once more in hope—Oh, God, she really did hope.
“At this point a friendly doctor took the matter in hand. That is to
say, he let fall a careless, but honestly indignant word about the
irresponsibility of bringing babies into the world. And when she
questioned him and would not let him go, he asked in great astonishment
if she really did not know what was wrong with her child. And since she
did not, he told her. Certainly he was entirely within his rights in
doing so. But he reproached himself bitterly afterwards. For that very
day Nora was hurt by a fall from a hay-loft, and suffered such severe
internal injuries that she was never well again. Whereupon Hersfeld
procured a divorce!”
“Is he still alive?” asked Myra.
“Why? You made a face when you asked me that as though you intended to
kill him if he were. But you can rest easy—he is dead. He came to quite
a dramatic end, or rather, his end had quite a dramatic beginning.
Imagine, that man intended to marry a second time after he divorced
Nora! A beautiful innocent young girl from one of the best families. You
have no idea what qualms of conscience Nora suffered at that time. She
knew the bride, she knew her parents, and she knew particularly
Hersfeld, her former husband. But despite the fact that she knew him so
well, she must still have loved him. Somewhere in the innermost recesses
of her heart were still the ruins of a strong passion. And it seemed a
crime to her to accuse the man. Besides, everybody would have called it
an act of petty revenge. On the other hand, it would be a far greater
crime to let the poor girl make such a marriage out of ignorance.”
“Good God!” said Myra, “did she do it?”
“Nora was so helpless, she could scarcely move, and the situation was
further complicated by the fact that the girl had already been in love
with Hersfeld while he was married, and regarded his wife, if not
hostilely, at least with suspicion. Nora has often told me that in her
desperate dilemma she used to pray for a miracle.
“And the miracle happened. The wedding did not take place—the bridegroom
did not appear. When they went to fetch him, he hid himself in the
stable and began shooting with his revolver. At last he was overpowered
and taken to an institution. He lived a few months longer subject to
delusions of persecution and raving madness. Then he died. Softening of
the brain. When the cause of his death became known, one of his former
cronies observed that it was the first time anyone suspected Hersfeld of
having a brain.”
They walked on a while in silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts.
Then Eccarius looked up with sudden resolution. Once more his face was
irradiated by that fugitive, friendly smile.
“But you have got me off my subject very insidiously. I’ve told you a
long story, but not a word about what I was instructed to tell you. And
not only instructed, what I want to tell you of my own free will....”
“Must you?” asked Myra with imploring eyes. “Do you really believe there
is anything you can tell me? I know that you mean well by me, and I am
grateful to you for it. But I feel so strongly—perhaps because I am so
young and have just come of age—that only I can help myself and that I
must help myself. I know that I will not always find the best and the
shortest way, and I haven’t even any goal, or only insofar as it may be
a goal to want to know life whole, as far as it is possible for a woman
to do so, its light and its shadowy sides, its merits and demerits. Just
as one gets to know a person—whom one loves!”
“If you love life,” said Eccarius with an accommodating persistence,
“you must approach it very discreetly. And if you have no goal, or only
the desire to see as much as possible in the paths of your own
selecting, then you should be careful not to end up in a blind alley
from which there is no escape. Don’t be angry with me, but I have been
guilty of watching you on the quiet. I’ve seen you twice a day at least
in the last two months. In the course of the years I have acquired some
little knowledge of people, and the impression you make is not that of a
person who loves life, but of one who is not afraid of death.”
Myra was already ringing the door-bell, and she turned to him.
“Is that a contradiction? Can’t one do both—love life and not be afraid
of death? Perhaps they belong together. I will make it my motto and
write it large over all my days and ways—‘Love life and be not afraid of
death.’”
“I know a still better motto,” said Eccarius, “it is possible to turn
the sentence about. Then I will make it my motto.”
The maid opened the door. To Myra’s questioning glance Eccarius shook
his head slightly.
“Some other time.”
* * * * *
They were sitting together in the early twilight of a winter’s day,
Nora, Sophie, Eccarius and Myra. It was already dark in the room so that
it was no longer possible to distinguish the features of the person
sitting next one. But nobody wanted the light.
Myra had asked after John. And Sophie told her with anger and
perturbation that he was the victim of some very hateful gossip. Someone
had informed his friend, the fat old Drencker, in a very ugly way, that
his money was making it possible for young Kraft to pursue his studies,
or rather that Will Kraft was squandering his, Drencker’s, money at
cards and on women.
Nora had defended John. Even though she saw him in no very transfiguring
light, and his relationship with Drencker was always incomprehensible
and painful to her, she had never ceased to believe that his friendship
for Will Kraft was an entirely ideal infatuation.
“And suppose it weren’t!” said Sophie stubbornly. “Whenever a human
bargain is struck the buyer is to blame. The person who sells himself is
always in extremity. And it is bad enough that it is possible for a rich
swine like him to buy a share in a human creature. His demand to have
him wholly and solely to himself is insolence!”
“Every transaction must be honest!” said Eccarius in his gentle,
reflective way.
“No,” Sophie became excited. “Whoever buys a human being with his filthy
money for the gratification of his base little lusts ought to be
deceived. There _ought_ to be things that cannot be bought, that really
cannot be bought, whether it’s love of honor or fame or talent or
nobility—the buyer is always the first on the scene, thumping his
money-bags and commanding, ‘I want that, do this for me, I can pay.’ It
is not until then that the commodity appears. Do you suppose that the
idea would ever enter the head of a poor musician to offer his songs,
the most precious things he possesses, to a rich money-grubber so that
they may appear under the latter’s name? No, that idea could flower only
in the mind of a rich money-grubber.
“I know many such cases—from the most innocent beginnings when the
well-fed son of a middle class father has his poor, but talented
school-mate compose his love letters for him for a handful of
cigarettes—to those first nights at the opera when a gentleman takes his
bows as the composer who has never written a line of music, and couldn’t
write one. Ah, the world is a rather disgusting place! One can only be
happy by having as little to do with it as possible. We sit here on our
island, eh, Norina? And many as are the ships that touch here, they all
voyage on again. No one may settle on our domain. For the rest, all I
have to say is, that Drencker should be happy that his fate is not that
of the poor fellow who shot himself a week ago because a gang of
extortioners were slowly throttling him, and the unhappy man preferred
to be dead than always living in the shadow of the jail.”
Eccarius shook his head. “To think that this medieval punishment still
exists!”
“But there must be some protection for children and people not yet of
age,” Nora declared, “even when those minors happen to be over
twenty-one. There is a very true saying that where there is no accuser,
there is no judge. When two mature people live with one another, it is
no more the concern of any official body than is the private life of a
married couple. Unfortunately, I must say, in most cases. Where there is
punishment, there must first have been accusation, and where someone
accuses, he must first feel that he has suffered an injustice.”
“Paragraph one hundred and sixty-five is a cloak for scoundrels and
extortioners,” Eccarius objected more vehemently than was his wont, “and
no protection at all for children of whatever age. Children endure in
silence and make no accusations. When a case does come to light, then
the world cries out in indignation. But there are thousands of cases of
such crimes committed against children which never see the light of
day.”
“That can’t be possible,” said Sophie, her voice vibrant with emotion.
“In the whole world there cannot be a thousand monsters to whom a child
is not something sacred.”
Eccarius laughed, a harsh, lifeless laugh.
“I will describe to you one case, one out of thousands. One case out of
the thousands where the criminal goes unapprehended. I knew a family, a
well-to-do and respected family, clever, kindly parents, who had four
healthy, talented children—boys. The mother could not take care of the
needs of four growing boys unassisted, besides it would not have been
the proper thing to do, so they hired a maid for the lads. A
half-educated person, as is customary, with an agreeable exterior, good
references and all possible recommendations. This maid delighted in
nothing more than to inform the boys of matters against which they had
been carefully guarded. The unhappy children were thus completely under
her thumb. They knew that they were doing forbidden things. They were
tangled up in the terrible concept of ‘sin’ and prayed to God for
succor. The infamous woman had an inexhaustible imagination and
constantly invented new devices to whip up the resisting and jaded
children. They became more and more miserable. Everything possible was
done for them, they were sent to expensive baths—accompanied, of course,
by their maid. From time to time, one of the boys would resolve to
confess everything to his mother—but he got no farther than the resolve.
Such things were too frightful to confess to the gentlest of mothers.
Perhaps you can imagine what kind of ‘childhood’ such children enjoyed.
Exhausted in body and soul, disinclined to play or work, in spite of
their talents hardly able to pass through school, living in everlasting
fear of discovery, of punishment, of sickness, of Hell—and never able to
withstand their vices, slinking more and more like shadows through the
days, living only in the perilous practices of the night.
“When the maid left to continue her work in another family, it was too
late. Not one of the four recovered. One shot himself the night after
his marriage. The second remained an unhappy monomaniac and after a
complete nervous break-down had to be taken to a sanitarium. The two
youngest turned their backs on everything that suggested Eros. One, an
ascetic, took refuge in a monastery. The other dragged his way through a
drab and joyless world, shrinking from all human companionship. The
woman is probably an esteemed children’s maid to this very day, under
whose prudent care more charges are being ruined.”
Nobody said anything. The darkness had slowly filled the whole room,
leaving the windows hardly more than pale gray oblongs.
“Oh,” said Sophie. Myra seemed to hear her voice trembling with angry
tears, and seemed to feel her clench her fist. “She ought to be hanged!”
“Then you’d have to hang a great many people,” said Eccarius quietly.
Again the heavy silence weighed on them.
There was a knock, somebody opened the door. A ray of light stabbed the
darkness, a voice tore the silence.
“Here is the newspaper,” said the maid, stopping in surprise at the
door. “Shall I turn on the lights, madame?”
“Yes, do, Martha.”
The light was like a trumpet blast. They all bowed their heads to escape
its glare, knitting their brows and blinking their eyes.
None of them had the courage to look at the others. Sophie took the
paper from the maid and began to read aloud, the most indifferent things
in the world, things that could interest nobody. But all of them feigned
interest, and everybody had something to say, so that a lively
conversation ensued, made up entirely of trifling remarks.
Eccarius left before the conversation had died down again.
They continued to speak of various things after he was gone. But they
seemed no longer able to sustain an affectedly frivolous conversation.
Sophie had a saving idea. She proposed a game of scat so that they could
sit together for a little longer and have something to occupy their
minds.
But suddenly, in the middle of the game, she let the hand holding her
cards sink to the table.
“He has one brother in the insane asylum,” she said as if she had been
thinking of nothing else all the while.
“I know,” said Nora just as seriously. “And another in a monastery.”