Edgar Lorm was playing in Karlsruhe. On a certain evening he had
increased the tempo of his playing, and given vent to his disgust with
his rôle, the piece, his colleagues, and his audience so obviously that
there had been hissing after the last act.
“I’m a poor imbecile,” he said to his colleagues at their supper in a
restaurant. “Every play actor is a poor imbecile.” He looked at them
all contemptuously, and smacked his lips.
“We must have had more inner harmony in the days when we were suspected
of stealing shirts from the housewife’s line and children were
frightened at our name. Don’t you think so? Or maybe you’re quite
comfortable in your stables.”
His companions observed a respectful silence. Wasn’t he the famous man
who filled the houses, and whom both managers and critics flattered?
Dust was whirling in the streets, the dust of summer, as he returned to
his hotel. How desolate I feel, he thought, and shook himself. Yet his
step was free and firm as a young huntsman’s.
When he had received his key and turned toward the lift, Judith Imhof
suddenly stood before him. He started, and then drew back.
“I am ready to be poor,” she said, almost without moving her lips.
“Are you here on business, dear lady?” Lorm asked in a clear, cold
voice. “Undoubtedly you are expecting your husband----?”
“I am expecting no one but you, and I am alone,” answered Judith, and
her eyes blazed.
He considered the situation with a wrinkled face that made him look old
and homely. Then with a gesture he invited her to follow him, and they
entered the empty reading room. A single electric lamp burned above the
table covered with newspapers. They sat down in two leather armchairs.
Judith toyed nervously with her gold mesh-bag. She wore a travelling
frock, and her face was tired.
Lorm began the conversation. “First of all: Is there any folly in your
mind that can still be prevented?”
“None,” Judith answered in a frosty tone. “If the condition you made
was only a trick to scare me off, and you are cowardly enough to
repudiate it at the moment of its fulfilment, then, of course, I have
been self-deceived, and my business here is at an end. Don’t soothe me
with well-meant speeches. The matter was too serious to me for that.”
“That is sharply and bitterly said, Judith, but terribly impetuous,”
Lorm said, with quiet irony. “I’m an old hand at living, and far from
young, and a good bit too experienced to fly into the passion of a
Romeo at even the most precious offers and surprises of a woman.
Suppose we discuss what you’ve done like two friends, and you postpone
for a bit any final judgment of my behaviour.”
Judith told him that she had written her father, and requested him to
make some other disposition of the annual income which he had settled
on her at the time of her marriage, since she had determined to get a
divorce from Felix Imhof, and to marry a man who had made this step
a definite condition of their union. At the same time she had made
a legal declaration of her renunciation before a notary, which she
had brought to show Lorm, and intended thereupon to send on to her
father. All this she told him very calmly. Felix had known nothing
of her intentions at the time of her departure. She had left a note
for him in the care of his valet. “Explanations are vain under such
circumstances,” she said. “To tell a man whom one is leaving why one
is leaving him is as foolish as turning back the hands of the clock in
the hope of really bringing back hours that are dead. He knows where I
am and what I want. That’s enough. Anyhow, it’s not the sort of thing
he comprehends, and there are so many affairs in his busy life that one
more or less will make little difference.”
Lorm sat quietly, his head bent forward, his chin resting on the
mother-of-pearl handle of his stick. His carefully combed hair, which
was brown and still rather thick, gleamed in the light. His brows were
knit. In the lines about his nose, and his wearied actor’s mouth, there
was a deep joylessness.
A waiter appeared at the door and vanished again.
“You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for, Judith,” Lorm
said, and tapped the floor lightly with his feet.
“Then tell me about it, so that I can adjust myself.”
“I’m an actor,” he said almost threateningly.
“I know it.”
He laid his stick on the table, and folded his hands. “I’m an actor,”
he repeated, and his face assumed the appearance of a mask. “My
profession involves my representing human nature at its moments of
extreme expressiveness. The fascination of the process consists in the
artificial concentration of passion, its immediate projection, and the
assigning to it of consequences that reality rarely or never affords.
And so it naturally happens--and this deception is the fatal law of
the actor’s life--that my person, this Edgar Lorm who faces you here,
is surrounded by a frame that suits him about as well as a Gothic
cathedral window would suit a miniature. A further consequence is that
I lack all power of adjustment to any ordered social life, and all my
attempts to bring myself in harmony with such a life have been pitiable
failures. I struggle and dance in a social vacuum. My art is beaten
foam.
“I’ve been told of people who have a divided personality. Well, mine
is doubled, quadrupled. The real me is extinct. I detest the whole
business; I practise my profession because I haven’t any other. I’d
like to be a librarian in the service of a king or a rich man who
didn’t bother me, or own a farm in some Swiss valley. I’m not talking
about the accidental miseries of the theatre, disgusting and repulsive
as they are--the masquerading, the lies and vanities. And I don’t
want you to believe either that I’m uttering the average lament of
the spoiled mime, which is made up of inordinate self-esteem and of
coquettish fishing for flattering contradiction.
“My suffering lies a little deeper. Its cause is, if you will try to
understand me, the spoken word. It has caused a process within me that
has poisoned my being and destroyed my soul. What word, you may ask?
The words that pass between man and man, husband and wife, friend and
friend, myself and others. Language, which you utter quite naturally,
has in my case passed through all the gamuts of expression and all the
temperatures of the mind. You use it as a peasant uses his scythe, the
tailor his needle, the soldier his weapon. To me it is a property and
a ghost, a mollusk and an echo, a thing of a thousand transformations,
but lacking outline and kernel. I cry out words, whisper them, stammer
them, moan, flute, distend them, and fill the meaningless with meaning,
and am depressed to the earth by the sublime. And I’ve been doing that
for five and twenty years. It has worn me thin; it has split my gums
and hollowed out my chest.
“Hence all words, sincere as they may be on others’ lips, are untrue
on mine, untrue to me. They tyrannise over me and torment me, flicker
through the walls, recall to me my powerlessness and unrewarded
sacrifices, and change me into a helpless puppet. Can I ever, without
being ashamed to the very marrow, say: I love? How many meanings
have not those words! How many have I been forced to give them! If I
utter them I practise merely the old trick of my trade, and make the
pasteboard device upon my head look like a golden crown. Consider me
closely and you will see the meaning of literal despair. Words have
been my undoing. It sounds queer, I know; but it is true. It may be
that the actor is the absolute example of hopeless despair.”
Judith looked at him rather emptily. “I don’t suppose that we’ll
torture each other much with words,” she said, merely to say something.
But Edgar Lorm gave to this saying a subtle interpretation, and
nodded gratefully. “What an infinitely desirable condition that would
be,” he answered, in his stateliest manner; “because, you see, words
and emotions are like brothers and sisters. The thing that I detest
saying is mouldy and flat to me in the realm of feeling too. One
should be silent as fate. It may be that I am spoiled for any real
experience--drained dry. I have damned little confidence in myself, and
nothing but pity for any hand stretched out to save me. However that
may be,” he ended, and arose with elastic swiftness, “I am willing to
try.”
He held out his hand as to a comrade. Charmed by the vividness and
knightly grace of his gesture, Judith took his hand and smiled.
“Where are you stopping?” he asked.
“In this hotel.”
Chatting quite naturally he accompanied her to the door of her room.