For an hour Olivia had lain motionless upon the divan in the guest's
room. Then she was seized with anxiety, not so much as to the issue
of the duel, but rather as to the possibility of seeing Andreas
again. He could not come to her; she could not go to his hotel.
Next morning she sought out the prince in his office. She was
hatless, for thus she had left her apartment to come down to see him.
Her whole aspect and the unusualness of such a visit (she had never
entered the offices at the embassy before) were a surprise.
"Prince, listen to me. I want--I must--this evening--I must see Herr
Seeland once more. You will lend me your rooms?"
It sounded more like a command than a request. He understood, drew
his keys from his pocket, and handed her the one she needed.
"Thanks. Thank you very much."
Late that same evening, on foot, muffled in a veil, she entered the
little flat. It was empty. Soon after, there was a gentle tap on
the door. She opened. Andreas stood outside.
There had been no extensive preparations for the visitors. On the
buffet, fresh water and wine, cigarettes, and a few biscuits, were
just as the prince had left them. He had sent his servants away till
the morrow, had, himself, gone through the rooms to see that all was
as it should be. In the dining-room where, on New Year's Eve, they
had drunk the count's health, he paused for a moment and smiled
ironically. Here, two weeks later, the count's wife was to spend
what would perhaps be the last hours she would ever spend with her
husband's rival. He put on his hat, took his walking-stick, then
went back to his bedroom to readjust his tie in front of the mirror.
His eye fell upon the perfectly made bed with its faultless coverlet,
and he whistled softly as he puffed at his cigarette.
"Honi soit..."
At first Olivia seemed agitated, and her lover thought:
"She's not at her best tonight."
She would stare mutely into nothingness, and then suddenly make a
wild gesture as if to pull him to her, following this with another
gesture which thrust him away. She got up and paced to and fro in
the little room, backwards and forwards between the window, the
chairs, and the divan. She spoke of Clemens, of divorce, of
Linnartz, once even referred to her mother in Dalmatia, about whom
she usually thought with contempt. But Andreas soon realized that
all this was merely an effort to bridge the gulf that had yawned
between them when these two persons of simple nature had suddenly
been brought face to face with the fact that they were guilty of
adultery.
Andreas had always looked indulgently and even reverently upon her
blind gratification of her instincts; he had interpreted the
inability on her part to speak, a dumbness which was wont to follow
upon moments of ardent ecstasy, as a symbol of the ineffable which
he, the plastic artist, was excluded from experiencing. His alert
and active mind had found a haven in the churlish silences of this
woman, and it was that more than anything else which had swept him
along into the stormy waters in which he now found himself. He had
never conceived of his passion or of hers as appertaining to the
courses of everyday life, and he was at a loss to understand why this
everyday life should now intrude upon a province outside its sphere.
Yesterday's happenings left him cold, they did not seem to him to be
part of the world he and she had created in common--a community based
on the sensuous and yet quite above and beyond the circle of the
senses, intangible, in no way belonging to the realm of reason.
Now, when he and Olivia were alone and together once more, he too was
aware of the same inhibition within himself which had caused her so
much disquietude; and he who had vowed himself to Olivia with that
first look into her languorous eyes as he gazed from afar across the
wide expanse of blue carpet, felt that he was hedged about with the
identical constraints as she. Had it been otherwise, the insatiable
thirst which consumed them would have driven them into one another's
arms immediately the door had closed upon the outside world, and the
turbulent waters of passion would have submerged them, leaving them
with neither regrets nor shame when they came to the surface again.
Today the banality of a conventional discovery stood like a barrier
between them. In the twilight hours, as he sat with Othello in his
room, the thought of death sprang at him, attacking him unexpectedly,
from the rear. But now he had no other thought at all than to come
to some sort of an understanding with this woman.
An hour of torturing suspense found them at last in that sphere which
their natures shared in common: their passion. Olivia, wearied with
pacing the tiny room like a wild beast in a cage, had thrown herself,
distraught and exhausted, upon the divan, and Andreas, who felt that
at any cost this state of tension must be snapped, flung himself upon
her and with shameless cynicism took that which in no way he desired.
And yet, maybe, it was this rough handling which she needed for the
appeasement of her uneasy soul. She yielded to his embraces with the
frosty delight of a hetaira, wrapping herself round in the mantle of
fleshly lust as if in defiance, as if to shield herself from a foe.
Yet when they emerged from this dread battlefield, they had found
themselves and they had found each other. The lassitude with which
love's combat had so often before made limp their limbs, filling
their souls with a strange and voluptuous horror, was now, after this
present possession, bordering as it did upon the realm of hate, to
leave them benumbed, inert, as if death's hand were upon them.
Bitterness, the bitterness Olivia had dreamed of these twenty years,
the draught whose waters she had first tasted in Andreas's arms, now
submerged her, covering her face, her body, as with a grievous mask.
She felt the flesh of her cheeks, her brow, her chin, her throat,
filmed over as it were with a strange, green patina like that which
covers very ancient bronzes, while her body seemed crushed and broken
beneath the man who lay like a corpse across her.
A chance movement at last released them from the spell. Andreas said:
"Why continue?"
The words fell into the great pool of tragical silence with a sound
as warm and gentle as that of woodwind after brass.
"We should soon have been consumed in our own fires. It is well that
the man should die, his heart pierced by so tiny a thing as a bullet.
But the woman must live!"
She scarcely heard what he said. All she felt sure of was that he
had surrendered himself to his destiny, that a strange, far-away
voice was telling her what she had known since yesterday: "It may not
be just, but it is perfectly logical, that Andreas should perish at
Gregor's hands." Age-long and primeval things had surged up within
her. In the half-ruinous crypts of her soul, after millennial sleep,
feelings, judgments, rights, belonging to an ancient line whose
origins were lost in the mists of time, now stirred, revealing to
her, who had imagined such primeval impulses to be dead, that she was
indeed a true daughter of her race, and that in her veins too the
same blood flowed. Vague memories of fights long past merged
themselves with present-day combats in her brain. In the mechanical
processes of thought, Gregor once more stood before her as a young
man, the descendant of a long succession of counts, bearing every
advantage in his hands; for now he was to use the weapons familiar to
all members of his caste, and to use them against a stripling who had
moved away from the customary pursuits of several generations of
learning in an inward, spiritual sense only, not by practical
experience. She, who had always been out of tune with his plans for
worldly advancement, who had been ever more and more strongly
convinced that his urge towards the practical field of politics and
diplomacy was in truth only the outcome of imaginative yearnings,
felt today more keenly than ever that he was a poet first, last, and
all the time, and that his invasion of the practical world would
recoil on his own head.
Andreas swung his legs over the divan and sat on the edge. Olivia
leaned on her elbow as was her custom, and surveyed the length of her
body. Then she said softly, as if lying in wait for his reply:
"Not long now, Andreas."
The words, and the queer way she added his name as an afterthought,
struck him by their strange ambiguity. He tried to jest:
"You are right, it is two o'clock," he said, glancing at the little
timepiece over the fireplace.
He did not know Diana's bedroom, nor could he know what she was doing
at the moment; and yet her form, her voice, appeared clearly to his
memory, at that instant when she, too, was saying the same words
while glancing at a similar clock. Incontinently he asked Olivia:
"Where's the count? At home?"
"He went out before I left. The servant said he had gone off in the
motor boat."
She held her peace and he, too, was silent. But Olivia's thoughts
ranged wide, and she asked after a considerable interval:
"Do you still love Diana?"
He flushed a little for she had read his thoughts, and countered with:
"Do you love the count?"
Olivia stirred. She put her right foot to the ground, and at the
same time drew the coverlet over her naked limbs as far as the waist.
Then she leaned her right arm on to the low table at the head of the
divan, and, drawing up her knee, clasped it round with her left hand.
A smile, at once wise and tragical, flitted across her habitually
solemn features. She gazed straight before her.
There rose upon her vision a castle overlooking the sea. Wedding
festivities were in progress. Two evenings earlier Gregor had been
sitting near her in her low-ceilinged, wainscoted room, and he had
watched her, from the embrasure in the window, combing her long,
golden hair. Suddenly he had sprung to his feet, had seized her in
his arms, had stepped over to the door and slipped the bolt, and had
had his will of the astonished bride. For him it was probably no
more than a dare-devil escapade, the gratification of a young man's
vanity; but her heart went out to him in thanks, for her stormy
nature felt a repugnance of displaying the squeamishness of a maiden
who, though betrothed, has not yet been legally wedded. Many years
later, in the midst of the disappointments of her married life, her
imagination was still pleasurably stimulated by the thought of that
adventurous impropriety which had been the herald of their nuptial
day.
"At one time I loved him," she said at last in a calm voice strangely
resembling the tone in which Diana was speaking those same words at
that same hour. Her alto gave the phrase a richer, fuller sound,
maybe; she uttered it, too, with greater solemnity to match the
heaviness of her nature as compared with Diana's elasticity and
lightsomeness.
Like an endless band, her life with Gregor unrolled itself before her
vision in retrospect. They were out hunting, the horn sounded in the
air, she was riding in advance of the others. Now she was walking
slowly, like a beast heavy with young. Those were the months just
before Clemens was born. She saw Gregor's gleeful face as he tossed
the baby, and how he played with the child in those early years.
Then she saw him drift away from her, she heard the whispers of
friends, the advice of the family doctor, her mother's anger; it
seemed as if her own recollection of these troublous days was
becoming dimmer, as if the measures taken by her relatives, their aid
and their claims, were receding more and more into the background.
Now she was always alone, she took no further part in the hunts, but
rode by herself, galloped, put her horse to jumps that only a madman
would attempt. She fell and lay for long where she had fallen.
Peasants found her and carried her home. Long months she kept her
bed, motionless. It was at that time she had acquired her taste for
recumbency. She read much, read and pondered. Sometimes she would
write letters which were never posted. She probed and sampled the
many who came to her house; in her, distrust of the higher circles of
society grew to irony, irony to cynicism. A sculptor had once wished
to model her, but Gregor had refused to let her sit to the man; such
opposition roused her desire, and for a while she was restless and
agitated. Then the post of ambassador had come their way. She saw
their new, palatial dwelling, heard the congratulations, pictured
again the mighty waters upon whose bosom she wished, all in vain, to
sail alone, gazed upon the immemorial park which reminded her so
poignantly of the home of her fathers, contemplated the blue carpet
she loved, alone, all alone, always alone, for Gregor had long since
vanished from the landscape, and even the child was lost in distant
mist-wreaths. Now, the poet entered her blue room, and she was
recalled from her dream, back into the world of reality, back to the
present hour.
Meanwhile Andreas had been gazing his fill at the majestic creature
before him, the woman who lay as it seemed on a rock emerging from a
vast blue sea, her eyes grave, overshadowed by a dark and monstrous
bird with pinions wide spread behind her. The beat of those giant
wings caused a wind which ruffled his hair; he knew that those were
the wings of the angel of death and he gazed on them unafraid. The
vision and the night filled his passionate nature with a contentment
he had never experienced before, so that as she now looked up at him
her eyes met a countenance at once so earnest and so taciturn that
she felt she must be gazing into her own soul.
They suddenly realized that this was the moment of their
leave-taking. Slowly they drew nearer to each other, body to body,
lip to lip, in a long farewell.
Four hours later three carriages drew up near a little pinewood where
many westerners had ere this met in mortal combat. Gregor was
accompanied by Kopp and the major; Andreas by two compatriots from
the Austrian embassy; the prince by a doctor. Abdul ran by the side
of the first carriage, eager as if going to the chase. He had
escaped just as his master was leaving the embassy and none had been
able to catch him.
It was raining. The fog lay like a canopy over their heads as they
took up their positions. The prince tested the pistols, handed them
to the seconds for their examination; hardly a word was spoken.
Andreas was wearing a grey morning suit; Gregor his loose and easy
blue jacket. The prince measured the distance; gave each a weapon.
Andreas was himself amazed at his own coolness. On the drive hither
he had been thinking: "Nikolai will publish my last poems.... My
sister will hang my portrait in the old garden house, next to
father's, in a black frame...." Now, when they had led him to his
place and he could look his opponent in the eyes, he thought: "Yes,
he is a lovable man; I understand Diana's choice better than I do
Olivia's. I wonder if Diana will weep when she gets my letter? I
have never seen her cry...."
Gregor was thinking: "He is still very young." And immediately
thereafter: "Scoundrel! What is the countess to him?" He looked
towards the prince from whom the signal was to come.
The prince asked:
"Ready?"
"Ready," came the reply.
"Fire!"
The two men stood unscathed.
The prince thought:
"What madness! As if a woman's part in life were not to bind men in
friendship rather than to separate them!"
While thus thinking he stepped up and changed the weapons.
"Attention! Fire!"
Gregor fell to the ground. The prince raised an arm. Kopp, who was
holding the dog in leash, was dragged forward by the outraged animal.
Doctor and umpire hastened to the wounded man's side. Gregor did not
stir, a little blood was oozing through his clothes on the left side.
The doctor cast a look of intelligence at the men who had gathered
round. The prince formally declared the duel at an end.
At first Andreas did not in the least understand what had happened.
He looked inquiringly at his seconds. One of them went over to where
the count lay. Then he beckoned to Andreas. The young man
approached. He found four men busied round Gregor. The doctor was
giving an injection of camphor; he was pouring brandy into the
prostrate man's mouth. Five minutes passed. At last Gregor opened
his eyes, looked at the circle of men, realized from the expression
on their faces and from his own feeling of weakness, from a strange
sensation near his heart, that all was over with him.
The others pushed Andreas forward. The count contemplated the young
man for a while, critically rather than wrathfully. He was silent.
Then he held out his hand and Andreas took it in his own.
"Impossible," the poet thought. "He cannot be more than slightly
wounded. He'll be all right again in a few minutes. Then..." He
felt himself tapped on the shoulder; he drew back, slowly, as if his
senses were befogged. Abdul was whining at his master's side. The
dog had growled at Andreas's approach. Then, he laid a paw ever so
lightly on the master's breast, cautiously, a caress as airy as
gossamer lest the touch should hurt the dying man.
Gregor tried to rise. Impossible! He mused: "Better lie quiet,
absolutely quiet, then, perhaps, I'll be able to say a few words."
With a look, he bade the prince come nearer. The other three
withdrew. The prince knelt close beside him. Gregor looked him in
the eyes, assembling his forces for a last endeavour. Then, very
slowly, in short-pulsed sentences:
"I beg you--to see that--Muthesius is not--given the post--as
ambassador--otherwise--everything will be ruined--Tell His
Majesty--yourself--personally, Prince--personally--I would
recommend--Winterthur--He shares my views--Promise me you'll..."
The prince slipped his hand into the limp hand beside him. He knew
his chief was nearing the end. A few minutes went by. Again the
lips moved, but all Gregor had strength to say was:
"My love to--my love to--the ladies...."
His eyes glazed over; another fifteen seconds passed; he fell back,
dead.