On their arrival at Trieste the expected dispatch was brought aboard.
It had been entrusted to the Austrian authorities, in the hope of
insuring speedier delivery. Thus the port officials were already
acquainted with its tenor. The crown prince was dead. Eduard was
heir apparent.
The party on the "Excelsior" had lunched late. Calmly awaiting the
end of the cruise, they had made the most of one another's company
during the hours that were left to them. Eduard (as if seeking for a
sedative) had reached for the chess-board and he and Kyril had played
while Diana and Scherer looked on. Kyril had won. The next game
likewise fell to the Russian. Soon after two, when the town was
already in sight, a third game was started. Still Kyril won.
"You'll have to give me my revenge," cried Eduard, with unusual
excitement.
"We'll play all the way to Vienna if you like!"
"You are taking the same train? Enchanté. Then we'll carry on the
fight, and in the end--by the time we reach St. Pölten I'm sure--I
shall have defeated you."
He bundled the chessmen away, and seized a telescope.
The tidings, expected as they were, left him cold. He begged them
not to visit the Trieste churches on his account, nor to dine in a
hotel, for his train was not timed to leave before ten. All four
felt that it would be better not to prolong this painful
leave-taking, so they bade farewell, the one hearty note being the
cordial thanks to Scherer for his genial hospitality. In a few days
they would probably meet again in Berlin, whither Scherer, Diana, and
Kyril would be going, to take up their work once more; and where
Eduard was likewise determined to go in order to hand over the
necessary documents of his office to the competent authority. As
Eduard bent over Diana's hand to kiss it, he looked up at her
beseechingly, but her eyes remained inscrutable. Then she felt
Kyril's peasant hand grip hers, so vehemently that she was troubled,
for she had not witnessed such a mood in him the last few days.
"And now at last the firm is all that is left," said Diana coming
through the door into the dining saloon, where but two places were
laid on the flower-bedecked table. "Just as two years ago on the
terrace of your house! Of course the fact that we are sailing to
Venice makes a slight difference, doesn't it?"
"She is careful not to refer to Athens," thought Scherer, leading her
to the table.
"His gallantry has assumed a lighter tone," Diana was thinking.
"Strangely enough, the companionship of young people does not make
him appear old."
"Souper des adieux, Prince Eduard would say," and Diana smiled at
Scherer's use of the plural, which implied a certain coquetry on his
part.
"Are we then to dine with ghosts?"
"I have never eaten in your company except in the presence of ghosts!"
"Wilhelm would say: But the salad is really only a take-in! It looks
as if there were mountains of it, and then it turns out to be nothing
but green air."
"Will you take some celery? It's as long as papyrus."
"One could write sonnets on it," said Diana.
She laughed at Franklin's excitable ways, Scherer aped the big blond
Russian; Diana, herself, was not spared in their merry badinage.
Then the various clerks in the office came in for their raillery, the
business had its share, and finally they drank a toast to
competition. It was a joyous meal after a day over which death had
cast its gloom, full of reminiscence, of quips, of caricature; and
when they at length rose from table they declared it would have been
far better if they two alone had sailed the Mediterranean and had
always drunk Marsala as they had this evening.
"I wonder where those two have got by now," said Diana in the
smoking-saloon on deck.
"They've not started yet! Or did you mean how far they had got with
one another?"
"How can one judge of others from a distance?" Diana crossed her
legs. She held her cigarette at arm's length, and asked, a challenge
in her voice: "Or, what was really in your mind? What are they
thinking of us, eh?"
"That you are delightful," said he, kissing her outstretched arm. As
he did so, his eyes dwelt on the firm muscles of her upper arm, which
shimmered through a filmy sleeve, and he drank in the sweet aroma of
her person, which was a composite of unscented soap, a thin layer of
powder, the acrid smell of eau de Cologne, clean linen and a fresh,
sound skin tanned by much exposure to the sun, and looking like
burnished metal against the delicate texture of her gown.
Diana was aware of the sensual appeal she exercised over this man,
whom she had found more chivalrous than he had ever been in the
presence of his guests; now she was reminded of this anew as he
slowly raised his head. She let her arm fall to her side, and lapsed
into a brown study: "He's thinking that we are alone on board....
Ah, Freedom! To enjoy all the sport of love, from the man's first
glance at the brooch, right to the fingers which nervously fumble
with the pin; to be free to weave the web of love, or to break off
when one willed, from minute to minute uncertain of what the next
move will be.... To make men pliable as wax; to make them reveal
themselves as they implore or threaten--so that their tongues are
loosened as their limbs grow tenser, tongues that had been too proud
to talk of plans, too discreet to disclose secrets.... And oneself
to be consumed with desire, to arise from ever renewed embraces, from
ever changing arms, a person refreshed, purified and rejuvenated,
more light-hearted, more audacious, flying free above the abyss--an
abyss which the unfree contemplate with alarm as a place full of
tribulation and uncertainty, haunted by an unknown destiny, and to be
shunned at all hazards--whereas the free, stretching their pinions
wide, soar joyfully over it in magic spirals.... Freedom! Not to
have to be the hammer doomed to a certain task...."
She sat very still, her gaze turned inward, lost to the passage of
time. Scherer observed her in silence, thinking the while: "How
turbulent she is within, how peaceful without! What must she be like
when she is ardent? One should never possess women of her sort; they
would then become simple, would lose their mystery, and Schopenhauer
with his cynical remarks is at bottom right.... But children ... to
lure children out of them ... that alone would be worth the price of
solitude...."
"Is the old prince very far gone?" asked Diana, unexpectedly breaking
the long silence.
"Last Christmas, when I saw him face to face, he had the bluish tint
and the pinched lips of a man in the last stages of heart disease.
Yesterday came the terrible shock of the accident. Prince Eduard is
likely to have a field for his activities any day now."
"Activities? I think the word suits him. But do you look upon him
as energetic?"
"He hides his capacity for doing great deeds in a mantle of
melancholy. But his ironical faculty is an obstacle to his troubling
himself to perform petty things. The puzzle to-day is, whether he
looks upon the princedom as a great thing."
"Surely that is no longer the question," said Diana, rising as if to
give freer rein to her thoughts. She drew her cape around her and
paced the deck at Scherer's side. "He has often spoken of the
unlikely eventuality of his being summoned to his present task, has
he not? Don't you think that his relief at there being so little
prospect of it was not wholly genuine? His repudiation of any desire
to succeed to the throne may really have been the expression of the
tragical conviction that, as things were, he had no reasonable
prospect of ever having any serious work to do in the world." She
stopped in her walk, looked at her companion, reflected for a moment,
then, shaking her head, she resumed her pacing to and fro, saying:
"And I can hardly believe any such thing. He is more interested in
his action upon the inner life of men than in his action upon
exterior things; he would be glad to know that a few thousand hearts
were the happier through his work. The balance of power in Europe,
courts and parliaments, alliances and intrigues, colonies and
navigation, trouble him little; and were he to inherit an empire
tomorrow, he would be more inclined to have a thousand peasants'
cottages built than one cruiser. Don't you think I'm right? For he
is good at bottom; and because he was born unfree, as Wilhelm was
born free, he is condemned to make himself appear cynical."
"If only he had some really live person at his side to act as
counsellor! But that old Tauernheim who has been in office these
twenty years trying to introduce communal welfare work--he's nothing
but a mummy."
"What do you think of Kyril Sergievitch?"
Diana was standing in the stern, where Kyril had so often sat. The
sea was calm, a veil of mist lay lightly upon it, the sky was thinly
overcast, the air was warm, and the wind had almost entirely dropped.
"Kyril, too, is unfree," said Scherer, looking down into the water.
"He has sold his peasanthood for an idea. Only a perfectly free
nature can constrain the prince to action."
And Diana thought: "True; yet he would bind this free nature of
mine.... Why should one always be cabined, cribbed, and confined as
soon as ever one comes in contact with one's fellows?"
"A penny for your thoughts," broke in Scherer's voice upon her
meditations. His tone struck her as unusual, and she looked up at
him, to find his eyes fixed upon the shoulder from which her wrap had
slipped. She turned towards him, looking him full in the face, her
eyes cold and aloof.
"I'm thinking that all of you build up systems, and it astonishes me
to find that even you seem to consider that I should be more useful
as one of the beams in an edifice than I can ever be soaring free.
Am I right?"
An impulse rose within her to set his mind in a whirl, to bewilder
this man whose constructive imagination was for ever making ingenious
combinations, who wanted to be the architect of her life and of the
lives of his friends. She would grip him in her pliant clutch and
force him to face the issues which his temperamental circumspection
made him prone to evade. Scherer read her hostility in her eyes as
she awaited his answer; but although his pride rose against the
challenge, his senses were doubly allured by the woman who for so
long had puzzled and perplexed him. A hazy conviction seemed to tell
him that the arrogance with which she defended her inner freedom
could be overcome by no other force than the power of the conquering
male. As these friends confronted one another, they rediscovered the
fundamental antagonism of their two natures; impulse took the bit
between its teeth, and rushed the opponents into a proximity which
intellect and respect had at all times avoided. Scherer, as he stood
there before her, elegant and enigmatical, was no longer Diana's
friend and host from the great city; she saw in him now the eternal
enemy, the man sure of himself, the burgher; at the same time the
vision of last night's outburst when Eduard had wanted to deprive her
of her freedom rose to her mind. What was she to do? She felt her
resolution wavering. Would she for ever be able to withstand the
supplication of so tender a heart as the prince's? Two forces seemed
to be contending for mastery over her: her own impulse to freedom,
which the future seemed to be threatening, and which, so long as it
remained hers, she wished to uphold at all costs; and Scherer's
impulse to order, which would attempt to make her life fruitful, nay,
would construct her life for her and in spite of her, an impulse she
deemed it worth while to bewilder and lead astray.
After the many thousand words these two had exchanged in the course
of their collaboration, they now, in silence, became convinced that
this hour was to bring a strange and abrupt turn in their
relationship. Scherer realized in Diana's quick breathing, all that
was implied in the challenging question she had put, and he felt that
it was a case of now or never with him, as it had been in the most
decisive moments of his career; such moments had been rare, it is
true, but the urgency of their claim was unmistakable. Thus it was
that now he risked all.
"You are right." His voice was harsh; he did not touch her. "Well?
Are you willing to make a gift of this thing--of your freedom, on the
last night of our voyage together--Diana?"
The boldness of the look with which he enveloped her, the unexpected
pathos with which he uttered the last word, the challenge in his
eyes, her own feelings of independence and of relish for the
love-game, the memory of his virile gaze at her feminine charms
during this evening, the disturbing consciousness of their being
alone on board; the realization that his commanding tone of tonight
was of a far more manly quality than had been his demeanour at Athens
the previous year; the feeling that now he was the master of a
graceful, white vessel, and that she was perhaps an Undine who had
swung herself aboard; freedom combined with fantasy; the warm sea
with its flowing heart; confused memories of scenes remote; and,
again, the energy emanating from the eyes in this clear-cut head
before her--all these vague sensations invaded and perturbed her as
the essential male within him had foreseen. Her eyes did not repel
him, as she slowly turned away, and preceded him down the
companion....
"Abominably confined," said Eduard at the same hour, as he and Kyril
were settling themselves into their compartment. "At this time we'd
be stretching our legs on the deck of the 'Excelsior'; nothing would
be rattling, everything would be working smoothly, bearing us
along...."
"After a dream, reality is always noisy. Smooth sailing is pleasant;
noise is instructive," said the Russian sententiously.
"Schoolroom in an express train! How do you fancy the remnant upon
the 'Excelsior' is passing the evening?"
"She'll be wearing her black dress, because it is the lowest cut--and
Scherer will be making advances!"
Eduard, a pang shooting through him at the words, merely asked:
"Do you really think our kindly host is in love?"
"She is beautiful. I once saw her pose as a statue at a public
gathering in Berlin; she was something like the goddess Diana.
Weren't you there, too?"
Eduard trembled.
"Unfortunately not," he said. "I've heard that it was most charming."
"How well he lies; with what effrontery they all lie, these princes,"
thought Kyril contemptuously--as though he himself invariably spoke
the truth.
"A thousand men's eyes stared at her," Eduard was thinking, "a
thousand thoughts crept around her and over her on that occasion....
Well, why not? How shall I know what covetous desires may flare up
in the hearts of men as we pass together through the public rooms of
some hotel in Palermo or Dresden or Cairo? ... Am I not taking too
much upon myself? ... Shall I be able to bear it?..."
"But he's not going to have her," Kyril broke in upon Eduard's
reverie, speaking like a man who is sure of possessing a particular
woman when the auspicious hour strikes.
"Russian cur," thought Eduard, as he said: "The young lady appears to
be incorruptible."
The sentence hovered in the air, flitted to and fro between the two
men, like a breath from Diana herself, belonging first to one and
then to the other, and blown backwards and forwards between them.
And while Diana, afloat on the sea, in the little cabin on the white
yacht, flaunting her liberty, was giving herself to a man she did not
love, to a man determined to solve the riddle of her nature, two men
in a compartment of a night express were dreaming of her, one
imagining he would win her with his tenderness, the other wishing to
master her in a mingled frenzy of hate and love.