He met her at one of those numerous little dancing clubs of Vienna which
assemble regularly once a week at a particular café, where the
facilities for introduction are only equalled by the ease of admission.
When he asked where they could meet again, she told him, smiling
sweetly, where to call her up next day, and he noticed that, besides
having beautiful grey eyes with lashes like black needles and luxuriant
black hair, she had an even, gapless semi-circle of white teeth and, at
the corners of her mouth, the foreshadowing of a moustache in after
years. “And what name?”
“Ask for Fräulein Isolde.”
“Isolde! How romantic! Will you dance?”
“I do not dance.” She smiled divinely.
“Well, it’s a relief, if anything. I am tired of jazz music, tired of
having to prance about every night on my flat feet on the dubious chance
of meeting a nice girl.”
“I like,” she said, “to sit at home with a book.”
“I can’t tell you how glad, how--”
“Are you fond of Art?”
“Love it!”
“I will take you to the Art-Historical Museum.”
“Good?”
She closed the eyes with the long lashes and nodded rapidly in response.
Her brows twitched. And he loved her.
Next day they met at a café in the Ring. She turned up three-quarters of
an hour after the appointed time in a black coat, black hat, and a black
frock buttoned to the neck. With dark abundant locks and pale powdered
face she sat, mysterious, smoking innumerable cigarettes. And only
asked, “What is it like in America?”
“Very nice,” he said.
“Are you studying here?”
He nodded. She smoked on.
A dingy pox-marked poet came in and sat down beside them and opened the
portfolio he carried stuffed with his writings. She laid a tender hand
on his shoulder, scanning the while the pages of a story. “Yes,” she
commended. “You have hit it off all right.”
They motored to the castle of Schönbrunn and sat in a summer-house by
the water, romantically, and walked in the park. He took her arm
tenderly. She was sad. “Why?” he asked.
“Memories.” They walked on in silence. “We shouldn’t have come here,” he
said. She pressed his arm in mute recognition. He helped her into the
motor. “You’re so kind and tender to me. I am not used to it,” she said.
He kissed her hand in dumb adoration. “I woke up this morning and
smiled. I wondered why I was smiling, and then remembered I had met a
nice man.”
“When I leave Vienna you must come abroad with me,” he said jestingly.
“It’s not out of the question,” she answered seriously.
He talked glibly about the dearth of intellectual satisfactions. “You’re
so different from other girls. Your nature is artistic.”
“I will show you round the gallery,” she said.
When they went--“This is a picture over which I wept,” she told him.
“This is not bad,” he said, stopping at a Rembrandt.
“Yes, he has hit it off.” Her eyes filled.
“What is it?”
“We used to come here, Hans and I.”
“And where is he now?”
“Dead.”
“Long?”
“Nine months. We had been engaged three years. And then, suddenly, he
died--for no reason--of a mere cold. So young--twenty-two.”
“But you too are so young, you have your life to live.”
“It’s all in the past.”
“No, no! And you’re so beautiful.”
“I will show you my big picture.”
He waited in the motor while she ran upstairs to the apartment to fetch
it.
“Wonderful!” he commented.
“Now I must rush back, father is waiting. And you can have the picture
of me till we meet again to-morrow.”
But she stepped inside and they went for another ride with the picture.
“Where to?” asked the man.
“Round and round,” she said. She crossed her legs, the skirt slipping up
above her knees, and lit a cigarette. And suddenly he leaned over to her
and kissed her on the mouth.
“Tut-tut-tut--You mustn’t kiss. Wait till I kiss you.”
“I _have_ waited,” he answered, “and I’m still waiting, and, by God! I
can’t wait any longer” (with the taxi-meter piling up, he thought,
piling up all the time while we wait, and the chauffeur the only one to
gain by it.)
“This is the Prater,” she said.
“Where to?” asked the taxi-man.
“Round and round,” he said dismally.
She burst out laughing. “You said this so funnily!” She gave him a
furtive kiss on the lips. “What is your name?”
“I have a silly name. I’m called Ebenezer.”
“It is--rather silly.”
“Well, you needn’t call me by it. You can invent another name for me.”
She considered. “Peter,” she said.
“All right--Peter.”
When she fell ill he sent her flowers, and every day she sent a
message--that she was a little better, or a little worse. Then she came
again to the café. “Beautiful, beautiful flowers! I was breathless when
I saw them. And so much!”
He buried his face in her hands, “Beautiful girl ... beautiful flowers.
Wonderful when I think: I’ve been seeking, all these months, all these
years I’ve been seeking, and now I have found.”
“I too. For nine months I was alone. Now when I come to the café, the
waiter says confidentially: ‘The gentleman is already here.’ One feels
one has somebody.”
“While you were ill, when I used to come here by myself, the waitress
looked at me with sad eyes, as if she thought you’d left me or we had
broken it off. I notice we’ve become privileged guests and are treated
accordingly.”
She smiled--so sweetly and intimately, and, watching him, laughed. He
looked up from his cup. “I must laugh,” she said, “at the way you
scratch the last drop of sugar out of the cup.” He laughed too. She was
delightful. “I’ve just come back from Adolf’s bedside,” she remarked.
“And who is Adolf?”
“My fiancé.”
“This is new to me.”
“At least he thinks he is my fiancé.”
“And you don’t think so.”
“No.”
“This is a relief.”
“He is dying now.”
“Oh--is he?” And secretly he thought: This is a relief. “What does he
do?”
“He is a doctor--venereal and skin diseases. But he is very tender and
aesthetic and plays the piano wonderfully--Schumann and Chopin. He says
he will let me live as I like and love whom I like, that he will never
touch me, and only wants to be allowed to marry me and to live by my
side.”
When they came out of the café, it was a sunny afternoon. “Come, I’ll
show you where I live,” he said, and they made their way to Am Hof--the
old-fashioned square of Vienna where he had rooms. She took off her hat
and used his comb and sat down at his writing-table. “It must be nice to
live like that. If I were you I would give myself up to my work, and
never tie myself up with any woman.”
“How you understand me! Other women are so conventional and
self-seeking. But you--you are so delightfully free and easy, so unusual
and romantic!”
She sat in his chair, and suddenly sleep overcame her. “I want to lie
down.” She lay down on his bed, and he sat down beside her. “I feel like
a faithful old dog sitting at your feet and seeing that you come to no
harm.” She gave him her hand, which he pressed to his lips. He looked at
her legs in the glossy silk stockings, the seductive shoe. Warm,
yielding curves, unexplored mysteries. And he said, “After all this
seeking, to feel you have found ... at last. It’s not--no, not your
face; it’s....” He was gently pressing her knee; she made an involuntary
attempt to disengage it. “ ... your soul,” he said--and she left it.
“I’m content: I really need nothing. Not by a word would I suggest or
precipitate the moment.... Not till you yourself ... an offering, a
priceless gift.” She pressed his hand to her heart. “Not even then. I’m
content, I need nothing.” She touched his brow silently with her lips.
“Yes?” he asked, suddenly crushing her in his arms. “Yes?”
She closed her eyes with the lashes like black needles, nodding rapidly
several times. “Pull down the blinds.”
“Oh, I am grateful! Tristan and Isolde.... _Nacht der Liebe_....” He was
whistling.
“Is the door locked?”
“I’ll lock it for you--do anything for you.” Of sheer relief, he felt
like cracking cheap jokes.
“What is the time?”
“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon--the time people here take their 5
o’clock tea.” The yellow blinds drew to and fro in the breeze. Outside
in the sunny square the women were selling oranges and flowers. Upstairs
somebody began playing the piano. “This is Schumann,” she said. “Adolf
plays this.” The blinds still swayed gently, gently, and they could feel
the breeze on their burning cheeks. She knitted her brows. “What are you
thinking?” he asked.
“Adolf is waiting for me. I’ve neglected supper for father.”
He turned on the switch. “No, no, I am ashamed of the light.”
It was black night when they went out. Stepping into the taxicab at the
door, she gave her address. “You shouldn’t have told him where you live
before that old caretaker woman. You never can tell.”
“I take full responsibility for what I do and I am prepared to face the
consequences of my acts, and I have nothing to be ashamed of,” she said.
He remembered the prudish cowardly attitude of his own forget-me-not
eyed sisters, his mother, his maidenly aunts. “You wonderful girl!” he
exclaimed. He felt grateful, so that he did not even mind how much he
had to pay for the taxi. She scanned his face and his figure, and he
instantly looked at his gloves. “They are filthy, I know.”
“Give them to me, I will wash them for you.”
“No, no, why should you?”
“The maid will wash them.”
“Very well, then.”
The taxicab pulled up at her house door. “Just see me upstairs. It’s so
dark.” She took hold of his arm and with a sure quick step ran up the
stairs, while he fumbled uncertainly with his feet. She gave him a kiss
in the dark, which missed the mark, handed him the house door key,
begged him for the sake of love not to make a noise--and was gone. He
felt his way carefully by the chalk walk, dirtying his coat and
hands--and presently lost himself. For an hour he fumbled about in the
dark, groping his way down the steps time without end, only to find
himself at the end of each attempt in the coal cellar. Now I’ve made a
noise, he thought, the caretaker will come out, call the police and have
me arrested. I’m a lost man. When, having given up all hope, suddenly he
saw a shimmering of light, then a new turning, the real stairs--and he
was saved. The Votive Church as he went home seemed made of lace: the
tall twin towers, like a prayer, strained heavenward in the blue night.
He sat down on a bench and thought of her.
He was more than usually courteous to the old caretaker woman. “A
pretty girl, I call her,” she said, opening the heavy outer door for
him, while he paid the customary “lockout money.” “Is she your bride?”
He nodded.
“Ah, well, young men have luck. But I’m not one to let the cat out of
the bag.”
He fumbled in his pockets.
“Thank you.--I am known to be discreet. Baron Waldmeyer who lived here
nine months ago also used to bring his bride up to his rooms, regularly
three times a week you might say. A pretty girl she was, too, Lina
Holz--you know the chemist’s daughter across the way. The white house
opposite. That’s right. Never a word to anybody. God beware! They were
very satisfied with me. ‘Frau Krampf,’ he used to say to me, ‘I can rely
on you.’”
Next day they were hurrying in the train into the country. “I too am
glad we’re friends,” she said. “My family is nothing to me. Mother died
when I was fourteen. She was so small I used to take her on my lap. My
sister married rich, but she can’t do anything decently. She is such a
snob--hides the fact that we are Jews. She will give father a new
suit--or rather says she will--and all so haughtily, you know, so
condescendingly, will talk so much about it and in the long run won’t
buy him anything and will even borrow money from him in the end. She
gives me things occasionally, or rather says she will and doesn’t. But
that which is inside one she doesn’t know.”
“Quite so.”
Yet he had discovered that Isolde, despite her intellectual pretensions,
was as fond of cabarets and dancing halls as any other child of
pleasure-loving Vienna. And she was not content with going to one
cabaret during a night, but from the one immediately wanted to go on to
another, and from that to a third--in all respects similar to the first.
“I’m different,” she said. “Already as a child we had no points of
contact. My sister would go out on the Korso to be stared at by men,
while I sought my friends among writers and artists, or went off by
myself to the Opera and tried to find my real ‘I’ in the _Walküre_, the
_Ring_, the _Meistersinger_, in _Tristan und Isolde_.”
“Very becoming for one named Isolde! If one didn’t know you were above
such cheap romanticism, one would almost suspect you gave yourself that
name.”
She laughed faintly.
“Why--_did_ you?”
She closed her eyes and nodded rapidly.
“How clever of you!” He kissed her hand.
“My real name is Rebecca.”
“Let’s forget that it is. We’ll go to the Opera together--to _Tristan_.
A good performance here, isn’t it?”
She closed her eyes and nodded rapidly, significantly. “I’ll bring the
complete musical score. I have the entire _partitura_ and we can follow
it.”
“By God! we’ll follow it!” said he, though he was quite unable to read
music.
At the Opera, all the liveried attendants seemed to know her. “Ah,
Fräulein Isolde, it’s good to see you again!”
“It’s the first time that I am here since (her eyes filled)--his death.”
And she ushered him upstairs through drafty corridors with the air of a
proprietress showing a visitor round the premises. “Here Hans and I used
to sit. Or, when we had little money, we stood over there or sat on the
steps.”
“A fine Opera House.”
“Yes, this is my temple.”
She carried an enormous book--the complete musical score of the piece,
and they sat down and he read the biographical note, while the orchestra
enclosure gradually filled and the executants began tuning up their
instruments.
“Because I have never known love in real life I want now to realise it
in music.” Thus Wagner one day wrote to Liszt. “I have jotted down in my
head a _Tristan und Isolde_, the simplest but the most full-blooded of
musical conceptions: with the black flag which flies at the end I then
want to cover myself and to--die.”
There was a meagre trickling of applause: the conductor threaded his way
to his seat, passed his hand over the page under the green-shaded lamp,
raised the _bâton_, and began. They sat close together, the Prelude with
its high-stepping, long-striding sinuous tentacles groping after new
resting-places, far out of reach, yet working out its salvation surely
and steadily, swelling and widening, till--the conductor shaking his
locks and his fists--the brass blared its compelling response; and, in a
tide of regaining tranquillity, the Prelude gradually evened itself out
to the level at which it began, and the curtains parted, revealing the
ship. She followed the score with a preoccupied air, now and then
nodding her head with that significant look of critical recognition; but
when he asked for the place they were at she never could find it and
began turning the pages backward and forward, six at a time and in vain.
And when, in the second act, King Marke’s hunting horns died away and
the cast-down torch went out, to a heart-sinking, intolerably dulcet
cadence, and the night was all astir, and Tristan staggered to Isolde,
and the great theatre plunged into the most passionately voluptuous
music that has ever been, then they pressed each other’s fingers more
tightly and their nerves throbbed in unison--until King Marke, returning
at a moment least desired from the hunt, surprised the twain. In this
passionate music, more truly voluptuous than the grosser senses of man
can divine, there lies concealed a certain pledge: a foretaste, maybe,
of a reality awaiting us, or one we needs must forego, wrenched from a
far world by a genius, for us to partake of before we go under.
In the interval he read more of the biography. Wagner, while working on
_Siegfried_, wrote to a friend: “My musical sensibility already sways
far beyond it--thither where my mood belongs: into the realm of
melancholy.” It was his love for Mathilde Wesendonck--a love of denial
for both--which determined the work. “That I have written Tristan I
thank you out of my deepest soul into all eternity.” Thus he writes to
her three years after completion. It has been said that the musical
drama is unreal because the love in it is the artificial outcome of the
love potion given to Tristan and Isolde during the voyage instead of the
death drink they bargained for. But the potion, of course, is a symbol.
Love was latent in them, but could not face the light of day: it is the
belief in the certainty of their death held for them in the cup which
works the love miracle. Only in death can they give each other. But of
that “realm of stilled longings” they had been cheated. He was
there--_Der öde Tag!_ And now the third and last act--the empty sea, the
hollow day, the dreary convalescence, with the black flag already flying
over their destinies. They sat and listened to the sundown glow now
sensible in the familiar bars of this greatest of love-tragedies--as it
had always been.
The measured strains of the _Liebestod_ had grown quicker and more
passionate; Isolde, wrenching her hands, was racing along with the
orchestra which, at this turn, was taking the melody from her, easily,
in rapidly rising voluptuous strains, climbing, slipping, climbing anew,
rapidly, rapidly, to a climax, now, now.... The conductor, forgetting
his quasi-reticent attitude, rose in his seat and with a sweep of his
stick commanding one hundred and twenty-six instruments, drowned her top
notes in a mighty volume of rapturous sound. But she did not mind. Nor
did any one mind. On that plane of emotion one does not mind: one felt
one wanted to go home, cover oneself with the black flag--and die....
They made their way past the drafty swinging doors into the lighted
streets and stood a while in the crowded Opernring, Peter taking her
arm. He was elated. He tried to whistle bits he remembered, but she
stopped him with a frown. In the café she seemed moody and irritable.
“_Must_ you always scratch the cup out?”
“I feel I am wasting my life if I don’t.”
“Why don’t you lick it out with your tongue?”
“What is the matter?”
“I must talk to you very seriously.”
“Well?”
“Another day--to-morrow.”
He would have died of anxiety if he had to wait till to-morrow.
“To-night or not at all.”
“About our--relation. I want to have it out with you. I don’t want you
to be merely playing with me and then, when it suits you, drop me.” They
were going down the teeming Kärntnerstrasse and bent their way into the
Graben, walking up the famous Korso. “Here is father’s jeweller’s shop.”
“What’s all this nonsense?” he asked peremptorily.
“Father’s been bullying me. No money to give me. Business going to ruin.
No one buying jewelry nowadays. ‘_Ein Skandal!_ You’re twenty-two and I,
a man of eighty-six, have to go on supporting you!’ and so on, and so
forth. My brother-in-law sits and talks to my father and tells him I
ought to get married. And father curses me: ‘Again you’ve been out all
night. A good bride and no mistake, Adolf sitting and waiting for you
here all the evening!’ Of course, he is right in a way. But I never
promised definitely to Adolf. I tell him, ‘Adolf, I value your feeling
for me, and if no one better crops up I will marry you in the end.’ So
he sits in our drawing-room all evening after leaving the venereal
disease hospital, waiting for me and playing Chopin.”
Peter thought of what he might say, but couldn’t say much. “Damn him!”
he said.
“And I mean--I don’t want to be playing ducks and drakes with Adolf, who
is a man of fine feeling--”
“But hasn’t he died? He was going to.”
“He wasn’t a bit. He only put himself to bed so as to get me to come and
sit at his bedside and hold his hand. And what I mean is, a man has a
love affair, then another, a third, a fourth, and is only looked up to,
even by women. But a girl has to think.”
“Is there--is there--well, you know what I mean?”
“No, there isn’t. All the same--”
“But why say it like that?”
“You should have thought of saying it yourself. I waited long enough.”
“But why in the world did you make out you were
unconventional--romantic--God knows what--unlike other women? Why did
you?”
“I thought you expected it.”
Damned shameless lie, he thought; and said aloud:
“This would not appear to correspond with the facts. Secretly you were
out for marriage from the start and only pretended--don’t I see it
now!--but all the time you were on the hunt for a husband.”
“You needn’t flatter yourself. I’m good-looking enough to marry any time
I want to. And such birds as you I can find on every bush.”
“Thank you.”
They had reached her house. “Well, am I to ring you up to-morrow as
usual?” Her voice was not friendly.
“As usual,” he said, and thought: As per usual, business as usual. But
the irony of using such decrepit war slang would be lost on her. That
was the worst of it all: they hadn’t really many points of contact. And
making the most of the few they had, he pressed forward to kiss her.
“No.”
He shrugged his shoulders, raised his hat and went. He went by the
familiar Kolowatring that he had paced no end of times before--in other,
happier days. How far away they seemed now!
Next day at two she did not call him up. At three she had not called him
up. By five his anxiety had reached seething point. She would not call
him up. She would never call him up. He was lost--damned. In all Vienna
he could not find a place for himself. He sat and waited, hoping,
doubting. And then, together with her friends, she came, as if not
noticing him, and was about to sit down at a table, when he went after
her and spoke. She turned round, abashed. “You are deadly pale,” he
said. “Are you frightened, or what?”
“No. But I didn’t expect to meet you here.”
“And I waited--five hours. God, how I suffered!”
She looked round at him to see if it was true. His face was haggard. She
was not unkind to him, yet took little notice of him, only now and then,
after the performance of an item turning to him with a--“Quite good,
wasn’t it?”
“Very good!” He was happy--come what might--for the abating of his
erewhile suffering. He begged for an appointment next day and obtained
one, and they lunched together at a freshly painted table of the
restaurant in the Volksgarten. The foliage was breaking out and
everywhere along the Ring the cafés were putting out their little
“gardens.” He glanced at her legs in the flesh-coloured stockings. How
romantically realistic--as if straight from Maupassant! he thought. And
took her hand. She withdrew it. He took it again. “Don’t touch me.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t.”
He remembered a cabaret singer in Vienna who sang in a feeble hoarse
voice: “I can’t, I can’t, I’m weak on the chest,” and then immediately
after in a voice that would put brass trumpets to shame, a voice so
powerful that it made the window panes rattle--“I CAN’T, I CAN’T, I’M
WEAK ON THE CHEST!!!” And he asked, “What do you mean ‘I can’t’? You’re
not weak on the chest?”
She did not laugh. “Something has broken within me--and I don’t know if
it can ever be put right.”
“Then we must set about mending it.”
“There is a gulf, the bridge has been broken. I can never come back. I
can’t help it. I’ve lost all feeling for you.”
“But, my darling, we’re mending it, aren’t we?”
“It can never be mended.”
How charmingly she walked, with feet a little outward and swaying
slightly from the hips. There was something of the awkward school girl
about her. Would she ever come back?
But one day, as the scent of jasmine hovered in the air and he gently
passed his hand over her own and said, “My love, come back to me,” she
closed her eyes with the lashes like black needles and nodded rapidly.
The bridge was mended.
His emotion of gratitude ran to kissing. “Can’t you sit still?” she
admonished him.
“But you are mine. Don’t you want to be?”
“Not in that way.” _Her_ love ran to emotion.
“In that way. Or I feel I am wasting my time.”
“Ach!” she waived him aside like a fly. Then angrily, wearily: “Pull
down the blinds!” She began to unhook her high collar at the neck. “Is
the door locked at least?”
He smiled reassuringly. “I’ve taken requisite steps against the
possibility of King Marke appearing when he is least wanted.”
He held her in his arms, and sang: “You Tristan, I Isolde, no more
Tristan!...”
“Shut up!”
“There is little poetry in you.”
“And you are a beast.”
“Thank you.” And looking at her, drinking her in with his eyes, he
thought, “Poor Richard Wagner! Who had never known such love as this!”
He thought so. He thought so a long time, when she attracted his
attention. “What do you want to do?”
“Go home.”
“No-o.”
“No-o!” she mimicked him angrily. “You’re like that--never enough of a
good thing--lick the sugar out of the bottom of the cup when there’s
nothing left.”
“Ha-ha!”
“Nothing to laugh at.”
He sang: “_Der öde Tag!_”
He went to the adjoining room. When he returned she had her coat on and
was powdering her face before the mirror. As they were leaving, “Put the
light out,” she said. At the café she read the paper and hardly spoke to
him. He looked at his associate in sin. Her face was still beautiful.
Sin sat lightly upon her. He remembered afterward how they sat in the
taxicab--how it rained outside. She only said, “Oh, yes, I’ve still got
your gloves. You will get them to-morrow.” At the gate she gave him her
hand, looked into his eyes, very kindly, he noticed, and said--“Peter,
farewell.”
“Good-bye. Matches!” he cried after her.
“Don’t want any.”
Walking home, he remembered her words and the strangeness of the
“farewell” dawned upon him. Returning, he found a note on the table
which he had not perceived as they went out. On the back of a slip
“Rimless Stockings. Best Quality” he read: “We shall never see each
other again. I _cannot_. Isolde.”
And then came a letter.
“Peter, I have not much to tell you, but I have the feeling that
you are still waiting for something. Somehow a cleft has arisen
between us, which can never be bridged. Is it the fulfilment in us,
was this giving one’s self also the end? I do not know, but it may
well be so.
“In me there is no mourning, not a shimmer of disappointment, no
reproach either for you or for me. And now I know why so long I
could not find any words for you.
“And so farewell, Peter, I wish you the best of luck in all the
coming years.
“ISOLDE.”
It was Easter. He strolled about by himself. When he perceived a black
hat and flesh-coloured stockings, he invariably thought it was she. And
the town was setting itself for the spring; the gardens, the freshly
painted tables and chairs beckoned invitingly. He remembered how he had
felt lost and damned when she had not telephoned to him one day, and now
felt doubly lost--doubly damned. What sort of thing was life? What sort
of creature was man? Daunted by tiny reverses, already squirming like a
worm at a woman’s feet. There he was, just like Adolf, he who had been
so sure of himself, supplicating for mercy, begging her for a morsel of
bread. He strolled all alone about the town, waited at her gate, sat in
the garden where (he remembered her telling him, though it had scarcely
interested him at the time) she had played as a child. There were rows
of seats lined with mothers and nurses. A little boy in the park was
kicking a ball. A nice little fellow, he thought, but he’ll probably
grow up to be a blackguard. Suddenly he saw her sitting with her
friends. A hot pang shot through his heart. She spoke to him pleasantly
but dispassionately. “How are you, Peter? How is life treating you?”
“Rottenly.”
When he had a chance to speak to her alone he supplicated for an
interview.
“Child, it’s no use,” she said wearily.
“Yes, yes, a quarter of an hour--eye to eye--to discuss matters--to talk
things over.”
“All right then, to-night at 8.30.”
When they did meet--at 9.30--he found that he had nothing to discuss,
nothing to talk over. He only wanted her, craved for her physical beauty
with all the strength of his physical being. She knew a subtler passion
that hovered in her breast and was more like music, that went out in
long curves and found no resting-places. And to her he had been part of
that elusive dream. “Forgive me, Isolde, but really it’s your fault. You
put it all so clumsily. Marriage. Yes. Even so, what can I do now?”
At the word marriage her eyes lit up and a smile played on her face.
“What can I say now? I can’t say: Isolde, marry me. I perfectly
understand you can’t say--your pride won’t allow you to say, yes.”
“I’ll go back to my memories. I knew I should have to be alone. I will
never have another like Hans.”
“I know it’s the bitter lot of those to follow him to fare badly by
comparison. Alas! no live virtue stands the ghost of a chance at the
side of retrospective illusion.”
She looked at him sharply. “The comparison does not arise. I didn’t
_love_ you.”
“But then why, may I ask--yes, precisely, why--?”
“Because I thought you expected it.”
“Look here. Listen. I want to tell you something.”
“Better hold your tongue.”
“I expect--” it was a desperate step--“yes, I expect you to marry me.”
Her face lit up at the word. She played with the idea. “I don’t
deny”--she puffed at a cigarette--“that it would have certain immediate
advantages. Father was carrying on again this morning. ‘_Ein Skandal!_
I, an old man with one foot in the grave, have to keep you.’ ‘What do
you want me to do?’ I cried at last. ‘You never taught me a thing. All
the shops and offices are reducing their staff. Do you want me to go on
the streets?’ He slapped my face. I went to my room and cried. Later he
came to me. He was sorry. ‘I’d like to see you settled before I close my
eyes.’ He’d be glad, and I’d be glad to make him happy. Let me see, I’d
have a little money if I married--not much, still a trifle.”
“Who from?”
“My brother-in-law promised. Then there are silver things--knives and
forks, solid silver--not much, but still something.”
_Der öde Tag!_
“Father might be prevailed upon to give something from his shop. Then
furniture--a bedstead--two chairs. My sister has taken the mattress,
though it didn’t belong to her. My mother left it to me.”
The vulgarity of it--things--cupboards--carpets--meddling relations. How
dismal was our human fate! He felt that one had but to set one’s ship
towards romance, to realise how fruitless were one’s hopes and how soon
frustrated! She thought of her father, of the end of squalor and deceit,
the joy of her brother-in-law, her own home, children, wealth. “But--”
she scarcely meant it--“but I can’t. It’s not honest towards you for me
to accept a solution for reasons of convenience only.”
“So you can’t?” He was almost relieved.
“I can’t.”
All the misery and anguish of his loneliness, his intolerable loneliness
dawned upon him. He had spent a week without her. He knew what it was
like. “Come, it really looks as though you didn’t want to make me happy
for my own sake!”
“Well, if you are sure that it will make you happy.”
He was not sure. (He was sure of the contrary.) He drank his cup to the
bottom and then took the spoon and licked off the sugar, while she
watched him critically. And he thought: She won’t let me drink my coffee
as I like. She won’t let me do anything as I like. I’m a lost man.
She said, “We must look at it sensibly. We both will have our
advantages. You will be proud of showing me to your people and friends,
while I shall be doing things for you at home.” He looked at her: she
was too small and when she walked she waddled like a duck. Indeed, what
would his sisters think of it? He pictured her at forty, at fifty,
sixty and seventy, while he pictured himself all the while at
twenty-five. She complained a good deal of her father, but if the old
man found fault with her it was, of course, with good cause. “I’ll mend
this for you,” she would say--and never did. “I must visit Hans’s grave
to-morrow”--but she went to a dance instead. He recalled that she had
not yet returned his gloves--after keeping them two months!
“But why are you looking so wretchedly sad? I’ve not accepted you yet.”
“Not a bit.” He imagined his arrival with his dark bride in the United
States, their appearing before his proud “one hundred per cent.
American” mother, the astonishment of his slim forget-me-not eyed
sisters, the curve of their raised brows.
“If I married--” and she looked at him out of the corner of the eye to
see how he took it, “we’d have separate bedrooms.”
He smiled faintly. It was past a joke.
“Cheer up. You look as though somebody has done you out of your money.
I can see it won’t do. You’re so cold, so calculating, so concentrated
on yourself. I am sure I could never marry you. I was merely joking.”
“No joke, I meant it. It’s settled--you’re my bride now and I’m your
blooming bridegroom.”
“Your first experience?”
“Yes. I feel like a fool.”
“Thank you,” she smiled. “It’s my second.” She looked at her hands. “May
I keep Hans’s ring?”
“Yes,” he said gloomily. Hans. Fritz. Grete. Nauseating relations.
They’ll want to congratulate him, see the ring, touch it, maybe--all the
dark Jewish brood, dentists, skin-disease doctors, stock-exchange
frequenters. A nosing father--perhaps suggesting purchasing the
engagement ring at his own shop, offering a wedding ring “cheap” in
advance, or questioning the value of it if bought elsewhere--belittling
the outlay--pooh-poohing expense. It was unbearable.
“Do your people speak German?”
He shook his head abjectly.
“Then you must teach me English.”
“I’ll try.” He pictured her dumbness, her being tied to him night and
day, his mother and sisters asking her easy simple questions:
“How--do--you--like--America?” and her asking back: “Please?” every
time. A bewildered aunt of his struggling with a dictionary to make
herself understood. Isolde smiling propitiatorily at his mother, trying
to curry favour with her, to appear the tender wife; and he the heavy
father to their common children.
“You needn’t look so unhappy. I haven’t accepted you yet.”
“It’s one o’clock, the café’s closing,” he said peremptorily, and called
to the waiter: “Herr Ober! Zalen!--Yes or no?”
She did not answer, but smiled shyly. He took an empty cigarette box,
unscrewed his fountain-pen, and wrote:
“?”
She took the fountain-pen from him and wrote:
“!”
He quibbled: “Is that an affirmative or perhaps an equally determined
negative?”
She did not answer. He helped her on with her coat and while he was
putting on his own, slowly, pensively she was collecting her things into
the bag: the powder-puff, the lip stick, the remaining cigarettes. He
watched her eagerly. If she took the cigarette box with his “?” and her
“!” it meant--he knew what it meant. It meant that in after years she
would be saying: “On this empty cigarette box my husband once proposed
marriage to me.” She would say it, a grey-haired gouty old woman, with a
deep black moustache and a beard, lying in bed with one complaint or
another, in a bonnet, her teeth in the glass at her side. She would say
it to their children, little hairy black Jews creeping about everywhere:
to her children’s children; and all those long years he’d be tied to
her. Her gaze lingered on the cigarette box, and her thoughts, from this
chance _memento_ of a romantic proposal swayed to that which it meant,
her new life in America, her newly-gained freedom, the long-awaited
salvation. But she noticed his searching critical look and did not take
the _memento_.
“Yes or no, for the last time?”
They were moving to the door into the street, where the rain was
beginning to dribble, and stood still on the pavement.
She shook her head, and he made a movement to go. She wanted to say
something to hold him back. “Here are your--your gloves, Peter.” And
tears seemed to come to her eyes.
He took them as a sign, pressed her hand and went his way hurriedly. At
the corner a gust of wind blew the rain against his face and tried for
his hat. He did not know what he had done, why he had done it, or what
had been done to him. He only knew he wanted to go home, cover himself
with the black flag--and die.