Part 12

She opened her suitcase and took out various articles she needed—a night-dress, which she spread on the bed, a couple of bottles and brushes, which she carried to the wash-basin. Then she brought the box from the night-table and laid a piece of soft white silk on the bottom—as carefully as if she were smoothing her lover’s couch, or preparing for a priestly service. With cautious movements, as if she were handling living objects, she laid the revolver and the cigarette-case with the scorpion inside. She shut the box with a determined gesture, for, as always, the sight of the revolver aroused in her an almost passionate desire to set its cool, smooth, metallic mouth to her temple. She was afraid to give way to this desire, for she was not sure that some sudden impulse might not make her pull the trigger, and thus, lead her, rather by accident than from necessity, to destroy herself, and thereby extinguish thought, feeling, memory, anticipation.

She did not wish to die. Or rather, she would gladly have died, if it had not involved being dead. She would gladly have died the same death as Olga, if only to be able to know with her last thought that she was suffering all that Olga had suffered, and that it was not so unbearable, so terrible, as inexperience imagined it.

On the other hand, she felt a fierce desire for life of which she knew so little. Not that she promised herself any great joys, any fine raptures therefrom. But she felt so well armed against the beautiful and terrifying monster that it would have been a pity to give up the struggle. It seemed to her as if Olga’s blood had bathed her soul in that invulnerability that Siegfried found in the dragon’s blood. She was convinced that she had surmounted the most beautiful, the most difficult, the most significant part of her life. In the tragedy or comedy in which birth compelled her to participate, she had had to play her part only in the first act. She had expended all her strength and feeling—and now she mingled with the supers, still eager, but exhausted by the shocks which she had undergone: half curiously, half wearily, she watched the others act.

In reality, her curiosity was stronger than she knew, and although she thought, or wished to think, that she was no longer capable of any powerful emotion, either joy or pain, although she felt that her peace of mind was steeled against impacts of every sort, she felt moved to try the invulnerability of her armor, to seek out new impressions, and expose herself to them. She would plunge into the thickest of the fray, pressing the bristling spear-heads to her breast.

The first to which she so eagerly offered herself and whose wounds she had certainly not suffered before, were strangeness of surroundings and solitude.

As a result of the feeling that in her new freedom she had herself elected strangeness and solitude, and as a result, too, of the thought that nothing more could hurt her, nothing more must hurt her since her separation from Olga Radó, she felt the cold and almost hostile silence as a kind of beneficent release.

One thing she knew—she could endure solitude. But tomorrow she would be compelled to take her meals in a room containing ten or twenty strange people. The idea almost took away her breath. She felt curious eyes pricking her skin like pin-points. But she would endure that, too.

Somewhere below a door slammed, with a dull, heavy sound that shook all the walls. The elevator rose with a humming noise as if the huge body of the house were drawing a labored breath. In the stillness of the night she could hear quite clearly the click as it passed the first, then the second, floor.

She heard, too, the opening of doors, the clinking of keys and grinding of locks, the snapping of electric buttons, footsteps moving carefully over muffling carpets or pounding on the bare floor. A suppressed laugh, a whispered good night.

Myra tried to decide whether these voices which she could barely hear were pleasant or unpleasant. She arrived at no very definite decision.

The door opened in the adjoining room. Again she heard the softest rustling, the click of the electric light, the drawing of curtains.

Myra knew nothing of the man in the next room, nothing. Not even his name, not even his age, not even as much as can be read in any face that hastily passes one by in a dark street. And yet she knew that her neighbor did not care to be waked up early, for she heard the window shut with considerable care. That he was a considerate person, for he took pains to make no noise, pulled off his shoes quietly and stole about in soft slippers so that she could no longer hear him walking, and sensed his presence only by a slight vibration. He was a cleanly person, too, for despite the lateness of the hour, he brushed his teeth at some length.

It made Myra laugh. Perhaps it would be best to make the acquaintance of all one’s fellow humans in this fashion. What good did it do to learn a stranger’s name, or his occupation, or his father’s position? What use was it to talk with someone and know no more about him in the end than where he spent last summer or what he thought of the latest operetta? But what use was it, either, to live with only a wall dividing you from someone so that you could hear every breath he drew—and still know nothing about him?

Ah, of what use was it to be of one blood with someone, and spend your life with him from the day you were born? Of what use was it to love someone, to love him with every fibre of your body and soul—if in the last analysis you really knew nothing about one another?

Myra went to the window and leaned out. She scanned the heavens for Antares, her star. But the brick walls of the houses hid it. She leaned out a little farther, peering down into the air-shaft. She felt a strange dizziness. If she were to fall down there, no one would notice it. If they found her body there in the morning, nobody would know what to do, whom to notify, whom to send for.

Myra was indeed free. So free that it sent a little shiver down her spine. Not the trace of a chain left, but no bond of any kind, either; no walls to circumscribe her, but also no sheltering roof.

The persons to whom love or obligation had bound her were dead. Her father was dead, Olga was dead. From the others she had severed herself with one sharp slash.

“Dear stars,” thought Myra, “how good it is that you are up there! Always the same, after tens of thousands of years, the same as when Olga and I lay by the Wannsee. There is no such thing as chance, there can be no such thing as chance. Why do not the stars collide and plunge with a trail of sparks through the night? Eternal, immutable laws keep their huge bodies floating in space and guide them with as vast composure along their courses as if it were the easiest thing in the world to rule the stars. At some point I, too, am subject to those laws and cannot resist—nor do I want to. I am afraid when I must decide to go right or left, and yet all roads are closed to me except that single one which I shall and must take because it is mine, the one immutably predestined road which will lead me to my goal. To what goal? That I do not know. But since I am alive there is probably something in store for me somewhere, and the best course is to await it in patience.”

* * * * *

In the large dining-room of the pension, Myra had her table in the darkest corner. The friendly hostess had felt obliged to apologize because all the places near the window were occupied by prior guests. It quite suited Myra. She sat with her back to the wall and the little table before her like a bastion. Usually she appeared when the first gong struck so that she could watch the others pass by and would not have to weave her way between the crowded tables. Once she was late, and the short walk across the room had been a torture to her. She felt herself racked and impeded by all the shamelessly inquisitive, and even the indifferent, glances. Although she always looked into the mirror before she left her room, she thought that her hair must be disordered if a glance rested on it, or that she had a hole in her stocking if someone stared at her legs. Then she would have to struggle sternly against the impulse to put her hand to her head, or to glance at her feet. She would press her elbows against her body, and endeavor to assume an impenetrable expression, and to move cautiously—she was plagued by the idea that she would overturn a chair or upset a plate. She tried to walk so quickly that no one could observe how precisely she navigated. Once seated, she felt as if she had reached a haven.

Generally, she took a newspaper with her, in order to screen herself behind it while she was waiting. She was not afraid that someone might accost her—talking was much less terrifying to her than walking—she was afraid of looking as if she were expecting to be accosted, so unoccupied, so solitary, so hungry for a charitable word.

Actually, she was nothing of the kind. The less she had occasion to speak, the less she missed speaking. But while it caused her no unhappiness, it did require a certain resolution before she could bring herself to say something to the maid. When, in the evening, she went to her room, and bolted the door after the last, “That will be all, thank you, Bertha,” the feeling that now she could be silent, now she was permitted to be silent, was like a deliverance to her. At times it seemed to her as if her tongue had become atrophied like any other disused muscle. And she wasted no further pity on the Trappists because she perceived quite clearly that it requires but a few weeks so to accustom one’s self to silence that the utterance of a word presents tremendous difficulties.

Myra’s yearning for Olga almost drove her mad—but that was by no means the worst of it. The worst was that her yearning was the cry of a human soul, not for love, not for companionship or understanding, but for the warmth of a body, for the pressure of encircling arms and tender lips.

At such times, Myra would tear the pillow with her nails and teeth, and shake as if in fever. At such moments, too, she felt certain that she really must be a wicked creature, the most damning evidence being that she could never succeed in feeling repentant or in making good resolutions. On the contrary, if she were very unhappy, she resolved at once to be wicked. Her desire to study and improve herself was only for the sake of acquiring more power over people, to beguile, to seduce them. Then she would enjoy whatever stirred her desire or her curiosity, were it only for an hour; she would merely skim the chalice, squeeze the juices from the fruit, and pass quickly from one sensation to another, never boring herself, never tying herself to anything, never creating from the depths.

Some such resolution impelled her to mingle with people. She meant to plunge head first into the stream, because she felt within herself the power to master the current. She determined to start an acquaintance the next day, to place herself on speaking terms with someone. Like a stone cast in the waters, a word can spread wider and wider ripples. In a few weeks she might find herself the center of a circle.

But next day when she reviewed all the faces, they seemed to her suddenly vacuous and boresome, or false and sinister, and she drew into herself like a frightened hedgehog, timid and hostile. She made a new resolution—not to speak, never, never to say a word, never to utter more than was absolutely essential, to erect barricades and walls of silence between herself and the world.

Things might have gone along in this fashion for weeks and months, had not Gisela Werkenthin arrived at the pension one day, to visit the painted young lady. She attracted Myra the instant that she entered the dining hall. Not that she was especially beautiful. She was built on the slim, slight, boyish scheme. Her narrow face seemed even narrower because of her dark hair, which was cut in page fashion and concealed half of her cheeks. Her mouth was all but lipless, simply a delicate, pale red, proud, severe curved line. Her dark eyes with their strikingly wide lids lay in great, deep ashen-gray hollows.

That night Myra did not rise from table immediately after supper as usual. She ordered a cup of tea and in order to have a pretext, pretended to be stirring the tea impatiently, to cool it while she watched the table at which sat the pale girl with the bobbed hair.

She laughed with the others, drank and smoked innumerable cigarettes. But she had a trick of withdrawing completely into herself in the midst of the noisy conversation. Her slender hand with its lit cigarette would remain as if petrified in the air, while her eyes bored through the fog of tobacco smoke and steam as if they were beholding something indescribably horrible.

The next day Myra visited Mrs. Meidinger, the hostess. There was a small matter she had to discuss with her which ordinarily she would have conveyed by the maid. But during the night, she determined irrevocably to make her leap into “life.” It was for this reason that she constrained herself for the first time to pay a personal call. The hostess, blond, rotund, coiffured and as amiable as ever, received her in her comfortable living-room, enthroned behind a well-covered tea-table.

She seemed quite enchanted to see Myra. She teased so long that at last Myra accepted a cup of tea, while she began to ply the girl with questions in which curiosity and friendliness were equally commingled, and which Myra answered because she saw no reason not to answer them. But she smiled slightly and thought, “If I really wanted to hide something from you, my dear, I would do it so well that you would never even suspect it.”

She readily admitted that she was an orphan. Yes, she believed that the mourning she was now wearing for her father did explain her pale and sorrowful expression. Thus the good-natured and inquisitive woman would never think of any secret grief or probe its causes.

Myra’s story was soon told. She was an orphan, had neither brothers nor sisters nor grandparents, and had visited this strange city in order to dispel her sad memories in a new environment. The hostess was satisfied with that explanation, or appeared to be. She confessed to Myra—what surprised her very much—that all the guests had inquired concerning her, and that each had assumed some romantic history behind the silent young lady in mourning. Miss Luigi—no doubt Myra knew who Miss Luigi was—worked at a cabaret and had enjoyed a great success, a really extraordinary success. Yes, the little lady with the beautiful red hair—dyed, quite obviously, as perhaps Myra had already remarked? Anyway Miss Luigi was always teasing her to introduce her to Myra. But when Mrs. Meidinger had told Miss Peters, the latter had said—Miss Peters was always very outspoken—and sometimes even a little broad—she had said, “What, you mean to introduce that delicate, tender, unborn babe to those....” Well, she would rather not repeat what Miss Peters had said. Miss Peters was sometimes a little broad. But little Miss Luigi was by no means as bad as that. Of course, she was no angel from heaven—but whose business was that? She, Mrs. Meidinger, was not her sister’s keeper—and the most important thing was that her house remained honest; that was her business and nobody could say anything against it. If a young woman has to earn her bread these days like a man, she wants to take her fun like a man, too. Of course, she liked respectable people, that went without saying. But, ah, who was respectable in these days? Some did one thing, some another. Had Myra noticed Gisela yesterday?

Myra assumed a forgetful expression, but felt as if she had blushed.

“One of the girls who visited Miss Luigi?”

“Yes, the dark one. Oh, you must have noticed her, Miss Rudloff! She looks so unhappy, so dreadfully unhappy! Didn’t it strike you? Of course, you wouldn’t notice such a thing, but it’s easy for anybody who knows, to see that she’s a dope-fiend. It certainly is no indiscretion on my part to tell you what the whole town is talking about. And such a talented person! It’s a terrible pity, but she’s going to pieces, literally going to pieces, over another woman!”

An artistic pause. Mrs. Meidinger looked at Myra expectantly. Myra felt that the glance demanded some comment from her.

“How dreadful!” she said in the tone of a child to whom someone has just told something incredibly horrible.

“Yes, my dear little girl,” said the hostess with an almost commiserating condescension, “in your big innocent eyes it is easy to read the question: ‘Are such things possible?’ My child, have you any idea of all that goes on! We live in an appalling age, really! But what can one do about it? We can no more escape our times than we can jump out of our own skins. If I had had my way, I’d have lived among respectable people where things are decent. Or have sat at the feet of Goethe. But where is one to find a Goethe today?”

Myra frankly regretted her inability to assist Mrs. Meidinger to this longed-for situation. She pictured it very amusingly to herself, and took her leave as soon as possible.

Even while she was traversing the long, feebly lighted corridor that led to her room, her thoughts returned to poor Gisela, and did not leave her again.

Poor Gisela, going to pieces over a woman! Ah, how well Myra understood that! Just as Gisela would understand Myra. Would understand all that Myra had been through, her struggles, her sorrow, her love.

Myra felt as if she must seek out this strange girl with the burning, tormented eyes, must follow her, must seize her hand and say, “We understand each other, we belong to each other, because we are the most unfortunate souls in the world! We must become friends because no one except ourselves can ever understand what we have suffered.”

* * * * *

The next evening the conversation between the tables concerned some story in the newspapers. Some had read it, others not, and since Myra had a paper in her hand she offered it to her neighbor. Little Miss Luigi also asked if she might glance over it, a request which Myra granted with great cordiality, and in five minutes a general conversation was in swing.

Next day it seemed perfectly natural to Miss Luigi to say a few friendly words to Myra. In the evening when she was inviting her usual crowd to “sample” a glass of brandy in her room, she walked over to Myra’s table and asked her to come up, too, for a quarter of an hour—nothing “formal,” just “sociable.”

Myra gave herself a mental push, and rose to go. She had to pass the table at which were sitting Luisa Peters and her companions. Myra held her head high as she walked by, but she thought she could feel their surprised and scornful looks along her spine. Defiance welled up within her, and she linked her arm in little Mara Luigi’s. “I belong with these,” it was meant to say to the others, “with these whom you despise but who sympathize with me. I don’t belong with you hardened saints. You never gave a thought to me before, now it serves you right if I am lost!”

As she became conscious of this feeling, it struck her as the height of absurdity. What had these utter strangers to do with her? In what way were they responsible for her? Then she felt darkly—“That crowd who are staring after me, scornfully and pityingly—are my kind. We have ties in common, I belong to them. But I am cutting those ties and going with these others, with these strangers with whom I also have something in common. But it is a common destiny, not merely a common existence. For they understand not merely suffering but passionate grief and passionate love. They are not merely ardent, but jealous, not merely active, but impetuous. No, I do not belong to you! I hate you, I despise you! You and your kind! Olga Radó has killed you for me. I no longer belong to you. But since I must belong somewhere, I shall try to belong with these others.”

She entered Mara Luigi’s room as tensely and determinedly as if she were entering a new life.

* * * * *

Mara Luigi had to snatch something from nearly all the chairs before she could offer her visitors a seat. She tossed an armful of all kinds of articles on the bed and said, “There you are, my children, be seated!”

Miss Lorenz, a slender, well-dressed, blondined girl with a pretty, expressionless doll’s face threw herself among the cushions on the divan and took a big teddy bear affectionately in her arms. A chap named Kramer, a slight, fair-haired young fellow, with the face of a child who has known too much too soon, struggled for a place on the divan. But pretty Miss Lorenz opposed him so vigorously that her slim kicking legs in their thin silk stockings were visible above her knees.

A grave and sickly looking man, who was not, strictly speaking, a member of this circle, since Myra had often observed him in friendly conversation with the other party, silently moved up a chair for Myra. She was standing irresolutely in the middle of the room.

Myra smiled her thanks to him, somewhat confused, and sat down.

Meanwhile young Kramer had encountered so powerful a blow that he scrambled down from the divan with a howl of pain and sat on the carpet where he remained, refusing to be elevated by force or entreaty.

Mrs. Breslauer, a buxom lady, with strikingly painted eyebrows, had discovered a corset of white tricot under a heap of other things on the bed, and she must absolutely know whether it was made in mass production or whether the famous Fischer had “created” it and how much it had cost.