Part 13

Giesbert, a young painter, a slender, good-looking fellow, wrenched the corset from the lady’s hands and danced through the room with it. Mara Luigi rushed after him. She had caught up her short little skirt in her left hand, her right was clutching after the artist. When Giesbert held the corset on high, she jumped on a chair to reach it. When he hopped back and forth on the far side of the table, prepared to change his direction any moment, she did the same on the other side. Her comb clattered to the floor; curls and strands of hair danced around her face.

Myra grasped the arms of her chair tightly and shut her eyes for a moment because she felt herself becoming dizzy.

“So this is ‘life,’” she thought. “I must accustom myself to it.”

The ugly, sickly looking man, who had been standing behind her chair, said in an uncommonly gentle and pleasant voice, “You are a stranger here, are you not?”

“Yes,” said Myra with a helpless sort of smile, “rather.”

She scolded herself for being petty and narrow-minded, but she could not help feeling that it was easier to get along in one of those stiff and conventional gatherings where the hostess felt obliged to look after a strange guest. She did not wish to be noticed, did not wish to play a part. She would gladly have attended this promiscuous gathering of the clans as a nonparticipating spectator—but a quite invisible one. For—quite mistakenly—she felt that everybody was staring at her and thinking rather uncomfortably that this serious, embarrassed and silent young lady did not belong. She was very grateful, therefore, when the strange and not very congenial looking man spoke to her, grateful that she could turn to him occasionally, if only so that the others might not think that she was waiting stiffly for somebody to befriend her.

The ugly man bent forward slightly. “My name is Eccarius,” he said. “We’ve been invited here very kindly, but unfortunately they’ve neglected to introduce us to one another.”

He smiled, and his smile was so kind, so indulgent that it captivated Myra at once.

“You shouldn’t say that,” she said, prepared to be indulgent on her side, too. “We can get along somehow this way.”

She mentioned her own name.

“May I?” He drew up a chair beside her. “Of course, we can get along, my dear Miss Rudloff! We are hidebound by too many outworn conventions. I envy these children their ease. They skip and frisk about, speak familiarly to one another, sharing all their secrets, and never dreaming how difficult it is for one of us to bridge the gap from individual to individual.”

By the word “us” Myra felt she had been recognized. No matter what pains she took, they realized that she was a stranger to this circle. She was not quite sure whether it was for better or for worse.

The pretty Giesbert was dancing before the large mirror. He had put on the corset over his gray jacket and was trying to pull it shut.

“My best corset!” screamed Mara Luigi in a rage. “You’re going to ruin it! You’re a beast! Take it off, I say, take it off!”

“You don’t need it,” said Giesbert laughing, “don’t try to act as if you’d ever worn one!”

He pinched her sides which caused her to squeak loudly.

Myra would not have admitted even to herself that she felt offended by his tone.

“How splendidly young these people are,” she said smiling at Eccarius. “I feel quite old and sour beside such children.”

“Children ...” repeated Eccarius with a strangely reserved expression as if his eyes were turned inward, “yes, perhaps—children....” Then he glanced at Myra again with his frank expression and his kindly smile.

“You must have had a very happy childhood.”

“Yes,” said Myra with complete conviction.

Myra recalled that she had learned to know struggle, unhappiness and suffering very young, that she had felt real hatred for Aunt Emily who had managed her upbringing with so much righteousness and so little understanding, that she was aware at an early age what it means to be jealous. And it seemed to her as if that period, a period when she was not yet quite ten years of age, no longer belonged to her childhood. Childhood had been those few years when a stream of happy love had bubbled up from her heart and had flowed forth without distinction toward whatever trees, animals, persons or dolls happened within range of her feelings.

At the moment when this stream of love had had to force its way over obstacles, when it was dried up in places which it had formerly enriched, leaving nothing but arid indifference or a swamp of hate—at that moment the idea of childhood seemed ended for Myra.

“Yes,” she said, again fastening her gaze on Eccarius, “a very happy childhood, but not a very long one. I have a feeling that I was awakened before most children—not that I was mature, I don’t want you to misunderstand me—I am not mature even today....”

“Who is?” asked Eccarius with his gentle smile.

“But I believe that I was awakened earlier than other children from the bliss of unconsciousness.”

“That is too bad.” Over his grave and clear gray eyes a veil, as of profound grief, seemed to be drawn. “It is a great pity, a great, great pity.”

Involuntarily Myra looked surprised, but he made an effort to explain his sympathy.

“You know whenever I see happy children, I always want to build walls and ramparts around them, so that they will remain as they are, will remain so for a long, long time. It is dreadful to think that one poisonous breath can change all the happiness of these little creatures into horrible pain.”

“Let him keep them,” cried little Kramer from his place on the floor, “let him keep them, if he can’t bear to part with the corsets! Every man has his passion, and there must be people who find corsets quite diverting.”

“You swine!” said Miss Lorenz and kicked his shoulder.

Giesbert had picked up a tulle hat with egret feathers and clapped it on his head. With one hand he held the corsets together across his stomach, with the other he clutched anxiously at the hat with every step, to keep it balanced.

“I’m going to wear this to the artists’ ball,” he announced in a tone of triumph, “I’ll be a sensation!” Suddenly he passed into falsetto. “Oh, no! I’ll be the fairest maid of all! Sugar-daddy will give me an education. If only I knew what for! I have so frightfully many talents!”

“Yes, yes,” cried little Miss Luigi meanwhile and skipped into the air, “the artists’ ball at Sophus’! Stand still a minute, you loathsome little darling! Tell me seriously, what are you going to wear? A costume or what? Come, put those things down, Giesbert, else you certainly won’t get a single glass of brandy!” She stamped on the floor for emphasis.

Giesbert pretended a terrified trembling and quaking while his knees shook as he put the articles on the bed.

Mara laughed and brought the bottle of brandy from the closet.

“I have only two glasses! Ring, will you, Erich?” she commanded.

“Oh, what’s the use,” said Miss Lorenz indifferently, without rising, “we’ll drink one after the other. If Emma brings glasses in here, she’ll report that we’re holding an orgy.”

“All right.” Mara Luigi rinsed the glasses in the wash-basin. She reached for a hand-towel, and Myra was somewhat shocked, thinking she was about to dry the glasses with it, but she merely wiped her finger-tips. She filled the glasses to the brim, and offered the first to Myra.

“Do you know what, Miss Rudloff?” she asked as she stood before her, “you must come with us tomorrow night, you really must.”

“I?” asked Myra frightened. “Where?”

“To the artists’ ball, of course! Probably you’ve never been to a really truly artists’ ball in all your life. But you must see one.” Myra did not feel the slightest inclination to accept. She even regretted having accepted the first invitation, instead of remaining in her room where she could shut out every disturbing sound, and take refuge from her own thoughts in quiet and clever books.

“But I don’t know the persons who are giving it at all,” she said helplessly. “Isn’t it strange?” she thought. “At home I should certainly have said, ‘The people,’ and have been sharply reprimanded by Aunt Emily. And here where ‘persons’ will be sure to strike everybody as affected, Aunt Emily’s good teachings burst forth for the first time in full flower.”

“Don’t know whom? Sophus and Nora?” asked Giesbert, checking his crazy behavior for a moment and speaking like a rational human being while, still out of breath, he smoothed his hair. “You don’t know them? Then you certainly will have to go there tomorrow for it’s high time that you did know them! A pair of splendid women, two of the most remarkable people I know! Would anybody like to take exception to that? If so, I challenge him to put on the gloves immediately.”

He rolled up his sleeves, drew his head between his shoulders, and bared his teeth.

“You need have no qualms about going,” said buxom Mrs. Breslauer in her somewhat unctuous voice. “I was lugged up there the first time positively _sans façon_, and was received charmingly, isn’t it true, Marakin, they were really perfectly charming.”

“Yes,” laughed little Kramer, “I really believe they never meet anybody except as their guest!”

“Is Gisela coming for us, or shall we see her there?” asked Miss Lorenz.

“Gisela,” thought Myra, “so she’s going to be there, too. I’ll really have to do it. The only alternatives I have are to bury myself like a hermit, or to take advantage of every opportunity to meet people and learn to know the world and human beings. Gisela! Here I sit trying in some way to meet her, and when I’m asked to make her acquaintance in the easiest way in the world, I haven’t the slightest desire, but only fear and shyness and aversion and a feeling that I’d like to creep away somewhere and be quiet.”

Eccarius must have read the inner struggle on her face. He bent forward slightly. “I think you can venture it,” he said in his very soothing way. “You will find a rare bouquet of people there. They will certainly distract and may even interest you. There are some really worthwhile characters among them. And if it becomes too lively for you, I shall undertake to bring you home at any time you wish.”

“So you will be there, too?” asked Myra, relieved.

He nodded.

“Yes, then I believe I can ‘venture it.’”

XI

While Myra was dressing to go to the artists’ ball, she was not conscious of any effort to beautify herself in order to attract attention, to please, to cause sensation. Indeed, she desired to attract as little attention as possible, and would have given a good deal to be invisible, or to watch the hubbub from a gallery or a darkened adjoining room.

She selected a very simple black taffeta dress quite void of color or boldness of line. Nevertheless, she could not prevent something striking in her appearance. Perhaps it was caused by the anticipation which flamed up in the depths of her lifeless eyes and which was in such sharp contrast to the gentle, almost colorless composure of her pale face.

* * * * *

As Myra took off her coat in the vestibule of the little villa and was at once surrounded by a throng of persons in fantastic costumes, and a throng of noises, her immediate thought was of escaping. She looked for little Mara Luigi who was raising waves of people about her. Perhaps no one would notice if she asked for her coat again and slipped quietly out the door. She glanced about, weighing the chances of flight, and encountered the eyes of Eccarius who stood directly behind her.

“Look around a bit first,” he said soothingly as if he had divined her thoughts, “and if it’s too much for you, give me a sign and I’ll take you home. I have no intention of staying here till daybreak myself.”

The rooms were large and bright, and so full of noisy people that Myra grew dizzy. A thin, bluish pall of smoke hung over the groups and spun in rings around the lamps. Faces stood out, impressed themselves on Myra’s mind, sharp and yet unreal, like visions in a fever—then disappeared again.

Eccarius remained at her side, pointing occasionally to someone whom she could not discover in the throng, or mentioning some name that she did not understand or could not catch because it had no meaning for her.

A tall, slender, beautiful girl passed them in a sort of page’s costume. Eccarius called to her and she stopped and greeted him. Myra had an opportunity to observe her. She wore black silk knee-breeches, white stockings, a jacket with lace cuffs, and had secured her dark, curling hair in a great black knot at her neck. Her features were clear and regular, a high and beautifully modelled forehead, and an almost challenging, free and bold expression which captivated Myra at first glance. She seemed to perceive that Myra did not feel quite at home in that tumult. She took her by the hand like a child.

“Come,” she said, half to Myra, half to Eccarius, “I’ll take this little girl to Nora. She is always ‘the pole of repose in the flux of appearances.’ You’ll feel much better with her. Good Lord!” She took Myra’s chin in her hand and turned her face to Eccarius. “Doesn’t she look like a little child on its first day at school? Come, baby; you shall have a place of honor.”

She forced her way through chattering, noisy groups. Everywhere the beautiful woman was called to, stopped, embraced, greeted, questioned. With a patience and affability that never altered she always managed to release herself again, but it took a quarter of an hour for Myra and her to cross two rooms.

At the end of the second room was a raised alcove on which, towering above the other chairs and a table with a charming cover, stood a Renaissance easy-chair, with high and very beautifully carved arms. In this arm-chair, standing out against its strawberry-red brocade as against a painted background, sat a very fair woman, dressed in white, softly flowing white veils over her shoulders, a soft white covering over her knees.

Myra was astounded at first sight by the beauty of this vision. On closer inspection she perceived that the woman in the chair had passed her fortieth birthday, that she was too buxom to be beautiful, that age and sickness had ravaged and obscured the once pure lines of her face. But the next moment, as Myra held her warm, matronly hand, and felt a smile of indescribably warming cordiality and kindness envelop her, she forgot all about beauty or ugliness, and surrendered without reserve to the mild fascination of this personality.

“Here, Norina.” The slender page laid her arm lightly across Myra’s shoulder. “Take this little girl under your protecting wings. Else she’ll be lost in the hubbub.”

Something in the words, the solicitude concealed by a gentle irony, recalled Olga so vividly that Myra wanted to howl like a whipped dog. She no longer seemed to see the bright room with its throngs of people and strange faces as through panes of glass. They seemed to crowd in upon her, somehow to break through those glass casements which she had set about her life. It was all too much after the silence and solitude of the last few weeks. She felt herself in a condition not unlike a violent attack of fever.

Myra had to smile when she saw a shade of concern pass over the fair face of the woman while the room seemed whirling about her. She felt a chair moved against her legs while she was forced to her seat by gentle but firm hands.

She was sitting on a low chair close beside the high arm-chair.

“There,” said the dark-toned voice behind her. “Now if it’s too bright, or too loud, or too gay for you, just lay your little head against the arm of my chair and creep under my veil. That’s what I always do.”

Obediently, Myra nestled her cheek against the arm of the high chair and felt the veil being drawn over her head. A gentle scent of mignonette emanated from the soft, filmy silk.

Nora turned to Myra. “You mustn’t imagine that it’s always as gay here as it is tonight. You must come sometime when we are more intimate, more quiet. We have a nice little garden which is our real joy. Just as long as it is possible, we take tea out there and love to have someone keep us company.”

“Yes, when the flag is up!” laughed the young person on the step, turning with a jerk. “You ought to know that we do here as at court. When their majesties are at home, the flag is hoisted!”

“You ought to explain, Will,” Nora amended, “just how it is done. On the roof of the arbor there is something like a little flag-staff _en miniature_, with a gay little pennant on it. You can see it from all sides, even in front, if you are passing the house.

“But if Sophie has to work very hard, or I am not feeling particularly well, we haul in the little flag. Then no one, at least none of the initiates, needs trouble to come to the door simply to be turned away. For, of course, that’s always painful to both sides. For those who have to interrupt their work or control their illness, and are disagreeable hostesses anyway; or for those who feel like disturbers of the peace. If they are really turned away, they usually think, ‘Well, they might have made an exception in my case,’ or, ‘They did not have to have the maid tell me.’ Most of them are habituated to the lie they tell themselves: There is no one at home. That someone should be working never seems a sufficient excuse for them.

“But all our friends know that I never leave the house and Sophie very rarely. So the little flag is there to avoid any unpleasantness. When it is unfurled that means, ‘Please come in, we’re expecting you.’ Then there’s no need even to come through the house, for everyone who wishes can enter by the garden-gate, or if it should be locked can jump the hedge, eh, Will?”

But Will had sprung up and motioned with his hand without even glancing back, for he was staring intently into the room where a circle was gathering around a dancing couple.

“Fiametta is dancing,” he called back, with a hasty turn of his head, “the woman is marvellous! You must see her!”

Quite youthful in his impetuousness, he seized Myra by the elbow and dragged her from her chair to the step.

“I ask you, have you ever seen anything like that in all your life? Isn’t she dazzling? Isn’t she perfect?”

In the rather narrow circle which the crowding spectators had left free, a slender, well-built young man was dancing with a woman of refined beauty and great charm. She was so perfectly at one with the music that its tones seemed to emanate from her supple body.

She had a manner of dancing such as Myra had never before seen. Her movements were gentle, cool, subdued, noble and almost solemn. At the same time it seemed as if the beautiful girl consumed a vast reserve of strength in compelling her symmetrical body to maintain its dignified repose, as if it would have required only a moment’s forgetfulness for that bridled temperament to leap up like a flame, for those soft, relaxed muscles to turn to steel and impel her sinewy body through the air, like a wild beast springing on its prey.

Myra felt a kind of painful, burning sensation at the sight of her, and when she sought, with her habitual honesty, to account for it, she decided that it was envy. A thousand appraising glances could never embarrass this woman: it would have been no task for her to cross a crowded dining-room to her table.

“Isn’t she marvellous?” said the young man beside Myra, aglow with enthusiasm, “isn’t she fascinating? Isn’t it just as if she stepped out of another century? Out of a century when there were still beautiful women, beautiful women who left the stamp of their personality on their environment, the courts, the city, the arts!”

Myra nodded silently. She would have been glad had he kept silent, too, for she wanted to know what was being said behind her. She could hear Nora’s quiet, gentle voice.

“Certainly, she is very beautiful, Ulrich. She has breeding, temperament and culture, everything one could wish, but she is a little strange to me, and a little strange she will always remain. Perhaps it will sound very silly and sentimental to you if I say that she has no heart. But I really believe that she has not even the most elementary sort of kindliness....”

Myra could not catch what Ulrich might have objected. But she heard Nora’s reply.

“No, Ulrich, I cannot agree with you. A woman without kindliness is something without charm, without fragrance for me, no matter if she is as beautiful as your Fiametta. Oh, yes, I know you have a foible for her, and forgive in her everything that you would never forgive in another. Of course, no one is obliged to love simply because she is loved by another. But then one should not arouse feelings in others if one has no use for them....”

“Oh, that! Yes, she does do that! And not in one case only—in hundreds of cases. And she keeps right on doing it! She completely ruined poor little Miss Bernhardt, she drove Erwin half mad, and she’s destroying Gisela now—for the mere diversion!”

At the name of Gisela Myra started. So this was the woman for whose sake Gisela’s life was being destroyed—poor Gisela! Oh, Myra knew only too well that it is possible to be destroyed for a woman’s sake! Her heart burned with anger and pity, with painful recollection and a desire to help, to alleviate, to save.

She had not another glance to spare for the beautiful woman. Her eyes sought Gisela, and found her on the opposite side of the room, her shoulders hunched over, the inevitable cigarette between her lips, staring into space with an expression of complete abstraction. Myra chose a moment when Mara Luigi was approaching Gisela, to turn to Nora and excuse herself.

“If you will pardon me, I should like to say a word to Miss Luigi.”

Nora’s tone seemed to veil a mild astonishment. “Ah, you know her? Are you friends?”

Myra felt a sudden redness invade her cheeks and forehead.

“Yes.... No ... that is, we stay at the same pension,” she said somewhat embarrassed.

She forced a path for herself along the walls, fearing all the while that little Mara would have stopped talking to Gisela by the time she reached her. She felt that she was committing a deed of great daring. She had a feeling, almost of homesickness, for the low seat beside the soft, concealing veil; she thought of herself as a half-fledged bird that has abandoned its nest to make a flight into the world.

But a fierce impulse drove her forward.