Part 16

“Good night,” she said, laying her hand tenderly and discreetly against Gisela’s cheek for a moment. It was as if she were speaking to a little child. “Sleep tight.”

* * * * *

Myra intended to lie down on her divan.

Though it was still early in the afternoon, she had lighted the lamp and drawn the curtains in order not to have to see how the endless autumnal rain poured down the gray walls of the buildings opposite.

She had heaped up cushions and covers on the divan, moved a chair within reach on which was a pile of books. The afternoon would be long and she wished to have no cause to get up again. Neither did she want to drown herself hour after hour in one book. So she had collected a half dozen books with the pleasurable foretaste of a gourmand preparing himself for an exceptional repast.

On the little glass-topped table at the head of the divan, she set cigarettes, chocolate and a vase with a few pale pink, pungent carnations that she had bought in town.

But no sooner had she lain down, drawn a light cover over her feet, and reached for the topmost book when there came a knock on the door.

“Why didn’t I lock the door,” she thought for a moment in vexation. “If I had, I would certainly never move. Whoever is there could rattle it as much as he likes.”

But when in response to her “Come in!” Gisela opened the door, she was really glad.

“Oh, how nice it is here!” cried Gisela before she had even said good day. “No, for Heaven’s sake, don’t jump up from there, or I’ll run right off again. You’ve made yourself so nice and cozy, don’t let me get you up. I was going to see Mara Luigi, but she isn’t home, and I wanted to have a look at your room. Heavens, how spick and span we are—my room never looks like this even on high holidays.”

“If you don’t want me to get up,” said Myra with a smile—she was resting on one elbow, the cover in her other hand, still in the act of springing up—“you’ll have to come here. Otherwise I’ll have to put on the light and settle you solemnly in an easy-chair.”

“No, no, I’m coming.” Gisela ran to the divan, pressed Myra back against the cushions and drew the cover up about her chin.

“Do you want to go to sleep, my love? Shall I sing you to sleep and then steal out on tiptoe? Sleep, little baby, sleep!” She knelt on one knee on the divan, clasped Myra about her shoulders and rocked her to and fro.

Myra experienced a slight and not at all unpleasant dizzying sensation.

“Don’t,” she said with her eyes closed, “I’m getting dizzy.”

She felt the rocking movement stop, and at the same time a gentle breath, and soft lips brush very lightly, very tenderly, over her forehead, her cheeks, her eyelids.

It was pleasant, but she resisted this pleasant sensation.

“I don’t love her,” she thought obstinately. “I did not desire her lips—this is the way an animal must feel when it is stroked.”

The soft lips ceased to brush her face and Gisela crouched down on the divan. Quite irrelevantly she pointed to the flowers. “Who sent you the lovely carnations?” she asked.

Myra turned her head to follow Gisela’s gesture with her eyes.

“I did,” she smiled.

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? I bought them myself this morning.”

“That’s strange!” Gisela shook her head. “Are you expecting a visitor?”

“No, why?”

“Because that would be the only reason I’d ever buy flowers for my room.”

“In fact, I bought them because I expected to be alone.”

“It’s very nice of you not to say ‘because I hoped....’”

Myra smiled. “Well then, because I feared I would be alone.”

“That’s just a polite lie,” said Gisela. “Anyhow, I’m thankful that I’m at least worth a lie to you. For I think you don’t lie very often.”

“I don’t know.” Myra reflected seriously. “I think that I lied a good deal as a child, at least as long as I was in the hands of my mentors. But it was cheerless and unimaginative living. I never had much talent at thinking up interesting tales. It was more a kind of denying, very persistent and obstinate.”

“Lying and denying—there are worlds between. You are quite right. But when a child denies, everybody says, it’s lying, or it’s deceiving. And all the while it’s probably just ashamed, or stubborn, or bewildered. I was treated so terribly when I was a child. Why don’t you have children? You’d certainly make a fine, understanding mother.”

“I’ve never thought about it.” Myra shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve always imagined that every mother is good and understanding. But that may very well be because I never knew my own mother.”

Gisela laughed bitterly. “I wish I’d never known mine either!”

Myra was shocked and seized Gisela’s hand. “It sounds dreadful when you talk that way! Was she so bad?”

“Bad? Oh, no, not just bad.” There was a note of forced lightness in her voice. “She was a worthy, efficient, excellent woman. Too worthy and efficient for my father. He left her and two years later hanged himself. And since I resembled him (naturally I couldn’t do anything about it; after all, she chose him for a husband, I didn’t choose him for a father)—but because I resembled my father’s family, my mother felt that I was hereditarily tainted in advance. You know, there are people—and my mother was one of them—who are so moral that they sniff immorality everywhere. We had to sleep with our hands outside the quilt, and if we forgot in our sleep, and my mother came in to check up, she’d tear the covers off the bed. I swear, I never once knew why she did it.”

Myra did not know either, but she did not ask, because she was ashamed to confess her ignorance, and furthermore she suspected that an explanation might be painful.

“That was the beginning.” Gisela sprang up and began to pace restlessly to and fro, with noiseless steps, on the thick carpet. “And it went on that way. At fourteen I had my first rendezvous. It was with a boy from dancing-school, a little fellow who was, if possible, more innocent and idealistic than myself. When this transgression came to light, I was subjected to a terrifying inquisition. Had we kissed, did we put our arms around one another, and when and where and how. These possibilities were first brought to my attention in this way....

“The same thing at school. Near the school there was a stationery store where we used to buy our copy-books. The man had picture post-cards in his window—among others a nude woman, the reproduction of some masterpiece or other. A terrible case was made out of that post-card. Investigation finally brought out which of the girls had stood in front of the shop-window. Parents and pupils together descended on the shop-keeper and forced him to remove all offensive pictures from his window. It became a real sport with us to buy pictures of nudes—during the Bible reading they circulated under the desks with inscriptions and observations. The contagion spread to the whole class, but they had first been inoculated with the virus, and at considerable pains, too.

“In a few among us, perhaps in many, there may have been a painfully repressed, immature sensuality. But children are by no means as shameless as adults—they are much more afraid of being shocked. But the general discussion of the ‘immoral picture’ removed all obstacles. Now everybody talked to everybody else about ‘it.’

“I resisted. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. It may be that I resisted out of timidity, because I felt that this thing, which was just a joke to the rest of the children, might become fate to me. Do you know how children act in such cases? Oh, so cruelly, so lustfully, so sadistically! Because I resisted, I was pursued, the whole class was in a conspiracy against me. I had to see what I didn’t want to see, hear what I didn’t want to hear, do what I didn’t want to do. I was driven to a pass from which I never again escaped.”

She folded her hands and wrung her fingers so that the bones cracked as if the thin wrists were going to snap.

“No, how can anybody buy herself flowers like that?” she said suddenly, standing before the carnations. “Why do you do it? Were you thinking of somebody to whom you wanted to give them? But didn’t—perhaps, well, because you happened to be put out with one another just then?”

“I have no one in the world to whom I might give flowers,” said Myra bitterly, “unless it is a grave, and that’s too far away.”

She did not know herself how she came to say it. She blushed violently at the thought that she was opening her heart, an error which she forgave in others with a certain condescending indulgence, but which she hated so intensely that she would be upset for weeks if she caught herself at it.

But perhaps it was not even a need to open her heart. Perhaps it was worse. Perhaps it was the desire—though still quite unconscious—to drape herself with this holy, destructive sorrow, to endow herself with a new mystical charm in the eyes of this ... this....

It seemed as if Gisela divined the feeling. She had started as if she meant to throw herself upon Myra, to overwhelm her with sympathy and comfort and affection—but checked herself and sat hunched over on the end of the divan, her head bowed, her hands folded.

“Promise me one thing,” she said softly with a quality in her voice as of joylessness which nothing could ever animate again. “When I am dead, put flowers on my grave. Not at my funeral and not a large bought wreath.

“I like to imagine how I’ll receive visits, how I’ll lie there and sleep. I love graveyards so—generally those that are a little run down. I don’t want any well-groomed gaudy grave—but a gray stone, half sunk already and half overgrown with ivy. Then the beautiful woman in the white dress who stops before it will think of me for a moment, not with grief, but with a gentle melancholy, and will strew a handful of flowers over me. I’ll feel them, oh, make no mistake, I’ll feel them!”

Myra sat up and taking her by both shoulders, shook her.

“Child!” she said. “Are you asking _me_ to do that? I’ll hand on the commission to my grandchild! By the time that stone has sunken on your grave, my ashes will have long been scattered by the wind.”

“How long does it take a stone to sink?” asked Gisela in such a comically impatient and plaintive tone that Myra laughed aloud.

“But you’re not dead and buried yet,” she said consolingly.

“Unfortunately,” Gisela said in a lifeless voice but with suddenly flashing eyes. There was bitterness in the words.

Again Myra felt a slight aversion. “She has no right to say that,” she thought. “She certainly can’t have suffered so terribly.... But then, who can estimate what gives another the right to desperation? Perhaps it is much harder to struggle against one’s self than against fate.”

Her objection melted and she felt only a warm but helpless pity. With timid hands she began to stroke the soft, tangled, dark hair from the white forehead before her. Those burning eyes were shut, while on that narrow face appeared the expression of quiet, yearning bliss.

As Gisela sat motionless, without breathing, as if her pulse had stopped in her veins, Myra experienced a weird sensation.

“Open your eyes,” she commanded in a frightened voice. “I suppose it’s this devilish violet light, but you look like a marble death mask.”

The long lids opened heavily. The wide-open eyes were a lightless deep abyss to which life and vision returned gradually.

“Believe me, little Myra,” she said with her soft ailing child’s voice, “I will soon be dead.”

“What do the words ‘be dead’ mean to you?” asked Myra timidly.

“A deep, cool, undisturbed repose.” She closed her eyes, and immediately her face resembled a marble mask again.

“Eternal rest. Even in my childhood the words were like a melody, a sweet mysterious seductive song. I heard it the first time when I was quite small and had no ideas about it. It was a characteristic expression of my mother. This or that person had gone to his eternal rest. And it has never forsaken me, I have always longed to go to my eternal rest.”

In her high voice was a sustained disembodied tone.

There was a sparkle and glitter under those dark eyelashes that were like shadows on her face, and several pearly drops trickled down.

Myra kept both her hands clasped around Gisela’s blue-veined temples.

“No,” she said, without herself knowing what that “no” might mean. “No, no, no!”

The lids were raised like a curtain, and the tear-filled eyes in which the light was refracted, seemed larger and more burning than ever.

“No,” said Gisela. “No, no, no! Still no eternal rest, little Myra, sweet, beautiful little Myra! Life streams from your finger-tips, life flowers from your lips, life gleams from your eyes. I feel as if I were already dead, and you were saying to me: ‘Arise and walk!’ Oh, how hard it must be to rise up and leave a cool and narrow coffin because it pleases some miracle-maker!

“I am dead, little Myra, I have died of a mortal sickness that is called Fiametta. If you would bewitch the dead, little sorceress, you must nourish them with your own blood, but that you know. If I am to live, I must imbibe your blood.”

The slender hands fastened like talons in Myra’s shoulder, forcing her back on the cushions. Supine above her, lay Gisela’s light muscular body, close to her own hovered Gisela’s white face with the burning eyes.

Fear, horror, aversion, pity, tenderness and the infatuating throb of her own and another’s blood, whirled in a mad maelstrom that engulfed all thought in its brightly foaming depths.

XIII

Myra was glad to get out on the street. The keen east wind and the rain mixed with hail cut her face and felt good to her. She walked so fast that Gisela found it too difficult to keep up.

She felt as if she were being grievously insulted on all sides, and as if she might avenge herself by letting the rain lash her as she hurried through the cold dark night.

* * * * *

Myra and Eccarius walked down a street that echoed with the cold and was feathered with a fine frost.

“Did you wonder,” asked Eccarius, “why I spoke so ostentatiously about my friends at the table? It was because I have had a little dispute with Miss Peters. Miss Peters is really a splendid person, but somewhat strict in her judgments. Or I should rather say, is somewhat limited in her understanding of things. What she doesn’t understand she tosses all together into one pot and damns eternally. And among such understandable things, of course, is included a friendship like that of Sophie and Nora. She flung about words like abnormal and perverse and unnatural, and intimated that it was no place for you!”

“For me?” Myra was astonished. “How on earth did you come to be talking of me?”

“To be quite frank, we began with you,” Eccarius explained with a laugh that pleaded for forgiveness. “Yes, yes, one never knows how important one is to others or what interesting conversation one makes. Seriously, we never know who our enemies are or who is going to pick us to pieces next. Conversely, we don’t know our friends either or who is looking out for our weal and woe.

“Miss Peters has a heart of gold and she is concerned about you. She was explaining to me today that it is my duty to open your eyes for you. But if I were to open your eyes about Sophie and Nora, with the best will in the world I could only tell you that they are splendid people.”

“Nora told me recently that she had known you a long time,” said Myra with a gently insistent effort to turn the conversation from herself.

“A very long time.” She sighed with relief as Eccarius changed the subject. “I knew her when she was still the beautiful Nora Zeyern, the most popular of dancers, the most daring of riders! She had hundreds of suitors, and, out of those hundreds, of course, she had to pick Hersfeld!”

He stopped for a moment with a bitter laugh.

“He was diseased, wasn’t he?” asked Myra.

“Oh, if you know that much, there’s no indiscretion in my telling you more. He was ‘cured’ so-called, as he used proudly to relate to anyone who wanted or did not want to listen to him. But not to his wife and her family.”

“Hersfeld was an oldest son and he wanted an heir. And an heir did arrive, but it was covered with pimples from the day it was born. What that most maternal of women suffered with that child can never be told. And all of us, his so-called friends, we looked at the child and looked at one another and knew that it would never be anything else but a child. But not one of us dared say a word to the young mother. Meanwhile she hoped and hoped and cherished the unhappy little worm, rejoicing at the tiniest sign of progress. There wasn’t much progress to rejoice at.

“At an age when other children were running around, shouting and crowing, he would lie on his pillow, hardly turning his head when someone shook something bright before his eyes. ‘He’ll be a thinker,’ Nora said then, and smiled, a heart-rending smile. But when at four years he could not speak a word, and would merely utter an incoherent babble, she hid him and hid herself from the world. She never left her own house, she received no one. She shut herself and her child in the most impenetrable solitude. She still cherished him, played with him, strove tirelessly and futilely to make something human out of him.

“But Mr. Hersfeld needed an heir. In another six months, the unhappy woman was once more in hope—Oh, God, she really did hope.

“At this point a friendly doctor took the matter in hand. That is to say, he let fall a careless, but honestly indignant word about the irresponsibility of bringing babies into the world. And when she questioned him and would not let him go, he asked in great astonishment if she really did not know what was wrong with her child. And since she did not, he told her. Certainly he was entirely within his rights in doing so. But he reproached himself bitterly afterwards. For that very day Nora was hurt by a fall from a hay-loft, and suffered such severe internal injuries that she was never well again. Whereupon Hersfeld procured a divorce!”

“Is he still alive?” asked Myra.

“Why? You made a face when you asked me that as though you intended to kill him if he were. But you can rest easy—he is dead. He came to quite a dramatic end, or rather, his end had quite a dramatic beginning. Imagine, that man intended to marry a second time after he divorced Nora! A beautiful innocent young girl from one of the best families. You have no idea what qualms of conscience Nora suffered at that time. She knew the bride, she knew her parents, and she knew particularly Hersfeld, her former husband. But despite the fact that she knew him so well, she must still have loved him. Somewhere in the innermost recesses of her heart were still the ruins of a strong passion. And it seemed a crime to her to accuse the man. Besides, everybody would have called it an act of petty revenge. On the other hand, it would be a far greater crime to let the poor girl make such a marriage out of ignorance.”

“Good God!” said Myra, “did she do it?”

“Nora was so helpless, she could scarcely move, and the situation was further complicated by the fact that the girl had already been in love with Hersfeld while he was married, and regarded his wife, if not hostilely, at least with suspicion. Nora has often told me that in her desperate dilemma she used to pray for a miracle.

“And the miracle happened. The wedding did not take place—the bridegroom did not appear. When they went to fetch him, he hid himself in the stable and began shooting with his revolver. At last he was overpowered and taken to an institution. He lived a few months longer subject to delusions of persecution and raving madness. Then he died. Softening of the brain. When the cause of his death became known, one of his former cronies observed that it was the first time anyone suspected Hersfeld of having a brain.”

They walked on a while in silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts.

Then Eccarius looked up with sudden resolution. Once more his face was irradiated by that fugitive, friendly smile.

“But you have got me off my subject very insidiously. I’ve told you a long story, but not a word about what I was instructed to tell you. And not only instructed, what I want to tell you of my own free will....”

“Must you?” asked Myra with imploring eyes. “Do you really believe there is anything you can tell me? I know that you mean well by me, and I am grateful to you for it. But I feel so strongly—perhaps because I am so young and have just come of age—that only I can help myself and that I must help myself. I know that I will not always find the best and the shortest way, and I haven’t even any goal, or only insofar as it may be a goal to want to know life whole, as far as it is possible for a woman to do so, its light and its shadowy sides, its merits and demerits. Just as one gets to know a person—whom one loves!”

“If you love life,” said Eccarius with an accommodating persistence, “you must approach it very discreetly. And if you have no goal, or only the desire to see as much as possible in the paths of your own selecting, then you should be careful not to end up in a blind alley from which there is no escape. Don’t be angry with me, but I have been guilty of watching you on the quiet. I’ve seen you twice a day at least in the last two months. In the course of the years I have acquired some little knowledge of people, and the impression you make is not that of a person who loves life, but of one who is not afraid of death.”

Myra was already ringing the door-bell, and she turned to him.

“Is that a contradiction? Can’t one do both—love life and not be afraid of death? Perhaps they belong together. I will make it my motto and write it large over all my days and ways—‘Love life and be not afraid of death.’”

“I know a still better motto,” said Eccarius, “it is possible to turn the sentence about. Then I will make it my motto.”