Part 20

Sometimes she would find a touching and painful pleasure in imaging that Olga was still living and would suddenly appear in these circles. Among these elegant, assured and clever women, she would be the most elegant, the most assured, the cleverest. If she but wished, she would succeed in ravishing this cool, reserved and self-conscious company in half an hour.

But the more clearly she had visualized the picture of the living Olga, the more her remembrance had paled in the last few months. Now and again it seemed to her like the giddy whirl of carnival night, and she was convinced that no one had a right to discuss a confidence of that time, any more than one had a right to remind a lady in the sober light of day that one had kissed her under her mask at the carnival carouse.

Myra had taken off her mask and costume. She was once more Myra Rudloff, and it would have been tactless to allude to any fugitive half forgotten connections.

So completely was she Myra Rudloff that she sometimes wondered if there were not someone of her own name to whom she could attach herself or whom she could attach to herself.

So weary was she of her young freedom.

Or perhaps of its restriction.

If she had an older relative with her, she could take lodgings and live more according to her taste. For, of course, it was forbidden her to live alone, just as she must not stay at a hotel, and just as there were a very few pensions, coffee-houses, restaurants and even streets that she might frequent.

Sometimes it struck her as absurd when people said in quite shocked voices, “Good Heavens, you mustn’t go there. One can see that you’re a stranger here!”

But she always acquiesced. She knew too well that she herself had lost her standards. For a while she had thought defiantly that she was old and stable enough to permit herself any associates, any book, any manner of life. Then she had found out that she could not swim in the troubled, swirling waters into which she had plunged. When she was close to drowning her pride had forsaken her and she was submissive and grateful that a firm hand had pulled her out.

She no longer felt secure. She had thought she could plunge into the sea without danger—now she was glad when expert hands prepared her bath for her.

Sometimes she was slightly embarrassed when an astonished glance rested upon her because she let slip that she had read a book, or seen a play which were strictly forbidden to young ladies of “her station.”

Sometimes she had to fight down a free and easy manner that had become so natural to her in the last few months that she noticed nothing improper in it.

Sometimes she thought almost with gratitude of Aunt Emily. At least she had taught Myra how to hold her knife and fork, and it would have been bad had she had to pay attention to such details and live in fear of violating etiquette. But in all matters of form, her “good training” had become blood of her blood.

From time to time she was in doubt as to whether a young lady of good family might go alone to the opera, or might be invited by an acquaintance whom she had met in the city to partake of a tart in a pastry-shop. Then she would think in a flash, “What would Aunt Emily say in so difficult a dilemma?” And as Aunt Emily averred nearly everything to be unseemly, reprehensible and immoral, Myra could feel in obeying her that she was leading a blameless-life, even in the eyes of the sternest critic.

She had already considered if the most sensible course were not simply to summon Aunt Emily. Then she would have the infallible oracle in all matters of propriety at her elbow. She could rent a house, take the furniture out of storage, have a home, receive visitors, give little parties. Besides, there was no occasion for contentions of any sort. Even Aunt Emily could have nothing to say against her present associates.

Myra was tamed. It made quite a difference whether one viewed the world, the blooming laughing world, always from the inside of a cage, against whose bars one continually batted one’s head and wings in an effort to escape, if just for once. Or whether one were flying back, tired out at evening, somewhat scratched and ruffled, to steal voluntarily into the comfortable cage and find refuge there.

Of course, the door would always remain open now, Myra was of age.

Instantly she recalled that she had come of age a few months too late. Otherwise Olga Radó would still be living, living with her, free at last of all cares and debts and worries, in a beautiful cozy home such as she had always wanted. She would be alive and happy, her laugh would still ring out for the world’s delight—and her bell-toned voice, and her beautiful proud face and her delicate, strong hands. Yes, none of these would have been destroyed, annihilated, extinguished—had there been no Aunt Emily.

And hate blazed up in Myra again like a red flame.

The voices from the tennis court drew nearer. White flannels flashed amongst the blackish-red foliage of a purple-beech and the golden-yellow leaves of a maple. The first pair turned the corner, passed the rose-trellis, and approached the terrace—Gwen and Fred Wietinghoff.

Mrs. Peters smiled in greeting to her beautiful daughter. The smile still further revealed her long prominent, rather uneven teeth, stopped with all kinds of fillings, embellished with specks of white porcelain, encircled with threads of gold as fine as a hair. Her teeth were the same color as the big dull gray pearl in her beautifully shaped ear and gave the same impression of some infinitely fragile, infinitely precious object which must be preserved at any price and with the most tender solicitude. Without the teeth her regular, somewhat withered but haughty features, crowned by a pile of carefully waved blonde hair carefully restrained by a net, regardless of fashion, might almost have been called handsome.

She smiled proudly and complacently. She had every right to.

Myra was delighted anew by the lovely firm way in which Gwen set down her tiny foot with its springy ankle, and by the slender firm body under its white dress, and the curly hair glistening and fluttering in the sunlight.

The sight of her filled Myra’s heart with a buoyant delight—but it did not throb faster by a single beat.

She was just as pleased to see Fred Wietinghoff, who was walking beside Gwen. He was much taller than she, broad-shouldered, and narrow in the hips, all the contours of his muscles showing under his silk shirt. He looked like a twenty-year-old. But when the light fell on his face, a network of sharp little wrinkles was visible in his clear, golden brown skin around his eyes and mouth, and a few white threads in his smooth metallic blond hair, at the temples.

But she was pleased, too, when she saw Vandahl whose eager eyes were seeking out his young wife from a distance, and blinking a greeting to her.

And she was pleased when she saw Henry Rantzau and young Lucius appear behind the others, plunged as deeply in conversation, which the younger man was accompanying with sweeping gestures, as if they were strolling somewhere across a lonely field, and not going to meet a group of people who were expecting and watching them.

“My dears, I’m dying of thirst!” It was Gwen’s first utterance as she took the last steps of the terrace at a bound.

She ran to the tea-wagon behind Myra, and poured raspberry juice and ice water into a cut-glass goblet.

With the utmost composure, Fred took the goblet from her as she was about to carry it to her lips and drained it at a draught.

“What is the meaning of that?” she asked amazed and angry.

“I’m sacrificing myself for you again,” he said with unshakable equanimity. “I’ve warned you against inflaming your lungs. I beg you, when you are thirsty, drink tea. May I pour you a cup?”

“I _will_ drink water!” Gwen stamped her foot in annoyance. “Give me that carafe, I’m dying of thirst!”

“You won’t die of thirst for some time yet,” replied Fred. “You’re really hardly thirsty at all, but since you’ve never suffered from thirst in your life you have no standards by which to judge. Drink a cup of lukewarm tea, it will be very good for you.”

“But I don’t want lukewarm tea,” said Gwen between laughter and anger. “I drink hot tea in winter and ice water in summer. I’m going to drink water and if I get inflammation of the lungs, it’s no concern of yours.”

“Good heavens,” said Fred pityingly, “what a little sixteen-year-old! You’re not so young any more that you make yourself ‘cute’ that way. Probably you think it’s very romantic to toss off a glass of ice water in a fit of youthful impetuosity when you’re overheated with playing, and then be carried off by inflammation of the lungs in the flower of your youth.” He was sitting on the arm of a basket-chair, swinging his foot in its heelless shoe. “Inflammation of the lungs is a horrid malady with phlegm and spittle—not in the least poetic. In fact, there is no poetic sickness.” He straightened his shoulders slightly. “Only health is poetic, but everything from a saber cut to typhus is prosaic and disgusting and mostly connected with bad smells.”

“Oh, Fred, you’re disgusting.” She turned her back on him. “You’re positively not fit to enter a drawing-room. I’m going to tell your mother so.”

“She’ll think you’re slandering me!” He smiled complacently and somewhat mischievously. “She knows you can’t bear me.”

Vandahl had moved a stool beside his young wife’s chair. Myra observed how his big well-formed hands caressed the folds of her dress stealthily.

A radiant stream of tenderness was constantly playing on him from her soft brown eyes.

Myra was a little anxious on her account. She looked so happy, and apparently worshipped her husband so idolatrously. If only she had finished with her hours of pain! The wish burned in Myra’s heart like a mute prayer.

Rantzau and Lucius were leaning against the stone balustrade. Myra could catch disjointed fragments of their conversation when the others were silent.

“Why not? The electrons that are thrown off by the so-called cathode rays have a velocity of something like a quarter of a million kilometer seconds.”

It was Rantzau’s deep, vibrant voice.

Gwen seated herself on the arm of Myra’s chair and put her arm around her shoulders.

“Protect me, Myra,” she said, “everybody makes me angry and seems horrid to me. You are the only person here whom I really like!”

“Oh, Gwen,” Myra smiled up at her, “it’s a good thing that you don’t have to cross any bridges tonight!”

Gwen’s face grew serious. “I’ll kill somebody yet,” she said as if she were telling a fairy-tale, “and I’ll bury the corpse in a cellar and steal everything valuable and bury that in the forest. Then I’ll go somewhere, to the courts, to the police or the senate and tell everything. Then everybody will laugh and pity me and say, ‘Poor child, she has a fever, she’s delirious—that’s Mr. Peters’ little daughter! get a car, and take the youngster home, her mother ought to pack her off to bed, she’s got the measles.’ And then the bailiff or an officer will take me home so that nothing may happen to me on the way. Oh, Myra have you had any of the short-cake? Deuli makes them simply divine! They make life worth living. But I’ve never yet been able to eat enough of them. I’ve stipulated that when I get married I want you to give me a bath-tub full of short-cakes. And on my wedding-day I’ll eat short-cake from morning till night. Eat something, Myra—I really believe that you live on air and love.”

“On air perhaps,” said Fred dryly, “as far as I can judge your consumption of the other so-called popular commodity, I couldn’t last a week on your rations.”

Myra took good care not to understand his remark.

“I’d like to live on air,” she said, breathing in the breeze that came from the garden. Despite the fragrance of the roses, it was strong and sharp and smelled a little of the sea. “On pure fresh air!”

XVII

Myra sat beside Gwen in the car.

“My hair looks something terrible, doesn’t it?” said Gwen. “If mamma sees me like this, she’ll begin to lecture me. How do you manage to keep your hair in place? You danced too! Mamma would be delighted with you. In fact, mamma likes you a whole lot. She’s always holding you up to me as a model. But even that doesn’t make me dislike you. I’m really quite smitten with you, really—but I think you don’t like me.”

Myra laid her arms lightly around her shoulder.

“Silly little Gwen,” she said, smiling. “You don’t know what you’re chattering.”

“That’s nice,” said Gwen, cuddling up to her like a little kitten, “leave your arm there, it feels nice. I know very well what I’m talking about. Mamma always says ‘Don’t talk, you’re dizzy with dancing,’ because she insists that I talk so much nonsense after a dance—more than usual. But I’m really not dizzy with dancing, and I know that I like you a lot, and I know too that you don’t like me. And you don’t contradict me either, you’re much too honest for that. You say, ‘Don’t talk nonsense, little Gwen,’ which is what people always tell little children when they happen to hit on the truth. But I don’t want to embarrass you. Your eyes look very sad now because you don’t know how you’re going to get out of this mess.”

“I was thinking,” said Myra honestly, “that you are a very charming little creature and that I like you very much indeed—and that nevertheless I disavowed you today and said you were not my friend.”

“At the table,” said Gwen seriously, “I felt it. But it doesn’t make me angry with you.” She smiled. “You oughtn’t to admit it either, if you want to keep in the good graces of my dear Henry. Did he tell you what a beast I am?”

“He said nothing at all,” replied Myra, shocked. “How on earth did you know that I said it to Rantzau?”

“Because I know _him_!” said Gwen triumphantly. “He hates me like—like sin would hardly be the proper expression. But I know he does, and I know why.”

By these words and by the expression of Gwen’s face Myra felt somewhat repelled. “She’s like every other woman,” she thought contemptuously. “She thinks that Henry Rantzau hates her because he loves her and she doesn’t love him! Now she’ll tell me that she broke with him on some occasion. It’s the only thing that these little creatures can get through their heads.”

“Shall I tell you why your friend hates me?” A thousand little imps were dancing on Gwen’s face.

“If you like,” said Myra somewhat coolly.

“I’ve taken his friend away from him!”

“What does that mean—taking a friend away? Can a woman take a man’s friend away from him?”

“From Henry? Oh, yes! For he wants his friend all to himself, hair and hide, body and soul. Don’t try to pretend, dear little Miss Innocence, that you haven’t noticed what the whole town knows!”

“Strange,” Myra shook her head, “all that a town knows!”

“Stranger yet is all that it doesn’t know!” said Gwen with a laugh. “All that goes on in its midst without anybody’s suspecting it. But Rantzau is known because he’s a public menace. He has an influence over young men that is nothing short of uncanny. He’s always got a circle around him that idolizes him. And I don’t like that....”

“You mean when somebody else is idolized?” teased Myra.

“Yes, exactly,” declared Gwen defiantly. “That one thing I can’t stand at all is to see a man idolized by men. I don’t know if I can explain it, but you see the essential thing about human beings is their sex. The great two-fold division of all life—it’s not my own idea, of course. Later on there’s the division into races, with the races dividing into nations, the nations into classes and families, each of them struggling against the others. I am a bourgeois as compared with the nobility and an aristocrat as compared with the plebs. But first and foremost I am a woman in contrast to a man, and the most unpardonable insult that can be offered me is one to my sex. Don’t you understand that? If a man can’t see me because he worships another woman, that doesn’t wound my vanity. But a man for whom no woman is good enough, who prefers men, who is contemptuous of my whole sex—oh, it drives me almost insane with anger. Rantzau is incorruptible—I know that—but I lure away his favorites, one after the other. Ever since I could think, no, ever since I could feel, we’ve waged a bitter war. Do you know, Myra, sometimes it seems like a holy mission to me and not just an amusing game!” There was a strange light in her eyes, they blazed like blue jewels. “He loved Fred Reimer, for example, loved him insanely. But Fred is very happily married today. What do I get out of it? Well, sometimes when I see his wife, I think, ‘You owe it to me and you never even suspect it.’”

“What a queer mixture you are.” Myra looked at her, shaking her head reflectively. “A well-bred, sheltered girl and yet....”

“And yet? Go ahead and say it!”

“Oh, nothing. But tell me, how does it happen that your parents don’t notice anything—Henry Rantzau, for instance, whose reputation the whole town knows?”

“Don’t you know, Myra,” said Gwen with a superior smile, “that parents have an unerring eye only for what doesn’t exist?”

* * * * *

“I’m coming out directly,” called Gwen from behind the door of the bathroom where one could hear the splashing of water and the pelting of a shower. “Take a seat, Myra, and pick up a book! I’ll be ready in five minutes.”

“I have time,” said Myra quietly.

But Gwen wished to shorten her wait for her. “You’ll find something to look at. There’s a package on the table. I bought myself some stockings today. See if you don’t think they’re stunning. But you mustn’t open what’s under them, something flat in tissue paper. Ah, I’ll show it to you anyhow. Go ahead and open it!”

“I’m not curious.”

“Go on, go on, open it. It’s better that you should look at it when I’m not there. Then I won’t have to blush at least. Hurry up, I’ll be out in two minutes! Do you hear? I’m already emerging from the crystal flood, and when I’m halfway dry, I’ll be out there!”

Myra removed the tissue paper. She looked into Fred Wietinghoff’s face, lifelike and expressive. She felt a flash of pleasure pass over her as she studied the handsome features, and almost at the same moment a childish desire to steal the picture so that she could always have it before her eyes, and could delight in it when she was far from here.

For she was perfectly conscious at that moment, without thinking about it at all, that she would leave Hamburg in a very short time. She had never yet thought of the change, but suddenly she saw herself with visionary distinctness, so self-evidently that there was nothing terrifying about it, in a state of loneliness in which this picture would make pleasant company for her.

She started when Gwen leaned over her shoulder.

“Handsome picture, what?” she laughed. “You started so just now that I might imagine you have a little weakness for the gentleman. Confess the truth, Myra! Out with it. You were so lost in the picture, so lost that you didn’t hear me coming.”

Myra put down the picture without glancing at it again.

“Because my thoughts were somewhere else entirely,” she said, still rather distractedly.

“Too bad,” teased Gwen, “where else if not with Fred? Certainly not with me, I’m afraid. Very far off? Don’t you want to tell me where?”

She laid her soft bare arm around Myra’s neck, pressing it against her cheeks.

“I don’t know where myself,” said Myra. “Not in the past and not in the present. Somewhere I’ve never yet been. Perhaps in the future. I have a feeling, quite indistinct and hazy, of a snowed-up lonely house.”

Gwen shook her by the shoulders.

“Come out of it,” she cried, “you’re supposed to be here and not in any snowed-up lonely houses. How do you like our friend, Freddy?”

“_Our_ friend?” repeated Myra with a smile.

“Of course ours. He’s your friend as much as mine. He thinks a great deal of you, a great deal!”

“He only says that to make you jealous,” said Myra consolingly.

“Make me jealous!” Gwen laughed aloud. “No, I’m not that petty. And besides, you mean too much to me. I’m always very proud, really, my heart is filled with pleasure when I hear people praising you. And Fred praises you very often....”

“He would send me his picture if he really thought so much of me,” thought Myra. “If it weren’t all just silly talk, he’d send me his picture. I don’t want anything more of him than that.”

“Do you really like him?” Gwen asked it lightly. But Myra felt something watchful, almost lowering in her look.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“He’s good looking and has a very agreeable disposition,” she said indifferently.

“Nothing more?”

Myra did not want to reply. “I don’t know much more about him.”

“He is discreet and trustworthy,” said Gwen after hesitating a moment. Then she laughed through her teeth, “And he has very good taste!”

“Perhaps,” said Myra somewhat guardedly.

Sometimes she had a feeling of fear in the presence of this fair-haired child. Frequently she was afraid to put a question because she did not want to hear the answer—an answer that would tear off the thin covering of the abyss.

Suddenly Gwen stroked her cheeks with a childish gesture.

“Don’t be angry,” she said gently.

Myra laid her lips against that soft little fragrant hand.

“Why should I be angry at you, you child?” she asked, smiling.

But she knew very well that she had been angry.

“Tell me something!” begged Gwen. “Yes, sit right down beside me here and tell me something. I’ll lie down, I’m a little tired from my bath, and you sit beside me and we’ll jaw a little.”

With one hand she drew Myra fawningly to the divan, with the other she held together her kimono of peach-bloom china crêpe which showed every line of her slim, soft body.

She adjusted her mountain of pillows and made herself comfortable on it.

Myra sat quiet and erect beside her on a chair. She always felt rather stiff in the presence of so much sinuous grace, and a little frosty in the warm breath of this sunny creature.