Part 7

“If that’s the end of it,” said Vera Solomonovna, “there was no need to tell the story. You had no business to begin, Boris Nikolàech. It’s simply disappointing.”

“Well,” said Lieutenant Barahmeiev, who seemed hurt, “if it comes to disappointment, I think I have been disappointed more than anyone.”

“The more fool you,” said Finkelstein.

“Nothing to do with me. Didn’t I tell you it was raining?”

“Raining?”

“Pouring! It came on suddenly, burst upon us through the sky. A flood. The revenge of heaven on us.”

“But what’s the point of your story, anyhow?” asked Finkelstein.

“The point?”

“Yes, the moral? Why have you been telling it?”

“Oh, well, I told it to Vera Solomonovna by way of illustrating the psychology of women, because, like Zina, she affects derision of human passion, calls my amorous advances ‘idiotic’; but just you wait and before the day is up---- There you are!”

Vera Solomonovna rose and left the room in protest.

“There,” said Finkelstein, “you’ve disgusted Vera.”

“Disgusted her! Ha! ha! Don’t you believe it. Bluff! my dear fellow. All bluff. You don’t know women.”

“You’re a funny fellow, Boris Nikolàech. One can’t say you’re altogether stupid, but there are things you simply cannot understand. Impossible to penetrate yon marble brow of yours; it’s just like throwing a rubber ball at a stone wall: jumps back at you every time. And you don’t know women. To take my wife, for instance. She’s had enough of you already; she’s gone back to her bedroom in disgust.”

“To _her_ bedroom?” questioned the Lieutenant in a derisive tone of voice.

“You don’t expect her to go to yours, do you!”

“Why.... Oh, well, really, my dear fellow, I can see that you don’t know women--although you’ve got a wife. Believe me, I know a thing or two about them. Wasn’t born yesterday. Disgusted! Ha, ha, ha! You wait till I finish my cigarette and retire to my bedroom. You may be sure she’s----”

“Boris Nikolàech,” said Finkelstein, looking at him tranquilly through the smoke from his cigar, “you are an optimist.”

And, looking dignified and prepossessing, he sauntered over to his study where his stock-exchange associates were already waiting for him to resume their game of cards.

“Just a moment ...” muttered the Lieutenant, “ ...finish my cigarette....”

TRISTAN UND ISOLDE

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?”