Part 8

“You should have thought of saying it yourself. I waited long enough.”

“But why in the world did you make out you were unconventional--romantic--God knows what--unlike other women? Why did you?”

“I thought you expected it.”

Damned shameless lie, he thought; and said aloud:

“This would not appear to correspond with the facts. Secretly you were out for marriage from the start and only pretended--don’t I see it now!--but all the time you were on the hunt for a husband.”

“You needn’t flatter yourself. I’m good-looking enough to marry any time I want to. And such birds as you I can find on every bush.”

“Thank you.”

They had reached her house. “Well, am I to ring you up to-morrow as usual?” Her voice was not friendly.

“As usual,” he said, and thought: As per usual, business as usual. But the irony of using such decrepit war slang would be lost on her. That was the worst of it all: they hadn’t really many points of contact. And making the most of the few they had, he pressed forward to kiss her.

“No.”

He shrugged his shoulders, raised his hat and went. He went by the familiar Kolowatring that he had paced no end of times before--in other, happier days. How far away they seemed now!

Next day at two she did not call him up. At three she had not called him up. By five his anxiety had reached seething point. She would not call him up. She would never call him up. He was lost--damned. In all Vienna he could not find a place for himself. He sat and waited, hoping, doubting. And then, together with her friends, she came, as if not noticing him, and was about to sit down at a table, when he went after her and spoke. She turned round, abashed. “You are deadly pale,” he said. “Are you frightened, or what?”

“No. But I didn’t expect to meet you here.”

“And I waited--five hours. God, how I suffered!”

She looked round at him to see if it was true. His face was haggard. She was not unkind to him, yet took little notice of him, only now and then, after the performance of an item turning to him with a--“Quite good, wasn’t it?”

“Very good!” He was happy--come what might--for the abating of his erewhile suffering. He begged for an appointment next day and obtained one, and they lunched together at a freshly painted table of the restaurant in the Volksgarten. The foliage was breaking out and everywhere along the Ring the cafés were putting out their little “gardens.” He glanced at her legs in the flesh-coloured stockings. How romantically realistic--as if straight from Maupassant! he thought. And took her hand. She withdrew it. He took it again. “Don’t touch me.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t.”

He remembered a cabaret singer in Vienna who sang in a feeble hoarse voice: “I can’t, I can’t, I’m weak on the chest,” and then immediately after in a voice that would put brass trumpets to shame, a voice so powerful that it made the window panes rattle--“I CAN’T, I CAN’T, I’M WEAK ON THE CHEST!!!” And he asked, “What do you mean ‘I can’t’? You’re not weak on the chest?”

She did not laugh. “Something has broken within me--and I don’t know if it can ever be put right.”

“Then we must set about mending it.”

“There is a gulf, the bridge has been broken. I can never come back. I can’t help it. I’ve lost all feeling for you.”

“But, my darling, we’re mending it, aren’t we?”

“It can never be mended.”

How charmingly she walked, with feet a little outward and swaying slightly from the hips. There was something of the awkward school girl about her. Would she ever come back?

But one day, as the scent of jasmine hovered in the air and he gently passed his hand over her own and said, “My love, come back to me,” she closed her eyes with the lashes like black needles and nodded rapidly.

The bridge was mended.

His emotion of gratitude ran to kissing. “Can’t you sit still?” she admonished him.

“But you are mine. Don’t you want to be?”

“Not in that way.” _Her_ love ran to emotion.

“In that way. Or I feel I am wasting my time.”

“Ach!” she waived him aside like a fly. Then angrily, wearily: “Pull down the blinds!” She began to unhook her high collar at the neck. “Is the door locked at least?”

He smiled reassuringly. “I’ve taken requisite steps against the possibility of King Marke appearing when he is least wanted.”

He held her in his arms, and sang: “You Tristan, I Isolde, no more Tristan!...”

“Shut up!”

“There is little poetry in you.”

“And you are a beast.”

“Thank you.” And looking at her, drinking her in with his eyes, he thought, “Poor Richard Wagner! Who had never known such love as this!”

He thought so. He thought so a long time, when she attracted his attention. “What do you want to do?”

“Go home.”

“No-o.”

“No-o!” she mimicked him angrily. “You’re like that--never enough of a good thing--lick the sugar out of the bottom of the cup when there’s nothing left.”

“Ha-ha!”

“Nothing to laugh at.”

He sang: “_Der öde Tag!_”

He went to the adjoining room. When he returned she had her coat on and was powdering her face before the mirror. As they were leaving, “Put the light out,” she said. At the café she read the paper and hardly spoke to him. He looked at his associate in sin. Her face was still beautiful. Sin sat lightly upon her. He remembered afterward how they sat in the taxicab--how it rained outside. She only said, “Oh, yes, I’ve still got your gloves. You will get them to-morrow.” At the gate she gave him her hand, looked into his eyes, very kindly, he noticed, and said--“Peter, farewell.”

“Good-bye. Matches!” he cried after her.

“Don’t want any.”

Walking home, he remembered her words and the strangeness of the “farewell” dawned upon him. Returning, he found a note on the table which he had not perceived as they went out. On the back of a slip “Rimless Stockings. Best Quality” he read: “We shall never see each other again. I _cannot_. Isolde.”

And then came a letter.

“Peter, I have not much to tell you, but I have the feeling that you are still waiting for something. Somehow a cleft has arisen between us, which can never be bridged. Is it the fulfilment in us, was this giving one’s self also the end? I do not know, but it may well be so.

“In me there is no mourning, not a shimmer of disappointment, no reproach either for you or for me. And now I know why so long I could not find any words for you.

“And so farewell, Peter, I wish you the best of luck in all the coming years.

“ISOLDE.”

It was Easter. He strolled about by himself. When he perceived a black hat and flesh-coloured stockings, he invariably thought it was she. And the town was setting itself for the spring; the gardens, the freshly painted tables and chairs beckoned invitingly. He remembered how he had felt lost and damned when she had not telephoned to him one day, and now felt doubly lost--doubly damned. What sort of thing was life? What sort of creature was man? Daunted by tiny reverses, already squirming like a worm at a woman’s feet. There he was, just like Adolf, he who had been so sure of himself, supplicating for mercy, begging her for a morsel of bread. He strolled all alone about the town, waited at her gate, sat in the garden where (he remembered her telling him, though it had scarcely interested him at the time) she had played as a child. There were rows of seats lined with mothers and nurses. A little boy in the park was kicking a ball. A nice little fellow, he thought, but he’ll probably grow up to be a blackguard. Suddenly he saw her sitting with her friends. A hot pang shot through his heart. She spoke to him pleasantly but dispassionately. “How are you, Peter? How is life treating you?”

“Rottenly.”

When he had a chance to speak to her alone he supplicated for an interview.

“Child, it’s no use,” she said wearily.

“Yes, yes, a quarter of an hour--eye to eye--to discuss matters--to talk things over.”

“All right then, to-night at 8.30.”

When they did meet--at 9.30--he found that he had nothing to discuss, nothing to talk over. He only wanted her, craved for her physical beauty with all the strength of his physical being. She knew a subtler passion that hovered in her breast and was more like music, that went out in long curves and found no resting-places. And to her he had been part of that elusive dream. “Forgive me, Isolde, but really it’s your fault. You put it all so clumsily. Marriage. Yes. Even so, what can I do now?”

At the word marriage her eyes lit up and a smile played on her face.

“What can I say now? I can’t say: Isolde, marry me. I perfectly understand you can’t say--your pride won’t allow you to say, yes.”

“I’ll go back to my memories. I knew I should have to be alone. I will never have another like Hans.”

“I know it’s the bitter lot of those to follow him to fare badly by comparison. Alas! no live virtue stands the ghost of a chance at the side of retrospective illusion.”

She looked at him sharply. “The comparison does not arise. I didn’t _love_ you.”

“But then why, may I ask--yes, precisely, why--?”

“Because I thought you expected it.”

“Look here. Listen. I want to tell you something.”

“Better hold your tongue.”

“I expect--” it was a desperate step--“yes, I expect you to marry me.”

Her face lit up at the word. She played with the idea. “I don’t deny”--she puffed at a cigarette--“that it would have certain immediate advantages. Father was carrying on again this morning. ‘_Ein Skandal!_ I, an old man with one foot in the grave, have to keep you.’ ‘What do you want me to do?’ I cried at last. ‘You never taught me a thing. All the shops and offices are reducing their staff. Do you want me to go on the streets?’ He slapped my face. I went to my room and cried. Later he came to me. He was sorry. ‘I’d like to see you settled before I close my eyes.’ He’d be glad, and I’d be glad to make him happy. Let me see, I’d have a little money if I married--not much, still a trifle.”

“Who from?”

“My brother-in-law promised. Then there are silver things--knives and forks, solid silver--not much, but still something.”

_Der öde Tag!_

“Father might be prevailed upon to give something from his shop. Then furniture--a bedstead--two chairs. My sister has taken the mattress, though it didn’t belong to her. My mother left it to me.”

The vulgarity of it--things--cupboards--carpets--meddling relations. How dismal was our human fate! He felt that one had but to set one’s ship towards romance, to realise how fruitless were one’s hopes and how soon frustrated! She thought of her father, of the end of squalor and deceit, the joy of her brother-in-law, her own home, children, wealth. “But--” she scarcely meant it--“but I can’t. It’s not honest towards you for me to accept a solution for reasons of convenience only.”

“So you can’t?” He was almost relieved.

“I can’t.”

All the misery and anguish of his loneliness, his intolerable loneliness dawned upon him. He had spent a week without her. He knew what it was like. “Come, it really looks as though you didn’t want to make me happy for my own sake!”

“Well, if you are sure that it will make you happy.”

He was not sure. (He was sure of the contrary.) He drank his cup to the bottom and then took the spoon and licked off the sugar, while she watched him critically. And he thought: She won’t let me drink my coffee as I like. She won’t let me do anything as I like. I’m a lost man.

She said, “We must look at it sensibly. We both will have our advantages. You will be proud of showing me to your people and friends, while I shall be doing things for you at home.” He looked at her: she was too small and when she walked she waddled like a duck. Indeed, what would his sisters think of it? He pictured her at forty, at fifty, sixty and seventy, while he pictured himself all the while at twenty-five. She complained a good deal of her father, but if the old man found fault with her it was, of course, with good cause. “I’ll mend this for you,” she would say--and never did. “I must visit Hans’s grave to-morrow”--but she went to a dance instead. He recalled that she had not yet returned his gloves--after keeping them two months!

“But why are you looking so wretchedly sad? I’ve not accepted you yet.”

“Not a bit.” He imagined his arrival with his dark bride in the United States, their appearing before his proud “one hundred per cent. American” mother, the astonishment of his slim forget-me-not eyed sisters, the curve of their raised brows.

“If I married--” and she looked at him out of the corner of the eye to see how he took it, “we’d have separate bedrooms.”

He smiled faintly. It was past a joke.

“Cheer up. You look as though somebody has done you out of your money. I can see it won’t do. You’re so cold, so calculating, so concentrated on yourself. I am sure I could never marry you. I was merely joking.”

“No joke, I meant it. It’s settled--you’re my bride now and I’m your blooming bridegroom.”

“Your first experience?”

“Yes. I feel like a fool.”

“Thank you,” she smiled. “It’s my second.” She looked at her hands. “May I keep Hans’s ring?”

“Yes,” he said gloomily. Hans. Fritz. Grete. Nauseating relations. They’ll want to congratulate him, see the ring, touch it, maybe--all the dark Jewish brood, dentists, skin-disease doctors, stock-exchange frequenters. A nosing father--perhaps suggesting purchasing the engagement ring at his own shop, offering a wedding ring “cheap” in advance, or questioning the value of it if bought elsewhere--belittling the outlay--pooh-poohing expense. It was unbearable.

“Do your people speak German?”

He shook his head abjectly.

“Then you must teach me English.”

“I’ll try.” He pictured her dumbness, her being tied to him night and day, his mother and sisters asking her easy simple questions: “How--do--you--like--America?” and her asking back: “Please?” every time. A bewildered aunt of his struggling with a dictionary to make herself understood. Isolde smiling propitiatorily at his mother, trying to curry favour with her, to appear the tender wife; and he the heavy father to their common children.

“You needn’t look so unhappy. I haven’t accepted you yet.”

“It’s one o’clock, the café’s closing,” he said peremptorily, and called to the waiter: “Herr Ober! Zalen!--Yes or no?”

She did not answer, but smiled shyly. He took an empty cigarette box, unscrewed his fountain-pen, and wrote:

“?”

She took the fountain-pen from him and wrote:

“!”

He quibbled: “Is that an affirmative or perhaps an equally determined negative?”

She did not answer. He helped her on with her coat and while he was putting on his own, slowly, pensively she was collecting her things into the bag: the powder-puff, the lip stick, the remaining cigarettes. He watched her eagerly. If she took the cigarette box with his “?” and her “!” it meant--he knew what it meant. It meant that in after years she would be saying: “On this empty cigarette box my husband once proposed marriage to me.” She would say it, a grey-haired gouty old woman, with a deep black moustache and a beard, lying in bed with one complaint or another, in a bonnet, her teeth in the glass at her side. She would say it to their children, little hairy black Jews creeping about everywhere: to her children’s children; and all those long years he’d be tied to her. Her gaze lingered on the cigarette box, and her thoughts, from this chance _memento_ of a romantic proposal swayed to that which it meant, her new life in America, her newly-gained freedom, the long-awaited salvation. But she noticed his searching critical look and did not take the _memento_.

“Yes or no, for the last time?”

They were moving to the door into the street, where the rain was beginning to dribble, and stood still on the pavement.

She shook her head, and he made a movement to go. She wanted to say something to hold him back. “Here are your--your gloves, Peter.” And tears seemed to come to her eyes.

He took them as a sign, pressed her hand and went his way hurriedly. At the corner a gust of wind blew the rain against his face and tried for his hat. He did not know what he had done, why he had done it, or what had been done to him. He only knew he wanted to go home, cover himself with the black flag--and die.