CHAPTER FIVE

On their arrival at Trieste the expected dispatch was brought aboard. It had been entrusted to the Austrian authorities, in the hope of insuring speedier delivery. Thus the port officials were already acquainted with its tenor. The crown prince was dead. Eduard was heir apparent.

The party on the "Excelsior" had lunched late. Calmly awaiting the end of the cruise, they had made the most of one another's company during the hours that were left to them. Eduard (as if seeking for a sedative) had reached for the chess-board and he and Kyril had played while Diana and Scherer looked on. Kyril had won. The next game likewise fell to the Russian. Soon after two, when the town was already in sight, a third game was started. Still Kyril won.

"You'll have to give me my revenge," cried Eduard, with unusual excitement.

"We'll play all the way to Vienna if you like!"

"You are taking the same train? Enchanté. Then we'll carry on the fight, and in the end--by the time we reach St. Pölten I'm sure--I shall have defeated you."

He bundled the chessmen away, and seized a telescope.

The tidings, expected as they were, left him cold. He begged them not to visit the Trieste churches on his account, nor to dine in a hotel, for his train was not timed to leave before ten. All four felt that it would be better not to prolong this painful leave-taking, so they bade farewell, the one hearty note being the cordial thanks to Scherer for his genial hospitality. In a few days they would probably meet again in Berlin, whither Scherer, Diana, and Kyril would be going, to take up their work once more; and where Eduard was likewise determined to go in order to hand over the necessary documents of his office to the competent authority. As Eduard bent over Diana's hand to kiss it, he looked up at her beseechingly, but her eyes remained inscrutable. Then she felt Kyril's peasant hand grip hers, so vehemently that she was troubled, for she had not witnessed such a mood in him the last few days.

"And now at last the firm is all that is left," said Diana coming through the door into the dining saloon, where but two places were laid on the flower-bedecked table. "Just as two years ago on the terrace of your house! Of course the fact that we are sailing to Venice makes a slight difference, doesn't it?"

"She is careful not to refer to Athens," thought Scherer, leading her to the table.

"His gallantry has assumed a lighter tone," Diana was thinking. "Strangely enough, the companionship of young people does not make him appear old."

"Souper des adieux, Prince Eduard would say," and Diana smiled at Scherer's use of the plural, which implied a certain coquetry on his part.

"Are we then to dine with ghosts?"

"I have never eaten in your company except in the presence of ghosts!"

"Wilhelm would say: But the salad is really only a take-in! It looks as if there were mountains of it, and then it turns out to be nothing but green air."

"Will you take some celery? It's as long as papyrus."

"One could write sonnets on it," said Diana.

She laughed at Franklin's excitable ways, Scherer aped the big blond Russian; Diana, herself, was not spared in their merry badinage. Then the various clerks in the office came in for their raillery, the business had its share, and finally they drank a toast to competition. It was a joyous meal after a day over which death had cast its gloom, full of reminiscence, of quips, of caricature; and when they at length rose from table they declared it would have been far better if they two alone had sailed the Mediterranean and had always drunk Marsala as they had this evening.

"I wonder where those two have got by now," said Diana in the smoking-saloon on deck.

"They've not started yet! Or did you mean how far they had got with one another?"

"How can one judge of others from a distance?" Diana crossed her legs. She held her cigarette at arm's length, and asked, a challenge in her voice: "Or, what was really in your mind? What are they thinking of us, eh?"

"That you are delightful," said he, kissing her outstretched arm. As he did so, his eyes dwelt on the firm muscles of her upper arm, which shimmered through a filmy sleeve, and he drank in the sweet aroma of her person, which was a composite of unscented soap, a thin layer of powder, the acrid smell of eau de Cologne, clean linen and a fresh, sound skin tanned by much exposure to the sun, and looking like burnished metal against the delicate texture of her gown.

Diana was aware of the sensual appeal she exercised over this man, whom she had found more chivalrous than he had ever been in the presence of his guests; now she was reminded of this anew as he slowly raised his head. She let her arm fall to her side, and lapsed into a brown study: "He's thinking that we are alone on board.... Ah, Freedom! To enjoy all the sport of love, from the man's first glance at the brooch, right to the fingers which nervously fumble with the pin; to be free to weave the web of love, or to break off when one willed, from minute to minute uncertain of what the next move will be.... To make men pliable as wax; to make them reveal themselves as they implore or threaten--so that their tongues are loosened as their limbs grow tenser, tongues that had been too proud to talk of plans, too discreet to disclose secrets.... And oneself to be consumed with desire, to arise from ever renewed embraces, from ever changing arms, a person refreshed, purified and rejuvenated, more light-hearted, more audacious, flying free above the abyss--an abyss which the unfree contemplate with alarm as a place full of tribulation and uncertainty, haunted by an unknown destiny, and to be shunned at all hazards--whereas the free, stretching their pinions wide, soar joyfully over it in magic spirals.... Freedom! Not to have to be the hammer doomed to a certain task...."

She sat very still, her gaze turned inward, lost to the passage of time. Scherer observed her in silence, thinking the while: "How turbulent she is within, how peaceful without! What must she be like when she is ardent? One should never possess women of her sort; they would then become simple, would lose their mystery, and Schopenhauer with his cynical remarks is at bottom right.... But children ... to lure children out of them ... that alone would be worth the price of solitude...."

"Is the old prince very far gone?" asked Diana, unexpectedly breaking the long silence.

"Last Christmas, when I saw him face to face, he had the bluish tint and the pinched lips of a man in the last stages of heart disease. Yesterday came the terrible shock of the accident. Prince Eduard is likely to have a field for his activities any day now."

"Activities? I think the word suits him. But do you look upon him as energetic?"

"He hides his capacity for doing great deeds in a mantle of melancholy. But his ironical faculty is an obstacle to his troubling himself to perform petty things. The puzzle to-day is, whether he looks upon the princedom as a great thing."

"Surely that is no longer the question," said Diana, rising as if to give freer rein to her thoughts. She drew her cape around her and paced the deck at Scherer's side. "He has often spoken of the unlikely eventuality of his being summoned to his present task, has he not? Don't you think that his relief at there being so little prospect of it was not wholly genuine? His repudiation of any desire to succeed to the throne may really have been the expression of the tragical conviction that, as things were, he had no reasonable prospect of ever having any serious work to do in the world." She stopped in her walk, looked at her companion, reflected for a moment, then, shaking her head, she resumed her pacing to and fro, saying: "And I can hardly believe any such thing. He is more interested in his action upon the inner life of men than in his action upon exterior things; he would be glad to know that a few thousand hearts were the happier through his work. The balance of power in Europe, courts and parliaments, alliances and intrigues, colonies and navigation, trouble him little; and were he to inherit an empire tomorrow, he would be more inclined to have a thousand peasants' cottages built than one cruiser. Don't you think I'm right? For he is good at bottom; and because he was born unfree, as Wilhelm was born free, he is condemned to make himself appear cynical."

"If only he had some really live person at his side to act as counsellor! But that old Tauernheim who has been in office these twenty years trying to introduce communal welfare work--he's nothing but a mummy."

"What do you think of Kyril Sergievitch?"

Diana was standing in the stern, where Kyril had so often sat. The sea was calm, a veil of mist lay lightly upon it, the sky was thinly overcast, the air was warm, and the wind had almost entirely dropped.

"Kyril, too, is unfree," said Scherer, looking down into the water. "He has sold his peasanthood for an idea. Only a perfectly free nature can constrain the prince to action."

And Diana thought: "True; yet he would bind this free nature of mine.... Why should one always be cabined, cribbed, and confined as soon as ever one comes in contact with one's fellows?"

"A penny for your thoughts," broke in Scherer's voice upon her meditations. His tone struck her as unusual, and she looked up at him, to find his eyes fixed upon the shoulder from which her wrap had slipped. She turned towards him, looking him full in the face, her eyes cold and aloof.

"I'm thinking that all of you build up systems, and it astonishes me to find that even you seem to consider that I should be more useful as one of the beams in an edifice than I can ever be soaring free. Am I right?"

An impulse rose within her to set his mind in a whirl, to bewilder this man whose constructive imagination was for ever making ingenious combinations, who wanted to be the architect of her life and of the lives of his friends. She would grip him in her pliant clutch and force him to face the issues which his temperamental circumspection made him prone to evade. Scherer read her hostility in her eyes as she awaited his answer; but although his pride rose against the challenge, his senses were doubly allured by the woman who for so long had puzzled and perplexed him. A hazy conviction seemed to tell him that the arrogance with which she defended her inner freedom could be overcome by no other force than the power of the conquering male. As these friends confronted one another, they rediscovered the fundamental antagonism of their two natures; impulse took the bit between its teeth, and rushed the opponents into a proximity which intellect and respect had at all times avoided. Scherer, as he stood there before her, elegant and enigmatical, was no longer Diana's friend and host from the great city; she saw in him now the eternal enemy, the man sure of himself, the burgher; at the same time the vision of last night's outburst when Eduard had wanted to deprive her of her freedom rose to her mind. What was she to do? She felt her resolution wavering. Would she for ever be able to withstand the supplication of so tender a heart as the prince's? Two forces seemed to be contending for mastery over her: her own impulse to freedom, which the future seemed to be threatening, and which, so long as it remained hers, she wished to uphold at all costs; and Scherer's impulse to order, which would attempt to make her life fruitful, nay, would construct her life for her and in spite of her, an impulse she deemed it worth while to bewilder and lead astray.

After the many thousand words these two had exchanged in the course of their collaboration, they now, in silence, became convinced that this hour was to bring a strange and abrupt turn in their relationship. Scherer realized in Diana's quick breathing, all that was implied in the challenging question she had put, and he felt that it was a case of now or never with him, as it had been in the most decisive moments of his career; such moments had been rare, it is true, but the urgency of their claim was unmistakable. Thus it was that now he risked all.

"You are right." His voice was harsh; he did not touch her. "Well? Are you willing to make a gift of this thing--of your freedom, on the last night of our voyage together--Diana?"

The boldness of the look with which he enveloped her, the unexpected pathos with which he uttered the last word, the challenge in his eyes, her own feelings of independence and of relish for the love-game, the memory of his virile gaze at her feminine charms during this evening, the disturbing consciousness of their being alone on board; the realization that his commanding tone of tonight was of a far more manly quality than had been his demeanour at Athens the previous year; the feeling that now he was the master of a graceful, white vessel, and that she was perhaps an Undine who had swung herself aboard; freedom combined with fantasy; the warm sea with its flowing heart; confused memories of scenes remote; and, again, the energy emanating from the eyes in this clear-cut head before her--all these vague sensations invaded and perturbed her as the essential male within him had foreseen. Her eyes did not repel him, as she slowly turned away, and preceded him down the companion....

"Abominably confined," said Eduard at the same hour, as he and Kyril were settling themselves into their compartment. "At this time we'd be stretching our legs on the deck of the 'Excelsior'; nothing would be rattling, everything would be working smoothly, bearing us along...."

"After a dream, reality is always noisy. Smooth sailing is pleasant; noise is instructive," said the Russian sententiously.

"Schoolroom in an express train! How do you fancy the remnant upon the 'Excelsior' is passing the evening?"

"She'll be wearing her black dress, because it is the lowest cut--and Scherer will be making advances!"

Eduard, a pang shooting through him at the words, merely asked:

"Do you really think our kindly host is in love?"

"She is beautiful. I once saw her pose as a statue at a public gathering in Berlin; she was something like the goddess Diana. Weren't you there, too?"

Eduard trembled.

"Unfortunately not," he said. "I've heard that it was most charming."

"How well he lies; with what effrontery they all lie, these princes," thought Kyril contemptuously--as though he himself invariably spoke the truth.

"A thousand men's eyes stared at her," Eduard was thinking, "a thousand thoughts crept around her and over her on that occasion.... Well, why not? How shall I know what covetous desires may flare up in the hearts of men as we pass together through the public rooms of some hotel in Palermo or Dresden or Cairo? ... Am I not taking too much upon myself? ... Shall I be able to bear it?..."

"But he's not going to have her," Kyril broke in upon Eduard's reverie, speaking like a man who is sure of possessing a particular woman when the auspicious hour strikes.

"Russian cur," thought Eduard, as he said: "The young lady appears to be incorruptible."

The sentence hovered in the air, flitted to and fro between the two men, like a breath from Diana herself, belonging first to one and then to the other, and blown backwards and forwards between them. And while Diana, afloat on the sea, in the little cabin on the white yacht, flaunting her liberty, was giving herself to a man she did not love, to a man determined to solve the riddle of her nature, two men in a compartment of a night express were dreaming of her, one imagining he would win her with his tenderness, the other wishing to master her in a mingled frenzy of hate and love.