In her sleep Myra heard a violent ringing. Then she woke up: doors were slamming, steps approaching, there were many excited voices.
She opened her eyes and saw Olga standing beside the bed, already fully dressed. She was very pale, her eyes dark and blazing. “Get up, Myra,” she commanded in a voice that was breathless with excitement, “get up for God’s sake and dress!”
Myra threw on her things in mad haste. Meanwhile they were pounding on the door. Olga immediately went over to it, unbolted and opened it a crack.
“Who is there?”
Loud excited voices in the hall: excited faces trying to force themselves through the crack.
“I’m sorry, I can’t permit you in my room at this moment,” Olga said with icy courtesy.
Some voices began to shout louder than the others, Aunt Emily and Uncle George. Also the girl who had admitted Myra that night.
Myra’s hands were trembling as in a nightmare. She could not button her dress. She was aware only of a dreadful desire to be invisible or to jump out of the window or to sink into some vast unconsciousness.
Olga’s voice rose above the clamor, deep and calm, but as cold and sharp as polished steel.
“Does this conversation have to take place in the hall?”
Then suddenly, a soft, gentle voice: “May I offer the use of my room. I’ll be glad to step out.”
The voices withdrew next door and a few moments later—Myra had thrown on her dress—Peterkin stole into the room.
“Can I help you, Myra?” he whispered. His eyes were troubled.
At the same moment, there came a sound from next door as if a stick had been smashed across a table.
“I’ll have you thrown into jail!” thundered Uncle George.
Myra wanted to rush in, but Peterkin restrained her, imploring her not to go. “Don’t, don’t!” he begged. “Fix your hair quickly! Put on your shoes!” While she smoothed her hair, he knelt before her and buttoned her shoes. She let him. She could not dash next door in her stocking-feet, with her hair unkempt, to the immense pleasure of all the people peeping through the cracks in their doors.
When Myra did go down the hall to the next room, she was quite calm, quite erect, and sustained by a strong, brave, hot and almost joyous determination.
At the bottom of the hall stood a strange man with his hat and overcoat on. He looked her over with a piercing glance.
“Straight from her father’s dead body!” whimpered Aunt Emily with high pathos.
“The criminal police in a decent house!” screamed Frau Flesch. “Never in all my life have I had anything to do with the police!”
Myra pressed down hard on the latch. Her pulse was throbbing in her neck. For an instant the thought flashed through her mind: Perhaps it was best that this happened. Perhaps it was a good thing that she must now have the courage to take her place beside Olga and say, “I belong to her and will never leave her, even if you tear her and me into little pieces! If you have the courage and the right, use force on me, for I’ll never go one step with you of my own free will.”
Olga was standing, leaning against the table, her arms crossed on her breast, the fingers clasping her elbows.
As Myra opened the door, Aunt Emily rushed to her with a choking cry, “Here is the unfortunate child!”
Myra stood for an instant as though numbed. For a moment she felt as if she were among lunatics or had gone mad herself. With a hasty glance, she thought how very becoming to Uncle George were his stern manner, his steel-blue eyes and his iron-gray mustache against a face crimson with rage.
He came up to her and said in a deep, rough voice that trembled with something like emotion, “Myra, my child, what are you doing here? We’re burying your poor father tomorrow and you’re here!”
He laid his heavy hand on her shoulder.
Myra did not look at him. She was looking at Olga.
“This is my home,” she said. She meant her voice to sound vibrant and firm, but she could not manage it, and it sounded soft and tremulous.
“If you think you have the right, go ahead and use force on me, for I’ll never go one step with you of my own free will.”
It was hard, very hard, to say that. Very hard to say it under Uncle George’s honest gaze while his face was distorted with rage and sorrow, under Aunt Emily’s little blinking bird-eyes, or Frau Flesch’s spongy face that seemed fixed in a repulsively avid grin. Hard to say it in front of the strange man and the maid, who were listening in the hall.
But now it was said. And now everything would be all right. Now Olga would come and take her in her arms, would press Myra’s head against her breast so that she need not hear or see anything more, would, with one of her haughty and imperious gestures, show all these strange and horrible faces the door, would point her revolver at these intruders and drive them out with a single word....
Olga turned her head without changing her position, and looked at Myra. Everybody thought she was looking at Myra and gave an involuntary start.
But actually her eyes were merely resting on Myra’s forehead, eyebrows and hair.
Myra strove to intercept her gaze, but could not. It was fixed on her forehead, her eyebrows, her hair—on a line above her eyes.
“My dear child,” said Olga with a gentleness that was icy-cold, “your sense of dependence on me is touching, but I have done nothing to merit it. If you feel about me as you say, you ought to go with your relatives, behave like a rational creature and spare me your visits in the future. You must see that they occasion me nothing but unpleasantness!”
Myra hesitated for a moment. “Something must happen,” she thought, “she must look at me, she must give me some sign, a glance, a gesture, that this is all comedy, that I must trust her, believe in her, wait for an explanation....”
But nothing did happen.
Myra racked her brain for something terrible with which to shatter that stony mask. Could she not say, “You made me come, lured me, forced me and now you deny me”? No, she had no right to do that. But could she not think of some abusive word, something that would pierce, would wound, something cruel?
She turned over various silly childish epithets in her mind: they were as heavy as blocks of stone.
“Canaille!” she thought. “Harlot!” That was not what she was seeking. It seemed to her as if she must shove the blocks of stone this way and that in feverish search for the one sharp word she must fling.
Suddenly, she felt as if she had stood there an endless time, with arms hanging, and vacant eyes and open mouth.
She drew herself up and attempted a smile that would be at once proud and affable. But she felt as she was doing it, as if madness were twitching the distorted muscles of her face.
“Will you telephone for a taxi, Uncle George?” she said. “I am too tired to walk.”
She went to the door. “I just want to gather up my things. I won’t be a moment.”
She went into the next room, put on her hat before the mirror very carefully, threw on her coat and looked for her bag. She did not hurry at all. She still had some mad feeling that Olga must steal in and whisper something to her—where they could meet, where she should write, when she could explain it all to her. But no Olga came.
As Myra opened her bag, she noticed a little wad of tightly pressed bills.—What was left from their trip. She took them out, laughing bitterly. Probably she would no longer be in any way tempted to steal.
Probably she would never again need money as long as she lived.
She raised her hand and opened it, letting the bills flutter down on the disordered bed.
Then she went out, past the strange man, past the maid, downstairs and out of the house, without once looking back.
* * *
In the street she got into the taxi with her relatives.
Uncle George remained for a while in the city. His behavior was really curious. He was quiet and kind, and always fixed upon Myra a pair of honest, anxious blue eyes, and always spoke to her in a slightly emotional tone. But there was never a word about the money or her flight.
When Myra pondered this behavior—she did not do so very often—she found only one explanation for it. She did not think it might be remorse because his vehement letter had occasioned her unhappy father’s death. Nor did it ever occur to her that he was striving to win her affection through love and kindness. No, probably she was a source of irritation to him. But he had seen Olga Radó. Had heard her voice. Had experienced something of her power. When Myra thought of that, she almost loved him.
He had heard how Olga denied, betrayed and humiliated her. And he sympathized with her. When Myra thought of that, she hated him.
Even Aunt Emily was singularly gentle. Myra thought later that it would have been better if they had tormented and wounded her at that time, and thereby made her strong through steely hate.
Aunt Emily and the entire family were all for expressing the depth of one’s grief by the length of one’s veil. Nobody was going to say that Myra, the depraved daughter, the unruly offspring, did not mourn her father’s death.
The first time Myra saw herself in a mirror, black crêpe from head to toe, slender and pale, with lifeless eyes and a mouth distorted with grief, she thought, “Like a widow!” Her heart contracted painfully.
When they drove to the interment, they sat side by side. Aunt Emily’s black-gloved right hand held a white handkerchief to her quivering lips; her left held Myra’s hand. And Uncle George stared out the window while from time to time a tear rolled from his blue eye and into his mustache.
Myra felt as if she had been a mountain: her stony invulnerability had turned aside every shot. But now an explosion had torn a crater in her. She was hollow inside, a deep, dark, precipitous chasm. The savage wound lay exposed to view, and everything fell into it without let or hindrance, lay in her like heavy stones, tortured her—everything, glances, words, tears, gestures.
“Woe to those who have torn me asunder!” she thought bitterly.
Then her fingers clasped Aunt Emily’s a little tighter for a moment. “We belong together,” she thought. “Forsaken, loveless, unhappy people who have grown hard and bitter—we belong together. There are two great families in this world—the rich and the poor, the sound and the sick, the laughers and the weepers.... Olga Radó belongs among the happy: she has triumphed, she has justified herself, she has rid herself of me—now she can go, laughing, to the next adventure.”
Myra did not always think such thoughts. She was a prey to the most conflicting feelings. There were sleepless nights when she thought that everything would be all right if only she could hold Olga’s hand and ask, “How did you come to do it, child? How could such a thing happen? What were you thinking of at the time?”
The next day she would pace up and down Motz Street and stare at the house across the way—but always in vain.
Then there were days when Aunt Emily displayed a loathsomely friendly sympathy and let fall insinuations concerning the ingratitude of the world in general and in particular, and how lonely Myra now was because she had given all her affection to such a person.
Then Myra hated them both—Aunt Emily and Olga—with a terrible hatred. But she hated Olga the more—Olga who had thrown her down where Aunt Emily could trample her, Olga who had torn that wound which Aunt Emily’s foul fingers could probe.
Sometimes she resolved to die, but more often to flee, to pack up a bundle and run down the highroad, to pass the night in meadows and hollows with nothing over her but the eternal starry skies.
At other times, it seemed to her as if that sort of life, particularly that sort of life, would be merely a constant torment without Olga—but a treasure without end, an inconceivable happiness if only Olga were there.
She strove to reconcile herself to the thought that Olga no longer loved her. But it was impossible that she actually hated her. She had simply sacrificed her, surrendered her without second thought in order to shield her reputation, in order to protect herself from unpleasantnesses. It is true, she did not love her. That was why her words had been lies. She had simply been glad when Myra came. Always. And she would be glad again if she returned.
It was becoming clearer and clearer to Myra every day how rich she was. Franz Rudloff had been no miser, but there was nothing for which he really cared to spend money. And Aunt Emily was much too much of a model not to economize, even in the pettiest ways.
Myra had no very clear understanding of money or the value of money. But she knew that the sums mentioned to her, guaranteed her freedom, promised her that in a few months she could live her life where she wished and as she wished.
A life without Olga?
Myra finally resolved to write to Olga. Not how she felt, nothing about her longing, her love—God forbid! But a line or two, quite businesslike, if one might use the expression—lines whose purpose would simply be to bring about an explanation.
With much effort she composed a letter which she amended and improved and copied; she felt quite satisfied with her handiwork. No one could find in it a trace of affection or humility of any kind.
Rather it was sharp, ironic and somewhat challenging in tone. She mailed the letter and awaited the answer. None came.
* * *
Meanwhile Aunt Emily decided to inform Myra of the “facts of life.” To be sure, she chose a rather remarkable method.
Aunt Emily was too much of a model to discuss morally offensive matters with a young girl. Besides, she was probably afraid of Myra’s outbursts of temper, though otherwise she was not cowardly.
Myra had fallen into the habit of sitting in her father’s study. She would sit and read the whole day through, the most difficult and abstruse things, simply in order not to think. Here she had all the books within reach. It was more convenient to sit down at the writing-table with them, than to lug the sometimes heavy folios into another room.
On his desk she now found from time to time pamphlets, brochures, apparently of a quite varied character, novels, medical works, daily papers with passages underlined—but all treating of one theme.
There were strange and weird stories of countesses who dressed in men’s attire and frequented various dives until they were lured into a trap and brutally murdered.
Or accounts of sickening orgies in well-known clubs where hundreds of women dressed and disported themselves like men, and men were dolled up with false curls with open-work silk stockings, and with their bare arms and shoulders powdered.
There were statistics showing all the unfortunates who fell victim to softening of the brain, lunacy, tuberculosis of the spine and other diseases as a result of unnatural practices.
Or descriptions of the soul life of sexual inverts which led one to suppose that these thousands of human beings constituted a vast community, a community bound together by no ties of common interest, no similarity of education, origin, taste or attitude toward life, and never by love, but by a common lust for a common form of excess.
There was the biography of a famous man who was miserably murdered by a blackmailing waiter with whom he had had intimate relations—whom he had loved.
Myra shuddered when she thought of the word love in this connection. Sometimes it seemed to her as if she would be stifled by so much filth. She became physically ill simply from touching the books. Then she would not read them—for quite a while. She would read historical, philosophic and scientific works. But there were long periods when she was not conscious what she was reading. Her eyes ran along the lines and reflected the words. But her thoughts struggled with the dreadful things that had been flung at her, like blocks of stone, to kill her. Then she would pick up the other books again, the bad ones, and look for enlightenment and draw conclusions and make comparisons.
Whenever masculine women were discussed, mention was made of their superior intelligence, their thirst for knowledge and their desire for culture, coupled with an abnormal tendency to spendthriftness, a passionate desire for luxury, and an unnatural predilection for beautiful foot-gear. Mention was made, too, of weird Don Juan natures who passed with insatiable lust from one adventure to another.
As a result of such readings, Myra was left in the most dreadful bewilderment. These books should have taught her to understand the person who, of all others, had been closest to her. She had said to herself a hundred times in the past months, “This woman is a riddle that cannot be guessed, a mystery that cannot be solved, forever strange and remote, not to be grasped or comprehended. And each time she had felt with every fibre of her being, ‘such and such is the solution; now everything is clear, everything is all right, nothing can ever arise to divide us again.’”
But now, now?
Now Myra felt an anguished need to pack up these books and take them to Olga Radó! “Tell me, are there such people? Are you one of them? Am I? What do you know about it?”
Olga had had to express an opinion about everything that Myra had heard or read in the last year. And Olga’s opinion had nearly always been Myra’s, or had aroused, strengthened, clarified another opinion in her.
Now, for the first time, she had to settle such monstrous matters single-handed and she groped about blindly in the dark. Where she thought to find a light, a way out, she merely strayed deeper into the maze. She could neither make headway nor go back.
So Myra wrote a second letter. This time, too, there was not a word about love or longing—simply an urgent appeal for help, a good deal of complaining about what was happening inside her and a certain reproachfulness: you have brought me so far, you must take my hand and lead me out of this swamp.
No answer came.
Spring came, however. Warm, caressing winds came, and broad flashing rays of sunlight and a veil of buds shrouding every branch, and snow-bells and crocuses, forcing their way with difficulty through dark purple, rotting leaves.
Myra could not bear the heavy, soft air. She could not sleep and suffered from headaches day and night. Reading no longer sufficed to distract her mind. She sat bowed over her books and stared out the window. The same page would lie in front of her for hours without her ever turning it.
She began to read novels. She could not forget she was reading them as easily as she could dry scientific works because they stirred her imagination and evoked certain pictures.
But those pictures were a torture to her.
There were always people in love with one another. They struggled with one another, discovered one another, came together or parted, destroyed one another, died or abandoned one another. It hurt her to read of love.
She read of riches, of luxury, of automobiles dashing along highways, of white hotels beside blue waters, of balls and banquets and yachts and journeys by sledge. Then she would begin to calculate her fortune and think, “Olga Radó could have led just such a life if she had remained with me.”
The cherries blossomed. Olga Radó was no doubt going by steamer with some lovely woman, over the blue waters of the Havel. And all about her was a world of beauty and sunshine and light.
Myra was seized with a mad desire to be where Olga was, to lead Olga’s life. Pride dropped away from her like a burned rag. She stood naked to herself and cried out with the pain.
She wrote her third letter to Olga Radó. She wrote that she could no longer live and breathe without her. That she wanted nothing from her, not love, or affection or friendship. That she wanted nothing but to serve her with all her strength, and in payment she would let herself be beaten and kicked. That she would feel no jealousy, no craving, no lust of possession. That she would serve anyone, man or woman, whom Olga loved, and that she would chain and immure her love so deep within her that never, never, never would anyone suspect its existence, not even Olga.
Again she waited for an answer. Again none came.
Suddenly it occurred to her that Olga might not have received her letters, certainly had not received them.
She went to Motz Street and every step made her feel as if she were walking on red hot coals. The same maid answered her ring who had admitted her that night. Myra could not bring herself to utter Olga’s name, so she asked for Peterkin.
He had moved—address unknown.
She lived through ten more days of torture. Then she went again. A new maid opened the door. “I’m in luck,” thought Myra and she was dizzied for a moment as the idea flashed through her mind that the next instant she might be standing face to face with Olga in her room. What might happen afterwards was of no moment.
Miss Radó had moved—address unknown.
Myra went to the bureau of registry. She filled out the prescribed blank and gave it to the gray-haired official while her heart throbbed wildly.
The friendly old gentleman rose, went searching, returned and asked if the lady lived in her own house. No? Unfortunately, they did not register people who lived in lodging-houses.
Then Myra made her last and most difficult attempt. She went to the Moebiuses. The girls grinned in her face, impudently, when she asked about Olga Radó.
No, they didn’t know anything about her. Naturally, she had not put in her appearance here again, and father would probably have very politely given her the air if she had. But they would be delighted to find things out. Ablaze with curiosity and pruriency, they began to ply her with questions, whether it was true that....
Myra blushed and paled, turned hot and cold. She might have murdered one of them if she had not been so tired. “I don’t know,” she said. She answered all their questions with “I don’t know.”
Perhaps she should have become indignant and defended Olga Radó. Perhaps she should have let them slander her and have made all kinds of mysterious insinuations. Perhaps she should have laughed and led the girls a merry chase. She supported herself against her chair with both hands, and said, “I don’t know!”
As she left the house she realized that she would never enter it again. A senseless expression kept running through her mind as in a delirium—“To be on everybody’s tongue....”
It had never before had any meaning for her. Now she felt, actually in a physical way, as if she had been chewed over and spat out on the sidewalk. She shuddered with nausea.
* * *
From time to time, but at ever shorter intervals, a dull racking hatred began to tarnish the surface of her feeling for Olga Radó. That woman was to blame for all that she was now suffering—heedlessly, cold-heartedly and quite unscrupulously to blame.
During this period, Myra was very unjust to Olga Radó. For it seemed to her as if she had been torn by her from a happy shielded youth, as if a profound and placid peace had been destroyed in her, some marvellous equilibrium shattered.
The be-all and end-all of her desire seemed to her to be a return to what she had once been. Her one wish was to strike the last year out of her life, to expunge, to forget it.
Then she would take up those evil books again and deliberately read the things which had most nauseated her. She thus artificially intensified her hate and anger and fear.
There were days when she said to herself, “At last I am free! It’s as if I had recovered from a severe illness; I feel that my blood is pure again. From now on I shall live as other people do, without pain and without joy, without desire and without fulfillment.”
And there were nights when she felt as if a burning poison were eating at her veins, when fear of an unutterly horrible future made her shudder. Nights when she felt she must succumb to her unbridled appetites, must give herself unresistingly to every loose woman who for criminal reasons chose to arouse her passion. She saw herself victimized by blackmailers, tracked by the police, sick, insane, in prison or murdered.
In one such period of abysmal despair she permitted herself to become engaged. Some decent, solid man or other came courting her.
She knew nothing about him. She did not know when or where she had seen him for the first time, knew hardly anything of his character or his inclinations. She simply became aware one day that for some time there had been some person around her who had made an effort to be kind to her. Someone who helped her on most carefully with her coat, stooped when she dropped something, brought her flowers, and tried to tell her cheerful stories in order to brighten her face a little.
The man knew as agreeably little about her. In his presence Aunt Emily bubbled over with gentle, motherly solicitude. She could just as well have made biting observations or cutting innuendoes about him, but he fitted into her program.
He pitied Myra tremendously because she was an orphan. He ascribed all the suffering in her pale face to grief for her father. Sometimes he ventured to take her cold fingers in both his hands and gently stroke them. At such moments Myra would close her eyes and scrutinize her feelings in terror. Warmth and peace flowed from his big strong hands. His gentle tenderness was pleasant rather than abhorrent. Then Myra would say to herself with a burst of hope, “Perhaps everything will be all right, after all. Perhaps I shall have somebody near who is good to me, I’ll have children and a home, I’ll always have something to do—perhaps it is still possible for a life like that to be bearable.”
She felt, too, an irrepressible desire for revenge. It might wound Olga Radó’s vanity somewhat, if she learned how quickly she had been forgotten.
The man was rich. That suited Aunt Emily and incidentally suited Myra. She pictured herself in the loge at the opera, flashing with jewels, beside this man, a very attractive and stately man—it would never occur to anyone that she had not married him for love—and suddenly Olga Radó would appear from somewhere. Or she saw herself driving past Olga Radó in a de luxe car. Or best of all, she saw them meeting when she was walking with her fair-haired children dressed neatly in white. Then she would draw the children away from Olga as if from a venomous snake. That was the way, yes, indeed, that was the way to wound Olga most cruelly.
As the man was persistent, Myra said yes. She had had sufficient time to accustom herself and took good care that it appeared in various newspapers.
On her twenty-first birthday, there was a little garden party at the villa of her parents-in-law. It was a very hot day in summer, the nineteenth of June, and on Aunt Emily’s advice, Myra again put on a white dress trimmed with black.
As she strolled past a mirror in that strange house with all the strange people about her, she did not recognize herself. She was shocked and could not rid herself of the idea that she was not the pretty girl dressed in white, who smiled at her from the mirror, on the arm of that strange man.
She tried to find herself and could not imagine where she could be. But it seemed to her as if she saw herself, thin and dark, like a specter, wandering through great, dark, empty rooms. Again, it seemed to her as if she really was the reflection in the glass, and that that other Myra, who was so identically like her, was the stranger. Dream and reality began to merge inextricably; all her nerves seemed to thrill like snapped chords. In mortal fear she longed for complete unconsciousness or for sudden complete clarity, feeling as if she were blinded by fog or a prey to vertigo. A moment later, she could not understand exactly what had happened to her, or give any answer to her fiancé who anxiously inquired the cause of her paleness.
But the singular feeling persisted all evening that all this was simply a dream, a game. The whole business of the engagement was simply a joke, a comedy. Each moment might step forward like a stage-manager and cry, “Enough! Let reality resume!”
* * *
On the twentieth of June, in the morning, Myra was called to the telephone. A light masculine voice spoke from the receiver, curiously restrained and hesitant.
“Is this Miss Rudloff herself? Myra, is that you? Forgive me for disturbing you—I wanted to speak to you!”
Myra felt her heart tear itself loose and plunge into an unfathomable dark abyss.
“Peterkin?” she said and tried to suppress her smile without stopping to think that no one could see her face. Nor could anyone have heard that smile in the trembling of her voice.
“May I speak with you, Myra? I mean....” Again that timid hesitation in his voice. “If you care to, you understand. Of course, I don’t know how interested you are in your old friends now.”
“It goes without saying,” said Myra firmly, “that you can see me any time, where and when you wish.”
She did not ask what had happened. She did not want to ask.
“It can’t come very well.” Again that timid tone. “And I’d rather not go on the street ... or to a coffee-house.... It really wouldn’t do....”
“I’ll come to you,” said Myra quickly. “Tell me where you live!”
“Yes—but—is that all right either? Particularly—if anything unpleasant should happen.... You’re engaged....”
“Nonsense!” said Myra roughly.
* * *
As she hurried down the street she did not try to picture what might actually have happened. She did not want to. “Perhaps Olga is sick and wants to see me,” she thought. “Perhaps she doesn’t know anything about it, and Peterkin simply called me of his own accord.”
She simply thought that she would see Olga, that she would take her hand. At the same time she thought, “I tell myself these things as we tell a feverish child stories, I paint them in the brightest colors, and believe them no more than we believe in fairies and sorcerers.”
But it was better to tell herself stories, better to sing herself cradle-songs, than to listen to the voice that cried the truth deep within her.
It was strange how, without a moment’s hesitation, she found the house and the street as if she had been there a hundred times.
When she rang, Peterkin was already at the door. That spared her any interrogation. And she felt, looking at the maid, the first human face she noticed, that she was in no condition to answer questions.
Peterkin took Myra by the hand and, without a word, led her past the astonished maid and into his room. He shut the door, and without looking at her, said, “Sit down, Myra.”
The first thing that Myra noticed in the room was the gold cigarette case on the black surface of the table. A ray of sunlight was flashing on it.
She made an effort to restrain herself. It was as if she tugged at the reins with both hands in order to check herself. But when Peterkin turned to her, and she saw how his hands, how his small white face quivered, with what an effort he was struggling for control—she lost control herself. She began to cry.
“Cry, cry,” he said at last, his chin quivering, while the tears started from his eyes. “Cry, for she was worthy of tears, you can believe me....”
“Believe you?” said Myra with heart-rending bitterness. She laid the handkerchief over her eyes and supported her head in her hand. Her other hand stroked his nervously.
“Now tell me everything, Peterkin. You see that I’m quite calm again, quite, quite calm. When did it happen? How? And why? Tell me everything, everything you know!”
“I could not tell you, Myra—not before your twenty-first birthday. That was yesterday, wasn’t it? I’ve marked it here on the calendar—for another reason—I’ll have to tell you all about that, too. I had a message to deliver to you. But of course, I had no suspicion—sometimes it is as if we were struck blind....”
Myra glanced up for a moment. “Did she do it herself?” There was nothing interrogatory in her tone.
“Yes.”
“Did she shoot herself?”
She covered her eyes again with her handkerchief.
“Go on.”
“She was sick during the spring, a light case of influenza. She had some fever and I used to sit beside the bed while she talked of death and burial, quite cheerfully and unconcernedly, as she always did. You know very well that nobody ever knew whether she was jesting or in earnest. She said to me at that time, ‘If I die now, Peterkin, take good care to keep it quiet. Don’t let it get into any of the papers, and don’t let anybody know about it, not even Myra. I’d like to strew my ashes on the sea or at least on the Wannsee. But the State won’t permit that, I believe. So simply make haste and have my remains cremated. I will have no traffic with my corpse. I won’t be inside it, you can be sure of that. Not for one moment longer than necessary will I remain inside my corpse.’”
To Myra it seemed as if she were hearing Olga speak. So clearly did she hear her voice, that her heart was filled with an inner joy and she smiled.
“I smiled, too, at the time,” said Peterkin sorrowfully. “But she became quite serious and sat up and looked at me. You know how she could look at one out of her intense eyes. ‘It is my sacred wish,’ she said. ‘Promise me you’ll do it, give me your word of honor!’ I promised her, but I said, ‘You’re crazy, in three days you’ll be well again.’ And she was well again in three days.” He stopped. Somewhere a clock was ticking and flies were buzzing against the window-pane.
Something filled Myra with a few moments of joy and tranquillity. An obscure feeling—how good that Olga was well again in three days. There was so much vigorous life in that beautiful body.
Then the present struck at her heart like a clenched fist. And now? And now? She had to wait a few moments before she could bring herself to utter the terrible word.
“Did you bury her at once?” she asked in a very low voice.
“She was cremated. The urn was sent to Vienna. Her sister lives there....”
“Did she live here toward the end?”
“Two doors away, around the corner.”
“And it happened there?”
“Yes.”
“Can one ...” Myra swallowed hard, “can one see the room?”
Peterkin shrugged his shoulders slowly. “What is the use? Everything is changed. Nothing of hers is left. It has been rented again.”
She had a peculiar feeling; it seemed to her as a curiously happy fact that every pattern which this spirit had created was now destroyed. There was not even a room left in the world which those hands, that mind, had arranged, and in which a trace of her being might have survived. Half unconsciously, Myra felt as if the shifting of a few pieces of furniture had broken the stones from a prison wall.
Now Olga Radó was wholly free.
A gentle breeze stirred the curtains at the open window. A sweet, cool breeze blew over Myra’s burning eyes. She smiled.
“It is best that way!” she said again.
Suddenly she understood that Olga had not received her letters. There was no need to inquire about it. But Peterkin was the only person of whose opinion she was a little afraid. She felt that she must justify herself.
“I wrote Olga three times!” she said.
“I had an idea that you did,” said Peterkin with a gloomy smile.
“She never received a line.”
“But you knew it anyway?”
“Of course. We talked often enough about you.”
While Peterkin was speaking, Myra had a curious feeling that she was living over in a few minutes and with the most powerful intensity, the last six months of her life. It seemed to her as if on that unhappy morning the woof-thread had been broken and day by day had labored at a make-shift pattern that was false. Now that false woof had suddenly been unravelled as the shuttle plied backwards like lightning. The thread was knotted where it had been broken and the true pattern was resumed, a little curtailed, perhaps, a little fainter in color, but there it was, woven for the present and for all days to come.
“What did you say about me?”
“Oh, a great many things. I urged her so often to write to you, to establish some sort of contact with you. But she was convinced that she must not do it. Sometimes I thought I would telephone you, or I’d waylay you somewhere against her will. Once I suggested it to her. She glared at me out of her big eyes. ‘If you ever do any such thing,’ she said, ‘our friendship is over with for all time! Do you want to destroy the poor child?’ She was always of the opinion that you were happy and that things were going well with you. But I was sure you must divine what was going on. I tried so hard, you’ll never know how hard. Once I promenaded under your windows for a whole hour. I always thought that if I could only speak to you, we would find some way out. I always thought that everything would be all right in the end. Then you became engaged. Yes, then I had to admit at last that she was right.”
“Oh, you idiot!” said Myra, laughing through her tears.
“I remember the day so well. Olga came up to my room early in the morning. She sat huddled over in the easy-chair, smoking one cigarette after another. For half an hour she did not utter a word. I sat here at the desk, pretending I was working. I had tossed aside my paper when I heard her coming. But from the way she sat there, I thought, ‘She knows already!’ She knew I knew it, but neither of us wanted to begin the conversation. When she finally did, she kept saying ‘I’m so happy, I’m so glad!’ And she demanded that I celebrate with her, too. In the evening we went to have a bottle of wine together. She made me do it. I can still see her as she sat at the table, turning the wine-glass in her hand. She had such a curious smile all that day. Again she said to me, ‘So little Myra is going to be married. That’s fine, fine. Our little Myra will have children, real lads who will never know a trouble in life.’ Then she kept demanding that I say how happy it made me. And I had to say so—as matters then stood it was the best thing to do—but from that day on she lived in morbid dread of meeting you somewhere on the street. Sometimes when she needed something, she would ask me to get it. She would sit here, pale, with her hands folded, and say, ‘Please, please, Peterkin, I can’t go to the store.’ For the last eight or ten days she hardly left her room. She used to telephone me to come over, she did not want to go on the street. But of course, there was another reason for that as well....”
“What was that?” asked Myra after staring silently out of the window for a long time.
He cast a quick and searching glance at her. “So you don’t know?” he asked as if relieved. “You really know nothing about it? I was sure you didn’t. But they had her shadowed—your people, you know. No matter where she went there was always a detective after her. Oh, she suffered so cruelly because of that!”
“But why?” asked Myra. “Why should they do that? They had me where they wanted me. They knew just where I spent every hour of the day.”
“Probably they were afraid. They may have thought, before your engagement at any rate, that you might waver in your resolves, or that she might try to influence you again; they may have wanted to catch her at something so that they could have her deported as an undesirable alien. Your Uncle bought up all her debts. You did not know that either, I believe. So they had her cornered. Every day there were letters from attorneys, from the courts.... Later on she simply refused to open them. She used to let them pile up on her desk. I said to her sometimes, ‘You can’t do that, you must answer them, you must go, you must make promises.’ Then she would smile an infinitely melancholy smile. ‘I’ve lost my sense of humor, Peterkin,’ she would say, ‘I’m old and tired. It isn’t a hunt as far as I’m concerned’—and she indicated the pile of papers with a wave of her hand.
“Then there were threatening letters—I can’t tell you how vulgar. Filled with expressions that one simply can’t repeat. From your Aunt Emily, I think. But they were sent as if they came from you. They said you knew now the sort she was and wanted her to drop every attempt to get in touch with you and to stop blackmailing you. It was sufficient that she had seduced you into stealing and breaking open people’s desks, that she had undermined your health, that she had caused your father’s death—ah, I don’t know all that was in them. And then, things you were supposed to have said—they must have been horrible, for she would never tell me what they were or let me read them.
“She used to sit here in front of me, her face perfectly white and her eyes blazing, while she gripped my wrist so that I thought she would snap the bone. ‘Myra doesn’t know anything of this, does she, Peterkin?’ she kept repeating, ‘Myra doesn’t know about this?’
“There were times when I did not like that tone of voice. But now, when it is ringing in my ears again, I don’t see how I could have failed to understand it. From that time forth, she began frequently to speak of the journey. ‘I’m going home on the twenty-second of June.’ She was always saying it. Once I asked her why she had chosen that particular day. She laughed and said, ‘Because it is three days after the nineteenth.’ I pondered over it considerably. But at that time the connection was not clear to me....
“But after your engagement everything was different. Suddenly she began to say ‘When I go away—next week—or the day after tomorrow,’ I teased her about it, ‘So you’ve turned traitor to your plans? I thought you weren’t going away until three days after the nineteenth?’ Then she looked at me mysteriously and shook her head. ‘Ah, no, Peterkin, I have no reason for waiting now!’”
* * *
“On the evening of the ... on Monday evening, she appeared here suddenly in what I thought was a very cheerful state of mind. She laid the cigarette case on my desk just where it’s lying now, and asked me to do her the favor of placing it in your hands. She intended to go away and was already packing. If she sent the case to you, it would probably be taken as an attempt at blackmail!
“I was to give it to you after she had gone—on your birthday. And she insisted that I mark the date on my calendar. I said I could remember it without that. But she opened my calendar to the date and marked it herself.”
With an almost devout gesture, he turned back the last leaf and pushed the calendar toward Myra. In the white space, under the nineteenth of June, which had been carefully circled, was written in Olga’s bold, beautiful hand, “Myra’s birthday. Don’t forget, Peterkin!” Underneath were three crosses, playful little crosses marked in black ink.
Myra said nothing. She laid the palm of her hand on the paper and did not remove it.
Peterkin cleared his throat a few times and continued. “Before she left, we arranged everything for the next day. We would inquire about the trains in the morning; in the evening, I would take her to the station. But when she had gone, I grew terribly nervous. Something struck me as wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. I tried to telephone her, but there was no answer. I sat here at my desk in a quite indescribable state of nerves. This thing was lying before me,” he picked up the cigarette case. “I picked it up quite without thinking. Suddenly it occurred to me—pardon, Myra, if it was not discreet, but I felt such dreadful anxiety—suddenly it occurred to me to open it. I did so half in fun, half with the notion that I might find something in it which would tell me something. When I opened it, I found this note.”
He handed it to Myra. Under the clasps that were to hold the cigarettes against the case, was a slip of paper. On it was written in Olga’s unmistakable hand:
“Qui vivens laedit, morte medetur!”
“Qui vivens laedit, morte medetur!” repeated Peterkin. “I read it several times like a drunken man without understanding. Then I rushed down. Without my hat, without my keys. The lower house was locked. I rang for the doorman. He did not come at once. I rushed upstairs again to get my keys. It took me ages to unlock the house, to run around the corner and ring for their doorman—ages. On the stairs I met the maid, screaming and sobbing. It had already happened.”
Myra laid her forehead against the edge of the desk. Not a sound was to be heard. Peterkin stroked Myra’s hair once or twice, with trembling fingers.
“There is something else that I must tell you,” he said in a low voice. “She was completely covered with your flowers. Perhaps that will make you happy. You know, when you parted that time—you ran downstairs with your people after you—I half heard what was said between you. After quite a long while I went back to my room—there was Olga still standing in the middle of the room, supporting herself against the table. When I entered, she looked at me as if I were awaking her from sleep. I took her by both arms and shook her. ‘What’s happened, Olga? What have you done to Myra?’ She looked distractedly at me and kept repeating ‘Something terrible, Oh, God, Peterkin, something terrible!’ She showed you the door quite formally, did she not? She said that you shouldn’t bother her again, or something like that, didn’t she?
“Then she seized my hand and said very quietly, ‘I’m lying, Peterkin, I’m simply lying. It was nothing but my miserable cowardice. But Myra must know that, she understands me. I would have jumped in front of a train for her, I’d have jumped out a window, but I can’t let the clothes be torn off my body in front of such people, I can’t, I can’t. I know, I’m a miserable, contemptible creature, but I can’t, I can’t.’ I asked her what you had answered. She turned quite pale and said, ‘Nothing. Not a word. That’s the terrible part. She was so defenseless against my commonness.’
“Then she had another discussion with Miss Flesch. You have no idea how that woman acted. Olga would not remain in the house another hour. For which I could hardly blame her. Then she went to pack her things. In a few moments she came back, and seizing me by the wrist, drew me into her room.
“‘That is her answer,’ she said and showed me the money on the bed. ‘She is articulate,’ she said. ‘We underestimated her powers.’ Oh, Myra, why did you do that? To be quite frank, I was dreadfully angry with you myself at the time. She kept saying ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’ I said ‘Put the money in an envelope and send it back without any message.’ But she shook her head. ‘I deserved the blow,’ she said at last, ‘I will have to take it and smile.’ She gathered the bills almost lovingly, saying several times in a low voice, ‘What a child! What a child! She did not know what she was doing! She did not know what she was doing!’ Then she gave me the roll of bills. ‘Keep it for me, Peterkin, the time may come when I shall need it, and when it will be a joy to me to know that it comes from Myra.’
“I mentioned it to her often before the end, when she literally did not know which way to turn for troubles. But she always shook her head and said, ‘Not yet, not yet!’
“After she—was dead,” his voice broke, “I bought white orchids for her, I spent the whole sum: she looked beautiful.”
He could get no further. His lips quivered, the tears rolled down his cheeks. After a long, long pause, Myra sat up: her eyes were dry.
Beside the cigarette case, on the desk, lay a revolver.
“Is that the revolver?” asked Myra and reached for it.
“Yes.”
“Give it to me.” She clasped the butt in her fingers.
Peterkin made a gesture of terror. But Myra slowly shook her head. Peterkin looked into her eyes, then he reluctantly drew back his hand.
“I do not want to keep it,” he said, “it is too much of a constant temptation. And not everyone has as steady a hand as Olga Radó. You have a right to it. Of course. But I should not like you to keep it either. Promise me something, Myra—promise me you will give it to the man you love. Then it will be in the best hands.”
She had risen. “I promise you,” she said almost solemnly, “I will give it to the man I love.”
“Promise that you won’t do anything silly with it, that you won’t carry it carelessly or foolishly.”
“I promise you,” said Myra, “with this proviso. I have no right yet to swear on my life that I won’t shoot myself. But I will swear by my eternal salvation. I will swear by Olga Radó’s ten thousand times sacred memory.”
Something struck him in her tone. He rose slowly from his chair as if trying to search her eyes with his own. “Tell me, Myra,” he said, “I hope you are not angry with me. I should not like anything that I have said to influence your decisions in any way.”
Myra held his fingers in a short firm clasp. From the swift gesture with which she drew herself up and ran her hand over his hips, it was apparent that she was at the utmost limit of her powers.
“I swear,” she said, “that from this hour forth nothing and nobody can ever again influence my decisions.”
* * *
Myra did not return home at once. In a few seconds she had made plans which instantly became decisions. There was no wavering as they took form; it all advanced with one stride from darkness into light and remained there irrevocably.
She visited a shipping-agency and the landlord of the house in which she had spent so many years. There was a time when she would have dreaded such tasks. Now she felt that never as long as she lived should anyone relieve her of such unpleasantnesses.
It made her feel good, to be determined, to manage her affairs prudently and deliberately. When she entered her room and laid her hat in the closet, her hand touched the black dress that she had worn to her father’s burial. For a moment, she felt a desire to put it on, to see herself in gloomy crêpe. But she drew herself up. “Nonsense!” she muttered, gritted her teeth and shut the closet.
She went to her father’s study, seated herself at the desk and wrote various letters, to the attorney, to the bank.
After a while the maid entered. “Your Aunt, my mistress, requests you to come to dinner.”
Myra did not raise her head. “Tell your mistress, my Aunt, that I have already eaten. And request my Aunt, your mistress, to come here after dinner.”
The maid stood in the door for a moment, her mouth wide open. But as Myra did not stir, adding nothing and retracting nothing, simply scratching her pen hurriedly over the paper, she trotted off.
Presently, Aunt Emily appeared, visibly undecided as to whether to be indignant or affable.
“Sit down, please,” said Myra in a tone, so businesslike, so short, so firm and unimpeachably polite that it threw Aunt Emily into confusion and deprived her of all power of speech. “Pardon me, if I shorten your afternoon nap a little, but I have something to say to you and time is pressing.”
Myra picked up the paper-knife, turned it over and over, bent it, rapped her outstretched fingers with it, and stared intently at it while she spoke.
“You will have to decide quickly where you are going—I am about to travel....”
“You?”
“I am about to travel. We are going to break up the household. The house will be rented. Newes has agreed to let me break the lease. The furniture will be put in storage. Within the next few days. I’m beginning today. The moving-men will be here tomorrow. You will certainly want to get out of the way of the commotion. I suggest that you go to a hotel or a pension until you have definitely made up your mind. If you need the maid this afternoon to help you pack, she will be at your service. And then—I should not like you to suffer in a pecuniary way on my account. I should prefer if you were to state your wishes in writing and hand them to Rosenbaum. I have already written him in this connection.”
Myra laid down the paper-knife.
“That’s about all!” She rose and supported herself with her hands behind her, against the desk. “But if we should not see one another again, God’s will be done, and well done by you.”
Aunt Emily also rose, her knees trembling, while her face turned all shades of color from citron yellow to ash gray.
“And—and Alfred?” she asked with a vain effort to inject a touching gentleness into her sharp voice.
“What? Who?” Myra knitted her brow. “Oh, yes—no thank you. You don’t have to notify him. I will take care of everything necessary myself.”
“Myra!” said Aunt Emily solemnly, “what would your dear father say! I have cared for and shielded you from the day you were born, and for thanks I am shown the door....”
Myra seized the paper-knife again.
“I have already written Rosenbaum that he is to transfer fifty thousand marks of my fortune to you. With what you have and what is coming to you from father, you can live very comfortably indeed. I will go tomorrow morning and give him the necessary authorizations.”
“Myra,” said Aunt Emily with mounting pathos. “I shielded you from an awful fate. You ought to go down on your knees and thank me!”
“All right, all right,” said Myra and made a rather wry mouth. “I’ll tell Rosenbaum a hundred thousand.”
Then Aunt Emily turned and rushed out.
Myra packed her things in feverish haste as if for flight. She worked all day and night, permitting no one to help her, not even the maid, not even Peterkin.
But on the evening, when she was departing, Peterkin came to fetch her from the house and accompany her to the depot.
The house was dark and empty. All the furniture had been removed. The chandeliers were down and the windows curtainless. Here and there a picture hook projected disconsolately from the bare wall, or a square on the paper showed that a picture had hung there for years. A big suitcase and a small bag stood in the middle of the empty room. Myra had stuck a lit taper on the window-sill. It gave a strange, flickering half-light. Their shadows glided, huge and bent along the walls and ceiling.
Peterkin kept glancing at his watch. “Isn’t it time for me to call the taxi?” he asked uneasily.
Myra raised her hand. “Stop it! We have oceans of time. What would we do at the station? And what difference does it make if I miss the train? I’ll simply leave in the early morning.”
“Ah,” said Peterkin relieved, “I’d much prefer that. I don’t understand how anybody can travel at night.”
“I’ll travel in the morning,” said Myra. “In a few hours the dawn will come. But I love the night. Whoever loves the stars must love the night. Tell me, Peterkin, have you really never thought that they’re up there in the daytime, too—just as remote and just as near as at night? Sometimes I try to see them when the sun is shining—and I feel quite certain—that such and such a one is here, and another there, and I can hardly wait for twilight to make them visible.”
“You get that from her, too,” said Peterkin sadly, “that insane love of the stars.”
“Yes,” said Myra and her deep voice was like a bell, “what have I that I didn’t get from her? Everything! Certainly all love. The earth and sky are full of things she loved. And her love streams back to me again from all those things. Good God, how many things she loved. Mountains and seas and flowers and spiders and little children and leather and silk and crystal and Günderode and the blessed St. Francis of Assisi—and—me.
“Truly, she taught me love. Good heavens, if Aunt Emily were to hear that she would certainly read a wrong meaning into it.
“Once she said something to me, Olga, I mean, it was when we were on our trip and were talking about our future, and I said that I did not want to be separated from her until I came of age. Then she grew quite impatient and said, ‘Good heavens, what a dreadful attitude, never to be able to love what you aren’t holding in your own two hands!’
“Wasn’t she right, too? Why shouldn’t one love the dead and those who are arriving and those who are far away, whose existence we can only surmise or whose creation wafts us a breath of their souls? And why only one, why not thousands—those for whom we yearn and those who yearn for us—those who have died with longing for us unfulfilled, and those who will live with longing unfulfilled after us, when we have long been dead. Sometimes I feel as if I should stretch both my arms into space and call, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you!’”
“It is strange,” said Peterkin timidly, shaking his head as he gazed up at Myra who stood, weirdly tall and slender in the spectral light, “it is strange how like her you sometimes are.”
“It is much stranger how unlike her I was,” said Myra, with a smile. “Remote, strange, unrelated. So horribly unlike her that I really did not understand her at all. I think I tormented her to death with jealousy and distrust.”
“And now?” asked Peterkin. “Would you be jealous and distrustful now? Who knows, if you had remained together, perhaps in a few months you would have had cause to be.”
Myra shook her head slowly. “You’re just trying to comfort me, Peterkin. But you don’t succeed. My delight in her was so uncontrollable. Even though her form were destroyed a thousand times, my delight in her will always remain. I see now that I should not have been so greedy as to rob heaven and earth of her love. But Olga never deceived me. Never, never, never!”
“The train, Myra,” warned Peterkin.
Myra glanced at her wrist-watch. “Yes, we must go.”
Peterkin went to call a taxi. The chauffeur carried down the luggage.
“And look there,” she rose with a strange rapture on her face and pointed to the starry sky, “there’s Antares! The heart of the Scorpion! I’ll follow it, farther and farther south. We may remain together, or I may wait until it appears again, for it is the most trustworthy of friends.”
“Nevertheless,” said Peterkin, “I have a feeling that it will be very little protection or friendship for you. When I think that in a few nights you will be sleeping in a strange city, in a strange bed....”
“Splendid!” said Myra. “That is the one thing that can give me peace. A room that I’ve never set eyes on before. And what if that room is already there and another person occupies it and fills it with his sorrows and joys and worries and thoughts? Must one always lie down in a strange bed with a feeling of aversion? There are no strange microbes and bacteria in a freshly made hotel bed.
“In the morning the strange bed will tell me everything it has ever experienced. That’s also a fairy gift, you know. I’m no longer afraid because things begin to talk to me. It is always the lucky children in the fairy tales or the wise men in the stories—King Solomon conversing with the birds—to whom things and animals and trees tell their secrets. You don’t know what that means. The whole world was so dreadfully mute. And now everywhere I hear beloved, familiar, inaudible voices. You can’t imagine with what joy and pride that fills one. See, Peterkin, that is something else that I learned from her, from Olga.”
“I am grateful to her for what hours of pleasure I may again find in this masked ball of life, but if the effort seems worthless to me, then I shall be grateful to her for showing me the exit.”
“Yes,” said Peterkin somewhat bitterly, “a loaded revolver.”
“Oh, more than that,” said Myra, “it isn’t done with that alone. Don’t you remember what the little mermaid yearned for, why she let them cut off her tongue, why she suffered a thousand agonies at every step she took—what only a great, a truly great love could give her? Well, Olga gave me that. Olga has given me everything one needs to confront the future with imperturbable calm—a loaded revolver and an immortal soul!”