They sat first in the basket-chairs in front of a café with little lamps that had roses on the silk shades and pearl fringes. There were Gisela, Kramer, Mara Luigi, Will Kraft, John. They ate fruit-ices and waffles and drank a sweet liqueur, in order, as Giesbert said, “to prevent a glaciation of their stomach walls.”
But Mara Luigi who had been dancing, and Kraft and John, who had been to the concert, had not eaten that evening and expressed their cravings for a real beefsteak. So they travelled two doors farther down to a wine restaurant where the orchestra was playing the same pieces in a somewhat different order.
After their meal they went to the nearest bar and drank a Sweden punch and a bottle of champagne, and Mara Luigi danced with Giesbert and Kraft, which caused all the other dancers to stop and stare with interest. Myra felt her vanity somewhat flattered because she was with such excellent dancers.
But the official closing time came. The waiters brought the bill, turned down the lights and drew the heavy purple curtains across the windows. But nobody thought of getting up and going.
At a neighboring table were sitting a beautiful blonde woman and two gentlemen. Myra kept staring at her all evening. The blonde woman regarded everything with a smiling or surprised curiosity, as if she were at a zoological garden, while the two robust gentlemen sat beside her as if it were their task to shield her from every impertinent glance and every poisonous breath.
“Probably one of them is her husband the other her brother,” thought Myra. “There is a place unoccupied at their table, why don’t I sit there? Don’t I belong among that kind of people? By family, education, training and manners? The smooth-shaven man is certainly her brother—he’s the dead image of her. Wouldn’t it be much more suitable if I were married to him, and were making a little evening out with my brother and sister-in-law. That would be very nice. But why do I want that? Merely because I have a nostalgia for perfectly plain simple bourgeois surroundings, or because that lovely woman pleases me?”
When the three people had left the neighboring table, Myra began to find it quite boresome and sterile. She was tired and had had her fill, but it seemed to her as if something further must happen in order to give this senseless expenditure of time and money some semblance of justification. She was afraid that it would happen again, as always, when she left a party early because she could not endure the boredom of it any longer. Everybody would say to her next day, “Oh, what a pity that you went so early, it was especially nice later on, we met so and so, and we had such a good time!”
Gisela was all for going to the Club. The others, except Kraft, who never touched a card, not from moral scruples, but because they bored him to death, agreed.
Myra was a little frightened. She knew that it would turn out as usual. Gisela would play and lose. Then Myra would try to save something and place her own bet—with some caution and discretion, and would win twice and lose three times. Or the other way round.
In any case, those hours at the Club always cost a few hundred or a few thousand marks, and for a week Myra would calculate the lost sums in terms of the books she saw in show-windows or handsome wood and leather goods. Or she would look at the beggars on the street whom she could have made happy, and the pale-faced children, with burning eyes, standing in front of toy shops or confectioners’ windows.
To be sure—she herself was not much put out. She could telegraph the bank and in a few hours would have as much money as she wanted. She was not extremely clever at banking manipulations but she did know one thing, she spent more than her interest. Sometimes it gave her an uneasy feeling, almost a slight dizziness. But she scolded herself for a narrow-minded Philistine. She would never have children—and she would not live long. It might even be good not to possess another cent and have, so to speak, to balance on a tight-rope. Such a situation would prove whether the forces of life were strong enough in her. Perhaps she would be happier in some very modest walk of life where she had to work—as a waitress or a shop-girl. Perhaps physical need would be at once an impetus and an absolution for putting her beloved revolver to her forehead.
But it was not merely indifference to life or death that caused Myra to go to the Club with the others. Gisela played with more bad luck than passion, and if she was so insistent about going to the Club or some bar or dance-hall, it was because she hoped to meet Fiametta there. Myra knew this. They had met often during the winter, and Myra was fascinated each time by her eloquent and haughty beauty, and was each time vexed because Fiametta was always dressed in better taste, was more assured in her manner, and above all, travelled in much better company than Myra.
As no one was at hand to attract Myra’s attention, she looked at herself in a mirror. She seemed quite a stranger to herself, and yet acceptable. She winked at herself in the glass as if to say, “Never fear, tonight we’ll manage to put on as haughty a face as that conceited person!”
* * *
By the time they left the Club they were all in a more or less bad humor. They had all lost except John, who, with his hands full of bills, was running after Kraft and with tears in his eyes and a pleading voice, trying to force the money on him.
Will Kraft refused it with a scarcely veiled irritation, his hands plunged in the pockets of his jacket.
Both of them made Myra feel sorry. And Kramer made her feel sorry too, for he had lost heavily, and was now quite pale and monosyllabic.
And Giesbert and Mara Luigi made her feel sorry: they were bandying reproaches for not having bet at least on different sides of the table. Under their harsh muttered words was something like a hate that has been smouldering for years.
And Gisela made her feel sorry, because she looked wretched and decayed, like a chronic invalid—and because she had not met Fiametta.
And she felt sorry for herself—Oh, she felt so sorry for herself!
They were all in a bad humor, but nobody wanted to go home and get over it by himself. All of them were expecting some compensation for this squandered night, some mad intoxication, some vast jollification—sensation, experience, joy, or an hour’s oblivion of all vexations.
“Where do we go from here?” asked Giesbert, swinging his cane with somewhat affected high spirits. “Heads up, ladies and gentlemen, heads up! As everybody knows, the tom-cat doesn’t really go into action till morning! Forward to our sweet Emil’s! I wager that the overwhelming majority of our distinguished little company will feel quite at home there.”
They turned down a quiet dark side-street where stood a quiet dark little third rate middle class beer-shop. An elderly woman, bare headed, with a shawl around her shoulders, seemed to be waiting for a dog that was sniffing around, and which she called and motioned to from time to time.
Giesbert appeared to know her. He greeted her with a friendly slap on the back, and asked her to open the door.
The old lady undertook to guide them, and amidst constant cries of “Watch out!” they went up and down stairs, across an unlighted yard, through narrow doors, and tiny pitch-black passages between thick baize curtains, until suddenly there was a confusion of lights, sounds, colors and voices.
The large long room, bathed in lilac light, was decorated with impeccable taste. Black and lavender were the dominating colors. The thick carpet was black strewn with lavender flowers. The polished panelling, the marble mantelpiece, the velvet hanging covered with wildly fantastic lavender designs were also black. On the cornice of the panelling were black bronze and black wood-carvings, standing out against the lilac wallpaper.
“How pretty!” said Myra her eyes wide with surprise. “How does it come to be here?”
“Oh, his friends have furnished it for him,” said Giesbert with a rather ironic smile. “As a kind of private establishment! Why shouldn’t it be pretty? There are very wealthy people among them—and some very well-known artists—painters, sculptors, interior decorators—or what have you! In return, little Emil provides them champagne and company!”
“Emil!” called John to a slender, sinuous, dark-haired man. “Show our ladies your establishment!”
Emil was all graciousness. He opened a narrow door, and they entered a dimly lighted, somber room, in which were standing a dozen brown tables. The light willow chairs had been piled on them, and the whole room was embellished with advertisements of beer and tobacco companies.
At one table in a corner a pair of young fellows were lounging with cards in their hands.
Next door was the real beer-shop whose window gave on the street. More chairs and tables, the tank with its brightly polished taps and a player-piano against the wall. The place was in almost total darkness, only a little night-lamp above the buffet was reflected in the metal trimmings. In one corner they saw two shadowy figures that seemed to be wrestling, and heard suppressed gigglings.
They returned to the first room, and Emil, as he was called on all sides, assisted them to find a cozy table and the necessary number of chairs.
Myra regarded the people around her with a mixture of curiosity, sympathy and aversion.
Not far off, there was sitting a fat black-bearded man on whose broad and hairy hand a rosy solitaire flashed and sparkled. And that fat-fingered hand adorned with rings was toying with the head and shoulder of a pale young lad, clad in what was obviously an outworn Sunday best. He seemed half brazen and half embarrassed.
At another table was seated a distinguished looking old gentleman, whose finely chiselled features and gray Van Dyke, betrayed the thinker. One of his slender white hands lay at the base of a champagne glass, the other accompanied his long discourses as if he were on a platform or in the pulpit. His handsome blue eyes glowed as though afire with youthful enthusiasm. Opposite him, sat a broad-shouldered, bull-neck soldier, with a good-looking honest peasant’s face, grinning, flattered but uncomprehending.
More even than the men, the women attracted Myra’s attention. They ran the whole gamut of types. Some had on dark jackets, with lapels, breast-pockets and stiff collars. On their mannishly cut hair they wore small men’s hats. Others betrayed themselves only by a slight overpainting. The sharp features of a few expressed intelligence and character. There were others who verged on the cocotte.
One in particular Myra thought very beautiful. She was tall and slender, had short golden brown curls and the build and features of a Greek boy. She was sitting with a big party having a very good time, and laughed a lot and seemed slightly drunk.
A sweet provocative muffled music issued from behind the curtain. Two young soldiers in uniform had clasped one another around the hips and were swaying, body to body, in waltz rhythm. Despite their heavy boots, they stepped as delicately and discreetly as women dancers—not a step was audible.
“Ah, Emil,” said Giesbert, “how real life is here! When I think I’ll get a bottle of champagne, I get it, but when I think, I’ll get nine bottles, I don’t get them!”
“No, no, Mr. Giesbert,” said Emil, smiling, “you can have nine bottles too!”
They drank champagne, and champagne with red wine, and champagne with Port, and Benedictines, and Sweden punches and flips and champagne.
Myra drank somewhat prudently, and it amused her to watch how one after the other, they began to talk nonsense.
But although she was still mistress of her tongue and her thoughts, she felt her blood pulsing somewhat faster and the music lap her nerves in a warm stream. For a moment, as she closed her eyes, she felt a desire, and actually visualized herself sitting by the Rhine, on a terrace, or in a garden, listening to old sentimental folk songs from the water, and drinking a fragrant “Maybowl” with trusted friends.
When she opened her eyes and saw the room with its morbid color-scheme, filled with smoke and fumes, she was overwhelmed with aversion and misery.
They had become quite merry at her table. All had soft, parted, burning lips and glowing eyes. All laughed and nestled into their chairs as into a caress, or groped for one another with their hands.
“Intoxication, intoxication,” Myra thought, “I must force myself to feel what the others feel! I had such a nice warm sense of well-being before, a soft gliding dizziness. Why has it gone and left everything so stale and horrid?”
She tossed off two glasses of champagne quickly, one after the other. But she simply felt a dull heavy pressure over her eyes. She held her hand over the glass that Kraft wanted to give her “to make her happy.”
“No, thanks, please, I have a head-ache, and I won’t become happy anyway.”
“Take a little coke and get rid of your head-ache,” suggested Gisela.
“Perhaps.” Myra was ready for anything.
From all sides little gold and silver boxes were offered her.
She took a pinch of the white powder on the back of her hand, and snuffed it up her nose. She had an impression of powdered snow when she saw the white crystals. The room was close and stuffy and the idea made her feel better. It was as if she were breathing pure clear winter air. The top of her skull opened and the depressing fog that had weighed down her brain all evening disappeared. The veils seemed to be torn from her weary eyes. Everything seemed nearer and clearer, firmer in its outlines, brighter in color.
“Thank God,” she said with relief, “I’m beginning to understand. It really is a glorious feeling.”
But the effect wore off quickly. She tried it again.
Her head was clear, her thought firm. She felt well and secure.
Giesbert was paying her rather thick-tongued compliments. “Shplendid, little Rudloff, shplendid! The little girl can carry off a thing or two! My highest reshpects! She’ll drink ush under the table, Will, and ‘shnow’ us under the floor, into the cellar, under the cellar. We jusht won’t be there at all, she makesh ush look shmall, sho shmall!”
Mara Luigi had changed places with Kramer in order to sit beside Myra. She laid both her arms on the arm of Myra’s chair and spoke to her in a low voice.
“Tell me honestly, why is it you don’t like me? I’ve always liked you so immensely. From the very first moment—I’m right in saying that, am I not, Gisela? But at the same time, I’ve always had the feeling that you couldn’t abide me. I’m too feminine for you, eh? But, believe me, the externals have very little to do with it! Or do you prefer bobbed hair? Shall I have my hair bobbed?”
“Myra is the only woman in the world I’d ever marry,” declared little John like a sleepy child. “I’d marry Myra right off, if I were a man!”
“God, what a fore-leg the lady has!” Kraft put his hand around her wrist admiringly. “Show us your feet too!”
Laughing, Myra pressed her crossed feet against the edge of his chair. He stroked her ankles in their sheer silk stockings.
“Yes, you may stroke them,” John conceded magnanimously, “you may stroke them because it’s Myra, that’s why.”
A great and almost thrilling joy surged over Myra. She felt herself beautiful, desirable and desired.
“She has the most beautiful legs in the world,” said Gisela, pulling back Myra’s skirt to her knees. Myra let her do it without protest. For the first time, in a burst of pride, she realized herself what perfect slender legs she had.
The girl at the other table, who looked like a Greek boy, had been constantly trying to attract Myra’s attention. Every time that Myra glanced up, the Greek boy would carry her glass to her mouth. At first she had done it as if by accident, now she smiled as she raised her glass. Myra smiled back and drank to her.
Presently the girl wanted to get up. The people at her table laughed and tried to restrain her. But she would not be deterred.
Glass in hand, she came over to Myra. The effort to walk without staggering, lent her movements an especial grace.
“I want to drink to you,” she said with a challenging little laugh.
Myra raised her glass. They drank.
The stranger hesitated. “And—I’d like to give you a kiss, too—that is, if Gisela will allow me.”
Everybody at the table laughed aloud and shouted remarks.
“Oh, I allow you,” said Gisela ironically.
“There is nothing for her to allow,” Myra contradicted haughtily.
The stranger bent quickly, and Myra felt against her lips a hot open wine-wet mouth—for the space of a second. She closed her eyes, and since her head was pressed back into her shoulders, and Kraft still held her feet on his chair, she became so dizzy that she gripped her chair with both hands. She felt as if the chair were tipping, the whole room swaying, as if she were on a swing that was plunging through the air, or on a ship whose planks were sprung and were being sucked into a raging whirl-pool.
She sat up and pushed away the stranger almost violently in her need for air.
At the same moment, she saw Gisela jump up, deathly pale, with her mouth distorted, her head stretched forward like a panther ready to spring. Her burning eyes were staring at the entrance door.
Involuntarily Myra followed her glance and saw the dark curtain fall into place behind the latest arrivals.
Beside Ulrich Zeeden’s somewhat stooped figure stood Fiametta, on the arm of a tall, slender elegant man.
Her eyes were large and clear and unsurprised, but full of a probing curiosity and of a warm velvety sheen. To Myra it seemed as if those eyes were not an arm’s length away from her, so distinctly could she observe the play of the lids, the flecks of light on the brown iris, the shadow of the lashes.
Those eyes were raised with a soft gleam to the man at her side as if they had had more than enough of the scene before them. Her lips moved. The man nodded in agreement. All three turned, and the curtain fell into place behind them again.
Gisela seized a glass from the table and flung it with a bitter laugh at the door. Giesbert and Kraft instantly caught her wrists. She resisted, trying to free herself, but finally dropped her head on her breast, and began to cry, loudly, unrestrainedly, hysterically.
The other people, occupied as they were with themselves, nevertheless watched her attentively.
Myra began to tremble in every limb.
“Go!” she muttered. “I must go, must go, must go!”
She felt as if she would join in that strident weeping the next moment, or throw herself on the floor, or overturn the table and trample the glasses and bottles under her feet.
She was glad when she found herself in the street at last, in a cold blue dawn, and still gladder to be in the taxi that they all took.
The air brought her to her senses. She felt beastly wretched.
She made the others swear not to cause any unnecessary commotion on the stairs or in the halls. But the more she pleaded, the more exuberant they became. Kramer had lost control completely. He was all for knocking on Mrs. Meidinger’s door and ordering her to send him up a pretty girl.
“It’s no more than her duty,” he babbled. “She’s the mother of this establishment. What’s to prevent her putting it on my bill, she puts everything else on it.”
When Myra opened her door, Giesbert tried to crowd in after her. She pushed him out, but he embraced her and a tussle ensued in the open door in the course of which Giesbert hugged Myra and covered her face and neck with passionate kisses.
Suddenly the door of the next room was opened with a bang, and Luisa Peters emerged in an amazing big-checked dressing-gown, with her hair done up for the night in two long smoothly plaited braids. She forcefully commanded quiet.
Little Marga Luigi found her unexpected appearance so comical that she bent double, shaking with laughter and pointing her finger at her.
Myra took advantage of Giesbert’s astonished about-face to slip into her room where she shut and bolted the door.
She staggered against the bureau with which she supported herself, trembling in every limb. Burning shame was devouring her, gnawing at her inwardly, hollowing her out.
She bent double but she could not escape the incessant gnawing pain. She wished she could get away, but she knew she did not have the courage or the strength to pack a suitcase. But she must get away, at least out of that house, before morning. It was unthinkable that she should ever cross the dining-room again. Unthinkable, too, to wait for Mrs. Meidinger to give her notice that she could not tolerate such a person in her house.
She abhorred, she loathed herself. In addition she felt physically wretched—dizziness, weariness, a galloping heart, the gall-like bitterness with which the cocaine burned her jaws.
She felt that she must come to some decision, but she did not know what.
Her thoughts sought feverishly for something to which they could cling, sought some person to whom they could confess, and who would have the power to absolve them. She was seeking someone who would protect her from herself, to whom she could kneel, in whose lap she could hide her face, and who would lay kind, strong hands on her head.
“Mother!” a voice cried within her. “Mother!”
Her thoughts turned to Sophie—but Sophie repelled them. In that serene little house, which had always been so comforting a refuge to her, she would be a disturber of the peace. Not through any fault of hers, she thought bitterly.
Olga—Olga alone was salvation. She would press the revolver to her forehead, would think that it was Olga’s cool, firm hand.
And Olga’s hands would efface, erase, all the painful things, the shame, the remorse, the disgust and grief and hopeless despair. In another moment all that could be effaced.
And if she was dead the next morning, everything would be explained. Of course, little Mara Luigi would not understand it: she would always declare that Myra had been “so cheerful last night.”
But Fiametta would understand. She would recall the previous night. For she had seen Myra, oh, Myra still felt the impact of her glance, and Fiametta would hunch up her shoulders with a sudden shudder at the thought that she had glanced at a dying woman.
Luisa Peters would say, “Poor child, she drank to find the courage.”
Sophie would be very shocked—perhaps she would be grieved too. But what concern was that of Myra’s! Sophie had not given a thought as to what became of Myra. And she had Nora....
It must happen quickly before anybody woke up in the house. In twenty seconds it would be over—all over.
At that moment when she took the revolver out of the box, there was a knock at the door.
Myra stood motionless, holding her breath. Perhaps she ought to do it now, at once, quickly, spurred by that impatient knocking.
Then it would be over, then whoever was outside there could enter, for all she cared.
Would it make a loud noise? Probably she wouldn’t hear it herself—she hoped not, though of all the senses the ear must function the longest. Ah, perhaps it wouldn’t happen so quickly, and she would hear them breaking down the door and the shrieks and cries.
“Please, open the door!” called the voice outside; it was as pleading as it was commanding. “Please, Miss Rudloff, open the door a moment!”
It was not Giesbert, or Mara Luigi, or one of the maids. It was Luisa Peters.
Perhaps she was sick and needed someone. She would hardly be rattling Myra’s door in the middle of the night to read her a moral lecture.
Myra tossed the revolver carelessly into the box and opened the door.
Luisa Peters forced her way into the room. She stood broad and robust, and a little ridiculous in her big-checked dressing-gown, in spite of her pale face.
Her quick alert eye instantly noticed the open box and the revolver with the butt sticking out.
But she did not betray this by the slightest gesture.
“I must beg your pardon, Miss Rudloff,” she said with a good-natured smile. “I complained because I thought that you came home in a rather happy condition. But I saw at once that you weren’t well. You must lie down immediately—you can hardly stand on your feet. Can I help you? You had better believe, I know something about taking care of sick people!”
While she was speaking, she took Myra’s hat from her tangled hair. She unbuttoned her dress. She held Myra like a doll, turning her this way and that with her strong arms. She removed the hurting hair-pins from the loosened knots.
Suddenly Myra felt the warm presence of a human being, felt those good, strong, solicitous hands. It was as if all her festering wounds broke open and warm blood washed away her pain. She began to weep, unappeasable gentle tears, releasing her, rinsing her of pain.
“I am still too much a child,” she said, while the tears streamed down her face. “You will think I am drunk—but I am perfectly serious. I am still too much a child to run around the world so horribly alone!”
* * *
For three days Luisa Peters held Myra in gentle captivity. She did not leave her alone for a moment, had her meals served in her room and turned away everyone with the announcement that Myra was sick.
Myra was perfectly satisfied with this arrangement. She herself would not have found the strength for this lie, and yet she felt the absolute necessity of separating forever from all the people among whom she had lived during the past year.
The very first day Luisa Peters endeavored to convince Myra—which did not prove difficult—that her associations were altogether unsuitable and that the best thing she could do would be to turn her back on that city and all her so-called friends.
On the third, in the morning, she told Myra a great deal about her native city, of its far-famed cleanliness for which she was constantly longing, of its people who were reputed stiff and formal because they did not wear their hearts on their sleeves—although they were honest and courageous and pure. She told her, too, about her beautiful little step-sister, Gwen, who was about Myra’s age, though still a child, the carefully sheltered pet of the whole house. She would be a more suitable companion for Myra than these horrible females here.
In the afternoon she helped Myra pack her suitcase. Myra wanted to go away, to go to the clean city where the swift white little boats crossed the blue waters.
Myra was quite touched by so much kindness and more so, if anything, by Luisa’s confidence.
She smiled, a sad and knowing smile, when at parting Luisa Peters took her in her arms and kissed her on both cheeks.
“At heart I’m at least ten years older than she,” she thought sorrowfully, “for I know what, God be praised, she does not even suspect—that she’s in love with me! Because she has little of the talent of ‘the horrible females,’ she’ll never confess it to herself. Probably she’d have to shoot herself, if she admitted it. God grant, that she never becomes conscious.”
The only person whose hand Myra wished to shake once more was Eccarius. There was much sympathy in his face. Perhaps Luisa Peters had informed him of more than Myra gave her credit for knowing.
“There is something that you still have to tell me,” said Myra with an attempt at smiling, “I’ve often thought of it on sleepless nights and have wanted to ask you—and then I’ve always forgotten. Do you remember when we were walking out to Mrs. Hersfeld’s one day”—a sudden shyness prevented her from mentioning Sophie’s name—“I said that my motto would be ‘Love life and be not afraid of death!’ But you wanted to turn the motto around....”
“Yes,” Eccarius nodded gravely. “‘Love death and be not afraid of life!’ Or in other words, and this is my life’s motto, a good motto for a long journey, ‘No one ought to die until he has learned to love death!’”