Gwen and Myra were sitting in a compartment of the moving train. Two elderly ladies, black, stiff and erect, were sitting opposite, watching them sharply.
From time to time, Fred would come through the aisle and make faces, with the desired result that Gwen nearly died laughing.
But if she controlled herself with an effort, she did everything in her power to make Myra laugh.
“Such shamelessness,” she said with pretended indignation. “Just see how that fellow stares in here every time he passes. Next time I’m going to report him to the conductor.”
With an offended mien, she pushed her travelling cap on tighter in order to lean back and cross her legs.
But Myra was not to be made to laugh by any such antic.
“Oh, don’t imagine that he stares in here because he likes your appearance!” she said quietly. “He is either a criminal or a detective looking for a criminal. You can see that at a glance.”
“Good heavens, no!” Gwen continued the game in the highest spirits. “Don’t frighten the wits out of me! I read such a horrible story the other day—about a hardened criminal who was travelling in women’s clothes. Of course he was smooth shaven. But he had such a heavy growth of beard that he had to shave twice a day.” She spoke in a low voice, though just loud enough so that attentive ears could catch every word. With that her glance strayed with intentional carelessness over the rather downy face of the lady sitting opposite. “Just imagine, he was alone in the compartment with a young woman, on a long journey, and she saw—of course, at first she thought she must be mistaken—but she saw more and more distinctly that the face of the lady sitting opposite was gradually becoming covered with a growth of stubble! It must have been terrible! I think I’d have died of shock. As it was, I made a resolution never to travel alone. That’s why I begged you so hard to come with me today.”
“I was glad to do it,” Myra assumed a worried expression, “if only Emma will take good care of the children. Bubbie was coughing so hard again this morning.”
This was too much even for Gwen. For a moment she stared at Myra’s immobile, serious face, then she burst out laughing, covering her mouth with her handkerchief and coughing in spasms.
When at last they got off the train, they stood on the platform doubled up with laughter.
Myra stared after the departing coaches. She had not been mistaken—a black-gloved hand rubbed the window clean, and a pointed nose was poked against it. An attentive glance followed her.
Gwen raised her hand to wave farewell, but Myra held her arm.
“Don’t,” Gwen tried to tear her arm away. “What do I care for the old witches? Good-bye, dear train, run along or run off the track! No, better not do that, there may be some nice people on you!”
“Come,” said Myra, “Fred is standing here closing and buckling his travelling bag, just in order not to attract attention—like a real detective. But we agreed that we should leave the station first. Come. He’s looking quite desperately in our direction.”
They passed through the gates and the waiting-room out on to the street, which lay in a glare of sunlight. Five minutes later, Fred approached and tipped his hat.
“If I may make a suggestion to you ladies,” said Fred, “we will get my travelling bag from the station now, and armed with that, you can seek accommodations at a hotel. Ladies without luggage—that would never do! And you can’t tell every chambermaid and waiter the story about the lost last train.”
“And you?” asked Gwen.
“I’ll borrow some kind of a suitcase from an acquaintance. We can provide ourselves with the most essential requisites for spending the night here on our way to the station. Then you can pack them in my bag and betake yourselves to the ‘Emperor’. In the meantime, I’ll look up my friend, Schmid, and borrow a suitcase with which to inspire confidence. In half an hour I’ll come to the hotel, go to the dining-room, and be insanely astonished to find you there. Agreed?”
“Splendid!” Gwen was again dancing for joy.
“Stop! Stop! Stop! No pirouettes and toe-dancing, if you please! I beseech you, Miss Myra, watch out for the child, she’s going to queer us in the hotel and all over town. I don’t know whether I dare leave you alone with her for half an hour.”
“It is only your presence that makes her so exuberant,” Myra assured him. “When she is alone with me, she is perfectly rational.”
“Indeed!” There was an odd twitch at the corners of Fred’s lips, his short sharp glance flew from Myra’s face to Gwen’s.
* * *
The early twilight had already fallen. Gwen drew the yellow curtains over the windows and turned on all the electric lights—the chandelier, the lamp on the night-table, the bulb over the wash-basin and the commode—so that the big hotel room was bathed in light.
“That’s how I like it.” She drew herself up like a purring kitten. “I must have light and warmth.” She tried the register under the window, a scorching heat poured out. “It’s beautiful! Like that! I detest a cold bedroom. At home the heat is always partially turned off because mamma thinks it’s unhealthy to sleep in a warm room. When I’m married, my bedroom will have to be as hot as a hot-house, so that I can sleep without a night-gown or covers!”
She opened Fred’s bag and took out their small purchases. When that was done, she rummaged on.
“Just see all the things he has in here! Wonderful soap, smell it, Myra! We’ll just keep it here. And a mouth-wash too. Shaving cream—we don’t need that. My God, how many brushes! Splendid, buckskin slippers. Not having any slippers with me is the most unpleasant part. I hate running around bare hotel floors in my bare feet. I must see what kind of pajamas he has. Violet and white. Very pretty. Do you want to wear pajamas? I think they’re very uncomfortable. But they’re very nice to take breakfast in in the morning. Do you know, I think they’re better looking on homely people than on pretty ones. Because you don’t see their necks and arms. But I’d like to wear them sometime just to see if they suit me, bleu électrique perhaps. And you must have strawberry ones, not fraise, but strawberry-colored. Judging by the French-German color designations, the French really are color-blind. We call fraise, fraise écrassée, and are surprised that we’ve never seen fraise-colored strawberries! Have you never had a shop-girl tell you, ‘We haven’t got that in blue, only in bleu’? Oh, the world is too idiotic. I have such a craving for some good alcohol. What drink do you like best? Do you want the right hand bed or the left? I suppose I’ll have to do up my hair again. Shall I wear the cap? It’s probably the most ladylike-looking. Are you ready? Shall we go down? How is it that your hair is always faultless? It isn’t so much shorter than mine. Do I look presentable? From the rear, from the front, from all sides? All right, then give me a kiss and come.”
Gwen turned again on the stairs. She brandished the key of their room at Myra before dropping it into her purse.
“The key! I took it out of the lock. They mustn’t find a gentleman’s bag with shaving materials and pajamas in our room. Fred must take it away as soon as he comes.”
Myra was a little frightened at the big bright dining-room. She had completely forgotten how to look for a table, how to treat waiters, how to run over a wine-card. It was like an examination. And the worst of it was, that she could not defer the answer to these questions with a “We’re expecting someone.”
As they entered, her first glance rested on a mirror, and in that mirror she saw Fred’s face. He was glancing up over the paper, which he held in both hands. His eyes, which were big and candid and of a deep luminous blue, looked a greeting at her. From his glance, from his firm bright face issued a current of repose and security.
How good that he was here! How good that he was here!
Presently she saw his broad shoulders and fair head in front of the mirror.
Gwen began to giggle and nudge Myra. She made a motion as if she intended to rush over and frighten him by a slap on the shoulder. But Myra held her arm tightly.
“He has seen us,” she said softly, “just walk past as if you didn’t notice him.”
Myra heard his chair scrape behind them and his quick, long stride.
They greeted one another with complete astonishment. Fred looked for a larger table—he had purposely seated himself at a small one—and ordered the waiter to bring over his things.
Carefully he selected a small supper and a good wine.
“Afterwards, we will have champagne,” he said when the waiter was out of ear-shot. “Of course,” with a hunch of his shoulders, “I will happen on the idea when he’s here. ‘Really, my dear ladies, we must celebrate this meeting with champagne!’ Doesn’t that sound quite credible?”
“Very,” Myra agreed with a laugh.
“Good heavens, the bag!” Gwen put her hand to her open mouth in terror, glancing from one to the other with her big frightened child’s eyes. “Fred, you must take your bag out of our room! What will the maid think of us? But don’t get caught, or they’ll have you arrested as a thief! That would be a wonderful joke. Watch, I’ll give you the key without anyone’s noticing.”
She rummaged in her purse, which she held under the table on her lap, drew out the key, squeezing it tight in her effort to hide it in her little hand, and thrust her clenched fist under the table.
Fred took the key from her, and slipping it into his trousers pocket, leaned back laughing in his chair.
“Wonderful!” he said, showing his firm white teeth, “now the whole room has seen you pass me the key without anyone’s noticing you! Well, I don’t mind. I don’t feel that I’m compromised any further. You look pretty enough!”
He said it rather disdainfully, with a mocking twitch at the corner of his mouth. But his lowered eyes ran over Gwen with a glance in which there was something intimately appraising, and at the same time, burning and absorbing.
“What am I doing here?” thought Myra with a sudden pang. “Why must I be the witness of their affection? Simply because they want to guard their reputation? Ridiculous. They have certainly been alone together a hundred times before. They can’t be afraid that something will happen that has never happened yet. These two people know one another completely and without reserves. I’ve been aware of it for months. How could I have forgotten it again? What am I doing here?”
Fred filled his glass.
“To good honest comradeship!” he said.
“I’ll drink to that!” Myra raised her glass.
Fred tried to meet her glance with serious, candid eyes. “You’re a born comrade,” he said sincerely. “Loyal, clever, reticent and daring. You know, we often visualize people in another age, with different lives, in other rôles, so to speak. When I visualize you, it is always a thousand years ago, in the days of the knights and minnesingers. Then I see you in an esquire’s costume, following your chosen loved one. There are such figures in the old songs and sagas, and even in my boyhood they always stirred my emotion and admiration. A heroic maiden, without personal ambition, but all for love, enduring all hardships, sharing all doughty deeds, chided and praised, but never receiving the wages of passion until some time in the tumult of battle she receives a blow or a thrust, and the knight himself carries his faithful esquire into the tent in his arms. Then as he peels off the boy’s doublet a woman’s body lies exposed.”
“Don’t you think he has talent?” teased Gwen. “He should run more with poets. And what am I? Utter yourself, Mr. Wietinghoff, in what rôle do you prefer to visualize me?”
“You are an unmistakable child of the twentieth century,” said Fred scornfully, “silly and precocious, spoiled and childish, fond of dress and arrogant....”
Gwen stamped her feet on the floor and opened her mouth for an unmannerly outcry, but Fred hastened to pacify her.
“But sweet,” he said hastily, “quite charming into the bargain, irresistible, enthralling, entrancing, enchanting!”
“It seems so,” laughed Gwen. “How did I ever enchant you that you’re so frightfully silly? Drink, children, I find the wine glorious and life a wonderfully beautiful affair.”
Myra drank to her. The wine made her nerves tingle warmly.
“Comrade,” she thought, “a beautiful, a dear word. Comrade! I would like to be that, and I can be. Comradeship. That is my strength. But nobody has ever required it of me yet. I can be a comrade to this little girl and a comrade to this man. Whether they have other relations with one another or not, makes no difference to me, doesn’t affect me. Strange, nobody has ever yet wanted me for a comrade, not even Olga. And yet I feel as if a key to my inner nature has been given me in those words. I feel as if I could see into and recognize what is within me. I will always be grateful to Fred for giving me that clue.”
They all remained in a good mood. Sometimes Gwen laughed so wantonly that Fred or Myra had to quiet her. Sometimes there was a humorous allusion which Myra did not understand. But she was no longer hurt by it. A good comrade must be trusting and patient in all matters. Must be able to overhear what he does not understand. And must be forever alert, must listen with ears peeled for a cry of need addressed to him.
At the entrance to their room Fred said good night. He lingered over both their hands as he kissed them, though not a fraction of a second longer over one than over the other. But he carried Gwen’s fingers to his lips and gazed piercingly into her eyes. He bowed his head low over Myra’s hand.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to the sea!” Gwen danced exuberantly across the room. “Myra, sweet Myra, isn’t life beautiful? And isn’t it marvellous to go on a spree with Fred? Aren’t you fascinated by him? Well, something like that, you don’t have to be afraid of telling me, I’m not jealous! Only I won’t let myself be put out of business.... But otherwise.... You are a little in love with him, you don’t have to be afraid to tell me.”
“I think you’re rather tipsy, little mouse,” said Myra, smiling. “It’s high time that you crept into your bed.”
“Yes, high time—high time,” Gwen hummed softly. She undressed while she danced around the room, strewing her things on tables and chairs. “But I’m not tired. Are you tired, Myra? I hope not.”
“Why not? What have you got up your sleeve?”
“Oh, I’m going to the ball with you tonight, to the ‘feather ball.’ Didn’t you use to say that when you were a child? It’s silly, isn’t it? All children have the same stupid expressions and always think they’re wonderfully witty, and can repeat them a thousand times over. But when you grow older you don’t want to hear the best joke or eat the most beautiful dish twice. Really sad, isn’t it? Or as Fred would say, ‘The eternal hunger for what is new drives us on.’ Otherwise we’d swing around in a circle like horses on a merry-go-round. Therefore, long live the urge to change! What’s taking you so everlastingly long, Myra? I’m getting into bed already.”
But she did not get into bed at once. She ran about the room in her undershirt, putting this and that in order and looking for something here, and wasted time chattering and loitering.
Myra was already in bed. “You’ll catch cold,” she said, shaking her head. “How can you dawdle around that way? You were ready a half hour ago. Turn out the unnecessary lights and creep into bed.”
Gwen stretched her bare arms over her head.
“I am so restless,” she complained, “can’t you understand. Ah, Myra, you always act as if you were made of ice and snow. Really don’t you feel the wine going through your veins and thudding up against your heart, again and again.” She struck her breast regularly with her clenched fist. “And can’t you feel that it’s spring outside? Have you no longer any roots in the earth so that you can’t feel how the sap is fermenting in you—in you, as in every tree and bush.”
She stopped beside the bureau and laid her arms and her forehead against the smooth wood.
“Sometimes I think that a poor mistreated, sawed up, polished piece of a tree like this still has a spark of life in it. And in spring, when the great orgy is preparing, it begins to feel a pulse and twitching in its poor polished wood. Feel it, there’s a throb like the soft beating of a heart in it. Then I think that the furniture is pleased with me. It feels my life frothing over, and that fulfills its desire and gives it rest, Myra!” With a bound she was on the edge of the bed, and was shaking Myra by the shoulders. “Are you more lifeless than that dead wood? It isn’t true and I don’t believe you are like that!”
She threw her arms around Myra, burrowing with her head among the pillows.
“Why don’t you like me, Myra?” she whispered in her ear. “Tell me, is it because you are in love with Fred? It isn’t true that you’ve never been in love with a woman. And it isn’t true that you could not love me....”
“Love?” said Myra in a toneless voice. “What do you call love?”
“I call love making someone happy—and making myself happy by doing so. I call everything else friendship or idolizing or infatuation, infatuation at most. I want to know what you have against me!”
She knelt on the edge of the bed, tearing the night-gown from her shoulders like a mad woman.
“You must look at me! You must look at me! Where have I any defect that could repel you?”
“You are very beautiful,” said Myra with a painful smile.
“Oh, but you are more!” Gwen threw herself upon Myra, and kissed her mouth and eyelids, her neck and cheeks.
“I don’t want her,” thought Myra. “She has opened her heart to me and I have not urged her on. I am his comrade, I am his comrade....”
Rosy red waves surged up. They swept from her heart, over her throat up to her eyes. The room seemed to reel, as if the walls were struggling for breath, as if their heart were palpitating by fits and starts.
Suddenly everything went still and bright. Like a dazzling light, like the blare of a trumpet.
Perhaps a board had creaked in the floor very softly.
Myra started up, alert, sober.
Something was in the room that had not been there before.
A violet blotch. And topping it, Fred’s face.
Fred’s eyes. Burning. Greedy. Completely unveiled like the eyes of rutting animals. Perfectly naked eyes.
She threw off the soft body that lay choking her.
A catch-phrase flashed through her mind which she could not forget again. It was the only thing she could think of, and her mind kept repeating it over and over.
“A put up job. All a put up job!”
She sat up and reached for her clothes.
At that moment Fred sprang at her.
“Myra,” he stammered, “my sweetest one!”
She slapped his face with the palm of her hand.
He had been prepared for resistance, for kicking, scratching and biting—he would have vanquished her laughingly. But the blow made him stagger back.
Myra slipped into her clothes.
“A put up job,” she thought, “a put up job!”
Her hands did not shake in spite of her frantic haste. Not until she was dressed did she cast a quick glance at Fred.
The mark of her hand on his pale face burned like a fiery brand. The wide lids were quivering over his eyes.
A strange feeling took possession of Myra. A furious joy, “I caught him a good one.” And then a dawning realization, “This is the first time that I have ever touched that handsome face—that handsome face.”
She had never formulated it before in thought, it was as if her hands had always longed to stroke that face.
An unutterable sorrow filled her heart. As if she had possessed something beautiful and precious and was first aware of it when it lay ruthlessly shattered and broken at her feet.
She walked quietly to and fro in the room, collecting her things. When she had to pass Fred she walked around him. He did not look at her, but he felt it and shuddered.
Gwen had crept out of her bed. She sat pink and naked on the big feather comforter. She had hunched up her shoulders and was playing rather embarrassedly with her toes.
The door to the adjoining room stood open. It was the door through which Fred had entered.
“A put up job,” thought Myra, “a put up job!”
She went with her hat and coat on to that door. With her hand on the latch, she stopped.
“I am going into the next room,” she said quietly. “I have no desire to leave the hotel in the middle of the night. I will go at seven and leave the door into the hall open.”
Fred turned.
“Miss Rudloff,” he said hoarsely, “Miss Rudloff!”
His two dark eyes in his pale face were like two open wounds.
Myra closed the door behind her and threw the bolt with a creak.
She did not turn on the light.
She knew, she sensed—there were things everywhere, strange things, his things.
After quite a long while she heard voices from the adjoining room, high and low, muffled and suppressed, but audible.
“Dear God, what won’t I have to hear,” she thought. “Dear God, give me strength, give me strength. Let me die, if you can, but don’t let me go insane, so that I will do something—something perfectly terrible....”
But the worst thing was the odor in the room. The smell of cigarettes, the delicate scent of Russian leather, of soap, of vinegar.
Myra threw the window wide open and moved a chair up to it. The night was cold. Myra trembled no matter how snugly she wrapped herself in her coat.
She thought of the city which she would leave. Where would she go now—whither?
Should she let herself be driven on, homeless, restless, the quarry of passionate desire?
Or die?
Yes, if she could but have believed in sleep.
But stronger at this moment than ever before she felt undeniably, inviolably, that there was in her something indestructible.
She was quite humble before that which she felt within her, with the humility of a mother who feels a strange life stir in her womb.
“My poor soul,” she said softly, “what have I done to you? Why have I never thought of taking care of and helping you? Why did I always want to set you wandering in the cold space between the stars? Poor soul, why do I have you, if you merely suffer on my account and I on yours? Sometime I shall know, sometime I shall learn all. I would not like to die, no, I would not like to die before I know why I have lived.”
The memory of Eccarius crossed her mind—“No one ought to die before he has learned to love death.”
“No, I do not love death. I do not fear him, but I do not love him. I will learn to love him. I will live in order to learn to love death. Perhaps that is why we have to live. And perhaps that is why we have to suffer.”
The voices in the next room hushed. The strange familiar odor had disappeared from the room.
In the sky the stars were paling before the first feeble light of a dawning March morning.
THE END