Part 7

“It is--rather silly.”

“Well, you needn’t call me by it. You can invent another name for me.”

She considered. “Peter,” she said.

“All right--Peter.”

When she fell ill he sent her flowers, and every day she sent a message--that she was a little better, or a little worse. Then she came again to the café. “Beautiful, beautiful flowers! I was breathless when I saw them. And so much!”

He buried his face in her hands, “Beautiful girl ... beautiful flowers. Wonderful when I think: I’ve been seeking, all these months, all these years I’ve been seeking, and now I have found.”

“I too. For nine months I was alone. Now when I come to the café, the waiter says confidentially: ‘The gentleman is already here.’ One feels one has somebody.”

“While you were ill, when I used to come here by myself, the waitress looked at me with sad eyes, as if she thought you’d left me or we had broken it off. I notice we’ve become privileged guests and are treated accordingly.”

She smiled--so sweetly and intimately, and, watching him, laughed. He looked up from his cup. “I must laugh,” she said, “at the way you scratch the last drop of sugar out of the cup.” He laughed too. She was delightful. “I’ve just come back from Adolf’s bedside,” she remarked.

“And who is Adolf?”

“My fiancé.”

“This is new to me.”

“At least he thinks he is my fiancé.”

“And you don’t think so.”

“No.”

“This is a relief.”

“He is dying now.”

“Oh--is he?” And secretly he thought: This is a relief. “What does he do?”

“He is a doctor--venereal and skin diseases. But he is very tender and aesthetic and plays the piano wonderfully--Schumann and Chopin. He says he will let me live as I like and love whom I like, that he will never touch me, and only wants to be allowed to marry me and to live by my side.”

When they came out of the café, it was a sunny afternoon. “Come, I’ll show you where I live,” he said, and they made their way to Am Hof--the old-fashioned square of Vienna where he had rooms. She took off her hat and used his comb and sat down at his writing-table. “It must be nice to live like that. If I were you I would give myself up to my work, and never tie myself up with any woman.”

“How you understand me! Other women are so conventional and self-seeking. But you--you are so delightfully free and easy, so unusual and romantic!”

She sat in his chair, and suddenly sleep overcame her. “I want to lie down.” She lay down on his bed, and he sat down beside her. “I feel like a faithful old dog sitting at your feet and seeing that you come to no harm.” She gave him her hand, which he pressed to his lips. He looked at her legs in the glossy silk stockings, the seductive shoe. Warm, yielding curves, unexplored mysteries. And he said, “After all this seeking, to feel you have found ... at last. It’s not--no, not your face; it’s....” He was gently pressing her knee; she made an involuntary attempt to disengage it. “ ... your soul,” he said--and she left it. “I’m content: I really need nothing. Not by a word would I suggest or precipitate the moment.... Not till you yourself ... an offering, a priceless gift.” She pressed his hand to her heart. “Not even then. I’m content, I need nothing.” She touched his brow silently with her lips.

“Yes?” he asked, suddenly crushing her in his arms. “Yes?”

She closed her eyes with the lashes like black needles, nodding rapidly several times. “Pull down the blinds.”

“Oh, I am grateful! Tristan and Isolde.... _Nacht der Liebe_....” He was whistling.

“Is the door locked?”

“I’ll lock it for you--do anything for you.” Of sheer relief, he felt like cracking cheap jokes.

“What is the time?”

“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon--the time people here take their 5 o’clock tea.” The yellow blinds drew to and fro in the breeze. Outside in the sunny square the women were selling oranges and flowers. Upstairs somebody began playing the piano. “This is Schumann,” she said. “Adolf plays this.” The blinds still swayed gently, gently, and they could feel the breeze on their burning cheeks. She knitted her brows. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Adolf is waiting for me. I’ve neglected supper for father.”

He turned on the switch. “No, no, I am ashamed of the light.”

It was black night when they went out. Stepping into the taxicab at the door, she gave her address. “You shouldn’t have told him where you live before that old caretaker woman. You never can tell.”

“I take full responsibility for what I do and I am prepared to face the consequences of my acts, and I have nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. He remembered the prudish cowardly attitude of his own forget-me-not eyed sisters, his mother, his maidenly aunts. “You wonderful girl!” he exclaimed. He felt grateful, so that he did not even mind how much he had to pay for the taxi. She scanned his face and his figure, and he instantly looked at his gloves. “They are filthy, I know.”

“Give them to me, I will wash them for you.”

“No, no, why should you?”

“The maid will wash them.”

“Very well, then.”

The taxicab pulled up at her house door. “Just see me upstairs. It’s so dark.” She took hold of his arm and with a sure quick step ran up the stairs, while he fumbled uncertainly with his feet. She gave him a kiss in the dark, which missed the mark, handed him the house door key, begged him for the sake of love not to make a noise--and was gone. He felt his way carefully by the chalk walk, dirtying his coat and hands--and presently lost himself. For an hour he fumbled about in the dark, groping his way down the steps time without end, only to find himself at the end of each attempt in the coal cellar. Now I’ve made a noise, he thought, the caretaker will come out, call the police and have me arrested. I’m a lost man. When, having given up all hope, suddenly he saw a shimmering of light, then a new turning, the real stairs--and he was saved. The Votive Church as he went home seemed made of lace: the tall twin towers, like a prayer, strained heavenward in the blue night. He sat down on a bench and thought of her.

He was more than usually courteous to the old caretaker woman. “A pretty girl, I call her,” she said, opening the heavy outer door for him, while he paid the customary “lockout money.” “Is she your bride?”

He nodded.

“Ah, well, young men have luck. But I’m not one to let the cat out of the bag.”

He fumbled in his pockets.

“Thank you.--I am known to be discreet. Baron Waldmeyer who lived here nine months ago also used to bring his bride up to his rooms, regularly three times a week you might say. A pretty girl she was, too, Lina Holz--you know the chemist’s daughter across the way. The white house opposite. That’s right. Never a word to anybody. God beware! They were very satisfied with me. ‘Frau Krampf,’ he used to say to me, ‘I can rely on you.’”

Next day they were hurrying in the train into the country. “I too am glad we’re friends,” she said. “My family is nothing to me. Mother died when I was fourteen. She was so small I used to take her on my lap. My sister married rich, but she can’t do anything decently. She is such a snob--hides the fact that we are Jews. She will give father a new suit--or rather says she will--and all so haughtily, you know, so condescendingly, will talk so much about it and in the long run won’t buy him anything and will even borrow money from him in the end. She gives me things occasionally, or rather says she will and doesn’t. But that which is inside one she doesn’t know.”

“Quite so.”

Yet he had discovered that Isolde, despite her intellectual pretensions, was as fond of cabarets and dancing halls as any other child of pleasure-loving Vienna. And she was not content with going to one cabaret during a night, but from the one immediately wanted to go on to another, and from that to a third--in all respects similar to the first.

“I’m different,” she said. “Already as a child we had no points of contact. My sister would go out on the Korso to be stared at by men, while I sought my friends among writers and artists, or went off by myself to the Opera and tried to find my real ‘I’ in the _Walküre_, the _Ring_, the _Meistersinger_, in _Tristan und Isolde_.”

“Very becoming for one named Isolde! If one didn’t know you were above such cheap romanticism, one would almost suspect you gave yourself that name.”

She laughed faintly.

“Why--_did_ you?”

She closed her eyes and nodded rapidly.

“How clever of you!” He kissed her hand.

“My real name is Rebecca.”

“Let’s forget that it is. We’ll go to the Opera together--to _Tristan_. A good performance here, isn’t it?”

She closed her eyes and nodded rapidly, significantly. “I’ll bring the complete musical score. I have the entire _partitura_ and we can follow it.”

“By God! we’ll follow it!” said he, though he was quite unable to read music.

At the Opera, all the liveried attendants seemed to know her. “Ah, Fräulein Isolde, it’s good to see you again!”

“It’s the first time that I am here since (her eyes filled)--his death.” And she ushered him upstairs through drafty corridors with the air of a proprietress showing a visitor round the premises. “Here Hans and I used to sit. Or, when we had little money, we stood over there or sat on the steps.”

“A fine Opera House.”

“Yes, this is my temple.”

She carried an enormous book--the complete musical score of the piece, and they sat down and he read the biographical note, while the orchestra enclosure gradually filled and the executants began tuning up their instruments.

“Because I have never known love in real life I want now to realise it in music.” Thus Wagner one day wrote to Liszt. “I have jotted down in my head a _Tristan und Isolde_, the simplest but the most full-blooded of musical conceptions: with the black flag which flies at the end I then want to cover myself and to--die.”

There was a meagre trickling of applause: the conductor threaded his way to his seat, passed his hand over the page under the green-shaded lamp, raised the _bâton_, and began. They sat close together, the Prelude with its high-stepping, long-striding sinuous tentacles groping after new resting-places, far out of reach, yet working out its salvation surely and steadily, swelling and widening, till--the conductor shaking his locks and his fists--the brass blared its compelling response; and, in a tide of regaining tranquillity, the Prelude gradually evened itself out to the level at which it began, and the curtains parted, revealing the ship. She followed the score with a preoccupied air, now and then nodding her head with that significant look of critical recognition; but when he asked for the place they were at she never could find it and began turning the pages backward and forward, six at a time and in vain. And when, in the second act, King Marke’s hunting horns died away and the cast-down torch went out, to a heart-sinking, intolerably dulcet cadence, and the night was all astir, and Tristan staggered to Isolde, and the great theatre plunged into the most passionately voluptuous music that has ever been, then they pressed each other’s fingers more tightly and their nerves throbbed in unison--until King Marke, returning at a moment least desired from the hunt, surprised the twain. In this passionate music, more truly voluptuous than the grosser senses of man can divine, there lies concealed a certain pledge: a foretaste, maybe, of a reality awaiting us, or one we needs must forego, wrenched from a far world by a genius, for us to partake of before we go under.

In the interval he read more of the biography. Wagner, while working on _Siegfried_, wrote to a friend: “My musical sensibility already sways far beyond it--thither where my mood belongs: into the realm of melancholy.” It was his love for Mathilde Wesendonck--a love of denial for both--which determined the work. “That I have written Tristan I thank you out of my deepest soul into all eternity.” Thus he writes to her three years after completion. It has been said that the musical drama is unreal because the love in it is the artificial outcome of the love potion given to Tristan and Isolde during the voyage instead of the death drink they bargained for. But the potion, of course, is a symbol. Love was latent in them, but could not face the light of day: it is the belief in the certainty of their death held for them in the cup which works the love miracle. Only in death can they give each other. But of that “realm of stilled longings” they had been cheated. He was there--_Der öde Tag!_ And now the third and last act--the empty sea, the hollow day, the dreary convalescence, with the black flag already flying over their destinies. They sat and listened to the sundown glow now sensible in the familiar bars of this greatest of love-tragedies--as it had always been.

The measured strains of the _Liebestod_ had grown quicker and more passionate; Isolde, wrenching her hands, was racing along with the orchestra which, at this turn, was taking the melody from her, easily, in rapidly rising voluptuous strains, climbing, slipping, climbing anew, rapidly, rapidly, to a climax, now, now.... The conductor, forgetting his quasi-reticent attitude, rose in his seat and with a sweep of his stick commanding one hundred and twenty-six instruments, drowned her top notes in a mighty volume of rapturous sound. But she did not mind. Nor did any one mind. On that plane of emotion one does not mind: one felt one wanted to go home, cover oneself with the black flag--and die....

They made their way past the drafty swinging doors into the lighted streets and stood a while in the crowded Opernring, Peter taking her arm. He was elated. He tried to whistle bits he remembered, but she stopped him with a frown. In the café she seemed moody and irritable. “_Must_ you always scratch the cup out?”

“I feel I am wasting my life if I don’t.”

“Why don’t you lick it out with your tongue?”

“What is the matter?”

“I must talk to you very seriously.”

“Well?”

“Another day--to-morrow.”

He would have died of anxiety if he had to wait till to-morrow. “To-night or not at all.”

“About our--relation. I want to have it out with you. I don’t want you to be merely playing with me and then, when it suits you, drop me.” They were going down the teeming Kärntnerstrasse and bent their way into the Graben, walking up the famous Korso. “Here is father’s jeweller’s shop.”

“What’s all this nonsense?” he asked peremptorily.

“Father’s been bullying me. No money to give me. Business going to ruin. No one buying jewelry nowadays. ‘_Ein Skandal!_ You’re twenty-two and I, a man of eighty-six, have to go on supporting you!’ and so on, and so forth. My brother-in-law sits and talks to my father and tells him I ought to get married. And father curses me: ‘Again you’ve been out all night. A good bride and no mistake, Adolf sitting and waiting for you here all the evening!’ Of course, he is right in a way. But I never promised definitely to Adolf. I tell him, ‘Adolf, I value your feeling for me, and if no one better crops up I will marry you in the end.’ So he sits in our drawing-room all evening after leaving the venereal disease hospital, waiting for me and playing Chopin.”

Peter thought of what he might say, but couldn’t say much. “Damn him!” he said.

“And I mean--I don’t want to be playing ducks and drakes with Adolf, who is a man of fine feeling--”

“But hasn’t he died? He was going to.”

“He wasn’t a bit. He only put himself to bed so as to get me to come and sit at his bedside and hold his hand. And what I mean is, a man has a love affair, then another, a third, a fourth, and is only looked up to, even by women. But a girl has to think.”

“Is there--is there--well, you know what I mean?”

“No, there isn’t. All the same--”

“But why say it like that?”

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

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

“I thought you expected it.”

Damned shameless lie, he thought; and said aloud:

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?”

“I can’t.”

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

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

“Then we must set about mending it.”

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

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

“It can never be mended.”

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

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

The bridge was mended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shut up!”

“There is little poetry in you.”

“And you are a beast.”

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

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

“Go home.”

“No-o.”

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

“Ha-ha!”

“Nothing to laugh at.”

He sang: “_Der öde Tag!_”

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

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

“Don’t want any.”

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

And then came a letter.

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

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

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

“ISOLDE.”

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

“Rottenly.”

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

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

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

“All right then, to-night at 8.30.”