Part 19

“Oh, Fred, you’re disgusting.” She turned her back on him. “You’re positively not fit to enter a drawing-room. I’m going to tell your mother so.”

“She’ll think you’re slandering me!” He smiled complacently and somewhat mischievously. “She knows you can’t bear me.”

Vandahl had moved a stool beside his young wife’s chair. Myra observed how his big well-formed hands caressed the folds of her dress stealthily.

A radiant stream of tenderness was constantly playing on him from her soft brown eyes.

Myra was a little anxious on her account. She looked so happy, and apparently worshipped her husband so idolatrously. If only she had finished with her hours of pain! The wish burned in Myra’s heart like a mute prayer.

Rantzau and Lucius were leaning against the stone balustrade. Myra could catch disjointed fragments of their conversation when the others were silent.

“Why not? The electrons that are thrown off by the so-called cathode rays have a velocity of something like a quarter of a million kilometer seconds.”

It was Rantzau’s deep, vibrant voice.

Gwen seated herself on the arm of Myra’s chair and put her arm around her shoulders.

“Protect me, Myra,” she said, “everybody makes me angry and seems horrid to me. You are the only person here whom I really like!”

“Oh, Gwen,” Myra smiled up at her, “it’s a good thing that you don’t have to cross any bridges tonight!”

Gwen’s face grew serious. “I’ll kill somebody yet,” she said as if she were telling a fairy-tale, “and I’ll bury the corpse in a cellar and steal everything valuable and bury that in the forest. Then I’ll go somewhere, to the courts, to the police or the senate and tell everything. Then everybody will laugh and pity me and say, ‘Poor child, she has a fever, she’s delirious—that’s Mr. Peters’ little daughter! get a car, and take the youngster home, her mother ought to pack her off to bed, she’s got the measles.’ And then the bailiff or an officer will take me home so that nothing may happen to me on the way. Oh, Myra have you had any of the short-cake? Deuli makes them simply divine! They make life worth living. But I’ve never yet been able to eat enough of them. I’ve stipulated that when I get married I want you to give me a bath-tub full of short-cakes. And on my wedding-day I’ll eat short-cake from morning till night. Eat something, Myra—I really believe that you live on air and love.”

“On air perhaps,” said Fred dryly, “as far as I can judge your consumption of the other so-called popular commodity, I couldn’t last a week on your rations.”

Myra took good care not to understand his remark.

“I’d like to live on air,” she said, breathing in the breeze that came from the garden. Despite the fragrance of the roses, it was strong and sharp and smelled a little of the sea. “On pure fresh air!”

XVII

Myra sat beside Gwen in the car.

“My hair looks something terrible, doesn’t it?” said Gwen. “If mamma sees me like this, she’ll begin to lecture me. How do you manage to keep your hair in place? You danced too! Mamma would be delighted with you. In fact, mamma likes you a whole lot. She’s always holding you up to me as a model. But even that doesn’t make me dislike you. I’m really quite smitten with you, really—but I think you don’t like me.”

Myra laid her arms lightly around her shoulder.

“Silly little Gwen,” she said, smiling. “You don’t know what you’re chattering.”

“That’s nice,” said Gwen, cuddling up to her like a little kitten, “leave your arm there, it feels nice. I know very well what I’m talking about. Mamma always says ‘Don’t talk, you’re dizzy with dancing,’ because she insists that I talk so much nonsense after a dance—more than usual. But I’m really not dizzy with dancing, and I know that I like you a lot, and I know too that you don’t like me. And you don’t contradict me either, you’re much too honest for that. You say, ‘Don’t talk nonsense, little Gwen,’ which is what people always tell little children when they happen to hit on the truth. But I don’t want to embarrass you. Your eyes look very sad now because you don’t know how you’re going to get out of this mess.”

“I was thinking,” said Myra honestly, “that you are a very charming little creature and that I like you very much indeed—and that nevertheless I disavowed you today and said you were not my friend.”

“At the table,” said Gwen seriously, “I felt it. But it doesn’t make me angry with you.” She smiled. “You oughtn’t to admit it either, if you want to keep in the good graces of my dear Henry. Did he tell you what a beast I am?”

“He said nothing at all,” replied Myra, shocked. “How on earth did you know that I said it to Rantzau?”

“Because I know _him_!” said Gwen triumphantly. “He hates me like—like sin would hardly be the proper expression. But I know he does, and I know why.”

By these words and by the expression of Gwen’s face Myra felt somewhat repelled. “She’s like every other woman,” she thought contemptuously. “She thinks that Henry Rantzau hates her because he loves her and she doesn’t love him! Now she’ll tell me that she broke with him on some occasion. It’s the only thing that these little creatures can get through their heads.”

“Shall I tell you why your friend hates me?” A thousand little imps were dancing on Gwen’s face.

“If you like,” said Myra somewhat coolly.

“I’ve taken his friend away from him!”

“What does that mean—taking a friend away? Can a woman take a man’s friend away from him?”

“From Henry? Oh, yes! For he wants his friend all to himself, hair and hide, body and soul. Don’t try to pretend, dear little Miss Innocence, that you haven’t noticed what the whole town knows!”

“Strange,” Myra shook her head, “all that a town knows!”

“Stranger yet is all that it doesn’t know!” said Gwen with a laugh. “All that goes on in its midst without anybody’s suspecting it. But Rantzau is known because he’s a public menace. He has an influence over young men that is nothing short of uncanny. He’s always got a circle around him that idolizes him. And I don’t like that....”

“You mean when somebody else is idolized?” teased Myra.

“Yes, exactly,” declared Gwen defiantly. “That one thing I can’t stand at all is to see a man idolized by men. I don’t know if I can explain it, but you see the essential thing about human beings is their sex. The great two-fold division of all life—it’s not my own idea, of course. Later on there’s the division into races, with the races dividing into nations, the nations into classes and families, each of them struggling against the others. I am a bourgeois as compared with the nobility and an aristocrat as compared with the plebs. But first and foremost I am a woman in contrast to a man, and the most unpardonable insult that can be offered me is one to my sex. Don’t you understand that? If a man can’t see me because he worships another woman, that doesn’t wound my vanity. But a man for whom no woman is good enough, who prefers men, who is contemptuous of my whole sex—oh, it drives me almost insane with anger. Rantzau is incorruptible—I know that—but I lure away his favorites, one after the other. Ever since I could think, no, ever since I could feel, we’ve waged a bitter war. Do you know, Myra, sometimes it seems like a holy mission to me and not just an amusing game!” There was a strange light in her eyes, they blazed like blue jewels. “He loved Fred Reimer, for example, loved him insanely. But Fred is very happily married today. What do I get out of it? Well, sometimes when I see his wife, I think, ‘You owe it to me and you never even suspect it.’”

“What a queer mixture you are.” Myra looked at her, shaking her head reflectively. “A well-bred, sheltered girl and yet....”

“And yet? Go ahead and say it!”

“Oh, nothing. But tell me, how does it happen that your parents don’t notice anything—Henry Rantzau, for instance, whose reputation the whole town knows?”

“Don’t you know, Myra,” said Gwen with a superior smile, “that parents have an unerring eye only for what doesn’t exist?”

* * * * *

“I’m coming out directly,” called Gwen from behind the door of the bathroom where one could hear the splashing of water and the pelting of a shower. “Take a seat, Myra, and pick up a book! I’ll be ready in five minutes.”

“I have time,” said Myra quietly.

But Gwen wished to shorten her wait for her. “You’ll find something to look at. There’s a package on the table. I bought myself some stockings today. See if you don’t think they’re stunning. But you mustn’t open what’s under them, something flat in tissue paper. Ah, I’ll show it to you anyhow. Go ahead and open it!”

“I’m not curious.”

“Go on, go on, open it. It’s better that you should look at it when I’m not there. Then I won’t have to blush at least. Hurry up, I’ll be out in two minutes! Do you hear? I’m already emerging from the crystal flood, and when I’m halfway dry, I’ll be out there!”

Myra removed the tissue paper. She looked into Fred Wietinghoff’s face, lifelike and expressive. She felt a flash of pleasure pass over her as she studied the handsome features, and almost at the same moment a childish desire to steal the picture so that she could always have it before her eyes, and could delight in it when she was far from here.

For she was perfectly conscious at that moment, without thinking about it at all, that she would leave Hamburg in a very short time. She had never yet thought of the change, but suddenly she saw herself with visionary distinctness, so self-evidently that there was nothing terrifying about it, in a state of loneliness in which this picture would make pleasant company for her.

She started when Gwen leaned over her shoulder.

“Handsome picture, what?” she laughed. “You started so just now that I might imagine you have a little weakness for the gentleman. Confess the truth, Myra! Out with it. You were so lost in the picture, so lost that you didn’t hear me coming.”

Myra put down the picture without glancing at it again.

“Because my thoughts were somewhere else entirely,” she said, still rather distractedly.

“Too bad,” teased Gwen, “where else if not with Fred? Certainly not with me, I’m afraid. Very far off? Don’t you want to tell me where?”

She laid her soft bare arm around Myra’s neck, pressing it against her cheeks.

“I don’t know where myself,” said Myra. “Not in the past and not in the present. Somewhere I’ve never yet been. Perhaps in the future. I have a feeling, quite indistinct and hazy, of a snowed-up lonely house.”

Gwen shook her by the shoulders.

“Come out of it,” she cried, “you’re supposed to be here and not in any snowed-up lonely houses. How do you like our friend, Freddy?”

“_Our_ friend?” repeated Myra with a smile.

“Of course ours. He’s your friend as much as mine. He thinks a great deal of you, a great deal!”

“He only says that to make you jealous,” said Myra consolingly.

“Make me jealous!” Gwen laughed aloud. “No, I’m not that petty. And besides, you mean too much to me. I’m always very proud, really, my heart is filled with pleasure when I hear people praising you. And Fred praises you very often....”

“He would send me his picture if he really thought so much of me,” thought Myra. “If it weren’t all just silly talk, he’d send me his picture. I don’t want anything more of him than that.”

“Do you really like him?” Gwen asked it lightly. But Myra felt something watchful, almost lowering in her look.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“He’s good looking and has a very agreeable disposition,” she said indifferently.

“Nothing more?”

Myra did not want to reply. “I don’t know much more about him.”

“He is discreet and trustworthy,” said Gwen after hesitating a moment. Then she laughed through her teeth, “And he has very good taste!”

“Perhaps,” said Myra somewhat guardedly.

Sometimes she had a feeling of fear in the presence of this fair-haired child. Frequently she was afraid to put a question because she did not want to hear the answer—an answer that would tear off the thin covering of the abyss.

Suddenly Gwen stroked her cheeks with a childish gesture.

“Don’t be angry,” she said gently.

Myra laid her lips against that soft little fragrant hand.

“Why should I be angry at you, you child?” she asked, smiling.

But she knew very well that she had been angry.

“Tell me something!” begged Gwen. “Yes, sit right down beside me here and tell me something. I’ll lie down, I’m a little tired from my bath, and you sit beside me and we’ll jaw a little.”

With one hand she drew Myra fawningly to the divan, with the other she held together her kimono of peach-bloom china crêpe which showed every line of her slim, soft body.

She adjusted her mountain of pillows and made herself comfortable on it.

Myra sat quiet and erect beside her on a chair. She always felt rather stiff in the presence of so much sinuous grace, and a little frosty in the warm breath of this sunny creature.

“Do you know, Myra,” said Gwen after a while, “that I haven’t got a step closer to you since the first day you came here? You allow me to call you by your first name. Sometimes you call me by mine, but mostly you omit it because it’s so counter to your nature. No, no, you don’t have to make a polite denial! You are quite a stranger to me. Never, never, never do you tell me anything of your own volition. Sometimes you’ll answer one out of ten of my questions. I don’t even trust myself to ask you questions any more for fear I’ll frighten you away so that you’ll never come back again.”

“And what do I know of you either?” asked Myra without looking at her. “You are just as much of a stranger to me. You have a very childlike and open nature. My own, perhaps, is more reserved and cold, but there may be a hundred times bigger and more serious secrets hidden behind your innocent little mask than behind my reticence.”

“That’s still another matter,” Gwen interrupted sharply. “I can’t ever tell you anything, either, because you always put me off! Many times I feel the need of confiding in you, something that is worrying me, or simply occupying my attention. But you always turn me aside, or you make such a face that the words stick in my throat. As if, Heaven help you, you didn’t want to know anything about me, in order not to despise me. Or as if you already knew too much and were afraid of permitting any affection. Then again I feel that you really are not cold and lacking in understanding, you are not a prude, and you have no right to be.... Oh, Myra, don’t be angry with me for saying that! But you can never make me believe that you’ve spent your life sitting and knitting in a quiet friendly way with a lot of old ladies.”

Myra laughed. “I’ve never tried to make you think so.”

“But you act that way,” said Gwen hopelessly. “You’re like a stone that won’t give off a spark no matter how hard you strike it. Oh, Myra, I can’t get rid of the feeling that I could strike a whole series of fireworks out of you—such glorious fireworks! Am I not steel enough, or what is the matter? It torments me terribly....”

She was so shaken with emotion that the tears came into her eyes. She stretched her limbs as if in convulsions and tore the silk cushions with her teeth.

Suddenly she sat up, and throwing her arms around Myra’s neck, rubbed her face, between tears and laughter, against her shoulder.

“Tell me, Myra,” she wheedled, “tell me what I’ve known for a long time. Some time in your life you have been in love with a woman. You know how it can be—how heavenly it can be! Why don’t you like me, Myra? Am I not good enough for you? Not beautiful enough? Or do you think I haven’t had any experience? Or do you think I’d betray you? Why don’t you say something? Do you despise me so that you don’t think I’m worth an answer?”

Myra gritted her teeth and sat a little more stiffly. “I don’t know, my child,” she said with a labored smile and lifeless eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why do you suspect me of such a thing?”

“Stop!” said Gwen almost angrily, laying her hand on Myra’s mouth. “I don’t suspect anything—I _know_! You can keep quiet as long as you like. I’ll never force you to tell me, but I won’t let myself be deceived. And I won’t let myself be pointed out as a mad woman. I know that I’m right. Not because, as you’re thinking now, I’ve heard some gossip. I have a feeling for such things. Dear little Myra, if you were to sit in front of your mirror for a week and practice a face for me like a stone mask, it would still bear the stamp. Your hands would have it, and your eyelids and the corner of your mouth—here—this corner of your dear proud, yearning mouth. Promise me, Myra, promise me one thing—I believe that you live like a saint and want to live that way—but I know too, that you can’t. You can’t do it much longer. But when it gets too much for you, call me. I would like to kiss you until your yearning mouth is quite sated. I would like to see you bloom in all your tenderness you rose of Jericho! And if I could not bring it about, at least I should like to be present. Oh, Myra, you’re making a face as if I were saying hateful things. The ecstasy of the beautiful human body _is_ beautiful, and the throbbing pulse and the gasping breath of someone we love is the most beautiful music in the world. Everything else, art and sport, and alcohol and morphine, are just miserable attempts at substitutes for the one real thing—for love.”

“So many things are called love!” said Myra with a bitter taste in her mouth.

“I call love the thrill of the blood and the ravishment of the senses. And it is something I should like to give everybody.” Gwen sat up and the soft silk slid from her wonderfully modelled shoulders. Her eyes blazed with blue fire.

“Well, not everybody, but the beautiful, the profound, the warm, the sensitive, those who hunger and those who thirst, and I would like to give it to them because I am capable of giving it, because I am rich, because God has given it to me. And God gives no man anything to keep for himself but He cannot be too lavish because He has to give to so many. We are here as God’s stewards, we are here to save Him trouble, that is why He gives us so much, in order that we may share it with the most worthy.”

Myra shook her head. “You talk like the angel in a Christmas story, and you come out with these lovely theories in a Christmas story voice. Sometimes I have a feeling that you have no idea what you are saying. You are like a strip of garden in which a strange hand has strewn all possible seeds, so that it is surprised itself at all the gay flowers that come to light. But I am afraid I know the gardener who has made such a wildflower garden out of you!”

“Myra,” wheedled Gwen, “tell me one thing, please, please, tell me. Are you in love with Fred?”

“Nonsense,” said Myra in a hard voice. “What makes you think such a thing?”

“Perhaps not love,” said Gwen hesitantly, “perhaps you call ‘love’ something else. But don’t you feel that he’s wonderfully stimulating?”

Myra made a face, and without answering, rose and went to the window. She heard the soft silk behind her rustle and crinkle. Gwen thrust her sinuous body between Myra and the window-pane, beyond which lay the wintry garden. Her angelic face was suffused with red. Her large eyes under their long lashes were filled with tears. Her blonde hair, tousled and damp from her bath, trembled in ringlets and curls about her childish face.

She pursed her lips as if she were struggling against violent tears and clung to the folds of Myra’s waist with her soft little hands.

“Do you dislike me so much?” she asked shyly. “Do you? Am I really so distasteful to you?”

Laughing, Myra kissed her round firm cheeks with their peach-bloom complexion.

“You are very sweet!” she said sincerely.

* * * * *

“I’d rather not,” said Myra, knitting her brows slightly.

“Myra!” Gwen stamped her foot angrily. “I can’t understand you! How can it hurt you to go too? And you would be pleasing me so much! We had it planned so nicely. Really no sensible person can see anything wrong in our going together....”

“But your parents,” Myra objected.

“You will simply be doing them a favor if you don’t let me go alone to visit a bachelor in his apartment! For I’m going anyway! But it would be much nicer if you’d come too. And Fred will show you his library!”

That was the only thing that could tempt Myra as Gwen knew very well.

Myra would very much have liked to see the rooms and the books. She felt something akin to envy when she thought that Gwen and Fred would enjoy tea and a pleasant hour of conversation in what was undoubtedly a very pretty and tasteful apartment—while she would not be there. Because of stubbornness, because of obstinacy, because of a silly shyness.

She had done many other things which had still less to do with conventionality and propriety. She had done them from passion, from caprice, from pity—or from stupidity. For the first time in her life she was anxiously resisting an innocent dereliction from the conventional such as this tea with a young unmarried man.

Suddenly all her defiance rose within her. Why should she deny herself a pleasure because these well-born and highly conventional families could thenceforth refuse to receive her in their expensively furnished and meticulously clean houses? Let these families first so educate their sons and daughters that they did not wantonly strive to disturb the hard-won peace of a poor defenseless Myra Rudloff.

“I’ll go with you,” she said, gritting her teeth.

Gwen clasped her jubilantly in her arms.

* * * * *

A soft, but bright light streamed over a noble polished table. Gleaming bronze. Deep luxurious carpets.

“Isn’t it beautiful here?” asked Gwen, and strutted about proudly, showing this and extolling that as if it were all her property, or rather her own handiwork.

She moved through the rooms with an assurance that gave no indication that she was visiting them for the first time.

“And you must see the Corot!” Whereupon she rushed into the adjoining room, and lit a concealed lamp that cast a flood of light on the picture.

Myra followed her, an ironic smile on her lips.

“I thought I was supposed to go with you so that you could explore this place!” she murmured. “But you really seem to be quite at home here.”

Gwen laughed, not in the least offended or embarrassed.

“Haven’t I ever told you that I was here before? Not alone, of course. I came to tea then, too. Old Mrs. Wietinghoff was here and mamma. Wait, some member of my family was with me. Fred, who was with me when I had tea here before?”

A newspaper rustled in the next room.

“What did you say, dear?” came Fred’s voice.

“Idiot!” she said in a low voice.

Myra laughed too. It was very easy to see through the whole affair, and take in at a glance the tangle that a word had uncovered. She told herself that it was all right. But she did not feel any sincere pleasure. Her feelings said to her, “Go, you are superfluous here, perhaps even in the way. You are playing a part which has been forced upon you, and which doesn’t suit you.” But she would have scolded herself for being a silly prude if she had given in to this feeling and gone.

Gwen put her arm around Myra and drew her toward the door.

“What does Fred mean?” she asked as she stood in the door. “I don’t recall that we ever herded swine together.”

Fred laid down the paper with some embarrassment.

“Why the image, Miss Peters? I trust you will pardon me for glancing at the paper a moment while you ladies were out of the room. Have I absent-mindedly said something improper?”

Gwen sat on the arm of a leather chair and dangled her legs.