Part 9

Then Myra hated them both—Aunt Emily and Olga—with a terrible hatred. But she hated Olga the more—Olga who had thrown her down where Aunt Emily could trample her, Olga who had torn that wound which Aunt Emily’s foul fingers could probe.

Sometimes she resolved to die, but more often to flee, to pack up a bundle and run down the highroad, to pass the night in meadows and hollows with nothing over her but the eternal starry skies.

At other times, it seemed to her as if that sort of life, particularly that sort of life, would be merely a constant torment without Olga—but a treasure without end, an inconceivable happiness if only Olga were there.

She strove to reconcile herself to the thought that Olga no longer loved her. But it was impossible that she actually hated her. She had simply sacrificed her, surrendered her without second thought in order to shield her reputation, in order to protect herself from unpleasantnesses. It is true, she did not love her. That was why her words had been lies. She had simply been glad when Myra came. Always. And she would be glad again if she returned.

It was becoming clearer and clearer to Myra every day how rich she was. Franz Rudloff had been no miser, but there was nothing for which he really cared to spend money. And Aunt Emily was much too much of a model not to economize, even in the pettiest ways.

Myra had no very clear understanding of money or the value of money. But she knew that the sums mentioned to her, guaranteed her freedom, promised her that in a few months she could live her life where she wished and as she wished.

A life without Olga?

Myra finally resolved to write to Olga. Not how she felt, nothing about her longing, her love—God forbid! But a line or two, quite businesslike, if one might use the expression—lines whose purpose would simply be to bring about an explanation.

With much effort she composed a letter which she amended and improved and copied; she felt quite satisfied with her handiwork. No one could find in it a trace of affection or humility of any kind.

Rather it was sharp, ironic and somewhat challenging in tone. She mailed the letter and awaited the answer. None came.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Aunt Emily decided to inform Myra of the “facts of life.” To be sure, she chose a rather remarkable method.

Aunt Emily was too much of a model to discuss morally offensive matters with a young girl. Besides, she was probably afraid of Myra’s outbursts of temper, though otherwise she was not cowardly.

Myra had fallen into the habit of sitting in her father’s study. She would sit and read the whole day through, the most difficult and abstruse things, simply in order not to think. Here she had all the books within reach. It was more convenient to sit down at the writing-table with them, than to lug the sometimes heavy folios into another room.

On his desk she now found from time to time pamphlets, brochures, apparently of a quite varied character, novels, medical works, daily papers with passages underlined—but all treating of one theme.

There were strange and weird stories of countesses who dressed in men’s attire and frequented various dives until they were lured into a trap and brutally murdered.

Or accounts of sickening orgies in well-known clubs where hundreds of women dressed and disported themselves like men, and men were dolled up with false curls with open-work silk stockings, and with their bare arms and shoulders powdered.

There were statistics showing all the unfortunates who fell victim to softening of the brain, lunacy, tuberculosis of the spine and other diseases as a result of unnatural practices.

Or descriptions of the soul life of sexual inverts which led one to suppose that these thousands of human beings constituted a vast community, a community bound together by no ties of common interest, no similarity of education, origin, taste or attitude toward life, and never by love, but by a common lust for a common form of excess.

There was the biography of a famous man who was miserably murdered by a blackmailing waiter with whom he had had intimate relations—whom he had _loved_.

Myra shuddered when she thought of the word love in this connection. Sometimes it seemed to her as if she would be stifled by so much filth. She became physically ill simply from touching the books. Then she would not read them—for quite a while. She would read historical, philosophic and scientific works. But there were long periods when she was not conscious what she was reading. Her eyes ran along the lines and reflected the words. But her thoughts struggled with the dreadful things that had been flung at her, like blocks of stone, to kill her. Then she would pick up the other books again, the bad ones, and look for enlightenment and draw conclusions and make comparisons.

Whenever masculine women were discussed, mention was made of their superior intelligence, their thirst for knowledge and their desire for culture, coupled with an abnormal tendency to spendthriftness, a passionate desire for luxury, and an unnatural predilection for beautiful foot-gear. Mention was made, too, of weird Don Juan natures who passed with insatiable lust from one adventure to another.

As a result of such readings, Myra was left in the most dreadful bewilderment. These books should have taught her to understand the person who, of all others, had been closest to her. She had said to herself a hundred times in the past months, “This woman is a riddle that cannot be guessed, a mystery that cannot be solved, forever strange and remote, not to be grasped or comprehended. And each time she had felt with every fibre of her being, ‘such and such is the solution; now everything is clear, everything is all right, nothing can ever arise to divide us again.’”

But now, now?

Now Myra felt an anguished need to pack up these books and take them to Olga Radó! “Tell me, are there such people? Are you one of them? Am I? What do you know about it?”

Olga had had to express an opinion about everything that Myra had heard or read in the last year. And Olga’s opinion had nearly always been Myra’s, or had aroused, strengthened, clarified another opinion in her.

Now, for the first time, she had to settle such monstrous matters single-handed and she groped about blindly in the dark. Where she thought to find a light, a way out, she merely strayed deeper into the maze. She could neither make headway nor go back.

So Myra wrote a second letter. This time, too, there was not a word about love or longing—simply an urgent appeal for help, a good deal of complaining about what was happening inside her and a certain reproachfulness: you have brought me so far, you must take my hand and lead me out of this swamp.

No answer came.

Spring came, however. Warm, caressing winds came, and broad flashing rays of sunlight and a veil of buds shrouding every branch, and snow-bells and crocuses, forcing their way with difficulty through dark purple, rotting leaves.

Myra could not bear the heavy, soft air. She could not sleep and suffered from headaches day and night. Reading no longer sufficed to distract her mind. She sat bowed over her books and stared out the window. The same page would lie in front of her for hours without her ever turning it.

She began to read novels. She could not forget she was reading them as easily as she could dry scientific works because they stirred her imagination and evoked certain pictures.

But those pictures were a torture to her.

There were always people in love with one another. They struggled with one another, discovered one another, came together or parted, destroyed one another, died or abandoned one another. It hurt her to read of love.

She read of riches, of luxury, of automobiles dashing along highways, of white hotels beside blue waters, of balls and banquets and yachts and journeys by sledge. Then she would begin to calculate her fortune and think, “Olga Radó could have led just such a life if she had remained with me.”

The cherries blossomed. Olga Radó was no doubt going by steamer with some lovely woman, over the blue waters of the Havel. And all about her was a world of beauty and sunshine and light.

Myra was seized with a mad desire to be where Olga was, to lead Olga’s life. Pride dropped away from her like a burned rag. She stood naked to herself and cried out with the pain.

She wrote her third letter to Olga Radó. She wrote that she could no longer live and breathe without her. That she wanted nothing from her, not love, or affection or friendship. That she wanted nothing but to serve her with all her strength, and in payment she would let herself be beaten and kicked. That she would feel no jealousy, no craving, no lust of possession. That she would serve anyone, man or woman, whom Olga loved, and that she would chain and immure her love so deep within her that never, never, never would anyone suspect its existence, not even Olga.

Again she waited for an answer. Again none came.

Suddenly it occurred to her that Olga might not have received her letters, certainly had not received them.

She went to Motz Street and every step made her feel as if she were walking on red hot coals. The same maid answered her ring who had admitted her that night. Myra could not bring herself to utter Olga’s name, so she asked for Peterkin.

He had moved—address unknown.

She lived through ten more days of torture. Then she went again. A new maid opened the door. “I’m in luck,” thought Myra and she was dizzied for a moment as the idea flashed through her mind that the next instant she might be standing face to face with Olga in her room. What might happen afterwards was of no moment.

Miss Radó had moved—address unknown.

Myra went to the bureau of registry. She filled out the prescribed blank and gave it to the gray-haired official while her heart throbbed wildly.

The friendly old gentleman rose, went searching, returned and asked if the lady lived in her own house. No? Unfortunately, they did not register people who lived in lodging-houses.

Then Myra made her last and most difficult attempt. She went to the Moebiuses. The girls grinned in her face, impudently, when she asked about Olga Radó.

No, they didn’t know anything about her. Naturally, she had not put in her appearance here again, and father would probably have very politely given her the air if she had. But they would be _delighted_ to find things out. Ablaze with curiosity and pruriency, they began to ply her with questions, whether it was true that....

Myra blushed and paled, turned hot and cold. She might have murdered one of them if she had not been so tired. “I don’t know,” she said. She answered all their questions with “I don’t know.”

Perhaps she should have become indignant and defended Olga Radó. Perhaps she should have let them slander her and have made all kinds of mysterious insinuations. Perhaps she should have laughed and led the girls a merry chase. She supported herself against her chair with both hands, and said, “I don’t know!”

As she left the house she realized that she would never enter it again. A senseless expression kept running through her mind as in a delirium—“To be on everybody’s tongue....”

It had never before had any meaning for her. Now she felt, actually in a physical way, as if she had been chewed over and spat out on the sidewalk. She shuddered with nausea.

* * * * *

From time to time, but at ever shorter intervals, a dull racking hatred began to tarnish the surface of her feeling for Olga Radó. That woman was to blame for all that she was now suffering—heedlessly, cold-heartedly and quite unscrupulously to blame.

During this period, Myra was very unjust to Olga Radó. For it seemed to her as if she had been torn by her from a happy shielded youth, as if a profound and placid peace had been destroyed in her, some marvellous equilibrium shattered.

The be-all and end-all of her desire seemed to her to be a return to what she had once been. Her one wish was to strike the last year out of her life, to expunge, to forget it.

Then she would take up those evil books again and deliberately read the things which had most nauseated her. She thus artificially intensified her hate and anger and fear.

There were days when she said to herself, “At last I am free! It’s as if I had recovered from a severe illness; I feel that my blood is pure again. From now on I shall live as other people do, without pain and without joy, without desire and without fulfillment.”

And there were nights when she felt as if a burning poison were eating at her veins, when fear of an unutterly horrible future made her shudder. Nights when she felt she must succumb to her unbridled appetites, must give herself unresistingly to every loose woman who for criminal reasons chose to arouse her passion. She saw herself victimized by blackmailers, tracked by the police, sick, insane, in prison or murdered.

In one such period of abysmal despair she permitted herself to become engaged. Some decent, solid man or other came courting her.

She knew nothing about him. She did not know when or where she had seen him for the first time, knew hardly anything of his character or his inclinations. She simply became aware one day that for some time there had been some person around her who had made an effort to be kind to her. Someone who helped her on most carefully with her coat, stooped when she dropped something, brought her flowers, and tried to tell her cheerful stories in order to brighten her face a little.

The man knew as agreeably little about her. In his presence Aunt Emily bubbled over with gentle, motherly solicitude. She could just as well have made biting observations or cutting innuendoes about him, but he fitted into her program.

He pitied Myra tremendously because she was an orphan. He ascribed all the suffering in her pale face to grief for her father. Sometimes he ventured to take her cold fingers in both his hands and gently stroke them. At such moments Myra would close her eyes and scrutinize her feelings in terror. Warmth and peace flowed from his big strong hands. His gentle tenderness was pleasant rather than abhorrent. Then Myra would say to herself with a burst of hope, “Perhaps everything will be all right, after all. Perhaps I shall have somebody near who is good to me, I’ll have children and a home, I’ll always have something to do—perhaps it is still possible for a life like that to be bearable.”

She felt, too, an irrepressible desire for revenge. It might wound Olga Radó’s vanity somewhat, if she learned how quickly she had been forgotten.

The man was rich. That suited Aunt Emily and incidentally suited Myra. She pictured herself in the loge at the opera, flashing with jewels, beside this man, a very attractive and stately man—it would never occur to anyone that she had not married him for love—and suddenly Olga Radó would appear from somewhere. Or she saw herself driving past Olga Radó in a de luxe car. Or best of all, she saw them meeting when she was walking with her fair-haired children dressed neatly in white. Then she would draw the children away from Olga as if from a venomous snake. That was the way, yes, indeed, that was the way to wound Olga most cruelly.

As the man was persistent, Myra said yes. She had had sufficient time to accustom herself and took good care that it appeared in various newspapers.

On her twenty-first birthday, there was a little garden party at the villa of her parents-in-law. It was a very hot day in summer, the nineteenth of June, and on Aunt Emily’s advice, Myra again put on a white dress trimmed with black.

As she strolled past a mirror in that strange house with all the strange people about her, she did not recognize herself. She was shocked and could not rid herself of the idea that she was not the pretty girl dressed in white, who smiled at her from the mirror, on the arm of that strange man.

She tried to find herself and could not imagine where she could be. But it seemed to her as if she saw herself, thin and dark, like a specter, wandering through great, dark, empty rooms. Again, it seemed to her as if she really was the reflection in the glass, and that that other Myra, who was so identically like her, was the stranger. Dream and reality began to merge inextricably; all her nerves seemed to thrill like snapped chords. In mortal fear she longed for complete unconsciousness or for sudden complete clarity, feeling as if she were blinded by fog or a prey to vertigo. A moment later, she could not understand exactly what had happened to her, or give any answer to her fiancé who anxiously inquired the cause of her paleness.

But the singular feeling persisted all evening that all this was simply a dream, a game. The whole business of the engagement was simply a joke, a comedy. Each moment might step forward like a stage-manager and cry, “Enough! Let reality resume!”

* * * * *

On the twentieth of June, in the morning, Myra was called to the telephone. A light masculine voice spoke from the receiver, curiously restrained and hesitant.

“Is this Miss Rudloff herself? Myra, is that you? Forgive me for disturbing you—I wanted to speak to you!”

Myra felt her heart tear itself loose and plunge into an unfathomable dark abyss.

“Peterkin?” she said and tried to suppress her smile without stopping to think that no one could see her face. Nor could anyone have heard that smile in the trembling of her voice.

“May I speak with you, Myra? I mean....” Again that timid hesitation in his voice. “If you care to, you understand. Of course, I don’t know how interested you are in your old friends now.”

“It goes without saying,” said Myra firmly, “that you can see me any time, where and when you wish.”

She did not ask what had happened. She did not want to ask.

“It can’t come very well.” Again that timid tone. “And I’d rather not go on the street ... or to a coffee-house.... It really wouldn’t do....”

“I’ll come to you,” said Myra quickly. “Tell me where you live!”

“Yes—but—is that all right either? Particularly—if anything unpleasant should happen.... You’re engaged....”

“Nonsense!” said Myra roughly.

* * * * *

As she hurried down the street she did not try to picture what might actually have happened. She did not want to. “Perhaps Olga is sick and wants to see me,” she thought. “Perhaps she doesn’t know anything about it, and Peterkin simply called me of his own accord.”

She simply thought that she would see Olga, that she would take her hand. At the same time she thought, “I tell myself these things as we tell a feverish child stories, I paint them in the brightest colors, and believe them no more than we believe in fairies and sorcerers.”

But it was better to tell herself stories, better to sing herself cradle-songs, than to listen to the voice that cried the truth deep within her.

It was strange how, without a moment’s hesitation, she found the house and the street as if she had been there a hundred times.

When she rang, Peterkin was already at the door. That spared her any interrogation. And she felt, looking at the maid, the first human face she noticed, that she was in no condition to answer questions.

Peterkin took Myra by the hand and, without a word, led her past the astonished maid and into his room. He shut the door, and without looking at her, said, “Sit down, Myra.”

The first thing that Myra noticed in the room was the gold cigarette case on the black surface of the table. A ray of sunlight was flashing on it.

She made an effort to restrain herself. It was as if she tugged at the reins with both hands in order to check herself. But when Peterkin turned to her, and she saw how his hands, how his small white face quivered, with what an effort he was struggling for control—she lost control herself. She began to cry.

“Cry, cry,” he said at last, his chin quivering, while the tears started from his eyes. “Cry, for she was worthy of tears, you can believe me....”

“Believe you?” said Myra with heart-rending bitterness. She laid the handkerchief over her eyes and supported her head in her hand. Her other hand stroked his nervously.

“Now tell me everything, Peterkin. You see that I’m quite calm again, quite, quite calm. When did it happen? How? And why? Tell me everything, everything you know!”

“I could not tell you, Myra—not before your twenty-first birthday. That was yesterday, wasn’t it? I’ve marked it here on the calendar—for another reason—I’ll have to tell you all about that, too. I had a message to deliver to you. But of course, I had no suspicion—sometimes it is as if we were struck blind....”

Myra glanced up for a moment. “Did she do it herself?” There was nothing interrogatory in her tone.

“Yes.”

“Did she shoot herself?”

She covered her eyes again with her handkerchief.

“Go on.”

“She was sick during the spring, a light case of influenza. She had some fever and I used to sit beside the bed while she talked of death and burial, quite cheerfully and unconcernedly, as she always did. You know very well that nobody ever knew whether she was jesting or in earnest. She said to me at that time, ‘If I die now, Peterkin, take good care to keep it quiet. Don’t let it get into any of the papers, and don’t let anybody know about it, not even Myra. I’d like to strew my ashes on the sea or at least on the Wannsee. But the State won’t permit that, I believe. So simply make haste and have my remains cremated. I will have no traffic with my corpse. I won’t be inside it, you can be sure of that. Not for one moment longer than necessary will I remain inside my corpse.’”

To Myra it seemed as if she were hearing Olga speak. So clearly did she hear her voice, that her heart was filled with an inner joy and she smiled.

“I smiled, too, at the time,” said Peterkin sorrowfully. “But she became quite serious and sat up and looked at me. You know how she could look at one out of her intense eyes. ‘It is my sacred wish,’ she said. ‘Promise me you’ll do it, give me your word of honor!’ I promised her, but I said, ‘You’re crazy, in three days you’ll be well again.’ And she was well again in three days.” He stopped. Somewhere a clock was ticking and flies were buzzing against the window-pane.

Something filled Myra with a few moments of joy and tranquillity. An obscure feeling—how good that Olga was well again in three days. There was so much vigorous life in that beautiful body.

Then the present struck at her heart like a clenched fist. And now? And now? She had to wait a few moments before she could bring herself to utter the terrible word.

“Did you bury her at once?” she asked in a very low voice.

“She was cremated. The urn was sent to Vienna. Her sister lives there....”

“Did she live here toward the end?”

“Two doors away, around the corner.”

“And it happened there?”

“Yes.”

“Can one ...” Myra swallowed hard, “can one see the room?”

Peterkin shrugged his shoulders slowly. “What is the use? Everything is changed. Nothing of hers is left. It has been rented again.”

She had a peculiar feeling; it seemed to her as a curiously happy fact that every pattern which this spirit had created was now destroyed. There was not even a room left in the world which those hands, that mind, had arranged, and in which a trace of her being might have survived. Half unconsciously, Myra felt as if the shifting of a few pieces of furniture had broken the stones from a prison wall.

Now Olga Radó was wholly free.

A gentle breeze stirred the curtains at the open window. A sweet, cool breeze blew over Myra’s burning eyes. She smiled.

“It is best that way!” she said again.

Suddenly she understood that Olga had not received her letters. There was no need to inquire about it. But Peterkin was the only person of whose opinion she was a little afraid. She felt that she must justify herself.