Part 23

This perfume had seemed to her the crowning distinction of graceful elegance. She had often tried to recall it, and as the finest scented soap gave no idea of it, she resolved that she would instantly procure it in four years and four months' time, when she came into possession of her fortune. And now, as if wafted by magic from Uhlenfelde, this perfume suddenly pervaded the supper-table. She sniffed it in inquiringly, and measured with her eyes one after the other, mamma, Elly, grandmamma, but missed out Leo.

Johanna, who sat stiffly at the table, immovable as a statue, making everybody else feel uncomfortable, gave her stepdaughter an astonished look.

Hertha saved herself by asking leave to hand round the dish of potato-chips which Christian had left in the lurch to attend to the cutlets. While she passed from one chair to another she sampled critically the immediate atmosphere round each. And, sure enough, when she came with the dish behind Leo's place, the insidious fragrance rose to her nostrils with threefold power.

But Leo did not like scents--on the contrary, only a short time ago, when Christian had thought it necessary in honour of the Sabbath to plaster his grey straggly locks with hair-oil, he had been told, with a _donnerwetter_! to go and put his head under the pump. Leo helped himself to potatoes without bestowing a glance on the waitress who handed them. He seemed distrait and surly, and instead of eating, toyed with his knife-rest. Mamma's presence truly might be responsible for his temper, but Hertha suspected other causes.

The conversation was confined to monosyllabic questions and answers. Grandmamma inquired how many geese were to be stuffed for liver and how many fattened?

"Do as you like," said Leo.

"Were you at Uhlenfelde to-day?" Johanna asked suddenly.

Hertha sat erect on the _qui vive_. Ah, what would he say?

"No," was the short, sharp rejoinder. He did not like to be cross-examined, least of all by Johanna, who showed no disinclination to play the spy on him.

He was still wondering himself how the falsehood had escaped his lips when he glanced down the table and met Hertha's large shining eyes, which were fixed on him shocked and reproachful.

"The little one is getting uneasy," he thought; and as he was anxious to be alone, he rose and left the table, with a "Gesegneter Mahlzeit."

Every one looked after him.

"What can ail him?" asked grandmamma, referring to the food he had scarcely touched.

"He has had a lot of trouble with the foaling," put in Hertha, acting on an impulse, dimly felt, that it was her place to stand up for him.

She was quite sure that she hated him; but, all the same, whatever he did was no business of anybody else's. After supper she rushed into the dusky garden. She felt as if something had happened within her and without, the existence of which, up till now, she had not dreamed. She didn't know what it was, or what to call it, but that it was nothing good was proved by the anger which stormed in her breast at the thought of it. What did it mean if the beautiful woman had really poured some of her perfume on to his coat? But no, that wasn't the question. Why had he degraded himself by telling a lie? He, the haughty Leo, who had so loftily disdained her humble love! Why had he made a secret of this visit to Uhlenfelde, when, as a rule, he came from there openly, bringing messages of greeting from his friend?

Of course this beauty was a thousand times more beautiful than she was, and much cleverer, no doubt. It did not need much self-abasement to accord her the superiority. But the great insoluble problem, the stumbling-block to all her conjectures, was that she was a married woman. If only she had not been, then he could have been in love with her; but as it was, how could he? Women were loved by their husbands, that was what they married for, but by no one else in the world. Otherwise you might as well fall in love with Uncle Kutowski, or the dog, Leo, who at this moment was rubbing his damp nose against her sleeve, full of consolatory affection.

Shivering in the chill autumn wind, and yet with burning cheeks, she ran up and down the dew-spangled paths, where rustling dry leaves whirled before her like startled animals. She heard Leo's voice coming from the yard, raised to a scolding pitch, as he inspected the ploughs by lantern-light. Leo, the dog, answered with a joyous bay, and bounded off twice, but returned to her in the end.

"You are better than your master," she whispered, burying her face in his mane; and she decided that to-day, if possible, she would get to the bottom of this question about married people being beloved by some one to whom they weren't married.

First of all she sought information in her library. "The Lamplighter," to begin with, then "Goldelse," and "Barefeet." These were the maturist novels that she possessed. The writings of Clara Cron and Otilie Wildemuth were as yet not even to be thought of. She couldn't find any reference to the problem that bothered her, not even a hint that it existed. So she turned from fiction to the classics. Schiller--Amalia was a young girl--Luise (now she was coming to it, perhaps) a married woman--Queen of Spain, of course. But in this case it was clear as daylight that you couldn't believe the poet; for to be in love with your stepmother was a thing which could only happen in the world of imagination, that world in which genius, detached from earth and intoxicated with inspiration, roams at large. She hadn't written for nothing a German composition two years ago on "Genius and Reality," in which this question had been exhaustively dealt with. Those beautiful phrases, "genius detached from earth," and "intoxicated with inspiration," were quotations from it.

"Why are you rummaging so amongst the books?" asked Elly, who was already in bed, and before falling asleep, enjoying herself by stretching the counterpane tight between her teeth and feet, and pretending to play the banjo on it. As she alternately tightened and slackened her hold on the linen, it produced sounds, high and low, which distantly resembled those of a stringed instrument.

Hertha considered whether she should demean herself so far as to ask advice from this child. But, in her dire necessity, she did not long demur.

"Look here, Mouse," she said, sitting down by the head of the bed, "I want to ask you something. You are in love with a man, aren't you?"

"Oh yes," replied Elly, playing with her fingers.

"And you are quite sure that this man loves you too?"

"Why do you say _man_?" asked Elly. "Kurt is my ideal. Before it was Benno, and before that Alfred, but now it is Kurt. But, all the same, I don't think of him as a man."

"What is he, then?"

"Why, a _young_ man."

"Well, young man, if you like. Certainly, he is not my idea of a man." And her eyes gleamed with enthusiasm. Did she not know what a proper man _ought_ to be like? "Do you think, Mouse, that any man, or young man--it doesn't matter which--could love a married woman?"

"Of course ... quite easily," answered Elly, in her superb serenity.

Hertha smiled surreptitiously at such denseness. "No, Mouse, you don't understand," she said. "I don't mean the woman who is his wife, but the woman who is married to some one else."

"That's what I mean too."

"And it seems to you quite natural?"

"Really, I should not have thought you so inexperienced," said the little lady. "One's bound to know such things. In old days it was much worse. The man who was a brave knight _always_ loved the wife of some one else. To love his own would have been thought ridiculous.... It is all in Koenig's 'Unabridged History of Literature.'"

Hertha had become very thoughtful. "Ah! the olden times," she said, with a faint smile. "It's no good talking of them. They tilted at tournaments then, and killed each other with their lances for fun!"

"And to-day," said Elly in a whisper, raising herself in bed with the wide eyes of a child reading a fairy tale, "to-day they shoot each other dead with pistols for a joke instead."

Hertha felt a stab at her hearty and the little rosy daughter of Eve went on.

"I should think it lovely to have such an unhappy affair when married.... For, you know, most of the romantic love stories are of this kind."

"Who told you so?"

"Don't you remember what Kaethi Graffenstein said about her aunt?"

"Pah!" cried Hertha. "Whatever _she_ said about it would sure to be a lie."

The conversation ceased at this point, for, after Elly letting fall the much-hated name, Hertha refused to talk any more. But long after the light had been put out she lay awake pondering, and tried by various experimental thoughts to penetrate the veil which hung between her childlike outlook and life. The next afternoon she approached, with faltering step, kind grandmamma, whose wooden knitting-needles were busily employed on one of her favourite Shetland wool shawls.

"Have you an uneasy conscience?" asked grandmamma, who thought she knew what she wanted.

"God forbid! I only wish to know, am I properly grown up, or am I not?"

"Well ... half and half," suggested grandmamma, giving her a smiling scrutiny over her spectacles.

Hertha drew a deep breath. She had entered on a daring enterprise, she knew, but, at all costs, she must clear up this matter.

"I mean that I shall probably soon be married, and I----"

"You!" exclaimed grandmamma, in deadly terror.

The unhappy child had evidently come to break to her the proposal of some saucy youth in the neighbourhood.

"Of course ...," continued Hertha, mouthing her words, ... "of course ... with all my money I am not likely to be an old maid."

Grandmamma caught hold of her hands. "Child, whom have you got in your mind?" she cried, beginning to perspire with anxiety.

Hertha blushed to the roots of her hair. "I? ... nobody," she stuttered, struggling to maintain a nonchalant tone.

"You are talking indefinitely?"

"Yes ... of course ... indefinitely."

Grandmamma ventured to breathe more freely again, and determined forthwith that she would talk seriously to Leo that very day, and warn him that the "gold fish" might be snapped up, by some one else under his very eyes, if he did not look out.

"And ... now let me hear what you want to know."

"I want to know ... about love ... after marriage."

Grandmamma, who was used to these sort of questions, though lately they had been less frequent than of old, replied lightly, "It's the same after as before."

"Yes ... I know. But if there's another ... to whom one is not married ..."

"Gracious! _what_?" Grandmamma let her glasses fall off her nose in sheer horrified amazement. "What other?"

Hertha felt a sudden collapse of her heart-strings. She had to make energetic demands on her courage to be able to proceed.

"Can't it happen, dear grandmamma, that some one who isn't married to us, can get into his head ..."

"Hertha," interrupted the old lady, "look me straight in the eyes and tell me if you have been reading a forbidden book."

"How could I, grandmamma?"

"What are you reading now?"

"Oh, a yarn that Meta Podewyl lent me."

"We say story, not yarn. Who wrote it?"

"Felix Dahn."

"And what is it about?"

"I hardly know. Some one is always being stabbed dead by some one else. Some of them come to life again, and some of them are buried. There's no harm in that."

"No, certainly there is no harm in that," thought grandmamma; and then she said, "Don't come to me with such stupid questions again, child ... you are too young by far to understand such things. And now give me a kiss, and take your crochet."

So another plan had failed. Yet Hertha went on wondering how she was to solve the dark mystery with which her jealous heart was so blindly grappling.

The same day at dinner Leo made the unexpected proposal of rowing her and Elly over to the Isle of Friendship. He knew how long Hertha had cherished the wish to see with her own eyes the romantic spot, and thought that by giving her her desire he would improve the relations between them, which, he didn't know why, seemed to grow more strained from day to day.

But Hertha slightly curled her lips and remarked, "Many thanks; when I care to visit the island, I will row myself over."

"You'll try again?" he laughed.

"Yes, why not? There are two boats there now, and you can't want more than one at a time when you happen to be visiting Uhlenfelde."

There was something in her pronunciation of the last few words which vexed and irritated him.

"Nevertheless, my dear child," he replied, "I must ask you kindly to refrain from any more mad escapades; there really is no necessity for you periodically to rouse the neighbourhood."

"I promise you that I shall give you no further ground for complaint on that score," she made answer with quivering lips.

He nodded, immediately pacified, and grandmamma changed the topic to household matters.

Towards sunset, when Leo mounted his mare, Hertha, watching him from the garden, felt all the annoyance and antagonism of the evening before awake in her again. She would have liked to throw herself on the grass and tear up the sod with her fingers.

It was true that he rode out in the direction of Wengern, but Hertha had little doubt that he intended to make a _detour_ the quicker to reach the stream.

"Oh, if only I knew whether that could be so!" she thought, and gnashed her teeth.

Then she was seized with a brilliant idea.

Meta Podewyl, who had been transformed these four months into a sedate Frau von Sembritzky, used to be her confidential friend before her engagement. They had exchanged all sorts of promises and sealed their vow of friendship with endless kisses.

The first who, etc., should be the first to, etc.

But, as things had turned out, there had been no talk on either side of these promises being fulfilled, for the intimate relations between her and Meta had ceased, as most girls' friendships do in the early days of betrothal. And although she had followed the fortunate girl to the altar as her bridesmaid, she had long ago seemed to have vanished into an unknown far-away world to which she lacked a passport.

But now her happiness and peace of mind were at stake, and only Meta could help her.

In the evening, at bed-time, she said to Elly, "If I ask you to-morrow to drive over with me to see Meta, you must say 'No.' You understand?" The Mouse did not understand in the least, but submitted as usual with an inclination of her little fair head, and fell asleep.

The next day it rained, and as Hertha had no closed carriage at her command, she stayed at home. Two more wet days followed, in which Hertha's devouring curiosity had to rest unsatisfied. But when a fourth dawned hopelessly grey, with rain pattering on the windows, she resolved to pocket her pride and petition Leo, through the medium of grandmamma, for horse and carriage.

"Why these roundabout dealings, Hertha?" he said, as they met at table. "I should have thought you knew that the conveyances are as much at your disposal as any one else's."

At two o'clock that afternoon the carriage stood at the door, and she drove off in pouring rain.

She was lucky in the hour she had chosen. Meta's husband had gone into Muensterberg, and mamma-in-law, who made the young couple happy by her presence in the house, was suffering from a bilious attack.

So she found Meta alone in her bedroom, with its heavy satin curtains, its dainty muslin covers, its comfortable low sofa, and lamp with emerald-green shade, and all the thousand and one pretty knickknacks, and mysterious articles which betoken a recently accomplished matrimonial union, and seem to invite a cosy confidential chat.

Still, the reception accorded Hertha by her old chum was not altogether encouraging. She rose languidly from the rocking-chair in which she had been reclining, looking very delicate and fragile, and with a faint smile extended a cold thin hand, on which the wide hoop of her wedding-ring seemed conspicuously to inspire respect. A book bound in brown and gold slid from her lap on to the floor.

Hertha took in at a first glance how much Meta's young fresh-coloured little face had changed during the months since her marriage. Her nose had sharpened, and her full lips were pale, and the different way in which her hair was dressed made her quite a stranger.

"I am delighted to see you," she said, just as one dowager receives another when she pays her a formal visit. In fact, Hertha felt intimidated.

"What were you reading?" she asked, picking up the brown-and-gold book from the floor.

The little wife blushed hotly, and hurriedly took the book out of her hand, but not before Hertha had deciphered the gold letters on the back: "Ammon's Duties of Mothers."

"I never!" said Hertha. "May you read that?"

"I must read it," replied the young wife, with a slightly ironical twist of her mouth.

Hertha burned on the spot to gallop through the remarkable volume. She would have liked above all things to have laid it on her lap and asked her friend to leave her in peace for an hour or two. But she was too embarrassed to give any hint of her wishes.

"What shall we have with our coffee?" asked Meta, momentarily anxious to display her authority as mistress of the house. "Meringues, jam pancakes, or apple-fritters?"

"Can you really order anything you like?" asked Hertha, full of admiring envy. At this moment she could almost have made up her mind to accept a husband who was not Leo.

"Naturally I can order what I like," replied her friend, with a melancholy little shake of the head. Bui; she might have truthfully added, "That is, when Hans's mamma has a bilious attack."

"Well, then, I should like apple-fritters best!" exclaimed Hertha, with a sigh of relief, for now they seemed to be getting a more human footing.

As she threw her hat and cloak in a corner, she caught sight of a pair of pouter pigeons fluttering from the ceiling, holding a corner of the bed-canopy in their half-open bills.

"Oh, how perfectly heavenly!" she cried. "If I were married and might have everything I wanted, I would hang a gold cage up there with a nightingale in it, to sing me to sleep every night."

Her friend made no answer, but she smiled. And this smile, indulgent and sad, in which there lay worlds of profound knowledge, told Hertha that she had said something extraordinarily stupid. She rubbed her nose in her confusion, then drew herself erect again, for it seemed to her necessary to recapture her dignity.

A further survey of the room revealed new wonders at every turn. On the toilette table, which, like the bed, had a canopy of silken gauze draped above it, was an array of brushes, bottles, round and square boxes, all made of the same lapis lazuli glass.

She took out stoppers and lifted covers enviously. In one of the boxes she found a powder-puff. It was the first time in all her young life that she had held a powder-puff in her hand.

"May you powder too?" she asked.

Meta shook her head, laughing. "I might if I liked," she said, "but I don't."

Hertha felt a burning desire to guide the white soft ball of down over her face, but forebore from exposing her vanity before her friend.

"I suppose that you are very, very happy?" she asked.

"Thank God, yes," replied her friend, in a tone of solemn seriousness which Hertha couldn't understand, because she had always thought happiness was a laughing matter, and only unhappiness a subject that required to be treated seriously.

Her eyes began to wander round the room again, for she was keenly anxious to discover all the curiosities it contained. Suddenly she gave a start, for there in a corner she alighted on a row of high button-boots, of dimensions so enormous that no woman's feet could have filled them.

"How do they come there?" she asked timidly.

"They are Hans's Wellingtons," replied Meta, in a matter-of-course tone, which crushed her afresh.

It seemed to her as if the Wellingtons grew visibly to a still more gigantic size, and formed an insurmountable barrier between her and her friend. She began at the same time to resent the reserve with which Meta continued to behave towards her.... The days when they had sat in corners together and giggled and tittered while they crunched peppermint bull's-eyes out of a bag that lay across their laps, and now and then flipped each other behind the ear, seemed gone for ever.

"She, too, is going to prove faithless," thought Hertha, and her heart flamed up within her, as it always did at anything which recalled the fleeting vision of treacherous Kaethi Greiffenstein.

But that had nothing to do with her mission. Most undoubtedly any one who was on such familiar and intimate terms with a man's Wellingtons, must be able to enlighten her with regard to the mystery she was so eager to have explained. But she didn't dare yet throw out any hints of her thirst for knowledge. They talked of one thing and another, Meta maintaining her gentle smile and reticent manner. After about half an hour, she rose and explained with a sigh that she must go and inquire how mamma was--if her visitor would excuse her.

And Hertha was left alone. How could she make use of the time? For she had settled in her mind that she would make use of it, only she was undecided between duties of mothers and the powder-puff. At last, after a short but sharp struggle, the powder-puff gained the day. Her eyes guiltily fixed on the door, she snatched the little implement, and with a trembling, hasty movement, dabbed it over her forehead and cheeks. Then she ventured to take a nervous glance at herself in the mirror, and what she saw frightened her.... It was the face of a corpse!

Now she knew how she would look when she lay in her coffin with a wreath of myrtle on her hair and with roses in her marble hands--so pale, so beautiful!

She let her head fall as far back as possible on her neck, and dropped her lids so low that only a misty slit between her lashes was left for her to see through. Both her neck and the back of her head began to ache, but she did not stir.

"Had I been one quarter so fair in my lifetime," she thought, "as I am in death, he would not have disdained my love." A sweet longing to shed tears came over her, but she did not give way to it for fear of disfiguring her snow-white cheeks with brown channels.

"If he saw me like this," she went on, talking to herself, "he would be bound to repent his coldness.... While every one else was asleep, he would come on tiptoe to stand by my bier ... he would throw himself on his knees and cover my rigid face with passionate kisses."

She shuddered. The fire-light from the inn hearth on that never-to-be-forgotten summer evening flickered before her. "And suppose I only appeared to be dead and wasn't really," she went on, "or that his newly awakened love had the power of bringing me to life again. If I opened my eyes and stretched out my arms and drew him to me in full forgiveness."

And as she instinctively spread out those forgiving arms, she felt so much life and movement in her that the illusion of being dead vanished.

"What a pity!" she thought. "All that is beautiful passes like a dream."

She set to work at once to remove the powder from her face. With a handkerchief rolled into a ball she rubbed and scrubbed cheeks, forehead, and nose; and the harder she rubbed, the greater became her fear that she might not be able to wipe off all traces of her misdoing. Her heart beat loudly. She seemed to herself like a criminal on the verge of being discovered. At the sound of footsteps in the corridor, she let the handkerchief fall and retired to the most shadowy corner of the room behind the bed-curtains, where she pretended to be engrossed in the study of a picture.

"Mamma is asleep," said Meta, coming in, "and coffee is ready."