Maurice Guest (84 page)

Maurice did not follow him any further. He stood and watched, until he could no longer see the swaying head. After that he had a kind of collapse. He leaned up against the wall of a house, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. Passers by believed him to be drunk, and were either amused, or horrified, or saddened. He discovered, in truth, that his legs were shaking as if with an ague, and, stumbling into a neighbouring wine-shop, he drank brandy—not enough to stupefy him, only to give back to his legs their missing strength.

To postpone her knowing! To hinder her from knowing at any cost!—his blurred thoughts got no further than this. He covered the ground at a mad pace, clinging fast to the belief that he would find her, as he had left her, in bed. But his first glimpse of her turned him cold. She was standing before the glass, dressed to go out. This in itself was bad enough. Worse, far worse, was it that she had put on, to-day, one of the light, thin dresses she had worn the previous spring, and never since. It was impossible to see her tricked out in this fashion, and doubt her knowledge of the damning fact. He held it for proved that she was dressed to leave him; and the sight of her, refreshed and rejuvenated, gave the last thrust to his tottering sense. He demanded with such savageness the meaning of her adornment, that the indignant amazement with which she turned on him was real, and not feigned.

"Take off that dress! You shan't go out of the house in it!—Take it off!"

He raved, threatened, implored, always with icy fingers at his heart. He knew that she knew; he would have taken his oath on it; and he only had room in his brain for one thought: to prevent her knowing. His rage spent itself on the light, flowery dress. As nothing he said moved her, he set his foot on the skirt, and tore it down from the waist. She struck at him for this, then took another from the wardrobe—a still lighter and gaudier one. They had never yet gone through an hour such as that which followed. At its expiry, clothes and furniture lay strewn about the room.

When Louise saw that he was not to be shaken off, that, wherever she went on this day, he would go, too, she gave up any plan she might have had, and followed where he led. This was, as swiftly as possible, by the outlying road to the Connewitz woods. If he could but once get her there, they would be safe from surprise. Once out there, in solitude, among the screening trees, something, he did not yet know what, but something would—must—happen.

He dragged her relentlessly along. But until they got there! His eyes grew stiff and giddy with looking before him, behind him, on all sides. And never had she seemed to move so slowly; never had she stared so brazenly about her, as on this afternoon. With every step they took, certainty burned higher in him; the thin, fixed smile that disfigured her lips said: do your worst; do all you can; nothing will save you! He did not draw a full breath till they were far out on the SCHLEUSSIGER WEG. Then he dropped her arm, and wiped his face.

The road was heavy with mud, from rains of the preceding day. Louise, dragging at his side, was careless of it, and let her long skirt trail behind her. He called her attention to it, furiously, and this was the first time he had spoken since leaving the house. But she did not even look down: she picked out a part of the road that was still dirtier, where her feet sank and stuck.

They crossed the bridge, and joined the wood-path. On one of the first seats they came to, Louise sank exhausted. Filled with the idea of getting her into the heart of the woods, he was ahead of her, urging the pace; and he had taken a further step or two before he saw that she had remained behind. He was forced to return.

"What are you sitting there for?" He turned on her, with difficulty resisting the impulse to strike her full in her contemptuous white face.

She laughed—her terrible laugh, which made the very nerves twitch in his finger-tips. "Why does one usually sit down?"

"ONE?—You're not one! You're you!" Now he wished hundreds of listeners were in their neighbourhood, that the fierceness of his voice might carry to them.

"And you're a madman!"

"Yes, treat me like the dirt under your feet! But you can't deceive me.—Do you think I don't know why you're stopping here ?"

She looked away from him, without replying.

"Do you think I don't know why you've decked yourself out like this?"

"For God's sake stop harping on my dress!"

"Why you've bedizened yourself? . . . why you were going out? . . . why you've spied and gaped eternally from one side of the street to the other?"

As she only continued to look away, the desire seized him to say something so incisive that the implacability of her face would have to change, no matter to what. "I'll tell you then!" he shouted, and struck the palm of one hand with the back of the other, so that the bones in both bit and stung. "I'll tell you. You're waiting here . . . waiting, I say! But you'll wait to no purpose! For you've reckoned without me."

"Oh, very well, then, if it pleases you, I'm waiting! But you can at least say for what? For you perhaps?—for you to regain your senses?"

"Stop your damned sneering! Will you tell me you don't know who's—don't know he's here?"

Still she continued to overlook him. "He?—who?—what?" She flung the little words at him like stones. Yet, in the second that elapsed before his reply, a faint presentiment widened her eyes.

"You've got the audacity to ask that?" Flinging himself down on the seat, he put his hands in his pockets, and stretched out his legs. "Who but your precious Schilsky!—the man who knew how you ought to be treated . . . who gave you what you deserved!"

His first feeling was one of relief: the truth was out; there was an end to the torture of the past hour. But after this one flash of sensation, he ceased to consider himself. At his words Louise turned so white that he thought she was going to faint. She raised her hand to her throat, and held it there. She tried to say something, and could not utter a sound. Her voice had left her. She turned her head and looked at him, in a strange, apprehensive way, with the eyes of a trapped animal.

"Eugen!—Eugen is here?" she said at last. "Here?—Do you know what you're saying?" Now that her voice had come, it was a little thin whisper, like the voice of a sick person. She pushed hat and hair, both suddenly become an intolerable weight, back from her forehead.

Still he was not warned. "Will you swear to me you didn't know?"

"I know? I swear?" Her voice was still a mere echo of itself. But now she rose, and standing at the end of the seat furthest from him, held on to the back of it. "I know?" she repeated, as if to herself. Then she drew a long breath, which quivered through her, and, with it, voice and emotion and the power of expression returned. "I know?" she cried with a startling loudness. "Good God, you fool, do you think I'd be here with you, if I had known?—if I had known!"

A foreboding of what he had done came to Maurice. "Take care!—take care what you say!"

She burst into a peal of hysterical laughter, which echoed through the woods.

"Take care!" he said again, and trembled.

"Of what?—of you, perhaps? YOU!"

"I may kill you yet."

"Oh, such as you don't kill!"

She lowered her veil, and stooped for her gloves. He looked up at her swift movement. There was a blueness round his lips.

"What are you going to do?"

She laughed.

"You're . . . you're going to him! Louise!—you are NOT going to him?"

"Oh, you poor, crazy fool, what made you tell me?"

"Stay here!" He caught her by the sleeve. But she shook his hand off as though it were a poisonous insect. "For God's sake, think what you're doing! Have a little mercy on me!"

"Have you ever had mercy on me?"

She took a few, quick steps away from the seat, then with an equally impulsive resolve, came back and confronted him.

"You talk to me of mercy?—you !—when nothing I could wish you would be bad enough for you?—Oh, I never thought it would be possible to hate anyone as I hate you—you mean-souled, despicable dummy of a man!—Why couldn't you have let me alone? I didn't care that much for you—not THAT much! But you came, with your pretence of friendship, and your flattery, and your sympathy—it was all lies, every word of it! Do you think what has happened to us would ever have happened if you'd been a different kind of man?—But you have never had a clean thought of me—never! Do you suppose I haven't known what you were thinking and believing about me in these last weeks?—those nights when I waited night after night to see a light come back in his windows? Yes, and I let you believe it; I wanted you to; I was glad you did—glad to see you suffer. I wish you were dead!—Do you see that river? Go and throw yourself into it. I'll stand here and watch you sink, and laugh when I see you drowning.—Oh, I hate you—hate you! I shall hate you to my last hour!"

She spat on the ground at his feet. Before he could raise his head, she was gone.

He made an involuntary, but wholly uncertain, movement to follow her, did not, however, carry it out, and sank back into his former attitude. His cold hands were deep in his pockets, his shoulders drawn up; and his face, drained of its blood, was like the face of an old man. He had made no attempt to defend himself, had sat mute, letting her vindictive words go over him, inwardly admitting their truth. Now he closed his eyes, and kept them shut, until the thudding of his heart grew less forcible. When he looked up again, his gaze met the muddy, sluggish water, into which she had dared him to throw himself. But he did not even recall her taunt. He merely sat and stared at the river, amazed at the way in which it had, as it were, detached itself from other objects. All at once it had acquired a life of its own, and it was difficult to believe that it had ever been an integral part of the landscape.

He remained sitting till the mists were breast-high. But even when, after more than one start—for his legs were stiff and numbed—he rose to go home, he did not realise what had happened to him. He was only aware that night had fallen, and that it would be better to get back in the direction of the town.

The twinkling street-lamps did more than anything towards rousing him. But they also made him long, with a sudden vehemence, for some warm, brightly lighted interior, where it would be possible to forget the night—haunted river. He sought out an obscure cafe, and entering, called for brandy. On this night, he was under no necessity to limit himself; and he sat, glowering at the table, and emptying his glass, until he had died a temporary, and charitable, death. The delicious sensation of sipping the brandy was his chief remembrance of these hours; but, also, like far-off, incorporate happenings, he was conscious, as the night deepened, of women's shrill and lively voices. and of the pressure of a woman's arms.

He wakened, the next morning, to strange surroundings. Half opening his eyes, he saw a strip of drab wall-paper, besprinkled with crude pink roses, and the black and gilt frame of an oblong mirror. He shut them again immediately, preferring to believe that he was still dreaming. Somewhere in the back of his head, a machine was working, with slow, steady throbs, which made his body vibrate as a screw does a steamer. He lay enduring it, and trying to sleep again, to its accompaniment. But just as he was on the point of dozing off, a noise in the room startled him, and made him wide awake. He was not alone. Something had fallen to the floor, and a voice exclaimed impatiently. Peering through his lids, he looked out beyond the will which had first chained his attention. His eyes fell on the back of a woman, who was sitting in front of one of the windows, doing her hair. In her hand she held a pair of curlingtongs, and, before her, on the foot-end of the sofa, a hand-glass was propped up. Her hair was thick and blond. She wore a black silk chemise, which had slipped low on her plump shoulders; a shabby striped petticoat was bound round her waist, and her naked feet were thrust into down-trodden, felt shoes. Maurice lay still, in order that she should not suspect his being awake. For a few minutes, there was silence; then he was forced to sneeze, and at the sound the woman muttered something, and came to the side of the bed. A curl was imprisoned between the blades of the tongs, which she continued to hold aloft, in front of her forehead.

"NA, KLEINER! . . . had your sleep out?" she asked in a raucous voice. As Maurice did not reply, but closed his eyes again, blinded by the sunshine that poured into the room, she laughed, and made a sound like that with which one urges on a horse. "Don't feel up to much this morning . . . eh? HERRJE, KLEINER, but you were tight!" and, at some remembrance of the preceding night, she chuckled to herself. "And now, I bet you, you feel as if you'd never be able to lift your head again. Just wait a jiffy! I'll get you something that'll revive you."

She waddled to the door and he heard her call: "JOHANN, EINEN SCHNAPS!"

Feet shuffled in the passage; she handed Maurice a glass of brandy.

"There you are!—that'll pull you together. Swallow it down," she said, as he hesitated. "You'll feel another man after it.—And now I'll do what I wouldn't do for every one—make you a coffee to wash down the nasty physic."

She laughed loudly at her own joke, and laid the curlingtongs aside. He watched her move about the room in search of spirit-lamp and coffee-mill. Beneath the drooping black chemise, her loose breasts swayed.

"Not that I've much time," she went on, as she ground the coffee. "It's gone a quarter to twelve already, and I like fresh air. I don't miss a minute of it.—So up you get! Here, dowse your head in this water."

Leaning against the table, Maurice drank the cup of black coffee, and considered his companion. No longer young, she was as coarsely haggard as are the generality of women of her class, scanned by cruel daylight. And while she could never have been numbered among the handsome ones of her profession, there was yet a certain kindliness in the smallish blue eyes, and in her jocose manner of treating him.

She, too, eyed him as he drank.

"SAG''MAL KLEINER—will you come again?" she broke the silence.