A Woman's Will

“Yes, it was here,” he said, and then he shuddered slightly. “It was very well to laugh after, but that might have been so bad. I was angry and I struck a fearful blow then; I have often think of it when we were travelling together.”

She grew thoughtful also, and her imagination found food among some miserable possibilities which might have been.

So they came to the river banks and the Maximilianbrücke, and paused by its rail.

The air was grand, fresh and moist, reminiscent of summer’s breath while also prophetic of winter’s bite, and the Isar swept below them, carrying its hurry of tumult away, away, far into the west, towards a wealth of rose and golden sky. Between the glory and the water, in the middle distance, lay a line of roofs stretching irregularly into the blackness of their own shadows, and beyond them was the forest, to the fringing haze of whose bare branches the distance lent a softness not their own. The banks of the Promenade were still green, but the masses of vine that trailed in the green ripples were all of a crimson or reddish brown, and the shrubs showed here and there an echo of the same color.

It was beautiful and wonderful to see, and they stood still and feasted their eyes for some long minutes.

“Oh, Isar,” Rosina cried softly, holding her hand out towards the singing waters below, “when shall I see you again?”

“You will return some day,” her companion said hopefully.

“Who can tell?”

“But always you must come over some bridge to return to-night.”

She felt that such levity jarred upon her mood, and refused to return his smile. She did not like him to feel like smiling too often these days.

“Do not be of a bad humor,” he entreated. “I am this afternoon of such a good one; and how can you know that you will not return? A woman can never be decided, so you may very well see the Isar soon again. Vous comprenez?”

“Is it being bad-humored to be sad?” she asked; “and why can’t I be decided if I want to be?”

“Because,” he said, wisely, “you are a woman; and a woman is very foolish to ever be decided, for she always changes her mind; and then all her decided seems to have been quite useless.”

Rosina felt that this sentence called for study before reply, and so walked on without speaking.

“Is that not so?” he asked, as they went down by the little stone stair.

“I never change.”

“Oh, now you know well that you do not speak the truth, – you are so very changeable. This afternoon, par exemple, when I first come to ask you to go out, you say you cannot of any possibility make it, and then, very suddenly, we go.”

“But I recollected that I might wear this skirt.”

“And there was that lady, also,” he said thoughtfully.

“Yes, she was there, too.”

“But always you did change.”

“I don’t call it being changeable when one has a good reason for so doing.”

He stopped short; and she, after going a few steps further, discovered herself to be unaccompanied and stopped also.

“What is the matter?”

“Suddenly, I think.”

“Can’t you walk and think at the same time?”

He smiled, and came up with her again.

“If I make you a good reason – ” he began, and then hesitated and was silent.

They followed the muddy path almost to the Luitpoldbrücke before he continued his phrase.

“If one can change for a good reason, and if I make you a good reason, then will you change about me?”

She drew a quick little breath.

“I can’t change in that way,” she said; “you know that I do not want to marry again: marriage is too awful an undertaking. Don’t you see that even now it does not make you always happy to be around me – ”

“I am never around you,” he exclaimed indignantly. “I never have hardly touch you. I have been with you not as a man, but as an angel. Je me comporte comme un ange – comme un ange – c’est moi qui vous le dit! I have given you one kiss such as a small baby might give its mother, and that is all; – and then you say that I am always around you.”

He ceased speaking, and looked straitly and darkly before him. She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

“I tell you,” he continued violently after a short interval, “I am very much too good. Whatever you bid me do, that I do. Whatever you bid me not do, that I do not. And you do not thank me, or trust me, or treat me as a friend. Vous avez toujours peur de moi. When I approach you, you have always the air to expect that I will displease you. Have I deserved that? Have I behaved badly once? Did I kiss you when you knew nothing and I held you there in the mud – the night when I lose my umbrella? Mon Dieu, you are very drôle, if you have known many men and do not appreciate me.”

He stopped as if choked.

They had passed beyond the bridge and entered upon a path along the river bank, a path bordered with willow trees. The sky was more brilliantly gorgeous than ever, but under foot it was wet indeed.

“Try not to stamp so much as you walk,” she asked him very gently; “you keep splashing me.”

“What is splash?” he demanded gloomily; “something that annoys your ears?”

“No, something that spoils my boots.”

“I do not care if I spoil those boots; I find them most ugly.”

“Perhaps; but I could not be here but for them.”

He walked on with somewhat less vigor.

“Let us talk about us,” he suggested, presently.

“With reference to what?”

“To me.”

“No, no,” she said unwillingly.

“Yes; why not?”

“You always come back to that same subject; your mind appears to follow a circuit, like a squirrel in a ring.”

“‘Wheel,’ you mean.”

“Well, ‘wheel,’ then.”

“What squirrel? We never have talked of a squirrel before.”

Rosina’s laugh rang out among the willows.

“Decidément vous n’êtes pas du tout poli,” he cried angrily. “You say I am like a squirrel; I ask what squirrel, and you begin to laugh.”

“I never said that you were like a squirrel,” she exclaimed, greatly shocked; “how can you think that I would say such a thing?”

“You did,” he declared bitterly. “You said I was like a squirrel in his wheel, because I tell you so often that I love you.”

“Oh, monsieur, you know that I never meant it in that way; how can you think for an instant that I could have – have said that – that – ” She felt it impossible to define her offence again without having the corners of her mouth give way; but she went close beside him and faced his vexation with earnest, upraised eyes the while that she laid one hand upon his arm with the sweet impulsive gesture of a pleading child.

The gold had all faded from the sky, and the pink reflection in the far west was sunk beyond the horizon. The path was very solitary; they were quite alone except for an occasional peasant returning from his labor.

“Say that you understand,” she said anxiously, as a break in the trees revealed a long stretch of river; “you must say something, because I want to know how far it is to the next bridge.”

He stopped and stared ahead.

“There are no more bridges,” he proclaimed.

“No more bridges,” she cried.

He shook his head.

“Must we go the whole way back along this same muddy path?”

“Yes, surely.”

She turned.

“Then let us go back now. There is no fun walking any further this way after the sunset is over.”

“Is it for the sunset alone that you walk?”

“What shall I say?” she asked, looking up at him.

“Say that you walk for me.”

“And then what follows?”

“I follow.”

They laughed together.

“I am so good to you,” he declared; “even when you laugh at me I am never angry. I am truly so very good.”

He appeared so well content with himself that they went the whole distance to the Peace Monument before she disturbed his placid introspection. There was a pleasure to her in simply walking beside him in silence; it was a sensation which she had never attempted to analyze, but its existence had become a part of her own.

“Do not let us go home,” he proposed suddenly, when her turning to cross the Luitpoldbrücke recalled him to himself; “let us go somewhere and dine alone together. It is perhaps the last time; Jack returns to-morrow.”

“Oh, let us,” she agreed delightedly; but then her voice altered suddenly for the worse. “No, it’s impossible,” she said sadly, “I can’t go to a café and dine in this short skirt.”

“Why can you not?”

“Can’t you see why?”

He walked off some ways to the side and gazed critically at her skirt.

“Yes,” he said, rejoining her, “I can see why.”

They were halfway across the bridge; he laid his hand on her arm and stopped her.

“Je vous ferai un propos,” he said eagerly; “we will take a car going to the Ostbahnhof, and then we will leave it at a quiet place and seek a quiet café and dine there.”

“All right,” she said; “but you must telephone to the pension, or they won’t know what has become of me.”

“I can say that we are gone to the theatre,” he suggested.

“They won’t believe that because of this skirt.”

“I will say we are gone too far and must send for a cab, and will eat while we wait.”

“I think that whatever you say will sound like a lie, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“Then I will say that we do not return until after the supper, and nothing else.”

“Where will you telephone from?”

“From the café. Where would I telephone from?”

Rosina looked vaguely around in the darkness.

“We are only three or four blocks from the pension now, are we not?”

He glanced about.

“It will be droll if we meet some one you know.”

“Yes,” she said coldly; “it will be very funny – like Mrs. Jones to-day.”

“I am quite vexed when she came in,” he said seriously; “why do people come in like that?”

“We’ll be just as thoughtless when we’re her age,” Rosina said charitably. “I think myself that it is astonishing that so many young people manage to get betrothed when there are so many old people to keep coming in.”

“Getting betrothed is very simple,” said Von Ibn, “because always the young girl is willing; but when she is a young widow and not willing, that is what is difficult, and makes Mrs. Jones de trop.”

She was obliged to laugh.

They were come to the Maximiliansstrasse, and a car was making its way jerkily around the corners of the monument in the middle of the square. It was a car for the Ostbahnhof, and full – very full.

“Let it go by,” he said. “We will walk on and another comes in a moment.”

They let it pass, and wandered on towards the rushing river.

“You see why it was so foolish to be sad,” he remarked, as they approached the bridge; “here is the second time that you have seen the Isar since you weep good-bye forever this afternoon.”

“I didn’t weep,” she said indignantly.

“Did you not? I thought that you did.”

They waited for another car at the end of the bridge; the island where the Isarlust sports its lights and music all summer, looked particularly deserted in the contrast of this October night. She spoke of the fact.

“You were often there?” he asked; “yes?”

“Yes, very often.”

“With who?”

She smiled a little in the dark.

“We used to come in the evenings,” she said; “every one used to come.”

Another car approached – again crowded.

“Let us walk,” she suggested; “all the cars will be crowded for the next hour.”

“Will your feet go further?” he inquired anxiously.

“Yes, I think so.”

They turned their faces to that gardened slope which rises to the right of the Maximilianeum. The full moon was coming up behind the stately building, and its glorious open arches were outlined against the evening sky. The great tower which rose at the end near them seemed to mount straight upward into heaven itself.

“I don’t want to leave the Maximilianeum,” she exclaimed, reft with an intense admiration for the grandeur of what was before her; “I don’t want to leave the Bavarian moon; oh, I don’t want to leave Munich; not a bit.”

“And me?” said her companion, taking her arm, “do you want to not leave me also?”

“I don’t want to leave you either,” she declared. “I don’t want to leave anything, and I must leave everything. Oh,” she exclaimed suddenly and viciously, “I wish I might know who it was that wrote home to Uncle John.”

“But you have thought to know?”

“Oh, I’m almost sure that it was that man in Zurich.”

“He was not so bad, that Zuricher man,” he said, reflectively. “Did I ever say to you that I did go to the Gare with him when he went to Lucerne?”

“No, you never told me that. What did you go to the station with him for?”

“I thought that I would know whether after all he really went to Constance. At the Gare, after he has bought his ticket for Lucerne, I find him most agreeable.”

“Did you really think that perhaps he was going to Constance?”

“Yes, I did. I find it very natural that he shall want to go to Constance. I am surprise that day at every one who can decide to go any other place because I so wish to get to Constance myself. Vous comprenez?”

She was obliged to smile audibly.

“It was very funny the way that you came into the Insel salle-à-manger that night. I never was more surprised in my life.”

“I like to come to you that way,” he went on. “When you are so your face becomes glad and I believe that you have been really lonely for me and – ”

He stopped suddenly; two big electric lights loomed at the corner to their right and the scene which was revealed by the uncurtained state of the window was responsible for the sudden turn of the current of his thoughts.

“We can eat there,” he exclaimed.

She stopped, astonished.

“Can we?” she asked. “I wouldn’t think so.”

“But surely yes,” he affirmed; “it is a café.”

He flung the door open as he spoke and stood back to let her pass inside.

“It is a little smoky,” he continued, as the door fell to, “but – ”

“A little!” she interrupted.

“But what does that do to you? and there is another lady, so it is very right for you to be here too.”

“She doesn’t look like a lady to me,” said Rosina, dodging under a billiard-cue, for in this particular café the centre of the room is occupied by the billiard-tables; “she looks decidedly otherwise.”

Von Ibn glanced carelessly at the person alluded to.

“It is always a woman,” he remarked; and then he led the way around to a vacant corner where there was somewhat less confusion than elsewhere. “Here you may sit down,” he commanded, and laid aside his own hat and overcoat.

She obeyed him, contemplating her surroundings with interest as she began to unbutton her gloves.

For the place was, to her eyes, unique of its kind, her lot having been cast hitherto in quite another class of cafés. It was very large, and decidedly hideous, wainscoted in imitation panels and frescoed in imitation paintings. The columns which supported the ceilings were brilliantly banded in various colors and flowered out below their pediments into iron branches of oak leaves among which blossomed the bulbs of many electric lights. By each column stood a severely plain hat-rack. In the middle of the room were four billiard tables, around its sides numberless small marble-topped stands where beer was being served galore. Against the walls were fastened several of those magnificent mirrors which testify so loudly to the reasonable price of good glass in that happy land across the seas; each mirror was flanked by two stuffed eagles, and decorated above its centre with one ornate quirl in gilt and stucco. And the whole was full and more than full of smoke.

Von Ibn rapped on the tiled floor with his umbrella, and a waitress serving at a table near, five beer-mugs in each hand, nodded that she heard. Then he turned to Rosina:

“Eh bien!”

“I never was in a place like this before.”

“You may very likely never be in such a one again,” he told her seriously; “so you must be as happy as you can while you’re here.”

“That reason for having a good time hadn’t occurred to me,” she answered, giving him back his smile.

“Then think to occur it now,” he rejoined.

The waitress had by this time gotten rid of her ten mugs and came to them, beginning proceedings by spreading the ménu down on the table and running her pencil through item after item.

“You had better order before everything is gone,” Rosina suggested.

“I must think the same,” he replied, and took up the ménu.

“Haben Sie bouillon?” he demanded immediately.

The waitress signified that bouillon was not to be.

“How shall I do?” he asked, looking blank. “In all my life I have never eat without a bouillon before?”

Rosina and the waitress felt their mutual helplessness in this difficulty, and the proceedings in hand came to a standstill natural under the circumstances.

“Can’t they make you some?” the American brain suggested.

He turned the idea over in his mind once or twice and then:

“No,” he said; “it is not worth. It will be better that we eat now, and later, when I am in town, I will get a bouillon.”

So, that difficulty being disposed of, he ordered a species of repast with an infinite sense of amusement over the bill of fare. The waitress then retired and they were left alone in their corner.

“The other lady is getting kissed,” Rosina said. The publicity of a certain grade of continental love-making is always both interesting and amazing to the Anglo-Saxon temperament.

He looked behind him without at all disturbing what was in progress there. After a minute’s quiet stare he turned back in his seat and shrugged his shoulders.

“You see how simple it is when the woman is still,” he said pointedly. “There is no fainting there; he loses no seventeen-mark umbrella from Baden-Baden.”

She ignored the gist of this remark, and began to unhook the collar of her jacket. Then she decided to take it off altogether.

“You find it too warm?” he said, rising to assist her.

“I certainly do.”

“It is curious for you and I to be in such a place, n’est-ce pas?”

“Very curious.”

“But it is an experience, like eating in the woods.”

“I don’t think that it is at all like eating in the woods; I think that nothing could be more different.”

“We are so alone.”

“Oh!”

“Now you understand what I mean.”

“Yes, now I understand what you mean. And it is really a little like the woods, too,” she added. “Those iron acorns and leaves are the branches, and the stuffed eagles are the birds.”

He looked at the oak-branches and the eagles for some time, and then he said:

“Let us talk.”

“What are we doing now?”

“We are waiting for what is to be to eat.”

“I thought that that in itself was always sufficient entertainment for a man.”

“I like better to talk. I have not much time more to talk with you, vous savez.”

“We will talk,” she said, hastily. Her eyes wandered vaguely over the room seeking a subject for immediate discussion; all that she saw was the perpendicular cue of one of the billiard players.

“Watch!” she exclaimed. “He’s going to make an awfully difficult shot.”

Von Ibn looked towards the player with very little interest depicted on his countenance.

“Oh, he missed,” she exclaimed disgustedly.

“But of course. How could a man like that do such a massé? You are so hopeful ever. You say, ‘See him make so difficult a play,’ when only looking upon the man’s face tells that he himself is sure that he is about to fail.”

“I’ll give you a riddle,” she went on, receiving his expostulation with a smile. “But perhaps you don’t know what a riddle is?” she added questioningly.

“Yes, I do know what a riddle is; it is what you do not know and must tell.”

“Yes, that is it.”

“And your riddle is?”

“Why am I like a dragon?”

“Like a – ” he faltered.

“Dragon.”

“What is a dragon?”

“It’s a horrible monster. Don’t you know the picture in the Schaak Gallery of that creature running its neck out through the slit in the rock so as to devour the two donkeys?”

“Yes, I know the picture. But that creature is blue.”

“Oh,” she said hopelessly, “it’s no use trying to tell you riddles, you don’t understand.”

“Yes, I do,” he cried eagerly. “I understand perfectly and I assure you that I like very much. Dragon is ‘drachen,’ n’est ce pas?”

“Yes.”

“And you are as one?”

“I ask why am I like one?”

He looked particularly blank.

“You are perhaps hungry?” he hazarded.

She began to laugh.

“No, it’s because I’m breathing smoke.”

“Do dragons breathe smoke? It is a salamander you are believing in.”

“In pictures dragons always breathe smoke and fire.”

“But there is no fire here.”

“There must be somewhere, because there is so much smoke.”

He was unmoved and ruminative.

“I do not find your riddle very clever,” he said at last.

Rosina buried the poor, weak, little scintillation at once and stamped on its grave in hot haste.

“I think that our dinner is coming,” she announced presently, turning her veil above her brows, “and I am so hungry.”

“I find your hunger a much better answer of that riddle than to be breathing smoke,” he said.

“Of course you do, because that is the answer that you thought of.”

The waitress began to arrange the dishes upon the table and when all was in order he prepared to serve them both.

“I often start to say most clever things,” he said, as he carved the fish, “but before I can speak you have always say something else.”

She took the plate that he passed her, and picked up her fork at once.

“Then when you are silent for a quarter of an hour or so it would really pay me to keep still and wait; wouldn’t it?” she inquired.

He took a mouthful and deliberated.

“I think so,” he said at last.

A deep stillness fell over the festal board. Von Ibn was mute and his companion felt that, the preceding remarks considered, she would be dumb herself. The entire meal was accordingly eaten in absolute silence, until, when she had finished, she could not refrain from stealing one amused glance in his direction.

“You laugh,” he said, returning the smile in kind.

“I am sure that it is going to be something very brilliant this time,” she told him.

He stared for a minute; and then he understood and laughed aloud.

“I only eat then,” he exclaimed, “mais, Dieu! quels enfants nous sommes ensemble. I must often wonder if you are so happy with me as I am with you? I cannot say why it is, but if you only be there I am content. Tell me, is it at all so for you?”

“I enjoy you,” she answered; “most men are stupid or horrid.”

“When?” he asked anxiously.

“When one is much with them.”

He looked at her with some alarm.

“But are many men much with you?”

Rosina laughed merrily over the trouble in his face.

“You would have been unbearable if you had been of a jealous disposition,” she said, nodding.

“Yes,” he replied gravely, “I have always feel that myself; for with me it is very strong that there shall be no other. But tell me now, truly are many men much with you?”

“Why I have hosts of friends,” she declared, “and, on account of the way that the world is made, half of them are obliged to be men.”

“But you said that they were all stupid or horrible,” he reminded her carefully.

“I said that most of them were.”

He thought a moment.

“I wish that there had been a bouillon here,” he said then.

She began to put on her gloves, thinking that the hour of departure was close at hand.

“J’ai envie de fûmer une cigarette,” he said suddenly, “ça ne vous fait rien d’attender un peu?”

“I don’t care,” she answered, and laid her gloves down again.

“Am I ever horrible to you?” he asked, taking a match from the white china pyramid that ornamented the centre of the table.

“I didn’t say ‘horrible;’ I said ‘horrid.’”

“Is there a difference?” he lit his cigarette.

“Yes, indeed.”

He crossed his arms upon the table, and smiled at her through his own personal quota of smoke.

“Tell me the difference. Why are we horrid?”

“Because you so often are. Men never understand.”