A Woman's Will

“Au contraire,” he said quietly, “men always understand. It is the woman who will not believe it, and it is cruel to say her the truth. A woman is always genée, she will sob in a man’s arms and still declare that ‘No.’ Why is it necessary for her to be so? That I cannot understand.”

Rosina caught a quick little breath; she had not been prepared for such a turn of conversation. Von Ibn went on with a degree of nonchalance that masked his close observance admirably.

“When a man loves a woman, he knows certainly if she loves him or not. It is there every minute in her eyes and on her lips; and yet he must ask her, and she must pretend a surprise. Why? We are altogether human. Then why must women be different? I am most sorry for a poor woman; she cannot be kissed or caressed or loved without the pretence that she dislikes it. It must be very difficult.”

She felt her face getting warm.

“You do not like what I have say?” he asked.

“No.”

“Because it is true?”

“It isn’t true.”

“An American would not say that to you?”

“Certainly not.”

“Do you like better the American way of covering up all truth?”

“It is politer, I think.”

He looked at her for a moment.

“I have been horrible, n’est-ce pas?” he asked.

She felt very uncomfortable indeed.

“Do let us go now,” she said in a low tone.

He struck his water-glass with a knife, and their waitress, who was near by, looked around.

“’Zahlen!” he called to her. She nodded. He went for his coat and hat, and when he returned Rosina was fastening the frogs on her jacket.

“I would have put it on if you had waited,” he said in a tone of remonstrance.

“I am used to getting into it,” she assured him.

He looked attentively at her and perceived more than she thought. Then the waitress came up and recited all that they had eaten in a sing-song tone, and he pushed some money towards her with a gesture that disposed of the question as to making change.

“We will go out now,” he said, turning towards the door, and the next minute they were in the cool, fresh night air. He put his hand upon her arm, and bent his head a little.

“Do not be vexed with me,” he said softly; “even a little vexing of you makes me great pain.”

Then he pressed her arm closely.

“It is not long that we have now to talk. I beg you talk to me; do not be so sad.”

“I’m not sad.”

“Then talk.”

She gathered up her energy with a mighty effort.

“What shall we talk about?”

“Anything. Have you a letter to-day?”

“Yes.”

“From who? From Jack?”

“No, from the Marquis de W – .”

His fingers came together over her arm in a vice-like grip.

“I have never heard of him,” he cried; “where have you know him?”

“In Paris. And then I met him on the train – ”

Von Ibn’s eyes grew large with fright.

“But you must not meet men on trains,” he said; “that is not at all proper for you.”

“He took charge of me from Paris to Lucerne,” she said soothingly; “he is really very delightful – ”

“I did not see him at Lucerne,” he interrupted.

“No, he was gone when you came.”

“How old is he?”

“He is seventy.”

His heat subsided suddenly, and there was a pause during which she felt circulation returning slowly to her arm.

“And you have a letter from him to-day?” he asked, after a while.

“I have a letter from him almost every day.”

He looked down at her with an air of genuine astonishment.

“What can a man of seventy say in a letter almost every day?” he asked.

“He can say a great deal. He wants me to marry him!”

He laughed aloud, and then exclaimed gayly:

“What a great lady you will be! and how nice you will look in your mourning!” and then he threw his cigarette away and laughed afresh.

His laughter was so infectious that she laughed also.

“He writes me how happy I would be with him,” she continued merrily; “and he is very positive about it, too. How can he think that I would really wish to marry him?”

“He can think it very well from the newspapers of your land. Is he not a marquis? If I did not love you, I should always have surprise to think that you are an American, and will not let me make you a great lady.”

She ignored this speech in its entirety.

“To think,” she pursued, “that one cannot travel in a daughterly way with a gentleman of seventy without – ”

“Yes,” he interrupted, “but that is why it is best not to travel in the charge of gentlemen. One is always so liable to be disagreeably urged to become a marchioness.”

She assented with a thoughtful nod.

“I don’t answer all his letters,” she said; “I burn them.”

“Poor marquis!”

“They are good letters of their kind; but there are a whole lot of things which it does not pay to write to a widow. You can fool a girl, but a widow always knows.”

“Does a widow always know?”

“Oh, dear me; yes.”

“Then why did you not save the poor marquis his pain?”

“I never dreamed of his feeling that way. How could I? I only thought he was delightful. And always, even the first day at Madame de S – ’s, when he said adieu he would kiss my hands in the most adorable Louis XIV. kind of a way.”

“And all the while it was in his heart a plot to marry you. You see!”

“Men are so queer,” she reflected; “I cannot see why that old gentleman should have wanted to marry me.”

“I can,” said Von Ibn, dryly; “I can see quite well.”

The marquis as a topic of conversation seemed at an end. They were in the Hellerstrasse, going towards the river, and the heaviness which the Isar always cast over her fell down about her spirits.

“Oh, I cannot believe that in forty-eight hours I shall be gone!” she exclaimed suddenly.

“Do not go,” he said, tightening his hold upon her arm again; “stay with me.”

“I must go,” she declared. “I couldn’t stay with you, anyway,” she added, in a tone of unintended mournfulness.

His mood altered, and the light of a street lamp showed that every tinge of gayety had fled his face.

“You have no will of your own,” he said with acerbity; “that Jack has it all. I find you so very weak.”

She raised her eyes to his and they looked strangely at one another. The moon was above them, full and beautiful, and the Isar rapids were murmuring their far cry.

“We shall return over the Ludwigsbrücke,” he said, and they went down the incline in silence.

She thought vaguely, “I am here now, and he is here! How will it be when I am gone and we are separated forever?” But her brain refused to comprehend – only her heart felt the warmth of his touch upon her sleeve.

So they came down to the bridge, which abuts on an island and accommodates the tram passing from the Ostbahnhof to the Marien Platz. The Isarthor rose up grimly between the city lights and their view. Above was the golden moon. Behind, the black outlines of the suburb which they had just quitted.

“Let us stop here,” he proposed, pausing by the bridge rail, and she stayed her steps in obedience.

It was nearly nine o’clock, and the passers-by were few. They had the bridge quite to themselves; the water running beneath murmured gently, but did not interrupt even their unvoiced thoughts.

The man took out his étui and lit another cigarette, sinking his sombre gaze meanwhile deep into the stream below. His companion leaned upon the stone parapet.

And then he sighed most heavily.

“It is the autumn,” he said; “all the summer is over. Tout est fini!” There was a profound melancholy in his voice which threw a band of iron about her throat and choked all power of speech out of her. “How little I know last May of what this summer brings,” he continued; “I have believe that all summers were to come alike to me.”

A tram approached and crossed behind them with a mighty rumble. When all was still he spoke again, and the tone of his voice was childishly wistful.

“I did not know, there in Lucerne, before you came, how happy I might be. You are not so wonderful, but to me you are now a need, like air which I must breathe to live.”

There was an anguish underlying his words which set her heart to aching intolerably.

“Oh,” she gasped helplessly, “let us walk on! Let us go home! I cannot bear to hear all that again.”

She turned to go, but he caught her hand in his.

“I must speak,” he said forcefully, though in the lowest possible tones; “it is perhaps the tenth time, but it is certainly the last time. Will you not think once more again of it all, and say here now that you love me?”

He held her hand so tightly that it was impossible for her to withdraw it. She looked up in his face, and the moon showed each the unfeigned feeling of the other.

“You don’t know about marriage,” she told him with white lips and laboring breath. “One may be very unhappy alone, and there is always the strength to bear, but when you are married and unhappiness comes, there is always that other unhappiness chained to you like a clog, shutting out all joy in the present, all hope in the future; and nothing can help you, and you can help nothing.” She stopped and put her hand to her bosom. “Only death can help!” she cried, in a voice as if a physical torture had its grip upon her; “and it is so awful when death alone can help!” She looked at the ground and then up at him. “Oh,” she sighed miserably, “how can I dare to go where I may come to that pass again? Don’t ask that of me.”

He turned his face away from her and she felt his fingers loosen, little by little, their clasp upon her arm. Then he loosed her altogether, left her side, moved away a space, and stood, his head bowed, his eyes bent upon the water. There was a fearful horror of hopelessness in his attitude.

Down from the Gasteig came a cab, an empty cab, and he looked up and hailed it.

“We will ride home,” he said, coming back to her; “I am bereft of strength.”

The cab halted and he put her inside.

“6 Maximiliansstrasse,” he called to the driver, and got in himself and banged the door behind him.

Then he threw himself back against the cushions, covered his eyes with his hand, and remained silent and motionless the ten minutes that they were en route.

She did not speak either; she dared not. The air was so heavy with sorrow and despair that words would have seemed like desecration; and the telepathic misery that emanated from him loaded her soul as if she had been guilty of a crime.

When the cab stopped he opened the door, and as he turned to give her his hand she caught one shocked glimpse of the grief in his face – of the oddly drawn look of suffering in his half-closed eyes. The whole change in him, in them, in it all, had come so quickly that as she stepped from the cab she was conscious of a stunned sensation, a dazed lack of feeling, a cold and stony power to bear much – for a little while.

“Go by the door,” he said in muffled tones, “I must pay the cab.”

She crossed the width of the sidewalk and stood by the great porte, waiting.

When the cabman was disposed of he came to her side, and felt in his pocket for the keys. Then he took his gloves off and felt again; as he felt he stared steadily across the street.

“It’s the round key,” she said, when he finally produced them. “Have you any tapers? I’m afraid that the hall will be dark.”

He shrugged his shoulders as if tapers were of no earthly consequence in such a time of stress. Then he fitted the key in the lock and swung back the massive portal.

Because of that vast key system which is part of the intricacy of the very good housekeeping of Frau G – , there was no necessity to disturb the Hausmeister; but nothing could lessen the wail of the door which let them in with a groan, and closed behind them with a bang that was worthy of the occasion. It was the man’s place to have lessened the noise by laying a restraining hand upon the lock, in accordance with the printed directions nailed against the main panel, but Rosina felt intuitively that this was no time to remind him of the fact.

With the closing of the door they were left in a darkness thorough and complete.

Rosina’s voice: “You said you had wax tapers.”

Von Ibn’s voice: “No, I have not say so.”

Rosina’s accents of distress: “Haven’t you any tapers?”

Von Ibn’s voice, dully: “Yes, I have, but I have not say so before.”

Rosina, entreatingly: “Then do please light one.”

Dead silence.

She began to walk towards the stairs that she could not see; as she did so she heard his keys jingling, and knew from the sound that he must be hunting the wherewithal for illumination. He struck a match and adjusted it in the small hole at the end of the box, and as he did so he called:

“Stop! wait for me to come also.”

She paused and looked back towards him. By the white light of the little taper his face appeared absolutely ghastly, and his heavy eyelids drooped in a way that pierced her heart.

“I think,” he said, when he was beside her, “that it is better that I go to-morrow very early, and that we meet no more.”

At that she was forced to put her hand against the wall in the seeking for some support without herself. They were upon the first step of the stairs, she leaning against one side wall and he standing close to the other. After he had spoken he crossed to her and his voice altered.

“If you had loved me,” he said, “here – now – I should have kissed you, and all would have been for us as of the skies above.”

“Oh, look out!” she exclaimed.

He was close above her.

“You are afraid of me?”

“No, it is the wax; you are letting it drip on us both.”

“It should stop upon the box,” he said shortly.

She began to mount the stairs, pulling off her gloves as she went. One fell, and he stooped quickly for it, with the result that he dropped the match-box. Again they were alone in the darkness.

“This is an awful place,” he said irritably, feeling blindly for what was lost. “That I am on my knees to a match-box this night,” he added savagely.

Her soul was full of sympathy for him. She bent to aid him in his search, and her hand in its wandering encountered his own. He seized her fingers and pressed them to his lips, and she knew that he was kneeling close at her feet.

“This is impossible,” he said vaguely, hurriedly; “we may not part now in a minute, like this. You have spoken foolishly, and I have accept it too quick. We must speak longer and talk reasonably to each of us. We must go where we may sit down and be quiet. Faut être raisonable. Let us go out of the door and go to the Café Luitpold and there speak.”

The Café Luitpold is a gorgeous and fashionable resort in the Briennerstrasse; its decorations are a cross between Herrn-Chiemsee and a Norddeutscher steamer, and its reputation is blameless.

“I can’t go to the Café Luitpold at ten o’clock at night in a golf skirt,” she objected gently, and tried to continue on her upward way; but he held her fast by her hand, and as he pressed it alternately to his face and lips, she felt her flesh wet with hot tears.

“You are crying!” she exclaimed in awe.

“I hope not,” he said; “I hope not, but I am near it. If I do weep, will you then despise me?”

“No,” she said faintly; “no – I – ”

He rose to his feet, and in the dark she knew him to be very, very near. He still held her hand and his breath touched her cheek.

“Oh,” he whispered, “say you love me if it be but so little! Dites que vous m’aimez! I have hoped so greatly, I have dreamed so greatly; I will ask now no more to possess you for my own; I will content myself with what you can so easy give – only a little love – ”

He drew his arm about her. Something within her was rising as the slow tide rises before the September gale, and she felt that all her firmness would be as the sand forts which the children build, when that irresistible final wave shall carry its engulfing volume over all. She summoned to her aid the most frightful souvenirs of her unhappy marriage, and pushed him violently away. His answer was a sudden grasp of mighty vigor, at which she gave a muffled scream.

“You detest me, then?” he said through his teeth.

“It is my hat,” she cried, freeing herself; “you drove the longest pin straight into my head.”

He moved a little away, and in so doing trod upon the match-box. Then in an instant there was light again, and he could see her, her arms upraised, straightening her hat.

“It is most badly on,” he told her.

“I know it,” she replied, starting swiftly upward.

At the curve he stopped short and shut his eyes; she stopped too, three steps farther on.

“Are you ill?” she asked anxiously.

He opened his eyes.

“I am most unhappy,” he replied, and went on again.

So they came to the top at last.

“Here we are,” she said, halting before the door; “give me the keys, they work intricately.”

He handed them to her in silence; she took them in her hand and tried to smile.

“If you really go to-morrow,” she said, as she put one into the lock, “I hope – ” her lips trembled traitorously and she could not go on.

“Dites,” he whispered, coming nearer, “you do care a little, a very – ”

He dropped the matches a second time.

“That was never an accident,” she cried, below her breath.

“It was not my intention,” he declared; then he added, “you have only to go in, I can very well find my way out in the dark.”

But the door refused to open; instead, the key turned around and around in the lock.

“I do believe,” she said at last, in a curiously inexplicable tone, “that we have come up the wrong stairs!”

A sort of atmosphere of blankness saturated the gloom.

“Is there another stair?” he asked.

“Yes; it goes from the other passage. It’s the staircase to No. 5. I think – indeed I’m sure – that we have come up the stairs of No. 6 with the keys of No. 5.”

“I have never know that there was another stair,” he declared. “If you had say that before I – ” then a fresh thought led him to interrupt himself. “It is a fate that leads us. We must go to the street again, and we shall go to the American Bar and talk there.”

The “American Bar” is the name which the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten has elected to give to a small and curious restaurant situated in its basement. There is nothing against the “American Bar” except its name, which naturally leads American women to avoid it.

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” said Rosina, drawing the keys into her hand; “it is no use. We are both all used up. I want to get home. And I couldn’t go anywhere if I wanted to in this skirt.”

“It is always that skirt,” he cried angrily; “that my heart breaks to-night is nothing, – only ever I must hear of your skirt.”

“Oh, where are the matches?” she said nervously; “we must find them somehow.”

He stooped to institute another search, and the umbrella slipped from his hand; it struck the floor with a noise that echoed from the attic to the cellar.

“Oh!” she gasped sharply; “we shall wake every one in the building before we get through.”

“It is very terrible – this night,” he said quietly, and as he spoke he found the match-box and there was light again. Then he picked up his umbrella, and they returned down the three flights of stairs. In the lower hall he stopped again.

“We cannot separate like this,” he said, laying his hand upon her arm; “there are doings that one human cannot do. I must speak longer with you before I go. It is not talking to be going ever up and down steps with a wax taper. I know nothing of what I have say since we leave the cab, and here, each minute, any one may enter. When we go out, come with me across to the Hofbrauhaus, and there we will talk for but five minutes, and then you shall return. Your skirt will go very well there. We shall quickly return. Dites ‘oui’.”

The Hofbrauhaus is, as its name indicates, the café, or rather brasserie, of the Court brewery. It is a curious place, the beer of which is backed by centuries of fame, and Von Ibn told no lie when he said that any skirt would do well there.

“Oh, I can’t go,” she said, almost crying in her distress and agitation. “It will do no good; we just suffer more and more the longer we are together. I am miserable and you are miserable, and it takes all my strength to remember that if I yield we shall be very much more miserable in the end. Let me get home!”

She unlocked the large porte as she spoke, and he blew out the taper, pushed it open, held it while she passed through, and then stayed its slam carefully behind her.

Then there was the porte of No. 5 to unlock and the taper to relight, and three more staircases to mount.

“I shall go to-morrow morning,” he said quietly and hopelessly, as they went a second time upon their upward way. “I shall put all the force of my will to it that I go. It is better so. Pourquoi vous vexer avec mon ardent désir pour vous?”

Her heart contracted with a spasm of pain, but she made no reply.

“To meet again will be but more to suffer,” he continued. “I touch at the end of what I am capable to suffer. Why should I distress you for no good to any one? And for me all this is so very bad! I can accomplish nothing. The power dies in me these days. Toute ma jeunesse est prise! I feel myself become old and most desolate. I am content that it is good-bye here.”

It seemed to her that her turn had come to falter, and fail to move, and close her eyes in misery. If – if – only —

But they went on slowly until the top landing was just above their heads. Both knew that the top landing must bring the termination of all.

She took the door-key in her hand, went a little ahead of him and fitted it noiselessly into the lock. It turned. The end was at hand. She looked towards him and attempted a smile. He put the match-box on the window ledge and drew her within his arms.

“It is for the first and the last time,” he said hoarsely, and then he kissed her furiously, passionately, – twice, thrice, and once again. “C’est comme ça, l’amour!” he whispered; “and because you know nothing of it, you let it go from you.”

Then he put his hand to his throat as if strangling, and, opening the door, stepped aside.

“Good-bye,” he murmured, as she passed within. “Bon voyage!”

The door closed between them.

She went to her room and found Ottillie asleep upon the sofa.

She crossed to the window, opened it softly and leaned out; after a little she heard the door beneath open and close, and then his shadow fell beneath the electric light.

Then he was gone!

This time there would be no return.

The moisture of his lips was yet upon her own, and he was gone forever.

She crossed the room and fell upon her knees beside the bed.

Part III

THE BREAKING OF THE BARRIERS

Chapter Fourteen

IT was very early, very dark, very cheerless, that most miserable hour of six o’clock in the morning, the very worst hour ever known in which to be routed out of bed in order that an unpleasant journey may be begun.

Without, it was faintly light; within, it was brightly gas. What is less cheerful than the aspect given a room by the gas burning high at six o’clock in the morning? Rosina’s room looked absolutely ghastly, for it was bare of everything but travelling apparatus, and they were all strapped and waiting. She herself sat before her untouched breakfast tray and watched Ottillie lace her boots, while she dismally went over for the two hundred and seventy-sixth time every detail of the night before the last.

There was a tap at the door and Jack came in. He was tanned with his recent trip and had a thrilling new travelling ulster with carved deer-horn buttons. He had bought the buttons at the Tagernsee and had had an ulster constructed in Vienna, just as a background for them. He looked at his cousin with a buoyant air that she felt to be bitterly unkind, all things considered, and exclaimed:

“You must hurry up, my dear; the cab will be at the door in five minutes, and we don’t want to miss that train, you know.”

“I’m quite ready,” she said helplessly.

“Is all this stuff going?” he asked, looking about; “you can’t mean to carry all this with us to Genoa, surely.”