Books: Maurice Guest

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Maurice, all unsuspecting, sat with his back to her, and laced his
boots.

But he was startled into an exclamation, when he climbed the bank and saw
the state she was in.

"Louise! Good Heavens, what's the matter? Are you ill?"

He took her by the arm, and shook her a little, to arrest her attention.

"Maurice! . . . no!" Her voice was hoarse. "Oh, let me go home!"

He repeated the words in amazed alarm. "But what is it, darling? Are you
ill? Are you cold?--that you're trembling like this?"

"No . . . yes. Oh, I want to go home !--back to Leipzig."

"Why, of course, if you want to. At once."

The rushes lay forgotten on the ground. Without further words, they
hastened to the inn. There, Maurice helped her to throw her things into
the bag she had not wholly unpacked, and, having paid the bill, led her,
with the same feverish haste, through the woods and town to the
railway-station. He was full of distressed concern for her, but hardly
dared to show it. for, to all his questions, she only shook her head.
Walking at his side, she dug her nails into her palms till she felt the
blood come, in her effort to conceal and stifle the waves of almost
physical repugnance that passed through her, making it impossible for her
to bear even the touch of his hand. In the train, she leaned back in the
corner, and, shutting her eyes, pretended to be asleep.

They took a droschke home; the driver whipped up his horse; the landlady
was called in to make the first fire of the season. Louise went to bed at
once. She wanted nothing, she said, but to lie still in the darkened room.
He should go away; she preferred to be alone. No, she was not ill, only
tired, but so tired that she could not keep her eyes open. She needed
rest: tomorrow she would be all right again. He should please, please,
leave her, and go away. And, turning her face to the wall, she drew the
bedclothes over her head.

At his wits' end to know what it all meant, Maurice complied. But at home
in his room, he could settle to nothing; he trembled at every footstep on
the stair. No message came, however, and when he had seen her again that
evening, he felt more reassured.

"It's nothing--really nothing. I'm only tired . . . yes, it was too
much. just let me be, Maurice--till to-morrow." And she shut her eyes
again, and kept them shut, till she heard the door close behind him.

He was reassured, but still, for the greater part of the night, he lay
sleepless. He was always agitated anew by the abrupt way in which Louise
passed from mood to mood; but this was something different; he could not
understand it. In the morning, however, he saw things in a less tragic
light; and, on sitting down to the piano, he experienced almost a sense of
satisfaction at the prospect of an undisturbed day's work.

Meanwhile Louise shrank, even in memory, from the feverish weeks just
past, as she had shrunk that day from his touch. And she struggled to keep
her thoughts from dwelling on them. But it was the first time in her life
that she felt a like shame and regret; and she could not rid her mind of
the haunting images. She knew the reason, too; darkness brought the
knowledge. She had believed, had wished to believe, that the failure was
her fault, a result of her unstable nature; whereas the whole undertaking
had been merely a futile attempt to bolster up the impossible, to stave
off the inevitable, to postpone the end. And it had all been in vain. The
end! It would come, as surely as day followed night--had perhaps indeed
already come; for how else could the nervous aversion be explained, which
had seized her that day? What, during the foregoing weeks, she had tried
not to hear; what had sounded in her ears like the tone of a sunken bell,
was there at last, horrible and deafening. She had ceased to care for him,
and ceased, surfeited with abundance, with the same vehement abruptness as
she had once begun. The swiftness with which things had swept to a
conclusion, had, confessedly, been accelerated by her unhappy temperament;
but, however gentle the gradient, the point for which they made would have
remained the same. What she was now forced to recognise was, that the
whole affair had been no more than an episode; and the fact of its having
begun less brutally than others, had not made it a whit better able than
these to withstand decay.

A bitter sense of humiliation came over her. What was she? Not a week
ago--she could count the days on her fingers--the mere touch of his hand
on her hair had made her thrill; and now the sole feeling she was
conscious of was one of dislike. She looked back over the course of her
relations with him, and many things, unclear before, became plain to her.
She had gone into the intimacy deliberately, with open eyes, knowing that
she cared for him only in a friendly way. She had believed, then, that
the gift of herself would mean little to her, while it would secure her a
friend and companion. And then, too--she might as well be quite honest
with herself--she had nourished a romantic hope that a love which
commenced as did this shy, adoring tenderness, would give her something
finer and more enduring than she had hitherto known. Wrong, all wrong,
from beginning to end! It had been no better than those loves which made
no secret of their aim and did not strut about draped in false sentiment.
The end of all was one and the same. But besides this, it had come to mean
more to her than she had ever dreamt of allowing. You could not play with
fire, it seemed, and not be burned. Or, at least, she could not. She was
branded with wounds. The fierce demands in her, over which she had no
control, had once more reared their heads and got the mastery of her, and
of him, too. There had been no chance, beneath their scorching breath, for
a pallid delicacy of feeling.

It did not cross her mind that she would conceal what she felt from him.
Secrecy implied a mental ingenuity, a tiresome care of word and deed. His
eyes must be opened; he, too, must learn to say the horrid word "end." How
infinitely thankful she had now reason to be that she had not yielded to
his persuasions, and married him! No, she had never seriously considered
the idea, even at the height of her folly. But then, she was never quite
sure of herself; there was always a chance that some blind impulse would
spring up in her and overthrow her resolutions. Now, he must suffer,
too--and rightly. For, after all, he had also been to blame. If only he
had not importuned her so persistently, if only he had let her alone,
nothing of this would have happened, and there would be no reason for her
to lie and taunt herself. But, in his silent, obstinate way, he had given
her no peace; and you could not--she could not!--go on living unmoved,
at the side of a person who was crazy with love for you.

For two nights, she slept little. On the third, worn out, she fell, soon
after midnight, into a deep sleep, from which, the following morning, she
wakened refreshed.

When Maurice came, about half-past twelve, her eyes followed him with a
new curiosity, as he drew up a chair and sat down at her bedside. She
wondered what he would say when he knew, and what change would come over
his face. But she made no beginning to enlightening him. In his presence,
she was seized by an ungovernable desire to be distracted, to be
taken out of herself. Also, it was not, she began to grasp, a case of
stating a simple fact, in simple words; it meant all the circumstantiality
of complicated explanation; it meant a still more murderous tearing up of
emotion. And besides this, there was another factor to be reckoned with,
and that was the peculiar mood he was in. For, as soon as he entered the
room, she felt that he was different from what he had been the day before.

She heard the irritation in his voice, as he tried to persuade her to come
out to dinner with him. In fancy she saw it all: saw them walking together
to the restaurant, at a brisk pace, in order to waste none of his valuable
time; saw dinner taken quickly, for the same reason; saw them parting
again at the house-door; then herself in the room alone, straying from
sofa to window and back again, through the long hours of the long
afternoon. A kind of mental nausea seized her at the thought that the old
round was to begin afresh. She brought no answer over her lips. And after
waiting some time in vain for her to speak, Maurice rose, and, still under
the influence of his illhumour, drew up the three blinds, and opened a
window. A cold, dusty sunlight poured into the room.

Louise gave a cry, and put her hands to her eyes.

"The room is so close, and you're so pale," he said in selfexcuse. "Do you
know you've been shut up in here for three days now?"

"My head aches."

"It will never be any better as long as you lie there. Dearest, what is
it? WHAT'S the matter with you?"

"You're unhappy about something," he went on, a moment later. "What is it?
Won't you tell me?"

"Nothing," she murmured. She lay and pressed her palms to her eyeballs, so
firmly that when she removed them, the room was a blur. Maurice, standing
at the window, beat a tattoo on the pane. Then, with his back to her, he
began to speak. He blamed himself for what he called the folly of the past
weeks. "I gave way when I should have been firm. And this is the result.
You have got into a nervous, morbid state. But it's nonsense to think it
can go on."

For the first time, she was conscious of a somewhat critical attitude on
his part; he said "folly" and "nonsense." But she made no comment; she lay
and let his words go over her. They had so little import now. All the
words that had ever been said could not alter a jot of what she
felt--of her intense inward experience.

Her protracted silence, her heavy indifference infected him; and for some
time the only sound to be heard was that of his fingers drumming on the
glass. When he spoke again, he seemed to be concluding an argument with
himself; and indeed, on this particular day, Maurice found it hard to
detach his thoughts from himself, for any length of time.

"It's no use, dear. Things can't go on like this any longer. I've got to
buckle down to work again. I've . . . I. . .I haven't told you yet:
Schwarz is letting me play the Mendelssohn."

She thought she would have to cry aloud; here it was again: the chilling
atmosphere of commonplace, which her nerves were expected to live and be
well in; the well-worn phrases, the "must this," and "must that," the
confident expectation of interest in doings that did not interest her at
all. She could not--it would kill her to begin it anew! And, in spite of
her efforts at repression, an exclamation forced its way through her lips.

At this, Maurice went quickly back to her.

"Forgive me . . . talking about myself, when you are not well."

He knelt down beside the bed, and removed her hands from her face. She did
not open her eyes, kept quite still. At this moment, she felt mainly
curious: would the strange aversion to his touch return? He was kissing
her palms, pressing them to his face. She drew a long, deep sigh: it did
not come back. On the contrary, the touch of his hand was pleasant to her.
He stroked her cheek, pushed back a loose piece of hair from her forehead;
and, as he did this, she was aware of the old sense of well-being. Beneath
his hand, irksome thoughts fell away. Backwards and forwards it travelled,
as gently as though she were a sick person. And, little by little, so
gradually that, at first, she herself was not conscious of them, other
wishes came to life in her again. She began to desire more than mere
peace. The craving came over her to forget her self-torturings, and to
forget them in a dizzy whirl. Reaching up, she put her arms round his
neck, and drew him down. He kissed her eyelids. At this she opened her
eyes, enveloping him in a look he had learnt to know well. For a second he
sustained it: his life was concentrated in the liquid fire of these eyes,
in these eager parted lips. She pressed them to his, and he felt a
smart, like a bee's sting.

With a jerk, he thrust her arms away, and rose to his feet; to keep his
balance he was obliged to grasp the back of a chair. Taking out his
handkerchief, he pressed it to his lip.

"Maurice!"

"It's late . . . I must go . . . I must work, I tell you." He stood
staring at the drop of blood on his handkerchief.

"Maurice!"

He looked round him in a confused way; he was strangely angry, and hasty
to no purpose. "Won't you . . . then you won't come out with me?"

"Maurice!" The word was a cry.

"Oh, it's foolish! You don't know what you're doing." He had found his
coat, and was putting it on, with unsure hands. "Then, if . . . this
evening, then! As usual. I'll come as usual."

The door shut behind him; a minute later, the street-door banged. At the
sound Louise seemed to waken. Starting up in bed, she threw a wild look
round the empty room; then, turned on her face, and bit a hole in the
linen of the pillow.

Maurice worked that afternoon as though his future was conditioned by the
number of hours he could practise before evening. Throughout these three
days, indeed, his zeal had been unabating. He would never have yielded so
calmly to the morbid fashion in which she had cooped herself up, had not
the knowledge that his time was his own again, been something of a relief
to him. Yes, at first, relief was the word for what he felt. For, after
making one good resolution on top of another, he had, when the time came,
again been a willing defaulter. He had allowed the chance to slip of
making good, by redoubled diligence, his foolish mistake with regard to
Schwarz. Now it was too late; though the master had let him have his way
in the choice of piece for the coming PRUFUNG, it had mainly been owing to
indifference. If only he did not prove unequal to the choice now it was
made! For that he was out of the rut of steady work, was clear to him as
soon as he put his hands to the piano.

But he had never been so forlornly energetic as on this particular
afternoon. Yet there was something mechanical, too, about his playing;
neither heart nor brain was in it. Mendelssohn's effective roulades ran
thoughtlessly from his fingers: in the course of a single day, he
had come to feel a deep contempt for the emptiness of these runs and
flourishes. He pressed forward, however, hour after hour without a break,
as though he were a machine wound up for the purpose. But with the
entrance of dusk, his fictitious energy collapsed. He did not even trouble
to light the lamp, but, throwing himself on the sofa, covered his eyes
with his arm.

The twilight induced sensations like itself--vague, formless, intolerable.
A sudden recognition of the uselessness of human striving grew up in him,
with the rapidity of a fungus. Effort and work, ambition and success,
alike led nowhere, were so many blind alleys: ambition ended in smoke;
success was a fleeing phantom, which one sought in vain to grasp. To the
great mass of mankind, it was more than immaterial whether one of its
units toiled or no; not a single soul was benefited by it. Most certainly
not the toiler himself. It was only given to a few to achieve anything;
the rest might stand aside early in the day. Nothing of their labours
would remain, except the scars they themselves bore.

He was unhappy; to-night he knew it with a painful clearness. The shock
had been too rude. For him, change had to be prepared, to come gradually.
Sooner or later, no doubt, he would right himself again; but in the
meantime his plight was a sorry one. It was his duty to protect himself
against another onslaught of the kind--to protect them both. For there was
no blinking the fact: a few more weeks like the foregoing, and they would
have been two of the wretchedest creatures on earth. They were miserable
enough as it was, he in his, she in her own way. It must never happen
again. She, too, had doubtless become sensible of this, in the course of
the past three days. But had she? Could he say that? What had she
thought?--what had she felt? And he told himself that was just what he
would never know.

He saw her as she had lain that morning, her arms long and white on the
coverlet. He recalled all he had said, and tried to piece things together;
an inner meaning seemed to be eluding him. Again, in memory, he heard the
half-stifled cry that had drawn him to her side, felt her hands in his,
the springy resistance of her hair, the delicate skin of her eyelids.
Then, he had not understood the sudden impulse that had made him spring to
his feet. But now, as he lay in the dusk, and summed up these things, a
new thought, or hardly a thought so much as an intuition, flashed through
his mind, instantly to take entire possession of him--just as if it
had all along been present, in waiting. Simultaneously, the colour mounted
to his face: he refused to harbour such a thought, and put it from him,
angry with himself. But it was not to be kept down; it rose again, in an
inexplicable way--this suggestion, which was like a slur cast on her. Why,
he demanded of himself, should it not have occurred to him before?--once,
twenty, a hundred times? For the same thing had often happened: times
without number, she had striven to keep him at her side. Was its presence
to-day a result of his aimless irritation? Or was it because, after
holding him at arm's length for three whole days, she had asked, on
returning to him, neither affection nor comradeship, only the blind
gratification of sense?

He did not know. But forgotten hints and trifles--words, acts, looks--
which he had never before considered consciously, now recurred to him as
damning evidence. With his arm still across his eyes, he lay and let it
work in him; let doubts and frightful uncertainties grow up in his brain;
suffered the most horrible suffering of all--doubt of the one beloved. He
seemed to be looking at things from a new point, seeing them in different
proportions--all his own poor hopes and beliefs as well and, while the
spasm of distrust lasted, he felt inclined to doubt whether she had ever
really cared for him. He even questioned his own feeling for her, seeking
to discover whether it, too, had not been based on a mere sensual fancy.
He saw them satisfying an instinct, without reason and without nobility.
And, by this light, he read a reason for the past months, which made him
groan aloud.

He rose and paced the room. If what he was thinking of her were true, then
it would be better for both their sakes if he never saw her again. But,
even while he said this, he knew that he would have to see her, and
without loss of time. What he needed was to stand face to face with her,
to look into her eyes, which, whatever they might do, had never learned to
hide the truth, and there gain the certainty that his imaginings were
monstrous--the phantoms of a melancholy October twilight.

It was nearly nine o'clock, but there was no light in her room. He
pictured her lying in the dark, and was filled with remorse. But he said
her name in vain; the room was empty. Lighting the lamp, he saw that the
bedclothes had been thrown back over the foot-end of the unmade bed, as
though she had only just left it. The landlady said that she had gone out,
two hours previously, without leaving any message. All he could do
was to sit down and wait; and in the long half-hour that now went by, the
black thoughts that had driven him there were forgotten. His only wish was
to have her safe beside him again.

Towards ten o'clock he heard approaching sounds. A moment later Louise
came in. She blinked at the light, and began to unfasten her veil before
she was over the threshold.

He gave a sigh of relief. "At last! Thank goodness! Where have you been?"

"Did you think I was lost? Have you been here long?"

"For hours. Where else should I be? But you--where have you been?"

Standing before the table, she fumbled with the veil, which she had pulled
into a knot. He did not offer to help her; he stood looking at her, and
both voice and look were a little stern.

"Why did you go out?"

She did not look at him. "Oh, just for a breath of air. I felt I . . . I
HAD to do something."

From the moment of her entrance, even before she had spoken, Maurice was
aware of that peculiar aloofness in her, which invariably made itself felt
when she was engrossed by something in which he had no part.

"That's hardly a reason," he said nervously.

With the veil stretched between her two hands, she turned her head. "Do
you want another? Well, after you left me to-day, I lay and thought and
thought . . . till I felt I should go mad, if I lay there any longer."

"Yes, but all of a sudden, like this! After being in bed for three
days . . . to go out and . . ."

"But I have not been ill!"

"Go out and wander about the streets, at night."

"I didn't mean to be so late," she said, and folded the veil with an
exaggerated care. "But I was hindered; I had a little adventure."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing much. A man followed me--and I couldn't get rid of him."

"Go on, please!" He was astonished at the severity of his own voice.

"Oh, don't be so serious, Maurice!" She had folded the veil to a neat
square, stuck three hatpins in it, and thrown it with her hat and jacket
on the sofa. "No one has tried to murder me," she said, and raised both
her hands to her hair. "I was standing before Haase's window--the big
jeweller's in the PETERSTRASSE, you know. I've always loved
jewellers' windows--especially at night, when they're lighted up. As a
child, I thought heaven must be like the glitter of diamonds on blue
velvet--the Jasper Sea, you know, and the pearly floor."

"Never mind that now!"

"Well, I was standing there, looking in, longer perhaps than I knew. I
felt that some one was beside me, but I didn't see who it was, till I
heard a man's voice say: 'SCHONE SACHEN, FRAULEIN, WAS?' Of course, I took
no notice; but I didn't run away, as if I were afraid of him. I went on
looking into the window, till he said: 'DARF ICH IHNEN ETWASS KAUFEN?'and
more nonsense of the same kind. Then I thought it was time to go. He
followed me down the PETERSTRASSE, and when I came to the ROSSPLATZ, he
was still behind me. So I determined to lead him a dance. I've been
walking about, with him at my heels, for over an hour. In a quiet street
where there was no one in sight, he spoke to me again, and refused to go
away until I told him where I lived. I pretended to agree, and, on the
condition that he didn't follow me any further, I gave him a number in the
QUERSTRASSE; and in case he broke his. word, I came home that way. I hope
he'll spend a pleasant evening looking for me."

She laughed--her fitful, somewhat unreal laugh, which was always
displeasing to him. To-night, taken in conjunction with her story, and her
unconcerned way of telling it, it jarred on him as never before.

"Let me catch him here, and I'll make it impossible for him to insult a
woman again!" he cried. "For it is an insult though you don't see it in
that light. You laugh as you tell it, as if something amusing had happened
to you. You are so strange sometimes.--Tell me, dearest, WHY did you go
out? When I asked you, you wouldn't come."

"No. Then I wasn't in the mood." Her smile faded.

"No. But after dark--and quite alone--then the mood takes you."

"But I've done it hundreds of times before. I can take care of myself."

"You are never to do it again--do you hear?--Why didn't you give the
fellow in charge?" he asked a moment later, in a burst of distrust.

Again Louise laughed. "Oh, a German policeman would find that rather funny
than otherwise. It's the rule, you know, not the exception. And the same
thing has happened to me before. So often that it's literally not
worth mentioning. I shouldn't have spoken of it to-night if you hadn't
been so persistent. Besides," she added as an afterthought--and, in the
face of his grave displeasure, she found herself wilfully exaggerating the
levity of her tone--"besides, this wasn't the kind of man one gives in
charge. Not the usual commercial-traveller type. A Graf, or Baron, at
least."

He was as nettled as she had intended him to be. "You talk just as if you
had had experience in the class of man.--Do you really think it makes
things any better? To my mind, it's a great deal worse.--But the thing
is--you don't know how . . . You're not to go out alone again at night. I
forbid it. This is the first time for weeks; and see what happens! And
it's notyou may well say it has happened to you before. I don't know what
it is, but--The very cab-drivers look at you as they've no business to--as
they don't look at other women!"

"Well, can I help that?--how men look at me?" she asked indignantly. "Do
you wish to say it's my fault? That I do anything to make them?"

"No. Though it might be better if you did," he answered gloomily. "The
unpleasant thing is, though you do nothing . . . that it's there all the
same . . . something . . . I don't know what."