Books: Maurice Guest

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"Don't, Madeleine--please, don't say any more! I don't care to hear
it," broke in Maurice. He had flushed to the roots of his hair, at
some points of resemblance to his own case, then grown pale again, and
now he waved his arm meaninglessly in the air. "He is a scoundrel,
a--a----" But he recognised that he could not condemn one without the
other, and stopped short.

"My dear boy, if I don't tell you, other people will. And at least you
know I mean well by you. Besides," she went on, not without a touch of
malice as she eyed him sitting there, spoiling the leaves of a book.
"Besides, I may as well show you, how you have to treat Louise, if you
want to make an impression on her. You call him a scoundrel, but what
of her? Believe me, Maurice," she said more seriously, "Louise is not
a whit too good for him; they were made for each other. And of course
he will marry her eventually, for the sake of her, money "--here she
paused and looked deliberately at him--"if not for her own."

This time there was no mistaking the meaning of her words.

"Madeleine!"

He rose from his seat with such force that the table tilted.

But Madeleine did not falter. "I told you already, you know, that
Louise doesn't care what is said about her. As soon as this
unfortunate affair began, she threw up the rooms she was in at the
time, and moved nearer the TALSTRASSE--where he lives. Rumour has it
also that she provided herself with an accommodating landlady, who can
be blind and deaf when necessary."

"How CAN you repeat such atrocious scandal?"

He stared at her, in incredulous dismay. Her words were so many
arrows, the points of which remained sticking in him.

She shrugged her shoulders. "Your not believing it doesn't affect the
truth of the story, Maurice. It was the talk of the place when it
happened. And you may despise rumour as you will, my experience is, a
report never springs up that hasn't some basis of fact to go
on--however small."

He choked back, with an effort, the eloquent words that came to his
lips; of what use was it to make himself still more ridiculous in her
eyes? His hat had fallen to the floor; he picked it up, and brushed it
on his sleeve, without knowing what he did. "Oh, well, of
course, if you think that," he said as coolly as he was able, "nothing
I could say would make any difference. Every one is free to his
opinions, I suppose. But, all the same, I must say, Madeleine"--he
grew hot in spite of himself. "You have been her friend, you say; you
have known her intimately; and yet just because she . . . she cares for
this fellow in such a way that she sets caring for him above being
cautious--why, not one woman in a thousand would have the courage for
that sort of thing! It needs courage, not to mind what people--no, what
your friends imagine, and how falsely they interpret what you do.
Besides, one has only to look at her to see how absurd it is. That
face and--I don't know her, Madeleine; I've never spoken to her, and
never may, yet I am absolutely certain that what is said about her
isn't true. So certain that--But after all, if this is what you think
about . . . about it, then all I have to say is, we had better not
discuss the subject again. It does no good, and we should never be of
the same opinion."

Not without embarrassment, now that he had said his say, he turned to
the door. But Madeleine was not in the least angry. She gave him her
hand, and said, with a smile, yet gravely, too: "Agreed, Maurice! We
will not speak of Louise again."

V.

He shunned Madeleine for days after this. He was morose and unhappy,
and brooded darkly over the baseness of wagging tongues. For the first
time in his life he had come into touch with slander, that invisible
Hydra, and straightway it seized upon the one person to whom he was
not indifferent. In this mood it was a relief to him that certain
three windows in the BRUDERSTRASSE remained closed and shuttered; with
the load of malicious gossip fresh on his mind, he chose rather not to
see her; he must first accustom himself to it, as to the scar left by
a wound.

He did not, of course, believe what Madeleine, with her infernal
frankness, had told him; but the knowledge that such a report was
abroad, depressed him unspeakably: it took colour from the sky and
light from the sun. Sometimes in these days, as he sat at his piano,
he had a sudden fit of discouragement, which made it seem not worth
while to continue playing. It was unthinkable that she could be aware
how busy scandal was with her name, and how her careless acts were
spied on and misrepresented; and he turned over in his mind ways and
means by which she might be induced to take more thought for herself
in future.

He did not believe it; but hours of distracting uncertainty came, none
the less, when small things which his memory had stored up made him go
so far as to ask himself, what if it should be true?--what then? But
he had not courage enough to face an answer; he put the possibility
away from him, in the extreme background of his mind, refused to let
his brain piece its observations together. The mere suspicion was a
blasphemy, a blasphemy against her dignified reserve, against her
sweet pale face, her supreme disregard of those about her. Not thus
would guilt have shown itself.

Schilsky, who was the origin of all the evil, he made wide circuits to
avoid. He thought of him, at this time, with what he believed to be a
feeling of purely personal antipathy. In his most downcast moments, he
had swift and foolish visions publicly executing vengeance on him; but
if, a moment later, he saw the violinist's red hair or big hat before
him in the street, he turned aside as though the other had been
plague-struck. Once, however, when he was going up the steps of the
Conservatorium, and Schilsky, in leaping down, pushed carelessly
against him, he returned the knock so rudely and swore with such
downrightness that, in spite of his hurry, Schilsky stopped and fixed
him, and with equal vehemence damned him for a fool of an Englishman.

His despondency spread like a weed. A furious impatience overcame him,
too, at the thought of the innumerable hours he would be forced to
spend at the piano, day in, day out, for months to come, before the
result could be compared with the achievements even of many a
fellow-student. As the private lessons Schwarz gave were too expensive
for him, he decided, as a compromise, to take a course of extra
lessons with Furst, who prepared pupils for the master, and was quite
willing to come to terms, in other words, who taught for what he could
get.

Once a week, then, for the rest of the summer, Maurice climbed the
steep, winding stair of the house in the BRANDVORWERKSTRASSE where
Furst lived with his mother. It was so dark on this stair that, in
dull weather, ill-trimmed lamps burnt all day long on the different
landings. To its convolutions, in its unaired corners, clung what
seemed to be the stale, accumulated smells of years; and these were
continually reinforced; since every day at dinnertime, the various
kitchen-windows, all of which gave on the stair, were opened to let
the piercing odours of cooking escape. The house, like the majority of
its kind in this relatively new street, was divided into countless
small lodgings; three families, with three rooms apiece, lived on each
storey, and on the fifth floor, at the top of the house, the same
number of rooms was let out singly. Part of the third storey was
occupied by a bird-fancier; and between him and the Fursts above waged
perpetual war, one of those petty, unending wars that can only arise
and be kept up when, as here, such heterogeneous elements are forced
to live side by side, under one roof. The fancier, although his
business was nominally in the town, had enough of his wares beside him
to make his house a lively, humming kind of place, and the strife
dated back to a day when, the door standing temptingly ajar, Peter,
the Fursts' lean cat, had sneaked stealthily in upon this, to him,
enchanted ground, and, according to the fancier, had caused the death,
from fright, of a delicate canary, although the culprit had done
nothing more than sit before the cage, licking his lips. This had
happened several years ago, but each party was still fertile in
planning annoyances for the other, and the females did not bow when
they met. On the fourth floor, next the Fursts, lived a pale, harassed
teacher, with a family which had long since outgrown its
accommodation; for the wife was perpetually in childbed, and cots and
cradles were the chief furniture of the house. As the critical moments
of her career drew nigh, the "Frau Lehrer" complained, with an
aggravated bitterness, of the unceasing music that went on behind the
thin partition; and this grievance, together with the racy items of
gossip left behind the midwife's annual visit, like a trail of smoke,
provided her and Furst's mother with infinite food for talk. They were
thick friends again a few minutes after a scene so lively that blows
seemed imminent, and they met every morning on the landing, where,
with broom or child in hand, they stood gossiping by the hour.

When Maurice rang, Frau Furst opened the door to him herself, having
first cautiously examined him through the kitchen window. Drying her
hands on her apron, she ushered him through the tiny entry--a place of
dangers, pitch-dark as it was, and lumbered with chests and
presses--into Franz's room, the "best room" of the house. Here were
collected a red plush suite, which was the pride of Frau Furst's
heart, and all the round, yellowing family photographs; here, too,
stood the well-used Bechstein, pile upon pile of music, a couple of
music-stands, a bust of Schubert, a faded, framed diploma. For years,
assuredly, the windows had never been thrown wide open; the odours of
stale coffee and forgotten dinners, of stove and warmed wood, of
piano, music and beeswax: all these lay as it were in streaks in the
atmosphere, and made it heavy and thought-benumbing.

A willing listener was worth more than gold to Frau Furst and here,
the first time he came, while waiting for Franz, Maurice heard in
detail the history of the family. The father had been an oboist in the
Gewandhaus orchestra, and had died a few years previously, of a chill
incurred after a performance of DIE MEISTERSINGER. At his death, it
had fallen on Franz to support the family; and, thanks to Schwarz's
aid and influence, Franz was able to get as many pupils as he had time
to teach. It was easy to see that this, her eldest son, was the apple
of Frau Furst's eye; her other children seemed to be there only to
meet his needs; his lightest wish was law. Each additional pupil that
sought him out, was a fresh tribute to his genius, each one that left
him, no matter after how long, was unthankful and a traitor.
For the nights on which his quartet met at the house, she prepared as
another woman would for a personal fete; and she watched the candles
grow shorter without a tinge of regret. When Franz played at an
ABENDUNTERHALTUNG, the family turned out in a body. Schwarz was a god,
all-powerful, on whom their welfare depended; and it was necessary to
propitiate him by a quarterly visit on a Sunday morning, when, over
wine and biscuits, she wept real and feigned tears of gratitude.

In this hard-working, careworn woman, who was seldom to be seen but in
petticoat, bed-jacket, and heelless, felt shoes; who, her whole life
long, had been little better than a domestic servant; in her there
existed a devotion to art which had never wavered. It would have
seemed to her contrary to nature that Franz should be anything but a
musician, and it was also quite in the order of things for them to be
poor. Two younger boys, who were still at school, gave up all their
leisure time to music--they had never in their lives tumbled round a
football or swung a bat--and Franz believed that the elder would prove
a skilful violinist. Of the little girls, one had a pure voice and a
good ear, and was to be a singer--for before this Juggernaut, prejudice
went down. Had anyone suggested to Frau Furst that her daughter should
be a clerk, even a teacher, she would have flung up hands of horror;
but music!--that was a different matter. It was, moreover, the single
one of the arts, in which this staunch advocate of womanliness granted
her sex a share.

"Ask Franz," she said to Maurice. "Franz knows. He will explain. All
women can do is to reproduce what some one else has thought or felt."

As an immortal example of the limits set by sex, she invariably fell
back on Clara Schumann, with whom she had more than once come into
personal contact. In her youth, Frau Furst had had a clear soprano
voice, and, to Maurice's interest, she told him how she had sometimes
been sent for to the Schumann's house in the INSELSTRASSE, to sing
Robert's songs for him.

"Clara accompanied me," she said, relating this, the great
reminiscence of her life; "and he was there, too, although I never saw
him face to face. He was too shy for that. But he was behind a screen,
and sometimes he would call: 'I must alter that; it is too high;' or
'Quicker, quicker!' Sometimes even 'Bravo!'"

Her motherly ambitions for Franz knew no bounds. One of the few
diversions she allowed herself was a visit to the theatre--when Franz
had tickets given to him; when one of her favourite operas was
performed; or on the anniversary of her husband's death--and, on such
occasions, she pointed out to the younger children, the links that
bound and would yet bind them to the great house.

"That was your father's seat," she reminded them every time. "The
second row from the end. He came in at the door to the left. And
that," pointing to the conductor's raised chair, "is where Franz will
sit some day." For she dreamed of Franz in all the glory of
KAPELLMEISTER; saw him swinging the little stick that dominated the
theatre-audience, singers and players alike.

And the children, hanging over the high gallery, shuffling their
restless feet, thus had their path as dearly traced for them, their
destiny as surely sealed, as any fate-shackled heroes of antiquity.

* * * * *

Late one afternoon about this time, Franz might have been found
together with his friends Krafft and Schilsky, at the latter's lodging
in the TALSTRASSE. He was astride a chair, over the back of which he
had folded his arms; and his chubby, rubicund face glistened with
moisture.

In the middle of the room, at the corner of a bare deal table that was
piled with loose music and manuscript, Schilsky sat improving and
correcting the tails and bodies of hastily made, notes. He was still
in his nightshirt, over which he had thrown coat and trousers; and,
wide open at the neck, it exposed to the waist a skin of the dead
whiteness peculiar to red-haired people. His face, on the other hand,
was sallow and unfresh; and the reddish rims of the eyes, and the
coarsely self-indulgent mouth, contrasted strikingly with the general
youthfulness of his appearance. He had the true musician's head: round
as a cannon-ball, with a vast, bumpy forehead, on which the soft
fluffy hair began far back, and stood out like a nimbus. His eyes were
either desperately dreamy or desperately sharp, never normally
attentive or at rest; his blunted nose and chin were so short as to
make the face look top-heavy. A carefully tended young moustache stood
straight out along his cheeks. He had large, slender hands, and quick
movements.

The air of the room was like a thin grey veiling, for all three puffed
hard at cigarettes. Without removing his from between his
teeth, Schilsky related an adventure of the night before. He spoke in
jerks, with a strong lisp, intent on what he was doing than on what he
was saying.

"Do you think he'd budge?" he asked in a thick, spluttery way. "Not
he. Till nearly two. And then I couldn't get him along. He thought it
wasn't eleven, and wanted to relieve himself at every corner. To
irritate an imaginary bobby. He disputed with them, too. Heavens, what
sport it was! At last I dragged him up here and got him on the sofa.
Off he rolls again. So I let him lie. He didn't disturb me."

Heinrich Krafft, the hero of the episode lay on the short,
uncomfortable sofa, with the table-cover for a blanket. In answer to
Schilsky, he said faintly, without opening his eyes: "Nothing would.
You are an ox. When I wake this morning, with a mouth like gum arabic,
he sits there as if he had not stirred all night. Then to bed, and
snores till midday, through all the hellish light and noise."

Here Furst could not resist making a little joke. He announced himself
by a chuckle-like the click of a clock about to strike.

"He's got to make the most of his liberty. He doesn't often get off
duty. We know, we know." He laughed tonelessly, and winked at Krafft.

Krafft quoted:

In der Woche zwier--

"Now, you fellows, shut up!" said Schilsky. It was plain that banter
of this kind was not disagreeable to him; at the same time he was just
at the moment too engrossed, to have more than half an car for what
was said. With his short-sighted eyes close to the paper, he was
listening with all his might to some harmonies that his fingers played
on the table. When, a few minutes later he rose and stretched the
stiffness from his limbs, his face, having lost its expression of rapt
concentration, seemed suddenly to have grown younger. He set about
dressing himself by drawing off his nightshirt over his head. At a
word from him, Furst sprang to collect utensils for making coffee.
Heinrich Krafft opened his eyes and followed their movements; and the
look he had for Schilsky was as warily watchful as a cat's.

Schilsky, an undeveloped Hercules--he was narrow in proportion to his
height--and still naked to the waist, took some bottles from a long
line of washes and perfumes that stood on the washstand, and,
crossing to an elegant Venetian-glass mirror, hung beside the window,
lathered his chin. It was a peculiarity of his only to be able to
attend thoroughly to one thing at a time, and a string of witticisms
uttered by Furst passed unheeded. But Krafft's first words made him
start.

Having watched him for some time, the latter said slowly. "I say, old
fellow, are you sure it's all square about Lulu and this Dresden
business?"

Razor in hand, Schilsky turned and looked at him. As he did so, he
coloured, and answered with an over-anxious haste: "Of course I am. I
made her go. She didn't want to"

"That's a well-known trick."

The young man scowled and thrust out his under-lip. "Do you think I'm
not up to their tricks? Do you want to teach me how to manage a woman?
I tell you I sent her away."

He tried to continue shaving, but was visibly uneasy. "Well, if you
won't believe me," he said, with sudden anger, though neither of the
others had spoken. "Now where the deuce is that letter?"

He rummaged among the music and papers on the table; in chaotic
drawers; beneath dirty, fat-scaled dinner-dishes on the washstand;
between door and stove, through a kind of rubbishheap that had formed
with time, of articles of dress, spoiled sheets of music-paper, soiled
linen, empty bottles, and boots, countless boots, single and in pairs.
When he had found what he looked for, he ran his eyes down the page,
as if he were going to read it aloud. Then, however, he changed his
mind; a boyish gratification overspread his face, and, tossing the
letter to Krafft, he bade them read it for themselves. Furst leaned
over the end of the sofa. It was written in English, in a bold,
scrawly hand, and ran, without date or heading:

MY OWN DEAREST

NOW ONLY FOUR DAYS MORE--I COUNT THEM MORNING AND NIGHT. I AM GOOD FOR
NOTHING--MY THOUGHTS ARE ALWAYS WITH YOU. YESTERDAY AT THE GALLERY I
SAT ALONE IN THE ROOM WHERE THE MADONNA IS, PRETENDING ENTHUSIASM--WHILE
THE REST WENT TO HOLBEIN--AND READ YOUR LETTER OVER AND OVER
AGAIN. BUT IT MADE ME A LITTLE UNHAPPY TOO, FOR I SOON FOUND OUT THAT
YOU HAD WRITTEN IT AT THREE DIFFERENT TIMES. IS IT REALLY SO HARD TO
WRITE TO LULU?

HAVE YOU WORKED BETTER FOR WANT OF INTERRUPTION ?--MY DAMNED
INTERRUPTIONS, AS YOU CALLED THEM LAST WEEK WHEN YOU WERE SO ANGRY
WITH ME. SHALL YOU HAVE A GREAT DEAL TO SHOW ME WHEN I COME HOME?
NO--DON'T SAY YOU WILL--OR I SHALL HATE ZARATHUSTRA MORE THAN I DO
ALREADY.

AND NOW ONLY TILL FRIDAY. THIS TIME YOU WILL MEET ME YES?--AND NOT COME
TO THE STATION AN HOUR LATE, AS YOU SAID YOU DID LAST TIME. IF YOU ARE
NOT THERE--I WARN YOU--I SHALL THROW MYSELF UNDER THE TRAIN. I AM
WRITING, TO GRUNHUT. GET FLOWERS--THERE IS MONEY IN ONE OF THE VASES
ON THE WRITING-TABLE. OH, IF YOU ONLY WILL, WE SHALL HAVE SUCH A HAPPY
EVENING--IF ONLY YOU WILL. AND I SHALL NEVER LEAVE YOU AGAIN, NEVER
AGAIN.

YOUR OWN LOVING, L.

Furst could not make out much of this; he was still spelling through
the first paragraph when Krafft had finished. Schilsky, who had gone
on dressing, kept a sharp eye on his friends--particularly on Krafft.

"Well?" he asked eagerly as the letter was laid down.

Krafft was silent, but Furst kissed his finger-tips to a large hanging
photograph of the girl in question, and was facetious on the subject
of dark, sallow women.

"And you, Heinz? What do you say?" demanded Schilsky with growing
impatience.

Still Krafft did not reply, and Schilsky was mastered by a violent
irritation.

"Why the devil can't you open your mouth? What's the matter with you?
Have YOU anything like that to show--you Joseph, you?"

Krafft let a waxen hand drop over the side of the sofa and trail on
the floor. "The letters were burned, dear boy--when you appeared." He
closed his eyes and smiled, seeming to remember something. But a
moment later, he fixed Schilsky sharply, and asked: "You want my
opinion, do you?"

"Of course I do," said Schilsky, and flung things about the room.

"Lulu," said Krafft with deliberation, "Lulu is getting you under her
thumb."

The other sprang up, swore, and aimed a boot, which he had been vainly
trying to put on the wrong foot, at a bottle that protruded from the
rubbish-heap.

"Me? Me under her thumb?" he spluttered--his lips became more
marked under excitement. "I should like to see her try it. You don't
know me. You don't know Lulu. I am her master, I tell you. She can't
call her soul her own."

"And yet," said Krafft, unmoved, "it's a fact all the same."

Schilsky applied a pair of curling tongs to his hair, at such a degree
of heat that a lock frizzled, and came off in his hand. His anger
redoubled. "Is it my fault that she acts like a wet-nurse? Is that
what you call being under her thumb?" he cried.

Furst tried to conciliate him and to make peace. "You're a lucky dog,
old fellow, and you know you are. We all know it--in spite of
occasional tantaras. But you would be still luckier if you took a
friend's sound advice and got you to the registrar. Ten minutes before
the registrar, and everything would be different. Then she might play
up as she liked; you would be master in earnest."

"Registrar?" echoed Krafft with deep scorn. "Listen to the ape! Not if
we can hinder it. When he's fool enough for that--I know him--it will be
with something fresher and less faded, something with the bloom still
on it."

Schilsky winced as though he had been struck. Her age--she was eight
years older than he--was one of his sorest points.

"Oh, come on, now," said Furst as he poured out the coffee. "That's
hardly fair. She's not so young as she might be, it's true, but no one
can hold a candle to her still. Lulu is Lulu."

"Ten minutes before the registrar," continued Krafft, meditatively
shaking his head. "And for the rest of life, chains. And convention.
And security, which stales. And custom, which satiates. Oh no, I am
not for matrimony!"

Schilsky's ill-humour evaporated in a peal of boisterous laughter.
"Yes, and tell us why, chaste Joseph, tell us why," he cried, throwing
a brush at his friend. "Or go to the devil--where you're at home."

Krafft warded off the brush. "Look here," he said, "confess. Have you
kissed another girl for months? Have you had a single billet-doux?"

But Schilsky only winked provokingly. Having finished laughing, he
said with emphasis: "But after Lulu, they are all tame. Lulu is Lulu,
and that's the beginning and end of the matter."

"Exactly my opinion," said Furst. "And yet, boys, if I wanted
to make your mouths water, I could." He closed one eye and smacked his
lips. "I know of something--something young and blond . . . and dimpled
. . . and round, round as a feather-pillow"--he made descriptive
movements of the hand--"with a neck, boys, a neck, I say----" Here in
sheer ecstasy, he stuck fast, and could get no further.

Schilsky roared anew. "He knows of something . . . so he does," he
cried--Furst's pronounced tastes were a standing joke among them.
"Show her to us, old man, show her to us! Where are you hiding her? If
she's under eighteen, she'll do--under eighteen, mind you, not a day
over. Come along, I'm on for a spree. Up with you, Joseph!"