Books: Maurice Guest

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"You will surely not be so childish?" said Madeleine, on seeing him
take up his hat.

"Childish?--you call it childish?" he exclaimed, growing angry with
her, too. "Do you know what time it is? Three o'clock, you write me,
and it's now a quarter past five. I have sat here doing nothing for
over two mortal hours. It seems to me that's enough, without being
made the butt of your friends' wit into the bargain. I'm sick of the
whole thing. Good-bye."

"We seem bound to quarrel," said Madeleine calmly. "And always about
Louise. But there's no use in being angry. I am not responsible for
what Heinz says and does. And on the mere chance of his coming in
to-day, to sit down and unroll another savoury story to you, about
your idol--would you have thanked me for it? Remember the time I did
try to open you eyes!--It's not fair either to blame me because Louise
hasn't come. I did my best for you. I can't help it if she's as stable
as water."

"I think you dislike her too much to want to help it," said Maurice
grimly. He stood staring at the carnations, and his resentment gave
way to depression, as he recalled the mood which he had bought them.

"Come back as soon as you feel better. I'm not offended, remember!"
Madeleine called after him as he went down the stairs. When she was
alone, she said "Silly boy!" and, still smiling, made excuses for him:
he had come with such pleasurable anticipations, and everything had
gone wrong. Heinz had behaved disagracefully, as only he could. While
as for Louise, one was no more able to rely on her than on a wisp straw;
and she, Madeleine, was little better than a fool not to have known
it.

She moved about the room, putting chairs and papers in their
places, for she could not endure disorder of any kind. Then she sat
down to write a letter; and when, some half hour later, the girl for
whom they had waited, actually came, she met her with exclamations of
genuine surprise.

"Is it really you? I had given you up long ago. Pray, do you know what
time it is?"

She took out her watch and dangled it before the other's eyes. But
Louise Dufrayer hardly glanced at it. As, however, Madeleine
persisted, she said: "I'm late, I know. But it was not my fault. I
couldn't get away."

She unpinned her hat, and shook back her hair; and Madeleine helped
her to take off her jacket, talking all the time. "I have been much
annoyed with you. Does it never occur to you that you may put other
people in awkward positions, by not keeping your word? But you are
just the same as of old--incorrigible."

"Then why try to improve me?" said the other with a show of lightness.
But almost simultaneously she turned away from Madeleine's
matter-of-fact tone, passed her handkerchief over her lips, and after
making a vain attempt to control herself, burst into tears.

Madeleine eyed her shrewdly. "What's the matter with you?"

But the girl who had sunk into a corner of the sofa merely shook her
head, and sobbed; and Madeleine, to whom such emotional outbreaks were
distasteful, went to the writing-table and busied herself there, with
her back to the room. She did not ask for an explanation, nor did her
companion offer any.

Louise abandoned herself to her tears with as little restraint as
though she were alone, holding her handkerchief to her eyes with both
hands and giving deep, spasmodic sobs, which had apparently been held
for some time in cheek.

Afterwards, she sat with her elbow on the end of the sofa, her face on
her hand, and, still shaken at intervals by a convulsive breath,
watched Madeleine make fresh tea. But when she took the cup that was
handed to her, she was so far herself again as to inquire whom she was
to have met, although her voice still did not obey her properly.

"Some one who is anxious to know you," replied Madeleine an air of
mystery. "But he couldn't, or rather would not, wait so long."

Louise showed no further curiosity. But when Madeleine said
with meaning emphasis that Krafft had also been there in the course of
the afternoon, she shrank perceptibly and flushed.

"What! Does he still exist?" she asked with an effort at playfulness.

"As you very well know," answered Madeleine drily. "Tell me, Louise,
how do you manage to keep out of his way?"

Louise made no rejoinder; she raised her cup to her lips, and the dark
blood that had stained her face, in a manner distressing to see,
slowly retreated. She continued to look down, and, the light of her
big, dark eyes gone out, her face seemed wan and dead. Madeleine,
studying her, asked herself, not for the first time, but, as always,
with an unclear irritation, what the secret of the other's charm was.
Beautiful she had never thought Louise; she was not even pretty, in an
honest way--at best, a strange, foreign-looking creature, dark-skinned,
black of eyes and hair, with flashing teeth, and a wonderfully mobile
mouth--and some people, hopeless devotees of a pink and white fairness,
had been known to call her plain. At this moment, she was looking her
worst; the heavy, blue-black lines beneath her eyes were deepened by
crying; her rough hair had been hastily coiled, unbrushed; and she was
wearing a shabby red blouse that was pinned across in front, where a
button was missing. There was nothing young or fresh about her; she
looked her twenty-eight years, every day of them--and more.

And yet, Madeleine knew that those who admired Louise would find her
as desirable at this moment as at any other. Hers was a nameless
charm; it was present in each gesture of the slim hands, in each turn
of the head, in every movement of, the broad, slender body. Strangers
felt it instantly; her very walk seemed provocative of notice; there
was something in the way her skirts clung, and moved with her, that
was different from the motion of other women's. And those whose type
she embodied went crazy about her. Madeleine remembered as though it
were yesterday, the afternoon on which Heinz had burst in to rave to
her of his discovery; and how he would have dragged her out hatless to
see this miracle. She remembered, too, after--days, when she had had
him there, pacing the floor, and pouring out his feelings to her,
infatuated, mad. An he was not the only one; they bowled over like
ninepins; an it would be the same for years to come--was there any
reason to wonder at Maurice Guest?

Meanwhile, as Madeleine sat thinking these and similar things,
Maurice was tramping through the ROSENTAL. The May afternoon, of
lucent sunshine and heaped, fleecy clouds, had tempted a host of
people into the great park, but he soon left them all behind him, for
he walked as though he were pursued. These people, placid, and content
of face, and the brightness of the day, jarred on him; he was out of
patience with himself, with Madeleine, with the World at large.
Especially with Madeleine, he bore her a grudge for her hints and
innuendoes, for being behind the scenes, as it were, and also for
being so ready to enlighten him; but, most of all, for a certain
malicious gratification, which was to be felt in ever word she said
about Louise.

He went steadily on, against the level bars of the afternoon sun and, by
the time he had tired himself bodily, he had worked off his inward
vexation as well. As he walked back towards the town, he was almost
ready to smile at his previous heat. What did all these others matter
to him? They could not hinder him from carrying through what he had
set his mind on. To-morrow was a day, and the next was another, and
the next again; and life, considered thus in days and opportunities,
was infinitely long.

He now felt not only an aversion to dwelling on his thoughts of an
hour back, but also the need of forgetting them altogether. And, in
nearing the LESSINGSTRASSE, he followed an impulse to go to Ephie and
to let her merry laugh wipe out the last traces of his ill-humour.

Mrs. Cayhill and Johanna were both reading in the sitting room, and
though Johanna agreeably laid aside her book, conversation languished.
Ephie was sent for, but did not come, and Maurice was beginning to
wish he had thought twice before calling, when her voice was heard in
the passage, and, a moment later, she burst into the room, with her
arms full of lilac, branches of lilac, which she explained had been
bought early that morning at the flower-market, by one of their
fellow-boarders. She hardly greeted Maurice, but going over to him
held up her scented burden, and was not content till he had buried his
face in it.

"Isn't it just sweet?" she cried holding it high for all to see. "And
the very first that is to be had. Again, Maurice again, put your face
right down into the middle of it--like that."

Mrs. Cayhill laughed, as Maurice obediently bowed his head, but
Johanna reproved her sister.

"Don't be silly, Ephie. You behave as if you had never seen
lilac before."

"Well, neither I have--not such lilac as this, and Maurice hasn't
either," answered Ephie. "You shall smell it too, old Joan!"--and in
spite of Johanna's protests, she forced her sister also to sink her
face in the fragrant white and purple blossoms. But then she left them
lying on the table, and it was Johanna who put them in water.

Mrs. Cayhill withdrew to her bedroom to be undisturbed, and Johanna
went out on an errand. Maurice and Ephie sat side by side on the sofa,
and he helped her to distinguish chords of the seventh, and watched
her make, in her music-book, the big, tailless notes, at which she
herself was always hugely tickled, they`reminded her so of eggs. But
on this particular evening, she was not in a studious mood, and bock,
pencil and india-rubber slid to the floor. Both windows were wide
open; the air that entered was full of pleasant scents, while that of
the room was heavy with lilac. Ephie had taken a spray from one of the
vases, and was playing with it; and when Maurice chid her for
thoughtlessly destroying it, she stuck the pieces in her hair. Not
content with this, she also put bits behind Maurice's ears, and tried
to twist one in the piece of hair that fell on his forehead. Having
thus bedizened them, she leaned back, and, with her hands clasped
behind her head, began to tease the young man. A little bird, it
seemed, had whispered her any number of interesting things about
Madeleine and Maurice, and she had stored them all up. Now, she
repeated them, with a charming impertinence, and was so provoking
that, in laughing exasperation, Maurice took her fluffy, flower-bedecked
head between his hands, and stopped her lips with two sound kisses.

He acted impulsively, without reflecting, but, as soon as it was done,
he felt a curious sense of satisfaction, which had nothing to do with
Ephie, and was like a kind of unconscious revenge taken on some one
else. He was not, however, prepared for the effect of his hasty deed.
Ephie turned scarlet, and jumping up from the sofa, so that all the
blossoms fell from her hair at once, stamped her foot.

"Maurice Guest! How dare you!" she cried angrily, and, to his
surprise, the young man saw that she had tears in her eyes.

He had never known Ephie to be even annoyed, and was consequently
dumfounded; he could not believe, after the direct provocation
she had given him, that his crime had been so great

"But Ephie dear!" he protested. "I had no idea, upon my word I hadn't,
that you would take it like this. What's the matter? It was nothing.
Don't cry. I'm a brute."

"Yes, you are, a horrid brute! I shall never forgive you--never!" said
Ephie, and then she began to cry in earnest.

He put his arm round her, and coaxing her to sit down, wiped away her
tears with his own handkerchief. In vain did he beg her to tell him
why she was so vexed. To all he said, she only shook her head, and
answered: "You had no right to do it."

He vowed solemnly that it should never happen again, but at least a
quarter of an hour elapsed before he succeeded in comforting her, and
even then, she remained more subdued than usual. But when Maurice had
gone, and she had dropped the scattered sprays of lilac out of the
window on his head, she clasped her hands at the back of her neck, and
dropped a curtsy to herself in the locking-glass.

"Him, too!" she said aloud.

She nodded at her reflected self, but her face was grave; for between
these two, small, blue-robed figures was a deep and unsuspected secret.

And Maurice, as he walked away, wondered to himself for still a little
why she should have been so disproportionately angry; but not for
long; for, when he was not actually with Ephie, he was not given to
thinking much about her. Besides, from there, he went straight to the
latter half of an ABENDANTERKALTUNG, to hear Furst play Brahms'
VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY HANDEL

VIII.

That night he had a vivid dream. He dreamt that he was in a garden,
where nothing but lilac grew--grew with a luxuriance he could not have
believed possible, and on fantastic bushes: there were bushes like
steeples and bushes smaller than himself, big and little, broad and
slender, but all were of lilac, and in flower--an extravagant profusion
of white and purple blossoms. He gazed round him in delight, and took
an eager step forward; but, before he could reach the nearest bush, he
saw that it had been an illusion: the bush was stripped and bare, and
the rest were bare as well. "You're too late. It has all been
gathered," he heard a voice say, and at this moment, he saw Ephie at
the end of a long alley of bushes, coming towards him, her arms full
of lilac. She smiled and nodded to him over it, and he heard her
laugh, but when she was half-way down the path, he discovered his
mistake: it was not Ephie but Louise. She came slowly forward, her
laden arms outstretched, and he would have given his life to be able
to advance and to take what she offered him; but he could not stir,
could not lift hand or foot, and his tongue clove to the roof of his
mouth. Her steps grew more hesitating, she seemed hardly to move; and
then, just as she reached the spot where he stood, he found that it
was not she after all, but Madeleine, who laughed at his
disappointment and said: "I'm not offended, remember!"--The revulsion
of feeling was too great; he turned away, without taking the flowers
she held out to him--and awoke.

This dream was present to him all the morning, like a melody that
haunts and recalls. But he worked more laboriously than usual; for he
was aggrieved with himself for having idled away the previous
afternoon, and then, too, Furst's playing had made a profound
impression on him. In vigorous imitation, he sat down to the piano
again, after a hasty dinner snatched in the neighbourhood; but as he
was only playing scales, he propped open before him a little volume of
Goethe's poems, which Johanna had lent him, and suiting his scales to
the metre of the lines, read through one after another of the poems he
liked best. At a particular favourite, he stopped playing and held the
book in both hands.

He had hardly begun anew when the door of his room was
unceremoniously opened, and Dove entered, in the jocose way he adopted
when in a rosy mood. Maurice made a movement to conceal his book,
merely in order to avoid the explanation he new must follow; but was
too late; Dove had espied it. He did not belie himself on this
occasion; he was extremely astonished to find Maurice "still at it,"
but much more so to see a book open before him; and he vented his
surprise loudly and wordily.

"Liszt used to read the newspaper," said Maurice, for the sake of
saying something. He had swung round in the piano-chair, and he yawned
as he spoke, without attempting to disguise it.

"Why, yes, of course, why not?" agreed Dove cordially, afraid lest he
had seemed discouraging. "Why not, indeed? For those who can do it. I
wish I could. But will you believe me, Guest"--here he seated himself,
and settled into an attitude for talking, one hand inserted between
his crossed knees--"will you believe me, when I say I find it a
difficult business to read at all?--at any time. I find it too
stimulating, too ANREGEND, don't you know? I assure you, for weeks
now, I have been trying to read PAST AND PRESENT, and have not yet got
beyond the first page. It gives one so much to think about, opens up
so many new ideas, that I stop myself and say: 'Old fellow, that must
be digested.' This, I see, is poetry"--he ran quickly and disparagingly
through Maurice's little volume, and laid it down again. "I don't care
much for poetry myself, or for novels either. There's so much in life
worth knowing that is true, or of some use to one; and besides, as we
all know, fact is stranger than fiction."

They spoke also of Furst's performance the evening before, and Dove
gave it its due, although he could not conceal his opinion that
Furst's star would ultimately pale before that of a new-comer to the
town, a late addition to the list of Schwarz's pupils, whom he, Dove,
had been "putting up to things a bit." This was a "Manchester man" and
former pupil of Halle's, and it would certainly not be long before he
set the place in a stir. Dove had just come from his lodgings, where
he had been permitted to sit and hear him practise finger-exercises.

"A touch like velvet," declared Dove. "And a stretch!--I have never
seen anything like it. He spans a tenth, nay, an eleventh, more easily
than we do an octave."

The object of Dove's visit was, it transpired, to propose that
Maurice should accompany him that evening to the theatre, where DIE
WALKURE was to be performed; and as, on this day, Dove had reasons for
seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses, he suggested, out of
the fulness of his heart, that they should also invite Madeleine to
join them. Maurice was nothing loath to have the meeting with her
over, and so, though it was not quite three o'clock, they went
together to the MOZARTSTRASSE.

They found Madeleine before her writing-table, which was strewn with
closely written sheets. This was mail-day for America, she explained,
and begged the young men to excuse her finishing an important letter
to an American journalist, with whom she had once "chummed up" on a
trip to Italy.

"One never knows when these people may be of use to one," she was
accustomed to say.

Having addressed and stamped the envelope, and tossed it to the
others, she rose and gave a hand to each. At Maurice, she smiled in a
significant way.

"You should have stayed, my son. Some one came, after all."

Maurice laid an imploring finger on his lips, but Dove had seized the
opportunity of glancing at his cravat in the mirror, and did not seem
to hear.

She agreed willingly to their plan of going to the theatre; she had
thought of it herself; then, a girl she knew had asked her to come to
hear her play in ENSEMBLESPIEL.

"However, I will let that slip. Schelper and Moran-Olden are to sing;
it will be a fine performance. I suppose some one is to be there," she
said laughingly to Dove, "or you would not be of the party."

But Dove only smiled and looked sly.

Without delay, Madeleine began to detail to Maurice, the leading
motives on which the WALKURE was built up; and Dove, having hummed,
strummed and whistled all those he knew by heart, settled down to a
discourse on the legitimacy and development of the motive, and
especially in how far it was to be considered a purely intellectual
implement. He spoke with the utmost good-nature, and was so
unconscious of being a bore that it was impossible to take him amiss.
Madeleine, however, could not resist, from time to time, throwing in a
"Really!" "How extraordinary!" "You don't say so!" among his abstruse
remarks. But her sarcasm was lost on Dove; and even if he had noticed
it, he would only have smiled, unhit, being too sensible and
good-humoured easily to take offence.

It was always a mystery to his friends where Dove got his information;
he was never seen to read, and there was little theorising about art,
little but the practical knowledge of it, in the circles to which he
belonged. But just as he went about picking up small items of gossip,
so he also gathered in stray scraps of thought and information, and
being by nature endowed with an excellent memory, he let nothing that
he had once heard escape him. He had, besides, the talker's gift of
neatly stringing together these tags he had pulled off other people,
of connecting them, and giving them a varnish of originality.

"By no means a fool," Madeleine was in the habit of saying of him. "He
would be easier to deal with if he were."

Here, on the leading motive as handled by Wagner and Wagner's
forerunners, he had an unwritten treatise ripe in his brain. But he
had only just compared the individual motives to the lettered ribbons
that issue from the mouths of the figures in medieval pictures, and
began to hint at the IDEE FIXE of Berlioz, when he was interrupted by
a knock at the door.

"HEREIN!" cried Madeleine in her clear voice; and at the sight of the
person who opened the door, Maurice involuntarily started up from his
chair, and taking his stand behind it, held the back of it firmly with
both hands, in self-defence.

It was Louise.

On seeing the two young men, she hesitated, and, with the door-handle
still in her hand, smiled a faint questioning smile at Madeleine,
raising her eyebrows and showing a thin line of white between her
lips.

"May I come in?" she asked, with her head a little on one side.

"Why, of course you know you may," said Madeleine with some asperity.

And so Louise entered, and came forward to the table at which they had
been sitting; but before anything further could be said, she raised
her arms to catch up a piece of hair which had fallen loose on her
neck. The young men were standing, waiting to greet her, Maurice still
behind his chair; but she did not hurry on their account, or "just on
their account did not hurry," as Madeleine mentally remarked.

Both watched Louise, and followed her movements. To their eyes, she
appeared to be very simply dressed; it was only Madeleine who
appreciated the cost and care of this seeming simplicity. She wore a
plain, close-fitting black dress, of a smooth, shiny stuff, which
obeyed and emphasised the lines and outlines of her body; and, as she
stood, with her arms upraised, composedly aware of being observed,
they could see the line of her side rising and falling with the rise
and fall of each breath. Otherwise, she wore a large black hat, with
feathers and an overhanging brim, which threw shadows on her face, and
made her eyes seem darker than ever.

Letting her arms drop with a sigh of relief, she shook hands with
Dove, and Dove--to Madeleine's diversion and Maurice's intense
disgust--introduced Maurice to her as his friend. She looked full at
the latter, and held out her hand; but before he could take it, she
withdrew it again, and put both it and her left hand behind her back.

"No, no," she said. "I mustn't shake hands with you to-day. Today is
Friday. And to give one's hand for the first time on a Friday would
bring bad luck--to you, if not to me."

She was serious, but both the others laughed, and Maurice, having let
his outstretched hand fall, coloured, and smiled rather foolishly. She
did not seem to notice his discomfiture; turning to Madeleine, she
began to speak of a piece of music she wished to borrow; and then
Maurice had a chance of observing her at his ease, and of listening to
her voice, in which he heard all manner of impossible things. But
while Madeleine, with Dove's assistance, was looking through a pile of
music, Louise came suddenly up to him and said: "You are not offended
with me, are you?" She had a low voice, with a childish cadence in it,
which touched him like a caress.

"Offended? I with you?" He meant to laugh, but his voice shook.

She stared at him, openly astonished, not only at his words, but also
at the tone in which they were said; and the strange, fervent gaze
bent on her by this man whom she saw for the first time in her life,
confused her and made her uneasy. Slowly and coldly she turned away,
but Madeleine, who was charitably occupying Dove as long as she could,
did not take any notice of her. And as the young man continued to
stare at her, she looked out of the window at the lowering grey sky,
and said, with a shudder: "What a day for June!"

All eyes followed hers, Maurice's with the rest; but almost instantly
he brought them back again to her face.

"Louise is a true Southerner," said Madeleine; "and is
wretched if there's a cloud in the sky."

Louise smiled, and he saw her strong white teeth. "It's not quite as
bad as that," she said; and then, although herself not clear why she
should have answered these searching eyes, she added, looking at
Maurice: "I come from Australia."

If she had said she was a visitant from another world, Maurice would
not, at the moment, have felt much surprise; but on hearing the name
of this distant land, on which he would probably never set foot, a
sense of desolation overcame him. He realised anew, with a pang, what
an utter stranger he was to her; of her past life, her home, her
country, he knew and could know nothing.