The Strong City

  Ernestine frowned a little. But perhaps all Germans resembled each other, as did Englishmen, and Frenchmen. It was a racial resemblance, and nothing else. Her face cleared.

  “Are we going to have a marriage?” asked Irmgard, from her strange still posture from the window.

  Ernestine had never found Irmgard “impertinent” at any time, and the epithet with regard to her mother’s maid would never have occurred to her before. But now it did, for some peculiar and obscure reason. With a somewhat haughty expression, Ernestine picked up the book again, without answering, and her small body and pretty profile took on a cold and rather remote aspect. What an odd question for Irmgard to ask, really! She was presuming.

  But Mrs. Schmidt, smiling, nodding, looked at Irmgard fondly. “Dear me, child, nothing quite so definite. I am afraid I have given you a wrong impression. It is just my silly mother’s heart, and love for her little daughter. Ernestine has not even met Mr. Stoessel, and she may not even like him. I have been very fanciful, and it is inexcusable of me,” and she glanced at her daughter with timid apology.

  Ernestine, in a slightly louder voice, and with a little hardness, began to read again. She was too kind-hearted to be abrupt and discourteous, even to a maid who had presumed on the affection shown her. Too, it put herself in a ridiculous and pathetic light. Her voice, as she read, touched the most sentimental passages with a steely inflexibility, and the posture of her head and her cool manner suggested to Irmgard that the girl was not needed in the room just at present.

  But Irmgard did not move. Mrs. Schmidt, with her invalid’s sensitiveness, felt that something was amiss in this room, something dark and dangerous, if still very vague. She did not listen to Ernestine. She looked at Irmgard.

  Irmgard’s face was still in shadow, her fine tall figure outlined with light. Her hand still crushed the fold of drapery she held. Mrs. Schmidt saw the tense fingers, white and clenched about the knuckles. Now she caught a shadowy glimpse of Irmgard’s face, deep in the shadow. Oh, surely it was impossible, and only the effect of light and shade! But Irmgard’s features were large and marble-like and bitter and understanding. Her eyes stared blindly before her, as though seeing something very clearly, very terrible.

  Then, abruptly, Irmgard picked up the tray and left the room, closing the door swiftly and silently behind her. After she had gone, Ernestine put down the book with an impatient and annoyed sigh.

  “Really, Mama! Your remarks were inexcusable, to Irmgard. We all love Irmgard, I am sure, but after all, we must not allow her to presume on our affection. And you have made me ridiculous. Making me appear to be a disappointed old maid avidly looking for a man, any man, to marry! I am sure Irmgard must smile at me. That is intolerable! After all, she is only a servant.”

  But Mrs. Schmidt, though uneasily noting Ernestine’s unusual color and exasperatedly sparkling eyes, was dimly troubled for another reason. She stammered, pleadingly:

  “My darling, I am sure that poor Irmgard would not laugh at you. And it is very cruel to refer to her as a ‘servant.’ Your attitude was very harsh, and I am afraid that you have hurt her without reason. She looked quite ghastly, after your snub.”

  Ernestine felt a qualm, which reduced her own annoyance. “I’m sorry if I was so hard to Irmgard, Mama,” she murmured.

  “She speaks only out of her love for us, dear,” said Mrs. Schmidt, quickly. “I am sure she meant no impertinence.”

  Ernestine laughed a little. “The fault was all yours, Mama, not Irmgard’s. You gave her an opening, and she cannot be blamed, I see, for her remark. I am quite a nasty minx, I’m afraid.”

  She bounced energetically to her feet. “I shall go to her and apologize.” She bent quickly and kissed her mother, and tripped lightly to the door. But Irmgard’s bedroom was empty. Ernestine returned to her mother, subdued and remorseful, her kind little heart disturbed.

  CHAPTER 41

  Irmgard, upon returning to her room, sat down on her bed. She was trembling and shivering. She gazed before her stonily, and little rigors jerked her mouth, her hands.

  “I quite see,” she said, aloud. An appalling sickness filled her, made her relax her limbs involuntarily. She sat in silence for some moments, her eyes fixed on some hideous vision. She wallowed in the vision, tasting bitter waters, feeling some agonized disintegration all through her being.

  She had missed nothing of Ernestine’s color and embarrassment. It was true that Ernestine had not yet met Franz, that she might not even like him, might despise him. But Irmgard saw the whole plot, clearly, with agonized clarity. Franz would see to it that Ernestine was entranced by him. She remembered the questions he had asked her, which had seemed at the time to be only impudent curiosity. Now she saw a purpose in the questions.

  “Foul swine!” she said, quite loudly.

  She saw his plottings, knew that he had coldly and viciously planned for just this time. He would charm the silly little Ernestine. He had planned that. He would leave nothing undone. He had told her often that nothing would stand in his way. From the beginning, he had planned this. Ernestine might revolt him, with her flutterings and blushings and bouncings and fragility, for he hated all these things. But that would not matter. Irmgard did not believe that mere chance had been leading to this. She knew Franz too well. The mere revulsion of his flesh against this small dark woman would be insignificant. Irmgard saw him as an explosion among the Schmidts. She knew Hans well enough to know that this invitation was not a mere courtesy extended to a promising employee. Her sharp prescience told her more things than mere logic could do. Ernestine’s prolonged maidenhood disturbed Hans. For her sake, if she liked Franz Stoessel, Franz’s way would be swept clear to anything he desired. It was, then, necessary for him to charm and bewitch Ernestine. He would do so. He would work grimly for this very thing, as he had long plotted to do.

  A wild and devastating rage swept over her, like a gale, a murderous rage. Never had she felt like this. Mingled with the rage was an overwhelming humiliation, and frenzied terror. She saw herself confronting Franz, an embodied fury. Her hand closed convulsively about the smooth cool bedpost, and the gesture was like the seizing of a weapon. Hatred filled her, and with it, a sensation of almost voluptuous impotence. This increased her rage. Her heart beat so savagely that her face turned scarlet.

  Oh, the schweinehund! Her fingers tightened about the post. The weak, bragging, remorseless, vicious, malignant scoundrel! With his cold remorseless eyes, his love for himself, his cruelty and virulence! Her lips fell open, and she panted. To this creature she had given herself, with passion, madness and love! This man who saw no one but himself, this vile plotter—she had given herself to him! It was not to be borne. She moaned aloud, pressed her hand over her lips.

  Suddenly she got to her feet, and began to pace up and down, panting heavily, drops of sweat standing on her forehead and on her upper lip. The sickness mounted in her, became violently physical. She caught hold of the bedpost, pushed a lock of pale bright hair from her temple. Her face was white and blazing with suppressed fury, and standing there, with the sunlight streaming through the window upon her, she looked like some avenging Valkyrie, blowing with unearthly winds, standing on red and swirling clouds.

  Then all at once a frightful agony of grief and despair fell on her like a crushing wall. Her hatred and her fury whirled into a cone of smoke, disappeared. Devastating loneliness and sorrow swept up into her heart, her soul. She moaned again, and now tears fell on her cheeks. She felt in herself a deluge of icy and desolating waters, quenching all fires, all conflagrations. She felt naked, stripped, in that flood, cringing, crying out from her heart like a voice in a great storm. Loneliness, dread, longing, passion and mourning were in that cry. She could not bear it. She wept, wringing her hands, feeling her loneliness, her desolation, her anguish and pain, her complete and abandoned nakedness.

  Then, she was still, thinking with chaotic turbulence. In the midst of it, as in a dark wild storm, came cold thin flas
hes of cruelty. She had only to go to Ernestine and say: “This man who excites you before you know him: he is my lover. I have lain in his arms. He is mine.” This would be the end of herself. But it would also be the end of Franz, the end of all his long plotting, his ruthlessness, his dreams, his plans, and all his iron hopes. He was not the sort made stronger by immense reverses. This she knew. He would be ruined. Even Ernestine, the virginal, the untouched and the ignorant, could not be able to endure the sight of a man who had embraced her servant. She would be physically, as well as mentally, sickened, this woman without blood and without bowels, this creature no longer young who knew nothing of passion, violent and elemental. She, Irmgard, could understand this passion. Had Franz developed it for Ernestine, forgetting herself, forgetting his own plots and schemes, she could have forgiven him, obliterated herself, knowing what immensities and storms this passion developed in a helpless human being. But Ernestine, so fastidious, so bloodless, could not conceive of it, and its raw panting breast, its glowing eyes, its sweat and it odor, would only revolt and terrify her.

  Knowing that no passion was involved in this hideous tangle, Irmgard was the more enraged, and she brooded on the vision of Ernestine’s face if she were told. She brooded, smiling evilly to herself, on Franz’s face, when he knew he was utterly ruined. This was revenge. It was puling and absurd to say that revenge was weak and wicked and foolish. It was the thing for which men lived, when they were assaulted without justice!

  Now her hatred extended itself like a fire to include Ernestine. She had nothing to offer Franz but money. No lust, no passion, no vitality, no strength! Fragile and delicate, the leaves of her first youth already fallen from her in spite of her deceptively childish face and immature body, she was not even a woman! Irmgard had seen her sudden coldness and reserve that morning. Under that childishness and impulsive warmth, was the patrician, the aristocrat, who remembered, at the last, that a better woman was her servant!

  She thought of Franz again. He was a man who had put his hopes of harvest in one tree, alone. He was incapable, because of his lack of imagination, of planting another tree. When his one shoot was destroyed, he, himself, was completely destroyed, and would die of starvation.

  And then again, like a deep and irresistible flood, came her love for this man, overwhelming, distraught. In spite of what he was, she loved him. She could not relinquish him. She began to weep again, sobbing silently, from the very deeps of her heart. He would sell himself for so cheap, so fragile, so brittle a thing! Franz, with his Viking’s face and head, his strong body and health, his intelligence which was without subtlety, his charm and his tenderness, his ruthless drive and ambition!

  Irmgard sat down on her bed and covered her face with her hands. He is mine, she thought. His blood is mine, his race, his language, his thought. I cannot give him up! I shall not give him up.

  Some one knocked on her other door, which led into the servants’ hall. She wiped her cheeks and eyes hastily, smoothed her hair and her dress, and opened the door. Gillespie stood outside, with another letter in his hand. He smiled at her and said: “Merry Christmas, Irmgard.”

  She responded, with deep irony: “Merry Christmas, Gillespie.” He gave her the letter, and said: “Mr. Baldur would like to see you for a few moments, Irmgard, as soon as possible.” He paused, and regarded her with concern: “You are ill, Irmgard?”

  “No. I have a headache. That is all.” She closed the door gently in his startled face.

  The letter was from Emmi. Irmgard skimmed impatiently over the short tense eulogies of the farm, and Egon’s marvelously increasing interest in living. Then there was a paragraph:

  “There is no longer any need, my niece, of you being in service. There is a home for you with us, in this quietness and peace. I have with me a former neighbor, a Florence Tandy, to assist me, and a young man, Hermann Schultz. So, it is not self-interest which inspires me to ask you to live with me, and share in this farm, and this happiness. I want you with me. Sometimes I am afraid, when I regard Egon—I have no one of my blood, for Franz is no longer my son. I ask you to come to me. We shall be happy.”

  Irmgard folded the letter, put it into her drawer. The pain in her was a dull and savage aching. Then she forgot the letter. She washed her streaked face, unfastened her long silver-gold hair. She coiled it again, removed her apron, and went quietly to Baldur’s rooms.

  He admitted her, at her knock, and his small pale face brightened as though moonlight had fallen on it. He urged her to sit down, which she did. She sat before him, her hands in her lap. He began to speak, then paused, standing before her, and his expression changed and darkened.

  “Irmgard. Is there something wrong?” He spoke in German, quickly and well, feeling himself closer to her when he did so.

  “There is nothing wrong,” she replied, tranquilly enough, and with a smile.

  But acquaintance with pain, long and hopeless, made him recognize it when he saw it. He did not speak for some moments, only eying her anxiously, and with foreboding. He was also frightened; the shadow of pain was so familiar to him, and it was unendurable when it appeared in the eyes of someone beloved. He knew that each hour of suffering decreases a man’s ability to endure another hour, and in some dim way he knew that suffering was waiting for him again, in Irmgard’s suffering. Perhaps, he thought, in his fear, it is because, having once seen the face of pain, its next appearance to him was full of dread familiarity. It is the cumulative effect of memory, and the horror of anticipation colored by that memory. The man who endures an onslaught of almost unbearable agony, whether it is mental or physical, with tremendous composure and courage, is a man who has no memory of similar pain, and can face it with a certain amount of curiosity and even a sense of novelty.

  I am no hero, he thought with bitterness. I cannot suffer much more. It is the man who has suffered frequently who whimpers at the approach of the whip. The hero lacks imaginanation or experience, or both. Fortitude is of virgin birth.

  He sat down near her, so inexpressibly weighted that he could not speak, and regarded her gravely. His misshapen figure huddled in its chair, as if cold and beaten. Now over his fear rode his compassion. To hide it, for he did not wish to embarrass her, he reached towards a table and took from it a long thin white box. He smiled at her with effort.

  “My Christmas present to you, Irmgard.”

  She took it with a murmur of thanks. He saw that her hands were shaking. She opened it. On a white bed of satin gleamed a necklace of opals, all fire, all blueness, all life, pulsing with crimson and rose and pearl.

  “You told me once that you were born in October,” he said, softly. Now his large blue eyes rested on her with a deep look of passion and love.

  Irmgard was silent. The opals fell across her fingers. She was afraid to speak, for the tears were thickening in her throat again. Aching for her, and more frightened than ever, he stood up hastily, and went to his piano, which was always his consolation. He began to play, smiling drily at his own sentimentality, which tried, with some puerility, to express what he felt he could not say. The notes were sweet and urging, and he sickened at them. “Mooncalf,” he said aloud, but the word was covered by the music. He detested himself for this childish exhibition, which only an East Lynne heroine could appreciate, and he hated himself for using the medium of noblest emotion to speak to a girl who would wrily understand, and be amused.

  He swung about on the stool and sat there, smiling sourly, a ruined shape of manhood perched like a toad on a toadstool, or so he thought himself. His helpless gesture, his smile, implored her forgiveness, and begged her not to ridicule him. But she was not smiling. She looked at him steadfastly.

  “I am a fool,” he said, with sudden vehemence, believing that he had embarrassed her.

  “Why?” she asked, quietly.

  For behaving to you like some callow cheap music-hall waiter, he thought. He slipped off the stool and came back to her. She still held the opals in her hands, running them th
rough her fingers like a rosary. Sometimes they flashed rose, and then with a glint of steely blue. He saw her thoughtful and somber expression, as though she were pre-occupied with things far from him, and he was immediately jealous as well as apprehensive.

  In an abstracted voice, he said: “I am a fool, Irmgard, for thinking you might not find me repulsive.” He cringed internally as he said this, but looked at her eagerly.

  She lifted her eyes and regarded him gently, understanding his pride, and even his egotism, and his helplessness.

  “You speak foolishly, Mr. Schmidt. But in any event, why should you care what I think of you?”

  “It is important to me,” he answered, very quietly.

  She blushed a little, and cupped the opals in her hands. Now he was certain that something distracted her, and again he was jealous. He saw that she was biting her lip, and that if she had caught the implications in his words she was giving them no thought at all. He also saw that she was fighting some internal distress, and was not too surprised when she spoke vehemently, glancing about the great dusky room which the brilliant sunlight outside could hardly penetrate, and using one of his own words:

  “But nothing is very important to you, Mr. Baldur! You have been hurt, and you hide here, sulking! I must speak plainly. I may never have the opportunity to speak to you again. There are so many things you can do, and you do not do them!”

  He leaned forward a little in his chair, and frowned, flushing somewhat.

  “What, for instance, Irmgard?”

  She made an impatient gesture, and unheeded, the opals slipped to the floor. “You want sympathy, Mr. Baldur. Perhaps you do not realize it, and would refuse it, if offered. But to you, I know, you appear a very sympathetic figure, even heroic.”