The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Xix Part 19

Billy was silent. She now let her arms hang limply, her eyes grew quite round and clear, and into them came the strangest expression of helplessness, even of fear. "Then--then--" she struggled to say, "then I don't know."

A boundless repugnance for his paternal role rose in the count; was it really his function to torture this lovely creature? But when he began to speak, his voice sounded even somewhat more cool and ironical:

"Go now, my daughter. Perhaps it will afford you some peace of mind to, think that for the pain which you are now feeling not you are responsible, but I. Life is rich in such little auxiliary hypotheses, as the professor would say, and why should we not use them."

Billy no longer heard him; her clear eyes seemed to be staring out upon something at which they wondered and which frightened them. Then she suddenly faced about and left the room.

The count pa.s.sed his hand over his face. A devilish feeling, sympathy.

It is really a powerful physical ailment. Then he bent down and picked up the carnations which Billy had plucked to pieces. He wished to keep them in his hand.

On this sultry day even life in Kadullen was strangely tense.

Everywhere people stood together in couples and whispered with serious faces. The professor's daughters sat a little neglected on the verandah, talking together in low voices. At times Egon joined them and flirted with them in a half-hearted, absent-minded way. Billy had withdrawn to her room, whither Countess Betty carried up quant.i.ties of raspberry-juice, and Marion was incessantly racing back and forth between the garden and Billy's room, carrying messages. No one was comfortable. Lisa walked around between the flower-beds under her red parasol. This love affair, in which she was to have no part, made her restless. The lieutenant had gone partridge-shooting. Of course, she had seen that in men; when there was a decision to make, or life became difficult in other ways, they always went shooting partridges. These poor creatures seemed to exist only for the purpose of helping mankind over difficult situations in life. Now she was looking for Boris, wis.h.i.+ng to speak with him. Who could give the lovers better counsel than she. But he was not there. They said he had gone out into the meadow. Very well, then Lisa would have a conversation with Billy. But when Marion took this message to Billy, the latter became quite violent.

"No, she is not to come. What will she say, and she'll talk about her old Greek. The affair with her Katakasianopulos is altogether different from mine. Tell her that. She can't help me; n.o.body can help me." And she buried her face in the pillows and wept. Marion stood helplessly before her. "And Boris has disappeared," continued Billy's wail; "go to Moritz, tell him to find Boris and keep watch over him and stay with him. Go quickly." Marion rushed down the stairs again.

She found Moritz in the park, stretched out lazy and woe-begone under a tree. He blinked sleepily at Marion as she delivered her message.

"Bah, keep watch over him," he said, "what's going to happen to him?

He's all right, and for all of me he can----"

"She wants it," said Marion.

With a sigh Moritz raised himself, took his towel, which was lying on the ground beside him, hung it over his shoulder, and struck reluctantly into the path toward the meadow.

All over the cropped meadow cobwebs were glittering on the short gra.s.s.

Swallows flitted quite low over the ground. The sun beat down pitilessly.

"Incredible," murmured Moritz, "to have to look for this Polish narcissus in such a heat. Where's he likely to be? Probably lying here somewhere."

He did actually find Boris lying flat on his back in the gra.s.s under a willow. When Moritz came to a stop before him, Boris looked at him indifferently and said, "What do you want?"

"I," said Moritz, "I don't really want anything, but Billy sent me to keep watch over you."

Boris did not answer, but looked up at the sky again. So Moritz also lay down in the gra.s.s. This handsome Pole in his yellow silk suit was unspeakably distasteful to him. How he lay there, as it were heavy and satiated with the admiration of all the beautiful women that were devoted to him. Moritz could have hit him. Yet he felt a craving to be near him, for there was something of Billy where Boris was: Boris knew about her, he was the stupid, hateful, locked door, behind which stood the only thing that Moritz now desired. To sit before that door was painful, but for now this pain was simply the only occupation left to him.

"Thoughtful?" remarked Moritz at last.

"Yes," said Boris with his lyrical inflection, "he who is not yet done with his life has much to think over."

Moritz laughed scornfully: "H'mp, you've managed to crowd a good lot into yours already."

"Oh, I've hardly begun yet," said Boris sleepily.

Moritz now reflected as to what he could say, then he began, "Tell me, how was that affair in Warsaw with the dancer Zucchetti? Didn't you have a _liaison_ with her?"

But Boris was not vexed. "How was it? Why, how should I know that now. You don't remember things like that. You might just as well ask me about the bottle of champagne I drank on the twelfth of August three years ago. I don't know." And comfortably, as if he were lying in bed, he turned over on his stomach in the gra.s.s, to let the sun warm his back.

"All right," Moritz continued obstinately. "But you did enough crazy things on her account, so you must have loved her."

"If you call that love in German," responded Boris, "then I am sorry for your poor German language."

"Is that so?" Moritz was provoked. "Then what is Polish love?"

"Polish love," said Boris, yawning discreetly, "Polish love is something infinitely delicate. It needs no more than a movement or a word to change it so that there can be no talk of love any more, but--well, heavens--of anything else." Boris raised himself up a little, closed his big eyes to tiny slits, and looked dreamily over toward the forest, which drew a very black line through all the brightness over yonder. "There was once a very beautiful woman. She was a neighbor of ours. I was on very good terms with her. She was accustomed to expect me at ten o'clock at night in her park. So far good. Once I was late, and instead of ten it had got to be a quarter of eleven. So when I got there and saw she was standing under a tree and had waited for me after all, I was glad, and at that moment I really loved her very much. But when I came closer she put on a severe expression and said, 'Well, you are punctual, I must say, and it is very chivalrous, too, to keep a lady waiting so long.' That sounded so pointed and tart and common, that there was no love left at all. 'A governess talking to a belated pupil,' I thought."

"What did you do?" asked Moritz.

"I made a bow and said, 'Madam, I only came to inform you that I shall not come today.' Well, and then I went."

Moritz shrugged his shoulders: "I don't see anything wonderful in that. That is the sort of thing you experience in order to tell about it afterward."

"You experience nothing and you tell nothing," concluded Boris, and he laid his head down on the gra.s.s again and pulled his hat over his eyes.

The two young men were silent; Boris seemed to be sleeping, Moritz sat leaning up against the trunk of the willow and looked out upon the plain, over which a uniform hum could be heard, the profoundly rea.s.sured activity of a sunny work-day. This made him sad and discouraged. He had a disagreeably distinct feeling that he himself was uninteresting and commonplace. The girls fell in love with others, unusual experiences existed for others; and even his sleek, pale-blond hair, his round face, his light-blue eyes seemed to cause him woe. And suddenly a very remote recollection came to him. He must have been a very small child as he sat with his nurse in the sunny garden-corner, yonder on the West Prussian estate. The old woman was asleep, her lean face reddened by the heat, and the air was full of a uniform, sleepy sound. The great burdock leaves, heated by the sun, discharged a strong sourish odor, and the child felt it to be something that would never change. But beyond the fence, from below in the village, the laughter and cries of children reached him from time to time, the children who had experiences.

Moritz started up. "Nonsense," he murmured, and he leaned forward and began to shake Boris. "Here, don't sleep."

"What is it," asked Boris, "why this brutality?"

"Come and take a swim," said Moritz.

"Swim?" repeated Boris, opening his eyes and looking sharply and reflectively at Moritz, as if trying to read something in him. "All right, let's go swimming," he decided.

The lake was very blue, and full of hard, gently swaying lights.

Between the horse-willows and the club-reeds wild ducks floated motionless, like s.h.i.+ning metal objects.

"Pretty," said Boris; "to climb down into this bowl of color is rather smart, sure enough."

"Oh," said Moritz ironically, "so you think the lake will be becoming to you."

"Yes, it probably will," said Boris, beginning to undress. "I suppose you swim very well?"

"Pretty well, and you?"

"I enjoy it very much," Boris informed him, "but it excites me; I haven't the feeling that the water is friendly to me."

"That means in German that you swim poorly," Moritz dryly remarked.

Boris laughed: "Your German is particularly good."

The water was lukewarm. It's like burying yourself in warm milk, thought Moritz, as he swam slowly into the flickering light. All sadness, all "these imbecilities" were gone, only a strong, quiet feeling of life warmed his limbs. He turned over on his back, wis.h.i.+ng to let himself be deliriously and lazily rocked by the water, like the ducks. The dragon-flies lit on his breast, water-plants tickled his flesh as with small wet fingers, over him flapped gulls with wings of pale gray, and they looked down upon him and cried shrill notes at him, which sounded like the laughter of the professor's two daughters.

"Billy, Billy," he murmured. Now he could say it without pain, it was only the expression of deepest contentment. Then he thought of Boris, and raised his head a little. The devil, was the fellow crazy, to swim out so far. Boris's head popped up over yonder between the spangles of sunlight like a dark speck, but it was not advancing; now it had disappeared, now it was there again. With vigorous strokes Moritz began to swim to the spot, and got there just in time to catch Boris by the arm; enmeshed in a net of water-lilies and water-plantains, he was just rising again, his eyes weirdly wide and black in his bluish face.

Moritz towed him away, and when he got to standing depth he took him in his arms to conduct him to the sh.o.r.e. He spoke kindly to him:

"Water swallowed, my boy, yes, that's the d.i.c.kens when you get into that mess yonder. Wait, we'll be on dry land directly."

Boris spat out the water and struggled for breath. Once on sh.o.r.e, he lay down in the gra.s.s; he felt a deadly exhaustion and closed his eyes.

Moritz sat beside him and looked at him. Suddenly Boris raised himself up, threw his arms about his knees, and his strangely dark eyes, still wide with fear, looked straight ahead of him.