“Your room would be the only safe place, Emilie,” said she, bravely. Emilie flushed darkly, and did not answer. Then she raised her head and looked at him challengingly, like a woman forced into a compact and assuming a responsibility against her will.
“Come then,” she said, moving to the door.
“I will see it is all right,” said Fräulein Hesse.
In a moment he was following humbly and obediently. He noticed the scarlet mantle of a child on the hall-stand, the great maps on the wall, the queer engravings on the stairs. Then they went down a long corridor. Emilie, closed and withdrawn, opened the door for him, and stood, like a servant silent and inscrutable, waiting for him to enter. He passed her, and stood in the little room, his head bent. There was a good deal of humiliation. Emilie entered and silently, like a servant, closed the door behind her. She stood waiting. A little hot feeling flickered up in his heart.
It cost him an effort to raise his head to her. Then he told her, briefly what had happened. He was afraid she should see the quiver of light in his eyes. The two of them were in a kind of bondage. In her silence and dumbness, she was so close to him.
“I shall think of a plan,” he said, watching her.
“Yes,” she said, staring at him.
“Do you think I shall be safe here?”
“If nobody has seen you.” She turned away from his eyes.
“It feels safe enough,” he said, vaguely.
“Yes,” she said.
And, without looking at him, a blush fading off her dark cheek, she left him.
He looked round the little room, standing in the middle, half afraid to touch anything. He knew she resented his having forced the privacy of the room. Yet there was something else, too, in her feeling, that made him rouse in his pride. The room was bare and severely tidy. He had often enough been into his mother’s bedroom. Yet this gave him a curious sensation, of fear, of alertness, excitement. There was a picture of the Sacred Heart over the chest of drawers, and above a low praying-chair a crucifix, rather large, carved in wood. He stood and looked at it. He had been brought up a Protestant. He stood and looked at the symbol. His senses quickened, he perceived for the first time in his life that the carved figure on the Cross was that of a young man, thin and wasted and cramped. It was a crucifix carved by a peasant-worker in Bavaria. The Christ was lean and rather bony, with high cheek-bones and a dead face, the mouth hanging slightly open. He was a common man. Bachmann had seen many a peasant who might have been his brother. And it startled him. He was shocked to think of the cramped torture the man must have gone through. He wondered what Emilie, dark and proud and isolated, thought when she looked at the naked, dead man carved there. “It might be me,” thought the soldier.
He saw her rosary beside the bed, and the strip of pictures representing the Stations of the Cross. He resented her religion, became violently Protestant. Then he looked round for water. There was none in the room. And he wondered if she would attend on him—bring him coffee perhaps. He wanted a drink.
She did not come. He sat down on the bed, feeling as if already he had crossed the sea into another land, almost into another self. Then he took off his belt and his boots, and wondered what he should do. He felt a little bit forlorn that she did not come at all. He would want a suit of clothes and a bicycle, that was all. His mother would give him money. She was well-off. There remained to cycle across the border into France. He would start the next night. That would mean thirty hours in this room. Better that than years in prison. The thought of prison made him grasp the bed-post hard. And then came the strong, curious sense of Emilie’s presence in the house.
He took off his tunic and lay down, pulling the great over-bolster across him. He felt subdued and disconsolate. There was nothing to get hold of anywhere, and he was not a man who could easily be much alone, or stand alone. He always wanted to feel other lives associated with his. Now there was nobody. Well, he would have to put up with it for the time being. Sometimes his heart beat fast when he thought she was coming. And then, too, he could ask her for a drink. But she did not come.
III.
When at last she opened the door he started and sat up in bed. His eyes, staring at her from the twilight, startled her too.
“Did you bring a drink?” he asked.
“No,” she said. They were afraid of each other. She went away, returning quickly with a jug of water. And she had to impose a restraint on herself, to bear it, whilst he drank long and heavily. Then he wiped his moustache on the back of his hand. He was afraid to begin to eat before her. He sat on the bed. She stood near the door. He looked at her strong, erect, aloof figure. She glanced at him. He was in his shirt and trousers, sitting bending forward on the bed.
“I thought I might ….” he said. And he told her quickly his plans. She heard, almost without paying attention. She wanted to go. A certain power, something strong and of which she was afraid, was taking hold on her. It was growing darker. His voice seemed to be getting slower, reaching to her, and she could not move. At last, slowly, after a silence, he slid off the bed, and in his silent stocking-feet, approached her. She stood like a rock.
“Emilie!” he said, afraid, and yet driven.
He put his hand on her. A shock went through her frame. Still she could not move. And in a moment his arms were round her, he was pressing her fast, holding her body hard against his own, which quivered through her in its vibrating. He had put his face on her, was kissing her throat. And there came upon her one intolerable flame, burning her breath away. She was beginning to swoon. He lifted his head.
“You’ll marry me, Emilie—as soon as ever—?”
But words were a falsity, and he fell into silence. He was kissing her throat. She did not know what she was panting for, waiting for. But his mouth, with the soft moustache, was moving across her throat to her cheek, and at last their mouths met. She met him in the long, blind, final kiss that hurt them both. And then in positive pain, blind, unconscious, she clutched him to her. She did not know what it was that hurt her with sheer pain. He, shuddering slightly, was growing afraid, so unconscious and awful she seemed. With trembling fingers he unbuttoned her bodice to feel the breasts that had been in his consciousness so long, buttoned firm under her cotton dress. He found them, and she started with agony.
Then her mouth met his mouth again. And now she was sheer instinct. It was so powerful that she would have died if she had to be taken from him at this moment. It went through her limbs till she felt she was sinking loose.
IV.
Sullen, reserved, she returned home. She agreed to sleep in Fräulein Hesse’s room. The governess remained excited, but kept just the same in her belief of the entire innocence of Emilie’s relationship.
“He wants me to marry him when he’s safe,” said Emilie, in her balanced fashion, yet something gnawing in all her veins.
“Well, you will, won’t you?” pleaded Fräulein Hesse. “I’m sure I would.”
Emilie’s face grew for a moment dull and submissive.
“Will he want anything more?” asked Fräulein Hesse, as they prepared for bed.
“No,” said Emilie, before her new submissiveness could work.
She would not go near him again. And yet every second she was aware of him. Her very heart beat in painful strokes of him. She bore him some deep, unfathomed grudge. He lay safe and easy in her room. When she went upstairs, she listened. There was not a sound. He would be fast asleep. Fast asleep! Her heart set sullen as she undressed in Fräulein Hesse’s room.
She could not sleep. All through the night the unsatisfaction, the slow, mean misery of half-satisfaction kept her awake. She lay suffering blindly, stubborn to what ailed her. But her heart was hot with sense of him, burning almost with hate of him. She lay and waited, waited in a slow torture, unable to sleep or to think. Something held her from going to him. It did not even occur to her. She lay almost without thought. Yet all the time she hated him that he left her so. It was for hi
m to finish what he had begun. Every fibre of her hurt with a kind of painful sensibility of him. Why could he not set her free to be herself again? She struggled, for him, against him. Through the early, beautiful dawn she lay awake, waiting, watching, waiting for something that never came. Some inertia held her. She could not go near him of herself. Like a thing bound down, the whole woman in her was held hour after hour, all through the night.
Towards five o’clock she dozed fitfully. She awoke again at six and got up. Her heart was sullen and dull with hate. She could have trampled on him. She went downstairs. The Baron was already stirring.
Bachmann had slept uneasily, with dreams and restlessness all the night. At first, quivering with anxiety, trembling he knew not why, he had lain and listened for her, the minutes one long-drawn-out space of waiting. Then at last his heart had thudded heavily, hearing her come upstairs. She was coming. But another door closed, and there was silence—a silence that grew longer and longer and more desert. Then slowly his heart sank very deep. She would not come. Nor could he move to find her. She would not come. So there was this strain between them, bleeding away his vitality. She had left him. She did not wish to come to him.
Then the physical shame of the time when he had clung on to the ladder, the shame of being hauled up like a sack, of having failed with himself, came up strongly, under the new pressure of her not wanting him. He lay feeling without honour and without worth. And he thought of the next night’s danger, and saw himself shot. Though really, he hoped for the morning, when everything would come right again. In the morning she would come. If he and she were all right, the other thing would be all right. If she had done with him, then he was afraid—there was nothing for him to grasp, to keep himself together. But his thoughts rambled on, to his escape, to his new life—and he fell fitfully asleep.
From four o’clock he lay and waited, dim, abstract, impersonal, his individuality gone, waiting dimly for her to come again. Then he might retrieve himself. He heard the doors close. She would have to come soon. And then, being pushed to the very brink of his own being, he would go to her. It was desperate for him. He seemed nothing anywhere.
He got up, looking out of the window. The bugle sounded from the barracks. Everything was fresh, steaming a faint grey vapour from off the dense greenness of the fields and the trees. There was no town anywhere. He stood looking out, feeling the world beyond him.
V.
At seven o’clock the Baron, a lieutenant from the barracks, and three soldiers came into the kitchen. Emilie stood erect and challenged them in her magnificent fashion, her grey eyes dilated. But she felt weak in herself, and foiled, feeling herself implicated.
The Baron had been working in his garden. He stood in his suit of green linen, fretted, not knowing quite what to say. He was a man of medium stature, full of life, with blue eyes, and sudden, hot movements. As a young lieutenant his right hand had been shattered in the Franco-Prussian war. As always, when much agitated, he shook his wounded hand. He did not want to question Emilie. She stood hostile to all these men. Suddenly the Baron flashed round on her, and asked:
“Did you post a postcard to the mother of this Bachmann last night, Emilie?”
The slim, deprecating lieutenant, the agitated, fuming Baron, the three clumsy soldiers looked at her. She felt herself the object of their cruel attention, and set herself back.
“Yes,” she said, distinctly, mechanically. She did not feel as if she herself had anything to do with all this.
The Baron’s wounded hand fluttered with irritation.
“And what about him, then?” he asked, angrily.
The very resentment in his tone prevented her answering. There was a pause, while everybody felt strained and falsified. Emilie alone stood, like a slave, by herself.
“Did he come here?” asked the Baron.
He grew furious. Standing in front of her, his eyes began to glare at her, his wounded hand, half-hidden by his side, shaking spasmodically. She knew he wanted her to say “No.” She stood straight, stubbornly muted. It made her soul go dead in her, to be bullied at this juncture. She did not answer. Slowly, the Baron submitted to the effect of her silence.
“Shall we go then and see?” he said, rather bitingly, to the lieutenant. And Emilie knew that he was hating her and despising her.
The soldiers, heavy and bearlike, tramped with their rifles after the two gentlemen. Emilie stood rooted, unable to move, but her anger was deep. She listened.
Bachmann heard the heavy feet approaching the door. So strong a tension stretched him, that he was unable to feel. He stood watching the door. It opened, and revealed the soldiers.
“So!” exclaimed the Baron, quietly, seeing him.
Now they had got him, the common soldiers lost their up-pricked excitement, and grew uncomfortable. As soon as the lieutenant had given the command to finish dressing, they went dull, and stood like clods near the door. The Baron took a pace or two, in irritable distress. He watched the shaking hands of Bachmann fastening at the belt. Then the expressionless face of the young soldier was raised in obedience. The Baron went out of the room. The voice of the lieutenant gave the order to march. Two soldiers went first, then one soldier holding Bachmann by the arm, then the officer in his fine uniform and the Baron in his green linen.
Bachmann moved dimly, scarcely realising anything. The soldiers went lumbering down the stairs, tramped through the hall, and then down one step into the kitchen. There was a smell of coffee and of morning. The prisoner was aware of the straight form of Emilie standing apart, her fine arms, bare from the elbows, hanging at her sides. She too held her face a little averted. He did not want to look at her, but her presence was very real to him.
The Baron came to a halt in the kitchen, hesitated and looked round.
“So you share your room with a deserter, Emilie,” he said to her ironically. Then he clapped his heels and shook hands very formally with the lieutenant.
“No,” said Emilie, forcing her lips apart. “I was with Fräulein Hesse.” Bachmann, hearing her struggling voice hating the imputation, faltered in his walk. The soldier pulled him by the sleeve, uneasily, miserable in his position. And when the prisoner started again, it was with uncertain steps, and his teeth closed on his lower lip, his eyes staring fixedly; and whichever way the soldier twitched his arm, he went obediently.
The sun was breaking through the morning. The Baron, in his old gardening-suit of green linen, stood watching the soldiers go down the drive. A cock crowed vociferously in the still new air. They were gone round the hedge. The Baron turned to Emilie. She stood more withdrawn than usual, as if waiting to defend herself. Her cheek was a little pale.
“The Baroness will be surprised,” said the Baron to the stiff-standing maid. She turned her eyes to him, like a slave at bay, unable to understand his tone. He bent his head.
“Hiding one of the soldiers in your room,” he continued, as if in raillery.
“He came and asked me,” she said, through scarcely-moving lips.
“So! Then it’s his own look-out?”
“Yes,” said the maid, not understanding.
“Yes,” re-echoed the Baron, and with a bitter sneer on his face, he went to the door. “In fact, you had nothing to do with it,” he said, turning with a furious smile. She stared at him. Why was he so angry with her? He was gone with his head down. She continued her preparation of coffee.
The Prussian Officer [Honour and Arms]
1.
They had marched more than thirty kilometres since dawn, along the white, hot road, where occasional thickets of trees threw a moment of shade, then out into the glare again. On either hand, the valley, wide and shallow, glistered with heat; dark green patches of rye, pale young corn, fallow and meadow and black pine-woods spread in a dull, hot diagram under a glistening sky. But right in front the mountains ranged across, pale blue and very still, the snow gleaming gently out of the deep atmosphere. And towards the mountains, on and on, the regiment
marched between the rye-fields and the meadows, between the scraggy fruit-trees set regularly on either side the highroad. The burnished, dark green rye threw off a suffocating heat, the mountains drew gradually nearer and more distinct. While the feet of the soldiers grew hotter, sweat ran through their hair under their helmets, and their knapsacks could burn no more in contact with their shoulders, but seemed instead to give off a cold, prickly sensation.
He walked on and on in silence, staring at the mountains ahead, that rose sheer out of the land, and stood fold behind fold, half earth, half heaven, the heaven, the barrier with slits of soft snow in the pale, bluish peaks.
He could now walk almost without pain. At the start, he had determined not to limp. It had made him sick to take the first steps, and during the first mile or so, he had compressed his breath, and the cold drops of sweat had stood on his forehead. But he had walked it off. What were they after all but bruises! He had looked at them, as he was getting up: deep bruises on the backs of his thighs. And since he had made his first step in the morning, he had been conscious of them, till now he had a tight, hot place in his chest, with suppressing the pain, and holding himself in. There seemed no air when he breathed. But he walked almost lightly.
The captain’s hand had trembled in taking his coffee at dawn: his orderly saw it again. And he saw the fine figure of the captain wheeling on horseback at the farm-house ahead, a handsome figure in pale blue uniform with facings of scarlet, and the metal gleaming on the black helmet and the sword scabbard, and dark streaks of sweat coming on the silky bay horse. The orderly felt he was connected with that figure moving so suddenly on horseback: he followed it like a shadow, mute and inevitable and damned by it. And the officer was always aware of the tramp of the company behind, the march of his orderly among the men.
Selected Stories Page 17