by Edna Ferber
“But—don’t you like it?” I asked, like a simpleton.
Frau Nirlanger seemed to shrink before our very eyes, so that the pretty gown hung in limp folds about her.
I stared, fascinated, at Konrad Nirlanger’s cruel face with its little eyes that were too close together and its chin that curved in below the mouth and out again so grotesquely.
“Like it?” sneered Konrad Nirlanger. “For a young girl, yes. But how useless, this belated trousseau. What a waste of good money! For see, a young wife I do not want. Young women one can have in plenty, always. But I have an old woman married, and for an old woman the gowns need be few—eh, Frau Orme? And you too, Frau Knapf?”
Frau Knapf, crimson and staring, was dumb. There came a little shivering moan from the figure crouched in the corner, and Frau Nirlanger, her face queerly withered and ashen, crumpled slowly in a little heap on the floor and buried her shamed head in her arms.
Konrad Nirlanger turned to his wife, the black look on his face growing blacker.
“Come, get up Anna,” he ordered, in German. “These heroics become not a woman of your years. And too, you must not ruin the so costly gown that will be returned to-morrow.”
Frau Nirlanger’s white face was lifted from the shelter of her arms. The stricken look was still upon it, but there was no cowering in her attitude now. Slowly she rose to her feet. I had not realized that she was so tall.
“The gown does not go back,” she said.
“So?” he snarled, with a savage note in his voice. “Now hear me. There shall be no more buying of gowns and fripperies. You hear? It is for the wife to come to the husband for the money; not for her to waste it wantonly on gowns, like a creature of the streets. You,” his voice was an insult, “you, with your wrinkles and your faded eyes in a gown of—” he turned inquiringly toward me—“How does one call it, that color, Frau Orme?”
There came a blur of tears to my eyes. “It is called ashes of roses,” I answered. “Ashes of roses.”
Konrad Nirlanger threw back his head and laughed a laugh as stinging as a whip-lash. “Ashes of roses! So? It is well named. For my dear wife it is poetically fit, is it not so? For see, her roses are but withered ashes, eh Anna?”
Deliberately and in silence Anna Nirlanger walked to the mirror and stood there, gazing at the woman in the glass. There was something dreadful and portentous about the calm and studied deliberation with which she critically viewed that reflection. She lifted her arms slowly and patted into place the locks that had become disarranged, turning her head from side to side to study the effect. Then she took from a drawer the bit of chamois skin that I had given her, and passed it lightly over her eyelids and cheeks, humming softly to herself the while. No music ever sounded so uncanny to my ears. The woman before the mirror looked at the woman in the mirror with a long, steady, measuring look. Then, slowly and deliberately, the long graceful folds of her lovely gown trailing behind her, she walked over to where her frowning husband stood. So might a queen have walked, head held high, gaze steady. She stopped within half a foot of him, her eyes level with his. For a long half-minute they stood thus, the faded blue eyes of the wife gazing into the sullen black eyes of the husband, and his were the first to drop, for all the noble blood in Anna Nirlanger’s veins, and all her long line of gently bred ancestors were coming to her aid in dealing with her middle-class husband.
“You forget,” she said, very slowly and distinctly. “If this were Austria, instead of Amerika, you would not forget. In Austria people of your class do not speak in this manner to those of my caste.”
“Unsinn!” laughed Konrad Nirlanger. This is Amerika.”
“Yes,” said Anna Nirlanger, “this is Amerika. And in Amerika all things are different. I see now that my people knew of what they spoke when they called me mad to think of wedding a clod of the people, such as you.”
For a moment I thought that he was going to strike her. I think he would have, if she had flinched. But she did not. Her head was held high, and her eyes did not waver.
“I married you for love. It is most comical, is it not? With you I thought I should find peace, and happiness and a re-birth of the intellect that was being smothered in the splendor and artificiality and the restrictions of my life there. Well, I was wrong. But wrong. Now hear me!” Her voice was tense with passion. “There will be gowns—as many and as rich as I choose. You have said many times that the ladies of Amerika you admire. And see! I shall be also one of those so-admired ladies. My money shall go for gowns! For hats! For trifles of lace and velvet and fur! You shall learn that it is not a peasant woman whom you have married. This is Amerika, the land of the free, my husband. And see! Who is more of Amerika than I? Who?”
She laughed a high little laugh and came over to me, taking my hands in her own.
“Dear girl, you must run quickly and dress. For this evening we go to the theater. Oh, but you must. There shall be no unpleasantness, that I promise. My husband accompanies us—with joy. Is it not so, Konrad? With joy? So!”
Wildly I longed to decline, but I dared not. So I only nodded, for fear of the great lump in my throat, and taking Frau Knapf’s hand I turned and fled with her. Frau Knapf was muttering:
“Du Hund! Du unverschamter Hund du!” in good Billingsgate German, and wiping her eyes with her apron. And I dressed with trembling fingers because I dared not otherwise face the brave little Austrian, the plucky little aborigine who, with the donning of the new Amerikanische gown had acquired some real Amerikanisch nerve.
CHAPTER XI
VON GERHARD SPEAKS
Of Von Gerhard I had not had a glimpse since that evening of my hysterical outburst. On Christmas day there had come a box of roses so huge that I could not find vases enough to hold its contents, although I pressed into service everything from Mason jars from the kitchen to handpainted atrocities from the parlor. After I had given posies to Frau Nirlanger, and fastened a rose in Frau Knapf’s hard knob of hair, where it bobbed in ludicrous discomfort, I still had enough to fill the washbowl. My room looked like a grand opera star’s boudoir when she is expecting the newspaper reporters. I reveled in the glowing fragrance of the blossoms and felt very eastern and luxurious and popular. It had been a busy, happy, work-filled week, in which I had had to snatch odd moments for the selecting of certain wonderful toys for the Spalpeens. There had been dolls and doll-clothes and a marvelous miniature kitchen for the practical and stolid Sheila, and ingenious bits of mechanism that did unbelievable things when wound up, for the clever, imaginative Hans. I was not to have the joy of seeing their wide-eyed delight, but I knew that there would follow certain laboriously scrawled letters, filled with topsy-turvy capitals and crazily leaning words of thanks to the doting old auntie who had been such good fun the summer before.
Boarding-house Christmases had become an old story. I had learned to accept them, even to those obscure and foreign parts of turkey which are seen only on boarding-house plates, and which would be recognized nowhere else as belonging to that stately bird.
Christmas at Knapf’s had been a happy surprise; a day of hearty good cheer and kindness. There had even been a Christmas tree, hung with stodgy German angels and Pfeffernuesse and pink-frosted cakes. I found myself the bewildered recipient of gifts from everyone—from the Knapfs, and the aborigines and even from one of the crushed-looking wives. The aborigine whom they called Fritz had presented me with a huge and imposing Lebkuchen, reposing in a box with frilled border, ornamented with quaint little red-and-green German figures in sugar, and labeled Nurnberg in stout letters, for it had come all the way from that kuchen-famous city. The Lebkuchen I placed on my mantel shelf as befitted so magnificent a work of art. It was quite too elaborate and imposing to be sent the way of ordinary food, although it had a certain tantalizingly spicy scent that tempted one to break off a corner here and there.
On the afternoon of Christmas day I sat down to thank Dr. von Gerhard for the flowers as prettily as might be. Also I asked his p
ardon, a thing not hard to do with the perfume of his roses filling the room.
“For you,” I wrote, “who are so wise in the ways of those tricky things called nerves, must know that it was only a mild hysteria that made me say those most unladylike things. I have written Norah all about it. She has replied, advising me to stick to the good-fellow role but not to dress the part. So when next you see me I shall be a perfectly safe and sane comrade in petticoats. And I promise you—no more outbursts.”
So it happened that on the afternoon of New Year’s day Von Gerhard and I gravely wished one another many happy and impossible things for the coming year, looking fairly and squarely into each other’s eyes as we did so.
“So,” said Von Gerhard, as one who is satisfied. “The nerfs are steady to-day. What do you say to a brisk walk along the lake shore to put us in a New Year frame of mind, and then a supper down-town somewhere, with a toast to Max and Norah?”
“You’ve saved my life! Sit down here in the parlor and gaze at the crepe-paper oranges while I powder my nose and get into some street clothes. I have such a story to tell you! It has made me quite contented with my lot.”
The story was that of the Nirlangers; and as we struggled against a brisk lake breeze I told it, and partly because of the breeze, and partly because of the story, there were tears in my eyes when I had finished. Von Gerhard stared at me, aghast.
“But you are—crying!” he marveled, watching a tear slide down my nose.
“I’m not,” I retorted. “Anyway I know it. I think I may blubber if I choose to, mayn’t I, as well as other women?”
“Blubber?” repeated Von Gerhard, he of the careful and cautious English. “But most certainly, if you wish. I had thought that newspaper women did not indulge in the luxury of tears.”
“They don’t—often. Haven’t the time. If a woman reporter were to burst into tears every time she saw something to weep over she’d be going about with a red nose and puffy eyelids half the time. Scarcely a day passes that does not bring her face to face with human suffering in some form. Not only must she see these things, but she must write of them so that those who read can also see them. And just because she does not wail and tear her hair and faint she popularly is supposed to be a flinty, cigarette-smoking creature who rampages up and down the land, seeking whom she may rend with her pen and gazing, dry-eyed, upon scenes of horrid bloodshed.”
“And yet the little domestic tragedy of the Nirlangers can bring tears to your eyes?”
“Oh, that was quite different. The case of the Nirlangers had nothing to do with Dawn O’Hara, newspaper reporter. It was just plain Dawn O’Hara, woman, who witnessed that little tragedy. Mein Himmel! Are all German husbands like that?”
“Not all. I have a very good friend named Max—”
“O, Max! Max is an angel husband. Fancy Max and Norah waxing tragic on the subject of a gown! Now you—”
“I? Come, you are sworn to good-fellowship. As one comrade to another, tell me, what sort of husband do you think I should make, eh? The boorish Nirlanger sort, or the charming Max variety. Come, tell me—you who always have seemed so—so damnably able to take care of yourself.” His eyes were twinkling in the maddening way they had.
I looked out across the lake to where a line of white-caps was piling up formidably only to break in futile wrath against the solid wall of the shore. And there came over me an equally futile wrath; that savage, unreasoning instinct in women which prompts them to hurt those whom they love.
“Oh, you!” I began, with Von Gerhard’s amused eyes laughing down upon me. “I should say that you would be more in the Nirlanger style, in your large, immovable, Germansure way. Not that you would stoop to wrangle about money or gowns, but that you would control those things. Your wife will be a placid, blond, rather plump German Fraulein, of excellent family and no imagination. Men of your type always select negative wives. Twenty years ago she would have run to bring you your Zeitung and your slippers. She would be that kind, if Zeitung-and-slipper husbands still were in existence. You will be fond of her, in a patronizing sort of way, and she will never know the difference between that and being loved, not having a great deal of imagination, as I have said before. And you will go on becoming more and more famous, and she will grow plumper and more placid, and less and less understanding of what those komisch medical journals have to say so often about her husband who is always discovering things. And you will live happily ever after—”
A hand gripped my shoulder. I looked up, startled, into two blue eyes blazing down into mine. Von Gerhard’s face was a painful red. I think that the hand on my shoulder even shook me a little, there on that bleak and deserted lake drive. I tried to wrench my shoulder free with a jerk.
“You are hurting me!” I cried.
A quiver of pain passed over the face that I had thought so calmly unemotional. “You talk of hurts! You, who set out deliberately and maliciously to make me suffer! How dare you then talk to me like this! You stab with a hundred knives—you, who know how I—”
“I’m sorry,” I put in, contritely. “Please don’t be so dreadful about it. After all, you asked me, didn’t you? Perhaps I’ve hurt your vanity. There, I didn’t mean that, either. Oh, dear, let’s talk about something impersonal. We get along wretchedly of late.”
The angry red ebbed away from Von Gerhard’s face. The blaze of wrath in his eyes gave way to a deeper, brighter light that held me fascinated, and there came to his lips a smile of rare sweetness. The hand that had grasped my shoulder slipped down, down, until it met my hand and gripped it.
“Na, ‘s ist schon recht, Kindchen. Those that we most care for we would hurt always. When I have told you of my love for you, although already you know it, then you will tell me. Hush! Do not deny this thing. There shall be no more lies between us. There shall be only the truth, and no more about plump, blonde German wives who run with Zeitung and slippers. After all, it is no secret. Three months ago I told Norah. It was not news to her. But she trusted me.”
I felt my face to be as white and as tense as his own. “Norah—knows!”
“It is better to speak these things. Then there need be no shifting of the eyes, no evasive words, no tricks, no subterfuge.”
We had faced about and were retracing our steps, past the rows of peculiarly homelike houses that line Milwaukee’s magnificent lake shore. Windows were hung with holiday scarlet and holly, and here and there a face was visible at a window, looking out at the man and woman walking swiftly along the wind-swept heights that rose far above the lake.
A wretched revolt seized me as I gazed at the substantial comfort of those normal, happy homes.
“Why did you tell me! What good can that do? At least we were make-believe friends before. Suppose I were to tell you that I care, then what.”
“I do not ask you to tell me,” Von Gerhard replied, quietly.
“You need not. You know. You knew long, long ago. You know I love the big quietness of you, and your sureness, and the German way you have of twisting your sentences about, and the steady grip of your great firm hands, and the rareness of your laugh, and the simplicity of you. Why I love the very cleanliness of your ruddy skin, and the way your hair grows away from your forehead, and your walk, and your voice and—Oh, what is the use of it all?”
“Just this, Dawn. The light of day sweetens all things. We have dragged this thing out into the sunlight, where, if it grows, it will grow sanely and healthily. It was but an ugly, distorted, unsightly thing, sending out pale unhealthy shoots in the dark, unwholesome cellars of our inner consciences. Norah’s knowing was the cleanest, sweetest thing about it.”
“How wonderfully you understand her, and how right you are! Her knowing seems to make it as it should be, doesn’t it? I am braver already, for the knowledge of it. It shall make no difference between us?”
“There is no difference, Dawn,” said he.
“No. It is only in the story-books that they sigh, and groan and utter silly no
nsense. We are not like that. Perhaps, after a bit, you will meet some one you care for greatly—not plump, or blond, or German, perhaps, but still—”
“Doch you are flippant?”
“I must say those things to keep the tears back. You would not have me wailing here in the street. Tell me just one thing, and there shall be no more fluttering breaths and languishing looks. Tell me, when did you begin to care?”
We had reached Knapfs’ door-step. The short winter day was already drawing to its close. In the half-light Von Gerhard’s eyes glowed luminous.
“Since the day I first met you at Norah’s,” he said, simply.
I stared at him, aghast, my ever-present sense of humor struggling to the surface. “Not—not on that day when you came into the room where I sat in the chair by the window, with a flowered quilt humped about my shoulders! And a fever-sore twisting my mouth! And my complexion the color of cheese, and my hair plastered back from my forehead, and my eyes like boiled onions!”
“Thank God for your gift of laughter,” Von Gerhard said, and took my hand in his for one brief moment before he turned and walked away.
Quite prosaically I opened the big front door at Knapfs’ to find Herr Knapf standing in the hallway with his:
“Nabben’, Frau Orme.”
And there was the sane and soothing scent of Wienerschnitzel and spluttering things in the air. And I ran upstairs to my room and turned on all the lights and looked at the starry-eyed creature in the mirror. Then I took the biggest, newest photograph of Norah from the mantel and looked at her for a long, long minute, while she looked back at me in her brave true way.
“Thank you, dear,” I said to her. “Thank you. Would you think me stagey and silly if I were to kiss you, just once, on your beautiful trusting eyes?”
A telephone bell tinkled downstairs and Herr Knapf stationed himself at the foot of the stairs and roared my name.
When I had picked up the receiver: “This is Ernst,” said the voice at the other end of the wire. “I have just remembered that I had asked you down-town for supper.”