The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  The door closed on her and her bundle.

  So this was Karen of the smile! Certainly I had seen little smile enough, but possibly she was not yet restored to a smiling humour, for had I been a woman I should not have cared to return to that hut with the icicled window and tell such a husband as Walther Blum a pack of lies in his teeth. I would as soon not have gone home at all. I wondered what her life with him was up there. He had been away on the road. She too, so far as I could gather, was temporarily under­taking other duties. But these were interruptions to the routine. Soon the hotel would close. She would return home, and all day long he would not be far away – merely in some neighbouring portion of the forest, helping the second forester. A couple of strokes with a brush-handle and that raffle of icicles would come splintering down. The interior would be set to rights. Normal cohabitation would go on as before.

  But I checked my thoughts, suddenly still. Everything as before! How then had that been? Since she was certainly not yet eighteen, there could not have been a great deal of ‘before’. And why should his statuette, so betrayingly evidential in everything else, keep that blank, mocking, unfeatured face? What was this reason he gave of a smile? A smile is a peaceful, happy thing. So much can it do that, let a man but have it, and a load falls from him, as the mass of late snow, slipping away, suddenly shows the green all new and tender beneath. Yet he had said it himself. She smiled, and the chisel was arrested in his hand. She smiled, and every other perfection that those few cubic inches of wood contained become anonymous. She smiled, and at the mere recollection of it he broke out in fury before a stranger. ‘Why? I will tell you why! Because she smiles! Once she did not smile, and I was happy. Now she smiles always, always smiles and it is driving me mad!’

  Sufficiently occupied with these thoughts, I turned my attention to the other man.

  For I already knew who he was. Even the few words I had over­heard at the back of the hotel had had that caressing yet acrid Neapolitan timbre. He was Nicolo, the white-jacketed waiter in the American bar, and his type is repugnant to me. He could not hide the fulsome meanings in his strongly staring black eyes, nor keep the vain and conquering smile from his shaven lips. Shaven? He was shaven au bleu. He must have shaved twice a day to keep the indigo so smoothly down. I learned that he did, in fact, shave for the second time before coming on to serve the evening cocktails, for, seeking a way up to the roof early one evening to see what the view was like up there, I came by chance upon the little room where daily the barber attended, and there was Nicolo, with the napkin tucked about the cauliflower of soap, his head back, and that ineffable smile on his face at something imaginary between him and the ceiling. His teeth, too, were as white as his barman’s jacket, and as he polished his glasses behind the counter he might have been under glass himself, so sleek and unspotted a picture did he make.

  In the circumstances I saw no reason why, over my modest apéritif, I should not find out as much about Nicolo as I could.

  I soon had him marked down as a diligent fellow, with ambitions. A German-Swiss hotel is no bad stepping-stone from Naples to London, and Nicolo was making the most of his time. He was continually checking his stock, marking bottles, and copying the remaining quantities into a little book; and he had another book, too, with coloured edges, in French, German, Italian and English. It was a book of cookery recipes, and his short straight nose was never out of it. One of these days he was going to have his own hotel. Every pfennig of change that was pushed back to him as trinkgeld was set aside, and presently he would be leaving Haar­heim, not to return. He would take his cookery-book with him in his trunk, and his hard-boiled shirts, and his black bows and starched white jackets. But he would not take his mistress, if she were that. Why pay excess on superfluous luggage? There were mistresses enough in London for a handsome, far-seeing, ambitious fellow such as our Nicolo.

  So there was dapper Nicolo, with his English lessons in his spare hours, and his serenely insolent way of looking at women, and his smooth, plump hands that would let them go like so many water-drops when he reached for a towel. And there was Walther Blum, muttering, morose, half-savage as regarded one part of his nature, the other half mingled flame and passion and nameless desire. And apparently Nicolo got the kisses and Walther got the smiles. It doesn’t matter by what processes I pieced all this together. I hardly think I did piece it together. It fell together of itself. It was simply the final assembly of elements that had long been preparing, and I doubt if anything could have changed the complete pattern into which they finally fell. On my walks, at my solitary table in the corner, leaning over the balcony at night and watching the waltz­ings and acrobatics on the eisbahn, I pondered much about it all, and one of the resolutions to which I came was that when Karen brought my linen back at half past eight o’clock on the Thursday evening I would be there to have, if possible, a word with her.

  4

  For I am no stranger to hotels, and I know what their promises about laundry usually amount to. It comes when it comes. But here was a promise much more precisely made. It was made even to the half-hour. She was doing it herself, and it was to be in my room at half past eight. Of course it might not come, but I was inclined to dismiss that. There were too many things against it. Say, for one thing, she was in love with this fellow. At half past eight the hotel, including myself, would be dining. The bedrooms would long since have been made ready for the night, except for the final touches that would only take a few minutes. And at half past eight Otto, as I knew, relieved Nicolo at the American bar. It was the one interval of the day that they might reasonably expect to have to themselves. That, briefly, was my guess at the position.

  Yet I was dissatisfied with my guess. It seemed to condemn her too summarily. There must be some reason for the hate and resent­fulness that dwelt so contradictorily side by side with the gravity in her clear eyes, and I began to play with hypotheses. Suppose, I argued to myself, that she had been married a year. If she had had even a little happiness during that year it was as much as could have been expected from a man so palpably at odds with the world and human life as he found it as Walther Blum. The chances were that he avoided his kind, or classed them, too, as phenomena with the trees and the rocks and the snows. He must have been a very difficult man to live with.

  Yet it was a woman he had married, not a rock or a tree; and there had been something very steadfast in the eyes she had turned up to me as she had packed my linen on the floor. Apparently this man, who took life hardly himself, had passed a hard portion on to her too, and she had flown to one who took it more easily, cajoled her, flattered her, and would turn her off the moment he got what he wanted. In that case I was sorry for her, but except to tell her to make the best of her Walther and leave the other alone, I should not have known how to advise her.

  I had intended to be in my room when Karen came at half past eight on Thursday; as it turned out I had no choice in the matter. A slight indisposition necessitated my seeing the doctor that afternoon; I was told that a couple of days in bed would set me right; and to bed I was sent. I had been in bed some hours when I heard Karen’s tap at the door.

  One minor difficulty at least was out of the way. I could not very well have detained her had she wished to finish the errand and be gone, but she, if she chose, might in the circumstances linger as long as she wished. She came in with my parcel. She wore the same little jacket and wide blue print skirt as before. In anybody else I should have called her salutation a curtsey, but in her it was somehow both given and withheld. Then, in the act of setting down the parcel, she paused.

  ‘The gnädiger Herr is not well?’ she asked, as if she had only just noticed that I was in bed.

  I told her that it was nothing, and that I should be all right in a couple of days.

  ‘Is it the gnädiger Herr’s pleasure that I should count the linen and put it away?’

  ‘If you would be so kind, Karen.
’

  She unfastened the parcel, checked its contents, and began to open drawers. She did not ask where anything was to be put, but went about her light task smoothly and efficiently. Only towards the end of her shirt-and-collar sorting did she delay a little. Then she turned, with the last of the washing still in her hand.

  ‘The gnädiger Herr then knows my name?’

  ‘Yes. You are Karen, the wife of Walther Blum. I have spoken with your husband.’

  ‘You know him?’ The limpid blue eyes were on mine, and she seemed to have forgotten the third-personal address.

  ‘Very slightly,’ I answered, though I felt this to be, in some odd way, untrue. ‘Among others, I am not at all sure that he didn’t save my life.’

  Most people would have asked how that had come about, but she only knitted the brows above the blue eyes. She put away the last of the linen and closed the drawer. I thought she was about to leave. But she stood there with her hands on her hips (she seemed incapable of an attitude that was not alive with grace, and her hands and wrists in particular were full of the most moving beauty), the small foot under the bell-shape of blue-print tapping, her teeth catching at that half-rose of a lower lip. No wonder Blum had given forth her shape so passionately in his wood. I could hardly take my eyes from her. And then her own eyes, which had been on the polished floor, met mine again.

  ‘I am also grateful to your husband for directing me when I had missed my way,’ I went on.

  And that she did take up. ‘When?’ she demanded, almost im­periously.

  ‘Let me see. Four nights ago.’

  She betrayed herself completely in her next question, for I might have met him anywhere; but she didn’t seem to care. ‘And you went in?’ she challenged me.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. There was no need to say where. She herself went straight to the point.

  ‘And he walked back to the hotel with you?’

  ‘Yes . . . Though I didn’t say so.’

  Still she didn’t seem to care, though she bit her lip again. I would have given a fortune to have known all that was passing behind those rounds of palest blue under the wreath of fairest hair, but a very little I thought I did know. I had been in her husband’s house four nights before. He had walked back to the hotel with me, and she herself had slipped away like a shadow by another path. There must have been – let us call it a situation – when she had climbed the mountain and pushed at the door of that solitary hut again. And above all, if I had been inside I had seen the statuette.

  ‘The gnädiger Herr speaks the truth,’ she said; ‘since I knew all that,’ she added, with a lift of her head.

  Then suddenly it came out, as if somebody else spoke for me. Up to that moment it had not entered my head to ask such a question.

  ‘Why do you smile, Karen? I want to know why you smile.’

  Ah! the eyes seemed to say. So I knew that too! Well, if I already knew it it saved the time and trouble of explanation. All could be understood without further ado. Nevertheless, she repeated my question.

  ‘Why do I smile?’

  ‘Why do you smile?’

  ‘You have been in the house?’

  ‘I said so.’

  ‘And you saw – it?’

  I spoke slowly: ‘By “it”’ you mean the thing that doesn’t smile?’

  ‘I knew you had seen it. It never will smile. It will never be finished. But I – I shall smile the more . . . So he told you that too?’

  ‘He told me that you smiled, and that it drove him mad.’

  ‘It is no worse to be mad than to be killed, as I have been killed,’ she answered, with compressed lips. ‘One can be killed, and yet go on living.’

  Killed! She in the bloom and freshness of her seventeen short years! . . . But girls have these fancies. In another year or two she would be laughing at them herself. I leaned up on my pillow and looked at her attentively.

  ‘What do you mean, Karen?’

  She returned my look disdainfully, as if I and all like me were things of so little importance that the truth could be flung to us as one tosses a bone to a dog. But her hands had left her hips, and were clenched at her sides.

  ‘Why should I not tell you? Why should I not tell everybody? It is only he who doesn’t understand!’ broke from her. ‘Listen! Do you know how old I am? I am seventeen and a half years old. And I have been married to Walther Blum one year – one whole year! I didn’t want to marry him. He made me marry him. We didn’t even belong to the same valley. He lived in one valley and I in another, with the Huldhorn between. Among us we marry in the same valley – because of the mountain, because of the Huldhorn. Hardly a man can pass the cornice in the winter. Even in the summer it is a toil. So our young men marry the girls at home. But he came over, down into our village from the skies. He came over whatever the weather was, with runners on his feet that he had made himself. He could have settled among us, for he lived alone, but he would not. He told me that he would not come every night, but I soon learned what that meant. It meant that he might not arrive every night. But he set out every night. I asked him once, when he was very late, whether he had got lost, but he said he had a compass in his breast. I used to open the shutters and look up at the crest of the hill for his lantern.’

  So he had made even his love difficult to the verge of impossibility! Her words pictured it all the more vividly because of their very abruptness – him in his hut making ready his lantern; his setting-out; the diamonded night sky overhead or else the blinding scurries of snow; the soft sliding thunder of a distant avalanche, the creep round the cornice of the Huldhorn; the pause to look down on the handful of houses that made the hamlet – and all guided by that in his breast that he called a compass. I saw the child of sixteen peering past the shutter for the winking light of his lantern. And I was quite prepared to hear that she had been afraid of him even then.

  ‘My parents were against it, gnädiger Herr,’ she went on more quietly. ‘They said it was not natural that he should not be able to get a girl without coming over the mountain. But he said: Get a girl! He had seen them – girls. They were nothing. If those were girls, then I was something else, and he wanted me, whatever I was, if those others were girls He said that my smile made him warm even on the cornice of the Huldhorn. My father said that was high-falutin talk, and not good. Let him come and make his home among us and then it would be time to talk, my father said. And the Herr Pastor, who was also my schoolmaster, said the same. But I began not to listen to them. At first, all the same, I didn’t want to marry Walther. I told him not to come. But he made me marry him, gnädiger Herr. He gave me no peace. There is no peace where he is. If there is a moment’s peace an avalanche follows. And when I learned that he set out every night, then the nights when he didn’t arrive were terrible. I felt that I had killed him by not marrying him sooner. I was very young, gnädiger Herr. I am older now. And so I married him.’

  That, too, I could believe – that he had made her marry him. He had compelled her a little at a time, as he had loaded up that sixty-foot tree, forcing it to bend. And suddenly she stamped her small foot so that the blue-print bell shook with the passionate gesture.

  ‘And what was it? Lieber Gott! Do the other men do so to the other girls? Why, then, do they not die? But I have seen them laughing, these young married girls; how can they do it? I tell you, you who lie there, that it was endless! Always it was so, always, always . . . And there, with the Huldhorn between, where was there to run to? And what was the good of crying? No, I do not wish! He broke me, he broke me. It arrived that he might do as he wished; what did I care? Then he reproached me; but it no longer mattered to me. Nothing mattered. And so I was contented, thinking I knew the worst.

  ‘But I did not know the worst, you who lie there!’ she cried, in a voice that mounted. ‘Having broken my body he began to break my mind to
o! I had had lessons from the Herr Pastor. I could read and write; I could speak a little French; and he could neither read nor write nor speak French. And because I could not answer his questions he called me a fool! His questions, lieber Gott! He did not understand them himself. They were not questions! I have heard him say that he did not know what it was he wanted to know! How, then, should I know? He called us all fools. Even the Herr Pastor he called a fool. He said that we knew no more than he, and that if he learned to read and write he would be the greatest fool of all. And when one is called a fool sufficiently one ceases to open one’s mouth. Days passed when I never spoke to him. Even at night I never spoke to him. All was without words or speech, since he wished it so. Why should one speak when one is a fool?’

  Poor, hapless pair! What was there to say? I said what I could.

  ‘Much is laid on him, Karen.’

  ‘What is laid on him? How, laid on him?’ she flashed.

  ‘It hasn’t got a name. He is right in saying that the Herr Pastor knows no more of the reason of everything than he. Nevertheless, it is fastened on him as they fasten the trees to the carts – with a chain and a winch.’

  ‘It is on me that it is fastened!’ she cried. ‘Listen to me! Listen heedfully! What had I left? My beauty remained. I do not mean my beauty as at first, though he might please himself about that. My beauty to his eyes remained. That was all – all! And his eyes never left me. They followed me about like the piercings in a dark shutter. And then the other – all else – stopped. I existed in his eyes only. I was his Gliederpuppe, his thing that he copied from. Even in mid-winter I must go about – yes, even when I was sweeping up his chippings or cooking the supper . . . but the gnädiger Herr has seen. Soon I ceased to blush. That was not his first statuette. Many he cast into the stove, saying it was all they were fit for – more true to say it was all I was fit for! I was a fool. That other was finished. But this remained. I had married a man who growled over pieces of wood. I was something to turn into a piece of wood. If I could tell you, you who lie there listening – if I could tell you –’