Old House — XVI
The hanging lamp over the table in the green room had been lit.
Anne’s hand fell slowly from the child’s cap she was crocheting.
She had been aware for a long time of the irregular sounds of Christopher’s steps.
Her brother walked restlessly up and down the rooms.
Occasionally he bumped into the open wings of doors, then again he would make aimless, unnecessary circuits round the furniture.
Anne noticed that Thomas dropped the newspaper he was reading upon his knees.
He too was listening to the disordered steps.
Again Christopher came in collision with a door, then he stopped nervously near the table.
“Land fetches a big price nowadays.
” While he spoke he lit a cigar and the smoke came in puffs from his lips.
“It will never again fetch as much.
We ought to sell some of the building sites; we have too many; at any rate I know of a better investment.
” Anne did not like the idea.
She would have liked to keep everything as it had been left to them by their grandfather.
“Our grandfather would be the first to exploit this exorbitant boom,” said Christopher with unnecessary temper.
“You don’t understand these things, my dear.
” Anne sighed.
“You are right.
Speak to Thomas about it.
” “To me?
” Illey laughed frigidly.
Looking at Christopher his expression became haughty.
“I understand that you gamble on the Stock Exchange and that you win.
Take care.
It is always like that at the start and then fortune turns.
People only stop it when they have broken their necks.
” “You have to remain cool, nothing else,” growled Christopher, “one must not lose one’s nerve.
Anyhow, that has nothing to do with it.
What is your opinion about selling building sites?
” Thomas shrugged his shoulders.
“I have no opinion.
I am unacquainted with the circumstances.
” He was aware that his obstinate reticence was nothing but the expression of his disappointed hopes.
Yet he could not alter it.
Christopher was delighted that everything went so smoothly.
As a matter of fact he had already sold some of the sites.
Now that the deed was done, he was given the required consent.
He breathed more freely.
He would sell the old timber yard too.
Otto Füger was a clever go-between.
Anne took up her work again.
Thomas’s aloof indifference revolted her.
She had lost her confidence in Christopher.
She suspected Otto Füger, but she did not understand business.
She had never been taught anything but to sing, to embroider, to play the piano and to dance.
She decided that when her little girl was born, she would make her learn everything that her mother did not know.
And while still young, she should be taught that people can never be entirely happy.
She would tell it to her simply, so that she could understand and not be obliged later on to hug to herself something that nobody wants and that is always unconsciously trampled on by those to whom it is vainly proffered.
But the little girl, for whom Anne was waiting in the old house, never came.
In spring the second boy was born and he was christened Ladislaus Thomas John Christopher in the old church, now rebuilt, at Leopold’s town.
After that Anne was ill for a long time.
The cold gleam, which had formerly made her glance so hard, disappeared from her eye.
The lines of her fine eyebrows softened down.
Her boyish bony little hands became softer, more womanly.
Then she was about again, but the shadow of her sufferings remained on her face.
Thomas was courteous and attentive.
He brought her books.
For hours he read to her aloud, without stopping, as if driven; he seemed to fear Anne’s gaze which his eye had to face when he put the book down.
What did this gaze want?
Did it say anything, or ask, or beg, or command?
No, Anne wanted nothing more from him.
The time was past when....
He buried his face sadly in his hands.
* * * * * Year by year Thomas became more taciturn and if Anne asked him whether anything hurt him or if he had any worries, he shook his head impatiently.
No, there was nothing the matter with him; that was just his Hungarian nature.
But when he took his son on his knee he told him tales of big forests, an ancestral country house, an old garden.
Fields, horses, harvests in the glaring sun ...
and his face became rejuvenated and he held his head as of old, in the little glen, when he turned towards the sun.
Anne had become accustomed not to be told these things by her husband.
Nor did she mention Ille when letters in a female hand came thence and one handwriting, with its shapeless, rustic characters, repeated itself frequently.
When once it happened that Otto Füger brought the mail up, Anne found one of these letters on the piano.
She took it into her hand and the contact made her tremble.
She had to struggle against herself;
was it pride, honesty, or cowardice?
She put the envelope untouched on Thomas’s table.
She did not question him, she did not complain, but she never spoke of Ille again.
From that time the name of this strange land became a ghost in the house.
They never pronounced it, but it was ever there between them.
It seemed to Anne that even now it was stealing, hostile, through the silence, drawing Thomas away from her.
Desperate fear possessed her;
she felt that she was going to be left alone in icy darkness with no way out of it.
“Thomas,” she said imploringly, as if calling for help, “why can’t we talk to each other?
” Illey raised his head from between his hands.
“Are you reproaching me with my nature again?
” Anne perceived impatient irritation in her husband’s voice.
“I did not mean it like that”; the woman stopped short as if a hand had been put rudely before her mouth.
Night was pouring slowly into the sunshine room.
They could not see each other’s faces when Thomas began suddenly to listen; he seemed to hear suppressed sobs....
No, it was imagination; his wife never cried.
They had been silent for such a long time that Anne had merely fallen asleep in the corner of the couch.
Illey rose and closed the door noiselessly behind him.
During Anne’s illness Thomas had moved from the common bedroom into the back room which had once belonged to Ulwing the builder.
When she improved, he did not himself know why, he remained there.
His wife did not oppose it and he was fond of the room.
From the window he could touch the leaves of the chestnut tree and after rain the smell of the damp earth in the garden reached him.
He sat on the window sill.
Outside, the trees whispered.
Thomas’s mind was gone from among the closed walls.
Desire carried his soul beyond the town.
He strolled alone and was met by a breeze smelling of rain.
How he loved that!
How he loved everything out of doors: the smells, the colours, the sounds, the steaming bogs of boiling summer, the frozen roads of winter, where one’s footsteps ring and the branches crack as they fall.
Then the wind rises from the soughing reeds and life trembles over the world.
In the furrows, the water soaks into the ground.
The wood resounds with the amorous complaint of birds.
Call ...
answer.
Do they always find their mate?
In his heart Thomas nearly felt the silence of the woods.
The seed of reproduction falls in this trembling, solemn peace.
Birds float slowly in the sunshine.
When the hour of the crops comes, summer is there.
Harvest is in full swing everywhere and his blood is haunted with inherited memories.
How often, how often, he has stopped at the edge of somebody else’s wheat-field and clenched his fist.
Nowhere in the world is anything growing for him.
This memory brought sad autumn weather to his mind.
A deep sad fall and he comes in a mist towards the town.
He comes like an escaped convict brought back to his prison.
Again the paved streets and narrow strips of smoky sky.
Office, blotches of ink, paper and the old house, which is strange to him, and the lovely cold woman who does not understand him.
Dim recollections stole upon him.
Again he seemed to feel Anne’s two little protesting hands on his breast and that unsympathetic look which had more than once repelled his desire.
He stretched his hand out of the window towards the chestnut tree.
He picked a young shoot.
The bough yielded itself easily, moist, fresh....
He thought of someone who had yielded herself as easily as the young shoot.
She had been bred there on his old land, the daughter of the keeper in the swampy wood.
Humble, as the former serf-girls had been with his ancestors, pretty too, with laughing eyes.
She never asked what her master was brooding about, and yet she knew.
The woods, the meadows, she too thought of them and she sang of them with the very voice of the earth.
One did not need to listen, one could whistle, she expected no praise.
No more do the birds....
Thomas could not remember how it was at first that he desired the girl.
He simply wanted her, like the perfume of the woods, the soft meadows under his feet.
His inherited man-conscience did not reprove him.
He did not think there was any sin, any unfaithfulness in it, for he did not love this girl.
He really believed that he did not wrong Anne or deprive her of anything to which she attached any importance.
He leaned again out of the window.
He looked up to the sky.
He would see it to-morrow above the woods....
Then he reached for his hat.
A
rare event with him, he longed to hear some gipsy music.
He wanted to be solitary, somewhere where the fiddle played for him alone.
He hesitated before Anne’s door.
Should he go in?
Perhaps she was still asleep....
His steps sounded in the sunshine room.
Anne jumped up.
If Thomas were to open the door she would throw herself into his arms ...
but the steps passed by.
She started to run after him, then stopped wearily before the threshold.
She would abase herself uselessly.
And as she stood there she remembered something.
A dream.
A desolated strange street.
One solitary person at the furthest end.
Thomas ...
and she runs after him, but the distance does not become less.
The street becomes longer.
Thomas seems always further and further away and she cannot reach him....
She thought of her girlhood, the time full of promises.
Was this to be their realization?
Would everything remain forever like this?
Would she and Thomas never come together again?
Live with each other and look at each other and remain strangers?
She shuddered as though she were cold.
Then she noticed that for a long time someone had been ringing the front door bell.
Who could it be?
The old friends came no more to her.
Thomas was taciturn with them too.
They may have thought it conceit and all stayed away.
The relations of the Illey family were avoided by Anne.
The voice of Bertha Bajmoczy stood between her and the descendants of the old landlords.
A knock at the door.
A lamp was burning in the corridor and the shape of a man appeared in the opening.
It was Adam Walter.
“After all this time....
” And Anne thought how wonderful it was that the old friend should come back just this day when she felt her life so poor and lonely.
Joy came to her heart for a moment.
It seemed to her that her youth, her girlhood, had returned to her, with everything that distance embellished.
Adam Walter was grave and serious like a man who has painful memories to bury in himself.
Yet his eyes followed Anne’s movements eagerly while she reached to light the lamp.
He longed and feared to see her face again.
“She has suffered since I have seen her,” thought Adam Walter, “and it has beautified her.
” Anne’s veiled voice and her look broke open in him a wound which he thought had long ago healed.
He too remembered his youth, when he went away from her all unsuspecting, when he worked, when he dreamed.
Then he heard that Anne had married and in the same instant he realized that he loved her.
He had loved her always.
She seemed strangely tall and slender to him.
The flame flared up.
“To be here again with you ...
it’s too good to be true.
” “You ought not to speak like that.
” Anne smiled her old, young smile, “or do you still say everything that passes through your mind?
Do you remember the Ferdinand Müllers?
And the new sign, the white head of Æsculapius?
How we laughed....
” “In those times everything was different,” said Walter dryly.
Anne looked at him.
“He too has become old.
How hard his looks are,” and the smile that had rejuvenated her vanished from her face.
And Walter’s voice became ironical.
“And I thought I would create like God, just like Him.
Then my opera failed, nobody wanted my sonatas.
Nobody ...
and now I am humbly thankful to become assistant professor in the National Academy of music.
” He laughed lifelessly.
“But perhaps it was bound to be like that.
When a man in his youth wants to become like God, he becomes at least an assistant professor in the end; who knows that if he had started with the ambition of becoming an assistant professor he would have ended by becoming nothing at all.
” Anne looked sadly down.
“So he too has failed to grasp what he reached for.
Does nobody grasp it?
” “Once upon a time we were all revolutionaries,” said Walter, “for is not youth a revolution in itself?
We are all borne to the executioner: one for a thought, the other for a dream, and ...
all of us for love.
It sounds mad, but it is so.
Man must die many deaths in himself to be able to live.
I was just the same as the others and those that are young to-day are as we were in old times.
In its unlimited conceit youth of every age believes that it has discovered the rising of the sun and all youth shouts vehemently that its sun will never set.
That is as it ought to be.
When the sun comes to set, the youth of another age believes the same thing.
Men drop out, but their faith remains in others, and in others again, and that is the thing that matters.
” It seemed to Anne, that Adam Walter, who once, when he was young, had guided her thoughts to freedom, now taught her the art of compromise.
Again Walter attempted to be ironical, but his voice failed him.
“Man is full of colours, brilliant colours, when he starts.
They all wear off.
Only grey remains.
The awful grey spreads and becomes greyer and greyer till it covers the man and his life.
” “Oh, Walter, how sad all this is....
” “To me it is sad no more.
I have got over it.
Don’t be sorry for me, please.
Even for the grey people there are still some lovely things in this world.
The grey ones see other people’s colours.
They alone can see them truly.
Since I have renounced creating myself, I enjoy peacefully, profoundly, other people’s creations.
Before, I was aggressive and impatient, now I love even Schumann and Schubert, and all those who have dreamed and who woke from their dreams.
” Anne sat with half-closed eyes, bent a little, and her pale hands were interlocked over her knee.
“Have I grieved you?
” asked Walter hesitatingly.
The woman shook her head.
“You have made me understand my own life....
” “So she is no happier than I am,” thought Walter, and for the moment he felt irrepressibly reconciled to his fate.
Then he was ashamed of the feeling.
He had no right to it.
Anne was not to blame for his state of mind.
She knew nothing of it.
“Do sing something....
” She looked at him with large, beaming eyes.
It was a long time since anybody had said this to her.
They began to talk of music.
And this changed them into their old selves; they were boy and girl again, just as on Sundays in the old days.
“Come again soon and bring your violin with you,” said Anne when they took leave of each other.
Then it struck her that neither of them had mentioned Thomas.
Adam Walter and Thomas Illey never became friends.
They met with courteous rigidity.
Adam Walter smiled disparagingly at Illey’s views, while Illey’s mocking gaze tried to call Anne’s attention to the musician’s ill-cut clothes and shapeless heavy boots.
It mattered little to Anne.
The piano stood mute no more in the sunshine room and a bright ray of light was cast on her life by the revival of music, which indifference and want of appreciation had silenced for so long.
Its resurrection was her salvation.
Her soul ceased to be strangled by the torture of enforced silence; it found relief and took flight on the wings of songs, attended, through many quiet evenings, by Walter’s soul cast into the music of his violin.
Christopher looked in occasionally.
He patted his old school-mate on the back and whistled softly to the music while he ran through Stock Exchange reports in the papers.
Soon after his uneven steps passed again through the corridor.
He could not find peace anywhere.
Calculations swarmed in his head.
They appeared, but before he was able to grasp them they scattered and vanished.
He had no idea if he was winning or losing and he dared not look at his accounts.
Money became dearer and dearer.
Banks restricted their credit.
Suspicious rumours from Vienna reached the Stock Exchange of Pest.
Quotations fluctuated and declined slowly, but he lacked the resolution to wind up his transactions.
He was still waiting, still buying.
He became intoxicated with the fascination of risks and blind hopes.
His nerves were in a constant state of tremulous tension.
The lust for gain became the torturing passion of his soul.
His grandfather had been the money’s conqueror, his father its guardian and he, it seemed, was to become its adventurer.
No matter, chance helped adventurers.
His nights became very long.
Restlessly, Christopher turned his head from one side to the other on his hot pillow.
He rose early.
He was no longer contented to send his agents on ’Change.
He wanted to see the confusion, hear the noise, feel the universal pulsation of money as evinced in the excitement of the crowd.
He rushed through the office.
Otto Füger had become manager with full powers.
He arranged the cover for speculations, he received and paid out money in the name of the firm.
Christopher had no time to see to anything.
In unbusinesslike handwriting he put his name to anything.
Then he rushed away, leaving the doors open behind him.
It was a lovely May morning.
At the Exchange in Dorothea Street brokers stood on the stairs and transacted their business, leaning against the balustrade.
Men stood in small groups in the acid, stuffy air of the cloak-room.
Subdued talk was heard here and there.
An old fat man with his hat perched on the back of his head, passed wheat between his fingers from one hand to the other.
Near the window a red-haired broker held some crushed maize in the palm of his hand.
He lifted it up, now and then, and at intervals pushed his tongue out between his yellow teeth.
Scattered grain crackled under people’s feet.
Doors banged in the big hall of the Stock Exchange.
The lesser fry was pushed back.
