The spring was early that year. Through the windows of the renaissance hall of the Hill villa the May sunshine flowed calm and warm as in June. But Hedvig, who was walking to and fro, had still retained her winter complexion. Yes, the tragic beauty of her face was deathly pale as she took a few steps to and fro like a prisoner measuring his cell. She seemed slimmer than ever and was still dressed in black. Like a dark shadow she glided to and fro, to and fro, across the wine-red sun-bespattered carpet. Each time Hedvig came opposite to the little cupboard on the wall where the telephone was concealed, she stopped a moment with helplessly hanging hands and a restless, anxious expression. By and by she approached the spot more and more frequently and it seemed as if an irresistible force drew her to the telephone. Then she stretched out her hand to lift the receiver. But then a door banged in the region of the kitchen and at once she withdrew her hand as if it had been burnt, and she resumed her restless pacing. Then everything was quiet again and Hedvig was again at the telephone. In a low unsteady voice she asked for a number. After which her voice with a tremendous effort rose and became tense, haughty, commanding:
“May I speak to Mr. Levy?”
But the tension died away in a disappointed, dissatisfied tone,
“I see, not in yet....”
346Hedvig resumed her cell-walking. She mumbled to herself and looked if possible even paler than before. Incessantly she looked at the clock in despair that the minutes passed so slowly through the silent and sunny room.
For the second time Hedvig was drawn to the telephone. Now at last he had come to the office. The cool relief suddenly made her voice indifferent, hard, businesslike:
“Good-morning! It is Mrs. Hill speaking. I only wanted to remind you of those mortgages that were to be attended to ... those in....”
Levy’s voice answered over the ’phone, stern and assured, with an imperceptible note of satisfaction:
“Yes, of course, the mortgages.... Yes, that will be all right.... I will come out to dinner, if I may, then we can talk it over....”
It was not the first time Levy had invited himself to dinner at Hill villa. Probably in the correct surmise that his client would never be able to make up her mind to do it.
Hedvig put the receiver down with a shrug of the shoulders, a wretched false little shrug. She resumed her walking. You could see how she tried to convince herself that she was quite cool and indifferent now that her anxiety lest he should forget the mortgages was over.
Her steps halted suddenly in front of one of the patches of sunlight on the carpet. It looked as if she dared not venture out on that red sea of light. It looked as if the spring sun, which flooded the large silent room in ever greater volume, had dazzled and paralysed her.
Good God! What was she to do before dinner? How was she to occupy herself the whole of this long pitiless radiant spring day!
She found no way out but the usual one—to fly to the shadows. She rang the bell and ordered her car.
“Shan’t we begin with the open car soon, Madam?” said Ohlesson, the chauffeur.
347“No!”
So the big black covered car ran out to the cemetery. And then Hedvig sat there on the seat by Percy’s grave, from which she had not allowed the dry withered funeral wreaths to be removed. Erect, motionless she sat under her black sunshade, whilst all around the light May green sparkled and swayed in the broad stream of sunlight. The sun appropriated even Hedvig’s black silk cloak and made it live and shimmer with a thousand colours. But her face was only lit up by a faint reflection from below, from the marble of the tomb.
It was more than a year and a half since Percy had died, but lately Hedvig had begun to take refuge here again. Here she fought her way back to the life of shadows, a thin life, a continuation of their life in the sanatorium. Not that she was able to forget even here on the seat in the cemetery all that consumed her:—money, business and everything connected with it. No, but she thought of it with less anxiety. Rather with a solemn and pious feeling that it was her duty to watch over what her dear Percy had left behind....
There was something strange about Percy Hill. He had been a poor invalid, and yet his character had been so free from any mean fears that even long after his death his memory acted as a sedative. As Hedvig sat there her heart filled with quiet gratitude that she had been given the joy of sacrificing some years of her life to him. She no longer suffered for having lied to him and cheated him in his last wish. She had only been the nurse who prevented her poor patient from injuring himself. Her conscience closed its eyes to the circumstances attending her patient’s death.
No, there was no danger in sitting there whispering to her memory, that sentimental liar. Her egoism was not frightened of the past, but of the future.
What a challenge to all the powers of the spirit, this 348feeble, mute, half-concealing lie in the midst of the clear sunshine! It seemed as if the light in sudden anger had surged around her with increased intensity; had sent a fresh wave of burning restlessness through her body. She rose and seemed to grope after the receding shadows. Then with dazzled, burning eyes she staggered along the cemetery path. Outside the gate her motor hummed, impatient to rush her back to all that waited for her ... business ... Levy ... the future...!
“I won’t change,” Hedvig thought in the car. She found there was something safe, reassuring, in the fact that she did not intend to put on different clothes. But when she came home she did so all the same. And she sat long before the mirror. And then she stood in the window looking down the road.
At last there came a car and Levy got out.
“Taxi,” thought Hedvig, as if she could blunt the point of a threat with that prosaic reflection. Levy ran quickly up the stairs. “Jew,” she thought, as if by doing so she had kept something at bay. But all the same she had to force herself to walk slowly, really slowly, out into the hall to receive her guest.
Levy had brought some yellow roses.
“If there were black roses, I should give you them instead,” he said.
Hedvig forgot the roses on a table in the hall on purpose. She had a sensation that he flushed up for a moment beneath his even pallor.
There were primroses and lilac on the dining-table.
“Those flowers don’t suit you,” he said with a quick bitter smile. Then he turned to the maid who was serving: “Take away those flowers and fetch my roses out of the hall!”
He seemed quite at home.
Then Levy threw himself into business and made good progress from the start.
349Levy had made money live for Hedvig, too much so! At first she had regarded her large fortune as a safe protection against all the demands and dangers of life. She sat huddled up in the middle of her gold heap where nothing could reach her. But Levy had thrown out his hands:
“Good God, what money! What a heavy shapeless mass! What an old, moss-grown stump of a fortune! For twenty years it has had to take care of itself. For twenty years not a single experienced hand has touched it. It looks like a fund for widows and orphans.”
“You mean that the investments are safe as a rock,” mumbled Hedvig. “But surely that is a good thing!”
“Yes, but the interest, Mrs. Hill, the interest! You don’t get much more than three and a half per cent. and you could get six. You allow a hundred thousand a year to run through your fingers. That is to make yourself a laughing stock to God and man. As an expert I can’t bear to see such an absurdity. Allow me to make some dispositions for you. You can submit them for the approval of your brothers.”
Hedvig worried and pondered long before she said yes. But the hundred thousand were stronger than her fears. And thus Levy had lured her into his world, the money-world. She began by questioning him on all occasions in a woman’s way, ignorantly, persistently, suspiciously. And he would reply. He answered not only patiently but willingly, quickly, ardently, enthusiastically. He explained the whole economic mechanism of credits, bills, mortgages, debentures, shares. The whole of this finely balanced system of suspicion and confidence made a deep impression on Hedvig. To her over-cautious spirit it seemed like balancing on the edge of the abyss. His quick purposeful assurance seemed to her something supernatural, almost creepy. But she had to hear more and more. Oh, it was deliciously exciting to hear Levy talk of money. It was 350only now she began to grasp what money was. And she felt as if she were in a swing, feeling giddy at the fact of owning so much.
Yes, Levy’s interest became more and more eager. Hedvig had already been lured from her gold-heap where she had enjoyed the twilight. Her money was no longer like a wall protecting her against the world. No, it was instead a medium in which she moved about. It formed the thousand connections, the tentacles and nerves thanks to which she at once felt what was happening in the town, in the country, in Europe, in the whole world.
Levy tore Hedvig with him half way into life, at least into that kind of life which consists of movement and business. He showed to her confined and numbed egoism another kind of egoism that was world-embracing, intensely awake and technically brilliant. He was the personification of that egoism. It was something different from Percy’s laissez-aller and cool, submissive irony. It was wheels that rolled. It was diamond cut diamond. It was power, destiny. Hedvig sometimes became quite frightened at his passionate discourse, frightened as if she had come out into the strong daylight without a dark corner to which to retreat. And she no longer had her money to protect her. It had become his confederate, it betrayed her to him, it was in love with him. Hedvig had no way out but to assume a forced reserve, a sudden cold, and sheer rudeness. But that had no effect on him at all. He was insensitive to everything which was not logic. Then in her anxiety she crept behind her dead husband, draped herself in crêpe, fled to the shadows and became just piety and memory. That was the only thing that hitherto could damp Levy’s eagerness. The world-embracing, hot and cold romance of money shrank up violently and he became gradually colder and colder, more formal and more ironical, till at last he said good-bye with a bow that was really a shrug of the shoulders.
351So today Mrs. Hedvig had to assume her crêpe.
During the soup Levy raised the question of the mortgage. That was a mere nothing, a bagatelle. They would buy the house by auction, no doubt about that. It would certainly be good business, because the house was, as it happened, valued much too high. Other people are frightened of houses that are assessed too high. But we are not, Mrs. Hill. For we know of a certain little insurance company that will take the house with open arms. They need it on their books. A house that is bought for 200,000 but can be taken up at 300,000 improves the position at once by 100,000—not for the shareholders but for the Board of Directors.
Levy’s face suddenly became contemptuous and almost offended. This topic seemed to upset him. It was not worthy of the occasion or of his feelings:
“Well, that’s that,” he exclaimed. “I am tired of the house property swindle. That’s for inferior people, philistines and small fry. I really can’t understand your brother Peter’s taste. I admit that he has a brutal sort of natural business shrewdness, but he lives like an old-fashioned craftsman amidst modern improvements. Before 1905 we believed that business consisted in cheating each other and the State. Yes, I believed it too. But that is now old-fashioned, hopelessly old-fashioned. Nowadays we have at last grasped the fact that the really lucrative business is the positive one in which money really makes a contribution.... That is to say shares, industrial shares! We live in the age of a most tremendous industrial boom. The whole world is becoming industrialised. You must be blind not to see in which direction the royal road of capital leads. Money and wheels are related. Shares, industrial shares! Invest your money in forests, waterfalls and iron mines! Send it to the saw mills, the harbours and the ammunition works!”
Here Levy swallowed the third glass of mineral water 352and broke out into a vehement flood of share quotations and statistics of exports. And all the time he stared at Hedvig with an expression that was at once appealing, passionate, embittered and sceptical. He wanted to dazzle her, make her enthusiastic, but there was something spasmodic and almost despairing in his efforts. There was not a spark of real and innocent joy in the present moment.
Did he see through her, this woman before him, or did he suffer from the fact that the passionate pulses of his heart were only capable of stirring the ashes of some dry calculations?
Hedvig stared at the table-cloth. She felt his glance on every point of her face and neck. His harsh, quick voice at the same time opened up the whole world for her and spun her into a net of supple meshes. It was already as if she could not move hands or feet. He seemed to her to come closer, closer. She intermittently felt hot and cold in this strange heat with cold currents that streamed out from his being. Quickly, relentlessly the terror rose in her, the irresistible terror of seeing herself cut off from any possibility of escape, overpowered.
She suddenly got up from coffee:
“Shall we not do the round of the pictures today?” she said. “It is the first time it has been light enough after dinner.”
The round of the pictures was an invention of Hedvig’s fear. She felt safer amongst Percy’s pictures.
Levy rose slowly and offered Hedvig his arm. The tension in his face broke down. He was evidently not pleased to have to leave his own special field of attack and to have to resort to a slow roundabout strategy in order to fight with a dead man.
And yet Levy could certainly talk of art, in case of need. He was a connoisseur in his own way and had a great deal to say not only of market values but also of theories and technique. There were various things here that he 353could tell some malicious stories about, various things he was prepared at once to slaughter with his criticism, but also some things he had to admire. But it was a jealous, inarticulate admiration. Levy bit his lip and kept silent. To come up against the dead husband all the time made him, Jacob Levy, barrister, embarrassed and uncertain of himself. He knew much, but not how to battle with a shadow.
Hedvig found time to breathe. And she at once started the game of “Chinese shades.” It was really a game in her own style, silent, stealthy, and unconsciously false. She had had many and long rehearsals of it out there by the grave. Every accent of her voice was reminiscent of crêpe. Solemnly she advanced through the rooms which the evening light was filling with its first pure tones of gold. She stopped with head inclined before one picture after the other. In every gesture, in every word, she simulated admiration for her dead husband’s fine understanding of art and for the modest, unselfish enthusiasm that never failed in spite of exhaustion and suffering.
A good dose of almost religious piety was administered to Levy. But he evidently did not like the medicine. His pallor was tinged with green. His lips curved into an imperceptible, nervous grimace. But he had to swallow it all the same. It was only when they had come out into the hall among the modern things that he suddenly plucked up his courage again amidst these new, more reckless and more highly coloured surroundings. With a solemnity that was more austere than ever—perhaps because it required more effort—Hedvig halted before an animal painting, signed by a not unknown French artist. The picture represented two tigers, as innocently striped as if they had been painted by a child of five. They were playing in a jungle which seemed to consist of a ragged bouquet of dried grass.
Then Levy could keep silent no longer: “I know a 354little story about that master,” he exclaimed eagerly. “Two Parisian Jewish dealers had a good lunch together and then went down to the Salon des Indépendants. And there one of the Jews made a bet with the other that inside a year he would take up and make famous any one of the exhibitors. And the other Jew walked about a long time searching till he found the most hopeless and impossible painter in the whole gigantic exhibition. He chose this painter. But the other was not frightened. He quickly created for the tiger painter a new school of art, which was dubbed ‘na?vism’ and in one year he became, as a matter of fact, world-famous. There you see the power of advertisement and of the Jewish genius.”
Of course Hedvig in her inmost heart understood Levy much better than the picture. But we are all most sensitive about our lies. And she also grew angry because she felt again that she was losing her supremacy and began to feel unsafe. That’s why she regarded his blasphemous story as an insult to Percy’s memory.
“An artist may be great even though he has been run by an unscrupulous Jew,” she mumbled. “This picture was, as a matter of fact, bought before the Jews made it expensive. And it was the general opinion amongst my husband’s friends that it was a real find.”
Hedvig began an eager defence of the striped tigers and the ragged dried grass. She used expressions that she had heard on Percy’s lips during the art discussions down in Montparnasse and from the time when he tried in vain to convince her of the new ideals. She stole his phrases, his catchwords, his characteristic abbreviations, his little jokes and even his trick of bending his head on one side and looking through half-closed eyes.
So the game of “Chinese shades” was followed by a plundering of the dead. All that she could lay hands on was now used as a weapon against the insistent Levy. Truly, human beings play strange games with each other.
355Levy suddenly looked very tired. There was something pathetic about his raised shoulders. He had one of his fits of inevitable truth-telling. But his quick, harsh voice was unsteady:
“Why do you lie to me, Hedvig?” he mumbled. “You were an enemy to all art whilst your husband was alive. Yes, I know it. And you are still to this day indifferent to all this. And all the same you let loose these striped tigers on me. Why can you never be sincere, Hedvig? Why are you so afraid that you must always lie?”
Hedvig froze up and was silent. Every nerve in her was chilled. Never had anyone dared to come so near to her. It seemed as if this man had dared to see more of her than she herself had seen. She kept absolutely motionless like an animal shamming death to escape a danger. And still,—did she not feel far, far within a sort of wild relief, something of the same kind as she had felt once when hearing Peter’s cynicisms, though deeper, finer....
Levy stretched out his hand:
“Good-night! I am a little tired. I must go now. I will look after your mortgage. Good-bye—till next time!”
And then he was gone.
Hedvig went to bed, though it was still daylight. She was accustomed to go to bed immediately after his visits. She longed to lie motionless on her back and think.
Hedvig undressed slowly and carefully. She still felt her nerves trembling. For a moment she stood naked before the big mirror built into the wall. Her body was wonderfully well preserved. In its pale, even whiteness, its slim roundness, it seemed to her wonderfully young, immensely younger than she herself. And still it made her shudder. It might betray her to love, at any moment it might betray her to love.... And some day it would relentlessly deliver her to death. Yes, Hedvig belonged to those in whom nakedness always awakens thoughts of death. If she had lived some hundred years earlier her fear would 356have driven her to self-torture. Then she would have scourged and martyred her body in order to blunt the point of death.
She quickly drew the blinds and crept beneath the bedcover. She slept in Percy’s old bedroom, that solemn debauch in the architecture of the ’nineties which had once aroused her frightened amusement when she came there as a nurse. The bed still resembled a gigantic catafalque, in the vault of the alcove, the zodiacal signs gleamed and in the twilight on the opposite wall the blood dripped from Saint Sebastian’s naked sides....
Hedvig knew that she had a long sleepless night in front of her. With her eyes half-closed and her hands stretched by her sides, she went slowly and carefully through all that had passed between her and Levy. In the silence she weighed his gestures, his looks, his tones and his actions. There was something in them that she revelled in, slowly sipping, drop by drop, like a frightened drinker. It was a lonely, selfish joy, separated from the world by walls of darkness and silence.
But by and by she grew more restless, sighed, and turned over beneath the bedclothes. She felt that she was approaching a thought that always recurred with terrible regularity during her nightly meditations. Levy was her lawyer? Why did he not charge her anything? She had asked once long ago what she owed for the winding-up, but she had received an evasive answer. Since then they had not discussed that point. Did he not want to accept anything? He might have asked for a very large sum. She could not help enjoying the thought of having perhaps escaped it. But then came the frightened after-thought: Why does he not want anything? Of course because it imposes an obligation, because he wants you to become his. He may ask you to be his wife any day.
Levy was no longer a harmless, gently stimulating, caressing shadow. He stood there by the side of her bed 357terribly alive and with pale face and harsh, passionate voice, hotly demanding his rights. And behind him roared the whole traffic of the vast opening world. She had to answer yes or no. She knew she could not escape that moment. Yes or no. Torn between jubilation and agony she writhed in the darkness. She could not quite set aside her passion. Her egoism trembled to the very roots. She dreamt frightened dreams of being permitted at last to bare herself, give herself up, be freed from herself, to fling all her misery into the flames of love.
But in the midst of her excitement she suddenly became cold as ice. Horribly clear a voice sounded inside her: “Supposing he only wants your money!”
Then suspicion, and anxious greed rushed over her with a thousand reasons. She tormented herself systematically with her sister’s and brothers’ shrugs of shoulders, sarcasms and covert warnings. Levy’s sharpness, his genius for business, his legal acumen, all that she had profited by in him seemed now to bear witness against him. “Yes, it is my money he wants,” she mumbled, “of course it is my money.” And now she forgot his looks, his accents and the unsteadiness of his voice. And the memory of her own white body in the mirror could no longer warm her with a sin............