She had not left the house for three days. And she realised, uneasily, that the rest of the household had noticed the fact that she was suddenly spending so much time at home, for in general it was very unusual for her to stay indoors in her own apartment for many hours on end, let alone whole days. Taking little interest in domestic matters, freed from petty economic anxieties by material independence, bored by her own company, she saw the apartment as little more than a place where she briefly rested. For preference she resorted to the streets, the theatre, the lively company at social gatherings, where something new was coming in from outside all the time. You could enjoy yourself without making any great effort there; you could find much to stimulate the slumbering senses. Irene’s cast of mind made her one of that elegant set of the Viennese bourgeoisie whose entire daily timetable seemed to consist, by some tacit agreement, in the constant meeting of all members of the same secret league at the same times of day to discuss their common interests, while it gradually elevated that meeting in order to observe others, that eternal drawing of comparisons, to the entire meaning of its existence. Once isolated and thrown on its own resources, a life so used to casual social intercourse loses any fixed point, the senses rebel without their usual diet of very mild but indispensable stimulation, and solitude degenerates into a kind of nervous self-animosity. Irene felt time weighing endlessly down on her, and without her usual occupations the passing hours lost all their point. She paced up and down the rooms of her apartment as if she were in a dungeon, both idle and agitated. The street and the society world that were her real life were barred to her. The blackmailer stood there with her threat, like the angel with the fiery sword.
Her children were the first to notice this change in her, particularly the elder child, her little boy, who expressed his surprise that Mama was at home so often with embarrassing clarity, while the servants whispered to each other and exchanged surmises with the governess. Irene tried in vain to devise all kinds of necessary reasons, some of them very ingenious, for her conspicuous presence, but in itself the artificial nature of her explanations showed her how years of indifference had made her unnecessary in her own family circle. Whenever she tried to do something actively useful she came up against the interests of others, who resisted her sudden attempts as an intrusion on their own customary rights. There was no place left for her; for lack of contact with it she herself had become a foreign body in the organism of her own household. She did not know what to do with herself and her time, and even her approaches to the children failed, for they suspected that her sudden lively interest in them meant the introduction of a new kind of discipline, and she felt herself blush in shame when, during one of her attempts to look after them, her seven-year-old son asked outright why she wasn’t going for so many walks these days. Wherever she tried to lend a helping hand she was disrupting an established order, and when she showed an interest she merely aroused suspicion. And she lacked the skill to make her constant presence less obtrusive by cleverly keeping in the background and staying quietly in a single room, with a single book or performing a single task. Her private fear, turning as all her strong feelings did to nervous strain, hunted her from one room to another. She jumped every time the telephone or the doorbell rang, and kept catching herself looking out into the street from behind net curtains, hungry for other people, or at least the sight of them, longing for freedom, and yet full of fear that suddenly, among all the passing faces, she might see the one face that followed her into her dreams staring up at her. She felt that her quiet existence was suddenly disintegrating, melting away, and this sense of helplessness was giving rise to a presentiment that her life was entirely ruined. These three days in the dungeon of her rooms at home seemed longer to her than all her eight years of marriage.
However, she and her husband had accepted an invitation for the evening of the third day weeks ago, and it was impossible for her to back out suddenly now without giving very good reasons. What was more, the invisible bars of horror that had built up around her life must be broken down some time if she was not to be utterly destroyed. She needed people around her, a couple of hours’ rest from her own company, from the suicidal loneliness of fear. Then again, where would she be better protected than in a strange house and surrounded by friends, where would she be safer from the invisible persecution dogging her footsteps? She shuddered just for a second, the brief second when she actually stepped out of the house, venturing into the street for the first time since that second encounter. The woman might be lying in wait anywhere out there. Instinctively, she took her husband’s arm, closed her eyes, and quickly walked the few steps from the pavement to the waiting motor car, but then, as she sat beside her husband while the car raced through the empty nocturnal streets, the weight fell from her mind, and as she climbed the steps up to the house they were visiting she knew she was safe. For a few hours she could be the woman she had been for many long years—carefree and happy. Indeed, she felt the intensified, conscious joy of a prisoner leaving the walls of the dungeon and returning to the light of day. There was a rampart against all persecution here, hatred could not come in, everyone here loved, respected and honoured her. She saw her friends, well-dressed people who spoke to her without any ulterior motive, who were bathed in the sparkling glow of the fires of cheerfulness, performing a round dance of enjoyment that, at long last, included her again. For now, as she came in, she felt from the glances turned on her by the other guests that she was beautiful, and she became yet more beautiful through being aware of their admiration after being deprived of it. How good it felt after all those days of silence, when she had felt the sharp ploughshare of that one idea cutting fruitlessly and repeatedly through her brain, while everything in her seemed to be sore and injured—oh, how good it was to hear flattering words again! They revived her like electric sparks crackling beneath her skin, rousing her blood. She stood and stared, something was vibrating restlessly inside her, trying to get out. And all of a sudden she knew it was her imprisoned laughter that wanted to be free. It popped out like a champagne cork, pealing in musical little coloraturas, she laughed and laughed, now and then feeling ashamed of her bacchanalian high spirits, but laughing again next moment. Electricity flashed from her relaxed nerves, all her senses were strong, healthy, stimulated. For the first time in days she ate with real appetite again, and she drank like a woman dying of thirst.
Her desiccated soul, yearning for human company, was absorbing all the life and enjoyment that it could. Music in the next room tempted her, moving far into her beneath her burning skin. The dancing began, and without knowing how she found herself in the middle of the milling throng. She danced as she had never danced in her life before. The circling eddies of the dance cast all her melancholy out of her, the rhythm infected her limbs, breathing ardent movement into her body. If the music stopped she felt that the silence was painful, the snake of restlessness darted its tongue at her quivering limbs, and she flung herself back into the eddies as if into a bath of cool, soothing water that bore her up. She had never been more than an average dancer before, she was too measured, too thoughtful, too cautious and firm in her movements, but this frenzy of liberated delight did away with all physical inhibitions. A steely band of bashful circumspection that usually held her wildest passions in check now broke apart, and she was out of control, restless, her mind blissfully melting away. She felt arms and hands around her, touching and disappearing again, she sensed the breath of spoken words, the tingling of laughter, music flickering in her blood, her whole body was tense, so tense that the clothes on her back were burning, and she would have liked to tear them all off spontaneously, so that she could dance naked and sense this intoxicating frenzy even deeper inside her.
“Irene, what’s the matter?” She turned around, swaying, laughter in her eyes, still heated from the embrace of her dancing partner. Her husband’s cold, hard look of astonishment struck her to the heart. She was alarmed. Had she danced too wildly? Had her frenzy given anyth
ing away?
“What … what do you mean, Fritz?” she stammered, surprised by his suddenly piercing gaze, It seemed to be forcing its way further and further into her, and now she felt it deep inside, close to her heart. She could have cried out aloud beneath that searching, determined gaze.
“How very strange,” he murmured at last. There was a note of sombre amazement in his voice. She dared not ask what he meant. But a shudder ran through her when, as he turned away without another word, she saw his shoulders, broad, wide, strong, vigorous, attracting her gaze to the nape of his neck, which was hard as iron. Like a murderer’s, the thought flashed through her mind, a crazy thought, instantly dismissed. Only now, as if she were seeing her own husband for the first time, did she feel with horror that he was powerful and dangerous.
The music began to play again. A gentleman came up to her, and automatically she took his arm. But now everything about her seemed weighty, and the bright melody no longer brought movement into her stiff limbs. A dull heaviness moved down from her heart towards her feet, every step she took hurt. She had to ask her partner to excuse her. As she stepped back she instinctively looked to see if her husband was near, and jumped in alarm. He was standing directly behind her, as if waiting for her, and once again his penetrating eyes met hers. What did he want? What did he know? She instinctively clutched her dress together at the neck, as if her breasts were bare and she must shield them from him. His silence was as persistent as his gaze.
“Shall we leave now?” she asked anxiously.
“Yes.” His voice sounded harsh and unfriendly. He went ahead. Once again she was looking at the broad, menacing back of his neck. Someone put her fur around her shoulders, but she still felt freezing cold. They drove home in silence, sitting side-by-side.
That night she had an oppressive dream. Some kind of strange, loud music was playing, she saw a brightly lit, high-ceilinged hall, she went in. A crowd of people and many bright colours were mingled in movement. Then a young man whose identity she thought she knew, although she could not entirely place him, made his way to her. He took her arm, and she danced with him. She felt well, she was soft and yielding. A great wave of music bore her up, so that she no longer felt the floor beneath her feet, and they danced through many halls with golden chandeliers high up in the roof, radiating little flames like stars, while mirrors on wall after wall reflected her own smile again and again to infinity. The dancing grew wilder and wilder, the music more and more urgent. She realised that the young man was pressing closer to her, his hand digging into her bare arm, making her groan with painful pleasure, and now, as her eyes plunged deep into his, she did think she knew him. She thought he was an actor whom she had adored from afar when she was a little girl. Delighted, she was just about to speak his name, but he silenced her soft cry with an ardent kiss. And so, their lips merged together, the two of them burning like a single body in each other’s embrace, they flew through the halls as if borne up on a blissful wind. The walls streamed past, she was no longer conscious of the hovering vault of the ceiling or of the hour, she felt amazingly weightless, all her limbs relaxed. And then, suddenly, someone touched her on the shoulder. She stopped, and the music stopped at the same time, the lights went out, the dark walls moved in on her, and her dancing partner had disappeared. “Give him back, you thief!” shouted that terrible woman, for it was she, making the walls ring with the sound, and she closed ice-cold fingers around Irene’s wrist. She resisted, hearing herself cry out with a mad shriek of horror, and the two of them wrestled, but the other woman was stronger. She tore off Irene’s pearl necklace, and half her dress with it, leaving her breasts bare and her arms exposed beneath the rags now hanging off her. All of a sudden there were other people around them again, streaming in from all the other halls on a rising tide of noise, staring with derision at her as she stood there half-naked, while the woman screeched: “She stole my beau, she did, that floozie, that adulteress!”
She didn’t know where to hide or which way to look, for the people were crowding in closer and closer, women looking at her with inquisitive eyes, hissing at her, grasping at her naked body, and now that her reeling gaze looked around for help she suddenly saw her husband standing motionless in the dark frame of the doorway, his right hand concealed behind his back. She screamed and ran away from him, ran through room after room, and the crowd, greedy for sensation, raced along after her. She felt more and more of her dress slip off, she could hardly clutch at it now. Then a door swung open ahead of her, eagerly she rushed down the stairs to save herself, but the terrible woman was waiting at the bottom of the staircase in her woollen skirt, with her claw-like hands outstretched. Irene swerved aside and ran out into the open air, but the other woman came after her, and so they both chased through the night down long, silent streets, and the street lights, grinning, bent down to greet them. She could hear the woman’s wooden clogs clattering along behind her, but whenever she reached a street corner the woman was there already, leaping out at her, and it was the same again at the next corner, she lay in wait beyond all the houses both to right and to left, always there, terrifyingly multiplied. There was no overtaking her, she always went on ahead and was there first, reaching out for Irene, who felt her knees begin to fail her. At last she saw the house where she lived and raced up to it, but as she wrenched the door open there stood her husband with a knife in his hand, his piercing gaze bent on her. “Where have you been?” he asked in sombre tones. “Nowhere,” she heard herself say, and already she heard the woman’s shrill laughter at her side. “I seen it! I seen it all!” screeched the grinning woman, who was suddenly there with her, laughing like a lunatic. And her husband raised the knife.
“Help!” she cried out. “Help!”
She was staring up, and her horrified eyes met her husband’s. What … what was all this? She was in her own room, and the ceiling lamp was on, casting a pale light. She was at home in her bed, she had only been dreaming. But why was her husband sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at her as if she were an invalid? Who had put the light on, why was he sitting there so rigid and motionless, staring at her so gravely? A shiver of horror ran through her once, and then again. Instinctively, she looked at his hand. No, there was no knife in it. Slowly, the drowsiness of sleep wore off, and so did the images it had brought like glaring flashes of lightning. She must have been dreaming, she must have called out in her dream and woken him. But why was he looking at her with such a serious, penetrating, implacably grave expression?
She tried to smile. “What … what is it? Why are you looking at me like that? I think I’ve been having a nightmare.”
“Yes, you called out in a loud voice. I could hear it in the other room.”
What did I call out, what did I give away, she thought, trembling, what does he know? She hardly dared to look up at him again. But he was gazing gravely down at her with a strange composure.
“What is it, Irene? There’s something the matter with you. You’ve been so different for the last few days, as if you had a fever, nervous, distracted, and now you cry out for help in your sleep.”
She tried to smile again. “No,” he persisted. “You mustn’t keep anything from me. Is there something on your mind, is anything troubling you? The whole household has noticed how you’ve changed. You ought to trust me, Irene.”
He moved a little closer to her, and she felt his fingers on her bare arm, caressing it. There was a strange light in his eyes. She was overcome by a longing to cast herself on his firm body, cling to him, confess everything and never let him go until he had forgiven her now, this very moment, now that he had seen her suffering.
But the pale light was shining down from the ceiling, illuminating her face, and she was ashamed. She felt afraid to say anything.
“Don’t worry, Fritz.” She tried to smile again, although she was still shivering all the way down to her bare toes. “I’m only feeling a little nervous strain. It will pass off.”
The hand holding hers
was quickly withdrawn. She felt afraid, now that she looked at him, pale in the glassy light, his forehead clouded by the shadow of dark thoughts. Slowly, he stood up.
“I don’t know why, but these last few days I’ve felt as if you had something to tell me. Something that concerns only you and me. We are alone now, Irene.”
She lay there motionless, as if hypnotised by that grave, veiled glance. How good, she felt, everything could be now, she had only to say two words, two little words—forgive me. And he wouldn’t ask what for. But why was the light on, that forthright, bold, light listening to them? She felt she could have said it in the dark, but in the light her strength failed her.
“So there’s nothing, really nothing that you want to tell me?”
It was a terrible temptation! How soft his voice was! She had never heard him speak like that before. But the light hanging from the ceiling, that yellow, avid light!
She shook herself. “What can you be thinking of?” she laughed, and was seized by alarm again at hearing her own shrill tone of voice. “If I’m not sleeping well, does that mean I’m keeping secrets from you? Maybe even having some kind of adventure?”
Once more she shivered. How false, how insincere those words sounded. She was horrified by herself, right to the marrow of her bones, and instinctively she looked away from him.
“Well—good night, then.” He spoke curtly now, in an entirely different, sharp voice. It sounded like a threat, or black and dangerous mockery.