Laughter in the Dark (14 page)

“Margot, enough! You must understand … Where’s my lighter? Where’s my lighter? Where’s my lighter? He’s waiting for me.”

“They’re fooling you. I won’t let you go.”

“They’re waiting for me,” Albinus stammered out with wide-open eyes.

“If you dare—”

Paul was standing in the hall, in the same posture, prodding the floor with his stick. Rex produced a tiny enamel box. From the drawing room came the blare of excited voices. Rex offered Paul some cough-drops. Paul pushed back with his
elbow without looking and spilled the sweets. Rex laughed. Again—that outburst of voices.

“Ghastly,” murmured Paul and walked out. With his cheeks quivering, he hurried downstairs.

“Well?” asked Fräulein in a whisper when he got back.

“No, he’s not coming,” answered Paul. He covered his eyes with his hand for a moment, cleared his throat, and, as before, tiptoed into the nursery.

Nothing had changed there. Softly, rhythmically, Irma was tossing her head to and fro on the pillow. Her half-opened eyes were dim; every now and then a hiccough shook her. Elisabeth smoothed the bedclothes: a mechanical gesture devoid of sense. A spoon fell off the table, and its delicate jingle lingered for a long time in the ears of those in the room. The hospital nurse counted the pulse-beats, blinked, and cautiously, as though afraid of hurting it, put back the little hand on the coverlet.

“She’s thirsty, perhaps?” whispered Elisabeth.

The nurse shook her head. Someone in the room coughed very softly. Irma tossed about; then she raised one slight knee under the bedclothes and presently stretched it out again very slowly.

A door creaked, Fräulein came in and said something in Paul’s ear. Paul nodded and she
went out. Presently the door creaked again; but Elisabeth did not turn her head …

The man who had entered halted a couple of feet from the bed. He could only dimly discern his wife’s fair hair and shawl, but with agonizing distinctness he saw Irma’s face—her small, black nostrils and the yellowish gloss of her rounded forehead. He stood like this for a long time, then he opened his mouth very wide and somebody (a distant cousin of his) seized him under the armpits from behind.

He found himself sitting in Paul’s study. On the divan in the corner two ladies, whose names he could not remember, were seated, talking in low tones; he had a queer feeling that if he remembered, everything would be right again. Huddled in an armchair, Irma’s Fräulein was sobbing. A dignified old gentleman with a great, bald brow was standing at the window smoking, and every now and then lifting himself from heel to toe. On the table, a glass bowl with oranges gleamed.

“Why didn’t they send for me before?” muttered Albinus, raising his eyebrows, without addressing anybody in particular. He frowned, shook his head and cracked his finger-joints. Silence. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. Lampert came in from the nursery.

“Well?” asked Albinus hoarsely.

Lampert turned to the dignified old gentleman, who shrugged his shoulders slightly and followed him into the sickroom.

A long time elapsed. The windows were quite dark; nobody had troubled to draw the curtains. Albinus took an orange and began peeling it slowly. Outside, snow was falling, and only muffled noises rose from the street. From time to time a tinkling sound came from the central heating apparatus. Down in the street someone whistled four notes
(Siegfried);
and then all was silent again. Albinus slowly ate the orange. It was very sour. Suddenly Paul came into the room, and without looking at anyone uttered a single short word.

In the nursery, Albinus saw his wife’s back, as she bent, motionless and intent, over the bed, still holding, it seemed, a ghostly glass in her hand. The hospital nurse put her arm round her shoulders and led her into dimness. Albinus walked up to the bed. For a moment he had a vague glimpse of a little dead face and of a short pale lip with bared front teeth—and one little milk-tooth was missing. Then all became misty before his eyes. He turned round and very carefully, trying not to jostle against anybody or anything, went out. The front-door below was locked.
But as he stood there, a painted lady in a Spanish shawl came down, opened it and let in a snow-covered man. Albinus looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Had he really been there five hours?

He walked along the white, soft, crunching pavement, and still could not quite believe what had happened. In his mind’s eye he pictured Irma with surprising vividness, scrambling onto Paul’s knees or patting a light ball against the wall with her hands; but the taxis hooted as if nothing had happened, the snow glittered Christmas-like under the lamps, the sky was black, and only in the distance, beyond the dark mass of roofs, in the direction of the Gedächtniskirche, where the great picture-palaces were, did the blackness melt to a warm brownish blush. All at once he remembered the names of the two ladies on the divan: Blanche and Rosa von Nacht.

At length he reached home. Margot was lying supine, smoking lustily. Albinus was vaguely aware of having quarreled with her hideously, but that did not matter now. She followed his movements in silence, as he quietly walked up and down the room and wiped his face, which was wet from the snow. All she felt now was delicious content. Rex had left a short time before, well-contented too.

P
ERHAPS
for the first time in the course of the year he had spent with Margot, Albinus was perfectly conscious of the thin, slimy layer of turpitude which had settled on his life. Now, with dazzling distinctness, fate seemed to be urging him to come to his senses; he heard her thunderous summons; he realized what a rare opportunity was being offered him to raise his life to its former level; and he knew, with the lucidity of grief, that if he returned to his wife now, the reconciliation, which under ordinary circumstances would have been impossible, would come about almost of itself.

Certain recollections of that night gave him no peace: he remembered how Paul had suddenly glanced at him with a moist imploring look, and then, turning away, had squeezed his arm slightly. He remembered how, in the mirror, he had had a fleeting glimpse of his wife’s eyes, in which there
had been a heart-rending expression—pitiful, hunted—but still akin to a smile.

He pondered over all this with deep emotion. Yes—if he were to go to his little girl’s funeral, he would stay with his wife forever.

He rang up Paul and the maid told him the place and hour of the burial. Next morning he rose, while Margot was still asleep, and ordered the servant to get him his black coat and top hat. After he had hastily swallowed some coffee, he went into Irma’s former nursery—where a long table, with a green net across it, now stood; listlessly he took up a small celluloid ball and let it bounce, but instead of thinking of his child he saw another figure, a graceful, lively, wanton girl, laughing, leaning over the table, one heel raised, as she thrust out her ping-pong bat.

It was time to start. In a few minutes he would be holding Elisabeth under the elbow, in front of an open grave. He threw the little ball on the table and went quickly into the bedroom, in order to see Margot asleep for the last time. And, as he stood by the bed and feasted his eyes on that childish face, with the soft pink lips and flushed cheeks, Albinus remembered their first night together and thought with horror of his future by the side of his pale, faded wife. This future seemed to him like one of those long, dim, dusty
passages where one finds a nailed-up box—or an empty perambulator.

With an effort, he turned his eyes away from the sleeping girl, nervously bit his thumbnail and walked to the window. It was thawing. Bright motorcars were splashing their way through the puddles; at the corner a ragged rapscallion was selling violets; an adventurous Alsatian was insistently following a tiny Pekinese, which snarled, turned and slithered at the end of its leash; a great brilliant slice of the rapid blue sky was mirrored in a glass pane which a bare-armed servant girl was washing vigorously.

“Why are you up so early? Where are you going?” asked Margot in a drawling voice broken by a yawn.

“Nowhere,” he said, without turning round.

“D
ON’T
be so depressed, woggy,” she said to him a fortnight later. “I know that it’s all very sad, but they’ve grown to be almost strangers to you; you feel that yourself, don’t you? And of course, they turned the little girl against you. Believe me, I do quite enter into your feelings, although if I could have a child, I’d rather have a boy.”

“You’re a child yourself,” said Albinus, stroking her hair.

“Today of all days we must be in good spirits,” continued Margot. “Today of all days! It’s the beginning of my career. I’ll be famous.”

“Why yes, I had forgotten. When is it? Really today?”

Rex sauntered in. Of late, he had been with them every day, and Albinus had poured out his heart to him on several occasions and told him all that he could not say to Margot. Rex listened
so kindly, made such sensible comments and was so sympathetic that the shortness of their acquaintance seemed to Albinus a mere accident in no way connected with the inner, spiritual time during which their friendship had developed and matured.

“One can’t build up one’s life on the quick-sands of misfortune,” Rex had said to him. “That is a sin against life. I once had a friend who was a sculptor and whose unerring appreciation of form was almost uncanny. Then, all of a sudden, out of pity he married an ugly, elderly hunchback. I don’t know exactly what happened, but one day, soon after their marriage, they packed two little suitcases, one for each, and went on foot to the nearest lunatic asylum. In my opinion, an artist must let himself be guided solely by his sense of beauty: that will never deceive him.”

“Death,” he had said on another occasion, “seems to be merely a bad habit, which nature is at present powerless to overcome. I once had a dear friend—a beautiful boy full of life, with the face of an angel and the muscles of a panther. He cut himself while opening a tin of preserved peaches—you know, the large, soft, slippery kind that plap in the mouth and slither down. He died a few days later of blood poisoning. Fatuous, isn’t it? And yet … yes, it is strange, but true, that,
viewed as a work of art, the shape of his life would not have been so perfect had he been left to grow old. Death often is the point of life’s joke.”

On such occasions Rex could talk endlessly, indefatigably, inventing stories about non-existent friends and propounding reflections not too profound for the mind of his listener and couched in a sham-brilliant form. His culture was patchy, but his mind shrewd and penetrating, and his itch to make fools of his fellow men amounted almost to genius. Perhaps the only real thing about him was his innate conviction that everything that had ever been created in the domain of art, science or sentiment, was only a more or less clever trick. No matter how important the subject under discussion, he could always find something witty or trite to say about it, supplying exactly what his listener’s mind or mood demanded, though, at the same time, he could be impossibly rude and overbearing when his interlocutor annoyed him. Even when he was talking quite seriously about a book or a picture, Rex had a pleasant feeling that he was a partner in a conspiracy, the partner of some ingenious quack—namely, the author of the book or the painter of the picture.

He watched with interest the sufferings of Albinus (in his opinion an oaf with simple passions
and a solid, too solid, knowlege of painting). who thought, poor man, that he had touched the very depths of human distress; whereas Rex reflected—with a sense of pleasant anticipation—that, far from being the limit, it was merely the first item in the program of a roaring comedy at which he, Rex, had been reserved a place in the stage manager’s private box. The stage manager of this performance was neither God nor the devil. The former was far too gray, and venerable, and old-fashioned; and the latter, surfeited with other people’s sins, was a bore to himself and to others, as dull as rain … in fact, rain at dawn in the prison-court, where some poor imbecile, yawning nervously, is being quietly put to death for the murder of his grandmother. The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom, the shadow of many-colored glass balls flying in a curve, the ghost of a juggler on a shimmering curtain.… This, at any rate, was what Rex surmised in his rare moments of philosophic meditation.

He took life lightly, and the only human feeling that he ever experienced was his keen liking for Margot, which he endeavored to explain to himself by her physical characteristics, by something in the odor of her skin, the epithelium
of her lips, the temperature of her body. But this was not quite the true explanation. Their mutual passion was based on a profound affinity of souls, though Margot was a vulgar little Berlin girl and he—a cosmopolitan artist.

When Rex called, on that day of all days, he managed to tell her, as he was helping her on with her coat, that he had rented a room where they could meet undisturbed. She flung him an angry glance—for Albinus was patting his pockets only ten paces away. Rex chuckled and added, hardly lowering his voice, that he would expect her there every day at a given hour.

“I’m inviting Margot to a rendezvous, but she won’t come,” he brightly said to Albinus as they were walking downstairs.

“Let her just try,” smiled Albinus, pinching Margot’s cheek affectionately. “Now we shall see what sort of an actress you are,” he added, drawing on his gloves.

“Tomorrow at five, Margot, eh?” said Rex.

“Tomorrow the child is going to choose herself a car,” said Albinus, “so she can’t come to you.”

“She’ll have plenty of time in the morning for choosing. Does five suit you, Margot? Or shall we say six and clinch it?”

Margot suddenly lost her temper. “Idiotic joke,” she said through her teeth.

The two men laughed and exchanged amused glances.

The hall-porter who was talking to the postman outside gazed at them curiously as they passed.

“It’s hardly believable,” said he when they were out of hearing, “that that Herr’s little daughter died a couple of weeks ago.”