The Road to the Open

by Arthur Schnitzler

He tried again to persuade her to come to the opera with him, but it was futile. He then inquired about her singing lessons and followed that up by speaking about his own activity, as though he had to convince her that after all he was not having a much better time than she was. And he referred to his letters, in which he had written about everything in full detail.

"So far as that's concerned ..." she said suddenly in quite a hard voice.... And when, hurt by her tone, he could not help throwing back his head, she proceeded: "What is there really in letters, however detailed they are?"

He knew what she was thinking about—he felt a certain heaviness at heart. Was there not in the very inexorableness of this silence all that she refused to voice aloud?—question, reproach and rage. He had already felt this morning and now felt again that a certain sense of positive enmity to himself was rising within her, against which she herself seemed to be struggling in vain. Was this morning the first time...? Had it not dated far longer back? Perhaps it had been always there, from the very first moment when they had belonged to each other, and even in the moments of their supreme happiness? Had not this hostile feeling been present when she pressed her bosom against his behind dark curtains to the music of the organ, when she waited for him in the room at the hotel in Rome, with eyes red with tears, while he had been watching with delight from Monte Pincio the sun setting in the Campagna, and had realised that he was finding this hour of solitary enjoyment the most wonderful in the whole journey? Had it not been present when he ran down the gravel path on a hot morning, dropped down at her feet and cried in her lap as though it had been the lap of a mother? And when he had sat by her bedside and looked out into the garden at eventime, while the dead child she had borne an hour ago lay silent on the white linen cloth, had it not been there again, drearier than ever, so that it would have been almost unbearable, if they had not long ago managed to put up with it, in the way one manages to endure so much of the unsatisfactoriness and so much of the sorrow that comes up out of the depths of human intercourse? And now how painfully did he feel this sense of hostility as he walked arm-in-arm with her, holding the umbrella carefully over her, down the damp streets? It was there again—menacing and familiar. The words which she had spoken were still ringing in his ears: "What is there really in letters, however detailed they are?"... But even more solemnly there rang in his ears the unspoken words: What does the most ardent kiss in which body and soul seem to fuse really come to? What does the fact that we travelled together for months through strange lands really come to? What does the fact that I had a child by you come to? What does the fact that you cried out in my lap your remorse for your deception? What does it all come to, when you still go and leave me quite alone?... Why, I was alone at the very moment when my body drank in the germ of life which I carried within me for nine months, which was intended to live amongst strangers, though our own child, and which did not wish to remain on earth!

But while all this sank heavily into his soul he agreed in a light tone that she was really quite right and that letters—even though they were actually twenty pages long—could not contain much in particular; and while a harrowing pity for her sprang up in him he gently expressed the hope that there would be a time in which they would neither of them any longer be thrown back upon mere letters. And then he found words of greater tenderness, told her of those lonely walks of his in the outskirts of the strange town when he thought of her; told her of the hours in that meaningless hotel room, with its view of the linden-planted square, and of his yearning for her, which was always present whether he sat alone at his work or accompanied singers at the pianoforte or chatted with new acquaintances. But when he stood with her in front of the house door, with her hand in his, and looked up into her eyes as he murmured a bright goodbye, he was shocked to see in them the flickering out of a jaded sense of disillusionment that had almost ceased to be painful. And he knew that all the words which he had spoken to her had meant nothing to her, had meant less than nothing, since the one word, the word she scarcely hoped for any more, and yet longed for all the time, had not come.

A quarter of an hour later George was sitting in his stall at the opera. He was first a little depressed and limp, but the pleasure of enjoyment soon began to course through his veins. And when Brangäne threw the king's cloak over her mistress's shoulders, Kurwenal announced the king's approach and the ship's crew on the deck hailed the land amid all the glory of the resplendent heavens, George had long ago forgotten a bad night in the train, some boring commissions, an extremely forced conversation with an old Jewish doctor and a walk on the wet pavement which mirrored the light of the lamps by the side of a young lady who looked decent, distinguished and somewhat depressed. And when the curtain fell for the first time and the light streamed through the enormous room, upholstered in red and gold, he did not feel any unpleasant sense of being brought back to sober life, but he rather felt as though he were plunging his head out of one dream into another; while a reality which was full of all kinds of wretched complications flew impotently past somewhere outside. The atmosphere of this house, so it seemed to him, had never made him so intensely happy as it did to-day. He had never felt so palpably that all the audience, so long as they were here, were protected in some mystic way against all the pain and all the dirt of life. He stood up in his corner seat, which was in front by the middle gangway, saw many a pleased glance turn towards him and felt conscious of looking handsome, elegant and even somewhat unusual. And besides that he was—and this filled him with satisfaction—a man who had a profession, a position, a man who sat in this very theatre with a responsible commission to perform, as a kind of envoy from a German court theatre. He looked round with his opera-glass. From the back of the stalls Gleissner greeted him with a somewhat too familiar nod of his head and seemed immediately afterwards to be expatiating on George's personal characteristics to the young lady who sat next to him. Who could she be? Was it the harlot which the author, with his hobby for experimenting on souls, wanted to make into a saint, or was it the saint whom he wanted to make into a harlot? Hard to say, thought George. They'd both look about the same, halfway.

George felt the lens of an opera-glass burning on the top of his head. He looked up. It was Else, who was looking down to him from a box in the first tier. Frau Ehrenberg sat near her and between them there bowed over the front of the box a tall young man who was no other than James Wyner. George bowed and two minutes later stepped into the box, to find himself greeted with friendliness but not a trace of surprise. Else, in a low-cut black velvet dress, with a small pearl necklet round her throat and a somewhat strange though interesting coiffure, held out her hand to him. "And how did you manage to get here? On leave? Sacked? Run away?"

George explained, briefly and good-humouredly.

"It was very nice of you," said Frau Ehrenberg, "to have sent us a line from Detmold."

"He really shouldn't have done that, either," remarked Else. "It was quite calculated to make one think that he had gone off to America with some one or other."

James was standing in the middle of the box, tall and gaunt, with his chiselled face and his dark smooth hair parted at the side. "Well, George, how do you like Detmold?"