Ideal (9 page)

“Ah, my sister, would you rather go free? What would you be profited if you shall gain the whole world and lose your own soul?”

“And of what account is a soul without a world to gain?”

“Ah, my child, pride is the greatest of our sins. Verily the greatest. Did not His Son say unto us: ‘except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shalt not enter into the kingdom of heaven'?”

“But why should I want to enter it?”

“If you know of a life that is supreme joy and beauty—how can you help but want to enter it?”

“How can I help but want it here,
here
?”

“Ours is a dark, imperfect world, my child.”

“Why is it not perfect? Because it can't be? Or because we don't want it to be?”

“Ah, my child, who among us doesn't want it? We all have that lost hope, that ray of light in the darkest one of us, that shining dream of something better than our lives, which it is not given us to reach.”

“We all want it?”

“Yes, my child.”

“And if it came, we would see it?”

“Yes.”

“But would we want to see it?”

“Who among us would not give his life gladly for a glimpse of it? But ours is a world of tears and iniquity. And paltry are its best rewards. Yet eternal happiness awaits us there, beyond, and eternal beauty such as our poor spirits can never conceive. If only we renounce our sins and repent before Him. And you have sinned, my child. You have sinned heavily. But He is kind and merciful. Repent, repent with your whole heart, and He shall hear you!”

“Then you want me to be hanged?”

“My sister! My poor, lost, anguished sister! Do you not know that it is a greater sacrifice I am making than you are? Do you not know that I am wrenching my own heart out at the altar of our duty? That I would rather take you away and flee to the end of the world, and protect you with my last dying breath? Only it's a poor service I would be doing you. I would rather save your soul and see mine writhing in the worst of all mortal agonies!”

She rose and stood before him, fragile, helpless, and her eyes were wide, frightened and she whispered:

“What do you want me to do?”

“Take upon your shoulders, bravely and willingly, the cross of your punishment. Confess! Confess your crime to the world! You are a great woman. The world lays its homage at your feet. Humble yourself. Go out into the very crowd on the marketplace and shout to the hearing of all men that you have sinned! Do not be afraid of what punishment may await you. Accept it humbly and joyously.”

“Now?”

“Right now!”

“But there is no crowd anywhere at this hour.”

“At this hour . . . at this hour . . .” He knew suddenly the thought that had been growing dimly somewhere in his mind. “My sister, at this very hour, a large crowd is gathered in a temple of error, not six blocks away, a poor, eager crowd searching for salvation. That's where we'll go! I'll take you there. I'll bring you in to show those poor, blind souls what real faith can do. To them you will confess your crime. For their sake will you offer your great sacrifice, for your brother men!”

“My brother men?”

“Think of them, my child. You have a great duty to your brothers on earth, as you have to your Father in Heaven, for all are His children. Look at them! They suffer in sin and in sin do they perish. You have a great chance, verily a blessed chance, to show them the true light of the Spirit. Great is your fame and your name will be heard to the four corners of the earth. They will know of the woman I rescued, the great woman who heard the call of the Truth, and they will follow your example.”

He was thinking of the broad white hall, dim with the breaths of thousands, thousands of eager eyes fixed hopefully on a gilded, tinsel altar. Right into the den of the enemy would he bring her, his greatest conquest, right before those faces that had turned from him, and let them all know what he could do, in his modest efforts for the glory of God. Kay Gonda! The great name, the magic name! Somewhere, beyond the tinsel bar, he could hear a flutter of white wings, of white wings and white newspaper sheets with letters of flame! “Minister Converts Kay Gonda! Evangelist saves the greatest murderess that ever . . .” They would come to him, rich and poor, from the farthest corners of the land; they would flock to him; they would . . . He felt himself reeling a little.

“Ah, my sister, they will repent even as you have repented. Your
great crime will pave the way for a great miracle. Verily, great are the ways of our Lord and unfathomable is His wisdom!”

She put on her hat and tilted it lightly, carelessly, over one eye, as if she were ready for the signal of a camera. She tightened the metal clasp of her collar, lightly, with the tip of the straight finger, as if she had just finished a fitting in the studio wardrobe. She asked, and her voice surprised him in its light calm, “It's six blocks to that place, isn't it?”

“Why . . . yes.”

“You do not want me to be seen walking in the street. Get a taxi.”

He emptied the dollar eighty-seven from his tin box into his trembling hands. He ran, hatless, through dark streets, looking for a taxi. He found one, and leaped in, and rode back, his head throbbing.

The taxi stopped at the Temple and he made the driver blow his horn. No one answered. Then he saw that the door was wide-open. The Temple was empty. A white cross flamed over the pulpit, on a black wall.

“Dear Miss Gonda,

There are not many things which I can boast of having never done, and writing to a film star being the last one left to me, I am taking advantage of it, to complete the record. I am sure this letter can be of no interest to you, among the thousands you get every day, but I want to add this drop to the ocean, if for no other reason than that I want to do it, and it is the last thing left to me which I can still want.

I will not tell you how much I have enjoyed your pictures, because I have not enjoyed them. I think they have been as tawdry as one can expect the world of today to welcome. I am afraid it is an ungracious admirer who greets you here. I hesitate on the word admirer, for admiration is a virtue long since buried, and that which
bears its name today can only insult its object. I cannot speak of your great beauty, for beauty is a dangerous curse to a world prostrate in worship at the feet of more hideous ugliness than the past centuries could ever have dreamt possible. I cannot tell you that you are the greatest actress living, for greatness is the target at which all the greatest of this age are aimed, and their aim is precise, inexorable.

I have seen all of life there is to see, and I feel now as if I were leaving a third-rate show on a disreputable side street, staged by a manager of very poor taste, and played by awkward amateurs. I have drunk to the last drop that which some call, presumptuously, the “cup of life,” and I found that it contained nothing but a thin, badly cooked soup without salt, which leaves one with a sickly taste in one's mouth and hungrier than when one started, but without any desire to eat further.

If I still find all this worth saying, if I am sitting here writing this letter to you, it is only because—in you—I have found one last exception, one last spark of that which life is not anymore. It is not your beauty, nor your fame, nor your great art. It is not in the women you have played—for you have never played that which I see in you, that which—with the last faith left to me—I believe you really are. It is something without name, something lost deep beyond your eyes, beyond the movements of your body, something to which one could wave banners, to which one could drink, for which one could go out into a last, sacred battle—if sacred battles were still possible in the world of today.

When I see you on the screen, I know suddenly what it
was that life has never given me, I know what I could have been, and I know—anxious, helpless, frightened—the fearful spark of what it means to be able to desire.

I have said that I am leaving the sideshow. It does not mean that I am dying. But if I do not bother to die, it is only because my life has all the emptiness of the grave and my death would have no change to offer me. It may happen, any day now, and nobody, not even the one writing these lines, will know the difference.

But before it happens, I want to raise what is left of my soul in a last salute to you, you who are that which the world could have been.
Morituri te salutamus
.

Dietrich von Esterhazy

Beverly-Sunset Hotel

Beverly Hills, California”

O
n the evening of May 5th, Dietrich von Esterhazy wrote out a check for one thousand and seventy-two dollars, while he had three hundred and sixteen dollars left in his bank account.

Lalo Jones shrugged her shoulders and whispered:

“I don't see why I have to stop, Rikki. If you let me stay a little longer, I'm sure I can win it back.”

He said:

“I'm sorry. I'm a little tired. Do you mind if we go now?”

She threw her head up, her long pearl earrings swaying like moist pink raindrops against her shoulders, and rose impatiently.

The tight ring of black coats and white, naked backs closed again around the roulette table. The huge white lamp in a slanting shade, low over the table, made a yellow pool in the blue, smoke-filled dusk, a pool edged by glistening black heads with neat parts, and heads of soft,
golden waves, and heads of silvery gray, and tiny pink ears sparkling with diamonds, all bending over a spot where chips clicked dryly and something whirred sharply, hissing in a sudden silence.

“What's the matter, Rikki?” Lalo Jones asked, putting a soft little hand on his black sleeve. “I must say you're not the best of company tonight.”

“My dear, I am ever helpless in your charming presence,” he answered indifferently.

“A drink, Rikki? Before we go? Just one?”

“As you wish.”

Beyond a broad arch, glasses glittered in a row like thin, upturned silvery bells in a haze of smoke, over a dark bar. Soft music came from nowhere, a whirling tune that gasped, breaking on sharp, high notes.

Lalo Jones raised a glass to her lips slowly, as if she was tired. Her movements were always slow, weary with the most graceful lassitude. Her arms and shoulders were bare, round and sunburnt, soft with a fuzz one could not see, but guessed, like the fuzz of a peach which one wanted irresistibly to feel. She drew her shoulders into a soft, lazy huddle, leaning with one elbow on the bar, resting her chin on the back of a little dimpled hand with tapering, gracefully drooping fingers. She wore a simple ring with a huge pink pearl, round and dully lustrous like her shoulders.

“But we'll have to go to Agua Caliente, Rikki,” she was saying, “and this time I'll put it all on Black Rajah. He's going to run and Marian says she knows for certain—she has it straight from Dicky—that it's a cinch. By the way, Madame Ailen is sure she can get that French perfume for me, the real thing, if you pay her a hundred or something to order it. . . . They make the most impossible martinis here. . . . By the way, Rikki, my chauffeur's wages were due yesterday. And, Rikki . . .”

Dietrich von Esterhazy was listening, and if he answered, neither he nor Lalo knew it. His empty glass stood at his elbow, but he did not order another, even though Lalo was sipping slowly her third one.

A glistening gentleman slapped his shoulder, and Lalo nodded to him lazily, and the gentleman roared confidentially at some joke he had just heard, and Lalo laughed, showing little sparkling teeth, and Dietrich von Esterhazy smiled, looking into space.

Then he threw a twenty-dollar bill to the bartender and turned away without waiting for the change. Behind his back the bartender was bowing eagerly, hurriedly.

“What I like about you, Rikki,” Lalo whispered, clinging to his arm as they made their way to the cloakroom, “is the manner you have of knowing how to spend money.”

Dietrich von Esterhazy smiled. When he smiled, his thin mouth drew into a longer line, without opening, and his lower lip stuck out slightly, and deep, ironic little wrinkles creased his pale, lean cheeks. He had golden blond hair, and silvery blue eyes, and a tall body, erect, precise, a body born for uniforms and evening clothes.

In the cloakroom, he held Lalo's wrap for her, and the white ermine cuddled in soft, lazy folds to her shoulders.

Then they were swaying in the deep cushions of his Duesenberg, and Lalo stretched out her little satin pumps, and put her dark, perfumed head on his shoulder.

“Sorry I lost that money,” she whispered lazily. “It wasn't very much, though.”

“Not at all, my dear. Glad you enjoyed the evening.”

Dietrich von Esterhazy suddenly felt very tired; his hands fell limply between his knees, and he had no strength to lift them.

The car drew up smoothly at the door of a tall, trim building with a gilded, softly lit lobby beyond the glass entrance.

“What? Taking me home already?” Lalo asked, wrinkling her little nose. “Don't you want me to go with you? To wish you good night?”

“Not tonight. Do you mind?”

She shrugged, tightening the white ermine under her chin. She stepped out, throwing back over her shoulder:

“Well, phone me sometime. I'll answer—if I feel like it.”

The door closed and the car tore forward. Dietrich von Esterhazy leaned back, his hands hanging between his knees.

When he stepped out at the door of the Beverly Sunset Hotel, he said to the chauffeur:

“I won't need you tomorrow, Johnson.”

He had no intention of saying that; but when he had said it he knew why he had.

He crossed the long lobby swiftly, swinging his cane under his arm. Upstairs, in his suite, where soft light made circles on a soft carpet, and long drapes seemed to swallow all sounds from the city far below, he put on a dark satin lounging jacket, walked to a table where a crystal decanter and spotless glasses were waiting for him, took a glass, hesitated, and put it down again. He walked to the window, pulled the drapes aside, and stood motionless, looking at the lights twinkling over the silence of a sleeping city.

It had been so sudden and now all was so simple. He had not planned to write that check; a few hours ago, he had problems, a thick web of problems he was too weary to untangle; now he was free, free at one useless stroke he had not intended striking.

He had other debts: his hotel bill, Lalo's new Packard, his tailor's bill, the diamond bracelet he had given Hughette Dorsey, the bill for that last party he had given—and cocaine was expensive, the sable coat for Lona Weston. And although he had repeated it to himself for the last few months, he knew suddenly, for the first time, that he had nothing left.

He had felt it vaguely, uncertainly, for the last two years; but a fortune of several millions did not disappear without a few last convulsions; there had always been something to sell, to pawn, to borrow on; always someone to borrow from. This time, the fortune lay still, dead in the fearful silence of a few hundreds in some bank, of closed safe deposit boxes, and unpaid bills. Tomorrow, Count Dietrich von Esterhazy would be called upon to explain the matter of a bad check. He would not be there for the call. Count Dietrich von Esterhazy had but one night left to live.

The thought left him completely indifferent; that surprised him, but he was indifferent even to his own indifference. There, below, beyond those lights twinkling in dim windows, men were struggling in agonies such as no hell could hold, to hang on to that precious, worthless gift of life which he was giving up, lightly, wearily, as if tossing a tip to a waiter.

Fifteen years ago, arrogant and young, last descendant of a proud old name, he had been thrown out of Germany by the revolution, with many millions in his pocket and an infinite contempt in his heart. He had wandered all over the world, strewing away, in his footsteps, his fortune and his spirit, drop by drop, with each step. He knew it had been fifteen years when he looked at the calendar; when he looked into his soul it seemed like fifteen centuries.

He dimly remembered chandeliers reflected in a polished floor and high-heeled slippers on slender, glistening legs; a hard, golden tennis court and his body swift, light, in white trousers and a damp white shirt; a propeller roaring through space and a flat, endless earth swaying very far below; white gulls and a motor shrieking through salty sprays, his hands on a wheel, his blond hair under a blue sky; a little ball spinning dizzily through squares of black and red; white bedrooms and white shoulders leaning back, limp, exhausted. And not one moment
was worth reliving. Not one foot of ground was worth retraveling, in an empty world to which a lonely, haughty aristocrat, drugging an anguished brain, could not be reconciled.

That was ended. He could still wear his trim evening clothes and beg lonely dollars from those who had them, a brazen nonchalance hiding an obsequious smile, pleading an equality that would exist no longer; he could carry a shining briefcase and talk glibly of bonds and interest, and bow like a well-trained valet. But Dietrich von Esterhazy had too much good taste.

He would do it in the morning. One bullet could end so much. He would go, weary and alone, without a great cause, without a last worthy gesture, end his life for the sake of a few moments of gambling by a woman he had never loved.

The telephone rang.

He lifted the receiver wearily.

“A lady wishes to see you, sir,” a polite, expressionless voice informed him from the desk below.

“Who is she?” asked Dietrich von Esterhazy.

There was a silence. Then the voice answered:

“The lady declines to give her name, sir. But she will send it up to you.”

Dietrich von Esterhazy let the receiver drop and yawned. He lit a cigarette and stuck it mechanically into the corner of his mouth. A hand knocked at his door. A stiff chest with two rows of polished buttons stood on the threshold, two straight fingers holding a sealed envelope.

Dietrich von Esterhazy tore the envelope open. The note contained but two words:

“Kay Gonda.”

Dietrich von Esterhazy laughed.

“All right,” he told the bellhop, “have the lady come up.”

If it was a joke, he wanted to know whose joke and why. When a hand knocked at his door again, his thin lips smiled without opening, and he said:

“Come in.”

Then the door opened and his smile disappeared. He did not move but for one hand that took his cigarette and descended slowly.

Dietrich von Esterhazy bowed calmly from the hips and said:

“Good evening, Miss Gonda.”

She answered:

“Good evening.”

“Please sit down.” He moved a comfortable armchair. “I am greatly honored.” He offered her a cigarette, but she shook her head.

She remained standing, looking at him from under the brim of her black hat.

“Are you sure you want me to stay?” she asked. “It may be dangerous. You have not asked me why I came.”

“You came—and that is all I have to know. Unless you wish to tell me now.”

“I want to tell you that I am hiding from the police.”

“I guessed that.”

“I'm in danger.”

“I understand. You do not have to explain, if you would rather not discuss it.”

“I'd rather not. But I must ask you to let me stay here for the night.”