The Mortgaged Heart Read online

  As she went into the studio Mister Bilderbach got up from the piano and silently watched her settle herself at the keyboard.

  "Well, Bienchen," he said, "this afternoon we are going to begin all over. Start from scratch. Forget the last few months."

  He looked as though he were trying to act a part in a movie. His solid body swayed from toe to heel, he rubbed his hands together, and even smiled in a satisfied movie way. Then suddenly he thrust his manner brusquely aside. His heavy shoulders slouched and he began to run through the stack of music she had brought in. "The Bach—no, not yet," he murmured. "The Beethoven? Yes. The Variation Sonata. Opus 26."

  The keys of the piano hemmed her in—stiff and white and dead-seeming.

  "Wait a minute," he said. He stood in the curve of the piano, elbows propped, and looked at her. "Today I expect something from you. Now this sonata—it's the first Beethoven sonata you ever worked on. Every note is under control—technically—you have nothing to cope with but the music. Only music now. That's all you think about."

  He rustled through the pages of her volume until he found the place. Then he pulled his teaching chair halfway across the room, turned it around and seated himself, straddling the back with his legs.

  For some reason, she knew, this position of his usually had a good effect on her performance. But today she felt that she would notice him from the corner of her eye and be disturbed. His back was stiffly tilted, his legs looked tense. The heavy volume before him seemed to balance dangerously on the chair back. "Now we begin," he said with a peremptory dart of his eyes in her direction.

  Her hands rounded over the keys and then sank down. The first notes were too loud, the other phrases followed dryly.

  Arrestingly his hand rose up from the score. "Wait! Think a minute what you're playing. How is this beginning marked?"

  "An-andante."

  "All right. Don't drag it into an adagio then. And play deeply into the keys. Don't snatch it off shallowly that way. A graceful, deep-toned andante—"

  She tried again. Her hands seemed separate from the music that was in her.

  "Listen," he interrupted. "Which of these variations dominates the whole?"

  "The dirge," she answered.

  "Then prepare for that. This is an andante—but it's not salon stuff as you just played it. Start out softly, piano, and make it swell out just before the arpeggio. Make it warm and dramatic. And down here—where it's marked dolce make the counter melody sing out. You know all that. We've gone over all that side of it before. Now play it. Feel it as Beethoven wrote it down. Feel that tragedy and restraint."

  She could not stop looking at his hands. They seemed to rest tentatively on the music, ready to fly up as a stop signal as soon as she would begin, the gleaming flash of his ring calling her to halt. "Mister Bilderbach—maybe if I — if you let me play on through the first variation without stopping I could do better."

  "I won't interrupt," he said.

  Her pale face leaned over too close to the keys. She played through the first part, and, obeying a nod from him, began the second. There were no flaws that jarred on her, but the phrases shaped from her fingers before she had put into them the meaning that she felt.

  When she had finished he looked up from the music and began to speak with dull bluntness: "I hardly heard those harmonic fillings in the right hand. And incidentally, this part was supposed to take on intensity, develop the foreshadowings that were supposed to be inherent in the first part. Go on with the next one, though."

  She wanted to start it with subdued viciousness and progress to a feeling of deep, swollen sorrow. Her mind told her that. But her hands seemed to gum in the keys like limp macaroni and she could not imagine the music as it should be.

  When the last note had stopped vibrating, he closed the book and deliberately got up from the chair. He was moving his lower jaw from side to side—and between his open lips she could glimpse the pink healthy lane to his throat and his strong, smoke-yellowed teeth. He laid the Beethoven gingerly on top of the rest of her music and propped his elbows on the smooth, black piano top once more. "No," he said simply, looking at her.

  Her mouth began to quiver. "I can't help it. I—"

  Suddenly he strained his lips into a smile. "Listen, Bienchen," he began in a new, forced voice. "You still play the Harmonious Blacksmith, don't you? I told you not to drop it from your repertoire."

  "Yes," she said. "I practice it now and then."

  His voice was the one he used for children. "It was among the first things we worked on together—remember. So strongly you used to play it—like a real blacksmith's daughter. You see, Bienchen, I know you so well—as if you were my own girl. I know what you have—I've heard you play so many things beautifully. You used to—"

  He stopped in confusion and inhaled from his pulpy stub of cigarette. The smoke drowsed out from his pink lips and clung in a gray mist around her lank hair and childish forehead.

  "Make it happy and simple," he said, switching on the lamp behind her and stepping back from the piano.

  For a moment he stood just inside the bright circle the light made. Then impulsively he squatted down to the floor. "Vigorous," he said.

  She could not stop looking at him, sitting on one heel with the other foot resting squarely before him for balance, the muscles of his strong thighs straining under the cloth of his trousers, his back straight, his elbows staunchly propped on his knees. "Simply now," he repeated with a gesture of his fleshy hands. "Think of the blacksmith—working out in the sunshine all day. Working easily and undisturbed."

  She could not look down at the piano. The light brightened the hairs on the backs of his outspread hands, made the lenses of his glasses glitter.

  "All of it," he urged. "Now!"

  She felt that the marrows of her bones were hollow and there was no blood left in her. Her heart that had been springing against her chest all afternoon felt suddenly dead. She saw it gray and limp and shriveled at the edges like an oyster.

  His face seemed to throb out in space before her, come closer with the lurching motion in the veins of his temples. In retreat, she looked down at the piano. Her lips shook like jelly and a surge of noiseless tears made the white keys blur in a watery line. "I can't," she whispered. "I don't know why, but I just can't—can't anymore."

  His tense body slackened and, holding his hand to his side, he pulled himself up. She clutched her music and hurried past him.

  Her coat. The mittens and galoshes. The school books and the satchel he had given her on her birthday. All from the silent room that was hers. Quickly—before he would have to speak.

  As she passed through the vestibule she could not help but see his hands—held out from his body that leaned against the studio door, relaxed and purposeless. The door shut to firmly. Dragging hei books and satchel she stumbled down the stone steps, turned in the wrong direction, and hurried down the street that had become confused with noise and bicycles and the games of other children.

  ***

  Sylvia Chatfield Bates' comment on an earlier draft of "Wunderkind":

  We disagree on your stories for I like this one. It seems to me a more than averagely successful evocation of a mood and a crisis, chiefly presented by objective details presented subjectively—that is through the veil of the mood. This is an excellent method, and not easy. That is why I like the degree of success you have attained.

  Some will think this story is too long. I don't. It is no longer than many published in the same genre. However, to be on the safe side with regard to publication since you are unknown as yet, it would be quite possible to point the mood, and give the crisis in the girl's life more emphasis and importance by cutting before the climax so that we arrive at it more quickly. You can cut Hortense. It would be possible to transfer some of the material thus cut to the scene of the climax, thus expanding it. Once arrived the reader is usually willing to go slowly, but he does not want to wait too long before he knows where he is going. I u
se the term climax, but of course this is a mood story, so that the climax takes the form of a high moment.

  The so-called stage business plus the mood make this story. Small details of gesture and property are excellent. Also it is a special knowledge story, and you know they appeal to curiosity. Please return for my files, i.e. submit for Mss 1936 & Story prize.

  S.C.B.

  [Story, December 1936]

  THE ALIENS

  IN AUGUST OF THE YEAR 1935 a Jew sat alone on one of the rear seats of a bus headed south. It was late afternoon and the Jew had been travelling since five o'clock in the morning. That is to say he had left New York at daybreak and except for a number of necessary brief stops he had been waiting patiently on his rear seat for the time when he would reach his destination. Behind him was the great city—that marvel of immensity and intricate design. And the Jew, who had set out at such an early hour on this journey, carried in him a last memory of a city strangely hollow and unreal. As the sun was rising he had walked alone in the unpeopled streets. As far ahead as he could see there were the skyscrapers, pastel mauve and yellow in color, clear and sharp as stalactites against the sky. He had listened to the sound of his own quiet footsteps and for the first time in that city he had heard on the streets the clear articulation of a single human voice. But even then there was the feeling of the multitude, some subtle warning of the raucous fury of the hours soon to come, the turmoil, the constant struggles around closing subway doors, the vast roaring of the city day. Such then was his last impression of the place he had left behind him. And now before him was the South.

  The Jew, a man of about fifty years of age, was a patient traveller. He was of middle height and only slightly under average weight. As the afternoon was hot he had removed his black coat and hung it carefully on the back of his seat. He wore a blue striped shirt and gray checked trousers. And of these rather threadbare trousers he was careful to the point of anxiousness, lifting the cloth at the knee each time he crossed his legs, flicking with his handkerchief the dust that seeped in the open window. Although there was no passenger beside him he kept himself well within the limits of his portion of the seat. On the rack above him there was a cardboard lunch box and a dictionary.

  The Jew was an observant person—and already with some care he had scanned each fellow passenger. Especially he had noticed the two Negroes who, although they had boarded the bus at widely separate points, had been talking and laughing together on the back seat all the afternoon. Also he watched with interest the passing landscape. He had a quiet face—this Jew—with a high, white forehead, dark eyes behind horn rimmed spectacles, and a rather strained, pale mouth. And for a patient traveller, a man of such composure, he had one annoying habit. He smoked constantly and as he smoked he quietly worried the end of his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, rubbing and pulling out shreds of tobacco so that often the cigarette was so ragged that he was obliged to nip off the end before putting it to his lips again. His hands were slightly calloused at the fingertips and developed to a state of delicate muscular perfection; they were a pianists hands.

  At seven o'clock the long summer twilight had just begun. After a day of glare and heat the sky was now tempered to a restful greenish blue. The bus wound along a dusty unpaved road, flanked by deep fields of cotton. It was here that a halt was made to pick up a new passenger—a young man carrying a brand new cheap tin suitcase. After a moment of awkward hesitation the young man sat down beside the Jew.

  "Good evenin', sir."

  The Jew smiled—for the young man had a sunburned pleasant face—and replied to this greeting in a voice that was soft and slightly accented. For a while these were the only words that were said between them. The Jew looked out of the window and the young man watched him shyly from the corner of his eye. Then the Jew took down his lunch box from the rack above his head and prepared to eat his evening meal. In the box there was a sandwich made with rye bread and two lemon tarts. "Will you have some?" he asked politely.

  The young man blushed. "Why, much obliged. You see, when I come in I had to wash and I didn't get a chance to eat my supper." His sunburned hand hovered hesitantly over the two tarts until he chose the one that was stickier and a little crushed around the edges. He had a warm musical voice -—with the vowels long drawn and the final consonants unsounded.

  They ate in silence with the slow enjoyment of those who know the worth of food. Then when his tart was finished the Jew moistened his fingertips with his mouth and wiped them with his handkerchief. The young man watched and gravely copied him. Dark was coming. Already the pine trees in the distance were blurred and there were flickering lights in the lonely little houses set back in the fields along the way. The Jew had been looking intently out the window and at last he turned to the young man and asked with a nod of his head toward the fields outside: "What is that?"

  The young man strained his eyes and saw above the trees in the distance the outline of a smokestack. "Can't tell from here," he said. "It might be a gin or even a sawmill."

  "I mean out there all around—growing."

  The young man was puzzled. "I can't see what it is you're talkin' about."

  "The plants with the white flowers."

  "Why man!" said the southerner slowly. "That's cotton."

  "Cotton," repeated the Jew. "Of course. I should have known."

  There was a long pause in which the young man looked at the Jew with anxiety and fascination. Several times he wet his lips as though about to speak. After some deliberation he smiled genially to the Jew and nodded his head with elaborate reassurance. And then (God knows from what experience in what small-town Greek café) he leaned over so that his face was only a few inches from the Jew's and said with a labored accent: "You Greek fallow?"

  The Jew, bewildered, shook his head.

  But the young man nodded and smiled even more insistently. He repeated his question in a very loud voice. "I say you Greek fallow?"

  The Jew drew back into his corner. "I can hear O.K. I just do not understand that idiom."

  The summer twilight faded. The bus had left the dusty road and was travelling now on a paved but winding highway. The sky was a deep somber blue and the moon was white. The fields of cotton (belonging perhaps to some huge plantation) were behind them and now on either side of the road the land was fallow and uncultivated. Trees on the horizon made a dark black fringe against the blue of the sky. The atmosphere had a dusky lavender tone and perspective was curiously difficult, so that objects which were far appeared near and things close at hand seemed distant. Silence had settled in the bus. There was only the vibrant throb of the motor, so constant that by now it was scarcely realized.

  The sunburned young man sighed. And the Jew glanced quickly into his face. The southerner smiled and asked the Jew in a soft voice: "Where is your home, sir?"

  To this question the Jew had no immediate answer. He pulled out shreds of tobacco from the end of his cigarette until it was too mangled for further use and then stamped out the stub on the floor. "I mean to make my home in the town where I am going—Lafayetteville."

  This answer, careful and oblique, was the best that the Jew could give. For it must be understood at once that this was no ordinary traveller. He was no denizen of the great city he had left behind him. The time of his journey would not be measured by hours, but by years—not by hundreds of miles, but by thousands. And even such measurements as these would be in only one sense accurate. The journey of this fugitive—for the Jew had fled from his home in Munich two years before—more nearly resembled a state of mind than a period of travelling computable by maps and timetables. Behind him was an abyss of anxious wandering, suspense, of terror and of hope. But of this he could not speak with a stranger.

  "I'm only going a hundred and eight miles away," said the young man. "But this is the futherest I've ever been away from home."

  The Jew raised his eyebrows with polite surprise.

  "I'm going to visit with my sister who's onl
y been wedded about a year. I think a mighty lot of this sister and now she's—" He hesitated and seemed to be rummaging in his mind for some choice and delicate expression. "She's with young." His blue eyes fastened doubtfully on the Jew as though uncertain that a man who had never before seen cotton would understand this other fundament of nature.

  The Jew nodded and bit his lower lip with restrained amusement.

  "Her time is just about here and her husband is cooking his tobacco. So I thought maybe I would come in handy."

  "I hope she will have an easy time," the Jew said.

  Here there was an interruption. By now it was quite dark and the driver of the bus pulled to the side of the road and turned on the lights inside. The sudden brightness awoke a child who had been sleeping and she began to fret. The Negroes on the back seat, for a long time silent, resumed their languorous dialogue. An old man on the front seat who spoke with the hollow insistence of the deaf began to joke with his companion.

  "Are your folks already at this town where you going?" the young man asked the Jew.

  "My family?" The Jew took off his spectacles, breathed on the lenses, and polished them on the sleeve of his shirt. "No, they will join me there when I have settled myself—my wife and my two daughters."

  The young man leaned forward so that his elbows rested on his knees and his chin was cupped in his palms. Beneath the electric light his face was round and rosy and warm. Beads of perspiration glistened on his short upper lip. His blue eyes had a sleepy look and there was something childish about the way the soft brown bangs of his hair lay damp on his forehead. "I mean to get married sometime soon," he said. "I been picking around for a long time amongst the girls. And now I got them finally narrowed down to three."