Your old friend,
Karl Steinmetz
Steinmetz waited with the letter in his hand for Paul’s approval. “You see,” he explained, “you are notoriously indifferent to the welfare of the peasants. It would be unnatural if you suddenly displayed so much interest as to induce you to go to Thors on a mission of charity.”
Paul nodded. “All right,” he said. “Yes, I see; though I confess I sometimes forget what the deuce I am supposed to be.”
Steinmetz laughed pleasantly as he folded the letter. He rose and went to the door.
“I will send it off,” he said. He paused on the threshold and looked back gravely. “Do not forget,” he added, “that Catrina Lanovitch loves you.”
XII
At Thors
Below the windows of a long, low, stone house, in its architecture remarkably like a fortified farm—below these deep-embrasured windows the river Oster mumbled softly. One of the windows was wide open, and with the voice of the water a wonderful music rolled out to mingle and lose itself in the hum of the pinewoods.
The room was a small one; beneath the artistic wallpaper one detected the outline of square-hewn stones. There were women’s things lying about; there were flowers in a bowl on a low, strong table. There were a few good engravings on the wall; deep-curtained windows, low chairs, a sofa, a fan. But it was not a womanly room. The music filling it, vibrating back from the grim stone walls, was not womanly music. It was more than manly. It was not earthly, but almost divine. It happened to be Grieg, with the halting beat of a disabled, perhaps a broken, heart in it, as that master’s music usually has.
The girl was alone in the room. The presence of anyone would have silenced something that was throbbing at the back of the chords. Quite suddenly she stopped. She knew how to play the quaint last notes. She knew something that no master had ever taught her.
She swung round on the stool and faced the light. It was afternoon—an autumn afternoon in Russia—and the pink light made the very best of a face which was not beautiful at all, never could be beautiful—a face about which even the owner, a woman, could have no possible illusion. It was broad and powerful, with eyes too far apart, forehead too broad and low, jaw too heavy, mouth too determined. The eyes were almond-shaped, and slightly sloping downward and inward—deep, passionate blue eyes set in a Mongolian head. It was the face of a woman who could, morally speaking, make mincemeat of nine young men out of ten. But she could not have made one out of the number love her. For it has been decreed that women shall win love—except in some happy exceptions—by beauty only. The same unwritten law has it that a man’s appearance does not matter—a law much appreciated by some of us, and duly canonized by not a few.
The girl was evidently listening. She glanced at a little golden clock on the mantelpiece, and then at the open window. She rose—she was short, and somewhat broadly built—and went to the window.
“He will be back,” she said to herself, “in a few minutes now.”
She raised her hand to her forehead, and pressed back her hair with a little movement of impatience, expressive, perhaps, of a great suspense. She stood idly drumming on the windowsill for a few moments; then, with a quick little sigh, she went back to the piano. As she moved she gave a jerk of the head from time to time, as schoolgirls who have too much hair are wont to do. The reason of this nervous movement was a wondrous plait of gold reaching far below her waist. Catrina Lanovitch almost worshipped her own hair. She knew without any doubt that not one woman in ten thousand could rival her in this feminine glory—knew it as indubitably as she knew that she was plain. The latter fact she faced with an unflinching, cold conviction which was not feminine at all. She did not say that she was hideous, for the sake of hearing a contradiction or a series of saving clauses. She never spoke of it to anyone. She had grown up with it, and as it was beyond doubt, so was it outside discussion. All her femininity seemed to be concentrated, all her vanity centred, on her hair. It was her one pride, perhaps her one hope. Women have been loved for their voices. Catrina’s voice was musical enough, but it was deep and strong. It was passionate, tender if she wished, fascinating; but it was not lovable. If the voice may win love, why not the hair?
Catrina despised all men but one—that one she worshipped. She lived night and day with one great desire, beside which heaven and hell were mere words. Neither the hope of the one nor the fear of the other in any way touched or affected her desire. She wanted to make Paul Alexis love her; and, womanlike, she clung to the one womanly charm that was hers—the wonderful golden hair. Pathetic, aye, pathetic—with a grin behind the pathos, as there ever is.
She sat down at the piano, and her strong, small hands tore the heart out of each wire. There are some people who get farther into a piano than others, making the wires speak as with a voice. Catrina Lanovitch had this trick. She only played a Russian people-song—a simple lay such
