“Listen!” she said—and he heard that still the applause went on. She released his hands. “You must go back,” she said. “They want to see you again.” She pushed at his shoulders. “Go back! You needn’t say anything. Bow!”
Otto turned towards the wings again.
“And Nils!” came an imperious whisper. “Smile at them!”
Otto marched out on to the stage and the spotlight picked him up and held on him. He made his stiff little bow again—and this time, as he straightened, he smiled.
The applause was redoubled as he left the stage, even continuing for several unrequited moments. . . .
There was a party after the performance, and the great Van Teller mansion on Park Avenue, unopened during the last years of the banker’s life but recently used again by his widow, overflowed with guests. All New York was there, said the papers, meaning three hundred men in dress clothes and perhaps more women. There were much gabble, a little unobtrusive music, a quantity oi strong drink—and yet more profit for the admirable Cause.
Otto wandered uncomfortably from one vast, crowded room to another. He was tired and worried and uncomfortable. He felt, although he sneered at himself for so feeling, embarrassed by the lionization he had received and acutely, ridiculously self-conscious of the special sort of prominence he was achieving visually by being in ordinary clothes. He seemed forever to be slipping out of Nils Jorgensen’s way of thought and forcing himself back into it.
It was after the grand auction that it all grew too much for him and he decided to slip quietly away, as he had seen many do even while newcomers kept arriving. He found his way, down stairs and through chattering throngs, to the main entrance hall, but he had not yet decided how and where to find his hat when a hand fell upon his arm and the troubling faint perfume came to his nostrils and a voice spoke in his ear.
“Traitor!” said Mrs. Van Teller—and he turned sharply to see her standing a little above him on the first tread of the wide, sweeping stairway. She looked amazingly beautiful, with the ripe, un-ageing beauty of Olympus, and the strange, almost blue-white hair seemed, as he looked up at her, the only possible crown for the face beneath it.
She stepped down from the slight eminence and stood beside him, her hand still on his arm. She said:
“I know it’s all very dull and stupid, Nils. But think of the money we’ll be sending to Athens!”
Otto murmured something. He was looking at her eyes and finding, for the fifth or sixth time in the three days he had known her, that they were not quite as he had remembered them.
“Don’t tell me!” she said, smiling at him. “You were going to leave! You know you were! . . . Don’t. Wait just a little while. They’ll all go soon; then well have a chat and a drink together—just you and I. I want to thank you—and talk to you about your plans, and . . .”
She broke off, catching sight of a group, about to depart, who were looking towards her expectantly. She moved towards them, talking as she went, but Otto could still feel the pressure of her fingers upon his arm.
He turned back as if to go up the stairs again. He would stay. He would, if such a thing proved possible, find himself a solitary corner and sit there, with a glass of champagne, until she found him. The waiting would probably be long, but wass denn—be had much to think about.
He went slowly up the stairs, past a steady flow of people coming down. It was a long and tedious journey, for all of them stared and many paused to speak with him and shake his hand. But he reached the second floor at last and the open doors of the huge so-called music room. It was still seething with people—and their senseless clattering suddenly filled him with rage.
He turned abruptly away, afraid he might not be able to keep his feelings from his face—and he came into hard collision with a hurrying man.
“Hey!” said Karl Etter. “Oh, hello, Jorgensen, glad to see you. Say, you went over big to-night—nice going!” He hurried away, throwing a “See you later!” over his shoulder as he went, a lean, shambling figure in dinner clothes only redeemed from disreputability by his unstudied disregard for them.
Otto stared after him without moving, smitten suddenly by an idea which, the longer he considered it, grew more and more into certainty. It explained everything—the strange delay of the Machine in approaching him, the inescapable and growing feeling that he was going through a period of test—everything!
He became conscious that someone was addressing him, and found himself looking down at a small and elderly woman who, by reason of her simple gown and crutched ebony cane, might have stepped out of another century. On the lined old face was a shy and sweet and determined smile, and the eyes which looked up at him were bright and blue and impossibly young.
“You must forgive me,” she was saying. “But I had to speak to you. I don’t know many people here and there was no one to present us to each other.” Her voice was shy, like her smile—and Otto was irresistibly reminded, despite the absence of any similarity in feature or voice or manner, of the mother he could barely remember.
He did not, this time, have to force the smile which came to his face. He bowed, perhaps a little more gracefully than Nils Jorgensen should have bowed. He said:
“I am happy that you spoke.” He waited, cutting off unborn a pleasant little phrase far too polished for any young seaman, however heroic.
She said: “I heard you speak, in the theatre. And I have been watching you.” The words came shyly and the lined face was tinted with a little flush, but the youthful eyes were steady with brave purpose.
She said: “You have suffered. They have killed the people you love. But you are going to fight them—you have fought them already: you saved one life they would have taken.”
Otto looked at her. He thought he was not hearing what she said.
She said: “They aren’t bad, you know—not the young men; they are taught and led by an evil Idea. And other young men—young men like you—are going to show them that what they have been taught is wrong.” She laid her hand upon his arm. “They don’t know—yet—that they cannot win; that an Evil Idea cannot beat a Good Idea. But you will help to teach them!”
Otto smiled down at her with vague tenderness: he was haunted increasingly by persistent, improbable reminiscence of his mother.
“I am going now,” she said, and moved the hand which had been upon his sleeve and offered it to him. He bowed over it and put it to his lips—perhaps too un-Nils-like a gesture, but there was no one to see. She smiled at him again and went away, walking slowly and leaning on her cane.
Otto looked after her for a moment; then dutifully wrenched himself from vague, lavender-scented nostalgia back to duty and the new thought which the sight of Karl Etter had given him. He walked across to a lone settee near the doors of the music room and dropped on to it and ordered his mind.
Yes, it was a good thought—more, it was right! Simply because upon two previous occasions the Machine had made the contact between him and itself did not mean that this must always be the case. Of course it did not—there had been nothing said in that strange interview on the upper floor in the Berlin suburban house which could be construed to mean that. In fact, stress had been laid upon initiative. . . .
He jumped to his feet, his course clear before him. Since his landing in New York—a landing arranged neatly by the Machine in the person of Karl Etter, he had been left to himself, as a test of his initiative! The Machine was waiting for him; waiting to see whether, left on his own in these unforeseen and unlikely circumstances, he was man enough to communicate with it or hidebound enough to wait indefinitely, an over-disciplined jelly-fish!