Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “Couldn’t you take off some of that crimson velvet, Mr. Werner?” Ilsa asked.

  “Dear lady,” he said, bowing again, “with your permission I should be most grateful.” He retired behind a screen, and emerged pulling a Chinese-silk bathrobe about him. It was wiled with make-up and quite threadbare, but it must once have been very beautiful, and I was reminded somehow of D, Brandes in his riding habit.

  “Perhaps you would forgive me if I take off some of this grease paint?” he asked.

  “Please do,” Ilsa said, and laughed. “It makes me hot to look at you.”

  His long fingers plunged into a tin of paint-stained cold cream which he spread with slow delicate strokes over his face. As he rubbed it off with a torn scrap of soft linen his own pale complexion began to show under the ruddy coloring.

  “This is quite fascinating, Mr. Werner,” Ilsa said. “I’d never even seen a play until I saw you do Hamlet last Monday, and to get behind the scenes like this is an added and unexpected bit of excitement.”

  “I hope”—he smoothed more cold cream onto his face and neck—“that you did not consider it an impertinence of me to ask you to come back to my dressing room.”

  “Not at all,” Ilsa said. “We were delighted and grateful.”

  “You see,” Mr. Werner went on, “I could not help noticing you several times in the audience. Perhaps you realized last night that I was playing for you, especially for you?” His dark eyes smouldered as he wiped off the cold cream.

  Ilsa laughed again. “Yes, I realized.”

  —So she did see, I thought. I should have known she would.

  “It is so rare in these insufferable times”—Mr. Werner went over to the cracked and rust-stained washbasin and sloshed water over his face—“to find even one person in an audience who appreciates the art of acting, and I could tell from the light in your eyes, most gracious lady, that you were the one person in a million who understands what the theater, what playing can and should mean. You say you had never been to a play before?”

  Ilsa nodded.

  “It is all the more to be wondered at and applauded, then. Perhaps may I have your comments?”

  “I’d never seen words brought to life like that,” Ilsa said. “It was very exciting to me. It gave me a feeling of the power of words, their potentialities, that I’d only guessed at before, never realized. I’m most grateful to you for that.”

  “Perhaps you should have been an actress,” he said. I don’t think he realized that she hadn’t mentioned his performance. “You have an interesting dark quality to your voice. It might be arresting on the stage. And your speech is so much less—lazy—than most of the speech one hears around here. Would you like to be an actress, perhaps? Has this experience awakened the desire in you?”

  “No,” Ilsa said, and laughed again. She always laughed a great deal, a free open laugh that expressed for me the objectivity with which she seemed, at any rate, to look on life. But I thought I detected a new note in her laughter tonight, a kind of secret question and-answer quality between the actor and herself. Perhaps it was only imagination on my part. I know I’ve always had a tendency to read more into her least gesture than she ever intended.

  “I’m much too lazy to want to be an actress,” she went on. “I don’t want to be anything. My father was a naturalist, and though he never once urged me, it would have made him very happy if I’d followed in his footsteps. But I don’t want to study nature; I just want to enjoy it. When you’ve pulled the petals off a flower in order to learn about it, you’ve destroyed the flower.… Henny here”—she nodded over at me—“would like me to take music seriously, to practise scales and finger exercises and become boring and intense about it. I don’t want to take anything seriously, and, of course, there’s no point in doing anything if you don’t.… No, the height of my ambition at the moment is to see mountains and snow.”

  “Ah!” Mr. Werner exclaimed. “You should see my birth place, then! I was born in a chalet in the Bavarian Alps. My father was a famous Viennese opera star; my mother a Bavarian peasant girl. I was,” he said, “what you call a child of love. My mother kept me until I was fourteen; then I was sent to Vienna where my father introduced me to life and the theater. Only you, dear lady, perhaps can imagine what it must mean to me to have to play in a theater like this, and before such audiences! What it must mean to one who has played in all the great cities of Europe to be forced to use a dressing room like this. Would you,” he said, taking two silver brushes and smoothing his masses of curly dark hair, “would you and your husband do me the honor of coming back to the hotel with me and perhaps having a little supper?”

  “I’m afraid we forgot to introduce ourselves,” Ilsa said. “This is Henry Porcher, a kind of brother-in-law of mine by marriage. I am Ilsa Brandes.” Then she added, as though as an afterthought, “Mrs. Woolf.”

  “But how unpardonably discourteous of me!” the actor exclaimed, rising and pacing about the room in what seemed to be real distress. “I simply assumed—”

  I don’t know exactly what he did assume at that point, but I knew from the way he looked at us that it was quite far from the truth. I flushed painfully. Ilsa saw my embarrassment, and put her hand lightly over mine.

  “My husband doesn’t care much for the theater,” she said, “so Mr. Porcher has been kind enough to indulge my whim by coming with me. We’re like brother and sister—”

  I wished she wouldn’t keep harping on that; how I wished she’d stop!

  “—we’ve known each other forever—but Henry has traveled—he lived in Paris for several years—while I’ve never been farther from this town than to the beach, where I was born.”

  “Ah, Paris!” Mr. Werner murmured. “Paris! You loved Paris, of course?”

  “Yes,” I said, conscious only of the excitement, the in-love-with-life-ness that seemed to have awakened in Ilsa.

  “Perhaps you would consider having supper with me anyhow?” he asked.

  Ilsa looked over at me. I didn’t shake my head, as I wanted to, because I knew that if I did she would accept promptly. So I simply looked blank and watched a stain on the wall as though I hadn’t seen her looking toward me.

  “Why don’t you and Henry both come back to my husband’s house!” she said suddenly. “I’m sure he’d enjoy it.”

  “That seems like a great imposition, Mrs. Woolf.”

  “Not at all—if you’d like to come.”

  “I can think of nothing that would give me greater pleasure. I have always had a burning desire to enter a real Southern home.”

  “I’m not sure that’s what you’ll be entering,” Ilsa said, “but you’re welcome to enter. In the drawing room there’s a marble group of Iago and Othello that I’m sure will give you great pleasure.”

  She and Franz Werner laughed heartily. Then she turned to me. “Hen, would you go across the street and phone Monty—just to make sure everything’s all right? You know what I mean.”

  I knew what she meant. But Monty was at home and his voice as he answered the phone was quite steady and agreeable.

  “Oh, hey, Henry. How was the show?”

  “Fine,” I said. “You know what happened, Monty?”

  “Unh unh, what?”

  “The actor who played Hamlet—you remember—”

  “Uh huh.”

  “We bumped into him in the drugstore—”

  “You don’t say—”

  “—and he asked us to come backstage and see him—”

  “I wondered what all you’d been doing.”

  “—and he wanted us to go to the hotel and have supper with him, but Ilsa suggested that he come back to your house, if it was all right with you, because she thought you might like to meet him, and he’s never been inside a southern home, so she asked me to ask you if it was all right.” I sounded like a nervous fool and I knew it.

  But Monty’s voice was still agreeable. “Sure, it’s all right with me, Henry. You come right on out and I�
��ll dig up a bottle of something. Ilsa’ll have to root in the kitchen. Mattie Belle’s been in bed and asleep for hours. I been seeing a man about my hounds. Ira’ll have kennels finished end of the week and I can have my hounds Monday. I’m right pleased about it.”

  “Oh, good,” I said vaguely. “Well, we’ll be right on out. Good-bye, Mont.”

  “Good-bye, Henry.” We hung up.

  34

  Rather to my surprise, Monty and Franz Josef Werner got on very well. They drank up a couple of pints of corn liquor while Ilsa and I had ginger ale, and we all ate quantities of ham sandwiches. Werner talked incessantly, obviously delighted with his audience. Ilsa lay sprawled on the bamboo chaise longue, but her eyes were flaming with excitement. From time to time Monty looked at her, the old admiration reawakening in his gaze.

  Franz Werner said to Monty, waving his newly filled glass and splashing corn liquor down his shirt, “My dear sir, with your appearance and your manner you are wasted here. You belong in the great capitals of Europe—Vienna, Berlin, Copenhagen, Budapest, Paris—”

  Monty sighed heavily into his drink. “Paris. Mm. Always wanted to travel. Henry here knows Paris.”

  “Ah, Paris,” Mr. Werner breathed. “I was born in Paris. My father was one of the principal actors at the Comédie Française, my mother the daughter of a noble English family. Of course, they would not countenance the marriage—”

  Ilsa and I looked at each other. For a moment a vague shadow went over the actor’s face; then he went on, with a commendably brave flourish, “and so I remained a child of love. I am told,” he added with a smile which to me was amusingly naïve, “that children of love have an advantage that so-called normal children can never enjoy.”

  Monty refilled their glasses. Ilsa went out to the kitchen to make more sandwiches. As soon as she had slipped through the rice portieres Monty took her glass, emptied it into the brass bucket of sea oats in the fireplace, and filled it up with corn liquor, grinning to himself like a pleased child.

  “I have heard that this is a noble climate for consumptives,” Franz Werner said, swallowing the burning corn as though it were water.

  Monty nodded, a gleam suddenly coming into his dull eyes. “Have a friend who makes his living out of the consumptives who come here. Come by boat or train?”

  “Boat.”

  “Notice a funny old fellow standing at the foot of the gangplank, with a long fishing rod?”

  “Now that I think back I believe I do recollect such a man.”

  Ilsa came in with a plate of sandwiches. She smiled at the sound of Werner’s labored, elaborate speech.

  Monty went on. “Well, this fellow, he measures the passengers on his pole by guesswork as they come down the gangplank, and when he sees one who looks especially ill he makes a coffin to fit.”

  “Holy Mother,” said Franz Werner, “I hope he hasn’t made one for me. I am so sensitive to the power of suggestion that I am sure if anyone made me a coffin I would immediately oblige by dying.”

  “I didn’t know you knew that old ghoul, Monty,” Ilsa said. “Father used to tell me about him.”

  “See him at Togni’s bar,” Monty mumbled unwillingly.

  “Oh.” Ilsa put the plate of sandwiches down between the actor and Monty, and reached for her glass. She didn’t smell it or even raise it to her lips, but went over to one of the long windows and threw it out. “You know I don’t trust that stuff of Togni’s, Mont,” she said, and poured herself a glass of ice water. She filled it too full and some of it spilled onto the table, but she didn’t notice, so I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped it up. She gave me a peculiar look, then turned to Franz Werner. “Father told me about one forehanded invalid who brought his own coffin with him, and after a year or so sent it back North, filled with oranges. Most of them aren’t so lucky, poor creatures.… I should think it would be rather damp down here for people with lung trouble. How did you get going on the subject, anyhow?”

  “One of the young ladies in our company, our Ophelia, you remember,” Franz Werner said, “is suffering from a bad cough, and though she is the queen of kvetch we are unquiet about her health.”

  “What’s kve—kvetch?” Monty asked.

  “I suppose it is what you would call ham acting. Literally translated, it means ‘push.’ About our Ophelia, we were wondering whether, after our tour closes, she ought to come back here.”

  “I’m sure a drier climate would be better,” Ilsa said. “Father always thought so. It’s so flat here—have you noticed the way mold gets on things?”

  The actor nodded.

  “I should think Arizona—or Switzerland—some place with less humidity. The air here often seems heavy and oppressive to people unless they were born here and love it, as I do.”

  “You are very kind to advise me,” Franz Werner said. “I wonder, Mrs. Woolf, if I could beg a tremendously large favor of you and your husband—”

  “What is it?”

  “Tomorrow is Friday—there is no matinée. I understand you have a famous beach here—so wide and hard that many cars can drive on it at once, side by side. It would give me the most extraordinary pleasure if we could take a little excursion together—all four of us—and at my expense—of course. Perhaps we could hire a car.”

  Ilsa tensed and said nothing. She was waiting for Monty to speak, and I noticed how she relaxed with relieved pleasure when he said, waving his glass, and bowing waveringly with what he considered old southern courtesy, “Splendid! Take our car, of course. Wife has a house at the beach—belonged to her father, distinguished naturalist, John Brandes, native of our own State—” His voice rumbled pompously. Ilsa stifled a grin.

  “Ah, yes, Brandes,” Franz Werner murmured politely.

  “Could have an early meal there. Time do you have to back to the theater, Werner?”

  “Seven-thirty at the very outside I like to be in my dressing room.”

  “Can be arranged,” Monty said, with what was a great deal of enthusiasm for him. I knew he was pleased to have found a drinking companion of whom Ilsa seemed to approve. “You free, Henry?” he asked. “You not needed at the mill?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not. I’m no earthly use there. I just sit around and do nothing all day, and Papa gets mad if he comes in and finds me reading. I’ll get away.”

  We arranged to meet in the morning. I set off for home on foot. Ilsa was to drive Franz Werner back downtown to his hotel. As she stood under the street lamp, the light flickering with soft gold and amber shadows as the wind shook the green palm branches in front of it, rattling them like paper in the night air, her face lit more from an inner radiance than from the moving light, I thought that she had never looked so beautiful.

  Out of the night a train wailed.

  “Listen!” Ilsa said, holding up her hand.

  “What?” Werner asked.

  “The train. It’s the most restless, searching noise in the world, a train calling like that. The way I feel.”

  “The way I feel, too,” Werner said.

  35

  The day at the beach was a tremendous success. Werner was as pleased as a child with the house and the water. Ilsa drove the car onto the beach from the main road and he made her drive him up and down the beach, up and down, and then spent hours running in and out of the waves, and collecting shells which he insisted on tying up in his handkerchief to carry back with him. He had obviously never been much out of the city, which made the story of the childhood spent in the mountains of Bavaria questionable, to say the least. As for Paris—I didn’t think he had a French father and an English mother. But that he was a child of love I didn’t doubt for a moment.

  It was a freak sort of day, hot and oppressive, but beautiful in that sultry sullen way I have never seen anywhere else—a few hours of dead calm and brilliant sun, then a few hours of tearing wind and solid rain. As the first drops of rain hit the beach they made round dents in the sand, tiny, where the beach was hard, large as a silver
dollar on the loose grains of the dunes.

  The changes in the day were so complete and so rapid that after we went into the house, when it began to rain, we kept turning toward the windows to watch. One minute the horizon would be curving out to infinity, the way it can do only on the ocean; then everything would close in quickly, with just a brief moment in between when you seemed to be looking from inside a closed dark globe out into the sun. Horizons disappeared completely; nothing was left but grayness, which seemed so close you could touch it, but which still stretched out without end.

  As I watched out of a window, then, the idea of space seemed very confusing; there was no space in sight; the gray couldn’t be placed as near or far. Suddenly in a spot I could almost have touched with my hand a moment before, a shrimping boat appeared. There was no ocean beneath it or beyond it—just a boat floating in grayness. Then it melted away, and I wasn’t really sure I had seen it at all. A few minutes later the sun was pouring over the water as if it hadn’t been washed almost out of existence.

  Monty had brought his records and phonograph. We were all so full of sea air and broiled mullet, grits, and greens, and a kind of excitement because Werner was something so out of, so alien to, our way of life, and we to his, that we were seized with a kind of childish gaiety and danced by turns with Ilsa until she was breathless. Werner was a magnificent dancer, smooth and intimate as only a Continental can be; when she was dancing with him she seemed as light as the spindrift that flew off the waves and scudded along the sand.

  At six-thirty we climbed into the car, laughing like children, and set off for home, singing all the way. Monty invited Werner to come and have dinner with them the next day between the matinée and the evening performance, and we all planned to go down to the beach after the performance at night and have a midnight swim, and perhaps dance a little. Ira would be through with the kennels and could go down ahead of us and boil us some crawfish for supper. The company was staying for a second week, so Werner didn’t have to catch a train in the morning, and we could sleep all the next day.