The Burning Secret — Context and Discussion

There was no partner for a game here--that the baron's experienced eye instantly detected. And there is nothing more exasperating than for a player with cards in his hands, conscious of his ability, to be sitting at the green table vainly awaiting a partner. The baron called for a newspaper, but merely ran his eyes down the columns fretfully. His thoughts were crippled and he stumbled over the words.

Suddenly he heard the rustling of a dress and a woman's voice saying in a slightly vexed tone:

"_Mais tais toi donc, Edgar._" Her accent was affected.

A tall voluptuous figure in silk crackled by his table, followed by a small, pale boy in a black velvet suit. The boy eyed the baron curiously, as the two seated themselves at a table reserved for them opposite to him. The child was making evident efforts to be correct in his behavior, but propriety seemed to be out of keeping with the dark, restless expression of his eyes.

The lady--the young man's attention was fixed upon her only--was very much betoiletted and dressed with conspicuous elegance. She was a type that particularly appealed to the baron, a Jewess with a somewhat opulent figure, close to, though not yet arrived at, the borderline of overmaturity, and evidently of a passionate nature like his, yet sufficiently experienced to hide her temperament behind a veil of dignified melancholy. He could not see her eyes, but was able to admire the lovely curve of her eyebrows arching clean and well-defined above a nose delicate yet nobly curved and giving her face distinction. It was her nose that betrayed her race. Her hair, in keeping with everything else about her, was remarkably luxuriant. Her beauty seemed to have grown sated and boastful with the sure sense of the wealth of admiration it had evoked.

She gave her order in a very low voice and told the boy to stop making a noise with his fork, this with apparent indifference to the baron's cautious, stealthy gaze. She seemed not to observe his look, though, as a matter of fact, it was his keen, alert vigilance that had made her constrained.

A flash lit up the gloom of the baron's face. His nerves responded as to an underground current, his muscles tautened, his figure straightened up, fire came to his eyes. He was not unlike the women who require a masculine presence to bring out their full powers. He needed the stimulation of sex completely to energize his faculties. The hunter in him scented the prey. His eyes tried to challenge hers, and her glance crossed his, but waveringly without ever giving an occasional relaxation of the muscles round her mouth, as if in an incipient smile, but he was not sure, and the very uncertainty of it aroused him. The one thing that held out promise was her constant looking away from him, which argued both resistance and embarrassment. Then, too, the conversation that she kept up with her child encouraged him, being obviously designed for show, while her outward calm, he felt, was forced and quite superficial, actually indicating the commencement of inner agitation. He was a-quiver. The play had begun.

He made his dinner last a long while, and for a full half-hour, almost steadily, he kept the woman fixed with his gaze, until it had travelled over every line of her face and touched, unseen, every spot of her body.

Outside the darkness fell heavily, the woods groaned as if in childish fear of the large, rain-laden clouds stretching out gray hands after them. The shadows deepened in the room, and the silence seemed to press the people closer together. Under the dead weight of the stillness, the baron clearly noted that the mother's conversation with her son became still more constrained and artificial and would soon, he was sure, cease altogether.

He resolved upon an experiment. He rose and went to the door slowly, looking past the woman at the prospect outside. At the door he gave a quick turn, as if he had forgotten something, and caught her looking at him with keen interest. That titillated him.

He waited in the hall. Presently she appeared, holding the boy's hand and paused for a while to look through some magazines and show the child a few pictures. The baron walked up to the table with a casual air, pretending to hunt for a periodical. His real intention was to probe deeper below the moist sheen of her eyes and perhaps even begin a conversation.

The woman instantly turned away and tapped the boy's shoulder.

"_Viens, Edgar. Au lit._"

She rustled past the baron. He followed her with his eyes, somewhat disappointed. He had counted upon making the acquaintance that very evening. Her brusque manner was disconcerting. However, there was a fascination in her resistance, and the very uncertainty added zest to the chase. At all events he had found a partner, and the play could begin.

The next morning, on entering the hall, the baron saw the son of the beautiful Unknown engaged in an eager conversation with the two elevator boys, to whom he was showing pictures in a book by Du Chaillu. His mother was not with him, probably not having come down from her room yet.

The baron took his first good look at the boy. He seemed to be a shy, undeveloped, nervous little fellow, about twelve years old. His movements were jerky, his eyes dark and restless, and he made the impression, so often produced by children of his age, of being scared, as if he had just been roused out of sleep and placed in strange surroundings. His face was not unbeautiful, but still quite undecided. The struggle between childhood and young manhood seemed just about to be setting in. Everything in him so far was like dough that has been kneaded but not formed into a loaf. Nothing was expressed in clean lines, everything was blurred and unsettled. He was at that hobbledehoy age when clothes do not fit, and sleeves and trousers hang slouchily, and there is no vanity to prompt care of one's appearance.

The child made a rather pitiful impression as he wandered about the hotel aimlessly. He got in everybody's way. He would plague the porter with questions and then be shoved aside, for he would stand in the doorway and obstruct the passage. Apparently there were no other children for him to play with, and in his child's need for prattle he would try to attach himself to one or other of the hotel attendants. When they had time they would answer him, but the instant an adult came along they would stop talking and refuse to pay any more attention to him.

It interested the baron to watch the child, and he looked on smiling as the unhappy little creature inspected everything and everybody curiously, while he himself was universally avoided as a nuisance. Once the baron intercepted one of his curious looks. His black eyes instantly fell, when he saw himself observed, and hid behind lowered lids. The baron was amused. The boy actually began to interest him, and it flashed into his mind that he might be made to serve as the speediest means for bringing him and his mother together. He could overcome his shyness, since it proceeded from nothing but fear. At any rate, it was worth the trial. So when Edgar strolled out of the door to pet, in his child's need of tenderness, the pinkish nostrils of one of the 'bus horses, the baron followed him.

Edgar was certainly unlucky. The driver chased him away rather roughly. Insulted and bored, he stood about aimlessly again, with a vacant, rather melancholy expression in his eyes. The baron now addressed him.

"Well, young man, how do you like it here?" He attempted a tone of jovial ease.

The child turned fairly purple and looked up in actual alarm, drawing his arms close to his body and twisting and turning in embarrassment. For the first time in his life a stranger was the one to address him and not he the stranger.

"Oh," he managed to stammer out, choking over the last words, "thank you. I--I like it."

"You do? I'm surprised," the baron laughed. "It's a dull place, especially for a young man like you. What do you do with yourself all day long?"

Edgar was still too confused to give a ready answer. Could it be true that this stranger, this elegant gentleman, was trying to pick up a conversation with him--with him, whom nobody had ever before cared a rap about? It made him both shy and proud. He pulled himself together with difficulty.

"I read, and we do a lot of walking. Sometimes we go out driving, mother and I. I am here to get well. I was sick. I must be out in the sunshine a lot, the doctor said."

Edgar spoke the last with greater assurance. Children are always proud of their ailments. The danger they are in makes them more important, they know, in the eyes of their elders.

"Yes, the sun is good for you. It will tan your cheeks. But you oughtn't to be standing round the whole day long. A fellow like you ought to be on the go, running, jumping, playing, full of spirits, and up to mischief, too. It strikes me you are too good. With that big fat book under your arm you look as though you were always poking in the house. By jingo, when I think of the kind of fellow I was at your age, I used to raise the devil, and every evening I came home with torn knickerbockers. Don't be so good, whatever you are."

Edgar could not help smiling, and the consciousness of his own smile removed his fear. Now he was anxious to say something in reply, but it seemed self-assertive and impudent to answer this affable stranger, who spoke to him in such a friendly way. He never had been forward and was easily abashed, so that now he was in the greatest embarrassment from sheer happiness and shame. He would have liked to continue the conversation, but nothing occurred to him. Luckily the great yellow St. Bernard belonging to the hotel came up and sniffed at both of them and allowed himself to be petted.

"Do you like dogs?" asked the baron.

"Oh, very much. Grandma has one in her villa at Bains. When we stop there he stays with me the whole time. But that's only in the summer when we go visiting."

"We have a lot of dogs at home on our estate, a full two dozen, I believe. If you behave yourself here I'll make you a present of one, brown with white ears, a pup still. Would you like to have it?"

The child turned scarlet with joy.

The words fairly burst from his lips in an access of eagerness. Then he caught himself up and stammered in distress and as if frightened:

"But mother won't allow me to have a dog. She says she won't keep a dog in the house. It's too much of a nuisance."

The baron smiled. The conversation had at last come round to the mother.

"Is your mother so strict?"

The child pondered and looked up for an instant as if to find out whether the stranger was to be trusted on such slight acquaintance.

"No," he finally answered cautiously, "she's not strict, and since I've been sick she lets me do anything I want. Maybe she'll even let me keep a dog."

"Oh, yes, please do," Edgar cried delightedly. "If _you_ do I'm sure she'll give in. What does he look like? White ears, you said? Can he do any tricks yet?"

"Yes, all sorts of tricks." The baron had to smile at the sparkle of Edgar's eyes. It had been so easy to kindle that light in them.

All at once the child's constraint dropped away, and all his emotionalism, kept in check till then by fear, bubbled over. In a flash the shy, intimidated child of a minute before turned into a boisterous lad.

"If only his mother is transformed so quickly," the baron thought. "If only she shows so much ardor behind her reserve."

Edgar went at him with a thousand questions.

"What's the dog's name?"

"Caro!" he cried happily, somehow having to answer every word with a laugh of delight, so intoxicated was he with the unexpectedness of having someone take him up as a friend. The baron, amazed at his own quick success, resolved to strike while the iron was hot, and invited the boy to take a walk with him. This put Edgar, who for weeks had been starving for company, into a fever of ecstasy.

During the walk the baron questioned him, as if quite by the way, about a number of apparent trifles, and Edgar in response blurted out all the information he was seeking, telling him everything he wanted to know about the family.

Edgar was the only son of a lawyer in the metropolis, who evidently came of a wealthy middle-class Jewish family. By clever, roundabout inquiries the baron promptly elicited that Edgar's mother had expressed herself as by no means delighted with her stay in Summering and had complained of the lack of congenial company. He even felt he might infer from the evasive way in which Edgar answered his question as to whether his mother wasn't very fond of his father that their marital relations were none of the happiest. He was almost ashamed at having been able to extract these family secrets from the unsuspecting child, for Edgar, very proud that anything he had to say could interest a grown-up person, fairly pressed confidences upon his new friend. His child's heart beat with pride--the baron had put his arm on his shoulder while they were walking--to be seen in such close intimacy with a "man," and gradually he forgot he was a child and talked quite unconstrainedly, as if to an equal.

From his conversation it was quite clear that he was a bright boy, in fact, a bit too precocious, as are most sickly children who spend much time with their elders, and his likes and dislikes were too marked. He took nothing calmly or indifferently. Every person or thing was discussed with either passionate enthusiasm or a hatred so intense as to distort his face into a mean, ugly look. There was something wild and jerky about his manner, accentuated perhaps by the illness he was just recovering from, which gave his talk the fieriness of fanaticism. His awkwardness seemed to proceed from the painfully suppressed fear of his own passion.

Before the end of half an hour the baron was already holding the boy's throbbing heart in his hands. It is so infinitely easy to deceive children, those unsuspecting creatures whose love is so rarely courted. All the baron needed to do was to transport himself back to his own childhood, and the talk flowed quite naturally. Edgar felt himself in the presence of an equal, and within a few minutes had lost all sense of distance between them, and was perfectly at ease, conscious of nothing but bliss at having so unexpectedly found a friend in this lonely place. And what a friend! Forgotten were all his mates in the city where he lived, those little boys with their thin voices and inexperienced chatter. This one hour had almost expunged their faces. All his enthusiasm and passion now belonged to this new, this big friend of his.

On parting the baron invited him to take a walk with him again the next morning. Edgar's heart expanded with pride. And, when from a little distance away the baron waved back to him like a real playmate, it was probably the happiest moment in his life. It is so easy to deceive children.

The baron smiled as he looked after the boy dashing away. The go-between had been won. Edgar, he knew, would bore his mother with stories of the wonderful baron and would repeat every word he had said. At this he recalled complacently how cleverly he had woven in some compliments for the mother's consumption. "Your beautiful mother," he had always said. There was not the faintest shadow of doubt in his mind that the communicative boy would never rest until he had brought him and his mother together. No need now to stir a finger in order to shorten the distance between himself and the lovely Unknown. He could dream away idly and feast his eyes on the landscape, for a child's eager hands, he knew, were building the bridge for him to her heart.

The plan, as appeared only an hour later, proved to be excellent. It worked without a hitch. The baron chose to be a little late in entering the dining-room, and when Edgar saw him, he jumped up from his seat and gave him an eager nod and a beatific smile, at the same time pulling his mother's sleeve, saying something to her hastily, and pointing conspicuously to the baron.

His mother reproved him for his demonstrativeness. She blushed and showed genuine discomfort, but could not help yielding to the boy's insistence and gave a glance across at the baron. This the baron instantly seized upon as the pretext for a deferential bow.

The acquaintance was made. The lady had to acknowledge his bow. Yet from now on she kept her head bent still lower over her plate and throughout the rest of the meal sedulously avoided looking over at the baron again.

Not so Edgar. Every minute or two he turned his eyes on the baron, and once he even tried to speak to him across the two tables, an impropriety which his mother promptly checked with a severe rebuke. As soon as dinner was over, Edgar was told he must go straight to bed, and an eager whispering began between him and his mother, which resulted in a concession to the boy. He was allowed to go to the baron and say good-night to him. The baron said a few kind words and so set the child's eyes ablaze again.

Here the baron rose and in his adroit way, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, stepped over to the other table and congratulated his neighbor upon her bright, intelligent son. He told her what a pleasant time he had spent with him that morning--Edgar beamed--and then inquired about the boy's health. On this point he asked so many detailed questions that the mother was compelled to reply, and so was drawn irresistibly into a conversation. Edgar listened to it all in a sort of rapturous awe.

The baron gave his name to the lady. The high sound of it, it seemed to him, made an impression on her. At any rate she lost her extreme reserve, though retaining perfect dignity.

In a few minutes she took leave, on account of Edgar's having to go to bed, as she said by way of a pretext.

Edgar protested he was not sleepy and would be happy to stay up the whole night. But his mother remained obdurate and held out her hand by way of good-night to the baron, who shook hands with her most respectfully.

Edgar did not sleep well that night. A chaos of happiness and childish despair filled his soul. Something new had come to him that day. For the first time he had played a part in the life of adults. In his half-awake state he forgot that he was a child and all at once felt himself a grown man. Brought up an only child and often ailing, he had never had many friends. His parents, who paid little attention to him, and the servants had been the only ones to meet his craving for tenderness.

The power of love is not properly gauged if it is estimated only by the object that inspires it, if the tension preceding it is not taken into account--that gloomy space of disillusionment and loneliness which stretches in front of all the great events of the heart.

In Edgar there had been a heavily fraught, unexpended emotion lying in wait, which now burst out and rushed to meet the first human being who seemed to deserve it. He lay in the dark, happy and dazed. He wanted to laugh, but had to cry. For he loved the baron as he had never loved friend, father, mother, or even God. All the immature passion of his ending boyhood wreathed itself about his mental vision of the man whose very name had been unknown to him a few hours before.