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PRETTY
CREATURES

By
WILLIAM GERHARDI



1927
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY
New York City

Copyright 1927 by
Duffield & Company


Printed in The United States of America
By The Cornwall Press

CONTENTS

The Vanity-Bag	Page    3
The Big Drum	Page  69
A Bad End	Page  85
In The Wood	Page 135
Tristan Und Isolde	Page 153

Other Books by William Gerhardi:

PRETTY CREATURES

THE VANITY-BAG

I

It was not that he thought her beautiful; but other people thought so, which made him think of her as such. And when these others came in swarms to wrest the prize from him which he had looked on as his own, he fell in love with her. During his first week in Salzburg, he received a card from Frau von Kranich: “As you whish to be introduced to interesting people, I would like to bring you on Monday next on the 15 February inst. to Professor Hollmann-Blum where there will be a pretty large party. Please komme to me at a quarter to five o’klock P.M. We will go together or better still, in the tram car. With my kind regards yours truly,—Emmy von Kranich.”

Calling, he beheld in the drawing-room with Frau von Kranich a young girl with clean-cut regularly chiselled features—he remembered later—of a quite extraordinary beauty. After introducing them: “Mr. Mackintosh Beck, of America;—Miss Schulz,” Frau von Kranich suddenly excused herself and went out. There was a pause. “What the devil can I say?” he thought.

“Do you dance a great deal?” He felt this was a happy shot.

“No,” said the girl.

“I notice that you Austrians dance very differently from us, and I have, so as not to feel provincial” (he smiled: the girl did not), “gone in for dancing lessons at Herr Pfleger’s—despite my middle age!” (Again she did not smile.) “I am told, on good authority, that he is better than Herr Loewe.”

“No,” said the girl. “Loewe is better than Pfleger.”

“But I think Herr Pfleger dances better then Herr Loewe,” he proffered tentatively.

The girl smiled a faint smile, as if of compassion for Mr. Beck’s poor understanding. “No,” she said. “Loewe dances better than Pfleger.”

There was an end of it. Mr. Beck was silent. Frau von Kranich came back with an enigmatic look on her face which implied: “Well, have you two young people hit it off?” And Mr. Beck felt sensitive for Fräulein Schulz, for, beside her, he was no longer young. But Frau von Kranich was so old that from the vantage-ground of her years the ages of both Mr. Beck and Fräulein Schulz seemed quantities so small as to appear to have no visible differentiation. She overtly began the matchmaking. “You must take long walks together in the spring as soon as the snow begins to thaw. She must show you round the lakes and up the hills.” Now that Frau von Kranich, who had no illusions about the hearts of young girls, was back, Fräulein Schulz ceased to be assertive and became the shy and diffident young maiden Frau von Kranich must have thought her. When called upon to speak, she blushed and lowered her lashes. They put on their coats. Frau von Kranich, very small and old, and carrying a little pot of flowers in pink tissue-paper, crawled into the tramcar, Mr. Beck after her; and Fräulein Schulz, murmuring “Kiss the hand,” went her way.

“She’s a beautiful girl—he, he,” said Frau von Kranich. The trolley rattled on. “She is a Cindrella who is waiting for the golden coach to halt at her door and for the Prince Charming to alight and offer her the shoe.” And she pierced him searchingly with her sharp watery old eyes, as if considering whether he might conceivably pass off as the desired Prince Charming, and laughed—“He, he, he!”

When they had crawled out of the tram and crawled upstairs into the flat, they made their way into a hall overcrowded by people’s overcoats, and added to the huge stack, with the aid of a bewildered parlour-maid, their own particular contribution. Frau von Kranich crawled towards the festive birthday table heaped with flowers and deposited thereon the pot in the pink tissue-paper.

“Ah! ah! Herr Direktor Schulz!” A tall massive man of sixty-five, with long silver locks, stood in the doorway and now sat down by Frau von Kranich and talked to her, his big hands moving all the while in little gestures. Mr. Beck, amid the hum of conversation, was grateful for such fragments as his ear could catch. “This invidious meanness ... this—this ... mean invidiousness ... this—how shall I say?” Herr Schulz was saying, when Frau von Kranich introduced them. “Sit down,” she said. “He-he-he; you are so tall!”

Mr. Mackintosh Beck was tall. He was not handsome, but he thought he was; and when at home in Philadelphia the shop-girls stared at him behind the counter he thought they were admiring his features. From time to time, when, trying on a new suit at his tailor’s, for example, he beheld his face in the three mirrors simultaneously from all four sides, he would experience a mild shock of revelation. But as a rule he would forget about his looks and go on figuring himself as he should have been instead of as he really was. “You can speak French with Mr. Mackintosh,” Frau von Kranich told Herr Schulz.

“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Beck rejoined, smiling shyly through his horn-rimmed spectacles, “I am here to learn the German language, and I should esteem it a privilege to have the opportunity of exercising my poor knowledge if you have the patience to talk it slowly to me.”

But Frau von Kranich looked as though she had something more important up her sleeve and was not to be deflected from her course. “French,” she said, “is the most wonderful language that I know for telling one des plaisanteries. I remember how, while my father was Bavarian Minister at Rome, the French Ambassador and I talked airy nothings for an hour and a half—he, he, he!” And she looked round at Mr. Beck to see if he had noticed it. But Mr. Beck was looking at Herr Schulz and thinking of his daughter. He thought of the last girl he should have married and reflected, with a twinge of melancholy, that it was always girls who were to blame for the deflections in his career. He had wanted to remain at Haverford and prepare for a professorship, then a girl came in sight and he had to think of making money quickly. He left the University and took to banking. Then she left him, he ceased banking and went back to the University. And—strange, he thought—every time he was engaged it always happened that the cause of their estrangement was a male relative, a brother, father or an uncle whom, as a human being, he liked better than the girl. He was just thinking now, as he looked at Herr Direktor Schulz, how really strange it was that he should always like the fathers or the brothers best, when the host came up to him: “You come from Philadelphia? Which University? And what is your particular faculty?”

“Well—my home town is Haverford, but I live in Philadelphia. My university——”

But Professor Hollmann Blum, with a little nod and smile, was already off and round the corner, his coat tails flying in the air, and talking to another guest.

After coffee, the Professor gave a little lecture and passed on pictures of Tut-An-Khaman; after which each of the more learned guests was expected to contribute his intellectual quota.

“I am a lonely soul here,” said Herr Schulz.

“I felt that,” Mr. Beck rejoined, and glanced significantly at Herr Schulz, who looked as if he did not quite take it in; though when later he discoursed again, he turned with deference to the foreigner, and praised America. He spoke haltingly, with little gestures, little pauses, as if fumbling for the right word, and a number of people had gathered round him, but Herr Schulz turned more and more towards Mr. Beck. “When we are alone I should like to develop” (he threw out illuminative little gestures) “before you the whole idea, so to speak.”

“And who is the greatest living writer of the German-speaking world to-day?” presently asked Mr. Beck.

Herr Schulz smiled, a little mischievously. “With my exception” (and Frau Kranich also smiled) “it’s Gerhart Hauptmann.”

“The Herr Direktor is a poet,” she explained.

“Oh?”

“I will present you with a copy of my book when next we have the opportunity of meeting.”

The Professor suddenly bobbed up from round the corner, and turning deferentially towards his host, the Herr Direktor, said: “The Herr Geheimrat will be able to reply to your question, Herr Doktor Mackintosh, with an authority greatly in excess of that which I command.”

“What’s that? What’s that?” asked the Professor, joining them as if for a long stay.

“We were talking of——”

But the Professor, with a nod and a smile, had already dashed off to the table in the other corner of the room and was fussing with a fork over the apricot cake.

Mr. Beck escorted the old lady home. “I like Herr Schulz,” he said.

“He’s very nice to you because you are a new man, a foreigner at that, and listen to him—and that flatters him. While we have all heard it endless times before and are sick and tired of it; and he knows it. But I will bring his daughter, Irmgard Schulz, for you to the Baroness Hauch’s dance on Thursday afternoon. Baroness Hauch has the finest china set in Salzburg.”

“Must I dress?”

“Yes.”

“Dinner-jacket?”

“No—cut-away.”

II

The trouble was that Mr. Beck possessed no “cut-away.” Accordingly, he had one made, and standing facing the three glasses at the front, with his back against three more, he suddenly perceived that he was very ugly. The tailor looked at him with glee, “American? Ah! ah! Dollar! A lot of dollar—he, he, he!” and recommended the most expensive stuff available, while Mr. Beck reflected with discomfort that not the least of his reasons in coming over to Austria was the resolve drastically to reduce expenditure. “Have the honour—kiss the hand—my compliment—greet God—commend myself,” the tailor bowed him out. In the afternoon Mr. Beck dropped cards on Baroness Hauch, on the door of whose apartment he read: “Baron Karl Franz Egon Gaestner zu Hauch Wolf-Kadelburg von Hofmannsthal,” and on Thursday, as arranged, he called on Frau von Kranich. Irmgard came. In her brown hat which covered her exquisitely moulded forehead she did not look quite so lovely, and he noticed that she had the small burning eyes of her father. At the Hauchs’ Irmgard appeared a little shy. She wore a blue dress with white lapels and American brown shoes, and all the young men fell in love with her at first sight and danced with her uninterruptedly. Mr. Beck found himself seated far away from the table, with a cup of tea in his hand. There was no sugar in the tea, but the cup was too full and too hot: he knew he could never get up without spilling it—and he suffered in silence. Moreover, he remembered being told that the Baronin Hauch possessed the finest china set in Salzburg and he was tormented by the thought that at any moment he might drop the cup and smash the precious thing to smithereens! And what then——? The hostess spoke agitatingly, with her mouth full of crumbs, and every now and then a crumb would be shot out of her mouth to fly like a bullet into the middle of the cakes and pies. “What a beautiful girl,” she remarked, watching Irmgard dance with her son Franz Egon Rudolf Ferdinand.

“She’s just like a Cindrella,” answered Frau von Kranich, “waiting for Prince Charming to claim her.”

“But I hear,” breathed a nondescript lady, “that her father is not liked because of his intolerable conceit. I am told that when someone asked him recently about German authors, Herr Direktor Schulz had the indiscretion to reply that he was by far the greatest writer living! And he looks as though he thought it—walking round in that old-fashioned bowler and the astrakhan coat, looking like an English lord.”

Frau von Kranich wrinkled her nose. “He is a little bit of a parvenu,” she said.

“I haven’t noticed that,” rejoined the Baroness, while a crumb shot from her mouth right into the sugar-basin.

“Still—a little.”

They were beginning to play bridge—the princes seated in one room; the counts in another; the barons in a third, Mr. Beck among the barons, who spoke to him of the high purchasing power of the U.S. dollar and urged him to subscribe to various aristocratic charities. Frau von Kranich had long since gone away. When the gathering at last dispersed, he went with Irmgard to the tram, but she suggested walking home together to the castle. “I like walking after a dance.”

Mr. Beck considered. “I like walking—with you.” He thought this very daring. And he reflected, with inward satisfaction, that he was actually making love in German—for the first time in his uneventful life. It wasn’t ... “half bad!”

She paused. “I like—walking,” she said.

This was cautious. And Mr. Beck put out feelers. “I don’t want to impose myself on you, and please tell me when you’ve had enough of me.”

“I’ll tell you.”

“I mentioned it because it seems to me that Frau von Kranich is rather inflicting my heavy company upon your slender shoulders. Needless to say, for my own part I like it. At the same time, I feel I may be boring you with my imperfect German, and I’d do anything in the world rather than be a nuisance to you.”

“She means well,” said Irmgard; and they walked along in silence through the frosty streets.

“Have you always lived in Salzburg, then?”

“Always—since my birth.”

“Do you like it?”

“I hate it.”

“But the people here are good people.”

“I hate them.”

“You ought to go abroad where the people might be more to your liking,” suggested Mr. Beck. “You’d like America.”

“I hate Americans.”

“Why?”

She thought hard. “Because they wear such ugly knickerbockers—the tourists here.”

“The child!” he thought. “The touching innocence!”

They were now going by a long country lane that stretched across a lonely field of snow. Far away an engine whistled. The snow hung heavy on the trees. Mr. Beck conceived the plan of approach by way of her father. “I do love the way your father speaks—these little movements of the hands, this fumbling pause, this seeking after the right word. He is by far the most considerable intellectual in the city.”

“Yes, Papa is very clever.”

They came out into an open space at the mouth of the river which extended wide into the distance, chained in ice. “This is our castle.” At the top of a hill surrounded by a fence stood the castle—looking rather less than a mere house. Irmgard quickly vanished up the steps. Mr. Beck stood still a while. The ice-chained river was bathed in moonlight.

There was an added warmth that winter evening about the sky and moon as he walked home to his pension.

III

The night after, he met the Schulzes at the concert in the City Hall. Herr Schulz always sat in the first row and championed foreign artists and blamed his own. That night the Russian Cossacks, visiting the city for two days, were giving a concert, and he presented them with an autograph copy of his book, The God Triumphant, and made a speech to them, sprinkling it with words that came most readily and, as he thought, appropriately to his lips: “Gorki ... Tolstoy ... Dostoevski ... the great Russian soul....” During the first interval they all sat down to refreshments. Herr Schulz held out his glass without a word. His daughter filled it.

After the concert they walked together down the slippery street, drifting along with a crowd of Herr Schulz’s admirers, in particular two middle-aged ladies, to whom Herr Schulz took the opportunity of presenting the new arrival from America. They seemed to hang upon every word that issued from the master—the master expatiating on the concert with his customary little gestures and taking off his hat and waving it to right and left, in acknowledgment of innumerable greetings.

“You have a lot of acquaintances,” Mr. Beck remarked.

“Yes, a lot of acquaintances, but not a single friend!—I come out with such aphorisms quite spontaneously, you know. Ach, if, like Goethe, I had an Eckermann to take them down! As it is, they are not taken down and are forgotten. Ah, wait a bit: the other day a splendid aphorism occurred to me: ‘The only decent people nowadays are to be found among the Jews.’”

“Come, try another!” the American commented to himself.

“Or this morning—‘What we call morality is merely envy.’”

“H’m.” There was a pause. “He was a great man—Goethe,” uttered Mr. Beck.

“Goethe was—I once put it so well—Goethe was the illegitimate child of the gods.”

“And Schiller?”

“Schiller was a fallen angel who, through a faultless life on earth, has redeemed his fall and secured his amnesty.”

“And Shakespeare?”

“Shakespeare—Shakespeare——” the Director fumbled. “Shakespeare——” It was clear that he was forced this time to make it up on the spot. “Shakespeare is a huge black angel.”

“Try another!” the American reflected.

“Shakespeare——!” Herr Schulz suddenly became excited. “It’s incredible.” He walked up and down. He waved his hat high in the air as if acknowledging the greetings of acquaintances (who were not there), then stopped dead. “It’s—it’s—it’s beyond words. King Lear. Antony and Cleopatra. Hamlet. It’s—it’s—it’s——”

“And Goethe too,” the American took up gratefully.

“Yes, Goethe! What a life the fellow had, long, rich, and complete. And he was understood. Goethe had Schiller. But I am alone: I have nobody.”

In bed, Mr. Beck pictured the wedding. Her dad showing off to advantage. What a splendid old fellow! Then the honeymoon, the bridal night, the return to her parents, the departure for the United States. Their married life when she would get used to him and find in him a vessel for her tenderest outpourings: when she would take him by the hand and, looking frankly in his eyes, would say:

“Mackintosh, I love you.”

Through his mind flashed pictures of travel, hotels in the hills, of evenings together, and kisses, caresses and love. And life seemed wonderful and miraculous and full of exquisite anticipations.

IV

When next day he went to Gmunden, he was stopped in the street by a lady whom he recognised as one of the two middle-aged disciples of Herr Schulz, to whom he had been presented after the concert. “Have you, Herr von Mackintosh, come to see the Herr Direktor Schulz?” she asked.

Mr. Beck had come to have a quiet view of Gmunden. But he did not deem it polite to say so, and answered, haltingly, “M-yes—I think I have.”

“Splendid! The Herr Direktor is now taking his after-dinner nap, but he will be up for coffee at a quarter past four o’clock and would be delighted to have you take a cup with him.”

“Curse him!” he thought. But at a quarter past four Mr. Beck was at the green, freshly painted gate of a beautiful white villa, trying hard to open the latch from inside, and Herr Schulz, just up from his nap, was coming smilingly down the steps in his pale-yellow boots to Mr. Beck’s assistance. He wore a coloured jersey with a plain back to it, and no coat, so that if you looked at him from behind, his shoulders appeared like gigantic epaulets, and there was something which suggested a fieldmarshal in his colossal bulk. They settled down to coffee in the over-heated glass veranda, the two ladies watching every movement of his brow. “Have you had a good sleep, Herr Direktor?” they inquired in unison.

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

“Yes,” he repeated, “I have had a good sleep.”

“That’s good.”

Herr Schulz sighed. “Creative work is very exhausting. It’s not the same as giving a lecture. It’s work of the spirit and must be spun out of your own soul’s substance, so to speak. That’s what I keep telling the professors here—he, he!” he laughed maliciously.

“Entirely so,” agreed Mr. Beck. Odd: all the time that the other was talking he could see through his pretense and laugh inwardly; yet Mr. Beck’s replies were sincerely respectful.

“I don’t mince words. I tell the professors here straight what I think of them—he, he! They don’t like me.”

“No wonder,” said the guest, instinctively falling into line with the commanding personality of the other.

“At the heat of creative work I can’t write, and so I dictate my thoughts to this lady here. I wish to goodness, Grete,” he turned towards the younger of the ladies, “that you would learn to use a typewriter.” He held out his cup: the lady filled it. “To attempt to read your hand is insufferable. How do you, Herr Doktor Mackintosh, do your work—Ethnology is your subject, I think you told me?—do you use a typewriter?”

“I’ve an Underwood Portable—it’s quite small.”

“H’m. I don’t think I could ever use a small typewriter. I should want something big and solid by way of a typewriter.”

“Yes! Yes!” the two sisters exclaimed ecstatically. “You must have everything big and solid, Herr Direktor, to express your personality.”

“He, he!” he laughed, and turning to the guest—“These ladies are hero-worshippers,” he explained.

“The Herr Direktor is always making fun of us,” they said, and looked at him adoringly.

“Perhaps if you will kindly follow me upstairs it might be of interest to you to see the room where some of the more significant strands of thought occur to me of a morning. Sophie and Grete come in and draw the blinds open for me when I ring. I let the sun shine in my eyes, and as I lie in bed all the morning, I think—God! the wonderful things that come into one’s head at these times. Ach! ... My family are jealous of these ladies because I spend so much time here. But I can’t work at home, with my wife and fourteen children in the house and the telephone going, doors banging. As I said to my wife when I left the house the other day, in protest: ‘It’s not the fact of the door banging that upsets me. No: it’s the brazen thoughtlessness behind the act, the invidious ignorance of the effect of such a bang upon an intellectual worker.’ That’s what drives me away from home to seek my real ‘I’ in solitude amid nature. Here I have peace. The ladies are so kind and thoughtful. It costs me nothing. They are only too glad to have me, and my company, they say, amply compensates them for whatever food I may consume here. Here I feel I can work. The sun shines in my window till I get up for dinner at two o’clock. After dinner I take a little nap on this tiny balcony till about a quarter past four, when I go down to coffee. After coffee—this reminds me—I take a little walk—you must come with me—till suppertime. H’m. We might as well go now.”

They went down the steps, Herr Schulz breathing heavily upon the nape of the visitor’s neck, who, turning round, asked, “Do you do most of your work after supper then?”

“No. I turn in early. Creative work is very exhausting. After supper we have a little game of chess—and then we all turn in.”

“I see. You do your writing in the morning, in bed?”

There was a pause. “I have ideas buzzing in my head for a novel, a play—a philosophical work. But what I lack is the inner freedom. I am upset by the invidious perversity of the people around me, by the perfidious, shameless, iniquitous meanness of mankind!”

Grete met them at the foot of the stairs. “I suppose, Herr von Mackintosh, that you’re an American journalist who has come over to Europe to acquaint himself with the life and works of Herr Direktor Schulz?”

“Well—perhaps—yes—though of course——” mumbled the visitor.

Herr Schulz now stood half turned away from them, with his hands behind his back, brooding.

“I should be glad,” said he, turning back to them suddenly, “if you, Herr Doktor Mackintosh, would acquaint the people of America—for whom, I assure you, I cherish the warmest regard (their achievements in technical knowledge are most valuable, I am sure, and are a significant contribution to mechanical progress)—if you would acquaint them with my writings and works and ... if you would be so kind,” he concluded.

“Gladly.”

“For I must confess that I do not expect much recognition at the hands of my own people—the professors especially. I have even coined a good aphorism about these gentlemen—‘science officials,’ I call them—he, he! They don’t like me. It’s nothing new, of course. There is even the proverb: ‘No man is a hero to his own valet’—I rather meant another proverb: ‘No man is a prophet in his own country.’”

“Pardon me, Herr Direktor, but will you be good enough to acquaint me with the titles of your works.”

Herr Schulz suddenly grew earnest. “There is that—God Triumphant—you know that. Or—I beg your pardon—I will send you a copy of it when I get home. Then—then there are one or two little—well, youthful attempts—school essays. Since I left the Bank two years ago I have not been able to do anything at all. I lack the inner freedom.”

“No matter. With us it’s not so much the work as the personality that counts. And that, I can assure you, you have in ample measure. You even, if you will pardon me for saying so, remind me of Henrik Ibsen.”

“Of Björnson,” corrected Herr Schulz. “Ibsen was small—insignificant-looking. But Björnson was a man after my own face and stature—he, he!”

“Yes! Yes!” chimed in the ladies. “The image of Björnson!”

“Though some people say I look rather like an English lord—he, he!”

Mr. Beck had never seen an English lord and did not know what a lord exactly looked like; but he knew he did not look like Herr Direktor Schulz. He gazed at the Director as he stood there with the “epaulets.” He was a great man; there was no doubt about it when you looked at him—six feet and a half high and two full spans between the shoulders!

“I shall now leave the two gentlemen to themselves,” said Grete. “They have doubtless important matters to discuss which are not for a woman’s poor mind.”

“We shall be back for supper, Grete,” rejoined Herr Schulz, “which I trust we shall enjoy the better after our walk.”

“I will do my best that it may come up to your expectation, Herr Direktor.” And the two men went through the garden into the adjacent wood, Herr Schulz breaking off dead branches (an easy enough job, the visitor reflected) as if to bear out the impression that he was, in every respect, a colossus. “You are lucky,” he said. “You’re still young, independent, can do your work without interruption. But I—I try to keep it down, but bitterness—bitterness rises here in my breast against—against people—debts, petty tyrannies—the invidious meanness, the iniquitous perfidy of mankind!” Herr Schulz broke off a dead branch. “If I had some great sorrow, I would rise to the occasion, like a tragic hero—a King Lear, let us say—with credit and glory. But no! These petty, senseless little pinpricks—the telephone ringing while I am composing a lyric, the door slamming away—these pinpricks ... these—these dirty little setbacks....”

Mr. Beck looked sympathetic. “I understand. Even Tartarin de Tarascon used to say: Des coups d’épee, des coups d’épee, messieurs, mais pas des coups d’épingle!”

“Don’t know. Haven’t read him.” He stopped, and suddenly, from habit, though no one was about, took off and waved his hat high in the air, as if acknowledging the greeting of somebody behind the trunk of the tree, then put it back on his head. “While I am trying hard to mount Pegasus I am pulled down ignominiously by the breeches, so to speak, because they come to tell me that baby has choked himself with orange pips. My wife has given birth to fourteen children. I ask: “What can a poet do?”

“Exactly. On that ground I am in favour of Eugenics.”

“What!” Herr Schulz broke off a dead branch. “You are in favour of that—that invidious—that—that infamous practice. You——”

“I am. I have a nightmare: over-population.”

Herr Schulz pooh-poohed this statement. “Nonsense! Look,”—his eye was searching forward past the densely growing trees; he pointed to an empty meadow,—“Look: plenty of standing room.”

“I am thinking,” the American pursued, “of the poor women who bear child after child without respite.”

“It’s their business.”

“But surely, Herr Direktor, there is many a wife who does not want any children. What are you to do with such a woman?”

“Fling her out of the window,” was the advice. “No, no, Herr Doktor Mackintosh, it’s no good arguing. My wife has had eleven children by me and three by my predecessor. I have no money. Being honest, I retired a poor man. I am creaking under a burden of debt. But I won’t stop. I will not contradict the will of God. And my old woman knows better than to show signs of unnatural reluctance. She knows her man—he, he!”

“But don’t the children get to be weaklings?”

“Not a bit of it. My youngest boy, who is only two, is the cleverest of the lot. I can talk to him as I do to you. Though naturally,” the Director hastened, “he hasn’t got your knowledge. Ethnology, is your subject, is it not?”

“Quite so.”

“Of course.”

“And your daughters, Herr Direktor?” Mr. Beck thought this might be the chance to ask Herr Schulz for the hand of Irmgard, though, on second thoughts, he resolved that it would be wiser to approach the daughter first.

“My daughters are not quite so clever. But then what can you expect of mere women? Though, Irmgard is awakening. She has vague unfocussed longings....”

“That reminds me,” chimed in the guest. “I have been reading recently the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. There is a passage where Goethe speaks of Spring: ‘I have an objectless sorrow in Spring....’”

“I too,” said Herr Schulz. “Ach! when I look at the hills and the lakes and the breaking rigour of the sky, I want—I want to go praying through the world!”

“Entirely so,” said the other.

They were returning to the villa, and Grete was waiting for them on the steps. “All’s ready,” she smiled dotingly.

V

And now Frau von Kranich began inviting him: “Please komme on Fryday next at 4 o’klock p.m. We will go together to Wolfs.” Or, “Please komme on Thursday at 3 o’klock p.m. We will go to Schmidts.” Presently he had another letter:

“Miss Schulz is just staying with me und whishes me to invite you for next Thursday to komme to the castle at 4 o’klock p.m. Then she advises you further to take dansing lessons by Herr Loewe to learn Wienerwalzer. I hope you don’t think me forward. If so, I beg your pardon. With her und my best compliments, Yours truly, Emmy von Kranich.”

Next morning there was another missive. Across a visiting card on which stood “Emmy von Kranich, née von Kolbe,” she wrote: “You are geting with this an invitation for a closed society fancy dress to which Miss Schulz will also komme. She is kounting on you beeing there because you are to accompany her home. Yours truly.”

When on Thursday he set out for the Schulz’s, he walked as it seemed to him a deuced long way, until at last the river spread wide before him and he perceived the castle on the hill, looking more than ever less than a mere house. He went up the winding path, till in the annexe on the second floor (the castle had been commandeered during the war and ever since the Schulz’s could not get the lodgers out) he rang the bell and waited, while his heart thumped loud within him. It was Irmgard herself who opened the door for him—Irmgard in a dark-blue velvet dress which she might have worn when she was only fifteen, and her hair, he noticed, was put up for the first time. As he entered the drawing-room (which, for lack of space, served also as a dining-room, and, in fact, as a study for the Herr Direktor at such rare times as he was at home: to-day he wasn’t) the mother of the fourteen children rose to greet him—a woman remarkably fresh for her achievement. On a pedestal stood a huge bronze bust of Herr Schulz, and on the shelf behind, two small busts—of Goethe and Schiller. There was a moment of confused silence. Mr. Beck surveyed the view through the window and expressed ravishment in no measured terms. A tiny little boy of two came in. “This is Karl, our youngest,” said Frau Schulz. And Irmgard, to give herself something to do—for she seemed very shy, Mr. Beck felt, at this overt arrival of the first grown man who had come expressly for her sake—took her little brother on her lap and screened her face with him from the visitor. But tight as she held him, he managed to crawl off and whispered something into his mother’s ear.

“No, the Herr Doktor is not interested to see your horse,” she rejoined aloud.

“Oh, but I am!” And by the mother’s pleasant smile he felt that he had thus commended himself to her heart.

“Well, fetch it then,” she said to Karl, who vanished; and presently there came a scratching, squealing noise from the adjoining room, and Karl dragged in on a long string a cadaverous moth-eaten rocking horse and began taking off the saddle in front of the visitor, who patted it to gain time, while thinking hard of what he might say next. He had an agreeable feeling of being taken straight into the heart of the family. Mother and daughter had fixed their eyes on Karl and Mr. Beck, who as it were made a tableau together, and the guest ransacked his mind for something at once appropriate and amusing to say to Karl. But—“Can you strap the saddle to the head?” was all he could produce. The little boy, evidently not amused, gravely repudiated the suggestion. Irmgard got up and busied herself with the tea-things. Her mother’s glance followed her fondly. “You can’t guess, Herr Doktor, what Irmgard will be wearing at the fancy-dress ball?”

“No, no!” cried the girl. “You mustn’t tell or he’ll recognise me!”

On the piano lid stood a family group which attracted Mr. Beck’s attention—padre, madre, and fourteen bambini: twelve girls, two boys. “This is Hellmuth, our grown-up brother. He is twenty-nine.”

“H’m. A good-looking youth,” commented the visitor.

“He used to be good-looking. But a year ago in tobogganing down the hill he banged with his nose into a tree, and ever since his nose is twice its former size. I always tease him about his double nose.”

“How very funny!”

The hours flashed by like lightning. The window grew dim. The maid came in, lit the lamp and drew the curtains. The hostess looked as though she thought that Mr. Beck ought to go now. But Mr. Beck sat still, and did not move.

“Irmgard is going to town now to a dancing lesson at Herr Loewe’s. She feels a little out-of-date and wants to regain confidence before the dance to-morrow,” Frau Schulz imparted to the lingering guest.

“You can come with me,” said Irmgard, “and arrange with Loewe about your Wienerwalzer lessons.”

They went down the endless road, Irmgard smiling to herself. She called in at several shops—“Just wait outside, will you?” He noticed through the glass door how the men behind the counter stared at her with rapture, and he felt proud of being—even if compelled to wait outside—her immediate companion. “Now we can go to Loewe’s,” she said—and sighed. And at that sigh, consummative of their arduous day’s work, he felt a thrill—and also sighed. “Now I should ask her,” he told himself, but they were crossing the main street and dodging vehicles, and now already they were at Herr Loewe’s door. He watched her take her lesson, Herr Loewe, as he held her in his practised arms, smiling all the while into her eyes. And when she left Herr Loewe exercised him for an hour and a half in the whirling motions of the Wienerwalzer, charged him a hundred thousand crowns and instructed him to come again to-morrow.

On the way to Herr Loewe’s next day he called on Frau von Kranich. “Mind the lamp,” she drawled. But Mr. Beck had already knocked his scalp against the pike of the brass fitting, and so sat down, feeling a little stunned, facing the old dame. “He, he, he—you are so tall,” she laughed, and looked at him in a strange way, as if to ask: “Is it coming off all right?” Mr. Beck responded with a look of joyous confidence. And she said, “We may soon be able to congratulate you?—he, he, he!”

“I hope so,” he responded, rising and once more knocking his head against the lamp.

“Mind!” said Frau von Kranich. She sat there in a soft armchair, with feet resting on a cushion, and smiled before her faintly—an old, old, white-haired woman with one foot already in the grave.

“What’s this?” he asked, striding over to the wall.

“A miniature of my mother as a young woman at the time my father was Bavarian Minister at Rome.”

Herr Loewe that day had hired two girls to spin Mr. Beck round, and, clad in his new cut-away, with his tails in the air, he went round and round, till one girl was fagged out and the other took him on and whirled on with him till he felt faint and the blood rushed to his eyes.

“Come now, beat the time with the right heel,” Herr Loewe admonished relentlessly. Mr. Beck spun round in a pink faint and reflected that his suffering must be endured for love’s sake.

“Now you’re all right,” Herr Loewe absolved him, more kindly, pocketing another hundred-thousand-crown note. “The secret remember, lies in beating the time with the right heel.”

On his way home, his heart thumping irregularly after the lesson, he thought: “Am I too old for her? Can girls like Irmgard really begin to love middle-aged men like myself?” The tailor had brought the new dinner-jacket and retired: “Have the honour—kiss the hand—greet God—commend myself—my compliment,” and as he was putting on his new clothes he whistled: “I, Mackintosh J. Beck, am taking out the prettiest girl in Europe!” He shaved with especial care, and beheld his face and his entire figure in the looking-glass with genuine satisfaction. Walking through the sloppy streets—it seemed that spring was already beginning—he remembered a bet with a college chum at home. The first of them to be engaged was to send the other a cheque for fifty dollars. He imagined his chum opening the envelope. He pictured how he would arrive in America with his young wife, how he would spite the dark-eyed Susy who had broken with him just because he happened to prefer the company of her intellectual brother to her own.

Schindler at last. All shake hands and introduce themselves, the Secretary in addition presenting Mr. Beck right and left as “Mister Captain Mackintosh.” He waits at the door. She comes in at last, dressed as a butterfly and wearing a black mask with a tilted nose. It was cold in the room and she twitched her nude girlish shoulders.

“I recognised you straight away.”

She looked a little sulky. Or was it the black mask that made her look so? The mother smiled sorrowfully. “I said he’d recognise you straight away if we went in together.”

“I’m afraid this is not a very good table,” said the cavalier, escorting them.

“It will do,” said the girl.

“Why so sulky?”

“I was so before we left.”

“Why?”

“Oh, never mind.”

The waiter came up. “What will you have?”

“Nothing yet.”

Remembering what Frau von Kranich said,—“You ought to have come not as a butterfly, but as Cindrella,” he ventured.

Her mouth smiled behind the mask, but the eyes still looked defiant. “Oh, yes, while I remember——” The mother was fumbling in her bag, and presently produced from there a copy of The God Triumphant with a huge brown man with a broken nose upon the cover, and duly autographed inside. “My husband sends you this, with his respectful compliments.”

“Oh, thanks—” Mr. Beck was peeping furtively into the pages, and—“It’s a great book,” he gave his grateful verdict.

“Yes, not everyone can understand it,” agreed the author’s wife.

Through her black mask with the unbecoming tilted nose Irmgard’s eyes glared angrily, defiantly, and he wondered what precisely was the matter. When the waiter came again, she would have nothing. When he came a third time, she would have nothing. When he came a fourth time, Irmgard said, abruptly, that she would have lemonade. Mr. Beck suggested wine, and she said she would have none, and Mr. Beck, thinking she was sorry for his pocket, hastened to suggest lightheartedly that Tokai wine was very nice and sweet. “I know Tokai wine,” she said, in a tone implying that it was certainly as familiar to her as to himself. “But I don’t want it.”

After that Mr. Beck sat silent for a while. And the waiter brought the lemonade. She sipped at it once, and then did not touch it again. The waitress came along with the cakes. “Will you have some?” he ventured.

But she shook her head and sighed. He looked at the mother, and the mother cast a sympathetic look at her. “Cheer up. He may come yet.”

The girl did not answer. Mr. Beck thought that he must on no account whatever miss the moment of proposing to her. “Shall I now?” But at the sight of her defiant eyes he let his head drop on his chest: and, behold! he noticed with dismay, that he had dropped pieces of the sticky chocolate-cream cake upon his trousers, and thinking this was possibly the reason why she was angry, he began to scratch it off, tentatively with his finger-nail. She averted her glance, still looking angry; and thinking that this was then why she was angry, he stopped scratching. Mother and daughter exchanged vague glances. “But to-morrow he is sure to come.”

“Yes, I think he’ll come to-morrow,” said the girl—and looked more friendly.

Mr. Beck rose. “May I have this dance?” She got up, without answering him, and adjusting her butterfly wings which hung down from her wrists, came into his arms, and they glided away cautiously and not too confidently. “Shall I now?” But he had to concentrate his attention on manœuvring her past other couples, while she seemed very frightened of making a mistake, and it was a relief to them both when the music stopped and they returned to the mother. “A bad floor,” said Mr. Beck.

“Yes, the floor is not good.”

“Do take off your mask.”

She shook her head.

Mr. Beck did not dance the next dance, nor the one after. Nor did a single cavalier come up to her.

“Oh, come, take off that mask!” her mother urged at last.

Irmgard shook her head. A minute elapsed; and she took off the mask.

No sooner had she done so than a cavalier was at her side, then a second, a third, a fourth, a tenth. Introductions—Herr Baron——, Herr Graf——. All the impecunious aristocracy of Austria was wooing her virginal charms. Irmgard brightened up. She danced. “What a beautiful girl!” “What an exquisite face!” said the old fogeys surveying her. They wished they could dance too, but their dancing was of the old school: alas! they were ignorant of the jazz.

But at last the conductor held up his baton more defiantly—and it went off, the old ever-popular waltz To the Beautiful Blue Danube. All the old fogeys, who had so far languished in obscure corners, crawled out, like beetles, at the sound of the first bars, and went spinning round on their axes, to the large, deliberate rhythm. Mr. Beck wanted to try his luck, but before he could open his mouth Irmgard was off, whirling round with Baron Karl Franz Egon Gaestner zu Hauch Wolf-Kadelburg von Hofmannsthal. Mr. Beck looked at her complexion. It was perfect as in a child, and the nose shone slightly. Clearly she hadn’t even begun to use powder.

Elated by her sudden success, Irmgard wanted to go to Herr Loewe’s dance next door. She was impatient—could not wait for the cloak-room ticket—could not wait till Mr. Beck had got back his change. She danced with him, excited by the stares which she received from every side, drunk with success. “Now let’s walk,” she said, taking his arm.

“This is the time,” he thought. “Still one can’t very well barge into it like that. One ought to tell her something about oneself,” he argued with himself; and opportunely said: “You hardly know anything about my life and work. I must seem a stranger to you—a blank signifying nothing. And yet I’ve written some standard works in Ethnology and am of some account in that branch of science.”

“You must write in German if I am to read them,” she replied. “Now we must rush back.”

At that “we” he felt unusually intimate, and he said as he helped her on with her coat, “Turn up your collar,” and even turned it up for her, at which she frowned. “Now for it!” he thought.

“I want to tell you something.”

“Afterwards,” she said, and rushed away from him back to her mother.

He walked with them to the castle. At the injunction of the mother Irmgard did not speak and held her shawl close to the chin. When he went to bed it was past five o’clock.

VI

The night after, he joined them at the dance in the City Hall. It seemed that the entrance ticket had already been provided for him by the girl. But when, pocket-book in hand, he was about to give her the money, she flared up—“Don’t give it me here!”

And he smarted. When he came up to her in the ball-room he saw that she was red and angry, standing with her brother Hellmuth with the double nose, who was also red and angry. They could not secure an empty table and stood in the drafty doorway, jammed by the crowd. “Will you put this into your pocket?” She handed him her little vanity-bag. The band struck up a Wienerwalzer, and he asked her. It didn’t go as well as it should have done, after two lessons. “Beat the time with the right heel,” he remembered Herr Loewe’s injunction. And he did beat it, and with the right heel. Only he could not get it exactly in time, and the left heel came down of itself just as the right one was due, every time. They had only done a few paces. “No, that won’t do,” she said, releasing him.

Two lessons gone for naught! However that may be, he must not miss the chance—perhaps the last—of proposing to her: “Shall I now?”

But she looked angry. Her (father’s) small eyes looked angry, as if at the perfidious meanness, the invidious perversity of mankind. Her sister Elsa’s fiancé, a young man employed at the local circus, was making funny little signs to Irmgard, to amuse her. But she never looked. Mr. Beck gave up talking to her.

“Ah! Mister Captain Mackintosh!” A man whom he had met the night before came up to him and, taking him by the arm, imparted to him that he was looking for a certain Dr. Schmidt. And for an hour Mr. Beck was dragged about all round the rooms and through the vestibule and down the restaurant and up the stairs all round the gallery, in search of the elusive Dr. Schmidt whom he had never seen nor even wished to see. They did not find Dr. Schmidt; and it is to be presumed that Mr. Beck died without seeing him; but he killed, however disagreeably and unprofitably, one hour of his mental agony.

Exhausted, he sat down in the gallery and watched the crowded ball-room heave in whirling couples to the mighty rhythm of the Danube Waltz. The big orchestra put a dashing emphasis into the mighty regularly whirling rhythm. “For you the hesitant irregularities of jazz: for us the regular abandon of the Wienerwalzer,” these whirling sounds and faces seemed to sing aloft. And behold, a military figure holding in his martial arms a slim fair lady went round and round, tapping the time with his right heel. And there again—an elderly couple: they had placed their hands on each other’s shoulders at arms’ length and went round, the man tapping his heel. A postal official whirled round with his girl, his face all of a smile. These multitudinous couples did not bang into one another as often as one might expect. Like so many spinning-tops, they each turned on their particular axis, just clearing each other, while the music lashed them on into a frenzied passion of regular rhythm. Mr. Beck leaned forward, watching down into the vulgar opulence of the gilded ball-room—stunned, fallen into a trance or reverie. And the conglomeration for some reason recalled to him those crowded frescoes packed with human figures that one sees in Botticelli. Away, away was the postal official. And there, nearing his end of the room, was Irmgard, the beautiful girl!

When at length he returned to the joint table, Irmgard was not there; it seemed as if she avoided him. Mr. Beck caught a sentence which had passed between Elsa and her fiancé: “It’s too late—he won’t come now. Poor Irmgard!” The betrothed young couple took pity on the lonely Mr. Beck and, with the aid of another young couple, got him to join in a complicated dance in which Mr. Beck had to describe elaborate, intricate figures with his tired legs—and felt like a fool. Irmgard, with an angry frown, danced with a pale young man with a pinched look. Mr. Beck paced round alone, pulling out his watch and rehearsing mentally how, in parting, he would thank the betrothed young couple for their kindness to him and hand Irmgard back her vanity-bag, without a word—and go. They talked of wanting to go on to a coffee-house to drink coffee till eight in the morning, by way of doing justice to the Carnival, but Mr. Beck only wanted to get into bed and to calm his poor nerves. The hours dragged. It was four; then it was five—but still the dancing went on. At last he buttonholed the circus man. “I want to go home,” he pleaded wearily.

“No, no! We’re staying on till six. Surely, Herr von Mackintosh, you don’t want to be guilty of ruining our little Carnival party?”

Mr. Beck did not want to ruin anything and as a cultivated man in foreign parts, deemed it only right not to do anything which might cause them, in their own poor light, to think him ill-mannered. So he paced on by himself round and round (he was afraid that if he sat down he might fall asleep), now and then pulling out his watch and yawning into his white-cuffed hand. The clock struck half-past seven. It struck eight o’clock. Somebody was making a collection for the band, and spoke: “If we pay them they’ll play on till nine.” A sleepy waiter looked angrily at Mr. Beck. “All d-ham foolishness!” said he, evidently recognising an American in him. “All d-ham foolishness! The lights are only paid for till half-past eight.” He was falling over from fatigue; his eyes were closing of themselves. He was a tottering figure in the corner. Mr. Beck was still pacing about, waiting eagerly for the Schulz’s to make a start—when suddenly he ran into the circus man. “The ladies have just gone home with their brother Hellmuth and asked me to say good-bye for them.”

“What! They’ve gone?”

He was staggered by the news—his heart all weeping tears. In the large vestibule there was a draught, and as he pressed his way through the crowd, Mr. Mackintosh Beck felt all nasty inside—as if he had just arrived at the Hook of Holland after a particularly vile crossing from Harwich. While waiting for his coat and hat in the icy cloak-room with the doors swinging to and fro, he had a chilly feeling in his bosom, as though some improvident maid had left open all windows and doors and a tremendous draught was sweeping the length and breadth of his inner rooms. When he came out of the City Hall it was morning, and a round white mist stood on the sharp mountain edge, like an enormous balloon. The snow fell in heaps; it seemed as though a new winter spell were beginning. He shivered in his coat and felt a dull ache in the pit of his stomach. As he walked home it was bitterly cold, and a sharp wind blew from across the river. And suddenly it seemed as if the mountains pressed their awful weight upon his chest, stifling his breath, so that he could have screamed in anguish—rapped his heart....

He could feel the vanity-bag in his side-pocket, and thought: “That girl ought to be whipped!” And to be treated like that by a mere Backfish! It came over him—the urgent wish to press all of his latent claims to renown upon her. Impudent nincompoop! The tears in his throat rolled back at this rebellious thought. He shaped in his mind the letter he would write to Frau von Kranich: “I return the vanity-bag which—— I am sorry that your good intentions have involved me——” No, that would never do. “Of all the rude girls that I have ever met——” No, no, that might lead to unpleasantness, who knows? Suddenly her brother Hellmuth with the swollen double nose rose before him, threatening. Mr. Beck did not know for a fact whether Hellmuth had been a student and so was a ready hand at sword-duelling. He assumed, nevertheless, that Herr Direktor Schulz, despite his record, had not begrudged his son a university education, seeing how extraordinarily cheap it was on the continent of Europe. He could not remember having seen any sword-cuts on Hellmuth’s face. But he recalled the swollen double nose, which, though no direct indication of unusual ferocity, yet did argue a certain dare-devilry, a love of courting danger—which well might mean danger for Mr. Mackintosh Beck. “Damn!” he thought, “blast the whole bally crew of them!”

He pictured the duel, the rising in the cold early morning—a sword in his vitals—his death. “No,” he thought, “the blooming girl isn’t worth it!”

Suddenly he felt old, too old to take on such risks. He understood that young girls like Irmgard could not love men like himself. He crossed the bridge, and slowly began the ascent to his pension. It was still snowing, and the sky looked bleak, solitary, senseless. And he thought: “I am glad; I am glad.”

Going back to his room—all upside down from the erewhile ardour of dressing—he remembered how he had looked forward to both nights and had dressed with particular care. It had seemed to him then that he looked very smart. Now the new dinner-jacket looked loose, the shirt crumpled, the new patent leather shoes cracked. He sat down at the table and saw his face in the glass: it was sallow, haggard—as though he had been travelling for three nights on end without a sleeper. What mental suffering could do! And the powder on the upper lip had melted away and revealed the red patches from the scraping blade. He noticed that whenever he shaved with particular care it always came out worse. His hair was turning very grey—there was a bald patch on the crown. He remembered how ugly he had looked in the glass at the tailor’s—and understood.

And now, with fluttering heart, he opened the vanity-bag—a plain little wallet of pink chiffon—and beheld its contents: a pinch of greased powder, sweet-smelling, in a scrap of crumpled paper. And he thought she never powdered! Two white spotless maiden handkerchiefs with the initial “I” and three little flowers around embroidered in blue silk. In another pocket, a crumpled bit of white paper containing rouge. How touching! And behold! a long hair—Irmgard’s. He took it up between his fingers and pressed it tight, and it seemed to coil, like a snake, as if alive. And in that cruel, treacherous movement also was Irmgard.

But what was this? A photo of a young good-looking student. Another photo—Irmgard and the student. A third photo—Irmgard, Elsa, Hellmuth, and the student. It dawned upon him suddenly how during both nights she had been strangely distracted; he recalled the words and looks that passed between her and her family. He understood: he perfectly understood....

And the whole vanity-bag smelled sweetly—like her sweet seventeen. By a simple flash of intuition into her being, he understood how she had moods and a life independent of his, and that it was right that it was so. In this her first Carnival dance, long since prepared for, she had been disappointed, and not the least disappointed in him, and perhaps also was crying now. And suddenly his sight was blurred. He took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and wiped the glass with his big handkerchief....