In a German Pension

GERMANS AT MEAT

Bread soup was placed upon the table.

“Ah,” said the Herr Rat, leaning upon the table as he peered into
the tureen, “that is what I need. My ‘magen’ has not been in
order for several days. Bread soup, and just the right consistency. I am a good
cook myself”—he turned to me.

“How interesting,” I said, attempting to infuse just the right
amount of enthusiasm into my voice.

“Oh yes—when one is not married it is necessary. As for me, I have
had all I wanted from women without marriage.” He tucked his napkin into
his collar and blew upon his soup as he spoke. “Now at nine o’clock
I make myself an English breakfast, but not much. Four slices of bread, two
eggs, two slices of cold ham, one plate of soup, two cups of tea—that is
nothing to you.”

He asserted the fact so vehemently that I had not the courage to refute it.

All eyes were suddenly turned upon me. I felt I was bearing the burden of the
nation’s preposterous breakfast—I who drank a cup of coffee while
buttoning my blouse in the morning.

“Nothing at all,” cried Herr Hoffmann from Berlin. “Ach, when
I was in England in the morning I used to eat.”

He turned up his eyes and his moustache, wiping the soup drippings from his
coat and waistcoat.

“Do they really eat so much?” asked Fräulein Stiegelauer.
“Soup and baker’s bread and pig’s flesh, and tea and coffee
and stewed fruit, and honey and eggs, and cold fish and kidneys, and hot fish
and liver? All the ladies eat, too, especially the ladies.”

“Certainly. I myself have noticed it, when I was living in a hotel in
Leicester Square,” cried the Herr Rat. “It was a good hotel, but
they could not make tea—now—”

“Ah, that’s one thing I can do,” said I, laughing
brightly. “I can make very good tea. The great secret is to warm the
teapot.”

“Warm the teapot,” interrupted the Herr Rat, pushing away his soup
plate. “What do you warm the teapot for? Ha! ha! that’s very good!
One does not eat the teapot, I suppose?”

He fixed his cold blue eyes upon me with an expression which suggested a
thousand premeditated invasions.

“So that is the great secret of your English tea? All you do is to warm
the teapot.”

I wanted to say that was only the preliminary canter, but could not translate
it, and so was silent.

The servant brought in veal, with “sauerkraut” and potatoes.

“I eat sauerkraut with great pleasure,” said the Traveller from
North Germany, “but now I have eaten so much of it that I cannot retain
it. I am immediately forced to—”

“A beautiful day,” I cried, turning to Fräulein Stiegelauer.
“Did you get up early?”

“At five o’clock I walked for ten minutes in the wet grass. Again
in bed. At half-past five I fell asleep, and woke at seven, when I made an
‘overbody’ washing! Again in bed. At eight o’clock I had a
cold-water poultice, and at half past eight I drank a cup of mint tea. At nine
I drank some malt coffee, and began my ‘cure.’ Pass me the
sauerkraut, please. You do not eat it?”

“No, thank you. I still find it a little strong.”

“Is it true,” asked the Widow, picking her teeth with a hairpin as
she spoke, “that you are a vegetarian?”

“Why, yes; I have not eaten meat for three years.”

“Im—possible! Have you any family?”

“No.”

“There now, you see, that’s what you’re coming to! Who ever
heard of having children upon vegetables? It is not possible. But you never
have large families in England now; I suppose you are too busy with your
suffragetting. Now I have had nine children, and they are all alive, thank God.
Fine, healthy babies—though after the first one was born I had
to—”

“How wonderful!” I cried.

“Wonderful,” said the Widow contemptuously, replacing the hairpin
in the knob which was balanced on the top of her head. “Not at all! A
friend of mine had four at the same time. Her husband was so pleased he gave a
supper-party and had them placed on the table. Of course she was very
proud.”

“Germany,” boomed the Traveller, biting round a potato which he had
speared with his knife, “is the home of the Family.”

Followed an appreciative silence.

The dishes were changed for beef, red currants and spinach. They wiped their
forks upon black bread and started again.

“How long are you remaining here?” asked the Herr Rat.

“I do not know exactly. I must be back in London in September.”

“Of course you will visit München?”

“I am afraid I shall not have time. You see, it is important not to break
into my ‘cure.’”

“But you must go to München. You have not seen Germany if you have
not been to München. All the Exhibitions, all the Art and Soul life of Germany
are in München. There is the Wagner Festival in August, and Mozart and a
Japanese collection of pictures—and there is the beer! You do not know
what good beer is until you have been to München. Why, I see fine ladies every
afternoon, but fine ladies, I tell you, drinking glasses so high.” He
measured a good washstand pitcher in height, and I smiled.

“If I drink a great deal of München beer I sweat so,” said Herr
Hoffmann. “When I am here, in the fields or before my baths, I sweat, but
I enjoy it; but in the town it is not at all the same thing.”

Prompted by the thought, he wiped his neck and face with his dinner napkin and
carefully cleaned his ears.

A glass dish of stewed apricots was placed upon the table.

“Ah, fruit!” said Fräulein Stiegelauer, “that is so necessary
to health. The doctor told me this morning that the more fruit I could eat the
better.”

She very obviously followed the advice.

Said the Traveller: “I suppose you are frightened of an invasion, too,
eh? Oh, that’s good. I’ve been reading all about your English play
in a newspaper. Did you see it?”

“Yes.” I sat upright. “I assure you we are not afraid.”

“Well, then, you ought to be,” said the Herr Rat. “You have
got no army at all—a few little boys with their veins full of nicotine
poisoning.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Herr Hoffmann said. “We don’t
want England. If we did we would have had her long ago. We really do not want
you.”

He waved his spoon airily, looking across at me as though I were a little child
whom he would keep or dismiss as he pleased.

“We certainly do not want Germany,” I said.

“This morning I took a half bath. Then this afternoon I must take a knee
bath and an arm bath,” volunteered the Herr Rat; “then I do my
exercises for an hour, and my work is over. A glass of wine and a couple of
rolls with some sardines—”

They were handed cherry cake with whipped cream.

“What is your husband’s favourite meat?” asked the Widow.

“I really do not know,” I answered.

“You really do not know? How long have you been married?”

“Three years.”

“But you cannot be in earnest! You would not have kept house as his wife
for a week without knowing that fact.”

“I really never asked him; he is not at all particular about his
food.”

A pause. They all looked at me, shaking their heads, their mouths full of
cherry stones.

“No wonder there is a repetition in England of that dreadful state of
things in Paris,” said the Widow, folding her dinner napkin. “How
can a woman expect to keep her husband if she does not know his favourite food
after three years?”

“Mahlzeit!”

“Mahlzeit!”

I closed the door after me.

THE BARON

“Who is he?” I said. “And why does he sit always alone, with
his back to us, too?”

“Ah!” whispered the Frau Oberregierungsrat, “he is a
Baron.”

She looked at me very solemnly, and yet with the slightest possible
contempt—a “fancy-not-recognising-that-at-the-first-glance”
expression.

“But, poor soul, he cannot help it,” I said. “Surely that
unfortunate fact ought not to debar him from the pleasures of intellectual
intercourse.”

If it had not been for her fork I think she would have crossed herself.

“Surely you cannot understand. He is one of the First Barons.”

More than a little unnerved, she turned and spoke to the Frau Doktor on her
left.

“My omelette is empty—empty,” she protested,
“and this is the third I have tried!”

I looked at the First of the Barons. He was eating salad—taking a whole
lettuce leaf on his fork and absorbing it slowly, rabbit-wise—a
fascinating process to watch.

Small and slight, with scanty black hair and beard and yellow-toned complexion,
he invariably wore black serge clothes, a rough linen shirt, black sandals, and
the largest black-rimmed spectacles that I had ever seen.

The Herr Oberlehrer, who sat opposite me, smiled benignantly.

“It must be very interesting for you, gnädige Frau, to be able to
watch… of course this is a very fine house. There was a lady from the
Spanish Court here in the summer; she had a liver. We often spoke
together.”

I looked gratified and humble.

“Now, in England, in your ‘boarding ’ouse’, one does
not find the First Class, as in Germany.”

“No, indeed,” I replied, still hypnotised by the Baron, who looked
like a little yellow silkworm.

“The Baron comes every year,” went on the Herr Oberlehrer,
“for his nerves. He has never spoken to any of the
guests—yet.” A smile crossed his face. I seemed to see his
visions of some splendid upheaval of that silence—a dazzling exchange of
courtesies in a dim future, a splendid sacrifice of a newspaper to this Exalted
One, a “danke schön” to be handed down to future generations.

At that moment the postman, looking like a German army officer, came in with
the mail. He threw my letters into my milk pudding, and then turned to a
waitress and whispered. She retired hastily. The manager of the pension came in
with a little tray. A picture post card was deposited on it, and reverently
bowing his head, the manager of the pension carried it to the Baron.

Myself, I felt disappointed that there was not a salute of twenty-five guns.

At the end of the meal we were served with coffee. I noticed the Baron took
three lumps of sugar, putting two in his cup and wrapping up the third in a
corner of his pocket-handkerchief. He was always the first to enter the
dining-room and the last to leave; and in a vacant chair beside him he placed a
little black leather bag.

In the afternoon, leaning from my window, I saw him pass down the street,
walking tremulously and carrying the bag. Each time he passed a lamp-post he
shrank a little, as though expecting it to strike him, or maybe the sense of
plebeian contamination….

I wondered where he was going, and why he carried the bag. Never had I seen him
at the Casino or the Bath Establishment. He looked forlorn, his feet slipped in
his sandals. I found myself pitying the Baron.

That evening a party of us were gathered in the salon discussing the
day’s “kur” with feverish animation. The Frau
Oberregierungsrat sat by me knitting a shawl for her youngest of nine
daughters, who was in that very interesting, frail condition…. “But it
is bound to be quite satisfactory,” she said to me. “The dear
married a banker—the desire of her life.”

There must have been eight or ten of us gathered together, we who were married
exchanging confidences as to the underclothing and peculiar characteristics of
our husbands, the unmarried discussing the over-clothing and peculiar
fascinations of Possible Ones.

“I knit them myself,” I heard the Frau Lehrer cry, “of thick
grey wool. He wears one a month, with two soft collars.”

“And then,” whispered Fräulein Lisa, “he said to me,
‘Indeed you please me. I shall, perhaps, write to your
mother.’”

Small wonder that we were a little violently excited, a little expostulatory.

Suddenly the door opened and admitted the Baron.

Followed a complete and deathlike silence.

He came in slowly, hesitated, took up a toothpick from a dish on the top of the
piano, and went out again.

When the door was closed we raised a triumphant cry! It was the first time he
had ever been known to enter the salon. Who could tell what the Future held?

Days lengthened into weeks. Still we were together, and still the solitary
little figure, head bowed as though under the weight of the spectacles, haunted
me. He entered with the black bag, he retired with the black bag—and that
was all.

At last the manager of the pension told us the Baron was leaving the next day.

“Oh,” I thought, “surely he cannot drift into
obscurity—be lost without one word! Surely he will honour the Frau
Oberregierungsrat or the Frau Feldleutnantswitwe once before he
goes.”

In the evening of that day it rained heavily. I went to the post office, and as
I stood on the steps, umbrellaless, hesitating before plunging into the slushy
road, a little, hesitating voice seemed to come from under my elbow.

I looked down. It was the First of the Barons with the black bag and an
umbrella. Was I mad? Was I sane? He was asking me to share the latter. But I
was exceedingly nice, a trifle diffident, appropriately reverential. Together
we walked through the mud and slush.

Now, there is something peculiarly intimate in sharing an umbrella.

It is apt to put one on the same footing as brushing a man’s coat for
him—a little daring, naïve.

I longed to know why he sat alone, why he carried the bag, what he did all day.
But he himself volunteered some information.

“I fear,” he said, “that my luggage will be damp. I
invariably carry it with me in this bag—one requires so little—for
servants are untrustworthy.”

“A wise idea,” I answered. And then: “Why have you denied us
the pleasure—”

“I sit alone that I may eat more,” said the Baron, peering into the
dusk; “my stomach requires a great deal of food. I order double portions,
and eat them in peace.”

Which sounded finely Baronial.

“And what do you do all day?”

“I imbibe nourishment in my room,” he replied, in a voice that
closed the conversation and almost repented of the umbrella.

When we arrived at the pension there was very nearly an open riot.

I ran half way up the stairs, and thanked the Baron audibly from the landing.

He distinctly replied: “Not at all!”

It was very friendly of the Herr Oberlehrer to have sent me a bouquet that
evening, and the Frau Oberregierungsrat asked me for my pattern of a
baby’s bonnet!

Next day the Baron was gone.

Sic transit gloria German mundi.

THE SISTER OF THE BARONESS

“There are two new guests arriving this afternoon,” said the
manager of the pension, placing a chair for me at the breakfast-table. “I
have only received the letter acquainting me with the fact this morning. The
Baroness von Gall is sending her little daughter—the poor child is
dumb—to make the ‘cure.’ She is to stay with us a month, and
then the Baroness herself is coming.”

“Baroness von Gall,” cried the Frau Doktor, coming into the room
and positively scenting the name. “Coming here? There was a picture of
her only last week in Sport and Salon. She is a friend of the Court: I
have heard that the Kaiserin says ‘du’ to her. But this is
delightful! I shall take my doctor’s advice and spend an extra six weeks
here. There is nothing like young society.”

“But the child is dumb,” ventured the manager apologetically.

“Bah! What does that matter? Afflicted children have such pretty
ways.”

Each guest who came into the breakfast-room was bombarded with the wonderful
news. “The Baroness von Gall is sending her little daughter here; the
Baroness herself is coming in a month’s time.” Coffee and rolls
took on the nature of an orgy. We positively scintillated. Anecdotes of the
High Born were poured out, sweetened and sipped: we gorged on scandals of High
Birth generously buttered.

“They are to have the room next to yours,” said the manager,
addressing me. “I was wondering if you would permit me to take down the
portrait of the Kaiserin Elizabeth from above your bed to hang over their
sofa.”

“Yes, indeed, something homelike”—the Frau Oberregierungsrat
patted my hand—“and of no possible significance to you.”

I felt a little crushed. Not at the prospect of losing that vision of diamonds
and blue velvet bust, but at the tone—placing me outside the
pale—branding me as a foreigner.

We dissipated the day in valid speculations. Decided it was too warm to walk in
the afternoon, so lay down on our beds, mustering in great force for afternoon
coffee. And a carriage drew up at the door. A tall young girl got out, leading
a child by the hand. They entered the hall, were greeted and shown to their
room. Ten minutes later she came down with the child to sign the
visitors’ book. She wore a black, closely fitting dress, touched at
throat and wrists with white frilling. Her brown hair, braided, was tied with a
black bow—unusually pale, with a small mole on her left cheek.

“I am the Baroness von Gall’s sister,” she said, trying the
pen on a piece of blotting-paper, and smiling at us deprecatingly. Even for the
most jaded of us life holds its thrilling moments. Two Baronesses in two
months! The manager immediately left the room to find a new nib.

To my plebeian eyes that afflicted child was singularly unattractive. She had
the air of having been perpetually washed with a blue bag, and hair like grey
wool—dressed, too, in a pinafore so stiffly starched that she could only
peer at us over the frill of it—a social barrier of a pinafore—and
perhaps it was too much to expect a noble aunt to attend to the menial
consideration of her niece’s ears. But a dumb niece with unwashed ears
struck me as a most depressing object.

They were given places at the head of the table. For a moment we all looked at
one another with an eena-deena-dina-do expression. Then the Frau
Oberregierungsrat:

“I hope you are not tired after your journey.”

“No,” said the sister of the Baroness, smiling into her cup.

“I hope the dear child is not tired,” said the Frau Doktor.

“Not at all.”

“I expect, I hope you will sleep well to-night,” the Herr
Oberlehrer said reverently.

“Yes.”

The poet from Munich never took his eyes off the pair. He allowed his tie to
absorb most of his coffee while he gazed at them exceedingly soulfully.

Unyoking Pegasus, thought I. Death spasms of his Odes to Solitude! There were
possibilities in that young woman for an inspiration, not to mention a
dedication, and from that moment his suffering temperament took up its bed and
walked.

They retired after the meal, leaving us to discuss them at leisure.

“There is a likeness,” mused the Frau Doktor. “Quite. What a
manner she has. Such reserve, such a tender way with the child.”

“Pity she has the child to attend to,” exclaimed the student from
Bonn. He had hitherto relied upon three scars and a ribbon to produce an
effect, but the sister of a Baroness demanded more than these.

Absorbing days followed. Had she been one whit less beautifully born we could
not have endured the continual conversation about her, the songs in her praise,
the detailed account of her movements. But she graciously suffered our worship
and we were more than content.

The poet she took into her confidence. He carried her books when we went
walking, he jumped the afflicted one on his knee—poetic licence,
this—and one morning brought his notebook into the salon and read to us.

“The sister of the Baroness has assured me she is going into a
convent,” he said. (That made the student from Bonn sit up.) “I
have written these few lines last night from my window in the sweet night
air—”

“Oh, your delicate chest,” commented the Frau Doktor.

He fixed a stony eye on her, and she blushed.

“I have written these lines:

“‘Ah, will you to a convent fly,
    So young, so fresh, so fair?
Spring like a doe upon the fields
    And find your beauty there.’”

Nine verses equally lovely commanded her to equally violent action. I am
certain that had she followed his advice not even the remainder of her life in
a convent would have given her time to recover her breath.

“I have presented her with a copy,” he said. “And to-day we
are going to look for wild flowers in the wood.”

The student from Bonn got up and left the room. I begged the poet to repeat the
verses once more. At the end of the sixth verse I saw from the window the
sister of the Baroness and the scarred youth disappearing through the front
gate, which enabled me to thank the poet so charmingly that he offered to write
me out a copy.

But we were living at too high pressure in those days. Swinging from our humble
pension to the high walls of palaces, how could we help but fall? Late one
afternoon the Frau Doktor came upon me in the writing-room and took me to her
bosom.

“She has been telling me all about her life,” whispered the Frau
Doktor. “She came to my bedroom and offered to massage my arm. You know,
I am the greatest martyr to rheumatism. And, fancy now, she has already had six
proposals of marriage. Such beautiful offers that I assure you I wept—and
every one of noble birth. My dear, the most beautiful was in the wood. Not that
I do not think a proposal should take place in a drawing-room—it is more
fitting to have four walls—but this was a private wood. He said, the
young officer, she was like a young tree whose branches had never been touched
by the ruthless hand of man. Such delicacy!” She sighed and turned up her
eyes.

“Of course it is difficult for you English to understand when you are
always exposing your legs on cricket-fields, and breeding dogs in your back
gardens. The pity of it! Youth should be like a wild rose. For myself I do not
understand how your women ever get married at all.”

She shook her head so violently that I shook mine too, and a gloom settled
round my heart. It seemed we were really in a very bad way. Did the spirit of
romance spread her rose wings only over aristocratic Germany?

I went to my room, bound a pink scarf about my hair, and took a volume of
Mörike’s lyrics into the garden. A great bush of purple lilac grew behind
the summer-house. There I sat down, finding a sad significance in the delicate
suggestion of half mourning. I began to write a poem myself.

“They sway and languish dreamily,
And we, close pressed, are kissing there.”

It ended! “Close pressed” did not sound at all fascinating.
Savoured of wardrobes. Did my wild rose then already trail in the dust? I
chewed a leaf and hugged my knees. Then—magic moment—I heard voices
from the summer-house, the sister of the Baroness and the student from Bonn.

Second-hand was better than nothing; I pricked up my ears.

“What small hands you have,” said the student from Bonn.
“They are like white lilies lying in the pool of your black dress.”
This certainly sounded the real thing. Her high-born reply was what interested
me. Sympathetic murmur only.

“May I hold one?”

I heard two sighs—presumed they held—he had rifled those dark
waters of a noble blossom.

“Look at my great fingers beside yours.”

“But they are beautifully kept,” said the sister of the Baroness
shyly.

The minx! Was love then a question of manicure?

“How I should adore to kiss you,” murmured the student. “But
you know I am suffering from severe nasal catarrh, and I dare not risk giving
it to you. Sixteen times last night did I count myself sneezing. And three
different handkerchiefs.”

I threw Mörike into the lilac bush, and went back to the house. A great
automobile snorted at the front door. In the salon great commotion. The
Baroness was paying a surprise visit to her little daughter. Clad in a yellow
mackintosh she stood in the middle of the room questioning the manager. And
every guest the pension contained was grouped about her, even the Frau Doktor,
presumably examining a timetable, as near to the august skirts as possible.

“But where is my maid?” asked the Baroness.

“There was no maid,” replied the manager, “save for your
gracious sister and daughter.”

“Sister!” she cried sharply. “Fool, I have no sister. My
child travelled with the daughter of my dressmaker.”

Tableau grandissimo!

FRAU FISCHER

Frau Fischer was the fortunate possessor of a candle factory somewhere on the
banks of the Eger, and once a year she ceased from her labours to make a
“cure” in Dorschausen, arriving with a dress-basket neatly covered
in a black tarpaulin and a hand-bag. The latter contained amongst her
handkerchiefs, eau de Cologne, toothpicks, and a certain woollen muffler very
comforting to the “magen,” samples of her skill in candle-making,
to be offered up as tokens of thanksgiving when her holiday time was over.

Four of the clock one July afternoon she appeared at the Pension Müller. I was
sitting in the arbour and watched her bustling up the path followed by the
red-bearded porter with her dress-basket in his arms and a sunflower between
his teeth. The widow and her five innocent daughters stood tastefully grouped
upon the steps in appropriate attitudes of welcome; and the greetings were so
long and loud that I felt a sympathetic glow.

“What a journey!” cried the Frau Fischer. “And nothing to eat
in the train—nothing solid. I assure you the sides of my stomach are
flapping together. But I must not spoil my appetite for dinner—just a cup
of coffee in my room. Bertha,” turning to the youngest of the five,
“how changed! What a bust! Frau Hartmann, I congratulate you.”

Once again the Widow seized Frau Fischer’s hands. “Kathi, too, a
splendid woman; but a little pale. Perhaps the young man from Nürnberg is here
again this year. How you keep them all I don’t know. Each year I come
expecting to find you with an empty nest. It’s surprising.”

Frau Hartmann, in an ashamed, apologetic voice: “We are such a happy
family since my dear man died.”

“But these marriages—one must have courage; and after all, give
them time, they all make the happy family bigger—thank God for that….
Are there many people here just now?”

“Every room engaged.”

Followed a detailed description in the hall, murmured on the stairs, continued
in six parts as they entered the large room (windows opening upon the garden)
which Frau Fischer occupied each successive year. I was reading the
“Miracles of Lourdes,” which a Catholic priest—fixing a
gloomy eye upon my soul—had begged me to digest; but its wonders were
completely routed by Frau Fischer’s arrival. Not even the white roses
upon the feet of the Virgin could flourish in that atmosphere.

“… It was a simple shepherd-child who pastured her flocks upon the
barren fields….”

Voices from the room above: “The washstand has, of course, been scrubbed
over with soda.”

“… Poverty-stricken, her limbs with tattered rags half
covered….”

“Every stick of the furniture has been sunning in the garden for three
days. And the carpet we made ourselves out of old clothes. There is a piece of
that beautiful flannel petticoat you left us last summer.”

“… Deaf and dumb was the child; in fact, the population considered her
half idiot….”

“Yes, that is a new picture of the Kaiser. We have moved the
thorn-crowned one of Jesus Christ out into the passage. It was not cheerful to
sleep with. Dear Frau Fischer, won’t you take your coffee out in the
garden?”

“That is a very nice idea. But first I must remove my corsets and my
boots. Ah, what a relief to wear sandals again. I am needing the
‘cure’ very badly this year. My nerves! I am a mass of them. During
the entire journey I sat with my handkerchief over my head, even while the
guard collected the tickets. Exhausted!”

She came into the arbour wearing a black and white spotted dressing-gown, and a
calico cap peaked with patent leather, followed by Kathi, carrying the little
blue jugs of malt coffee. We were formally introduced. Frau Fischer sat down,
produced a perfectly clean pocket handkerchief and polished her cup and saucer,
then lifted the lid of the coffee-pot and peered in at the contents mournfully.

“Malt coffee,” she said. “Ah, for the first few days I wonder
how I can put up with it. Naturally, absent from home one must expect much
discomfort and strange food. But as I used to say to my dear husband: with a
clean sheet and a good cup of coffee I can find my happiness anywhere. But now,
with nerves like mine, no sacrifice is too terrible for me to make. What
complaint are you suffering from? You look exceedingly healthy!”

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders.

“Ah, that is so strange about you English. You do not seem to enjoy
discussing the functions of the body. As well speak of a railway train and
refuse to mention the engine. How can we hope to understand anybody, knowing
nothing of their stomachs? In my husband’s most severe illness—the
poultices—”

She dipped a piece of sugar in her coffee and watched it dissolve.

“Yet a young friend of mine who travelled to England for the funeral of
his brother told me that women wore bodices in public restaurants no waiter
could help looking into as he handed the soup.”

“But only German waiters,” I said. “English ones look over
the top of your head.”

“There,” she cried, “now you see your dependence on Germany.
Not even an efficient waiter can you have by yourselves.”

“But I prefer them to look over your head.”

“And that proves that you must be ashamed of your bodice.”

I looked out over the garden full of wall-flowers and standard rose-trees
growing stiffly like German bouquets, feeling I did not care one way or the
other. I rather wanted to ask her if the young friend had gone to England in
the capacity of waiter to attend the funeral baked meats, but decided it was
not worth it. The weather was too hot to be malicious, and who could be
uncharitable, victimised by the flapping sensations which Frau Fischer was
enduring until six-thirty? As a gift from heaven for my forbearance, down the
path towards us came the Herr Rat, angelically clad in a white silk suit. He
and Frau Fischer were old friends. She drew the folds of her dressing-gown
together, and made room for him on the little green bench.

“How cool you are looking,” she said; “and if I may make the
remark—what a beautiful suit!”

“Surely I wore it last summer when you were here? I brought the silk from
China—smuggled it through the Russian customs by swathing it round my
body. And such a quantity: two dress lengths for my sister-in-law, three suits
for myself, a cloak for the housekeeper of my flat in Munich. How I perspired!
Every inch of it had to be washed afterwards.”

“Surely you have had more adventures than any man in Germany. When I
think of the time that you spent in Turkey with a drunken guide who was bitten
by a mad dog and fell over a precipice into a field of attar of roses, I lament
that you have not written a book.”

“Time—time. I am getting a few notes together. And now that you are
here we shall renew our quiet little talks after supper. Yes? It is necessary
and pleasant for a man to find relaxation in the company of women
occasionally.”

“Indeed I realise that. Even here your life is too strenuous—you
are so sought after—so admired. It was just the same with my dear
husband. He was a tall, beautiful man, and sometimes in the evening he would
come down into the kitchen and say: ‘Wife, I would like to be stupid for
two minutes.’ Nothing rested him so much then as for me to stroke his
head.”

The Herr Rat’s bald pate glistening in the sunlight seemed symbolical of
the sad absence of a wife.

I began to wonder as to the nature of these quiet little after-supper talks.
How could one play Delilah to so shorn a Samson?

“Herr Hoffmann from Berlin arrived yesterday,” said the Herr Rat.

“That young man I refuse to converse with. He told me last year that he
had stayed in France in an hotel where they did not have serviettes; what a
place it must have been! In Austria even the cabmen have serviettes. Also I
have heard that he discussed ‘free love’ with Bertha as she was
sweeping his room. I am not accustomed to such company. I had suspected him for
a long time.”

“Young blood,” answered the Herr Rat genially. “I have had
several disputes with him—you have heard them—is it not so?”
turning to me.

“A great many,” I said, smiling.

“Doubtless you too consider me behind the times. I make no secret of my
age; I am sixty-nine; but you must have surely observed how impossible it was
for him to speak at all when I raised my voice.”

I replied with the utmost conviction, and, catching Frau Fischer’s eye,
suddenly realised I had better go back to the house and write some letters.

It was dark and cool in my room. A chestnut-tree pushed green boughs against
the window. I looked down at the horsehair sofa so openly flouting the idea of
curling up as immoral, pulled the red pillow on to the floor and lay down. And
barely had I got comfortable when the door opened and Frau Fischer entered.

“The Herr Rat had a bathing appointment,” she said, shutting the
door after her. “May I come in? Pray do not move. You look like a little
Persian kitten. Now, tell me something really interesting about your life. When
I meet new people I squeeze them dry like a sponge. To begin with—you are
married.”

I admitted the fact.

“Then, dear child, where is your husband?”

I said he was a sea-captain on a long and perilous voyage.

“What a position to leave you in—so young and so
unprotected.”

She sat down on the sofa and shook her finger at me playfully.

“Admit, now, that you keep your journeys secret from him. For what man
would think of allowing a woman with such a wealth of hair to go wandering in
foreign countries? Now, supposing that you lost your purse at midnight in a
snowbound train in North Russia?”

“But I haven’t the slightest intention—” I began.

“I don’t say that you have. But when you said good-bye to your dear
man I am positive that you had no intention of coming here. My dear, I am a
woman of experience, and I know the world. While he is away you have a fever in
your blood. Your sad heart flies for comfort to these foreign lands. At home
you cannot bear the sight of that empty bed—it is like widowhood. Since
the death of my dear husband I have never known an hour’s peace.”

“I like empty beds,” I protested sleepily, thumping the pillow.

“That cannot be true because it is not natural. Every wife ought to feel
that her place is by her husband’s side—sleeping or waking. It is
plain to see that the strongest tie of all does not yet bind you. Wait until a
little pair of hands stretches across the water—wait until he comes into
harbour and sees you with the child at your breast.”

I sat up stiffly.

“But I consider child-bearing the most ignominious of all
professions,” I said.

For a moment there was silence. Then Frau Fischer reached down and caught my
hand.

“So young and yet to suffer so cruelly,” she murmured. “There
is nothing that sours a woman so terribly as to be left alone without a man,
especially if she is married, for then it is impossible for her to accept the
attention of others—unless she is unfortunately a widow. Of course, I
know that sea-captains are subject to terrible temptations, and they are as
inflammable as tenor singers—that is why you must present a bright and
energetic appearance, and try and make him proud of you when his ship reaches
port.”

This husband that I had created for the benefit of Frau Fischer became in her
hands so substantial a figure that I could no longer see myself sitting on a
rock with seaweed in my hair, awaiting that phantom ship for which all women
love to suppose they hunger. Rather, I saw myself pushing a perambulator up the
gangway, and counting up the missing buttons on my husband’s uniform
jacket.

“Handfuls of babies, that is what you are really in need of,” mused
Frau Fischer. “Then, as the father of a family he cannot leave you. Think
of his delight and excitement when he saw you!”

The plan seemed to me something of a risk. To appear suddenly with handfuls of
strange babies is not generally calculated to raise enthusiasm in the heart of
the average British husband. I decided to wreck my virgin conception and send
him down somewhere off Cape Horn.

Then the dinner-gong sounded.

“Come up to my room afterwards,” said Frau Fischer. “There is
still much that I must ask you.”

She squeezed my hand, but I did not squeeze back.

FRAU BRECHENMACHER ATTENDS A WEDDING

Getting ready was a terrible business. After supper Frau Brechenmacher packed
four of the five babies to bed, allowing Rosa to stay with her and help to
polish the buttons of Herr Brechenmacher’s uniform. Then she ran over his
best shirt with a hot iron, polished his boots, and put a stitch or two into
his black satin necktie.

“Rosa,” she said, “fetch my dress and hang it in front of the
stove to get the creases out. Now, mind, you must look after the children and
not sit up later than half-past eight, and not touch the lamp—you know
what will happen if you do.”

“Yes, Mamma,” said Rosa, who was nine and felt old enough to manage
a thousand lamps. “But let me stay up—the ‘Bub’ may
wake and want some milk.”

“Half-past eight!” said the Frau. “I’ll make the father
tell you too.”

Rosa drew down the corners of her mouth.

“But… but….”

“Here comes the father. You go into the bedroom and fetch my blue silk
handkerchief. You can wear my black shawl while I’m out—there
now!”

Rosa dragged it off her mother’s shoulders and wound it carefully round
her own, tying the two ends in a knot at the back. After all, she reflected, if
she had to go to bed at half past eight she would keep the shawl on. Which
resolution comforted her absolutely.

“Now, then, where are my clothes?” cried Herr Brechenmacher,
hanging his empty letter-bag behind the door and stamping the snow out of his
boots. “Nothing ready, of course, and everybody at the wedding by this
time. I heard the music as I passed. What are you doing? You’re not
dressed. You can’t go like that.”

“Here they are—all ready for you on the table, and some warm water
in the tin basin. Dip your head in. Rosa, give your father the towel.
Everything ready except the trousers. I haven’t had time to shorten them.
You must tuck the ends into your boots until we get there.”

“Nu,” said the Herr, “there isn’t room to turn. I want
the light. You go and dress in the passage.”

Dressing in the dark was nothing to Frau Brechenmacher. She hooked her skirt
and bodice, fastened her handkerchief round her neck with a beautiful brooch
that had four medals to the Virgin dangling from it, and then drew on her cloak
and hood.

“Here, come and fasten this buckle,” called Herr Brechenmacher. He
stood in the kitchen puffing himself out, the buttons on his blue uniform
shining with an enthusiasm which nothing but official buttons could possibly
possess. “How do I look?”

“Wonderful,” replied the little Frau, straining at the waist buckle
and giving him a little pull here, a little tug there. “Rosa, come and
look at your father.”

Herr Brechenmacher strode up and down the kitchen, was helped on with his coat,
then waited while the Frau lighted the lantern.

“Now, then—finished at last! Come along.”

“The lamp, Rosa,” warned the Frau, slamming the front door behind
them.

Snow had not fallen all day; the frozen ground was slippery as an icepond. She
had not been out of the house for weeks past, and the day had so flurried her
that she felt muddled and stupid—felt that Rosa had pushed her out of the
house and her man was running away from her.

“Wait, wait!” she cried.

“No. I’ll get my feet damp—you hurry.”

It was easier when they came into the village. There were fences to cling to,
and leading from the railway station to the Gasthaus a little path of cinders
had been strewn for the benefit of the wedding guests.

The Gasthaus was very festive. Lights shone out from every window, wreaths of
fir twigs hung from the ledges. Branches decorated the front doors, which swung
open, and in the hall the landlord voiced his superiority by bullying the
waitresses, who ran about continually with glasses of beer, trays of cups and
saucers, and bottles of wine.

“Up the stairs—up the stairs!” boomed the landlord.
“Leave your coats on the landing.”

Herr Brechenmacher, completely overawed by this grand manner, so far forgot his
rights as a husband as to beg his wife’s pardon for jostling her against
the banisters in his efforts to get ahead of everybody else.

Herr Brechenmacher’s colleagues greeted him with acclamation as he
entered the door of the Festsaal, and the Frau straightened her brooch and
folded her hands, assuming the air of dignity becoming to the wife of a postman
and the mother of five children. Beautiful indeed was the Festsaal. Three long
tables were grouped at one end, the remainder of the floor space cleared for
dancing. Oil lamps, hanging from the ceiling, shed a warm, bright light on the
walls decorated with paper flowers and garlands; shed a warmer, brighter light
on the red faces of the guests in their best clothes.

At the head of the centre table sat the bride and bridegroom, she in a white
dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her the
appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces
to the bridegroom beside her, who wore a suit of white clothes much too large
for him and a white silk tie that rose halfway up his collar. Grouped about
them, with a fine regard for dignity and precedence, sat their parents and
relations; and perched on a stool at the bride’s right hand a little girl
in a crumpled muslin dress with a wreath of forget-me-nots hanging over one
ear. Everybody was laughing and talking, shaking hands, clinking glasses,
stamping on the floor—a stench of beer and perspiration filled the air.

Frau Brechenmacher, following her man down the room after greeting the bridal
party, knew that she was going to enjoy herself. She seemed to fill out and
become rosy and warm as she sniffed that familiar festive smell. Somebody
pulled at her skirt, and, looking down, she saw Frau Rupp, the butcher’s
wife, who pulled out an empty chair and begged her to sit beside her.

“Fritz will get you some beer,” she said. “My dear, your
skirt is open at the back. We could not help laughing as you walked up the room
with the white tape of your petticoat showing!”

“But how frightful!” said Frau Brechenmacher, collapsing into her
chair and biting her lip.

“Na, it’s over now,” said Frau Rupp, stretching her fat hands
over the table and regarding her three mourning rings with intense enjoyment;
“but one must be careful, especially at a wedding.”

“And such a wedding as this,” cried Frau Ledermann, who sat on the
other side of Frau Brechenmacher. “Fancy Theresa bringing that child with
her. It’s her own child, you know, my dear, and it’s going to live
with them. That’s what I call a sin against the Church for a free-born
child to attend its own mother’s wedding.”

The three women sat and stared at the bride, who remained very still, with a
little vacant smile on her lips, only her eyes shifting uneasily from side to
side.

“Beer they’ve given it, too,” whispered Frau Rupp, “and
white wine and an ice. It never did have a stomach; she ought to have left it
at home.”

Frau Brechenmacher turned round and looked towards the bride’s mother.
She never took her eyes off her daughter, but wrinkled her brown forehead like
an old monkey, and nodded now and again very solemnly. Her hands shook as she
raised her beer mug, and when she had drunk she spat on the floor and savagely
wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Then the music started and she followed
Theresa with her eyes, looking suspiciously at each man who danced with her.

“Cheer up, old woman,” shouted her husband, digging her in the
ribs; “this isn’t Theresa’s funeral.” He winked at the
guests, who broke into loud laughter.

“I am cheerful,” mumbled the old woman, and beat upon the
table with her fist, keeping time to the music, proving she was not out of the
festivities.

“She can’t forget how wild Theresa has been,” said Frau
Ledermann. “Who could—with the child there? I heard that last
Sunday evening Theresa had hysterics and said that she would not marry this
man. They had to get the priest to her.”

“Where is the other one?” asked Frau Brechenmacher. “Why
didn’t he marry her?”

The woman shrugged her shoulders.

“Gone—disappeared. He was a traveller, and only stayed at their
house two nights. He was selling shirt buttons—I bought some myself, and
they were beautiful shirt buttons—but what a pig of a fellow! I
can’t think what he saw in such a plain girl—but you never know.
Her mother says she’s been like fire ever since she was sixteen!”

Frau Brechenmacher looked down at her beer and blew a little hole in the froth.

“That’s not how a wedding should be,” she said;
“it’s not religion to love two men.”

“Nice time she’ll have with this one,” Frau Rupp exclaimed.
“He was lodging with me last summer and I had to get rid of him. He never
changed his clothes once in two months, and when I spoke to him of the smell in
his room he told me he was sure it floated up from the shop. Ah, every wife has
her cross. Isn’t that true, my dear?”

Frau Brechenmacher saw her husband among his colleagues at the next table. He
was drinking far too much, she knew—gesticulating wildly, the saliva
spluttering out of his mouth as he talked.

“Yes,” she assented, “that’s true. Girls have a lot to
learn.”

Wedged in between these two fat old women, the Frau had no hope of being asked
to dance. She watched the couples going round and round; she forgot her five
babies and her man and felt almost like a girl again. The music sounded sad and
sweet. Her roughened hands clasped and unclasped themselves in the folds of her
skirt. While the music went on she was afraid to look anybody in the face, and
she smiled with a little nervous tremor round the mouth.

“But, my God,” Frau Rupp cried, “they’ve given that
child of Theresa’s a piece of sausage. It’s to keep her quiet.
There’s going to be a presentation now—your man has to
speak.”

Frau Brechenmacher sat up stiffly. The music ceased, and the dancers took their
places again at the tables.

Herr Brechenmacher alone remained standing—he held in his hands a big
silver coffee-pot. Everybody laughed at his speech, except the Frau; everybody
roared at his grimaces, and at the way he carried the coffee-pot to the bridal
pair, as if it were a baby he was holding.

She lifted the lid, peeped in, then shut it down with a little scream and sat
biting her lips. The bridegroom wrenched the pot away from her and drew forth a
baby’s bottle and two little cradles holding china dolls. As he dandled
these treasures before Theresa the hot room seemed to heave and sway with
laughter.

Frau Brechenmacher did not think it funny. She stared round at the laughing
faces, and suddenly they all seemed strange to her. She wanted to go home and
never come out again. She imagined that all these people were laughing at her,
more people than there were in the room even—all laughing at her because
they were so much stronger than she was.

They walked home in silence. Herr Brechenmacher strode ahead, she stumbled
after him. White and forsaken lay the road from the railway station to their
house—a cold rush of wind blew her hood from her face, and suddenly she
remembered how they had come home together the first night. Now they had five
babies and twice as much money; but—

“Na, what is it all for?” she muttered, and not until she had
reached home, and prepared a little supper of meat and bread for her man did
she stop asking herself that silly question.

Herr Brechenmacher broke the bread into his plate, smeared it round with his
fork and chewed greedily.

“Good?” she asked, leaning her arms on the table and pillowing her
breast against them.

“But fine!”

He took a piece of the crumb, wiped it round his plate edge, and held it up to
her mouth. She shook her head.

“Not hungry,” she said.

“But it is one of the best pieces, and full of the fat.”

He cleared the plate; then pulled off his boots and flung them into a corner.

“Not much of a wedding,” he said, stretching out his feet and
wriggling his toes in the worsted socks.

“N—no,” she replied, taking up the discarded boots and
placing them on the oven to dry.

Herr Brechenmacher yawned and stretched himself, and then looked up at her,
grinning.

“Remember the night that we came home? You were an innocent one, you
were.”

“Get along! Such a time ago I forget.” Well she remembered.

“Such a clout on the ear as you gave me…. But I soon taught you.”

“Oh, don’t start talking. You’ve too much beer. Come to
bed.”

He tilted back in his chair, chuckling with laughter.

“That’s not what you said to me that night. God, the trouble you
gave me!”

But the little Frau seized the candle and went into the next room. The children
were all soundly sleeping. She stripped the mattress off the baby’s bed
to see if he was still dry, then began unfastening her blouse and skirt.

“Always the same,” she said—“all over the world the
same; but, God in heaven—but stupid.”

Then even the memory of the wedding faded quite. She lay down on the bed and
put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr
Brechenmacher lurched in.

THE MODERN SOUL

“Good-evening,” said the Herr Professor, squeezing my hand;
“wonderful weather! I have just returned from a party in the wood. I have
been making music for them on my trombone. You know, these pine-trees provide
most suitable accompaniment for a trombone! They are sighing delicacy against
sustained strength, as I remarked once in a lecture on wind instruments in
Frankfort. May I be permitted to sit beside you on this bench, gnädige
Frau?”

He sat down, tugging at a white-paper package in the tail pocket of his coat.

“Cherries,” he said, nodding and smiling. “There is nothing
like cherries for producing free saliva after trombone playing, especially
after Grieg’s ‘Ich Liebe Dich.’ Those sustained blasts on
‘liebe’ make my throat as dry as a railway tunnel. Have
some?” He shook the bag at me.

“I prefer watching you eat them.”

“Ah, ha!” He crossed his legs, sticking the cherry bag between his
knees, to leave both hands free. “Psychologically I understood your
refusal. It is your innate feminine delicacy in preferring etherealised
sensations…. Or perhaps you do not care to eat the worms. All cherries
contain worms. Once I made a very interesting experiment with a colleague of
mine at the university. We bit into four pounds of the best cherries and did
not find one specimen without a worm. But what would you? As I remarked to him
afterwards—dear friend, it amounts to this: if one wishes to satisfy the
desires of nature one must be strong enough to ignore the facts of nature….
The conversation is not out of your depth? I have so seldom the time or
opportunity to open my heart to a woman that I am apt to forget.”

I looked at him brightly.

“See what a fat one!” cried the Herr Professor. “That is
almost a mouthful in itself; it is beautiful enough to hang from a
watch-chain.” He chewed it up and spat the stone an incredible
distance—over the garden path into the flower bed. He was proud of the
feat. I saw it. “The quantity of fruit I have eaten on this bench,”
he sighed; “apricots, peaches and cherries. One day that garden bed will
become an orchard grove, and I shall allow you to pick as much as you please,
without paying me anything.”

I was grateful, without showing undue excitement.

“Which reminds me”—he hit the side of his nose with one
finger—“the manager of the pension handed me my weekly bill after
dinner this evening. It is almost impossible to credit. I do not expect you to
believe me—he has charged me extra for a miserable little glass of milk I
drink in bed at night to prevent insomnia. Naturally, I did not pay. But the
tragedy of the story is this: I cannot expect the milk to produce somnolence
any longer; my peaceful attitude of mind towards it is completely destroyed. I
know I shall throw myself into a fever in attempting to plumb this want of
generosity in so wealthy a man as the manager of a pension. Think of me
to-night”—he ground the empty bag under his heel—“think
that the worst is happening to me as your head drops asleep on your
pillow.”

Two ladies came on the front steps of the pension and stood, arm in arm,
looking over the garden. The one, old and scraggy, dressed almost entirely in
black bead trimming and a satin reticule; the other, young and thin, in a white
gown, her yellow hair tastefully garnished with mauve sweet peas.

The Professor drew in his feet and sat up sharply, pulling down his waistcoat.

“The Godowskas,” he murmured. “Do you know them? A mother and
daughter from Vienna. The mother has an internal complaint and the daughter is
an actress. Fräulein Sonia is a very modern soul. I think you would find her
most sympathetic. She is forced to be in attendance on her mother just now. But
what a temperament! I have once described her in her autograph album as a
tigress with a flower in the hair. Will you excuse me? Perhaps I can persuade
them to be introduced to you.”

I said, “I am going up to my room.” But the Professor rose and
shook a playful finger at me. “Na,” he said, “we are friends,
and, therefore, I shall speak quite frankly to you. I think they would consider
it a little ‘marked’ if you immediately retired to the house at
their approach, after sitting here alone with me in the twilight. You know this
world. Yes, you know it as I do.”

I shrugged my shoulders, remarking with one eye that while the Professor had
been talking the Godowskas had trailed across the lawn towards us. They
confronted the Herr Professor as he stood up.

“Good-evening,” quavered Frau Godowska. “Wonderful weather!
It has given me quite a touch of hay fever!” Fräulein Godowska said
nothing. She swooped over a rose growing in the embryo orchard, then stretched
out her hand with a magnificent gesture to the Herr Professor. He presented me.

“This is my little English friend of whom I have spoken. She is the
stranger in our midst. We have been eating cherries together.”

“How delightful,” sighed Frau Godowska. “My daughter and I
have often observed you through the bedroom window. Haven’t we,
Sonia?”

Sonia absorbed my outward and visible form with an inward and spiritual glance,
then repeated the magnificent gesture for my benefit. The four of us sat on the
bench, with that faint air of excitement of passengers established in a railway
carriage on the qui vive for the train whistle. Frau Godowska sneezed. “I
wonder if it is hay fever,” she remarked, worrying the satin reticule for
her handkerchief, “or would it be the dew. Sonia, dear, is the dew
falling?”

Fräulein Sonia raised her face to the sky, and half closed her eyes. “No,
mamma, my face is quite warm. Oh, look, Herr Professor, there are swallows in
flight; they are like a little flock of Japanese thoughts—nicht
wahr?”

“Where?” cried the Herr Professor. “Oh yes, I see, by the
kitchen chimney. But why do you say ‘Japanese’? Could you not
compare them with equal veracity to a little flock of German thoughts in
flight?” He rounded on me. “Have you swallows in England?”

“I believe there are some at certain seasons. But doubtless they have not
the same symbolical value for the English. In Germany—”

“I have never been to England,” interrupted Fräulein Sonia,
“but I have many English acquaintances. They are so cold!” She
shivered.

“Fish-blooded,” snapped Frau Godowska. “Without soul, without
heart, without grace. But you cannot equal their dress materials. I spent a
week in Brighton twenty years ago, and the travelling cape I bought there is
not yet worn out—the one you wrap the hot-water bottle in, Sonia. My
lamented husband, your father, Sonia, knew a great deal about England. But the
more he knew about it the oftener he remarked to me, ‘England is merely
an island of beef flesh swimming in a warm gulf sea of gravy.’ Such a
brilliant way of putting things. Do you remember, Sonia?”

“I forget nothing, mamma,” answered Sonia.

Said the Herr Professor: “That is the proof of your calling, gnädiges
Fräulein. Now I wonder—and this is a very interesting
speculation—is memory a blessing or—excuse the word—a
curse?”

Frau Godowska looked into the distance, then the corners of her mouth dropped
and her skin puckered. She began to shed tears.

“Ach Gott! Gracious lady, what have I said?” exclaimed the Herr
Professor.

Sonia took her mother’s hand. “Do you know,” she said,
“to-night it is stewed carrots and nut tart for supper. Suppose we go in
and take our places,” her sidelong, tragic stare accusing the Professor
and me the while.

I followed them across the lawn and up the steps. Frau Godowska was murmuring,
“Such a wonderful, beloved man”; with her disengaged hand Fräulein
Sonia was arranging the sweet-pea “garniture.”

“A concert for the benefit of afflicted Catholic infants will take place
in the salon at eight-thirty P.M. Artists: Fräulein Sonia Godowska, from
Vienna; Herr Professor Windberg and his trombone; Frau Oberlehrer Weidel, and
others.”

This notice was tied round the neck of the melancholy stag’s head in the
dining-room. It graced him like a red and white “dinner bib” for
days before the event, causing the Herr Professor to bow before it and say
“good appetite” until we sickened of his pleasantry and left the
smiling to be done by the waiter, who was paid to be pleasing to the guests.

On the appointed day the married ladies sailed about the pension dressed like
upholstered chairs, and the unmarried ladies like draped muslin dressing-table
covers. Frau Godowska pinned a rose in the centre of her reticule; another
blossom was tucked in the mazy folds of a white antimacassar thrown across her
breast. The gentlemen wore black coats, white silk ties and ferny buttonholes
tickling the chin.

The floor of the salon was freshly polished, chairs and benches arranged, and a
row of little flags strung across the ceiling—they flew and jigged in the
draught with all the enthusiasm of family washing. It was arranged that I
should sit beside Frau Godowska, and that the Herr Professor and Sonia should
join us when their share of the concert was over.

“That will make you feel quite one of the performers,” said the
Herr Professor genially. “It is a great pity that the English nation is
so unmusical. Never mind! To-night you shall hear something—we have
discovered a nest of talent during the rehearsals.”

“What do you intend to recite, Fräulein Sonia?”

She shook back her hair. “I never know until the last moment. When I come
on the stage I wait for one moment and then I have the sensation as though
something struck me here,”—she placed her hand upon her collar
brooch—“and… words come!”

“Bend down a moment,” whispered her mother. “Sonia, love,
your skirt safety-pin is showing at the back. Shall I come outside and fasten
it properly for you, or will you do it yourself?”

“Oh, mamma, please don’t say such things,” Sonia flushed and
grew very angry. “You know how sensitive I am to the slightest
unsympathetic impression at a time like this…. I would rather my skirt
dropped off my body—”

“Sonia—my heart!”

A bell tinkled.

The waiter came in and opened the piano. In the heated excitement of the moment
he entirely forgot what was fitting, and flicked the keys with the grimy table
napkin he carried over his arm. The Frau Oberlehrer tripped on the platform
followed by a very young gentleman, who blew his nose twice before he hurled
his handkerchief into the bosom of the piano.

“Yes, I know you have no love for me,
And no forget-me-not.
No love, no heart, and no forget-me-not.”

sang the Frau Oberlehrer, in a voice that seemed to issue from her forgotten
thimble and have nothing to do with her.

“Ach, how sweet, how delicate,” we cried, clapping her soothingly.
She bowed as though to say, “Yes, isn’t it?” and retired, the
very young gentleman dodging her train and scowling.

The piano was closed, an arm-chair was placed in the centre of the platform.
Fräulein Sonia drifted towards it. A breathless pause. Then, presumably, the
winged shaft struck her collar brooch. She implored us not to go into the woods
in trained dresses, but rather as lightly draped as possible, and bed with her
among the pine needles. Her loud, slightly harsh voice filled the salon. She
dropped her arms over the back of the chair, moving her lean hands from the
wrists. We were thrilled and silent. The Herr Professor, beside me, abnormally
serious, his eyes bulging, pulled at his moustache ends. Frau Godowska adopted
that peculiarly detached attitude of the proud parent. The only soul who
remained untouched by her appeal was the waiter, who leaned idly against the
wall of the salon and cleaned his nails with the edge of a programme. He was
“off duty” and intended to show it.

“What did I say?” shouted the Herr Professor under cover of
tumultuous applause, “tem-per-ament! There you have it. She is a flame in
the heart of a lily. I know I am going to play well. It is my turn now. I am
inspired. Fräulein Sonia”—as that lady returned to us, pale and
draped in a large shawl—“you are my inspiration. To-night you shall
be the soul of my trombone. Wait only.”

To right and left of us people bent over and whispered admiration down Fräulein
Sonia’s neck. She bowed in the grand style.

“I am always successful,” she said to me. “You see, when I
act I am. In Vienna, in the plays of Ibsen we had so many bouquets that
the cook had three in the kitchen. But it is difficult here. There is so little
magic. Do you not feel it? There is none of that mysterious perfume which
floats almost as a visible thing from the souls of the Viennese audiences. My
spirit starves for want of that.” She leaned forward, chin on hand.
“Starves,” she repeated.

The Professor appeared with his trombone, blew into it, held it up to one eye,
tucked back his shirt cuffs and wallowed in the soul of Sonia Godowska. Such a
sensation did he create that he was recalled to play a Bavarian dance, which he
acknowledged was to be taken as a breathing exercise rather than an artistic
achievement. Frau Godowska kept time to it with a fan.

Followed the very young gentleman who piped in a tenor voice that he loved
somebody, “with blood in his heart and a thousand pains.” Fräulein
Sonia acted a poison scene with the assistance of her mother’s pill vial
and the arm-chair replaced by a “chaise longue”; a young girl
scratched a lullaby on a young fiddle; and the Herr Professor performed the
last sacrificial rites on the altar of the afflicted children by playing the
National Anthem.

“Now I must put mamma to bed,” whispered Fräulein Sonia. “But
afterwards I must take a walk. It is imperative that I free my spirit in the
open air for a moment. Would you come with me as far as the railway station and
back?”

“Very well, then, knock on my door when you’re ready.”

Thus the modern soul and I found ourselves together under the stars.

“What a night!” she said. “Do you know that poem of Sappho
about her hands in the stars…. I am curiously sapphic. And this is so
remarkable—not only am I sapphic, I find in all the works of all the
greatest writers, especially in their unedited letters, some touch, some sign
of myself—some resemblance, some part of myself, like a thousand
reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror.”

“But what a bother,” said I.

“I do not know what you mean by ‘bother’; is it rather the
curse of my genius….” She paused suddenly, staring at me. “Do you
know my tragedy?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“My tragedy is my mother. Living with her I live with the coffin of my
unborn aspirations. You heard that about the safety-pin to-night. It may seem
to you a little thing, but it ruined my three first gestures. They
were—”

“Impaled on a safety-pin,” I suggested.

“Yes, exactly that. And when we are in Vienna I am the victim of moods,
you know. I long to do wild, passionate things. And mamma says, ‘Please
pour out my mixture first.’ Once I remember I flew into a rage and threw
a washstand jug out of the window. Do you know what she said? ‘Sonia, it
is not so much throwing things out of windows, if only you
would—’”

“Choose something smaller?” said I.

“No… ‘tell me about it beforehand.’ Humiliating! And I do
not see any possible light out of this darkness.”

“Why don’t you join a touring company and leave your mother in
Vienna?”

“What! Leave my poor, little, sick, widowed mother in Vienna! Sooner than
that I would drown myself. I love my mother as I love nobody else in the
world—nobody and nothing! Do you think it is impossible to love
one’s tragedy? ‘Out of my great sorrows I make my little
songs,’ that is Heine or myself.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right,” I said cheerfully.

“But it is not all right!”

I suggested we should turn back. We turned.

“Sometimes I think the solution lies in marriage,” said Fräulein
Sonia. “If I find a simple, peaceful man who adores me and will look
after mamma—a man who would be for me a pillow—for genius cannot
hope to mate—I shall marry him…. You know the Herr Professor has paid
me very marked attentions.”

“Oh, Fräulein Sonia,” I said, very pleased with myself, “why
not marry him to your mother?” We were passing the hairdresser’s
shop at the moment. Fräulein Sonia clutched my arm.

“You, you,” she stammered. “The cruelty. I am going to faint.
Mamma to marry again before I marry—the indignity. I am going to faint
here and now.”

I was frightened. “You can’t,” I said, shaking her.

“Come back to the pension and faint as much as you please. But you
can’t faint here. All the shops are closed. There is nobody about. Please
don’t be so foolish.”

“Here and here only!” She indicated the exact spot and dropped
quite beautifully, lying motionless.

“Very well,” I said, “faint away; but please hurry over
it.”

She did not move. I began to walk home, but each time I looked behind me I saw
the dark form of the modern soul prone before the hairdresser’s window.
Finally I ran, and rooted out the Herr Professor from his room. “Fräulein
Sonia has fainted,” I said crossly.

“Du lieber Gott! Where? How?”

“Outside the hairdresser’s shop in the Station Road.”

“Jesus and Maria! Has she no water with her?”—he seized his
carafe—“nobody beside her?”

“Nothing.”

“Where is my coat? No matter, I shall catch a cold on the chest.
Willingly, I shall catch one…. You are ready to come with me?”

“No,” I said; “you can take the waiter.”

“But she must have a woman. I cannot be so indelicate as to attempt to
loosen her stays.”

“Modern souls oughtn’t to wear them,” said I. He pushed past
me and clattered down the stairs.

When I came down to breakfast next morning there were two places vacant at
table. Fräulein Sonia and Herr Professor had gone off for a day’s
excursion in the woods.

I wondered.

AT “LEHMANN’S”

Certainly Sabina did not find life slow. She was on the trot from early morning
until late at night. At five o’clock she tumbled out of bed, buttoned on
her clothes, wearing a long-sleeved alpaca pinafore over her black frock, and
groped her way downstairs into the kitchen.

Anna, the cook, had grown so fat during the summer that she adored her bed
because she did not have to wear her corsets there, but could spread as much as
she liked, roll about under the great mattress, calling upon Jesus and Holy
Mary and Blessed Anthony himself that her life was not fit for a pig in a
cellar.

Sabina was new to her work. Pink colour still flew in her cheeks; there was a
little dimple on the left side of her mouth that even when she was most
serious, most absorbed, popped out and gave her away. And Anna blessed that
dimple. It meant an extra half-hour in bed for her; it made Sabina light the
fire, turn out the kitchen and wash endless cups and saucers that had been left
over from the evening before. Hans, the scullery boy, did not come until seven.
He was the son of the butcher—a mean, undersized child very much like one
of his father’s sausages, Sabina thought. His red face was covered with
pimples, and his nails indescribably filthy. When Herr Lehmann himself told
Hans to get a hairpin and clean them he said they were stained from birth
because his mother had always got so inky doing the accounts—and Sabina
believed him and pitied him.

Winter had come very early to Mindelbau. By the end of October the streets were
banked waist-high with snow, and the greater number of the “Cure
Guests,” sick unto death of cold water and herbs, had departed in nothing
approaching peace. So the large salon was shut at Lehmann’s and the
breakfast-room was all the accommodation the café afforded. Here the floor had
to be washed over, the tables rubbed, coffee-cups set out, each with its little
china platter of sugar, and newspapers and magazines hung on their hooks along
the walls before Herr Lehmann appeared at seven-thirty and opened business.

As a rule his wife served in the shop leading into the café, but she had chosen
the quiet season to have a baby, and, a big woman at the best of times, she had
grown so enormous in the process that her husband told her she looked
unappetising, and had better remain upstairs and sew.

Sabina took on the extra work without any thought of extra pay. She loved to
stand behind the counter, cutting up slices of Anna’s marvellous
chocolate-spotted confections, or doing up packets of sugar almonds in pink and
blue striped bags.

“You’ll get varicose veins, like me,” said Anna.
“That’s what the Frau’s got, too. No wonder the baby
doesn’t come! All her swelling’s got into her legs.” And Hans
was immensely interested.

During the morning business was comparatively slack. Sabina answered the shop
bell, attended to a few customers who drank a liqueur to warm their stomachs
before the midday meal, and ran upstairs now and again to ask the Frau if she
wanted anything. But in the afternoon six or seven choice spirits played cards,
and everybody who was anybody drank tea or coffee.

“Sabina… Sabina….”

She flew from one table to the other, counting out handfuls of small change,
giving orders to Anna through the “slide,” helping the men with
their heavy coats, always with that magical child air about her, that
delightful sense of perpetually attending a party.

“How is the Frau Lehmann?” the women would whisper.

“She feels rather low, but as well as can be expected,” Sabina
would answer, nodding confidentially.

Frau Lehmann’s bad time was approaching. Anna and her friends referred to
it as her “journey to Rome,” and Sabina longed to ask questions,
yet, being ashamed of her ignorance, was silent, trying to puzzle it out for
herself. She knew practically nothing except that the Frau had a baby inside
her, which had to come out—very painful indeed. One could not have one
without a husband—that she also realised. But what had the man got to do
with it? So she wondered as she sat mending tea towels in the evening, head
bent over her work, light shining on her brown curls. Birth—what was it?
wondered Sabina. Death—such a simple thing. She had a little picture of
her dead grandmother dressed in a black silk frock, tired hands clasping the
crucifix that dragged between her flattened breasts, mouth curiously tight, yet
almost secretly smiling. But the grandmother had been born once—that was
the important fact.

As she sat there one evening, thinking, the Young Man entered the café, and
called for a glass of port wine. Sabina rose slowly. The long day and the hot
room made her feel a little languid, but as she poured out the wine she felt
the Young Man’s eyes fixed on her, looked down at him and dimpled.

“It’s cold out,” she said, corking the bottle.

The Young Man ran his hands through his snow-powdered hair and laughed.

“I wouldn’t call it exactly tropical,” he said. “But
you’re very snug in here—look as though you’ve been
asleep.”

Very languid felt Sabina in the hot room, and the Young Man’s voice was
strong and deep. She thought she had never seen anybody who looked so
strong—as though he could take up the table in one hand—and his
restless gaze wandering over her face and figure gave her a curious thrill deep
in her body, half pleasure, half pain…. She wanted to stand there, close
beside him, while he drank his wine. A little silence followed. Then he took a
book out of his pocket, and Sabina went back to her sewing. Sitting there in
the corner, she listened to the sound of the leaves being turned and the loud
ticking of the clock that hung over the gilt mirror. She wanted to look at him
again—there was a something about him, in his deep voice, even in the way
his clothes fitted. From the room above she heard the heavy dragging sound of
Frau Lehmann’s footsteps, and again the old thoughts worried Sabina. If
she herself should one day look like that—feel like that! Yet it would be
very sweet to have a little baby to dress and jump up and down.

“Fräulein—what’s your name—what are you smiling
at?” called the Young Man.

She blushed and looked up, hands quiet in her lap, looked across the empty
tables and shook her head.

“Come here, and I’ll show you a picture,” he commanded.

She went and stood beside him. He opened the book, and Sabina saw a coloured
sketch of a naked girl sitting on the edge of a great, crumpled bed, a
man’s opera hat on the back of her head.

He put his hand over the body, leaving only the face exposed, then scrutinised
Sabina closely.

“Well?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, knowing perfectly well.

“Why, it might be your own photograph—the face, I
mean—that’s as far as I can judge.”

“But the hair’s done differently,” said Sabina, laughing. She
threw back her head, and the laughter bubbled in her round white throat.

“It’s rather a nice picture, don’t you think?” he
asked. But she was looking at a curious ring he wore on the hand that covered
the girl’s body, and only nodded.

“Ever seen anything like it before?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of those funny ones in the illustrated
papers.”

“How would you like to have your picture taken that way?”

“Me? I’d never let anybody see it. Besides, I haven’t got a
hat like that!”

“That’s easily remedied.”

Again a little silence, broken by Anna throwing up the slide.

Sabina ran into the kitchen.

“Here, take this milk and egg up to the Frau,” said Anna.
“Who’ve you got in there?”

“Got such a funny man! I think he’s a little gone here,”
tapping her forehead.

Upstairs in the ugly room the Frau sat sewing, a black shawl round her
shoulders, her feet encased in red woollen slippers. The girl put the milk on a
table by her, then stood, polishing a spoon on her apron.

“Nothing else?”

“Na,” said the Frau, heaving up in her chair. “Where’s
my man?”

“He’s playing cards over at Snipold’s. Do you want
him?”

“Dear heaven, leave him alone. I’m nothing. I don’t
matter…. And the whole day waiting here.”

Her hand shook as she wiped the rim of the glass with her fat finger.

“Shall I help you to bed?”

“You go downstairs, leave me alone. Tell Anna not to let Hans grub the
sugar—give him one on the ear.”

“Ugly—ugly—ugly,” muttered Sabina, returning to the
café where the Young Man stood coat-buttoned, ready for departure.

“I’ll come again to-morrow,” said he. “Don’t
twist your hair back so tightly; it will lose all its curl.”

“Well, you are a funny one,” she said. “Good-night.”

By the time Sabina was ready for bed Anna was snoring. She brushed out her long
hair and gathered it in her hands…. Perhaps it would be a pity if it lost all
its curl. Then she looked down at her straight chemise, and drawing it off, sat
down on the side of the bed.

“I wish,” she whispered, smiling sleepily, “there was a great
big looking-glass in this room.”

Lying down in the darkness, she hugged her little body.

“I wouldn’t be the Frau for one hundred marks—not for a
thousand marks. To look like that.”

And half-dreaming, she imagined herself heaving up in her chair with the port
wine bottle in her hand as the Young Man entered the café.

Cold and dark the next morning. Sabina woke, tired, feeling as though something
heavy had been pressing under her heart all night. There was a sound of
footsteps shuffling along the passage. Herr Lehmann! She must have overslept
herself. Yes, he was rattling the door-handle.

“One moment, one moment,” she called, dragging on her stockings.

“Bina, tell Anna to go to the Frau—but quickly. I must ride for the
nurse.”

“Yes, yes!” she cried. “Has it come?”

But he had gone, and she ran over to Anna and shook her by the shoulder.

“The Frau—the baby—Herr Lehmann for the nurse,” she
stuttered.

“Name of God!” said Anna, flinging herself out of bed.

No complaints to-day. Importance—enthusiasm in Anna’s whole
bearing.

“You run downstairs and light the oven. Put on a pan of
water”—speaking to an imaginary sufferer as she fastened her
blouse—“Yes, yes, I know—we must be worse before we are
better—I’m coming—patience.”

It was dark all that day. Lights were turned on immediately the café opened,
and business was very brisk. Anna, turned out of the Frau’s room by the
nurse, refused to work, and sat in a corner nursing herself, listening to
sounds overhead. Hans was more sympathetic than Sabina. He also forsook work,
and stood by the window, picking his nose.

“But why must I do everything?” said Sabina, washing glasses.
“I can’t help the Frau; she oughtn’t to take such a time
about it.”

“Listen,” said Anna, “they’ve moved her into the back
bedroom above here, so as not to disturb the people. That was a
groan—that one!”

“Two small beers,” shouted Herr Lehmann through the slide.

“One moment, one moment.”

At eight o’clock the café was deserted. Sabina sat down in the corner
without her sewing. Nothing seemed to have happened to the Frau. A doctor had
come—that was all.

“Ach,” said Sabina. “I think no more of it. I listen no more.
Ach, I would like to go away—I hate this talk. I will not hear it. No, it
is too much.” She leaned both elbows on the table—cupped her face
in her hands and pouted.

But the outer door suddenly opening, she sprang to her feet and laughed. It was
the Young Man again. He ordered more port, and brought no book this time.

“Don’t go and sit miles away,” he grumbled. “I want to
be amused. And here, take my coat. Can’t you dry it
somewhere?—snowing again.”

“There’s a warm place—the ladies’ cloak-room,”
she said. “I’ll take it in there—just by the kitchen.”

She felt better, and quite happy again.

“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I’ll see where
you put it.”

And that did not seem at all extraordinary. She laughed and beckoned to him.

“In here,” she cried. “Feel how warm. I’ll put more
wood on that oven. It doesn’t matter, they’re all busy
upstairs.”

She knelt down on the floor, and thrust the wood into the oven, laughing at her
own wicked extravagance.

The Frau was forgotten, the stupid day was forgotten. Here was someone beside
her laughing, too. They were together in the little warm room stealing Herr
Lehmann’s wood. It seemed the most exciting adventure in the world. She
wanted to go on laughing—or burst out
crying—or—or—catch hold of the Young Man.

“What a fire,” she shrieked, stretching out her hands.

“Here’s a hand; pull up,” said the Young Man. “There,
now, you’ll catch it to-morrow.”

They stood opposite to each other, hands still clinging. And again that strange
tremor thrilled Sabina.

“Look here,” he said roughly, “are you a child, or are you
playing at being one?”

“I—I—”

Laughter ceased. She looked up at him once, then down at the floor, and began
breathing like a frightened little animal.

He pulled her closer still and kissed her mouth.

“Na, what are you doing?” she whispered.

He let go her hands, he placed his on her breasts, and the room seemed to swim
round Sabina. Suddenly, from the room above, a frightful, tearing shriek.

She wrenched herself away, tightened herself, drew herself up.

“Who did that—who made that noise?”

In the silence the thin wailing of a baby.

“Achk!” shrieked Sabina, rushing from the room.

THE LUFT BAD

I think it must be the umbrellas which make us look ridiculous.

When I was admitted into the enclosure for the first time, and saw my
fellow-bathers walking about very nearly “in their nakeds,” it
struck me that the umbrellas gave a distinctly “Little Black Sambo”
touch.

Ridiculous dignity in holding over yourself a green cotton thing with a red
parroquet handle when you are dressed in nothing larger than a handkerchief.

There are no trees in the “Luft Bad.” It boasts a collection of
plain, wooden cells, a bath shelter, two swings and two odd clubs—one,
presumably the lost property of Hercules or the German army, and the other to
be used with safety in the cradle.

And there in all weathers we take the air—walking, or sitting in little
companies talking over each other’s ailments and measurements and ills
that flesh is heir to.

A high wooden wall compasses us all about; above it the pine-trees look down a
little superciliously, nudging each other in a way that is peculiarly trying to
a débutante. Over the wall, on the right side, is the men’s
section. We hear them chopping down trees and sawing through planks, dashing
heavy weights to the ground, and singing part songs. Yes, they take it far more
seriously.

On the first day I was conscious of my legs, and went back into my cell three
times to look at my watch, but when a woman with whom I had played chess for
three weeks cut me dead, I took heart and joined a circle.

We lay curled on the ground while a Hungarian lady of immense proportions told
us what a beautiful tomb she had bought for her second husband.

“A vault it is,” she said, “with nice black railings. And so
large that I can go down there and walk about. Both their photographs are
there, with two very handsome wreaths sent me by my first husband’s
brother. There is an enlargement of a family group photograph, too, and an
illuminated address presented to my first husband on his marriage. I am often
there; it makes such a pleasant excursion for a fine Saturday afternoon.”

She suddenly lay down flat on her back, took in six long breaths, and sat up
again.

“The death agony was dreadful,” she said brightly; “of the
second, I mean. The ‘first’ was run into by a furniture wagon, and
had fifty marks stolen out of a new waistcoat pocket, but the
‘second’ was dying for sixty-seven hours. I never ceased crying
once—not even to put the children to bed.”

A young Russian, with a “bang” curl on her forehead, turned to me.

“Can you do the ‘Salome’ dance?” she asked. “I
can.”

“How delightful,” I said.

“Shall I do it now? Would you like to see me?”

She sprang to her feet, executed a series of amazing contortions for the next
ten minutes, and then paused, panting, twisting her long hair.

“Isn’t that nice?” she said. “And now I am perspiring
so splendidly. I shall go and take a bath.”

Opposite to me was the brownest woman I have ever seen, lying on her back, her
arms clasped over her head.

“How long have you been here to-day?” she was asked.

“Oh, I spend the day here now,” she answered. “I am making my
own ‘cure,’ and living entirely on raw vegetables and nuts, and
each day I feel my spirit is stronger and purer. After all, what can you
expect? The majority of us are walking about with pig corpuscles and oxen
fragments in our brain. The wonder is the world is as good as it is. Now I live
on the simple, provided food”—she pointed to a little bag beside
her—“a lettuce, a carrot, a potato, and some nuts are ample,
rational nourishment. I wash them under the tap and eat them raw, just as they
come from the harmless earth—fresh and uncontaminated.”

“Do you take nothing else all day?” I cried.

“Water. And perhaps a banana if I wake in the night.” She turned
round and leaned on one elbow. “You over-eat yourself dreadfully,”
she said; “shamelessly! How can you expect the Flame of the Spirit to
burn brightly under layers of superfluous flesh?”

I wished she would not stare at me, and thought of going to look at my watch
again when a little girl wearing a string of coral beads joined us.

“The poor Frau Hauptmann cannot join us to-day,” she said;
“she has come out in spots all over on account of her nerves. She was
very excited yesterday after having written two post-cards.”

“A delicate woman,” volunteered the Hungarian, “but pleasant.
Fancy, she has a separate plate for each of her front teeth! But she has no
right to let her daughters wear such short sailor suits. They sit about on
benches, crossing their legs in a most shameless manner. What are you going to
do this afternoon, Fräulein Anna?”

“Oh,” said the Coral Necklace, “the Herr Oberleutnant has
asked me to go with him to Landsdorf. He must buy some eggs there to take home
to his mother. He saves a penny on eight eggs by knowing the right peasants to
bargain with.”

“Are you an American?” said the Vegetable Lady, turning to me.

“No.”

“Then you are an Englishwoman?”

“Well, hardly—”

“You must be one of the two; you cannot help it. I have seen you walking
alone several times. You wear your—”

I got up and climbed on to the swing. The air was sweet and cool, rushing past
my body. Above, white clouds trailed delicately through the blue sky. From the
pine forest streamed a wild perfume, the branches swayed together,
rhythmically, sonorously. I felt so light and free and happy—so childish!
I wanted to poke my tongue out at the circle on the grass, who, drawing close
together, were whispering meaningly.

“Perhaps you do not know,” cried a voice from one of the cells,
“to swing is very upsetting for the stomach? A friend of mine could keep
nothing down for three weeks after exciting herself so.”

I went to the bath shelter and was hosed.

As I dressed, someone tapped on the wall.

“Do you know,” said a voice, “there is a man who lives
in the Luft Bad next door? He buries himself up to the armpits in mud and
refuses to believe in the Trinity.”

The umbrellas are the saving grace of the Luft Bad. Now when I go, I take my
husband’s “storm gamp” and sit in a corner, hiding behind it.

Not that I am in the least ashamed of my legs.

A BIRTHDAY

Andreas Binzer woke slowly. He turned over on the narrow bed and stretched
himself—yawned—opening his mouth as widely as possible and bringing
his teeth together afterwards with a sharp “click.” The sound of
that click fascinated him; he repeated it quickly several times, with a
snapping movement of the jaws. What teeth! he thought. Sound as a bell, every
man jack of them. Never had one out, never had one stopped. That comes of no
tomfoolery in eating, and a good regular brushing night and morning. He raised
himself on his left elbow and waved his right arm over the side of the bed to
feel for the chair where he put his watch and chain overnight. No chair was
there—of course, he’d forgotten, there wasn’t a chair in this
wretched spare room. Had to put the confounded thing under his pillow.
“Half-past eight, Sunday, breakfast at nine—time for the
bath”—his brain ticked to the watch. He sprang out of bed and went
over to the window. The venetian blind was broken, hung fan-shaped over the
upper pane…. “That blind must be mended. I’ll get the office boy
to drop in and fix it on his way home to-morrow—he’s a good hand at
blinds. Give him twopence and he’ll do it as well as a carpenter…. Anna
could do it herself if she was all right. So would I, for the matter of that,
but I don’t like to trust myself on rickety step-ladders.” He
looked up at the sky: it shone, strangely white, unflecked with cloud; he
looked down at the row of garden strips and backyards. The fence of these
gardens was built along the edge of a gully, spanned by an iron suspension
bridge, and the people had a wretched habit of throwing their empty tins over
the fence into the gully. Just like them, of course! Andreas started counting
the tins, and decided, viciously, to write a letter to the papers about it and
sign it—sign it in full.

The servant girl came out of their back door into the yard, carrying his boots.
She threw one down on the ground, thrust her hand into the other, and stared at
it, sucking in her cheeks. Suddenly she bent forward, spat on the toecap, and
started polishing with a brush rooted out of her apron pocket…. “Slut
of a girl! Heaven knows what infectious disease may be breeding now in that
boot. Anna must get rid of that girl—even if she has to do without one
for a bit—as soon as she’s up and about again. The way she chucked
one boot down and then spat upon the other! She didn’t care whose boots
she’d got hold of. She had no false notions of the respect due to
the master of the house.” He turned away from the window and switched his
bath towel from the washstand rail, sick at heart. “I’m too
sensitive for a man—that’s what’s the matter with me. Have
been from the beginning, and will be to the end.”

There was a gentle knock at the door and his mother came in. She closed the
door after her and leant against it. Andreas noticed that her cap was crooked,
and a long tail of hair hung over her shoulder. He went forward and kissed her.

“Good-morning, mother; how’s Anna?”

The old woman spoke quickly, clasping and unclasping her hands.

“Andreas, please go to Doctor Erb as soon as you are dressed.”

“Why,” he said, “is she bad?”

Frau Binzer nodded, and Andreas, watching her, saw her face suddenly change; a
fine network of wrinkles seemed to pull over it from under the skin surface.

“Sit down on the bed a moment,” he said. “Been up all
night?”

“Yes. No, I won’t sit down, I must go back to her. Anna has been in
pain all night. She wouldn’t have you disturbed before because she said
you looked so run down yesterday. You told her you had caught a cold and been
very worried.”

Straightway Andreas felt that he was being accused.

“Well, she made me tell her, worried it out of me; you know the way she
does.”

Again Frau Binzer nodded.

“Oh yes, I know. She says, is your cold better, and there’s a warm
undervest for you in the left-hand corner of the big drawer.”

Quite automatically Andreas cleared his throat twice.

“Yes,” he answered. “Tell her my throat certainly feels
looser. I suppose I’d better not disturb her?”

“No, and besides, time, Andreas.”

“I’ll be ready in five minutes.”

They went into the passage. As Frau Binzer opened the door of the front
bedroom, a long wail came from the room.

That shocked and terrified Andreas. He dashed into the bathroom, turned on both
taps as far as they would go, cleaned his teeth and pared his nails while the
water was running.

“Frightful business, frightful business,” he heard himself
whispering. “And I can’t understand it. It isn’t as though it
were her first—it’s her third. Old Schäfer told me, yesterday, his
wife simply ‘dropped’ her fourth. Anna ought to have had a
qualified nurse. Mother gives way to her. Mother spoils her. I wonder what she
meant by saying I’d worried Anna yesterday. Nice remark to make to a
husband at a time like this. Unstrung, I suppose—and my sensitiveness
again.”

When he went into the kitchen for his boots, the servant girl was bent over the
stove, cooking breakfast. “Breathing into that, now, I suppose,”
thought Andreas, and was very short with the servant girl. She did not notice.
She was full of terrified joy and importance in the goings on upstairs. She
felt she was learning the secrets of life with every breath she drew. Had laid
the table that morning saying, “Boy,” as she put down the first
dish, “Girl,” as she placed the second—it had worked out with
the saltspoon to “Boy.” “For two pins I’d tell the
master that, to comfort him, like,” she decided. But the master gave her
no opening.

“Put an extra cup and saucer on the table,” he said; “the
doctor may want some coffee.”

“The doctor, sir?” The servant girl whipped a spoon out of a pan,
and spilt two drops of grease on the stove. “Shall I fry something
extra?” But the master had gone, slamming the door after him. He walked
down the street—there was nobody about at all—dead and alive this
place on a Sunday morning. As he crossed the suspension bridge a strong stench
of fennel and decayed refuse streamed from the gulley, and again Andreas began
concocting a letter. He turned into the main road. The shutters were still up
before the shops. Scraps of newspaper, hay, and fruit skins strewed the
pavement; the gutters were choked with the leavings of Saturday night. Two dogs
sprawled in the middle of the road, scuffling and biting. Only the public-house
at the corner was open; a young barman slopped water over the doorstep.

Fastidiously, his lips curling, Andreas picked his way through the water.
“Extraordinary how I am noticing things this morning. It’s partly
the effect of Sunday. I loathe a Sunday when Anna’s tied by the leg and
the children are away. On Sunday a man has the right to expect his family.
Everything here’s filthy, the whole place might be down with the plague,
and will be, too, if this street’s not swept away. I’d like to have
a hand on the government ropes.” He braced his shoulders. “Now for
this doctor.”

“Doctor Erb is at breakfast,” the maid informed him. She showed him
into the waiting-room, a dark and musty place, with some ferns under a
glass-case by the window. “He says he won’t be a minute, please,
sir, and there is a paper on the table.”

“Unhealthy hole,” thought Binzer, walking over to the window and
drumming his fingers on the glass fern-shade. “At breakfast, is he?
That’s the mistake I made: turning out early on an empty stomach.”

A milk cart rattled down the street, the driver standing at the back, cracking
a whip; he wore an immense geranium flower stuck in the lapel of his coat. Firm
as a rock he stood, bending back a little in the swaying cart. Andreas craned
his neck to watch him all the way down the road, even after he had gone,
listening for the sharp sound of those rattling cans.

“H’m, not much wrong with him,” he reflected.
“Wouldn’t mind a taste of that life myself. Up early, work all over
by eleven o’clock, nothing to do but loaf about all day until milking
time.” Which he knew was an exaggeration, but he wanted to pity himself.

The maid opened the door, and stood aside for Doctor Erb. Andreas wheeled
round; the two men shook hands.

“Well, Binzer,” said the doctor jovially, brushing some crumbs from
a pearl-coloured waistcoat, “son and heir becoming importunate?”

Up went Binzer’s spirits with a bound. Son and heir, by Jove! He was glad
to have to deal with a man again. And a sane fellow this, who came across this
sort of thing every day of the week.

“That’s about the measure of it, Doctor,” he answered,
smiling and picking up his hat. “Mother dragged me out of bed this
morning with imperative orders to bring you along.”

“Gig will be round in a minute. Drive back with me, won’t you?
Extraordinary, sultry day; you’re as red as a beetroot already.”

Andreas affected to laugh. The doctor had one annoying habit—imagined he
had the right to poke fun at everybody simply because he was a doctor.
“The man’s riddled with conceit, like all these
professionals,” Andreas decided.

“What sort of night did Frau Binzer have?” asked the doctor.
“Ah, here’s the gig. Tell me on the way up. Sit as near the middle
as you can, will you, Binzer? Your weight tilts it over a bit one
side—that’s the worst of you successful business men.”

“Two stone heavier than I, if he’s a pound,” thought Andreas.
“The man may be all right in his profession—but heaven preserve
me.”

“Off you go, my beauty.” Doctor Erb flicked the little brown mare.
“Did your wife get any sleep last night?”

“No; I don’t think she did,” answered Andreas shortly.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not satisfied that she hasn’t a
nurse.”

“Oh, your mother’s worth a dozen nurses,” cried the doctor,
with immense gusto. “To tell you the truth, I’m not keen on
nurses—too raw—raw as rump-steak. They wrestle for a baby as though
they were wrestling with Death for the body of Patroclus…. Ever seen that
picture by an English artist. Leighton? Wonderful thing—full of
sinew!”

“There he goes again,” thought Andreas, “airing off his
knowledge to make a fool of me.”

“Now your mother—she’s firm—she’s capable. Does
what she’s told with a fund of sympathy. Look at these shops we’re
passing—they’re festering sores. How on earth this government can
tolerate—”

“They’re not so bad—sound enough—only want a coat of
paint.”

The doctor whistled a little tune and flicked the mare again.

“Well, I hope the young shaver won’t give his mother too much
trouble,” he said. “Here we are.”

A skinny little boy, who had been sliding up and down the back seat of the gig,
sprang out and held the horse’s head. Andreas went straight into the
dining-room and left the servant girl to take the doctor upstairs. He sat down,
poured out some coffee, and bit through half a roll before helping himself to
fish. Then he noticed there was no hot plate for the fish—the whole house
was at sixes and sevens. He rang the bell, but the servant girl came in with a
tray holding a bowl of soup and a hot plate.

“I’ve been keeping them on the stove,” she simpered.

“Ah, thanks, that’s very kind of you.” As he swallowed the
soup his heart warmed to this fool of a girl.

“Oh, it’s a good thing Doctor Erb has come,” volunteered the
servant girl, who was bursting for want of sympathy.

“H’m, h’m,” said Andreas.

She waited a moment, expectantly, rolling her eyes, then in full loathing of
menkind went back to the kitchen and vowed herself to sterility.

Andreas cleared the soup bowl, and cleared the fish. As he ate, the room slowly
darkened. A faint wind sprang up and beat the tree branches against the window.
The dining-room looked over the breakwater of the harbour, and the sea swung
heavily in rolling waves. Wind crept round the house, moaning drearily.

“We’re in for a storm. That means I’m boxed up here all day.
Well, there’s one blessing; it’ll clear the air.” He heard
the servant girl rushing importantly round the house, slamming windows. Then he
caught a glimpse of her in the garden, unpegging tea towels from the line
across the lawn. She was a worker, there was no doubt about that. He took up a
book, and wheeled his arm-chair over to the window. But it was useless. Too
dark to read; he didn’t believe in straining his eyes, and gas at ten
o’clock in the morning seemed absurd. So he slipped down in the chair,
leaned his elbows on the padded arms and gave himself up, for once, to idle
dreaming. “A boy? Yes, it was bound to be a boy this time….”
“What’s your family, Binzer?” “Oh, I’ve two girls
and a boy!” A very nice little number. Of course he was the last man to
have a favourite child, but a man needed a son. “I’m working up the
business for my son! Binzer & Son! It would mean living very tight for the
next ten years, cutting expenses as fine as possible; and then—”

A tremendous gust of wind sprang upon the house, seized it, shook it, dropped,
only to grip the more tightly. The waves swelled up along the breakwater and
were whipped with broken foam. Over the white sky flew tattered streamers of
grey cloud.

Andreas felt quite relieved to hear Doctor Erb coming down the stairs; he got
up and lit the gas.

“Mind if I smoke in here?” asked Doctor Erb, lighting a cigarette
before Andreas had time to answer. “You don’t smoke, do you? No
time to indulge in pernicious little habits!”

“How is she now?” asked Andreas, loathing the man.

“Oh, well as can be expected, poor little soul. She begged me to come
down and have a look at you. Said she knew you were worrying.” With
laughing eyes the doctor looked at the breakfast-table. “Managed to peck
a bit, I see, eh?”

“Hoo-wih!” shouted the wind, shaking the window-sashes.

“Pity—this weather,” said Doctor Erb.

“Yes, it gets on Anna’s nerves, and it’s just nerve she
wants.”

“Eh, what’s that?” retorted the doctor. “Nerve! Man
alive! She’s got twice the nerve of you and me rolled into one. Nerve!
she’s nothing but nerve. A woman who works as she does about the house
and has three children in four years thrown in with the dusting, so to
speak!”

He pitched his half-smoked cigarette into the fireplace and frowned at the
window.

“Now he’s accusing me,” thought Andreas.
“That’s the second time this morning—first mother and now
this man taking advantage of my sensitiveness.” He could not trust
himself to speak, and rang the bell for the servant girl.

“Clear away the breakfast things,” he ordered. “I can’t
have them messing about on the table till dinner!”

“Don’t be hard on the girl,” coaxed Doctor Erb.
“She’s got twice the work to do to-day.”

At that Binzer’s anger blazed out.

“I’ll trouble you, Doctor, not to interfere between me and my
servants!” And he felt a fool at the same moment for not saying
“servant.”

Doctor Erb was not perturbed. He shook his head, thrust his hands into his
pockets, and began balancing himself on toe and heel.

“You’re jagged by the weather,” he said wryly, “nothing
else. A great pity—this storm. You know climate has an immense effect
upon birth. A fine day perks a woman—gives her heart for her business.
Good weather is as necessary to a confinement as it is to a washing day. Not
bad—that last remark of mine—for a professional fossil, eh?”

Andreas made no reply.

“Well, I’ll be getting back to my patient. Why don’t you take
a walk, and clear your head? That’s the idea for you.”

“No,” he answered, “I won’t do that; it’s too
rough.”

He went back to his chair by the window. While the servant girl cleared away he
pretended to read… then his dreams! It seemed years since he had had the time
to himself to dream like that—he never had a breathing space. Saddled
with work all day, and couldn’t shake it off in the evening like other
men. Besides, Anna was interested—they talked of practically nothing else
together. Excellent mother she’d make for a boy; she had a grip of
things.

Church bells started ringing through the windy air, now sounding as though from
very far away, then again as though all the churches in the town had been
suddenly transplanted into their street. They stirred something in him, those
bells, something vague and tender. Just about that time Anna would call him
from the hall. “Andreas, come and have your coat brushed. I’m
ready.” Then off they would go, she hanging on his arm, and looking up at
him. She certainly was a little thing. He remembered once saying when they were
engaged, “Just as high as my heart,” and she had jumped on to a
stool and pulled his head down, laughing. A kid in those days, younger than her
children in nature, brighter, more “go” and “spirit” in
her. The way she’d run down the road to meet him after business! And the
way she laughed when they were looking for a house. By Jove! that laugh of
hers! At the memory he grinned, then grew suddenly grave. Marriage certainly
changed a woman far more than it did a man. Talk about sobering down. She had
lost all her go in two months! Well, once this boy business was over
she’d get stronger. He began to plan a little trip for them. He’d
take her away and they’d loaf about together somewhere. After all, dash
it, they were young still. She’d got into a groove; he’d have to
force her out of it, that’s all.

He got up and went into the drawing-room, carefully shut the door and took
Anna’s photograph from the top of the piano. She wore a white dress with
a big bow of some soft stuff under the chin, and stood, a little stiffly,
holding a sheaf of artificial poppies and corn in her hands. Delicate she
looked even then; her masses of hair gave her that look. She seemed to droop
under the heavy braids of it, and yet she was smiling. Andreas caught his
breath sharply. She was his wife—that girl. Posh! it had only been taken
four years ago. He held it close to him, bent forward and kissed it. Then
rubbed the glass with the back of his hand. At that moment, fainter than he had
heard in the passage, more terrifying, Andreas heard again that wailing cry.
The wind caught it up in mocking echo, blew it over the house-tops, down the
street, far away from him. He flung out his arms, “I’m so damnably
helpless,” he said, and then, to the picture, “Perhaps it’s
not as bad as it sounds; perhaps it is just my sensitiveness.” In the
half light of the drawing-room the smile seemed to deepen in Anna’s
portrait, and to become secret, even cruel. “No,” he reflected,
“that smile is not at all her happiest expression—it was a mistake
to let her have it taken smiling like that. She doesn’t look like my
wife—like the mother of my son.” Yes, that was it, she did not look
like the mother of a son who was going to be a partner in the firm. The picture
got on his nerves; he held it in different lights, looked at it from a
distance, sideways, spent, it seemed to Andreas afterwards, a whole lifetime
trying to fit it in. The more he played with it the deeper grew his dislike of
it. Thrice he carried it over to the fireplace and decided to chuck it behind
the Japanese umbrella in the grate; then he thought it absurd to waste an
expensive frame. There was no good in beating about the bush. Anna looked like
a stranger—abnormal, a freak—it might be a picture taken just
before or after death.

Suddenly he realised that the wind had dropped, that the whole house was still,
terribly still. Cold and pale, with a disgusting feeling that spiders were
creeping up his spine and across his face, he stood in the centre of the
drawing-room, hearing Doctor Erb’s footsteps descending the stairs.

He saw Doctor Erb come into the room; the room seemed to change into a great
glass bowl that spun round, and Doctor Erb seemed to swim through this glass
bowl towards him, like a goldfish in a pearl-coloured waistcoat.

“My beloved wife has passed away!” He wanted to shout it out before
the doctor spoke.

“Well, she’s hooked a boy this time!” said Doctor Erb.
Andreas staggered forward.

“Look out. Keep on your pins,” said Doctor Erb, catching
Binzer’s arm, and murmuring, as he felt it, “Flabby as
butter.”

A glow spread all over Andreas. He was exultant.

“Well, by God! Nobody can accuse me of not knowing what suffering
is,” he said.

THE CHILD-WHO-WAS-TIRED

She was just beginning to walk along a little white road with tall black trees
on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at
all, when a hand gripped her shoulder, shook her, slapped her ear.

“Oh, oh, don’t stop me,” cried the Child-Who-Was-Tired.
“Let me go.”

“Get up, you good-for-nothing brat,” said a voice; “get up
and light the oven or I’ll shake every bone out of your body.”

With an immense effort she opened her eyes, and saw the Frau standing by, the
baby bundled under one arm. The three other children who shared the same bed
with the Child-Who-Was-Tired, accustomed to brawls, slept on peacefully. In a
corner of the room the Man was fastening his braces.

“What do you mean by sleeping like this the whole night
through—like a sack of potatoes? You’ve let the baby wet his bed
twice.”

She did not answer, but tied her petticoat string, and buttoned on her plaid
frock with cold, shaking fingers.

“There, that’s enough. Take the baby into the kitchen with you, and
heat that cold coffee on the spirit lamp for the master, and give him the loaf
of black bread out of the table drawer. Don’t guzzle it yourself or
I’ll know.”

The Frau staggered across the room, flung herself on to her bed, drawing the
pink bolster round her shoulders.

It was almost dark in the kitchen. She laid the baby on the wooden settle,
covering him with a shawl, then poured the coffee from the earthenware jug into
the saucepan, and set it on the spirit lamp to boil.

“I’m sleepy,” nodded the Child-Who-Was-Tired, kneeling on the
floor and splitting the damp pine logs into little chips. “That’s
why I’m not awake.”

The oven took a long time to light. Perhaps it was cold, like herself, and
sleepy…. Perhaps it had been dreaming of a little white road with black trees
on either side, a little road that led to nowhere.

Then the door was pulled violently open and the Man strode in.

“Here, what are you doing, sitting on the floor?” he shouted.
“Give me my coffee. I’ve got to be off. Ugh! You haven’t even
washed over the table.”

She sprang to her feet, poured his coffee into an enamel cup, and gave him
bread and a knife, then, taking a wash rag from the sink, smeared over the
black linoleumed table.

“Swine of a day—swine’s life,” mumbled the Man, sitting
by the table and staring out of the window at the bruised sky, which seemed to
bulge heavily over the dull land. He stuffed his mouth with bread and then
swilled it down with the coffee.

The Child drew a pail of water, turned up her sleeves, frowning the while at
her arms, as if to scold them for being so thin, so much like little stunted
twigs, and began to mop over the floor.

“Stop sousing about the water while I’m here,” grumbled the
Man. “Stop the baby snivelling; it’s been going on like that all
night.”

The Child gathered the baby into her lap and sat rocking him.

“Ts—ts—ts,” she said. “He’s cutting his eye
teeth, that’s what makes him cry so. And dribble—I never
seen a baby dribble like this one.” She wiped his mouth and nose with a
corner of her skirt. “Some babies get their teeth without you knowing
it,” she went on, “and some take on this way all the time. I once
heard of a baby that died, and they found all its teeth in its stomach.”

The Man got up, unhooked his cloak from the back of the door, and flung it
round him.

“There’s another coming,” said he.

“What—a tooth!” exclaimed the Child, startled for the first
time that morning out of her dreadful heaviness, and thrusting her finger into
the baby’s mouth.

“No,” he said grimly, “another baby. Now, get on with your
work; it’s time the others got up for school.” She stood a moment
quite silently, hearing his heavy steps on the stone passage, then the gravel
walk, and finally the slam of the front gate.

“Another baby! Hasn’t she finished having them yet?”
thought the Child. “Two babies getting eye teeth—two babies to get
up for in the night—two babies to carry about and wash their little piggy
clothes!” She looked with horror at the one in her arms, who, seeming to
understand the contemptuous loathing of her tired glance, doubled his fists,
stiffened his body, and began violently screaming.

“Ts—ts—ts.” She laid him on the settle and went back to
her floor-washing. He never ceased crying for a moment, but she got quite used
to it and kept time with her broom. Oh, how tired she was! Oh, the heavy broom
handle and the burning spot just at the back of her neck that ached so, and a
funny little fluttering feeling just at the back of her waistband, as though
something were going to break.

The clock struck six. She set the pan of milk in the oven, and went into the
next room to wake and dress the three children. Anton and Hans lay together in
attitudes of mutual amity which certainly never existed out of their sleeping
hours. Lena was curled up, her knees under her chin, only a straight,
standing-up pigtail of hair showing above the bolster.

“Get up,” cried the Child, speaking in a voice of immense
authority, pulling off the bedclothes and giving the boys sundry pokes and
digs. “I’ve been calling you this last half-hour. It’s late,
and I’ll tell on you if you don’t get dressed this minute.”

Anton awoke sufficiently to turn over and kick Hans on a tender part, whereupon
Hans pulled Lena’s pigtail until she shrieked for her mother.

“Oh, do be quiet,” whispered the Child. “Oh, do get up and
dress. You know what will happen. There—I’ll help you.”

But the warning came too late. The Frau got out of bed, walked in a determined
fashion into the kitchen, returning with a bundle of twigs in her hand fastened
together with a strong cord. One by one she laid the children across her knee
and severely beat them, expending a final burst of energy on the
Child-Who-Was-Tired, then returned to bed, with a comfortable sense of her
maternal duties in good working order for the day. Very subdued, the three
allowed themselves to be dressed and washed by the Child, who even laced the
boys’ boots, having found through experience that if left to themselves
they hopped about for at least five minutes to find a comfortable ledge for
their foot, and then spat on their hands and broke the bootlaces.

While she gave them their breakfast they became uproarious, and the baby would
not cease crying. When she filled the tin kettle with milk, tied on the rubber
teat, and, first moistening it herself, tried with little coaxing words to make
him drink, he threw the bottle on to the floor and trembled all over.

“Eye teeth!” shouted Hans, hitting Anton over the head with his
empty cup; “he’s getting the evil-eye teeth, I should say.”

“Smarty!” retorted Lena, poking out her tongue at him, and then,
when he promptly did the same, crying at the top of her voice, “Mother,
Hans is making faces at me!”

“That’s right,” said Hans; “go on howling, and when
you’re in bed to-night I’ll wait till you’re asleep, and then
I’ll creep over and take a little tiny piece of your arm and twist and
twist it until—” He leant over the table making the most horrible
faces at Lena, not noticing that Anton was standing behind his chair until the
little boy bent over and spat on his brother’s shaven head.

“Oh, weh! oh, weh!”

The Child-Who-Was-Tired pushed and pulled them apart, muffled them into their
coats, and drove them out of the house.

“Hurry, hurry! the second bell’s rung,” she urged, knowing
perfectly well she was telling a story, and rather exulting in the fact. She
washed up the breakfast things, then went down to the cellar to look out the
potatoes and beetroot.

Such a funny, cold place the coal cellar! With potatoes banked on one corner,
beetroot in an old candle box, two tubs of sauerkraut, and a twisted mass of
dahlia roots—that looked as real as though they were fighting one
another, thought the Child.

She gathered the potatoes into her skirt, choosing big ones with few eyes
because they were easier to peel, and bending over the dull heap in the silent
cellar, she began to nod.

“Here, you, what are you doing down there?” cried the Frau, from
the top of the stairs. “The baby’s fallen off the settle, and got a
bump as big as an egg over his eye. Come up here, and I’ll teach
you!”

“It wasn’t me—it wasn’t me!” screamed the Child,
beaten from one side of the hall to the other, so that the potatoes and
beetroot rolled out of her skirt.

The Frau seemed to be as big as a giant, and there was a certain heaviness in
all her movements that was terrifying to anyone so small.

“Sit in the corner, and peel and wash the vegetables, and keep the baby
quiet while I do the washing.”

Whimpering she obeyed, but as to keeping the baby quiet, that was impossible.
His face was hot, little beads of sweat stood all over his head, and he
stiffened his body and cried. She held him on her knees, with a pan of cold
water beside her for the cleaned vegetables and the “ducks’
bucket” for the peelings.

“Ts—ts—ts!” she crooned, scraping and boring;
“there’s going to be another soon, and you can’t both keep on
crying. Why don’t you go to sleep, baby? I would, if I were you.
I’ll tell you a dream. Once upon a time there was a little white
road—”

She shook back her head, a great lump ached in her throat and then the tears
ran down her face on to the vegetables.

“That’s no good,” said the Child, shaking them away.
“Just stop crying until I’ve finished this, baby, and I’ll
walk you up and down.”

But by that time she had to peg out the washing for the Frau. A wind had sprung
up. Standing on tiptoe in the yard, she almost felt she would be blown away.
There was a bad smell coming from the ducks’ coop, which was half full of
manure water, but away in the meadow she saw the grass blowing like little
green hairs. And she remembered having heard of a child who had once played for
a whole day in just such a meadow with real sausages and beer for her
dinner—and not a little bit of tiredness. Who had told her that story?
She could not remember, and yet it was so plain.

The wet clothes flapped in her face as she pegged them; danced and jigged on
the line, bulged out and twisted. She walked back to the house with lagging
steps, looking longingly at the grass in the meadow.

“What must I do now, please?” she said.

“Make the beds and hang the baby’s mattress out of the window, then
get the wagon and take him for a little walk along the road. In front of the
house, mind—where I can see you. Don’t stand there, gaping! Then
come in when I call you and help me cut up the salad.”

When she had made the beds the Child stood and looked at them. Gently she
stroked the pillow with her hand, and then, just for one moment, let her head
rest there. Again the smarting lump in her throat, the stupid tears that fell
and kept on falling as she dressed the baby and dragged the little wagon up and
down the road.

A man passed, driving a bullock wagon. He wore a long, queer feather in his
hat, and whistled as he passed. Two girls with bundles on their shoulders came
walking out of the village—one wore a red handkerchief about her head and
one a blue. They were laughing and holding each other by the hand. Then the sun
pushed by a heavy fold of grey cloud and spread a warm yellow light over
everything.

“Perhaps,” thought the Child-Who-Was-Tired, “if I walked far
enough up this road I might come to a little white one, with tall black trees
on either side—a little road—”

“Salad, salad!” cried the Frau’s voice from the house.

Soon the children came home from school, dinner was eaten, the Man took the
Frau’s share of pudding as well as his own, and the three children seemed
to smear themselves all over with whatever they ate. Then more dish-washing and
more cleaning and baby-minding. So the afternoon dragged coldly through.

Old Frau Grathwohl came in with a fresh piece of pig’s flesh for the
Frau, and the Child listened to them gossiping together.

“Frau Manda went on her ‘journey to Rome’ last night, and
brought back a daughter. How are you feeling?”

“I was sick twice this morning,” said the Frau. “My insides
are all twisted up with having children too quickly.”

“I see you’ve got a new help,” commented old Mother
Grathwohl.

“Oh, dear Lord”—the Frau lowered her
voice—“don’t you know her? She’s the free-born
one—daughter of the waitress at the railway station. They found her
mother trying to squeeze her head in the wash-hand jug, and the child’s
half silly.”

“Ts—ts—ts!” whispered the “free-born” one
to the baby.

As the day drew in the Child-Who-Was-Tired did not know how to fight her
sleepiness any longer. She was afraid to sit down or stand still. As she sat at
supper the Man and the Frau seemed to swell to an immense size as she watched
them, and then become smaller than dolls, with little voices that seemed to
come from outside the window. Looking at the baby, it suddenly had two heads,
and then no head. Even his crying made her feel worse. When she thought of the
nearness of bedtime she shook all over with excited joy. But as eight
o’clock approached there was the sound of wheels on the road, and
presently in came a party of friends to spend the evening.

Then it was:

“Put on the coffee.”

“Bring me the sugar tin.”

“Carry the chairs out of the bedroom.”

“Set the table.”

And, finally, the Frau sent her into the next room to keep the baby quiet.

There was a little piece of candle burning in the enamel bracket. As she walked
up and down she saw her great big shadow on the wall like a grown-up person
with a grown-up baby. Whatever would it look like when she carried two babies
so!

“Ts—ts—ts! Once upon a time she was walking along a little
white road, with oh! such great big black trees on either side.”

“Here you!” called the Frau’s voice, “bring me my new
jacket from behind the door.” And as she took it into the warm room one
of the women said, “She looks like an owl. Such children are seldom right
in their heads.”

“Why don’t you keep that baby quiet?” said the Man, who had
just drunk enough beer to make him feel very brave and master of his house.

“If you don’t keep that baby quiet you’ll know why later
on.”

They burst out laughing as she stumbled back into the bedroom.

“I don’t believe Holy Mary could keep him quiet,” she
murmured. “Did Jesus cry like this when He was little? If I was not so
tired perhaps I could do it; but the baby just knows that I want to go to
sleep. And there is going to be another one.”

She flung the baby on the bed, and stood looking at him with terror.

From the next room there came the jingle of glasses and the warm sound of
laughter.

And she suddenly had a beautiful marvellous idea.

She laughed for the first time that day, and clapped her hands.

“Ts—ts—ts!” she said, “lie there, silly one; you
will go to sleep. You’ll not cry any more or wake up in the night.
Funny, little, ugly baby.”

He opened his eyes, and shrieked loudly at the sight of the
Child-Who-Was-Tired. From the next room she heard the Frau call out to her.

“One moment—he is almost asleep,” she cried.

And then gently, smiling, on tiptoe, she brought the pink bolster from the
Frau’s bed and covered the baby’s face with it, pressed with all
her might as he struggled, “like a duck with its head off,
wriggling”, she thought.

She heaved a long sigh, then fell back on to the floor, and was walking along a
little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led
to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all—nobody at all.

THE ADVANCED LADY

“Do you think we might ask her to come with us,” said Fräulein
Elsa, retying her pink sash ribbon before my mirror. “You know, although
she is so intellectual, I cannot help feeling convinced that she has some
secret sorrow. And Lisa told me this morning, as she was turning out my room,
that she remains hours and hours by herself, writing; in fact Lisa says she is
writing a book! I suppose that is why she never cares to mingle with us, and
has so little time for her husband and the child.”

“Well, you ask her,” said I. “I have never spoken to
the lady.”

Elsa blushed faintly. “I have only spoken to her once,” she
confessed. “I took her a bunch of wild flowers, to her room, and she came
to the door in a white gown, with her hair loose. Never shall I forget that
moment. She just took the flowers, and I heard her—because the door was
not quite properly shut—I heard her, as I walked down the passage, saying
‘Purity, fragrance, the fragrance of purity and the purity of
fragrance!’ It was wonderful!”

At that moment Frau Kellermann knocked at the door.

“Are you ready?” she said, coming into the room and nodding to us
very genially. “The gentlemen are waiting on the steps, and I have asked
the Advanced Lady to come with us.”

“Na, how extraordinary!” cried Elsa. “But this moment the
gnädige Frau and I were debating whether—”

“Yes, I met her coming out of her room and she said she was charmed with
the idea. Like all of us, she has never been to Schlingen. She is downstairs
now, talking to Herr Erchardt. I think we shall have a delightful
afternoon.”

“Is Fritzi waiting too?” asked Elsa.

“Of course he is, dear child—as impatient as a hungry man listening
for the dinner bell. Run along!”

Elsa ran, and Frau Kellermann smiled at me significantly. In the past she and I
had seldom spoken to each other, owing to the fact that her “one
remaining joy”—her charming little Karl—had never succeeded
in kindling into flame those sparks of maternity which are supposed to glow in
great numbers upon the altar of every respectable female heart; but, in view of
a premeditated journey together, we became delightfully cordial.

“For us,” she said, “there will be a double joy. We shall be
able to watch the happiness of these two dear children, Elsa and Fritz. They
only received the letters of blessing from their parents yesterday morning. It
is a very strange thing, but whenever I am in the company of newly-engaged
couples I blossom. Newly-engaged couples, mothers with first babies, and normal
deathbeds have precisely the same effect on me. Shall we join the
others?”

I was longing to ask her why normal deathbeds should cause anyone to burst into
flower, and said, “Yes, do let us.”

We were greeted by the little party of “cure guests” on the pension
steps, with those cries of joy and excitement which herald so pleasantly the
mildest German excursion. Herr Erchardt and I had not met before that day, so,
in accordance with strict pension custom, we asked each other how long we had
slept during the night, had we dreamed agreeably, what time we had got up, was
the coffee fresh when we had appeared at breakfast, and how had we passed the
morning. Having toiled up these stairs of almost national politeness we landed,
triumphant and smiling, and paused to recover breath.

“And now,” said Herr Erchardt, “I have a pleasure in store
for you. The Frau Professor is going to be one of us for the afternoon.
Yes,” nodding graciously to the Advanced Lady. “Allow me to
introduce you to each other.”

We bowed very formally, and looked each other over with that eye which is known
as “eagle” but is far more the property of the female than that
most unoffending of birds. “I think you are English?” she said. I
acknowledged the fact. “I am reading a great many English books just
now—rather, I am studying them.”

“Nu,” cried Herr Erchardt. “Fancy that! What a bond already!
I have made up my mind to know Shakespeare in his mother tongue before I die,
but that you, Frau Professor, should be already immersed in those wells of
English thought!”

“From what I have read,” she said, “I do not think they are
very deep wells.”

He nodded sympathetically.

“No,” he answered, “so I have heard…. But do not let us
embitter our excursion for our little English friend. We will speak of this
another time.”

“Nu, are we ready?” cried Fritz, who stood, supporting Elsa’s
elbow in his hand, at the foot of the steps. It was immediately discovered that
Karl was lost.

“Ka—rl, Karl—chen!” we cried. No response.

“But he was here one moment ago,” said Herr Langen, a tired, pale
youth, who was recovering from a nervous breakdown due to much philosophy and
little nourishment. “He was sitting here, picking out the works of his
watch with a hairpin!”

Frau Kellermann rounded on him. “Do you mean to say, my dear Herr Langen,
you did not stop the child!”

“No,” said Herr Langen; “I’ve tried stopping him before
now.”

“Da, that child has such energy; never is his brain at peace. If he is
not doing one thing, he is doing another!”

“Perhaps he has started on the dining-room clock now,” suggested
Herr Langen, abominably hopeful.

The Advanced Lady suggested that we should go without him. “I never take
my little daughter for walks,” she said. “I have accustomed her to
sitting quietly in my bedroom from the time I go out until I return!”

“There he is—there he is,” piped Elsa, and Karl was observed
slithering down a chestnut-tree, very much the worse for twigs.

“I’ve been listening to what you said about me, mumma,” he
confessed while Frau Kellermann brushed him down. “It was not true about
the watch. I was only looking at it, and the little girl never stays in the
bedroom. She told me herself she always goes down to the kitchen,
and—”

“Da, that’s enough!” said Frau Kellermann.

We marched en masse along the station road. It was a very warm
afternoon, and continuous parties of “cure guests”, who were giving
their digestions a quiet airing in pension gardens, called after us, asked if
we were going for a walk, and cried “Herr Gott—happy journey”
with immense ill-concealed relish when we mentioned Schlingen.

“But that is eight kilometres,” shouted one old man with a white
beard, who leaned against a fence, fanning himself with a yellow handkerchief.

“Seven and a half,” answered Herr Erchardt shortly.

“Eight,” bellowed the sage.

“Seven and a half!”

“Eight!”

“The man is mad,” said Herr Erchardt.

“Well, please let him be mad in peace,” said I, putting my hands
over my ears.

“Such ignorance must not be allowed to go uncontradicted,” said he,
and turning his back on us, too exhausted to cry out any longer, he held up
seven and a half fingers.

“Eight!” thundered the greybeard, with pristine freshness.

We felt very sobered, and did not recover until we reached a white signpost
which entreated us to leave the road and walk through the field
path—without trampling down more of the grass than was necessary. Being
interpreted, it meant “single file”, which was distressing for Elsa
and Fritz. Karl, like a happy child, gambolled ahead, and cut down as many
flowers as possible with the stick of his mother’s parasol—followed
the three others—then myself—and the lovers in the rear. And above
the conversation of the advance party I had the privilege of hearing these
delicious whispers.

Fritz: “Do you love me?” Elsa: “Nu—yes.” Fritz
passionately: “But how much?” To which Elsa never
replied—except with “How much do you love me?”

Fritz escaped that truly Christian trap by saying, “I asked you
first.”

It grew so confusing that I slipped in front of Frau Kellermann—and
walked in the peaceful knowledge that she was blossoming and I was under no
obligation to inform even my nearest and dearest as to the precise capacity of
my affections. “What right have they to ask each other such questions the
day after letters of blessing have been received?” I reflected.
“What right have they even to question each other? Love which becomes
engaged and married is a purely affirmative affair—they are usurping the
privileges of their betters and wisers!”

The edges of the field frilled over into an immense pine forest—very
pleasant and cool it looked. Another signpost begged us to keep to the broad
path for Schlingen and deposit waste paper and fruit peelings in wire
receptacles attached to the benches for the purpose. We sat down on the first
bench, and Karl with great curiosity explored the wire receptacle.

“I love woods,” said the Advanced Lady, smiling pitifully into the
air. “In a wood my hair already seems to stir and remember something of
its savage origin.”

“But speaking literally,” said Frau Kellermann, after an
appreciative pause, “there is really nothing better than the air of
pine-trees for the scalp.”

“Oh, Frau Kellermann, please don’t break the spell,” said
Elsa.

The Advanced Lady looked at her very sympathetically. “Have you, too,
found the magic heart of Nature?” she said.

That was Herr Langen’s cue. “Nature has no heart,” said he,
very bitterly and readily, as people do who are over-philosophised and
underfed. “She creates that she may destroy. She eats that she may spew
up and she spews up that she may eat. That is why we, who are forced to eke out
an existence at her trampling feet, consider the world mad, and realise the
deadly vulgarity of production.”

“Young man,” interrupted Herr Erchardt, “you have never lived
and you have never suffered!”

“Oh, excuse me—how can you know?”

“I know because you have told me, and there’s an end of it. Come
back to this bench in ten years’ time and repeat those words to
me,” said Frau Kellermann, with an eye upon Fritz, who was engaged in
counting Elsa’s fingers with passionate fervour—“and bring
with you your young wife, Herr Langen, and watch, perhaps, your little child
playing with—” She turned towards Karl, who had rooted an old
illustrated paper out of the receptacle and was spelling over an advertisement
for the enlargement of Beautiful Breasts.

The sentence remained unfinished. We decided to move on. As we plunged more
deeply into the wood our spirits rose—reaching a point where they burst
into song—on the part of the three men—“O Welt, wie bist du
wunderbar!”—the lower part of which was piercingly sustained by
Herr Langen, who attempted quite unsuccessfully to infuse satire into it in
accordance with his—“world outlook”. They strode ahead and
left us to trail after them—hot and happy.

“Now is the opportunity,” said Frau Kellermann. “Dear Frau
Professor, do tell us a little about your book.”

“Ach, how did you know I was writing one?” she cried playfully.

“Elsa, here, had it from Lisa. And never before have I personally known a
woman who was writing a book. How do you manage to find enough to write
down?”

“That is never the trouble,” said the Advanced Lady—she took
Elsa’s arm and leaned on it gently. “The trouble is to know where
to stop. My brain has been a hive for years, and about three months ago the
pent-up waters burst over my soul, and since then I am writing all day until
late into the night, still ever finding fresh inspirations and thoughts which
beat impatient wings about my heart.”

“Is it a novel?” asked Elsa shyly.

“Of course it is a novel,” said I.

“How can you be so positive?” said Frau Kellermann, eyeing me
severely.

“Because nothing but a novel could produce an effect like that.”

“Ach, don’t quarrel,” said the Advanced Lady sweetly.
“Yes, it is a novel—upon the Modern Woman. For this seems to me the
woman’s hour. It is mysterious and almost prophetic, it is the symbol of
the true advanced woman: not one of those violent creatures who deny their sex
and smother their frail wings under… under—”

“The English tailor-made?” from Frau Kellermann.

“I was not going to put it like that. Rather, under the lying garb of
false masculinity!”

“Such a subtle distinction!” I murmured.

“Whom then,” asked Fräulein Elsa, looking adoringly at the Advanced
Lady—“whom then do you consider the true woman?”

“She is the incarnation of comprehending Love!”

“But my dear Frau Professor,” protested Frau Kellermann, “you
must remember that one has so few opportunities for exhibiting Love within the
family circle nowadays. One’s husband is at business all day, and
naturally desires to sleep when he returns home—one’s children are
out of the lap and in at the university before one can lavish anything at all
upon them!”

“But Love is not a question of lavishing,” said the Advanced Lady.
“It is the lamp carried in the bosom touching with serene rays all the
heights and depths of—”

“Darkest Africa,” I murmured flippantly.

She did not hear.

“The mistake we have made in the past—as a sex,” said she,
“is in not realising that our gifts of giving are for the whole
world—we are the glad sacrifice of ourselves!”

“Oh!” cried Elsa rapturously, and almost bursting into gifts as she
breathed—“how I know that! You know ever since Fritz and I have
been engaged, I share the desire to give to everybody, to share
everything!”

“How extremely dangerous,” said I.

“It is only the beauty of danger, or the danger of beauty” said the
Advanced Lady—“and there you have the ideal of my book—that
woman is nothing but a gift.”

I smiled at her very sweetly. “Do you know,” I said, “I, too,
would like to write a book, on the advisability of caring for daughters, and
taking them for airings and keeping them out of kitchens!”

I think the masculine element must have felt these angry vibrations: they
ceased from singing, and together we climbed out of the wood, to see Schlingen
below us, tucked in a circle of hills, the white houses shining in the
sunlight, “for all the world like eggs in a bird’s nest”, as
Herr Erchardt declared. We descended upon Schlingen and demanded sour milk with
fresh cream and bread at the Inn of the Golden Stag, a most friendly place,
with tables in a rose-garden where hens and chickens ran riot—even
flopping upon the disused tables and pecking at the red checks on the cloths.
We broke the bread into the bowls, added the cream, and stirred it round with
flat wooden spoons, the landlord and his wife standing by.

“Splendid weather!” said Herr Erchardt, waving his spoon at the
landlord, who shrugged his shoulders.

“What! you don’t call it splendid!”

“As you please,” said the landlord, obviously scorning us.

“Such a beautiful walk,” said Fräulein Elsa, making a free gift of
her most charming smile to the landlady.

“I never walk,” said the landlady; “when I go to Mindelbau my
man drives me—I’ve more important things to do with my legs than
walk them through the dust!”

“I like these people,” confessed Herr Langen to me. “I like
them very, very much. I think I shall take a room here for the whole
summer.”

“Why?”

“Oh, because they live close to the earth, and therefore despise
it.”

He pushed away his bowl of sour milk and lit a cigarette. We ate, solidly and
seriously, until those seven and a half kilometres to Mindelbau stretched
before us like an eternity. Even Karl’s activity became so full fed that
he lay on the ground and removed his leather waistbelt. Elsa suddenly leaned
over to Fritz and whispered, who on hearing her to the end and asking her if
she loved him, got up and made a little speech.

“We—we wish to celebrate our betrothal by—by—asking you
all to drive back with us in the landlord’s cart—if—it will
hold us!”

“Oh, what a beautiful, noble idea!” said Frau Kellermann, heaving a
sigh of relief that audibly burst two hooks.

“It is my little gift,” said Elsa to the Advanced Lady, who by
virtue of three portions almost wept tears of gratitude.

Squeezed into the peasant cart and driven by the landlord, who showed his
contempt for mother earth by spitting savagely every now and again, we jolted
home again, and the nearer we came to Mindelbau the more we loved it and one
another.

“We must have many excursions like this,” said Herr Erchardt to me,
“for one surely gets to know a person in the simple surroundings of the
open air—one shares the same joys—one feels friendship. What
is it your Shakespeare says? One moment, I have it. The friends thou hast, and
their adoption tried—grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel!”

“But,” said I, feeling very friendly towards him, “the bother
about my soul is that it refuses to grapple anybody at all—and I am sure
that the dead weight of a friend whose adoption it had tried would kill it
immediately. Never yet has it shown the slightest sign of a hoop!”

He bumped against my knees and excused himself and the cart.

“My dear little lady, you must not take the quotation literally.
Naturally, one is not physically conscious of the hoops; but hoops there are in
the soul of him or her who loves his fellow-men…. Take this afternoon, for
instance. How did we start out? As strangers you might almost say, and
yet—all of us—how have we come home?”

“In a cart,” said the only remaining joy, who sat upon his
mother’s lap and felt sick.

We skirted the field that we had passed through, going round by the cemetery.
Herr Langen leaned over the edge of the seat and greeted the graves. He was
sitting next to the Advanced Lady—inside the shelter of her shoulder. I
heard her murmur: “You look like a little boy with your hair blowing
about in the wind.” Herr Langen, slightly less bitter—watched the
last graves disappear. And I heard her murmur: “Why are you so sad? I too
am very sad sometimes—but—you look young enough for me to dare to
say this—I—too—know of much joy!”

“What do you know?” said he.

I leaned over and touched the Advanced Lady’s hand. “Hasn’t
it been a nice afternoon?” I said questioningly. “But you know,
that theory of yours about women and Love—it’s as old as the
hills—oh, older!”

From the road a sudden shout of triumph. Yes, there he was again—white
beard, silk handkerchief and undaunted enthusiasm.

“What did I say? Eight kilometres—it is!”

“Seven and a half!” shrieked Herr Erchardt.

“Why, then, do you return in carts? Eight kilometres it must be.”

Herr Erchardt made a cup of his hands and stood up in the jolting cart while
Frau Kellermann clung to his knees. “Seven and a half!”

“Ignorance must not go uncontradicted!” I said to the Advanced
Lady.

THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM

The landlady knocked at the door.

“Come in,” said Viola.

“There is a letter for you,” said the landlady, “a special
letter”—she held the green envelope in a corner of her dingy apron.

“Thanks.” Viola, kneeling on the floor, poking at the little dusty
stove, stretched out her hand. “Any answer?”

“No; the messenger has gone.”

“Oh, all right!” She did not look the landlady in the face; she was
ashamed of not having paid her rent, and wondered grimly, without any hope, if
the woman would begin to bluster again.

“About this money owing to me—” said the landlady.

“Oh, the Lord—off she goes!” thought Viola, turning her back
on the woman and making a grimace at the stove.

“It’s settle—or it’s go!” The landlady raised her
voice; she began to bawl. “I’m a landlady, I am, and a respectable
woman, I’ll have you know. I’ll have no lice in my house, sneaking
their way into the furniture and eating up everything. It’s cash—or
out you go before twelve o’clock to-morrow.”

Viola felt rather than saw the woman’s gesture. She shot out her arm in a
stupid helpless way, as though a dirty pigeon had suddenly flown at her face.
“Filthy old beast! Ugh! And the smell of her—like stale cheese and
damp washing.”

“Very well!” she answered shortly; “it’s cash down or I
leave to-morrow. All right: don’t shout.”

It was extraordinary—always before this woman came near her she trembled
in her shoes—even the sound of those flat feet stumping up the stairs
made her feel sick, but once they were face to face she felt immensely calm and
indifferent, and could not understand why she even worried about money, nor why
she sneaked out of the house on tiptoe, not even daring to shut the door after
her in case the landlady should hear and shout something terrible, nor why she
spent nights pacing up and down her room—drawing up sharply before the
mirror and saying to a tragic reflection: “Money, money, money!”
When she was alone her poverty was like a huge dream-mountain on which her feet
were fast rooted—aching with the ache of the size of the thing—but
if it came to definite action, with no time for imaginings, her dream-mountain
dwindled into a beastly “hold-your-nose” affair, to be passed as
quickly as possible, with anger and a strong sense of superiority.

The landlady bounced out of the room, banging the door, so that it shook and
rattled as though it had listened to the conversation and fully sympathised
with the old hag.

Squatting on her heels, Viola opened the letter. It was from Casimir:

“I shall be with you at three o’clock this afternoon—and must
be off again this evening. All news when we meet. I hope you are happier than
I.—CASIMIR.”

“Huh! how kind!” she sneered; “how condescending. Too good of
you, really!” She sprang to her feet, crumbling the letter in her hands.
“And how are you to know that I shall stick here awaiting your pleasure
until three o’clock this afternoon?” But she knew she would; her
rage was only half sincere. She longed to see Casimir, for she was confident
that this time she would make him understand the situation…. “For, as
it is, it’s intolerable—intolerable!” she muttered.

It was ten o’clock in the morning of a grey day curiously lighted by pale
flashes of sunshine. Searched by these flashes her room looked tumbled and
grimed. She pulled down the window-blinds—but they gave a persistent,
whitish glare which was just as bad. The only thing of life in the room was a
jar of hyacinths given her by the landlady’s daughter: it stood on the
table exuding a sickly perfume from its plump petals; there were even rich buds
unfolding, and the leaves shone like oil.

Viola went over to the washstand, poured some water into the enamel basin, and
sponged her face and neck. She dipped her face into the water, opened her eyes,
and shook her head from side to side—it was exhilarating. She did it
three times. “I suppose I could drown myself if I stayed under long
enough,” she thought. “I wonder how long it takes to become
unconscious?… Often read of women drowning in a bucket. I wonder if any air
enters by the ears—if the basin would have to be as deep as a
bucket?” She experimented—gripped the washstand with both hands and
slowly sank her head into the water, when again there was a knock on the door.
Not the landlady this time—it must be Casimir. With her face and hair
dripping, with her petticoat bodice unbuttoned, she ran and opened it.

A strange man stood against the lintel—seeing her, he opened his eyes
very wide and smiled delightfully. “Excuse me—does Fräulein Schäfer
live here?”

“No; never heard of her.” His smile was so infectious, she wanted
to smile too—and the water had made her feel so fresh and rosy.

The strange man appeared overwhelmed with astonishment. “She
doesn’t?” he cried. “She is out, you mean!”

“No, she’s not living here,” answered Viola.

“But—pardon—one moment.” He moved from the door lintel,
standing squarely in front of her. He unbuttoned his greatcoat and drew a slip
of paper from the breast pocket, smoothing it in his gloved fingers before
handing it to her.

“Yes, that’s the address, right enough, but there must be a mistake
in the number. So many lodging-houses in this street, you know, and so
big.”

Drops of water fell from her hair on to the paper. She burst out laughing.
“Oh, how dreadful I must look—one moment!” She ran
back to the washstand and caught up a towel. The door was still open…. After
all, there was nothing more to be said. Why on earth had she asked him to wait
a moment? She folded the towel round her shoulders, and returned to the door,
suddenly grave. “I’m sorry; I know no such name,” in a sharp
voice.

Said the strange man: “Sorry, too. Have you been living here long?”

“Er—yes—a long time.” She began to close the door
slowly.

“Well—good-morning, thanks so much. Hope I haven’t been a
bother.”

“Good-morning.”

She heard him walk down the passage and then pause—lighting a cigarette.
Yes—a faint scent of delicious cigarette smoke penetrated her room. She
sniffed at it, smiling again. Well, that had been a fascinating interlude! He
looked so amazingly happy: his heavy clothes and big buttoned gloves; his
beautifully brushed hair… and that smile…. “Jolly” was the
word—just a well-fed boy with the world for his playground. People like
that did one good—one felt “made over” at the sight of them.
Sane they were—so sane and solid. You could depend on them never
having one mad impulse from the day they were born until the day they died. And
Life was in league with them—jumped them on her knee—quite rightly,
too. At that moment she noticed Casimir’s letter, crumpled up on the
floor—the smile faded. Staring at the letter she began braiding her
hair—a dull feeling of rage crept through her—she seemed to be
braiding it into her brain, and binding it, tightly, above her head…. Of
course that had been the mistake all along. What had? Oh, Casimir’s
frightful seriousness. If she had been happy when they first met she never
would have looked at him—but they had been like two patients in the same
hospital ward—each finding comfort in the sickness of the
other—sweet foundation for a love episode! Misfortune had knocked their
heads together: they had looked at each other, stunned with the conflict and
sympathised… “I wish I could step outside the whole affair and just
judge it—then I’d find a way out. I certainly was in love with
Casimir…. Oh, be sincere for once.” She flopped down on the bed and hid
her face in the pillow. “I was not in love. I wanted somebody to look
after me—and keep me until my work began to sell—and he kept
bothers with other men away. And what would have happened if he hadn’t
come along? I would have spent my wretched little pittance, and then—Yes,
that was what decided me, thinking about that ‘then.’ He was the
only solution. And I believed in him then. I thought his work had only to be
recognised once, and he’d roll in wealth. I thought perhaps we might be
poor for a month—but he said, if only he could have me, the stimulus….
Funny, if it wasn’t so damned tragic! Exactly the contrary has
happened—he hasn’t had a thing published for months—neither
have I—but then I didn’t expect to. Yes, the truth is, I’m
hard and bitter, and I have neither faith nor love for unsuccessful men. I
always end by despising them as I despise Casimir. I suppose it’s the
savage pride of the female who likes to think the man to whom she has given
herself must be a very great chief indeed. But to stew in this disgusting house
while Casimir scours the land in the hope of finding one editorial open
door—it’s humiliating. It’s changed my whole nature. I
wasn’t born for poverty—I only flower among really jolly people,
and people who never are worried.”

The figure of the strange man rose before her—would not be dismissed.
“That was the man for me, after all is said and done—a man without
a care—who’d give me everything I want and with whom I’d
always feel that sense of life and of being in touch with the world. I never
wanted to fight—it was thrust on me. Really, there’s a fount of
happiness in me, that is drying up, little by little, in this hateful
existence. I’ll be dead if this goes on—and”—she
stirred in the bed and flung out her arms—“I want passion, and
love, and adventure—I yearn for them. Why should I stay here and
rot?—I am rotting!” she cried, comforting herself with the sound of
her breaking voice. “But if I tell Casimir all this when he comes this
afternoon, and he says, ‘Go’—as he certainly
will—that’s another thing I loathe about him—he’s under
my thumb—what should I do then—where should I go to?” There
was nowhere. “I don’t want to work—or carve out my own path.
I want ease and any amount of nursing in the lap of luxury. There is only one
thing I’m fitted for, and that is to be a great courtesan.” But she
did not know how to go about it. She was frightened to go into the
streets—she heard of such awful things happening to those women—men
with diseases—or men who didn’t pay—besides, the idea of a
strange man every night—no, that was out of the question. “If
I’d the clothes I would go to a really good hotel and find some wealthy
man… like the strange man this morning. He would be ideal. Oh, if I only had
his address—I am sure I would fascinate him. I’d keep him laughing
all day—I’d make him give me unlimited money….” At the
thought she grew warm and soft. She began to dream of a wonderful house, and of
presses full of clothes and of perfumes. She saw herself stepping into
carriages—looking at the strange man with a mysterious, voluptuous
glance—she practised the glance, lying on the bed—and never another
worry, just drugged with happiness. That was the life for her. Well, the thing
to do was to let Casimir go on his wild-goose chase that evening, and while he
was away—What! Also—please to remember—there was the rent to
be paid before twelve next morning, and she hadn’t the money for a square
meal. At the thought of food she felt a sharp twinge in her stomach, a
sensation as though there were a hand in her stomach, squeezing it dry. She was
terribly hungry—all Casimir’s fault—and that man had lived on
the fat of the land ever since he was born. He looked as though he could order
a magnificent dinner. Oh, why hadn’t she played her cards
better?—he’d been sent by Providence—and she’d snubbed
him. “If I had that time over again, I’d be safe by now.” And
instead of the ordinary man who had spoken with her at the door her mind
created a brilliant, laughing image, who would treat her like a queen….
“There’s only one thing I could not stand—that he should be
coarse or vulgar. Well, he wasn’t—he was obviously a man of the
world, and the way he apologised… I have enough faith in my own power and
beauty to know I could make a man treat me just as I wanted to be
treated.”… It floated into her dreams—that sweet scent of
cigarette smoke. And then she remembered that she had heard nobody go down the
stone stairs. Was it possible that the strange man was still there?… The
thought was too absurd—Life didn’t play tricks like that—and
yet—she was quite conscious of his nearness. Very quietly she got up,
unhooked from the back of the door a long white gown, buttoned it
on—smiling slyly. She did not know what was going to happen. She only
thought: “Oh, what fun!” and that they were playing a delicious
game—this strange man and she. Very gently she turned the door-handle,
screwing up her face and biting her lip as the lock snapped back. Of course,
there he was—leaning against the banister rail. He wheeled round as she
slipped into the passage.

“Da,” she muttered, folding her gown tightly around her, “I
must go downstairs and fetch some wood. Brr! the cold!”

“There isn’t any wood,” volunteered the strange man. She gave
a little cry of astonishment, and then tossed her head.

“You again,” she said scornfully, conscious the while of his merry
eye, and the fresh, strong smell of his healthy body.

“The landlady shouted out there was no wood left. I just saw her go out
to buy some.”

“Story—story!” she longed to cry. He came quite close to her,
stood over her and whispered:

“Aren’t you going to ask me to finish my cigarette in your
room?”

She nodded. “You may if you want to!”

In that moment together in the passage a miracle had happened. Her room was
quite changed—it was full of sweet light and the scent of hyacinth
flowers. Even the furniture appeared different—exciting. Quick as a flash
she remembered childish parties when they had played charades, and one side had
left the room and come in again to act a word—just what she was doing
now. The strange man went over to the stove and sat down in her arm-chair. She
did not want him to talk or come near her—it was enough to see him in the
room, so secure and happy. How hungry she had been for the nearness of someone
like that—who knew nothing at all about her—and made no
demands—but just lived. Viola ran over to the table and put her arms
round the jar of hyacinths.

“Beautiful! Beautiful!” she cried—burying her head in the
flowers—and sniffing greedily at the scent. Over the leaves she looked at
the man and laughed.

“You are a funny little thing,” said he lazily.

“Why? Because I love flowers?”

“I’d far rather you loved other things,” said the strange man
slowly. She broke off a little pink petal and smiled at it.

“Let me send you some flowers,” said the strange man.
“I’ll send you a roomful if you’d like them.”

His voice frightened her slightly. “Oh no, thanks—this one is quite
enough for me.”

“No, it isn’t”—in a teasing voice.

“What a stupid remark!” thought Viola, and looking at him again he
did not seem quite so jolly. She noticed that his eyes were set too closely
together—and they were too small. Horrible thought, that he should prove
stupid.

“What do you do all day?” she asked hastily.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Why should I do anything?”

“Oh, don’t imagine for one moment that I condemn such
wisdom—only it sounds too good to be true!”

“What’s that?”—he craned forward. “What sounds
too good to be true?” Yes—there was no denying it—he looked
silly.

“I suppose the searching after Fräulein Schäfer doesn’t occupy all
your days.”

“Oh no”—he smiled broadly—“that’s very
good! By Jove! no. I drive a good bit—are you keen on horses?”

She nodded. “Love them.”

“You must come driving with me—I’ve got a fine pair of greys.
Will you?”

“Pretty I’d look perched behind greys in my one and only
hat,” thought she. Aloud: “I’d love to.” Her easy
acceptance pleased him.

“How about to-morrow?” he suggested. “Suppose you have lunch
with me to-morrow and I take you driving.”

After all—this was just a game. “Yes, I’m not busy
to-morrow,” she said.

A little pause—then the strange man patted his leg. “Why
don’t you come and sit down?” he said.

She pretended not to see and swung on to the table. “Oh, I’m all
right here.”

“No, you’re not”—again the teasing voice. “Come
and sit on my knee.”

“Oh no,” said Viola very heartily, suddenly busy with her hair.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Oh, come along”—impatiently.

She shook her head from side to side. “I wouldn’t dream of such a
thing.”

At that he got up and came over to her. “Funny little puss cat!” He
put up one hand to touch her hair.

“Don’t,” she said—and slipped off the table.
“I—I think it’s time you went now.” She was quite
frightened now—thinking only: “This man must be got rid of as
quickly as possible.”

“Oh, but you don’t want me to go?”

“Yes, I do—I’m very busy.”

“Busy. What does the pussy cat do all day?”

“Lots and lots of things!” She wanted to push him out of the room
and slam the door on him—idiot—fool—cruel disappointment.

“What’s she frowning for?” he asked. “Is she worried
about anything?” Suddenly serious: “I say—you know, are you
in any financial difficulty? Do you want money? I’ll give it to you if
you like!”

“Money! Steady on the brake—don’t lose your
head!”—so she spoke to herself.

“I’ll give you two hundred marks if you’ll kiss me.”

“Oh, boo! What a condition! And I don’t want to kiss you—I
don’t like kissing. Please go!”

“Yes—you do!—yes, you do.” He caught hold of her arms
above the elbows. She struggled, and was quite amazed to realise how angry she
felt.

“Let me go—immediately!” she cried—and he slipped one
arm round her body, and drew her towards him—like a bar of iron across
her back—that arm.

“Leave me alone! I tell you. Don’t be mean! I didn’t want
this to happen when you came into my room. How dare you?”

“Well, kiss me and I’ll go!”

It was too idiotic—dodging that stupid, smiling face.

“I won’t kiss you!—you brute!—I won’t!”
Somehow she slipped out of his arms and ran to the wall—stood back
against it—breathing quickly.

“Get out!” she stammered. “Go on now, clear out!”

At that moment, when he was not touching her, she quite enjoyed herself. She
thrilled at her own angry voice. “To think I should talk to a man like
that!” An angry flush spread over his face—his lips curled back,
showing his teeth—just like a dog, thought Viola. He made a rush at her,
and held her against the wall—pressed upon her with all the weight of his
body. This time she could not get free.

“I won’t kiss you. I won’t. Stop doing that! Ugh!
you’re like a dog—you ought to find lovers round
lamp-posts—you beast—you fiend!”

He did not answer. With an expression of the most absurd determination he
pressed ever more heavily upon her. He did not even look at her—but
rapped out in a sharp voice: “Keep quiet—keep quiet.”

“Gar-r! Why are men so strong?” She began to cry. “Go
away—I don’t want you, you dirty creature. I want to murder you.
Oh, my God! if I had a knife.”

“Don’t be silly—come and be good!” He dragged her
towards the bed.

“Do you suppose I’m a light woman?” she snarled, and swooping
over she fastened her teeth in his glove.

“Ach! don’t do that—you are hurting me!”

She did not let go, but her heart said, “Thank the Lord I thought of
this.”

“Stop this minute—you vixen—you bitch.” He threw her
away from him. She saw with joy that his eyes were full of tears.
“You’ve really hurt me,” he said in a choking voice.

“Of course I have. I meant to. That’s nothing to what I’ll do
if you touch me again.”

The strange man picked up his hat. “No thanks,” he said grimly.
“But I’ll not forget this—I’ll go to your
landlady.”

“Pooh!” She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. “I’ll
tell her you forced your way in here and tried to assault me. Who will she
believe?—with your bitten hand. You go and find your Schäfers.”

A sensation of glorious, intoxicating happiness flooded Viola. She rolled her
eyes at him. “If you don’t go away this moment I’ll bite you
again,” she said, and the absurd words started her laughing. Even when
the door was closed, hearing him descending the stairs, she laughed, and danced
about the room.

What a morning! Oh, chalk it up. That was her first fight, and she’d
won—she’d conquered that beast—all by herself. Her hands were
still trembling. She pulled up the sleeve of her gown—great red marks on
her arms. “My ribs will be blue. I’ll be blue all over,” she
reflected. “If only that beloved Casimir could have seen us.” And
the feeling of rage and disgust against Casimir had totally disappeared. How
could the poor darling help not having any money? It was her fault as much as
his, and he, just like her, was apart from the world, fighting it, just as she
had done. If only three o’clock would come. She saw herself running
towards him and putting her arms round his neck. “My blessed one! Of
course we are bound to win. Do you love me still? Oh, I have been horrible
lately.”

A BLAZE

“Max, you silly devil, you’ll break your neck if you go careering
down the slide that way. Drop it, and come to the Club House with me and get
some coffee.”

“I’ve had enough for to-day. I’m damp all through. There,
give us a cigarette, Victor, old man. When are you going home?”

“Not for another hour. It’s fine this afternoon, and I’m
getting into decent shape. Look out, get off the track; here comes Fräulein
Winkel. Damned elegant the way she manages her sleigh!”

“I’m cold all through. That’s the worst of this
place—the mists—it’s a damp cold. Here, Forman, look after
this sleigh—and stick it somewhere so that I can get it without looking
through a hundred and fifty others to-morrow morning.”

They sat down at a small round table near the stove and ordered coffee. Victor
sprawled in his chair, patting his little brown dog Bobo and looking, half
laughingly, at Max.

“What’s the matter, my dear? Isn’t the world being nice and
pretty?”

“I want my coffee, and I want to put my feet into my
pocket—they’re like stones…. Nothing to eat, thanks—the
cake is like underdone india-rubber here.”

Fuchs and Wistuba came and sat at their table. Max half turned his back and
stretched his feet out to the oven. The three other men all began talking at
once—of the weather—of the record slide—of the fine condition
of the Wald See for skating.

Suddenly Fuchs looked at Max, raised his eyebrows and nodded across to Victor,
who shook his head.

“Baby doesn’t feel well,” he said, feeding the brown dog with
broken lumps of sugar, “and nobody’s to disturb him—I’m
nurse.”

“That’s the first time I’ve ever known him off colour,”
said Wistuba. “I’ve always imagined he had the better part of this
world that could not be taken away from him. I think he says his prayers to the
dear Lord for having spared him being taken home in seven basketsful to-night.
It’s a fool’s game to risk your all that way and leave the nation
desolate.”

“Dry up,” said Max. “You ought to be wheeled about on the
snow in a perambulator.”

“Oh, no offence, I hope. Don’t get nasty…. How’s your wife,
Victor?”

“She’s not at all well. She hurt her head coming down the slide
with Max on Sunday. I told her to stay at home all day.”

“I’m sorry. Are you other fellows going back to the town or
stopping on here?”

Fuchs and Victor said they were stopping—Max did not answer, but sat
motionless while the men paid for their coffee and moved away. Victor came back
a moment and put a hand on his shoulder.

“If you’re going right back, my dear, I wish you’d look Elsa
up and tell her I won’t be in till late. And feed with us to-night at
Limpold, will you? And take some hot grog when you get in.”

“Thanks, old fellow, I’m all right. Going back now.”

He rose, stretched himself, buttoned on his heavy coat and lighted another
cigarette.

From the door Victor watched him plunging through the heavy snow—head
bent—hands thrust in his pockets—he almost appeared to be running
through the heavy snow towards the town.

Someone came stamping up the stairs—paused at the door of her
sitting-room, and knocked.

“Is that you, Victor?” she called.

“No, it is I… can I come in?”

“Of course. Why, what a Santa Claus! Hang your coat on the landing and
shake yourself over the banisters. Had a good time?”

The room was full of light and warmth. Elsa, in a white velvet tea-gown, lay
curled up on the sofa—a book of fashions on her lap, a box of creams
beside her.

The curtains were not yet drawn before the windows and a blue light shone
through, and the white boughs of the trees sprayed across.

A woman’s room—full of flowers and photographs and silk
pillows—the floor smothered in rugs—an immense tiger-skin under the
piano—just the head protruding—sleepily savage.

“It was good enough,” said Max. “Victor can’t be in
till late. He told me to come up and tell you.”

He started walking up and down—tore off his gloves and flung them on the
table.

“Don’t do that, Max,” said Elsa, “you get on my nerves.
And I’ve got a headache to-day; I’m feverish and quite flushed….
Don’t I look flushed?”

He paused by the window and glanced at her a moment over his shoulder.

“No,” he said; “I didn’t notice it.”

“Oh, you haven’t looked at me properly, and I’ve got a new
tea-gown on, too.” She pulled her skirts together and patted a little
place on the couch.

“Come along and sit by me and tell me why you’re being
naughty.”

But, standing by the window, he suddenly flung his arm across his eyes.

“Oh,” he said, “I can’t. I’m done—I’m
spent—I’m smashed.”

Silence in the room. The fashion-book fell to the floor with a quick rustle of
leaves. Elsa sat forward, her hands clasped in her lap; a strange light shone
in her eyes, a red colour stained her mouth.

Then she spoke very quietly.

“Come over here and explain yourself. I don’t know what on earth
you are talking about.”

“You do know—you know far better than I. You’ve simply played
with Victor in my presence that I may feel worse. You’ve tormented
me—you’ve led me on—offering me everything and nothing at
all. It’s been a spider-and-fly business from first to last—and
I’ve never for one moment been ignorant of that—and I’ve
never for one moment been able to withstand it.”

He turned round deliberately.

“Do you suppose that when you asked me to pin your flowers into your
evening gown—when you let me come into your bedroom when Victor was out
while you did your hair—when you pretended to be a baby and let me feed
you with grapes—when you have run to me and searched in all my pockets
for a cigarette—knowing perfectly well where they were kept—going
through every pocket just the same—I knowing too—I keeping up the
farce—do you suppose that now you have finally lighted your bonfire you
are going to find it a peaceful and pleasant thing—you are going to
prevent the whole house from burning?”

She suddenly turned white and drew in her breath sharply.

“Don’t talk to me like that. You have no right to talk to me like
that. I am another man’s wife.”

“Hum,” he sneered, throwing back his head, “that’s
rather late in the game, and that’s been your trump card all along. You
only love Victor on the cat-and-cream principle—you a poor little starved
kitten that he’s given everything to, that he’s carried in his
breast, never dreaming that those little pink claws could tear out a
man’s heart.”

She stirred, looking at him with almost fear in her eyes.

“After all”—unsteadily—“this is my room;
I’ll have to ask you to go.”

But he stumbled towards her, knelt down by the couch, burying his head in her
lap, clasping his arms round her waist.

“And I love you—I love you; the humiliation of it—I
adore you. Don’t—don’t—just a minute let me stay
here—just a moment in a whole life—Elsa! Elsa!”

She leant back and pressed her head into the pillows.

Then his muffled voice: “I feel like a savage. I want your whole body. I
want to carry you away to a cave and love you until I kill you—you
can’t understand how a man feels. I kill myself when I see
you—I’m sick of my own strength that turns in upon itself, and
dies, and rises new born like a Phœnix out of the ashes of that horrible
death. Love me just this once, tell me a lie, say that you do—you
are always lying.”

Instead, she pushed him away—frightened.

“Get up,” she said; “suppose the servant came in with the
tea?”

“Oh, ye gods!” He stumbled to his feet and stood staring down at
her.

“You’re rotten to the core and so am I. But you’re
heathenishly beautiful.”

The woman went over to the piano—stood there—striking one
note—her brows drawn together. Then she shrugged her shoulders and
smiled.

“I’ll make a confession. Every word you have said is true. I
can’t help it. I can’t help seeking admiration any more than a cat
can help going to people to be stroked. It’s my nature. I’m born
out of my time. And yet, you know, I’m not a common woman. I like
men to adore me—to flatter me—even to make love to me—but I
would never give myself to any man. I would never let a man kiss me…
even.”

“It’s immeasurably worse—you’ve no legitimate excuse.
Why, even a prostitute has a greater sense of generosity!”

“I know,” she said, “I know perfectly well—but I
can’t help the way I’m built…. Are you going?”

He put on his gloves.

“Well,” he said, “what’s going to happen to us
now?”

Again she shrugged her shoulders.

“I haven’t the slightest idea. I never have—just let things
occur.”

“All alone?” cried Victor. “Has Max been here?”

“He only stayed a moment, and wouldn’t even have tea. I sent him
home to change his clothes…. He was frightfully boring.”

“You poor darling, your hair’s coming down. I’ll fix it,
stand still a moment… so you were bored?”

“Um-m—frightfully…. Oh, you’ve run a hairpin right into
your wife’s head—you naughty boy!”

She flung her arms round his neck and looked up at him, half laughing, like a
beautiful, loving child.

“God! What a woman you are,” said the man. “You make me so
infernally proud—dearest, that I… I tell you!”