“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.