"And you?" asked George slowly.
"It is two years ago last summer. I was then twenty-one."
George suddenly stood still. "I know now, it was your singing-master.
Wasn't it?"
Anna did not answer.
"So it was he, then?" said George, without being really surprised, for
he was aware that all the celebrated master's pupils fell in love with
him in spite of his grey hairs.
"And did you love him most," asked George, "of all the men you had come
across?"
"Strange, isn't it? but it's a fact all the same."
"Did he know it?"
"I think so."
They had arrived at an open space with a small garden ... that was only
scantily lighted. At the back there towered a church with a reddish
glow. As though drawn to a quieter place they wandered on under dark
softly-waving branches.
"And what actually was there between you, if it is not a rude question?"
Anna was silent, and that moment George felt that everything was
possible--even that Anna should have been that man's mistress. But
underneath the disquiet which he felt at that thought the desire arose
gently and unconsciously to hear his fear confirmed. For if Anna had
already belonged to some one else before she became his, the adventure
could proceed as lightly and irresponsibly as possible.
"I will tell you the whole story," said Anna at last. "It is really not
so awful."
"Well?" asked George, strangely excited.
"Once, after the lesson," Anna began hesitatingly, "he gallantly helped
me into my jacket. And then suddenly he drew me to him, took me in his
arms and kissed me."
"And you...?"
"I ... I was quite intoxicated."
"Intoxicated?..."
"Yes, it was something indescribable. He kissed me on the forehead and
the hair, and then he took my hand and murmured all sorts of things
that I didn't hear properly...."
"And...."
"And then ... then voices came near, he let go my hand and it was all
over."
"All over?"
"Yes, over ... of course it was all over."
"I certainly don't think it such a matter of course. You saw him again,
no doubt."
"Of course, I still went on learning with him."
"And...?"
"I tell you it was over ... absolutely ... as though it had never
happened."
George was surprised that he should feel reassured. "And he never tried
again?" he asked.
"Never. It would have been so ridiculous, and as he was very clever he
knew that quite well himself. It is quite true that up to then I had
been very much in love with him, but after this episode he was nothing
more to me than my old teacher. In some way he seemed even older than
he really was. I don't know if you can really understand what I mean.
It was as though he had spent all the remains of his youth in that
moment."
"I quite understand," said George. He believed her and loved her more
than before. They went into the church. It was almost dark within the
large building. There were only some dim candles burning in front of
a side altar, and opposite, behind the small statue of a saint, there
shone a feeble light. A broad stream of incense flowed between the dome
and the flagstones. The verger was walking, jangling his keys softly.
Motionless figures appeared vaguely on the seats at the back. George
slowly walked forward with Anna and felt like a young husband on his
honeymoon going sight-seeing in a church with his young wife. He said
so to Anna. She only nodded.
"But it would be very much nicer," whispered George, as they stood
nestling close together in front of the chancel, "if we really were
together somewhere abroad...."
She looked at him ecstatically and yet interrogatively: and he was
frightened at his own words. Supposing Anna had taken it as a serious
declaration or as a kind of wooing? Was he not obliged to enlighten her
that he had not meant it in that way?... He remembered the conversation
which they had had a short time ago, when they had gone out hanging on
to one umbrella on a rainy windy day in the direction of Schönbrunn. He
had suggested to her she should drive into the town with him and dine
with him in a private room in some restaurant; she had answered with
that iciness in which her whole being was sometimes frozen: "I don't do
that kind of thing." He had not pressed her further.
And yet a quarter of an hour later she had said to him, apropos no
doubt of a conversation about George's mode of life, but yet with a
smile of many possibilities: "You have no initiative, George." And he
had suddenly felt at that moment as though depths in her soul were
revealing themselves, undreamt-of and dangerous depths, which it would
be a good thing to beware of. He could not help now thinking of this
again. What was passing within her mind?... What did she want and what
was she ready for?... And what did he desire, what did he feel himself?
Life was so incalculable. Was it not perfectly possible that he should
go travelling about the world with her, live with her a period of
happiness and finally part from her just as he had parted from many
another?... Yet when he thought of the end that was inevitably bound to
come, whether death brought it or life itself, he felt a gentle grief
in his heart.... She still remained silent. Did she think again that
he was lacking in initiative?... Or did she think perhaps "I am really
going to succeed, I shall be his wife?..."
He then felt her hand stroke his very gently, with a kind of new
tenderness that did him great good.
"George," she said.
"What is it?" he asked.
"If I were religious," she replied, "I should like to pray for
something now."
"What for?" said George, feeling almost nervous.
"For you to do something, George--something that really counted. For
you to become a genuine artist, a great artist."
He could not help looking at the floor, as though for very shame that
her thoughts had travelled on paths that were so much cleaner than his
own.
A beggar held open the thick green curtain. George gave the man a coin;
they were in the open air. The street lights shone up, the noise of
vehicles and closing shutters suddenly grew near. George felt as if a
fine veil which the twilight of the church had woven around him and
her had now been torn, and in a tone of relief he suggested a little
ride. Anna agreed with alacrity. They got into an open fiacre, had the
top pulled down over them, drove through the streets, then drove round
the Ring, without seeing much of the buildings and gardens, spoke not
a word and nestled closer and closer to each other. They were both
conscious of each other's impatience and their own, and they knew it
was no longer possible to go back.
When they were near Anna's home George said: "What a pity that you have
got to go home now."
She shrugged her shoulders and smiled strangely. The depths, thought
George again, but without fear and almost gaily. Before the vehicle
stopped at the corner they arranged an appointment for the following
morning in the Schwarzenberggarten and then got out. Anna rushed home
and George slowly strolled towards the town.
He considered whether he should go into the café. He did not really
feel keen on it. Bermann would probably stay to supper at the
Ehrenbergs' to-day, one could rarely count on Leo Golowski coming:
and George was not much attracted by the other young people, most of
them Jewish writers, with whom he had recently struck up a casual
acquaintance, even though he had thought many of them not at all
uninteresting. Speaking broadly, he found their tone to each other now
too familiar, now too formal, now too facetious, now too sentimental:
not one of them seemed really free and unembarrassed with the others,
scarcely indeed with himself.
Heinrich too had declared only the other day that he didn't want to
have anything more to do with the whole set, who had become thoroughly
antagonistic to him since his successes. George regarded it as
perfectly possible that Heinrich, with his characteristic vanity
and hypochondria, was scenting enmity and persecution where it was
perhaps merely a case of indifference or antipathy. He for his part
knew that it was not so much friendship that attracted him to the
young author, as the curiosity to get to know a strange man more
intimately. Perhaps also the interest of looking into a world which
up to the present had been more or less foreign to him. For while he
himself had remained somewhat reserved and had specially avoided any
reference to his own relations with women, Heinrich had not only told
him of his distant mistress, for whom he asserted he suffered pangs of
jealousy, but also of a blonde and pretty young person with whom he
had recently got into the habit of spending his evenings--merely to
deaden his feelings as he ironically added; he not only told him of his
life as a student and journalist in Vienna, which did not lie so far
back, but also of his childhood and boyhood in that little provincial
town in Bohemia where he had come into the world thirty years ago.
The half-affectionate and half-disgusted tone, with its mixture of
attachment and detachment, in which Heinrich spoke of his family and
especially of his suffering father, who had been an advocate in that
little town and a member of Parliament for a considerable period,
struck George as strange and at times as almost painful. Why, he seemed
to be even a little proud of the fact that when he was only twenty
years old he had prophesied his blissfully confident parent's fate to
the old man himself, exactly as it had subsequently fulfilled itself.
After a short period of popularity and success the growth of the
Anti-Semitic movement had driven him out of the German Liberal party,
most of his friends had deserted and betrayed him, and a dissipated
'corps' student, who described at public meetings the Tschechs and Jews
as the most dangerous enemies of Germanism, propriety and morality,
while at home he thrashed his wife and had children by his servants,
was his successor in the confidence of the electors and in Parliament.
Heinrich, who had always felt a certain amount of irritation at his
father's phrases, honest though they were, about Pan-Germanism, liberty
and progress, had at first gloated over the spectacle of the old man's
downfall. And it was only when the lawyer who had once been so much in
demand began to lose his practice into the bargain, and the financial
position of the family got worse from day to day, that the son began
to experience a somewhat belated sympathy. He had given up his legal
studies early enough, and had been compelled to come to the help of his
family with his daily journalistic work. His first literary successes
raised no echo in the melancholy household. There were sinister signs
that madness was looming over his father, while now that the latter was
falling into mental darkness his mother, for whom state and fatherland
had ceased to exist, when her husband was not elected to Parliament,
lost her grip of life and of the world. Heinrich's only sister, once a
buxom clever girl, had developed melancholia after an unhappy passion
for a kind of provincial Don Juan, and with morbid perverseness she put
the blame for the family misfortune on the shoulders of her brother,
though she had always got on with him perfectly well in her youth.
Heinrich also told George about other relations whom he remembered in
his early days, and a half-grotesque, half-pathetic series of strict
bigoted old-fashioned Jews and Jewesses swept by George like shadows
from another world. He eventually realised that Heinrich did not feel
himself any homesickness for that small town with its miserable petty
squabbles, or any call to return to the gloomy narrowness of his almost
ruined family, and saw that Heinrich's egoism was at once his salvation
and his deliverance.
It was striking nine from the tower of the Church of St. Michael when
George stood in front of the café. He saw Rapp the critic sitting by a
window not completely covered by the curtain, with a pile of papers in
front of him on the table. He had just taken his glasses off his nose
and was polishing them, and the dull eyes brought a look of absolute
deadness into a face that was usually so alive with clever malice.
Opposite him with gestures that swept over vacancy sat Gleissner the
poet in all the brilliancy of his false elegance, with a colossal black
cravat in which a red stone scintillated. When George, without hearing
their voices, saw the lips of these two men move, while their glances
wandered to and fro, he could scarcely understand how they could stand
sitting opposite each other for a quarter of an hour in that cloud of
hate. It flashed across him at once that this was the atmosphere in
which the life of the whole set played its comedy, and through which
there darted many a redeeming flash of wit and self-analysis.
What had he in common with these people? A kind of horror seized on
him, he turned away and decided to look up his club once again instead
of going into the café, the rooms of which he had not been in for
months past. It was only a few steps away. George was soon walking up
the broad marble staircase, went into the little dining-room with the
light green curtain and was greeted as a long-lost friend by Ralph
Skelton, the attaché of the English Embassy, and Doctor von Breitner.
They talked about the tournament which was going to take place and
about the banquet that was going to be organised in honour of the
foreign fencing-masters; they gossiped about the new operetta at the
Wiedner Theatre where Fräulein Lovan as a bayadère had come on to
the stage almost naked, and about the duel between the manufacturer
Heidenfeld and Lieutenant Novotny, in which the injured husband had
fallen. George had a game of billiards with Skelton after the meal and
won. He felt in better spirits and resolved henceforth to pay more
frequent visits to these airy prettily-furnished rooms frequented by
pleasant well-bred young men with whom one could converse lightly and
pleasantly.
Felician appeared, told his brother that it had been very amusing at
the Ehrenbergs' and that Frau Marianne sent her regards. Breitner, with
one of his celebrated huge cigars in his mouth, joined the brothers,
and began to speak about the hanging of the portraits of some of those
members of the club who had conferred services on it, mentioning
particularly the one of young Labinski who had ended all by suicide
in the previous year. And George could not help thinking of Grace, of
that strange hot-and-cold conversation with her in the cemetery in the
melting February snow and of that wonderful night on the moonlit deck
of the steamer that had brought them both from Palermo to Naples. He
scarcely knew which woman he longed for the most at this particular
moment: for Marianne whom he had deserted, for Grace who had vanished,
or for the fair young creature with whom he had walked about in a dusky
church a few hours ago like a honeymoon couple in a foreign town, and
who had wanted to pray to heaven for him to become a great artist. The
memory stirred a gentler emotion. Was it not almost as though she set
more store by his artistic future than by him himself?... No.... Not
more. She had only just spoken out what had lain slumbering all the
time at the bottom of her soul. It was simply that he forgot as it
were only too frequently that he was an artist. But all that must be
changed. He had begun and prepared so much. Just a little industry and
success was assured. And next year he would go out into the world. He
would soon get a post as conductor and with a sudden leap he would find
himself launched in a profession that brought both money and prestige.
He would get to know new people, a different sky would shine above him
and white unknown arms stretched towards him mysteriously as though
from distant clouds. And while the young people at his side were
weighing very seriously the chances of the champions at the approaching
tournament, George went on dreaming in his corner of a future full of
work, fame and love.
At the same time Anna was lying in her dark room. She was not asleep
and her wide-open eyes were turned towards the ceiling. She had for the
first time in her life the infallible feeling that there was a man in
the world who could do anything he liked with her. Her mind was firmly
made up to take all the happiness or all the sorrow that might lie in
front of her, and she had a gentle hope, more beautiful than all her
dreams of the past, of a serene and abiding happiness.