George slowly climbed up from the hold on narrow carpeted steps between
long oblique mirrors and wrapped in a long dark green rug which trailed
behind him, wandered up and down on the empty deck beneath the starry
sky. Motionless as ever, Labinski stood in the stern and turned the
wheel, while his gaze was directed towards the open sea. "What a
career!" thought George. "First a dead man, then a minister, then a
little boy with a muff and now a steersman. If he knew that I were on
this ship he would certainly hail me." "Look out!" cried behind George
the two blue girls, whom he had met on the sea-shore, but he rushed
on, wrapped himself in his rug and listened to the flapping of white
gulls over his head. Immediately afterwards he was in the saloon, down
below, sitting at the table, which was so long that the people at the
end were quite small. A gentleman near him, who looked like the elder
Grillparzer, remarked irritably: "This boat's always late. We ought to
have been in Boston a long time ago." George then felt very nervous;
for if he could not show the three music scores in the green cover when
he disembarked, he would certainly be arrested for high treason. That
was why the prince who had been rushing all over the deck with the
wheel all day long often cast such strange side-glances at him. And to
intensify his suspicions still more he was compelled to sit at table in
his shirtsleeves while all the other gentlemen wore generals' uniforms,
as they always did on boats, and all the ladies wore red velvet
dresses. "We shall soon be in America," said a raucous steward who was
serving asparagus. "Only one more station."
"The others can sit there quietly," thought George. "They have
nothing to do, but I must swim to the theatre straight away." The
coast appeared opposite him in the great mirror; nothing but houses
without roofs, whose tiers of terraces towered higher and higher,
and the orchestra was waiting impatiently up above in a quiet kiosk
with a broken stone cupola. The bell on the deck pealed and George
tumbled down the steps into the park with his green rug and two pocket
handkerchiefs. But they had shipped the wrong one across; it was
the Stadtpark, as a matter of fact; Felician was sitting on a seat,
an old lady in a cloak close to him put her fingers on her lips,
whistled very loudly and Felician said, with an unusually deep voice:
"Kemmelbach--Ybs." "No," thought George, "Felician never uses a word
like that ..." rubbed his eyes and woke up.
The train was just starting again. Two red lamps were shining in front
of the closed window of the compartment. The night ran past, silent and
black. George drew his travelling rug closer round him and stared at
the green shaded lamp in the ceiling. "What a good thing that I'm alone
in the compartment," he thought. "I have been sound asleep for at least
four or five hours. What a strange confused dream that was!" The white
gulls first came back into his memory. Did they have any significance?
Then he thought of the old woman in the cloak, who of course was no
other than Frau Oberberger. The lady would not feel particularly
flattered. But really, hadn't she looked quite like an old lady, when
he had seen her a few days ago by the side of her beaming husband in
the box of the little red-and-white theatre of the watering-place?
And Labinski, too, had appeared to him in his dream as a steersman,
strangely enough. And the girls in blue dresses, also, who had looked
out of the hotel garden into the piano room through the window as soon
as they heard him playing. But what was the really ghostly element in
that dream?
Not the girls in blue, not even Labinski, and not the Prince of
Guastalla, who had rushed like mad to the wheel over the deck. No, it
was his own figure which had appeared to him so ghostly as it had slunk
along by his side multiplied a hundred times over in the long oblique
mirrors on both sides. He began to feel cold. The cool night air
penetrated into the compartment through the ventilator in the ceiling.
The deep black darkness outside gradually changed into a heavy grey
and there suddenly rang in George's ears in a sad whisper the words he
had heard only a few hours ago in a woman's low voice: How soon will
it take you to forget me?... He did not wish to hear those words. He
wished they had already become true, and in desperation he plunged back
into the memory of his dream. It was quite clear that the steamer on
which he had gone to America on his concert tour really meant the ship
on which Ägidius had sailed towards his sinister fate. And the kiosk
with the orchestra was the hall where Ägidius had waited for death. The
starry sky which spread over the sea had been really wonderful. The
air had been bluer and the stars more silvery than he had ever seen
them in waking life, even on the night when he had sailed with Grace
from Palermo to Naples. Suddenly the voice of the woman he loved rang
through the darkness again, whispering and mournful: "How long will it
take you to forget me?"... And he now visualised her as he had seen her
a few hours ago, pale and naked, with her dark hair streaming over the
pillows. He did not want to think of it, conjured up other images from
the depths of his memory and deliberately chased them past him. He saw
himself going round a cemetery in the thawing February snow with Grace;
he saw himself riding with Marianne over a white country road towards
the wintry forest. He saw himself walking with his father over the
Ringstrasse in the late evening; and finally a merry-go-round whirled
past him. Sissy with her laughing lips and eyes was rocking about on
a brown wooden horse. Else, graceful and ladylike, was sitting in a
little red carriage, and Anna rode an Arab with the reins nonchalantly
in her hand. Anna! How young and graceful she looked! Was that really
the same being whom he was to see again in a few hours? and had he
really only been away from her for ten days? And was he ever to see
again all that he had left ten days ago? The little angel in blue
clay between the flower-beds, the verandah with the wooden gable, the
silent garden with the currant- and the lilac-bushes? It all seemed
absolutely inconceivable. She will wait for me on the white seat under
the pear-tree, he thought, and I will kiss her hands as though nothing
had happened.
"How are you, George dear?" she will ask me. "Have you been true to
me?" No.... That's not her way of asking, but she will feel without
asking at all or my answering that I have not come back the same as I
went away. If she only does feel it! If I am only saved from having to
lie! But haven't I done so already? And he thought of the letters which
he had written from the lake, letters full of tenderness and yearning,
which had really been nothing but lies. And he thought of how he had
waited at night with a beating heart, his ear glued to the door, till
all was quiet in the inn; of how he had then stolen over the passage
to that other woman who lay there pale and naked, with her dark eyes
wide open, enveloped in the perfume and bluish shimmer of her hair.
And he thought of how he and she one night, half drunken with desire
and audacity, had stepped out on to the verandah, beneath which the
water plashed so seductively. If any one had been out on the lake in
the deep darkness of this hour he would have seen their white bodies
shining through the night. George thrilled at the memory. We were out
of our senses, he thought; how easily it might have happened that I
should be lying to-day with a bullet through my heart six feet under
the ground. Of course there's still a chance of it. They all know.
Else knew first, though she scarcely ever came down from Auhof into
the village. James Wyner, who saw me with the other woman one evening
standing on the landing-stage is bound to have told her. Will Else
marry him? I can understand her liking him so much. He is handsome,
that chiselled face, those cold grey eyes which look shrewd and
straight into the world, a young Englishman. Who knows if he wouldn't
have turned into a kind of Oskar Ehrenberg in Vienna? And George
remembered what Else had told him about her brother. He had struck
George as so self-possessed, almost mature in fact, on his sick-bed
in the nursing-home. And now he was said to be leading a wild life in
Ostend, to be gambling and gadding about with the most evil associates,
as though he wanted to go thoroughly to the dogs. Did Heinrich still
find the matter so tragi-comic? Frau Ehrenberg had grown quite white
with grief. And Else had cried her eyes out in front of George one
morning in the grounds; but had she only been crying about Oskar?
The grey in front of the compartment window slowly cleared. George
watched the telegraph wires outside sweeping and shifting across each
other with swift movements and he thought of how, yesterday afternoon,
his own lying words to Anna had travelled across one of these wires:
"Shall be with you early to-morrow morning. Fondest love, your own
George."... He had hurried back straight from the post-office to an
ardent and desperate final hour with the other woman, and he could
not realise that even at this very minute, when he had already been
away from her for a whole eternity, she should still be lying asleep
and dreaming in that same room with the fast-closed windows. And she
will be home this evening with her husband and children. Home--just
as he would be. He knew that it was so and he could not understand
it. For the first time in his life he had been near doing something
which people would probably have had to call madness. Only one word
from her ... and he would have gone out with her into the world,
have left everything behind, friends, mistress and his unborn child.
And was he not still ready to do so? If she called him would he not
go? And if he did do so would he not be right? Was he not far more
cut out for adventures of that kind than for the quiet life full of
responsibilities which he had chosen for himself? Was it not rather
his real line to career boldly and unhesitatingly about the world than
to be stuck somewhere or other with his wife and child, with all the
bothers about bread-and-butter, his career and at the best a little
fame? In the days from which he had just come he had felt that he was
living, perhaps for the first time. Each moment had been so rich and
so full, and not only those spent in her arms. He had suddenly grown
young again. The country had flowered with a greater splendour, the
arc of the sky had grown wider, the air which he drank had exhaled
a finer spice and strength, and melodies had rippled within him as
never before. Had he ever composed anything better than that wordless
song to be sung on the water with its sprightly rocking melody? And
that fantasy had risen strangely by the shore of the lake one hour
out of depths of his which he had never dreamt of, after he had seen
the wondrous woman for the first time. Well, Herr Hofrat Wilt would
no longer have occasion to regard him as a dilettante. But why did he
think of him of all people? Did the others know what kind of a man he
was any better? Didn't it often seem to him as though even Heinrich,
who had once wanted to write an opera libretto for him, had failed to
judge him any more accurately? And he heard again the words which the
author had spoken to him that morning when they had cycled from Lambach
to Gmunden through the dew-wet forest. "You need not do creative work
in order to realise yourself ... you do not need work ... only the
atmosphere of your art...." He suddenly remembered an evening in the
keeper's lodge on the Alamsee when a huntsman of seventy-three had sung
some jolly songs and Heinrich had wondered at any one of that age being
still so jolly, since one would be bound to feel oneself so near one's
death. Then they had gone to bed in an enormous room which echoed all
their words, philosophised about life and death for a long time, and
suddenly fallen asleep.
George was still motionless as he lay stretched out in his rug and
considered whether he should tell Heinrich anything about his meeting
with his actress. How pale she had grown when she had suddenly seen
him. She had listened, with roving eyes, to his account of the cycle
tour with Heinrich and then begun to tell him straight away about her
mother and her little brother who could draw so wonderfully finely.
And the other members of the company had kept staring all the time
from the stage door, particularly a man with a green tyrol hat, in
which a chamois' beard was stuck. And George had seen her play the same
evening in a French farce, and asked himself if the pretty young person
who acted and pranced about so wildly down on the stage of the little
holiday theatre could really be so desperate as Heinrich imagined. Not
only he but James and Sissy as well had liked her very much. What a
jolly evening it had been! And the supper after the theatre with James,
Sissy, old mother Wyner and Willy Eissler! And next day the ride in the
four-in-hand of old Baron Löwenstein, who drove himself. In less than
an hour they had reached the lake. A boat was rowing near the bank
in the early sunshine. And the woman he loved sat on the rowing-seat
with a green silk shawl over her shoulders. But how was it that Sissy
also had divined the relationship between him and her? And then the
merry dinner at the Ehrenbergs' up at Auhof! George sat between Else
and Sissy, and Willy told one funny story after the other. And then
on the afternoon, George and Sissy had found each other without any
rendezvous in the dark green sultriness of the park amid the warm scent
of the moss and the pines, while all the others were resting. It had
been a wonderful hour, which had floated through this day as lightly
as a dream, without vows of troth and without fear of fulfilment. How
I like thinking every single minute of it all over again, savouring
it to the full, that golden day! I see both of us, Sissy and myself,
going down over the fields to the tennis-court, hand in hand. I think
I played better than I ever did in my life.... And I see Sissy again
lounging in a cane chair, with a cigarette between her lips and old
Baron Löwenstein at her side, while her looks flamed towards Willy.
What had become of me at that moment, so far as she was concerned? And
the evening! How we swam out in the twilight into the lake, while the
warm water caressed me so deliciously. What a delight that was! And
then the night ... the night....
The train stopped again. It was already quite light outside. George
lay still, as before. He heard the name of the station called out;
the voices of waiters, conductors and travellers; heard steps on the
platform, station-signals of all kinds, and he knew that in an hour he
would be in Vienna.... Supposing Anna had received information about
him, just as Heinrich had about his mistress the previous winter? He
could not imagine that a thing like that could make Anna lose control
of herself, even if she believed in it. Perhaps she would cry, but
certainly only to herself, quite quietly. He resolved firmly not to
let her notice anything. Was not that his plain duty? What was the
important thing now? Only this, that Anna should spend the last weeks
quietly and without excitement, and that a healthy child should come
into the world. That was all that mattered. How long had it been since
he had heard Doctor Stauber say those words? The child...! How near
the hour was, the child.... He thought again; but he could think of
nothing except the mere word. He then endeavoured to imagine a tiny
living being. But as though to mock him figures of small children kept
appearing, who looked as though they had stepped out of a picture-book,
drawn grotesquely and in crude colours. Where will it spend its first
years? he thought. With peasants in the country, in a house with a
little garden. But one day we will fetch it and take it home with us.
It might, too, turn out differently. One gets a letter like this: Your
Excellency, I have the honour to inform you that the child is seriously
ill.... Or.... What is the point of thinking about things like that?
Even though we kept it with us it might fall ill and die.
Anyway, it must be given to people who are highly responsible. I'll
see about it myself.... He felt as though he were confronted with new
duties which he had never properly considered and which he had not yet
grown able to cope with. The whole business was beginning, as it were,
over again. He came out of a world in which he had not bothered about
all these things, where other laws had prevailed than those to which he
must now submit.
And had it not been as though the other people, too, had felt that
he was not really one of them, as though they had been steeped in
a kind of respect, as though they had been seized by a feeling of
veneration for the power and holiness of a great passion, whose sway
they witnessed in their own neighbourhood? He remembered an evening on
which the hotel visitors had disappeared from the piano-room one after
another, as though they had been conscious of their duty to leave him
alone with her. He had sat down at the piano and begun to improvise.
She had remained in her dark corner in a big arm-chair. First of all
he had seen her smile, then the dark shining of her eyes, then only
the lines of her figure, then nothing more at all. But he had been
conscious the whole time "She is there!" Lights flashed out on the
other bank opposite. The two girls in the blue dresses had peered in
through the window and had quickly disappeared again. Then he stopped
playing and remained sitting by the pianoforte in silence. Then she
had come slowly out of the corner like a shadow and had put her hand
upon his head. How ineffably beautiful that had been! And it all came
into his mind again. How they had rested in the boat in the middle of
the lake, with shipped oars, while his head was in her lap! And they
had walked through the forest paths on the opposite bank until they
came to the seat under the oak. It had been there that he had told her
everything--everything as though to a friend. And she had understood
him, as never another woman had understood him before. Was it not
she whom he had always been seeking? she who was at once mistress
and comrade, with a serious outlook upon everything in the world,
and yet made for every madness and for every bliss? And the farewell
yesterday.... The dark brilliance of her eyes, the blue-black stream
of her loosened hair, the perfume of her white naked body.... Was it
really possible that this was over for ever? that all this was never,
never to come again?
George crumpled the rug between his fingers in his helpless longing and
shut his eyes. He no longer saw the softly moving lines of the wooded
hills, which swept by in the morning light, and as though for one last
happiness he dreamed himself back again into the dark ecstasies of
that farewell hour. Yet against his will he was overcome by fatigue
after the jar and racket of the night in the train, and he was swept
away out of the images which he had himself called up, in a route of
wild dreams which it was not vouchsafed him to control. He walked
over the Sommerhaidenweg in a strange twilight that filled him with a
deep sadness. Was it morning? Was it evening? Or just a dull day? Or
was it the mysterious light of some star over the world that had not
yet shone for any one except him? He suddenly stood upon a great open
meadow where Heinrich Bermann ran up and down and asked him: Are you
also looking for the lady's castle? I have been expecting you for a
long time. They went up a spiral staircase, Heinrich in front, so that
George could only see a tail of the overcoat which trailed behind.
Above, on an enormous terrace which gave a view of the town and the
lake, the whole party was assembled. Leo had started his dissertation
on minor harmonies, stopped when George appeared, came down from his
desk and himself escorted him to a vacant chair which was in the first
row and next to Anna. Anna smiled ecstatically when George appeared.
She looked young and brilliant in a splendid _décolletée_ evening
dress. Just behind her sat a little boy with fair hair, in a sailor
suit with a broad white collar, and Anna said "That's he." George made
her a sign to be silent, for it was supposed to be a secret. In the
meanwhile Leo played the _C sharp minor_ Nocturne by Chopin in order
to prove his theory, and behind him old Bösendorfer leaned against
the wall in his yellow overcoat, tall, gaunt and good-natured. They
all left the concert-room in a great crush. Then George put Anna's
opera cloak round her shoulders and looked sternly at the people round
him. He then sat in the carriage with her, kissed her, experienced a
great delight in doing so and thought: "If it could only be like this
always." Suddenly they stopped in front of the house in Mariahilf.
There were already many pupils waiting upstairs by the window and
beckoning. Anna got out, said good-bye to George with an arch
expression and vanished behind the door, which slammed behind her.
"Excuse me, sir. Ten minutes more," some one said. George turned round.
The conductor stood in the doorway and repeated: "We shall be in Vienna
in ten minutes."
"Thank you," said George and got up, with a more or less confused
head. He opened the window and was glad it was fine weather outside in
the world. The fresh morning air quite cheered him up. Yellow walls,
signal-boxes, little gardens, telegraph poles, streets, flew past him,
and finally the train stood in the station. A few minutes later George
was driving in an open fiacre to his apartment, saw workmen, shop girls
and clerks going to their daily callings; heard the rattle of rolling
shutters and in spite of all the anxiety which awaited him, in spite of
all the desire which drew him elsewhere, he experienced the deep joy of
once more being at home.
When he went into his room he felt quite hidden. The old secretary,
covered with green baize, the malachite letter-weight, the glass
ash-tray with its burnt-in cavalier, the slim lamp with the broad green
thick glass shade, the portrait of his father and mother in the narrow
mahogany frames, the round little marble table in the corner with its
silver case for cigars, the Prince of the Electorate, after Vandyck on
the wall, the high bookcase with its olive-coloured curtains; they all
gave him a hearty greeting. And how it did one good to have that good
home look over the tree tops in the park, towards the spires and roofs.
An almost undreamt-of happiness streamed towards him from everything
which he found again here, and he felt sore at heart that he would
have to leave it all in a few weeks. And how long would it last until
one had a home, a real home? He would have liked to have stopped for a
few hours in his beloved room but he had no time. He had to be in the
country before noon.
He had thrown off his clothes and let the warm water swirl round him
deliciously in his white bath. To avoid going to sleep in his bath he
chose a means he had often employed before. He rehearsed in his mind
note by note a fugue of Bach's. He thought of a pianoforte that would
have to be diligently practised and music scores which would have to
be read. Wouldn't it really be more sensible to devote another year to
study? Not to enter into negotiations straight away or to take a post,
which he would turn out to be unable to fill? Rather to stay here and
work. Stay here? But where? Notice had been given. It occurred to him
for a moment to take the apartment in the old house opposite the grey
church, where he had spent such beautiful hours with Anna, and it was
as though he were remembering a long-past episode, an adventure of his
youth, gay and yet a little mysterious, that had been over long ago....
He went back into his room, refreshed and wearing a brand-new suit,
the first light one which he had put on since his father's death. A
letter lay on the secretary which had just arrived by the first post,
from Anna. He read it. It was only a few words: "You are here again, my
love--I welcome you. I do long to see you. Don't keep me waiting too
long. Your Anna...."
George got up. He did not himself know what it was in the short letter
that touched him so strangely. Anna's letters had always retained, in
spite of all their tenderness, a certain precise, almost conventional
element, and he had frequently jokingly called them "proclamations."
This was couched in a tone that reminded him of the passionate girl
of by-gone days, of that love of his whom he had almost forgotten,
and a strangely unexpected anxiety seized on his heart. He rushed
downstairs, took the nearest fiacre and drove to the country. He soon
felt agreeably distracted by the sight of the people in the streets
who meant nothing to him at all; and later, when he was near the
wood, he felt soothed by the charm of the blue summer day. Suddenly,
sooner than George had anticipated, the vehicle stopped in front of
the country house. Involuntarily George first looked up to the balcony
under the gable. A little table was standing there with a white cover
and a little basket on it. Oh yes, Therese had been staying here for a
few days. He now remembered for the first time. Therese...! Where was
it now? He got out, paid the carriage and went into the front garden
where the blue angel stood on its unpretentious pedestal amid the faded
flower-beds. He stepped into the house. Marie was just laying the table
in the large centre room. "Madam's over there in the garden," she said.
The verandah door was open. The planks of its floor creaked underneath
George's feet. The garden with its perfume and its sultriness received
him. It was the old garden. During all the days in which George had
been far away it had lain there silently, just as it was lying at this
minute; in the dawn, in the sunshine, in the twilight, in the darkness
of night; always the same.... The gravel path cut straight through the
field to the heights. There were children's voices on the other side
of the bushes from which red berries were hanging. And over there on
the white seat, with her elbow on its arm, very pale, in her flowing
blue morning dress, yes, that was Anna. Yes, really she. She had seen
him now. She tried to get up. He saw it, and saw at the same time that
she found it difficult. But why? Was she spell-bound by excitement? Or
was the hour of trial so near? He signed to her with his hand that she
was to remain seated, and she really did sit down again, and only just
stretched out her arms lightly towards him. Her eyes were shining with
bliss. George walked very quickly, with his grey felt hat in his hand,
and now he was at her side.
"At last," she said, and it was a voice which came from as far back as
those words in her letter of this morning. He took her hands, shook
them in a strange clumsy way, felt a lump in his throat, but was still
unable to articulate anything and just nodded and smiled. And suddenly
he knelt before her on the grass, with her hands in his and his head in
her lap. He felt her lightly taking her hands away, and putting them on
his head; and then he heard himself crying quite softly. And he felt as
though he were in a sweet vague dream, a little boy again and lying at
his mother's feet, and this moment were already a mere memory, painful
and far away, even while he was living it.