On the next afternoon Felix Imhof suddenly appeared at the hotel. He
sent up his card to Judith, and waited in the hall. He walked up and
down, swinging his little cane, carelessly whistling through his thick
lips, his brain burdened with affairs, speculations, stock quotations,
a hundred obligations and appointments. But whenever he passed the
tall windows, he threw a curious and merry glance out into the street,
where two boys were having a fight.
But now and then his face grew dark, and a quiver passed over it.
The page returned, and bade him come up.
Judith was surprised to see him. He began to talk eagerly at once. “I
have business in Liverpool, and wanted to see you once more before
leaving. A crowd of people came, who all had some business with you.
Invitations came for you, and telephone calls; your dressmaker turned
up, and letters, and I was, of course, quite helpless. I can’t very
well receive people with the agreeable information that my wife has
just taken French leave of me. There are a thousand things; you have to
disentangle them, or the confusion will be endless.”
They talked for a while of the indifferent things which, according to
him, had brought him here. Then he added: “I had an audience with the
Prince Regent this forenoon. He bestowed a knighthood on me yesterday.”
Judith’s face flushed, and she had the expression of one who, in a
state of hypnosis, recalls his waking consciousness.
Felix tapped against his faultlessly creased trousers with his stick.
“I beg your pardon for venturing any criticism,” he said, “but I can’t
help observing that the whole matter might have been better managed.
To run off with that degree of suddenness--well, it wasn’t quite the
proper thing, a little beneath us, not quite fair.”
Judith shrugged her shoulders. “Things that are inevitable might as
well be done quickly. And I don’t see that your equanimity is at all
impaired.”
“Equanimity! Nonsense! Doesn’t enter the question.” He stood, as was
his habit, with legs stretched far apart, rocking to and fro a little,
and regarding his gleaming boots. “What has equanimity to do with it?
We’re cultivated people. I’m neither a tiger nor a Philistine. Nihil
humanum a me alienum, et cetera. You simply don’t know me. And it
doesn’t astonish me, for what chance have we ever had to cultivate
each other’s acquaintance? Marriage gave us no opportunity. We should
retrieve our lost occasions. It is this wish that I should like to take
with me into my renewed bachelorhood. You must promise not to avoid me
as rigorously in the future as you did during the eight months of our
married life.”
“If it will give you any pleasure, I promise gladly,” Judith answered
good-humouredly.
With that they parted.
An hour later Felix Imhof sat in the train. With protruding eyes
he stared at the passing landscape until darkness fell. He desired
conversation, argument, the relief of some projection of his inner
self. With wrinkled brow he watched the strangers about him who knew
nothing of him or his inner wealth, of his great, rolling ideas, or his
far-reaching plans.
At Düsseldorf he left the train. He had made up his mind to do so at
the last possible moment. He checked his luggage, and huddled in his
coat, walked, a tall, lean figure, through the midnight of the dark and
ancient streets.
He stopped in front of one of the oldest houses. In this house he had
passed his youth. All the windows were dark. “Hello, boy!” he shouted
toward the window behind which he had once slept. The walls echoed his
voice. “O nameless boy,” he said, “where do you come from?” He was
accustomed to say of himself often: “I am of obscure origin like Caspar
Hauser.”
But no secret weighed upon him, not even that of his own unknown
descent. He was a man of his decade--stripped of mystery, open to all
the winds.
He entered a house, which he remembered from his student days. In a
large room, lined with greasy mirrors, there were fifteen or twenty
half-dressed girls. In his hat and coat he sat down at the piano and
played with the false energy of the dilettante.
“Girls,” he said, “I’ve got a mad rage in me!” The girls played tricks
on him as he sat there. They hung a crimson shawl over his shoulders
and danced.
“I’m in a rage, girls,” he repeated. “It’s got to be drowned out.” He
ordered champagne by the pailful.
The doors were locked. The girls screeched with delight.
“Do something to relieve my misery, girls,” he commanded, bade half a
dozen stand in a row and open their mouths. Then he rolled up hundred
mark notes like cigarettes, and stuck them between the girls’ teeth.
They almost smothered him with their caresses.
And he drank and drank until he lost consciousness.