Part 1



PRETTY CREATURES

PRETTY CREATURES

_By_ WILLIAM GERHARDI

[Illustration]

_1927_ DUFFIELD AND COMPANY _New York City_

Copyright 1927 by DUFFIELD & COMPANY

_Printed in The United States of America By The Cornwall Press_

CONTENTS

_The Vanity-Bag_ _Page 3_

_The Big Drum_ _Page 69_

_A Bad End_ _Page 85_

_In The Wood_ _Page 135_

_Tristan Und Isolde_ _Page 153_

_Other Books by William Gerhardi_:

ANTON CHEHOV, _a critical study_. THE POLYGLOTS, _a novel_. FUTILITY, _a novel_.

THE VANITY-BAG

PRETTY CREATURES

THE VANITY-BAG

I

It was not that _he_ thought her beautiful; but other people thought so, which made him think of her as such. And when these others came in swarms to wrest the prize from him which he had looked on as his own, he fell in love with her. During his first week in Salzburg, he received a card from Frau von Kranich: “_As you whish to be introduced to interesting people, I would like to bring you on Monday next on the 15 February inst. to Professor Hollmann-Blum where there will be a pretty large party. Please komme to me at a quarter to five o’klock_ P.M. _We will go together or better still, in the tram car. With my kind regards yours truly,--Emmy von Kranich._”

Calling, he beheld in the drawing-room with Frau von Kranich a young girl with clean-cut regularly chiselled features--he remembered later--of a quite extraordinary beauty. After introducing them: “Mr. Mackintosh Beck, of America;--Miss Schulz,” Frau von Kranich suddenly excused herself and went out. There was a pause. “What the devil can I say?” he thought.

“Do you dance a great deal?” He felt this was a happy shot.

“No,” said the girl.

“I notice that you Austrians dance very differently from us, and I have, so as not to feel provincial” (he smiled: the girl did not), “gone in for dancing lessons at Herr Pfleger’s--despite my middle age!” (Again she did not smile.) “I am told, on good authority, that he is better than Herr Loewe.”

“No,” said the girl. “Loewe is better than Pfleger.”

“But I think Herr Pfleger dances better then Herr Loewe,” he proffered tentatively.

The girl smiled a faint smile, as if of compassion for Mr. Beck’s poor understanding. “No,” she said. “Loewe dances better than Pfleger.”

There was an end of it. Mr. Beck was silent. Frau von Kranich came back with an enigmatic look on her face which implied: “Well, have you two young people hit it off?” And Mr. Beck felt sensitive for Fräulein Schulz, for, beside her, he was no longer young. But Frau von Kranich was so old that from the vantage-ground of her years the ages of both Mr. Beck and Fräulein Schulz seemed quantities so small as to appear to have no visible differentiation. She overtly began the matchmaking. “You must take long walks together in the spring as soon as the snow begins to thaw. She must show you round the lakes and up the hills.” Now that Frau von Kranich, who had no illusions about the hearts of young girls, was back, Fräulein Schulz ceased to be assertive and became the shy and diffident young maiden Frau von Kranich must have thought her. When called upon to speak, she blushed and lowered her lashes. They put on their coats. Frau von Kranich, very small and old, and carrying a little pot of flowers in pink tissue-paper, crawled into the tramcar, Mr. Beck after her; and Fräulein Schulz, murmuring “Kiss the hand,” went her way.

“She’s a beautiful girl--he, he,” said Frau von Kranich. The trolley rattled on. “She is a Cindrella who is waiting for the golden coach to halt at her door and for the Prince Charming to alight and offer her the shoe.” And she pierced him searchingly with her sharp watery old eyes, as if considering whether he might conceivably pass off as the desired Prince Charming, and laughed--“He, he, he!”

When they had crawled out of the tram and crawled upstairs into the flat, they made their way into a hall overcrowded by people’s overcoats, and added to the huge stack, with the aid of a bewildered parlour-maid, their own particular contribution. Frau von Kranich crawled towards the festive birthday table heaped with flowers and deposited thereon the pot in the pink tissue-paper.

“Ah! ah! Herr Direktor Schulz!” A tall massive man of sixty-five, with long silver locks, stood in the doorway and now sat down by Frau von Kranich and talked to her, his big hands moving all the while in little gestures. Mr. Beck, amid the hum of conversation, was grateful for such fragments as his ear could catch. “This invidious meanness ... this--this ... mean invidiousness ... this--how shall I say?” Herr Schulz was saying, when Frau von Kranich introduced them. “Sit down,” she said. “He-he-he; you are so tall!”

Mr. Mackintosh Beck _was_ tall. He was not handsome, but he thought he was; and when at home in Philadelphia the shop-girls stared at him behind the counter he thought they were admiring his features. From time to time, when, trying on a new suit at his tailor’s, for example, he beheld his face in the three mirrors simultaneously from all four sides, he would experience a mild shock of revelation. But as a rule he would forget about his looks and go on figuring himself as he should have been instead of as he really was. “You can speak French with Mr. Mackintosh,” Frau von Kranich told Herr Schulz.

“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Beck rejoined, smiling shyly through his horn-rimmed spectacles, “I am here to learn the German language, and I should esteem it a privilege to have the opportunity of exercising my poor knowledge if you have the patience to talk it slowly to me.”

But Frau von Kranich looked as though she had something more important up her sleeve and was not to be deflected from her course. “French,” she said, “is the most wonderful language that I know for telling one _des plaisanteries_. I remember how, while my father was Bavarian Minister at Rome, the French Ambassador and I talked airy nothings for an hour and a half--he, he, he!” And she looked round at Mr. Beck to see if he had noticed it. But Mr. Beck was looking at Herr Schulz and thinking of his daughter. He thought of the last girl he should have married and reflected, with a twinge of melancholy, that it was always girls who were to blame for the deflections in his career. He had wanted to remain at Haverford and prepare for a professorship, then a girl came in sight and he had to think of making money quickly. He left the University and took to banking. Then she left him, he ceased banking and went back to the University. And--strange, he thought--every time he was engaged it always happened that the cause of their estrangement was a male relative, a brother, father or an uncle whom, as a human being, he liked better than the girl. He was just thinking now, as he looked at Herr Direktor Schulz, how really strange it was that he should always like the fathers or the brothers best, when the host came up to him: “You come from Philadelphia? Which University? And what is your particular faculty?”

“Well--my home town is Haverford, but I live in Philadelphia. My university----”

But Professor Hollmann Blum, with a little nod and smile, was already off and round the corner, his coat tails flying in the air, and talking to another guest.

After coffee, the Professor gave a little lecture and passed on pictures of Tut-An-Khaman; after which each of the more learned guests was expected to contribute his intellectual quota.

“I am a lonely soul here,” said Herr Schulz.

“I felt that,” Mr. Beck rejoined, and glanced significantly at Herr Schulz, who looked as if he did not quite take it in; though when later he discoursed again, he turned with deference to the foreigner, and praised America. He spoke haltingly, with little gestures, little pauses, as if fumbling for the right word, and a number of people had gathered round him, but Herr Schulz turned more and more towards Mr. Beck. “When we are alone I should like to develop” (he threw out illuminative little gestures) “before you the whole idea, so to speak.”

“And who is the greatest living writer of the German-speaking world to-day?” presently asked Mr. Beck.

Herr Schulz smiled, a little mischievously. “With my exception” (and Frau Kranich also smiled) “it’s Gerhart Hauptmann.”

“The Herr Direktor is a poet,” she explained.

“Oh?”

“I will present you with a copy of my book when next we have the opportunity of meeting.”

The Professor suddenly bobbed up from round the corner, and turning deferentially towards his host, the Herr Direktor, said: “The Herr Geheimrat will be able to reply to your question, Herr Doktor Mackintosh, with an authority greatly in excess of that which I command.”

“What’s that? What’s that?” asked the Professor, joining them as if for a long stay.

“We were talking of----”

But the Professor, with a nod and a smile, had already dashed off to the table in the other corner of the room and was fussing with a fork over the apricot cake.

Mr. Beck escorted the old lady home. “I like Herr Schulz,” he said.

“He’s very nice to you because you are a new man, a foreigner at that, and listen to him--and that flatters him. While we have all heard it endless times before and are sick and tired of it; and he knows it. But I will bring his daughter, Irmgard Schulz, for you to the Baroness Hauch’s dance on Thursday afternoon. Baroness Hauch has the finest china set in Salzburg.”

“Must I dress?”

“Yes.”

“Dinner-jacket?”

“No--cut-away.”

II

The trouble was that Mr. Beck possessed no “cut-away.” Accordingly, he had one made, and standing facing the three glasses at the front, with his back against three more, he suddenly perceived that he was very ugly. The tailor looked at him with glee, “American? Ah! ah! Dollar! A lot of dollar--he, he, he!” and recommended the most expensive stuff available, while Mr. Beck reflected with discomfort that not the least of his reasons in coming over to Austria was the resolve drastically to reduce expenditure. “Have the honour--kiss the hand--my compliment--greet God--commend myself,” the tailor bowed him out. In the afternoon Mr. Beck dropped cards on Baroness Hauch, on the door of whose apartment he read: “Baron Karl Franz Egon Gaestner zu Hauch Wolf-Kadelburg von Hofmannsthal,” and on Thursday, as arranged, he called on Frau von Kranich. Irmgard came. In her brown hat which covered her exquisitely moulded forehead she did not look quite so lovely, and he noticed that she had the small burning eyes of her father. At the Hauchs’ Irmgard appeared a little shy. She wore a blue dress with white lapels and American brown shoes, and all the young men fell in love with her at first sight and danced with her uninterruptedly. Mr. Beck found himself seated far away from the table, with a cup of tea in his hand. There was no sugar in the tea, but the cup was too full and too hot: he knew he could never get up without spilling it--and he suffered in silence. Moreover, he remembered being told that the Baronin Hauch possessed the finest china set in Salzburg and he was tormented by the thought that at any moment he might drop the cup and smash the precious thing to smithereens! And what then----? The hostess spoke agitatingly, with her mouth full of crumbs, and every now and then a crumb would be shot out of her mouth to fly like a bullet into the middle of the cakes and pies. “What a beautiful girl,” she remarked, watching Irmgard dance with her son Franz Egon Rudolf Ferdinand.

“She’s just like a Cindrella,” answered Frau von Kranich, “waiting for Prince Charming to claim her.”

“But I hear,” breathed a nondescript lady, “that her father is not liked because of his intolerable conceit. I am told that when someone asked him recently about German authors, Herr Direktor Schulz had the indiscretion to reply that he was by far the greatest writer living! And he looks as though he thought it--walking round in that old-fashioned bowler and the astrakhan coat, looking like an English lord.”

Frau von Kranich wrinkled her nose. “He is a little bit of a _parvenu_,” she said.

“I haven’t noticed that,” rejoined the Baroness, while a crumb shot from her mouth right into the sugar-basin.

“Still--a little.”

They were beginning to play bridge--the princes seated in one room; the counts in another; the barons in a third, Mr. Beck among the barons, who spoke to him of the high purchasing power of the U.S. dollar and urged him to subscribe to various aristocratic charities. Frau von Kranich had long since gone away. When the gathering at last dispersed, he went with Irmgard to the tram, but she suggested walking home together to the castle. “I like walking after a dance.”

Mr. Beck considered. “I like walking--with you.” He thought this very daring. And he reflected, with inward satisfaction, that he was actually making love in German--for the first time in his uneventful life. It wasn’t ... “half bad!”

She paused. “I like--walking,” she said.

This was cautious. And Mr. Beck put out feelers. “I don’t want to impose myself on you, and please tell me when you’ve had enough of me.”

“I’ll tell you.”

“I mentioned it because it seems to me that Frau von Kranich is rather inflicting my heavy company upon your slender shoulders. Needless to say, for my own part I like it. At the same time, I feel I may be boring you with my imperfect German, and I’d do anything in the world rather than be a nuisance to you.”

“She means well,” said Irmgard; and they walked along in silence through the frosty streets.

“Have you always lived in Salzburg, then?”

“Always--since my birth.”

“Do you like it?”

“I hate it.”

“But the people here are good people.”

“I hate them.”

“You ought to go abroad where the people might be more to your liking,” suggested Mr. Beck. “You’d like America.”

“I hate Americans.”

“Why?”

She thought hard. “Because they wear such ugly knickerbockers--the tourists here.”

“The child!” he thought. “The touching innocence!”

They were now going by a long country lane that stretched across a lonely field of snow. Far away an engine whistled. The snow hung heavy on the trees. Mr. Beck conceived the plan of approach by way of her father. “I do love the way your father speaks--these little movements of the hands, this fumbling pause, this seeking after the right word. He is by far the most considerable intellectual in the city.”

“Yes, Papa is very clever.”

They came out into an open space at the mouth of the river which extended wide into the distance, chained in ice. “This is our castle.” At the top of a hill surrounded by a fence stood the castle--looking rather less than a mere house. Irmgard quickly vanished up the steps. Mr. Beck stood still a while. The ice-chained river was bathed in moonlight.

There was an added warmth that winter evening about the sky and moon as he walked home to his _pension_.

III

The night after, he met the Schulzes at the concert in the City Hall. Herr Schulz always sat in the first row and championed foreign artists and blamed his own. That night the Russian Cossacks, visiting the city for two days, were giving a concert, and he presented them with an autograph copy of his book, _The God Triumphant_, and made a speech to them, sprinkling it with words that came most readily and, as he thought, appropriately to his lips: “Gorki ... Tolstoy ... Dostoevski ... the great Russian soul....” During the first interval they all sat down to refreshments. Herr Schulz held out his glass without a word. His daughter filled it.

After the concert they walked together down the slippery street, drifting along with a crowd of Herr Schulz’s admirers, in particular two middle-aged ladies, to whom Herr Schulz took the opportunity of presenting the new arrival from America. They seemed to hang upon every word that issued from the master--the master expatiating on the concert with his customary little gestures and taking off his hat and waving it to right and left, in acknowledgment of innumerable greetings.

“You have a lot of acquaintances,” Mr. Beck remarked.

“Yes, a lot of acquaintances, but not a single friend!--I come out with such aphorisms quite spontaneously, you know. _Ach_, if, like Goethe, I had an Eckermann to take them down! As it is, they are not taken down and are forgotten. Ah, wait a bit: the other day a splendid aphorism occurred to me: ‘The only decent people nowadays are to be found among the Jews.’”

“Come, try another!” the American commented to himself.

“Or this morning--‘What we call morality is merely envy.’”

“H’m.” There was a pause. “He was a great man--Goethe,” uttered Mr. Beck.

“Goethe was--I once put it so well--Goethe was the illegitimate child of the gods.”

“And Schiller?”

“Schiller was a fallen angel who, through a faultless life on earth, has redeemed his fall and secured his amnesty.”

“And Shakespeare?”

“Shakespeare--Shakespeare----” the Director fumbled. “Shakespeare----” It was clear that he was forced this time to make it up on the spot. “Shakespeare is a huge black angel.”

“Try another!” the American reflected.

“Shakespeare----!” Herr Schulz suddenly became excited. “It’s incredible.” He walked up and down. He waved his hat high in the air as if acknowledging the greetings of acquaintances (who were not there), then stopped dead. “It’s--it’s--it’s beyond words. _King Lear._ _Antony and Cleopatra._ _Hamlet._ It’s--it’s--it’s----”

“And Goethe too,” the American took up gratefully.

“Yes, Goethe! What a life the fellow had, long, rich, and complete. And he was understood. Goethe had Schiller. But I am alone: I have nobody.”

In bed, Mr. Beck pictured the wedding. Her dad showing off to advantage. What a splendid old fellow! Then the honeymoon, the bridal night, the return to her parents, the departure for the United States. Their married life when she would get used to him and find in him a vessel for her tenderest outpourings: when she would take him by the hand and, looking frankly in his eyes, would say:

“Mackintosh, I love you.”

Through his mind flashed pictures of travel, hotels in the hills, of evenings together, and kisses, caresses and love. And life seemed wonderful and miraculous and full of exquisite anticipations.

IV

When next day he went to Gmunden, he was stopped in the street by a lady whom he recognised as one of the two middle-aged disciples of Herr Schulz, to whom he had been presented after the concert. “Have you, Herr von Mackintosh, come to see the Herr Direktor Schulz?” she asked.

Mr. Beck had come to have a quiet view of Gmunden. But he did not deem it polite to say so, and answered, haltingly, “M-yes--I think I have.”

“Splendid! The Herr Direktor is now taking his after-dinner nap, but he will be up for coffee at a quarter past four o’clock and would be delighted to have you take a cup with him.”

“Curse him!” he thought. But at a quarter past four Mr. Beck was at the green, freshly painted gate of a beautiful white villa, trying hard to open the latch from inside, and Herr Schulz, just up from his nap, was coming smilingly down the steps in his pale-yellow boots to Mr. Beck’s assistance. He wore a coloured jersey with a plain back to it, and no coat, so that if you looked at him from behind, his shoulders appeared like gigantic epaulets, and there was something which suggested a fieldmarshal in his colossal bulk. They settled down to coffee in the over-heated glass veranda, the two ladies watching every movement of his brow. “Have you had a good sleep, Herr Direktor?” they inquired in unison.

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

“Yes,” he repeated, “I have had a good sleep.”

“That’s good.”

Herr Schulz sighed. “Creative work is very exhausting. It’s not the same as giving a lecture. It’s work of the spirit and must be spun out of your own soul’s substance, so to speak. That’s what I keep telling the professors here--he, he!” he laughed maliciously.

“Entirely so,” agreed Mr. Beck. Odd: all the time that the other was talking he could see through his pretense and laugh inwardly; yet Mr. Beck’s replies were sincerely respectful.

“I don’t mince words. I tell the professors here straight what I think of them--he, he! They don’t like me.”

“No wonder,” said the guest, instinctively falling into line with the commanding personality of the other.

“At the heat of creative work I can’t write, and so I dictate my thoughts to this lady here. I wish to goodness, Grete,” he turned towards the younger of the ladies, “that you would learn to use a typewriter.” He held out his cup: the lady filled it. “To attempt to read your hand is insufferable. How do you, Herr Doktor Mackintosh, do your work--Ethnology is your subject, I think you told me?--do you use a typewriter?”

“I’ve an Underwood Portable--it’s quite small.”

“H’m. I don’t think I could ever use a small typewriter. I should want something big and solid by way of a typewriter.”

“Yes! Yes!” the two sisters exclaimed ecstatically. “You must have everything big and solid, Herr Direktor, to express your personality.”

“He, he!” he laughed, and turning to the guest--“These ladies are hero-worshippers,” he explained.

“The Herr Direktor is always making fun of us,” they said, and looked at him adoringly.

“Perhaps if you will kindly follow me upstairs it might be of interest to you to see the room where some of the more significant strands of thought occur to me of a morning. Sophie and Grete come in and draw the blinds open for me when I ring. I let the sun shine in my eyes, and as I lie in bed all the morning, I think--God! the wonderful things that come into one’s head at these times. _Ach!_ ... My family are jealous of these ladies because I spend so much time here. But I can’t work at home, with my wife and fourteen children in the house and the telephone going, doors banging. As I said to my wife when I left the house the other day, in protest: ‘It’s not the _fact_ of the door banging that upsets me. No: it’s the brazen thoughtlessness _behind_ the act, the invidious ignorance of the effect of such a bang upon an intellectual worker.’ That’s what drives me away from home to seek my real ‘I’ in solitude amid nature. Here I have peace. The ladies are so kind and thoughtful. It costs me nothing. They are only too glad to have me, and my company, they say, amply compensates them for whatever food I may consume here. Here I feel I can work. The sun shines in my window till I get up for dinner at two o’clock. After dinner I take a little nap on this tiny balcony till about a quarter past four, when I go down to coffee. After coffee--this reminds me--I take a little walk--you must come with me--till suppertime. H’m. We might as well go now.”

They went down the steps, Herr Schulz breathing heavily upon the nape of the visitor’s neck, who, turning round, asked, “Do you do most of your work after supper then?”

“No. I turn in early. Creative work is very exhausting. After supper we have a little game of chess--and then we all turn in.”