Part 2

“I see. You do your writing in the morning, in bed?”

There was a pause. “I have ideas buzzing in my head for a novel, a play--a philosophical work. But what I lack is the _inner_ freedom. I am upset by the invidious perversity of the people around me, by the perfidious, shameless, iniquitous meanness of mankind!”

Grete met them at the foot of the stairs. “I suppose, Herr von Mackintosh, that you’re an American journalist who has come over to Europe to acquaint himself with the life and works of Herr Direktor Schulz?”

“Well--perhaps--yes--though of course----” mumbled the visitor.

Herr Schulz now stood half turned away from them, with his hands behind his back, brooding.

“I should be glad,” said he, turning back to them suddenly, “if you, Herr Doktor Mackintosh, would acquaint the people of America--for whom, I assure you, I cherish the warmest regard (their achievements in technical knowledge are most valuable, I am sure, and are a significant contribution to mechanical progress)--if you would acquaint them with my writings and works and ... if you would be so kind,” he concluded.

“Gladly.”

“For I must confess that I do not expect much recognition at the hands of my own people--the professors especially. I have even coined a good aphorism about these gentlemen--‘science officials,’ I call them--he, he! They don’t like me. It’s nothing new, of course. There is even the proverb: ‘No man is a hero to his own valet’--I rather meant another proverb: ‘No man is a prophet in his own country.’”

“Pardon me, Herr Direktor, but will you be good enough to acquaint me with the titles of your works.”

Herr Schulz suddenly grew earnest. “There is that--_God Triumphant_--you know that. Or--I beg your pardon--I will send you a copy of it when I get home. Then--then there are one or two little--well, youthful attempts--school essays. Since I left the Bank two years ago I have not been able to do anything at all. I lack the inner freedom.”

“No matter. With us it’s not so much the work as the personality that counts. And that, I can assure you, you have in ample measure. You even, if you will pardon me for saying so, remind me of Henrik Ibsen.”

“Of Björnson,” corrected Herr Schulz. “Ibsen was small--insignificant-looking. But Björnson was a man after my own face and stature--he, he!”

“Yes! Yes!” chimed in the ladies. “The image of Björnson!”

“Though some people say I look rather like an English lord--he, he!”

Mr. Beck had never seen an English lord and did not know what a lord exactly looked like; but he knew he did not look like Herr Direktor Schulz. He gazed at the Director as he stood there with the “epaulets.” He _was_ a great man; there was no doubt about it when you looked at him--six feet and a half high and two full spans between the shoulders!

“I shall now leave the two gentlemen to themselves,” said Grete. “They have doubtless important matters to discuss which are not for a woman’s poor mind.”

“We shall be back for supper, Grete,” rejoined Herr Schulz, “which I trust we shall enjoy the better after our walk.”

“I will do my best that it may come up to your expectation, Herr Direktor.” And the two men went through the garden into the adjacent wood, Herr Schulz breaking off dead branches (an easy enough job, the visitor reflected) as if to bear out the impression that he was, in every respect, a colossus. “You are lucky,” he said. “You’re still young, independent, can do your work without interruption. But I--I try to keep it down, but bitterness--bitterness rises here in my breast against--against people--debts, petty tyrannies--the invidious meanness, the iniquitous perfidy of mankind!” Herr Schulz broke off a dead branch. “If I had some great sorrow, I would rise to the occasion, like a tragic hero--a King Lear, let us say--with credit and glory. But no! These petty, senseless little pinpricks--the telephone ringing while I am composing a lyric, the door slamming away--these pinpricks ... these--these dirty little setbacks....”

Mr. Beck looked sympathetic. “I understand. Even Tartarin de Tarascon used to say: _Des coups d’épee, des coups d’épee, messieurs, mais pas des coups d’épingle!_”

“Don’t know. Haven’t read him.” He stopped, and suddenly, from habit, though no one was about, took off and waved his hat high in the air, as if acknowledging the greeting of somebody behind the trunk of the tree, then put it back on his head. “While I am trying hard to mount Pegasus I am pulled down ignominiously by the breeches, so to speak, because they come to tell me that baby has choked himself with orange pips. My wife has given birth to fourteen children. I ask: “What can a poet do?”

“Exactly. On that ground I am in favour of Eugenics.”

“What!” Herr Schulz broke off a dead branch. “You are in favour of that--that invidious--that--that infamous practice. You----”

“I am. I have a nightmare: over-population.”

Herr Schulz pooh-poohed this statement. “Nonsense! Look,”--his eye was searching forward past the densely growing trees; he pointed to an empty meadow,--“Look: plenty of standing room.”

“I am thinking,” the American pursued, “of the poor women who bear child after child without respite.”

“It’s their business.”

“But surely, Herr Direktor, there is many a wife who does not want any children. What are you to do with such a woman?”

“Fling her out of the window,” was the advice. “No, no, Herr Doktor Mackintosh, it’s no good arguing. My wife has had eleven children by me and three by my predecessor. I have no money. Being honest, I retired a poor man. I am creaking under a burden of debt. But I won’t stop. I will not contradict the will of God. And my old woman knows better than to show signs of unnatural reluctance. She knows her man--he, he!”

“But don’t the children get to be weaklings?”

“Not a bit of it. My youngest boy, who is only two, is the cleverest of the lot. I can talk to him as I do to you. Though naturally,” the Director hastened, “he hasn’t got your knowledge. Ethnology, is your subject, is it not?”

“Quite so.”

“Of course.”

“And your daughters, Herr Direktor?” Mr. Beck thought this might be the chance to ask Herr Schulz for the hand of Irmgard, though, on second thoughts, he resolved that it would be wiser to approach the daughter first.

“My daughters are not quite so clever. But then what can you expect of mere women? Though, Irmgard is awakening. She has vague unfocussed longings....”

“That reminds me,” chimed in the guest. “I have been reading recently the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. There is a passage where Goethe speaks of Spring: ‘I have an objectless sorrow in Spring....’”

“I too,” said Herr Schulz. “_Ach!_ when I look at the hills and the lakes and the breaking rigour of the sky, I want--I want to go _praying_ through the world!”

“Entirely so,” said the other.

They were returning to the villa, and Grete was waiting for them on the steps. “All’s ready,” she smiled dotingly.

V

And now Frau von Kranich began inviting him: “_Please komme on Fryday next at 4 o’klock p.m. We will go together to Wolfs._” Or, “_Please komme on Thursday at 3 o’klock p.m. We will go to Schmidts._” Presently he had another letter:

“_Miss Schulz is just staying with me und whishes me to invite you for next Thursday to komme to the castle at 4 o’klock p.m. Then she advises you further to take dansing lessons by Herr Loewe to learn Wienerwalzer. I hope you don’t think me forward. If so, I beg your pardon. With her und my best compliments, Yours truly, Emmy von Kranich._”

Next morning there was another missive. Across a visiting card on which stood “Emmy von Kranich, née von Kolbe,” she wrote: “_You are geting with this an invitation for a closed society fancy dress to which Miss Schulz will also komme. She is kounting on you beeing there because you are to accompany her home. Yours truly._”

When on Thursday he set out for the Schulz’s, he walked as it seemed to him a deuced long way, until at last the river spread wide before him and he perceived the castle on the hill, looking more than ever less than a mere house. He went up the winding path, till in the annexe on the second floor (the castle had been commandeered during the war and ever since the Schulz’s could not get the lodgers out) he rang the bell and waited, while his heart thumped loud within him. It was Irmgard herself who opened the door for him--Irmgard in a dark-blue velvet dress which she might have worn when she was only fifteen, and her hair, he noticed, was put up for the first time. As he entered the drawing-room (which, for lack of space, served also as a dining-room, and, in fact, as a study for the Herr Direktor at such rare times as he was at home: to-day he wasn’t) the mother of the fourteen children rose to greet him--a woman remarkably fresh for her achievement. On a pedestal stood a huge bronze bust of Herr Schulz, and on the shelf behind, two small busts--of Goethe and Schiller. There was a moment of confused silence. Mr. Beck surveyed the view through the window and expressed ravishment in no measured terms. A tiny little boy of two came in. “This is Karl, our youngest,” said Frau Schulz. And Irmgard, to give herself something to do--for she seemed very shy, Mr. Beck felt, at this overt arrival of the first grown man who had come expressly for her sake--took her little brother on her lap and screened her face with him from the visitor. But tight as she held him, he managed to crawl off and whispered something into his mother’s ear.

“No, the Herr Doktor is not interested to see your horse,” she rejoined aloud.

“Oh, but I am!” And by the mother’s pleasant smile he felt that he had thus commended himself to her heart.

“Well, fetch it then,” she said to Karl, who vanished; and presently there came a scratching, squealing noise from the adjoining room, and Karl dragged in on a long string a cadaverous moth-eaten rocking horse and began taking off the saddle in front of the visitor, who patted it to gain time, while thinking hard of what he might say next. He had an agreeable feeling of being taken straight into the heart of the family. Mother and daughter had fixed their eyes on Karl and Mr. Beck, who as it were made a tableau together, and the guest ransacked his mind for something at once appropriate and amusing to say to Karl. But--“Can you strap the saddle to the head?” was all he could produce. The little boy, evidently not amused, gravely repudiated the suggestion. Irmgard got up and busied herself with the tea-things. Her mother’s glance followed her fondly. “You can’t guess, Herr Doktor, what Irmgard will be wearing at the fancy-dress ball?”

“No, no!” cried the girl. “You mustn’t tell or he’ll recognise me!”

On the piano lid stood a family group which attracted Mr. Beck’s attention--_padre_, _madre_, and fourteen _bambini_: twelve girls, two boys. “This is Hellmuth, our grown-up brother. He is twenty-nine.”

“H’m. A good-looking youth,” commented the visitor.

“He used to be good-looking. But a year ago in tobogganing down the hill he banged with his nose into a tree, and ever since his nose is twice its former size. I always tease him about his double nose.”

“How very funny!”

The hours flashed by like lightning. The window grew dim. The maid came in, lit the lamp and drew the curtains. The hostess looked as though she thought that Mr. Beck ought to go now. But Mr. Beck sat still, and did not move.

“Irmgard is going to town now to a dancing lesson at Herr Loewe’s. She feels a little out-of-date and wants to regain confidence before the dance to-morrow,” Frau Schulz imparted to the lingering guest.

“You can come with me,” said Irmgard, “and arrange with Loewe about your _Wienerwalzer_ lessons.”

They went down the endless road, Irmgard smiling to herself. She called in at several shops--“Just wait outside, will you?” He noticed through the glass door how the men behind the counter stared at her with rapture, and he felt proud of being--even if compelled to wait outside--her immediate companion. “Now we can go to Loewe’s,” she said--and sighed. And at that sigh, consummative of their arduous day’s work, he felt a thrill--and also sighed. “Now I should ask her,” he told himself, but they were crossing the main street and dodging vehicles, and now already they were at Herr Loewe’s door. He watched her take her lesson, Herr Loewe, as he held her in his practised arms, smiling all the while into her eyes. And when she left Herr Loewe exercised him for an hour and a half in the whirling motions of the _Wienerwalzer_, charged him a hundred thousand crowns and instructed him to come again to-morrow.

On the way to Herr Loewe’s next day he called on Frau von Kranich. “Mind the lamp,” she drawled. But Mr. Beck had already knocked his scalp against the pike of the brass fitting, and so sat down, feeling a little stunned, facing the old dame. “He, he, he--you are so tall,” she laughed, and looked at him in a strange way, as if to ask: “Is it coming off all right?” Mr. Beck responded with a look of joyous confidence. And she said, “We may soon be able to congratulate you?--he, he, he!”

“I hope so,” he responded, rising and once more knocking his head against the lamp.

“Mind!” said Frau von Kranich. She sat there in a soft armchair, with feet resting on a cushion, and smiled before her faintly--an old, old, white-haired woman with one foot already in the grave.

“What’s this?” he asked, striding over to the wall.

“A miniature of my mother as a young woman at the time my father was Bavarian Minister at Rome.”

Herr Loewe that day had hired two girls to spin Mr. Beck round, and, clad in his new cut-away, with his tails in the air, he went round and round, till one girl was fagged out and the other took him on and whirled on with him till he felt faint and the blood rushed to his eyes.

“Come now, beat the time with the right heel,” Herr Loewe admonished relentlessly. Mr. Beck spun round in a pink faint and reflected that his suffering must be endured for love’s sake.

“Now you’re all right,” Herr Loewe absolved him, more kindly, pocketing another hundred-thousand-crown note. “The secret remember, lies in beating the time with the right heel.”

On his way home, his heart thumping irregularly after the lesson, he thought: “Am I too old for her? Can girls like Irmgard really begin to love middle-aged men like myself?” The tailor had brought the new dinner-jacket and retired: “Have the honour--kiss the hand--greet God--commend myself--my compliment,” and as he was putting on his new clothes he whistled: “I, Mackintosh J. Beck, am taking out the prettiest girl in Europe!” He shaved with especial care, and beheld his face and his entire figure in the looking-glass with genuine satisfaction. Walking through the sloppy streets--it seemed that spring was already beginning--he remembered a bet with a college chum at home. The first of them to be engaged was to send the other a cheque for fifty dollars. He imagined his chum opening the envelope. He pictured how he would arrive in America with his young wife, how he would spite the dark-eyed Susy who had broken with him just because he happened to prefer the company of her intellectual brother to her own.

Schindler at last. All shake hands and introduce themselves, the Secretary in addition presenting Mr. Beck right and left as “Mister Captain Mackintosh.” He waits at the door. She comes in at last, dressed as a butterfly and wearing a black mask with a tilted nose. It was cold in the room and she twitched her nude girlish shoulders.

“I recognised you straight away.”

She looked a little sulky. Or was it the black mask that made her look so? The mother smiled sorrowfully. “I said he’d recognise you straight away if we went in together.”

“I’m afraid this is not a very good table,” said the cavalier, escorting them.

“It will do,” said the girl.

“Why so sulky?”

“I was so before we left.”

“Why?”

“Oh, never mind.”

The waiter came up. “What will you have?”

“Nothing yet.”

Remembering what Frau von Kranich said,--“You ought to have come not as a butterfly, but as Cindrella,” he ventured.

Her mouth smiled behind the mask, but the eyes still looked defiant. “Oh, yes, while I remember----” The mother was fumbling in her bag, and presently produced from there a copy of _The God Triumphant_ with a huge brown man with a broken nose upon the cover, and duly autographed inside. “My husband sends you this, with his respectful compliments.”

“Oh, thanks--” Mr. Beck was peeping furtively into the pages, and--“It’s a great book,” he gave his grateful verdict.

“Yes, not everyone can understand it,” agreed the author’s wife.

Through her black mask with the unbecoming tilted nose Irmgard’s eyes glared angrily, defiantly, and he wondered what precisely was the matter. When the waiter came again, she would have nothing. When he came a third time, she would have nothing. When he came a fourth time, Irmgard said, abruptly, that she would have lemonade. Mr. Beck suggested wine, and she said she would have none, and Mr. Beck, thinking she was sorry for his pocket, hastened to suggest lightheartedly that Tokai wine was very nice and sweet. “I know Tokai wine,” she said, in a tone implying that it was certainly as familiar to her as to himself. “But I don’t want it.”

After that Mr. Beck sat silent for a while. And the waiter brought the lemonade. She sipped at it once, and then did not touch it again. The waitress came along with the cakes. “Will you have some?” he ventured.

But she shook her head and sighed. He looked at the mother, and the mother cast a sympathetic look at her. “Cheer up. He may come yet.”

The girl did not answer. Mr. Beck thought that he must on no account whatever miss the moment of proposing to her. “Shall I now?” But at the sight of her defiant eyes he let his head drop on his chest: and, behold! he noticed with dismay, that he had dropped pieces of the sticky chocolate-cream cake upon his trousers, and thinking this was possibly the reason why she was angry, he began to scratch it off, tentatively with his finger-nail. She averted her glance, still looking angry; and thinking that _this_ was then why she was angry, he stopped scratching. Mother and daughter exchanged vague glances. “But to-morrow he is sure to come.”

“Yes, I think he’ll come to-morrow,” said the girl--and looked more friendly.

Mr. Beck rose. “May I have this dance?” She got up, without answering him, and adjusting her butterfly wings which hung down from her wrists, came into his arms, and they glided away cautiously and not too confidently. “Shall I now?” But he had to concentrate his attention on manœuvring her past other couples, while she seemed very frightened of making a mistake, and it was a relief to them both when the music stopped and they returned to the mother. “A bad floor,” said Mr. Beck.

“Yes, the floor is not good.”

“Do take off your mask.”

She shook her head.

Mr. Beck did not dance the next dance, nor the one after. Nor did a single cavalier come up to her.

“Oh, come, take off that mask!” her mother urged at last.

Irmgard shook her head. A minute elapsed; and she took off the mask.

No sooner had she done so than a cavalier was at her side, then a second, a third, a fourth, a tenth. Introductions--Herr Baron----, Herr Graf----. All the impecunious aristocracy of Austria was wooing her virginal charms. Irmgard brightened up. She danced. “What a beautiful girl!” “What an exquisite face!” said the old fogeys surveying her. They wished they could dance too, but their dancing was of the old school: alas! they were ignorant of the jazz.

But at last the conductor held up his _baton_ more defiantly--and it went off, the old ever-popular waltz _To the Beautiful Blue Danube_. All the old fogeys, who had so far languished in obscure corners, crawled out, like beetles, at the sound of the first bars, and went spinning round on their axes, to the large, deliberate rhythm. Mr. Beck wanted to try his luck, but before he could open his mouth Irmgard was off, whirling round with Baron Karl Franz Egon Gaestner zu Hauch Wolf-Kadelburg von Hofmannsthal. Mr. Beck looked at her complexion. It was perfect as in a child, and the nose shone slightly. Clearly she hadn’t even begun to use powder.

Elated by her sudden success, Irmgard wanted to go to Herr Loewe’s dance next door. She was impatient--could not wait for the cloak-room ticket--could not wait till Mr. Beck had got back his change. She danced with him, excited by the stares which she received from every side, drunk with success. “Now let’s walk,” she said, taking his arm.

“This is the time,” he thought. “Still one can’t very well barge into it like that. One ought to tell her something about oneself,” he argued with himself; and opportunely said: “You hardly know anything about my life and work. I must seem a stranger to you--a blank signifying nothing. And yet I’ve written some standard works in Ethnology and am of some account in that branch of science.”

“You must write in German if I am to read them,” she replied. “Now we must rush back.”

At that “we” he felt unusually intimate, and he said as he helped her on with her coat, “Turn up your collar,” and even turned it up for her, at which she frowned. “Now for it!” he thought.

“I want to tell you something.”

“Afterwards,” she said, and rushed away from him back to her mother.

He walked with them to the castle. At the injunction of the mother Irmgard did not speak and held her shawl close to the chin. When he went to bed it was past five o’clock.

VI

The night after, he joined them at the dance in the City Hall. It seemed that the entrance ticket had already been provided for him by the girl. But when, pocket-book in hand, he was about to give her the money, she flared up--“Don’t give it me here!”