Part 3

And he smarted. When he came up to her in the ball-room he saw that she was red and angry, standing with her brother Hellmuth with the double nose, who was also red and angry. They could not secure an empty table and stood in the drafty doorway, jammed by the crowd. “Will you put this into your pocket?” She handed him her little vanity-bag. The band struck up a _Wienerwalzer_, and he asked her. It didn’t go as well as it should have done, after two lessons. “Beat the time with the right heel,” he remembered Herr Loewe’s injunction. And he _did_ beat it, and with the right heel. Only he could not get it exactly in time, and the left heel came down of itself just as the right one was due, every time. They had only done a few paces. “No, that won’t do,” she said, releasing him.

Two lessons gone for naught! However that may be, he must not miss the chance--perhaps the last--of proposing to her: “Shall I now?”

But she looked angry. Her (father’s) small eyes looked angry, as if at the perfidious meanness, the invidious perversity of mankind. Her sister Elsa’s fiancé, a young man employed at the local circus, was making funny little signs to Irmgard, to amuse her. But she never looked. Mr. Beck gave up talking to her.

“Ah! Mister Captain Mackintosh!” A man whom he had met the night before came up to him and, taking him by the arm, imparted to him that he was looking for a certain Dr. Schmidt. And for an hour Mr. Beck was dragged about all round the rooms and through the vestibule and down the restaurant and up the stairs all round the gallery, in search of the elusive Dr. Schmidt whom he had never seen nor even wished to see. They did not find Dr. Schmidt; and it is to be presumed that Mr. Beck died without seeing him; but he killed, however disagreeably and unprofitably, one hour of his mental agony.

Exhausted, he sat down in the gallery and watched the crowded ball-room heave in whirling couples to the mighty rhythm of the _Danube Waltz_. The big orchestra put a dashing emphasis into the mighty regularly whirling rhythm. “For you the hesitant irregularities of jazz: for us the regular abandon of the _Wienerwalzer_,” these whirling sounds and faces seemed to sing aloft. And behold, a military figure holding in his martial arms a slim fair lady went round and round, tapping the time with his right heel. And there again--an elderly couple: they had placed their hands on each other’s shoulders at arms’ length and went round, the man tapping his heel. A postal official whirled round with his girl, his face all of a smile. These multitudinous couples did not bang into one another as often as one might expect. Like so many spinning-tops, they each turned on their particular axis, just clearing each other, while the music lashed them on into a frenzied passion of regular rhythm. Mr. Beck leaned forward, watching down into the vulgar opulence of the gilded ball-room--stunned, fallen into a trance or reverie. And the conglomeration for some reason recalled to him those crowded frescoes packed with human figures that one sees in Botticelli. Away, away was the postal official. And there, nearing his end of the room, was Irmgard, the beautiful girl!

When at length he returned to the joint table, Irmgard was not there; it seemed as if she avoided him. Mr. Beck caught a sentence which had passed between Elsa and her fiancé: “It’s too late--he won’t come now. Poor Irmgard!” The betrothed young couple took pity on the lonely Mr. Beck and, with the aid of another young couple, got him to join in a complicated dance in which Mr. Beck had to describe elaborate, intricate figures with his tired legs--and felt like a fool. Irmgard, with an angry frown, danced with a pale young man with a pinched look. Mr. Beck paced round alone, pulling out his watch and rehearsing mentally how, in parting, he would thank the betrothed young couple for their kindness to him and hand Irmgard back her vanity-bag, without a word--and go. They talked of wanting to go on to a coffee-house to drink coffee till eight in the morning, by way of doing justice to the Carnival, but Mr. Beck only wanted to get into bed and to calm his poor nerves. The hours dragged. It was four; then it was five--but still the dancing went on. At last he buttonholed the circus man. “I want to go home,” he pleaded wearily.

“No, no! We’re staying on till six. Surely, Herr von Mackintosh, you don’t want to be guilty of ruining our little Carnival party?”

Mr. Beck did not want to ruin anything and as a cultivated man in foreign parts, deemed it only right not to do anything which might cause them, in their own poor light, to think him ill-mannered. So he paced on by himself round and round (he was afraid that if he sat down he might fall asleep), now and then pulling out his watch and yawning into his white-cuffed hand. The clock struck half-past seven. It struck eight o’clock. Somebody was making a collection for the band, and spoke: “If we pay them they’ll play on till nine.” A sleepy waiter looked angrily at Mr. Beck. “All d-ham foolishness!” said he, evidently recognising an American in him. “All d-ham foolishness! The lights are only paid for till half-past eight.” He was falling over from fatigue; his eyes were closing of themselves. He was a tottering figure in the corner. Mr. Beck was still pacing about, waiting eagerly for the Schulz’s to make a start--when suddenly he ran into the circus man. “The ladies have just gone home with their brother Hellmuth and asked me to say good-bye for them.”

“What! They’ve gone?”

He was staggered by the news--his heart all weeping tears. In the large vestibule there was a draught, and as he pressed his way through the crowd, Mr. Mackintosh Beck felt all nasty inside--as if he had just arrived at the Hook of Holland after a particularly vile crossing from Harwich. While waiting for his coat and hat in the icy cloak-room with the doors swinging to and fro, he had a chilly feeling in his bosom, as though some improvident maid had left open all windows and doors and a tremendous draught was sweeping the length and breadth of his inner rooms. When he came out of the City Hall it was morning, and a round white mist stood on the sharp mountain edge, like an enormous balloon. The snow fell in heaps; it seemed as though a new winter spell were beginning. He shivered in his coat and felt a dull ache in the pit of his stomach. As he walked home it was bitterly cold, and a sharp wind blew from across the river. And suddenly it seemed as if the mountains pressed their awful weight upon his chest, stifling his breath, so that he could have screamed in anguish--rapped his heart....

He could feel the vanity-bag in his side-pocket, and thought: “That girl ought to be whipped!” And to be treated like that by a mere _Backfish_! It came over him--the urgent wish to press all of his latent claims to renown upon her. Impudent nincompoop! The tears in his throat rolled back at this rebellious thought. He shaped in his mind the letter he would write to Frau von Kranich: “I return the vanity-bag which---- I am sorry that your good intentions have involved me----” No, that would never do. “Of all the rude girls that I have ever met----” No, no, that might lead to unpleasantness, who knows? Suddenly her brother Hellmuth with the swollen double nose rose before him, threatening. Mr. Beck did not know for a fact whether Hellmuth had been a student and so was a ready hand at sword-duelling. He assumed, nevertheless, that Herr Direktor Schulz, despite his record, had not begrudged his son a university education, seeing how extraordinarily cheap it was on the continent of Europe. He could not remember having seen any sword-cuts on Hellmuth’s face. But he recalled the swollen double nose, which, though no direct indication of unusual ferocity, yet did argue a certain dare-devilry, a love of courting danger--which well might mean danger for Mr. Mackintosh Beck. “Damn!” he thought, “blast the whole bally crew of them!”

He pictured the duel, the rising in the cold early morning--a sword in his vitals--his death. “No,” he thought, “the blooming girl isn’t worth it!”

Suddenly he felt old, too old to take on such risks. He understood that young girls like Irmgard could not love men like himself. He crossed the bridge, and slowly began the ascent to his _pension_. It was still snowing, and the sky looked bleak, solitary, senseless. And he thought: “I am glad; I am glad.”

Going back to his room--all upside down from the erewhile ardour of dressing--he remembered how he had looked forward to both nights and had dressed with particular care. It had seemed to him then that he looked very smart. Now the new dinner-jacket looked loose, the shirt crumpled, the new patent leather shoes cracked. He sat down at the table and saw his face in the glass: it was sallow, haggard--as though he had been travelling for three nights on end without a sleeper. What mental suffering could do! And the powder on the upper lip had melted away and revealed the red patches from the scraping blade. He noticed that whenever he shaved with particular care it always came out worse. His hair was turning very grey--there was a bald patch on the crown. He remembered how ugly he had looked in the glass at the tailor’s--and understood.

And now, with fluttering heart, he opened the vanity-bag--a plain little wallet of pink chiffon--and beheld its contents: a pinch of greased powder, sweet-smelling, in a scrap of crumpled paper. And he thought she never powdered! Two white spotless maiden handkerchiefs with the initial “I” and three little flowers around embroidered in blue silk. In another pocket, a crumpled bit of white paper containing rouge. How touching! And behold! a long hair--Irmgard’s. He took it up between his fingers and pressed it tight, and it seemed to coil, like a snake, as if alive. And in that cruel, treacherous movement also was Irmgard.

But what was this? A photo of a young good-looking student. Another photo--Irmgard and the student. A third photo--Irmgard, Elsa, Hellmuth, and the student. It dawned upon him suddenly how during both nights she had been strangely distracted; he recalled the words and looks that passed between her and her family. He understood: he perfectly understood....

And the whole vanity-bag smelled sweetly--like her sweet seventeen. By a simple flash of intuition into her being, he understood how she had moods and a life independent of his, and that it was right that it was so. In this her first Carnival dance, long since prepared for, she had been disappointed, and not the least disappointed in him, and perhaps also was crying now. And suddenly his sight was blurred. He took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and wiped the glass with his big handkerchief....

VII

Next morning he despatched the vanity-bag, with a note, to Frau von Kranich, requesting her to hand it to the proper owner, and having done that he felt relieved, and even whistled. When he came back to lunch, he was informed that in his absence Herr Direktor Schulz had telephoned no less than half-a-dozen times, and that Frau von Kranich had also telephoned. “Aha!” he thought “They’ve smelt a rat! They’ve got the wind up!” He remembered the attitude of Frau von Kranich right from the beginning. He recalled the glib, glossy manner of Herr Schulz. A bag of vanity! What was he after? What was this indeed? An attempt at the eleventh hour to enmesh him, an American, into matrimonial entanglements. He pictured how they had prevailed on her, the dollars looming largely in their mind, to give up the student and to accept him before too late. Like a good American, he was afraid of being drawn into the dark jungles and tangles of European affairs--family affairs most of all--and, for the first time in his life, he perceived the deep significance, the traditional sacrosanctity of the Monroe Doctrine of uncompromising isolation and entrenchment. As he finished his soup, the maid came in to say that Herr Direktor Schulz was at the telephone and had also sent up his son with a message of an urgent kind. The blood rushed to his temples. “A plot!” he thought. “A finely laid snare!” Mr. Mackintosh Beck became that most scared of all things--a middle-aged gentleman afraid of being seduced. But he conquered these insidious thoughts. He held fast to his chair and spoke:

“My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

He packed in a frenzy, strapping up his bags before he was quite ready, and at the last shoving things into his pockets, and set off to the station, and as he crossed the bridge chucked _The God Triumphant_, unread, into the river. He was pacing the platform, muttering through his teeth--

“It matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishment the scroll; I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul,”

when he heard a heavy puffing at his back, and turning, he perceived Herr Schulz in the square bowler hat and astrakhan coat (looking like an English lord), striding up to him in his pale-yellow boots. “Herr Doktor Mackintosh!” The man was holding out his arms. “_Ach!_ how incredibly glad I am to have caught you!”

“Now he’ll begin throwing the girl at me when I don’t want her,” the American reflected, and steeled his heart, and bowed his head as if to meet the attack. Herr Schulz breathed heavily and wiped his brow. “It’s ... awful! On the one hand, this lovely weather--these mountains--lakes--the breaking rigour in the sky--when I look at nature I feel--I feel I want to go _praying_ through the world! On the other hand, this other life, immediate, extravagant, calls on my nervous force.” He spoke on, with little wavy movements of the hand. “If I had some great sorrow, by God I would bear it--like a Lucifer, I would bear it! But these petty, senseless, dirty little pinpricks ... setbacks, bills, petty tyrannies, telephone calls, interruptions. At last, I could stand it no longer, I opened the door. When I’m angry I’m like a raging elephant. I’m a big man, and my family know that at such moments I am capable of anything; they are then like frightened mice--he, he! ‘I want Herr Doktor Mackintosh!’ I shouted. I felt that I must have a kindred soul to talk to--immediately, that very moment--if I was not to suffocate of rage and bitterness which rises--rises and boils here in my breast! My wife began undoing trunks and boxes, looking, if you please, for my old waterproof! I lost my temper. It’s not the act, the absurdity of looking for a raincoat when you crave the presence of a human soul: it’s the thought _behind_ the act--or rather this sheer thoughtlessness and inattentiveness, this--this invidious meanness and perversity latent in mankind that stabs me. I said: _Herr Doktor_ Mackintosh. There was no possible chance of misapprehension. Well, I had them telephone to you all morning--to Frau von Kranich. They couldn’t get you. They can never get anything. I slammed the door and went. Hellmuth ran up against me and said they’d told him you had gone straight to the station. And now I’m here. Well, how are you? Where are you going?”

“At first to Vienna. Then to Venice, Florence, Rome, Paris, London, and so home _via_ New York.”

Herr Schulz looked at him, and down at his own pale-yellow boots, but with a vacant stare, obviously not perceiving either. “We poets need friends. Goethe had Schiller. I have nobody. I am alone, and the divine gift in me is dribbling to no purpose. There are no real people here. The professors--I tell them straight what I think of them--he, he! They don’t like me. Yes, we need friends. Even little poets,” Herr Schulz added, unexpectedly.

He listened to Herr Schulz. And he experienced an agreeable feeling of elation at his self-control. That he was able, for the time, to shelve his love and give attention to those other matters proved to him that he was stronger than his love, not then suspecting that, perhaps, his love itself had temporarily abated. “Been doing any work?” he asked.

“My head is full of ideas--for a novel--a philosophical work--a series of short stories--an epic--a drama--and a comedy. But what I lack is peace. Peace and the opportunity to collect my mood and spirits.”

Mr. Beck stood speechless, thinking hard what he could say. “Your book was wonderful,” he said at length.

“It was very well received.”

The guards were already slamming the doors, and Mr. Beck stepped inside, and let down the window and shook hands with Herr Schulz. The whistle went. The train moved. And Herr Schulz, waving his hat in the air, his long silver locks flying grotesquely in the wind, receded and glided away.

“_She_ had not stirred at all then....” He felt a mild pang for his pride. He had adjusted his things on the rack. It was hot in the compartment, but he had not yet taken off his coat because the old lady next him was sitting on his coat buttons. Past glided the long yellow building, the barracks, the hills, the Café Schindler, the City Hall, the river--towers and pinnacles. “All the same,” he reflected, “I think I like the old duffer best.”

THE BIG DRUM

The brass band played _Im Köpfle zwei Augle_, and it seemed to her that the souls of these men were like notes of this music, crying for something elusive, for something in vain. To blare forth one’s love on a brass trumpet! An earnest of one’s high endeavour fallen short through the inadequate matter of brass; but withal in these abortive notes one felt the presence of the heights the instrument would reach, alas, if it but could!

It touched her to the heart. She would have liked her Otto to play the trumpet instead of the big drum. It seemed more romantic. Otto was not a bit romantic. He was a soldier all right, but he looked more like a man who had started life as a shoemaker’s apprentice, had grown old, and was still a shoemaker’s apprentice. The band played well--a compact synthetic body--but Otto was a forlorn figure who watched the proceedings with sustained and patient interest and was suffered by them, every now and then, to raise his drumstick and to give a solitary, judicious “Bang!” And he--a tall gaunt man--seemed as though he were ashamed of his small part. And as she watched him she felt a pang of pity for herself: wedded to him, she would be forgotten, while life, indifferent, strode by; and no one in the world would care whether she had her share of happiness before she died. And the music brought this out acutely, as if along the hard stone-paved indifference of life it dragged, dragged on excruciating its living bleeding soul. It spoke of loneliness, of laughter, of the pathos, pity and futility of life.

She watched them. The bayonets at their side. The military badges of rank. The hard discipline. And the music seemed to say, “Stop! What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” And thoughts flowed into her mind. Of soldiers dreaming on a Sunday afternoon. A fierce old corporal, of whom everyone was afraid, talking to her of children and of daisies. Soldiers who, too, had dreams in long waves--of what? she did not know--but not this. And the men who stood up and blew the brass trumpets seemed to say, and the shining trumpets themselves seemed to say: “We were not born for the Army; we were born for something better--though Heaven only knows what it is!”

That was so. Undeniably so. Yet she wished it were otherwise. It helped to make allowances for Otto. Whatever else he lacked, it made her think at least he had a soul. But to be wedded for life to the big drum! She did not fancy the idea. It didn’t seem a proper career. But Otto showed no sign of _wanting_ to “get on”--even in the orchestra. The most exasperating thing about it all was that Otto showed no sign of even _trying_! She had asked him if he would not, in time, “move on” and take over--say, the double-bass. He did not seem to think it either feasible or necessary. Or _necessary_! He had been with the big drum for close on twelve years. “It’s a good drum,” he had said. And that was all.

There was no ... “go” in him. That was it: no go. It was no use denying it. As she watched him--gaunt and spectacled--she wished Otto were more of a man and less of an old maid. The conductor, a boozer with a fat red face full of pimples, some dead and dried up, others still flourishing, was a gallant--every inch a man. He had the elasticity and suppleness and military alertness of the continental military man. She could not tell his rank from the stripes on his sleeves, but thought he must be a major. His heels were high and tipped with indiarubber, and so were straight and smart, but his trousers lacked the footstrap to keep them in position--poor dilapidated Austrian Army! How low it had sunk! Nevertheless they were tight and narrow and showed off the major’s calves to advantage. He wore a pince-nez, but a rimless kind, through which gazed a pair of not altogether innocent eyes. But a man and a leader of men. While Otto had no rubber on his heels. His heels looked eaten away. He wore a pair of spectacles through which he peered from afar at his neighbour’s music-stand, and at the appointed time--not one-tenth of a second too late or to early--down came the drumstick with the long-awaited “Bang!” So incidental, so contemptible was Otto’s part that, in addition to handling the drum, he had to turn the pages for the man who played the cymbals. It seemed to her humiliating. It was very wrong that Otto had no music-stand of his own.

He smiled shyly, and she turned away, annoyed. The little modiste walked on, meeting the stream of people who promenaded the path surrounding the bandstand; a man on high heels, three girls with a pinched look, a famous Tyrolese basso with a long ruddy beard, a _jeune premier_ with whiskers and hair like a wig, whose look appeared to imply: “Here am I.” Innsbruck looked morose that Sunday morning, and the military band in the park executed music that was tattered, gross, a little common, yet compelling, even like the daily fare of life. Oh, why were there no heroes? Of course she would have loved to be dominated. That’s what men were for. She was a womanly woman. From Vienna. Exalted, brimming over with life. These men of the Tyrol! And as for Otto? Why, she could have only waved her hand!