Fräulein Sonia raised her face to the sky and half closed her eyes. “No, mamma, my face is quite warm. Oh, look, Herr Professor, there are swallows in flight; they are like a little flock of Japanese thoughts — nicht wahr?”
“Where?” cried the Herr Professor. “Oh yes, I see, by the kitchen chimney. But why do you say ‘Japanese’? Could you not compare them with equal veracity to a little flock of German thoughts in flight?” He rounded on me. “Have you swallows in England?”
“I believe there are some at certain seasons. But doubtless they have not the same symbolical value for the English. In Germany—”
“I have never been to England,” interrupted Fräulein Sonia, “but I have many English acquaintances. They are so cold!” She shivered.
“Fish-blooded,” snapped Frau Godowska. “Without soul, without heart, without grace. But you cannot equal their dress materials. I spent a week in Brighton twenty years ago, and the travelling cape I bought there is not yet worn out — the one you wrap the hot-water bottle in, Sonia. My lamented husband, your father, Sonia, knew a great deal about England. But the more he knew about it the oftener he remarked to me, ‘England is merely an island of beef flesh swimming in a warm gulf sea of gravy.’ Such a brilliant way of putting things. Do you remember, Sonia?”
“I forget nothing, mamma,” answered Sonia.
Said the Herr Professor: “That is the proof of your calling, gnädiges Fräulein. Now I wonder — and this is a very interesting speculation — is memory a blessing or — excuse the word — a curse?”
Frau Godowska looked into the distance, then the corners of her mouth dropped and her skin puckered. She began to shed tears.
“Ach Gott! Gracious lady, what have I said?” exclaimed the Herr Professor.
Sonia took her mother’s hand. “Do you know,” she said “tonight it is stewed carrots and nut tart for supper. Suppose we go in and take our places,” her sidelong, tragic stare accusing the Professor and me the while.
I followed them across the lawn and up the steps. Frau Godowska was murmuring, “Such a wonderful, beloved man”; with her disengaged hand Fräulein Sonia was arranging the sweet-pea “garniture”.
—
“A concert for the benefit of afflicted Catholic infants will take place in the salon at eight-thirty p.m. Artists: Fräulein Sonia Godowska, from Vienna; Herr Professor Windberg and his trombone; Frau Oberlehrer Weidel and others.”
This notice was tied round the neck of the melancholy stag’s head in the dining-room. It graced him like a red and white dinner bib for days before the event, causing the Herr Professor to bow before it and say “good appetite” until we sickened of his pleasantry and left the smiling to be done by the waiter, who was paid to be pleasing to the guests.
On the appointed day the married ladies sailed about the pension dressed like upholstered chairs, and the unmarried ladies like draped muslin dressing-table covers. Frau Godowska pinned a rose in the centre of her reticule; another blossom was tucked in the mazy folds of a white antimacassar thrown across her breast. The gentlemen wore black coats, white silk ties and ferny buttonholes tickling the chin.
The floor of the salon was freshly polished, chairs and benches arranged, and a row of little flags strung across the ceiling — they flew and jigged in the draught with all the enthusiasm of family washing. It was arranged that I should sit beside Frau Godowska, and that the Herr Professor and Sonia should join us when their share of the concert was over.
“That will make you feel quite one of the performers,” said the Herr Professor genially. “It is a great pity that the English nation is so unmusical. Never mind! Tonight you shall hear something — we have discovered a nest of talent during the rehearsals.”
“What do you intend to recite, Fräulein Sonia?”
She shook back her hair. “I never know until the last moment. When I come on the stage I wait for one moment and then I have the sensation as though something struck me here” — she placed her hand upon her collar brooch — “and … words come!”
“Bend down a moment,” whispered her mother. “Sonia, love, your skirt safety is showing at the back. Shall I come outside and fasten it properly for you, or will you do it yourself?”
“Oh, mamma, please don’t say such things.” Sonia flushed and grew very angry. “You know how sensitive I am to the slightest unsympathetic impression at a time like this.… I would rather my skirt dropped off my body.”
“Sonia — my heart!”
A bell tinkled.
The waiter came in and opened the piano. In the heated excitement of the moment he entirely forgot what was fitting, and flicked the keys with the grimy table napkin he carried over his arm. The Frau Oberlehrer tripped on the platform followed by a very young gentleman, who blew his nose twice before he hurled his handkerchief into the bosom of the piano.
“Yes, I know you have no love for me,
And no forget-me-not.
No love, no heart, and no forget-me-not,”
sang the Frau Oberlehrer, in a voice that seemed to issue from her forgotten thimble and have nothing to do with her.
“Ach, how sweet, how delicate,” we cried, clapping her soothingly. She bowed as though to say, “Yes, isn’t it?” and retired, the very young gentleman dodging her train and scowling.
The piano was closed, an arm-chair was placed in the centre of the platform. Fräulein Sonia drifted towards it. A breathless pause. Then, presumably, the winged shaft struck her collar brooch. She implored us not to go into the woods in trained dresses, but rather as lightly draped as possible, and bed with her among the pine needles. Her loud, slightly harsh voice filled the salon. She dropped her arms over the back of the chair, moving her lean hands from the wrists. We were thrilled and silent. The Herr Professor, beside me, abnormally serious, his eyes bulging, pulled at his moustache ends. Frau Godowska adopted that peculiarly detached attitude of the proud parent. The only soul who remained untouched by her appeal was the waiter, who leaned idly against the wall of the salon and cleaned his nails with the edge of a programme. He was “off duty” and intended to show it.
“What did I say?” shouted the Herr Professor under cover of tumultuous applause, “tem-per-ament! There you have it. She is a flame in the heart of a lily. I know I am going to play well. It is my turn now. I am inspired. Fräulein Sonia” — as that lady returned to us, pale and draped in a large shawl — “you are my inspiration. To-night you shall be the soul of my trombone. Wait only.”
To right and left of us people bent over and whispered admiration down Fräulein Sonia’s neck. She bowed in the grand style.
“I am always successful,” she said to me. “You see, when I act I am. In Vienna, in the plays of Ibsen we had so many bouquets that the cook had three in the kitchen. But it is difficult here. There is so little magic. Do you not feel it? There is none of that mysterious perfume which floats almost as a visible thing from the souls of the Viennese audiences. My spirit starves for want of that.” She leaned forward, chin on hand. “Starves,” she repeated.
The Professor appeared with his trombone, blew into it, held it up to one eye, tucked back his shirt cuffs and wallowed in the soul of Sonia Godowska. Such a sensation did he create that he was recalled to play a Bavarian dance, which he acknowledged was to be taken as a breathing exercise rather than an artistic achievement. Frau Godowska kept time to it with a fan.
Followed the very young gentleman who piped in a tenor voice that he loved somebody, “with blood in his heart and a thousand pains”. Fräulein Sonia acted a poison scene with the assistance of her mother’s pill vial and the arm-chair replaced by a chaise longue; a young girl scratched a lullaby on a young fiddle; and the Herr Professor performed the last sacrificial rites on the altar of the afflicted children by playing the National Anthem.
“Now I must put mamma to bed,” whispered Fräulein Sonia. “But afterwards I must take a walk. It is imperative that I free my spirit in the open air for a moment. Would you
come with me as far as the railway station and back?”
“Very well, then, knock on my door when you’re ready.”
Thus the modern soul and I found ourselves together under the stars.
“What a night!” she said. “Do you know that poem of Sappho about her hands in the stars.… I am curiously sapphic. And this is so remarkable — not only am I sapphic, I find in all the works of all the greatest writers, especially in their unedited letters, some touch, some sign of myself — some resemblance, some part of myself, like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror.”
“But what a bother,” said I.
“I do not know what you mean by ‘bother’; it is rather the curse of my genius.…” She paused suddenly, staring at me. “Do you know my tragedy?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“My tragedy is my mother. Living with her I live with the coffin of my unborn aspirations. You heard that about the safety-pin tonight. It may seem to you a little thing, but it ruined my three first gestures. They were—”
“Impaled on a safety-pin,” I suggested.
“Yes, exactly that. And when we are in Vienna I am the victim of moods, you know. I long to do wild, passionate things. And mamma says, ‘Please pour out my mixture first.’ Once I remember I flew into a rage and threw a washstand jug out the window. Do you know what she said? ‘Sonia, it is not so much throwing things out of windows, if only you would—’”
“Choose something smaller?” said I.
“No … ‘tell me about it beforehand.’ Humiliating! And I do not see any possible light out of this darkness.”
“Why don’t you join a touring company and leave your mother in Vienna?”
“What! Leave my poor, little, sick, widowed mother in Vienna! Sooner than that I would drown myself. I love my mother as I love nobody else in the world — nobody and nothing! Do you think it is impossible to love one’s tragedy? ‘Out of my great sorrows I make my little songs,’ that is Heine or myself.”
“Oh, well, that’s all right,” I said cheerfully.
“But it is not all right!”
I suggested we should turn back. We turned.
“Sometimes I think the solution lies in marriage,” said Fräulein Sonia. “If I find a simple, peaceful man who adores me and will look after mamma — a man who would be for me a pillow — for genius cannot hope to mate — I shall marry him.… You know the Herr Professor has paid me very marked attentions.”
“Oh, Fräulein Sonia,” I said, very pleased with myself, “why not marry him to your mother?” We were passing the hairdresser’s shop at the moment. Fräulein Sonia clutched my arm.
“You, you,” she stammered. “The cruelty. I am going to faint. Mamma to marry again before I marry — the indignity. I am going to faint here and now.”
I was frightened. “You can’t,” I said, shaking her. “Come back to the pension and faint as much as you please. But you can’t faint here. All the shops are closed. There is nobody about. Please don’t be so foolish.”
“Here and here only!” She indicated the exact spot and dropped quite beautifully, lying motionless.
“Very well,” I said, “faint away; but please hurry over it.”
She did not move. I began to walk home, but each time I looked behind me I saw the dark form of the modern soul prone before the hairdresser’s window. Finally I ran, and rooted out the Herr Professor from his room. “Fräulein Sonia has fainted,” I said crossly.
“Du lieber Gott! Where? How?”
“Outside the hairdresser’s shop in the Station Road.”
“Jesus and Maria! Has she no water with her?” — he seized his carafe — “nobody beside her?”
“Nothing.”
“Where is my coat? No matter, I shall catch a cold on the chest. Willingly, I shall catch one .… You are ready to come with me?”
“No,” I said; “you can take the waiter.”
“But she must have a woman. I cannot be so indelicate as to attempt to loosen her stays.”
“Modern souls oughtn’t to wear them,” said I. He pushed past me and clattered down the stairs.
—
When I came down to breakfast next morning there were two places vacant at table. Fräulein Sonia and the Herr Professor had gone off for a day’s excursion in the woods.
I wondered.
The Advanced Lady
— 1910 —
Do you think we might ask her to come with us?” said Fräulein Elsa, re-tying her pink sash ribbon before my mirror. “You know, although she is so intellectual, I cannot help feeling convinced that she has some secret sorrow. And Lisa told me this morning, as she was turning out my room, that she remains hours and hours by herself, writing; in fact Lisa says she is writing a book! I suppose that is why she never cares to mingle with us, and has so little time for her husband and the child.”
“Well, you ask her,” said I. “I have never spoken to the lady.”
Elsa blushed faintly. “I have only spoken to her once,” she confessed. “I took her a bunch of wild flowers to her room, and she came to the door in a white gown, with her hair loose. Never shall I forget that moment. She just took the flowers, and I heard her — because the door was not quite properly shut — I heard her, as I walked down the passage, saying ‘Purity, fragrance, the fragrance of purity and the purity of fragrance!’ It was wonderful!”
At the moment Frau Kellermann knocked at the door.
“Are you ready?” she said, coming into the room and nodding to us very genially. “The gentlemen are waiting on the steps, and I have asked the Advanced Lady to come with us.”
“Na, how extraordinary!” cried Elsa. “But this moment the gnädige Frau and I were debating whether—”
“Yes, I met her coming out of her room and she said she was charmed with the idea. Like all of us, she has never been to Schlingen. She is downstairs now, talking to Herr Erchardt. I think we shall have a delightful afternoon.”
“Is Fritzi waiting too?” asked Elsa.
“Of course he is, dear child — as impatient as a hungry man listening for the dinner bell. Run along!”
Elsa ran, and Frau Kellermann smiled at me significantly. In the past she and I had seldom spoken to each other, owing to the fact that her “one remaining joy” — her charming little Karl — had never succeeded in kindling into flame those sparks of maternity which are supposed to glow in great numbers upon the altar of every respectable female heart; but, in view of a premeditated journey together, we became delightfully cordial.
“For us,” she said, “there will be a double joy. We shall be able to watch the happiness of these two dear children, Elsa and Fritz. They only received the letters of blessing from their parents yesterday morning. It is a very strange thing, but whenever I am in the company of newly engaged couples I blossom. Newly engaged couples, mothers with first babies, and normal deathbeds have precisely the same effect on me. Shall we join the others?”
I was longing to ask her why normal deathbeds should cause anyone to burst into flower, and said, “Yes, do let us.”
We were greeted by the little party of “cure guests” on the pension steps, with those cries of joy and excitement which herald so pleasantly the mildest German excursion. Herr Erchardt and I had not met before that day, so, in accordance with strict pension custom, we asked each other how long we had slept during the night, had we dreamed agreeably, what time had we got up, was the coffee fresh when we had appeared at breakfast, and how had we passed the morning. Having toiled up these stairs of almost national politeness we landed, triumphant and smiling, and paused to recover breath.
“And now,” said Herr Erchardt, “I have a pleasure in store for you. The Frau Professor is going to be one of us for the afternoon. Yes,” nodding graciously to the Advanced Lady. “Allow me to introduce you to each other.”
We bowed very formally, and looked each other over with that eye which is known as “eagle” but is far more the property of the
female than that most unoffending of birds. “I think you are English?” she said. I acknowledged the fact. “I am reading a great many English books just now — rather, I am studying them.”
“Nu,” cried Herr Erchardt. “Fancy that! What a bond already! I have made up my mind to know Shakespeare in his mother tongue before I die, but that you, Frau Professor, should be already immersed in those wells of English thought!”
“From what I have read,” she said, “I do not think they are very deep wells.”
He nodded sympathetically.
“No,” he answered, “so I have heard.… But do not let us embitter our excursion for our little English friend. We will speak of this another time.”
“Nu, are we ready?” cried Fritz, who stood, supporting Elsa’s elbow in his hand, at the foot of the steps. It was immediately discovered that Karl was lost.
“Ka-rl, Karl-chen!” we cried. No response.
“But he was here one moment ago,” said Herr Langen, a tired, pale youth, who was recovering from a nervous breakdown due to much philosophy and little nourishment. “He was sitting here, picking out the works of his watch with a hairpin!”
Frau Kellermann rounded on him. “Do you mean to say, my dear Herr Langen, you did not stop the child!”
“No,” said Herr Langen; “I’ve tried stopping him before now.”
“Da, that child has such energy; never is his brain at peace. If he is not doing one thing, he is doing another!”
“Perhaps he has started on the dining-room clock now,” suggested Herr Langen, abominably hopeful.
The Advanced Lady suggested that we should go without him. “I never take my little daughter for walks,” she said. “I have accustomed her to sitting quietly in my bedroom from the time I go out until I return!”
“There he is — there he is,” piped Elsa, and Karl was observed slithering down a chestnut tree, very much the worse for twigs.
In Bavaria Page 7
