by Leo Perutz
In a few days' time Eugen Bischoff was to play Richard III for the first time; that had been in all the newspapers, but he did not welcome Dr Gorski's suggestion. He twisted his mouth and frowned.
"Not today," he said. "Another time I'll do it with pleasure."
Dina and her brother set vigorously about trying to persuade him to change his mind. Why not today? Why be so temperamental? When everyone would enjoy it so much.
"Those enjoying the privilege of knowing you personally, Bischoff," Dr Gorski announced, "are surely entitled to some precedence over the common herd in the boxes and the stalls."
Eugen Bischoff shook his head and refused to give in.
"No, not today, it just wouldn't do. You'd hear something that's simply not ready for performance yet, and I don't want that."
"A kind of dress rehearsal before close friends," the engineer suggested.
"No, you mustn't press me. Normally I don't refuse, in fact I enjoy doing what you ask, but today it's out of the question. I haven't visualised Richard yet, I must be able to see him standing in front of me, it's essential."
Dr Gorski apparently gave in, but he once more slyly twinkled at me, for he had an excellent and well tried method of overcoming the actor's resistance, and had decided to use it now. He set about it very cautiously and cleverly by talking with the most innocent expression on his face about a very mediocre Berlin actor whom he said he had seen playing the part. He praised the man's performance highly.
"You know I'm not a mere gallery fan, Bischoff, but that Semblinsky — he's simply marvellous," he said. "The ideas the man has. The way he sits on the palace steps, throws his glove up in the air and catches it, and then lies down and stretches out like a cat in the sunshine. And then there's the way he builds up the soliloquy."
And to give Eugen Bischoff an idea of what the man's performance was like he began declaiming with passionate gestures and much pathos:
"Cheated of feature by dissembling nature
Unfinished, deformed ..."
He interrupted himself with some textual criticism. "No, it's the other way round, deformed comes first. Never mind.
"Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world — "
At this point the actor interrupted, still very gently. "That's enough, doctor," he said.
"Into this breathing world — don't interrupt me, please -
scarce half made up
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them ..."
"That's enough," Bischoff exclaimed, putting his hands to his ears. "Stop! You make me feel ill."
But Dr Gorski was not to be put off so easily.
"Why I, in this piping time of peace
Have no delight to pass away the time;
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore — since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days —
I am determined to prove a villain ..."
"And I'm determined to wring your neck if you don't stop," Eugen Bischoff declared threateningly. "I ask you, you turn Gloucester into a sentimental clown. Richard III is a beast of prey, a monster, a brute — but yet he's a man and a king, not a hysterical buffoon, damn it."
He began pacing excitedly up and down the room, carried away by the part. Then he suddenly stopped. What happened next was exactly what Dr Gorski had expected.
"I'll show you how to play Richard III. But quiet, please, I'll give you the soliloquy."
"I have my own conception of the character," Dr Gorski said with cool impertinence. "But please — you're the actor, I'm always willing to learn."
Eugen Bischoff rewarded him with a glance full of malice and contempt. In the process of transforming himself into the Shakespearean king he was no longer faced with Dr Gorski, but with his wretched brother Clarence.
"Listen," he said. He rapped out the word as if he were giving an order. "I'm going over to the pavilion for a few minutes. Meanwhile open the window. It's intolerable here because of the smoke. I shan't be long."
"Are you going to put on make-up? Why, Eugen? We'll do without it," Dina's brother said.
Eugen Bischoff's eyes flickered and shone. Never before had I seen him in such a state of excitation, and he said something very strange.
"Make-up? No. What I want is to see the button on the uniform. You must leave me alone for a while. I'll be back in a couple of minutes."
He went out, but came back immediately.
"Listen," he said. "That Semblinsky, that great Semblinsky of yours. Do you know what he is? He's a fool. I once saw him as Iago, it was a disaster."
Then he went. I saw him walking quickly across the garden, talking to himself and gesticulating, he was already in the world of Richard III, in Baynard's Castle. In his hurry he nearly knocked over his old gardener, who was still kneeling on the lawn cutting the grass, though by now it was quite dark outside. Then he disappeared, and a moment later the pavilion windows were brightly lit, scattering tremulous shafts of light and shifting shadows into the big, quiet, night-time garden.
FOUR
Dr Gorski was still declaiming Shakespearean verse with false pathos and absurdly extravagant gestures. Eugen Bischoff having left the room, he did this partly out of sheer enthusiasm for Shakespeare, partly out of pig-headedness, and partly to pass the time pending the actor's return. Being completely carried away by this time, he had got to King Lear and, to the distress of the rest of us, insisted on singing the jester's songs in that hoarse voice of his to any tune that came into his head. Meanwhile the engineer sat silently in his armchair, chainsmoking and gazing at the pattern of the carpet at his feet. He could not get the young naval officer's story out of his head, his tragic and puzzling suicide left him no peace. Every now and then he started up and looked with amazement at the singing doctor, shaking his head as at a strange and extraordinary phenomenon, and once he tried to drag him back to the world of rational reality.
He leaned forward and took Dr Gorski's wrist.
"Listen, doctor, there's one thing that I simply can't understand. Listen to me for a moment, please. Let us assume it was suicide on a sudden impulse. But in that case why did he lock himself in his room a quarter of an hour beforehand? Why should he lock himself in his room if he was thinking of suicide? Why? Explain that to me, please."
"That lord that counsell'd thee
To give away thy land
Come place him here by me
Do thou for him stand ..."
That was Dr Gorski's only reply, apart from an irritable gesture as if he were shooing away a fly that was bothering him.
"Oh, stop that nonsense," the engineer said to him. "He locked the door a quarter of an hour beforehand. So the presumption is that he had plenty of time to make his preparations. But then he jumped out of the window. An officer who has a revolver and a whole box of ammunition in a drawer of his desk does not do that."
Dr Gorski did not allow himself to be diverted by such considerations from his Shakespearean recitation. The small, slightly malformed gnome, standing in the middle of the room, completely carried away by his performance and plucking the strings of an imaginary lute, provided a comic interlude when he sang
"The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear ..."
The engineer at last realised the hopelessness of trying to get him to take an interest in his theories, and he turned to me.
"The two things are mutually exclusive, don't you agree?" he said. "Don't let me forget to ask Eugen Bischoff about it before we go."
"Where has my sister vanished to?" Felix suddenly asked.
"She was quite right to leave, there's much too much smoke in the room," Solgrub said, stubbing out his cigarette. "Magna pars fui, it's largely my fault, I admit. We should have opened the window, but forgot."
No-one noticed when I got up and l
eft the room, noiselessly shutting the door behind me. I hoped I would find Dina in the garden. I walked round the path that surrounded the lawn until I reached the wooden fence of the next-door garden, but she was not in any of her usual places. There was an open book on the garden table under the slope, and the leaves felt damp from the rain of the past few days or from the evening dew. Once I thought I could see someone in a recess in the wall and thought it must be Dina, but when I drew near it turned out to be some gardening tools, two empty watering cans, a basket, a rake propped up against the wall and a torn hammock moving in the wind.
I don't know how long I stayed in the garden. It may have been a long time. I may have been leaning against a tree and dreaming.
Suddenly I heard the sound of voices and loud laughter from the room, and someone's hand swept high-spiritedly up the keys of the piano from the lowest octaves to the shrill highest notes. Felix's figure appeared like a big, dark shadow at the open window.
"Hi, is that you, Eugen?" he called down into the garden. "No, it isn't, it's you, baron. Where have you been all this time?"
There was suddenly an anxious note in his voice.
Dr Gorski appeared behind him, he recognised me, and began declaiming.
"Here, in the moon's pale light, we meet ..."
He broke off, because one of the two others dragged him away from the window, and I heard him call out: "How dare you, traitor?"
Then all was quiet again. Light suddenly appeared on the first floor over their heads. Dina appeared on the veranda and started laying the table for supper in the milky glow of the standard lamp.
I went back towards the house and up the wooden steps to the veranda. Dina heard my footsteps, turned and shaded her eyes with her hand.
"Is that you, Gottfried?" she said.
I sat silently facing her and watched as she arranged the plates and glasses on the white tablecloth. I listened to her deep and steady breathing, she breathed like a dreamlessly sleeping child. The wind bent and shook the branches of the chestnut trees and swept small cavalcades of withered autumn leaves before it down the gravel path. Down in the garden the old gardener was still at work. He had lit his lantern, which was next to him on the lawn, and its melancholy glow mingled with the broad band of steady bright light coming from the windows of the pavilion.
Suddenly I started.
Someone had called out my name — "Yosch!" — just my name, nothing else, but in the sound of that voice there was something that startled me — anger, reproach, horror and surprise . . .
Dina stopped laying the table and listened. Then she looked at me inquiringly and with surprise in her voice.
"That was Eugen," she said. "What can he be wanting?"
Then Eugen cried out a second time. "Dina! Dina!" he cried, but his voice was completely changed, there was no more anger or surprise in it, but anguish, grief and infinite despair.
"I'm here, Eugen, I'm here," she cried, leaning out over the garden.
For two or three seconds there was no reply. Then a shot rang out, followed immediately by another.
I saw Dina start back, she stood there unable to speak or move. I couldn't stay with her, I had to go down and find out what had happened. I think I remember that at the first moment I had a distinct impression of two intruders who had climbed over the garden fence to steal fruit. I don't know how it happened, but I found myself in a dark, unfamiliar room on the raised ground floor. I couldn't find the way out, and I couldn't find the window or the electric-light switch. There was nothing but the wall everywhere, and I struck my brow painfully against something with a sharp edge. I groped about in the dark for some minutes getting angrier and angrier and more and more dismayed.
Then I heard footsteps, a door opened, a match flared up in the darkness, and I found myself face to face with the engineer.
"What was it? What happened?" I asked, full of alarm and fear, yet glad that there was light at last and that I was no longer alone. "What was it? What happened?" The idea of thieves breaking in that had formed in my mind hardened into a distinct vision I was convinced I had actually seen. I was now sure I had seen three of them. One of them, a short, bearded man, was clinging to the top of the fence, another was just rising from the ground while the third, using the bushes and tree-trunks as cover, ran towards the pavilion with long, loping strides.
"What happened?" I asked yet again. The match went out, and the engineer's pale and distraught face disappeared in the darkness.
"I'm looking for Dina," I heard him say. "We mustn't let her go to him. It's terrible. One of us must stay with her."
"She's up on the veranda."
"How could you leave her alone?" he exclaimed, and a moment later he was outside.
I found the music room. It was empty, and outside the door a chair had been upset.
I went down to the garden. I still remember the torment of impatience I felt for a brief moment because the garden path was so long and seemed never-ending.
The pavilion door was open, and I went in.
I knew at once, even before I looked into the room. I knew what had happened. I knew that there had been no struggle with intruders, but that Eugen Bischoff had committed suicide. Where my certainty came from I cannot say.
He lay next to the desk with his face turned in my direction. His coat and waistcoat were unbuttoned, and he had a revolver in his stiffly outstretched right hand. In falling he had brought down two books, the inkstand and a small marble bust of Iffland. Dr Gorski was kneeling on the floor beside him.
He was still alive when I got there. He opened his eyes, his hand trembled, his head moved. Or was that an illusion? His face was slightly distorted with pain, and when he recognised me, or so I thought, it assumed an expression of indescribable, overwhelming surprise.
He tried to sit up, he wanted to speak, groaned, and fell back. Dr Gorski held his left hand. But that puzzling expression of infinite surprise lasted for only a brief moment. Then it turned into a grimace of blazing hatred.
Those hate-filled eyes were directed at me, and so they remained and would not let me go. They were directed at me, at me alone, and I did not, could not understand what he was trying to say to me. Also I could not understand, it was utterly unintelligible to me that I, faced with a dying man, felt no awe or terror or shock, but merely a slight discomfort at the way he looked at me and a dread of coming into contact with the bloodstain on the carpet, which was getting bigger and bigger all the time.
Dr Gorski rose to his feet. Eugen Bischoff's face, normally so mobile, had turned into a stiff, pale, silent mask.
I heard Felix call out from the door:
"She's coming, she's in the garden, doctor, what are we to do?"
Dr Gorski had taken a mackintosh from the wall and spread it over Eugen Bischoff's lifeless body.
"Go and meet her, doctor," Felix implored. "Talk to her, I can't."
I saw Dina approaching the pavilion, and the engineer was with her, trying to stop her. I was suddenly overcome with an immense weariness, I found standing difficult, I wanted to fling myself down on the lawn to rest. It's nothing, I said to myself, just a passing weakness, perhaps because of the way I rushed through the garden just now.
And, while Dina disappeared through the door of the pavilion I had a strange experience.
It was the deaf gardener. He was standing beside me, bending over the grass, still working away as if nothing had happened.
So far as he was concerned, nothing had happened. To him everything was as it had been before. He had not heard the cry or the shots. But now he must have felt my eyes on him, for he stood up and looked at me.
"You called me, sir," he said.
I shook my head. No, I hadn't called him.
He didn't believe me. The muffled, confused noise that reached his deaf ears had given him a vague idea that someone had called his name.
"But you did call me, sir," he said grumpily, but he was still suspicious of me and kept me under observation, lo
oking at me sideways while he went on with his work.
And only now was I overcome with the horror I had not felt when faced with Eugen Bischoff's body, but now it was suddenly there, and shock sent ice-cold shivers down my spine.
No, I had not called him. But the way he stood there and stared at me and swung the sickle as he cut the grass: he was the deaf elderly gardener, but for a moment he looked like the figure of death in an old picture.
FIVE
It lasted only for a moment, and then I regained control of my nerves and my senses. I shook my head, I could not help smiling at the fact that in a waking dream I had seen in that simple old servant of the household the silent messenger, the ferryman across the everlasting stream. Slowly I walked down the garden until I reached the edge of the slope, and there, at a concealed spot between the fence and the greenhouse I found a table and a bench, and sat down.
It must have rained, or was it the evening dew? The wet leaves and branches of the elderberry bushes brushed against my face, a drop of water trickled down my hand. There must have been some spruce or pine trees not far away, I could not see them in the dark, but their smell reached me.
It did me good to sit there. I breathed in the cool, damp garden air, I let the wind stroke my face, and I listened to the breathing of the night. Inside me there was a quietly nagging anxiety, I was afraid they might have missed me and be looking for me, and that they might find me here. No, I must remain alone, there was no-one to whom I could talk at that moment. I was afraid of meeting Dina and her brother — what, at that moment, could I have said to them? Nothing but empty words of pitifully inadequate commiseration, the triviality of which filled me with horror.
It was clear to me that my disappearance would be taken for what at the deepest level it really was — flight from the gravity of the hour. But I didn't mind. I remembered that I had often done the same thing as a child. On my mother's name day, when I should have recited the carefully inculcated verses and good wishes, I had been afflicted by similar fears, and took refuge somewhere where no-one could find me, and reappeared only when everything was over.
