"Now I must put mamma to bed," whispered Fraulein 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'; is it 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 to-night. 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 of 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 Fraulein 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, Fraulein Sonia," I said, very pleased with myself, "why not marry him to your mother?" We were passing the hairdresser's shop at the moment. Fraulein 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. "Fraulein 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. Fraulein Sonia and Herr Professor had gone off for a day's excursion in the woods.
I wondered.
7. AT LEHMANN'S.
Certainly Sabina did not find life slow. She was on the trot from early morning until late at night. At five o'clock she tumbled out of bed, buttoned on her clothes, wearing a long-sleeved alpaca pinafore over her black frock, and groped her way downstairs into the kitchen.
Anna, the cook, had grown so fat during the summer that she adored her bed because she did not have to wear her corsets there, but could spread as much as she liked, roll about under the great mattress, calling upon Jesus and Holy Mary and Blessed Anthony himself that her life was not fit for a pig in a cellar.
Sabina was new to her work. Pink colour still flew in her cheeks; there was a little dimple on the left side of her mouth that even when she was most serious, most absorbed, popped out and gave her away. And Anna blessed that dimple. It meant an extra half-hour in bed for her; it made Sabina light the fire, turn out the kitchen and wash endless cups and saucers that had been left over from the evening before. Hans, the scullery boy, did not come until seven. He was the son of the butcher—a mean, undersized child very much like one of his father's sausages, Sabina thought. His red face was covered with pimples, and his nails indescribably filthy. When Herr Lehmann himself told Hans to get a hairpin and clean them he said they were stained from birth because his mother had always got so inky doing the accounts—and Sabina believed him and pitied him.
Winter had come very early to Mindelbau. By the end of October the streets were banked waist-high with snow, and the greater number of the "Cure Guests," sick unto death of cold water and herbs, had departed in nothing approaching peace. So the large salon was shut at Lehmann's and the breakfast-room was all the accommodation the cafe afforded. Here the floor had to be washed over, the tables rubbed, coffee-cups set out, each with its little china platter of sugar, and newspapers and magazines hung on their hooks along the walls before Herr Lehmann appeared at seven-thirty and opened business.
As a rule his wife served in the shop leading into the cafe, but she had chosen the quiet season to have a baby, and, a big woman at the best of times, she had grown so enormous in the process that her husband told her she looked unappetising, and had better remain upstairs and sew.
Sabina took on the extra work without any thought of extra pay. She loved to stand behind the counter, cutting up slices of Anna's marvellous chocolate-spotted confections, or doing up packets of sugar almonds in pink and blue striped bags.
"You'll get varicose veins, like me," said Anna. "That's what the Frau's got, too. No wonder the baby doesn't come! All her swelling's got into her legs." And Hans was immensely interested.
During the morning business was comparatively slack. Sabina answered the shop bell, attended to a few customers who drank a liqueur to warm their stomachs before the midday meal, and ran upstairs now and again to ask the Frau if she wanted anything. But in the afternoon six or seven choice spirits played cards, and everybody who was anybody drank tea or coffee.
"Sabina... Sabina..."
She flew from one table to the other, counting out handfuls of small change, giving orders to Anna through the "slide," helping the men with their heavy coats, always with that magical child air about her, that delightful sense of perpetually attending a party.
"How is the Frau Lehmann?" the women would whisper.
"She feels rather low, but as well as can be expected," Sabina would answer, nodding confidentially.