an unhappy man right from the start. All these suicides, he said, were unhappy people right from the start, sometimes more so, sometimes less, but always essentially unhappy. It never comes as a surprise when they end up killing themselves, he said. When Joana was engaged by the Burgtheater management to teach the actors how to walk he had found the whole idea crazy. The managers of the Burgtheater were forever coming up with crazy ideas, he said. They wanted to help people like Joana, but this meant that they were bound to come up with some crazy idea. The actors at the Burgtheater are quite capable of walking, he said, and of standing and sitting and lying. He could clearly remember the observations of one Viennese criticaster, as he put it, which were published in the Presse, to the effect that the actors at the Burgtheater could neither walk norspeak, or at least that they could not do both at once. Whenever a critic writes this kind of nonsense, said the actor, it’s immediately taken up by the theater management. In this case they engaged a speech instructor, so that the actors could learn to speak. Absurd! said the actor. But if it helped our dear departed friend, he said, then there was some point in it. While he was speaking I recalled how distastefully Jeannie had behaved at Kilb. After the funeral she had gone to the woman from the general store and pressed a hundred-schilling note into her hand to cover the cost of the telephone call she had made from Kilb to inform her of Joana’s death. Less than a hundred yards from the grave she had pressed this hundred-schilling note into the woman’s hand, I thought, in such a tasteless manner that the woman could not help feeling insulted. In fact she really was insulted by Jeannie’s behavior, for it would never occur to a person like her to expect to be reimbursed for making a telephone call to report her friend’s death to another friend. But Jeannie always went in for that kind of tasteless behavior, I thought: she hasn’t changed. But not content with this, she turned up at the IronHand, where I had gone with the woman from the general store to continue our conversation about Joana, and had the impertinence to go around among the funeral guests begging for money for poorJohn, who was now all alone, she said, and had to payfor all the funeral arrangements — who did not have a single penny, but had to meet all the expenses connected with Joana’s funeral. She would make the first donation, as she put it, by contributing five hundred schillings. Jeannie has always played the Good Samaritan, I now reflected, and I’ve always found it repugnant, since she’s never been motivated by genuine charity: it’s always been an act intended to demonstrate her social concern. All her life she’s had an unstable and unsavory character and has never been above using any available means to put others in the wrong, as she did at Kilb after Joana’s funeral. She had the audacity to pick up an empty cigar box and place her own five-hundred-schilling note in it, then go from one mourner to another canvassing contributions, with an expression on her face that made one want to slap it rather than give her any money for John, poor though he may have been — holding out the cigar box and carefully noting the amounts her victims were prepared to contribute and actually did contribute. Everyone found this performance of hers quite tasteless, and curiously enough it was Auersberger who voiced their feelings by suddenly saying to her face, How tasteless you are,howtasteless,howtasteless! Twice he repeated the words howtasteless—in other words he uttered them three times altogether — and then threw a thousand-schilling note into the cigar box. Finally there was a sum of several thousand schillings in the box, together with a hundred and twenty pounds which I had put in. Jeannie walked over to the table at which John was sitting with the woman from the store and myself and tipped out the contents of the cigar box on the table in front of him, behaving as though it were her money, all her own work, as it were. And indeed it was all her own tasteless work, but by no means her own money — her own tastelessness, but not her own money, I had said to myself at the time, though I refrained from telling her that I thought she was disgusting. That was the proper word for her, and it was on the tip of my tongue. The Virginia Woolf of Vienna, I thought at the time, who has used John as a means of once more parading her social concern, thereby facing him with one of the most embarrassing situations of his life! He would have liked to crawl under the table. People like Jeannie Billroth, who have a great understanding of art (or used to have), lack any instinct for real life, for dealing with real people, I thought. And this, it now occurred to me, has more than a little to do with the fact that, having perhaps once been a truly gifted artist, an artist of considerable talent, Jeannie has in the course of the last two decades developed into an unscrupulous, petit bourgeois hypocrite of the most dreadful kind. But she always made this hypocritical pretense to social concern, I thought, though thirty years ago, even twenty years ago, this repellent side of her character did not strike me with such depressing force as it does today, I thought. In fact in those days I was unaware of her weaknesses and the generally disagreeable traits in her personality. For a long time we see only one side of a person’s personality, because for reasons of self-preservation we do not wish to see any other, I thought, then suddenly we see all sides of their personality and are disgusted by them, I thought. I sat in the Iron Hand for over two hours, and finally took my leave shortly after Jeannie had left for Vienna with the Auersbergers. Once more I could see her ostentatious fir wreath adorned with a bright silvery bow imprinted with the words FromJeannie, which the sexton had contrived to place on top of the pile of flowers by the graveside in such a way that everybody saw only the one name Jeannie. Not that I suspect Jeannie of having prevailed upon the sexton to give her wreath such prominence, but all the same it was her wreath with the words From Jeannie that had pride of place, and this seemed to sum up the whole of her performance at Kilb. She was also the only one who had prayed aloud with the local people; this I found almost insufferable, considering that Jeannie is not a Catholic and has always disparaged Christianity, at least when speaking to me. She put on a show of being pious, and this was the most repulsive aspect of the ceremony; no one else, I thought, had made this distasteful pretense of piety. At Kilb she behaved altogether as though she were Joana’s bestfriend, though I know that in reality she had let Joana down, abandoning her at the very moment when she was deserted by Fritz, the fashionable artist of the Sebastiansplatz — the moment the lights went out in the Sebastiansplatz, as it were, when there were no more parties and no longer anything to be gained by going there. She pretended to be her closest friend, whereas she had been a deserter from Joana’s cause for years. And then she had arranged for her wreath to have this dreadful bow with the words From Jeannie attached to it, in the belief that this would somehow cancel out years of disloyalty, I thought. And I thought to myself: she hates me because, contrary to her wishes, I finally became a writer, no matter what kind of a writer — a writer all the same, in other words a competitor, and not an actor or a producer or a theater manager, as she would have liked me to become. This, after all, was the reason why one day she introduced me to Joana, I thought. At all costs she wanted to prevent my becoming a writer, I thought, but now that I had become one she hated me for it. In her eyes I had committed a capital offense by becoming a writer in spite of everything — in spite of everything, I am bound to repeat, in spite of all her efforts to prevent me. And I thought of all the venom with which she had pursued me during the last twenty years in the pages of her journal