Part 21

“You will find what you are seeking in my work, Countess,” rejoined Wenk quickly.

Suddenly the butler, in his black livery, with its blue lappets and silver buttons, appeared noiselessly, and bent down whispering something to his mistress.

“My husband!” said the Countess to Wenk, fixing a steady and lingering glance on him, and as the Count came forward she introduced the two men.

Count Told was an extremely thin man, and gave an impression of excessive sprightliness. He was surprisingly young and very fashionably dressed. He gesticulated a good deal, and the movement of his hands gave prominence to a ring he wore, set with an unusual gem, such as Wenk had never before seen.

It might have been a flame topaz, with streaks of blood-red across it, trailing off into milky whiteness at the edges and emphasizing the clear honey colour of the transparent stone. In the middle of it, just where its lightning rays were most dazzling, was a tiny pearl, an islet, hardly larger than a freckle, but of a blue that put the sapphire into the shade, and....

Thus Wenk was thinking to himself, unable to keep his eyes from the jewel.

“It is a trifle too big for my hand,” said the Count, answering his visitor’s unspoken thoughts, “but the stone is so ... how shall I describe its originality? Well, I can only say that it is like a recital by Endivian, whom you doubtless know, and it was he who gave it to me. He brought it back from Penderappimur.”

“Is he the fashionable jeweller nowadays?” asked Wenk, who seemed somewhat at sea.

“Herr von Wenk,” said the Countess gravely, “Endivian is the fashionable young Goethe of this season.” Then she laughed. “No! Endivian the poet received the jewel at the Court of Artimerxes II, instead of the goblet, from the poem of his spiritual father ... you know it, ‘Give me no golden chain’ ... and when he returned, he announced in Germany, much as the Pope announces the Golden Rose, that his greatest admirer should have it. The choice fell upon my husband. It would have been better if he had given it me.”

“Why don’t you enthuse about him as I do?” asked the Count, with a pleasant smile, looking at her very tenderly as he spoke.

“Peter Resch dedicated his rubbish to him, and that was enough for me,” was the Countess’s laughing retort.

“Pooh, Peter Resch, indeed!” said the Count. “He is one of the Impressionists who has arrived. By the way, dearest, I have got something new.”

“From the Jennifer gallery?”

“Can one get a real picture anywhere else? There is nothing left.... And one has a clear and incontestable and direct impression. If the artistic temperament would only renounce colour ... it would be the beginning of really abstract thought, of the detachment from everything which needs the help of another consciousness to interpret its vision.”

The Countess replied, with apparent earnestness: “Thank Heaven, we do get a little further. If in the realm of music, too, genius had any prospect of renouncing the crash of sound when it desires to express itself, the world would soon be attaining its aim.”

The Count went on enthusiastically: “A sublime atmosphere of space ... in two blues ... which project into the cosmogony and play upon each other between storm and lightning....

“Whereupon the Almighty leaves His seat, dear Herr von Wenk, saying, ‘My creation has surpassed Me; I take My leave!’”

The conversation continued in this tone for awhile, and an hour later Wenk took his leave. He felt depressed as he drove home, but he had hardly sat down to dinner when a note was brought him, and he read:

DEAR HERR VON WENK,

I am sorry that our meeting to-day fell out differently from the one we had planned. That is not why I am writing to you, however, for we can continue our conversation in another place and at another time. But you may have left our house under the impression that my husband was “nothing but a fool,” and in his wife’s eyes too, and that would have been my fault, so I want to entreat you not to allow yourself to take up a depreciatory attitude. It is true that the Count buys Futurist pictures, but that must be understood more or less symbolically. I have always found that the more “foolish” a man appeared at one’s first encounter with him, the more approachable he became when one met him in his more serious moments.

Au revoir ... but when, and where?

Yours sincerely, LUCY TOLD.

“So Lucy is her name? And indeed she is rightly called Light. If she were my light of life!... Oh, what a fool I am,” said he, as he felt an unaccustomed warmth steal over him--a warmth for which he always yearned.... Then he stood up, shaking off these delicious tremors, and saying sternly to himself, “This is a pretty way to reach a criminal ... through falling in love with a beautiful woman.”

The telephone rang: “Hull speaking!”

Hull told him that a new gaming-house had been opened, and he really must visit it. The saloon was not only arranged to accommodate a large number of people, at least a hundred, but it had certain mechanical contrivances which could turn it into a music-hall if the police were to appear. He did not know how it was done, but Cara had written to him about it and she was always au courant of any new sensation of this kind. They were going there, and taking Karstens with them, but Hull did not know the address of this place, and they would trust to Cara’s guidance. Of course, she knew nothing about his writing to Wenk.

A rendezvous was arranged, and at ten o’clock Wenk drove to the Café Bastin, whence they were to set out.

VII

The house they entered lay on the border of the inner city, in one of the mean, sordid streets leading to Schwabing. Its outward appearance, like its neighbours’, showed an unimposing façade. It was one of those shops having lodgings above, and the sliding shutters over the shop were drawn to the ground. It was too dark to read the name, but Wenk noticed the number, that of his birth-year--’76.