Part 14

“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 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 Herr Professor had gone off for a day’s excursion in the woods.

I wondered.

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.