Disorder and Early Sorrow

The principal dish at the midday meal had been confined to vegetables; that is, to cabbage fricandeaux; it was followed by a thin, flabby pudding, concocted from one of the pudding-powders, tasting of almonds and soap, which filled the shops. While Xavier, the youthful butler, in a striped coat which he had grown out of, in white cotton gloves and yellow sandals, served this mixture, the Big Ones gently reminded their father that they would have company today.

The Big Ones⁠—that is to say, Ingrid, who was eighteen years old and had brown eyes and was a very charming girl, and Bert, who was fair-haired and seventeen. Ingrid was about to graduate and was pretty certain of passing, if only for the reason that she was able to twist the teachers and especially the director round her little finger and exact absolute indulgence. She intended, however, to make no use of her degree, but to force her way upon the stage, by virtue of her agreeable smile, her equally engaging voice, and her marked and amusing talent for parody. Bert, for his part, was determined not to finish school at all, but to plunge into the thick of life at once, and become either a dancer, a cabaret reciter, or a waiter; the last, however, only “in Cairo”⁠—to which end he had once made an attempt to escape the parental home, at five in the morning, an attempt that had barely been frustrated. He revealed a decided resemblance to Xavier, the butler, who was of the same age; not because he was in any way ordinary⁠—he even bore in feature a close resemblance to his father, Professor Cornelius⁠—but rather through some approach from another side, or at least through a kind of alternating adjustment of types, in which an extensive compromise in the matter of clothes and in general behaviour played the chief part. Both wore their thick hair very long and carelessly parted in the middle, and in consequence both had acquired the same movement of the head, whenever they tossed back an obtruding lock from their foreheads. Whenever one of them went out through the garden gate, bareheaded no matter what the weather might be, and wearing a linen Norfolk jacket belted out of sheer sportiness with a leather strap, with body bent forward and head inclined slightly upon the shoulder, and rushed off, or mounted his bicycle⁠—Xavier indiscriminately using the bicycles of the whole family, even the women’s, and when he was particularly happy-go-lucky, even the professor’s⁠—then Doctor Cornelius, standing at his bedroom window, was unable, try as he might, to distinguish his son from his servant. He thought that they looked like young muzhiks, one like the other. Both were passionate cigarette-smokers, even though Bert had not the means to buy as many as Xavier, who had established a record of thirty a day, smoking a brand that bore the name of a popular film-star.

The Big Ones called their parents the “Ancients”⁠—not behind their backs, but in all affection and as a mode of address, though Cornelius was only forty-seven and his wife eight years younger. They would address father or mother as “Beloved Ancient!” or “Faithful Ancient!” The professor’s parents, who led the lives of permanently astounded and intimidated old people, were called the “Arch-ancients.” As to the Little Ones, Lorie and Biter, who ate in the upper nursery with “Blue Anna”⁠—so called from the colour of her cheeks⁠—these were accustomed to address him as their mother addressed him⁠—that is, by his Christian name, Abel. There was something indescribably droll in the rather extravagant and ingratiating manner and tone they assumed when they called or addressed him thus, especially in the sweet-chiming voice of five-year-old Eleonore, who looked exactly like Frau Cornelius in her childhood pictures, and whom the professor loved above everything.

“Ancient one,” said Ingrid pleasantly, and laid her large but beautiful hand upon her father’s⁠—he was sitting at the head of the table, according to the not unnatural bourgeois tradition, while she sat to his left, opposite her mother⁠—“good, dear ancestor, I am sure you have lost it in your subconscious. Well, it’s this afternoon that we’re having our little jollification, our little hop with herring salad accompaniment, and so it’s up to you to keep us in countenance and not to despair⁠—it will be all over by nine o’clock.”

“Oh!” said Cornelius with long-drawn face. “All right,” he added, and shook his head to show himself adjusted to the inevitable. “I merely thought⁠—is it really today? Why, yes, it is really Thursday. How time flies! When are they coming?”

“At half past four,” answered Ingrid, whose brother always permitted her to have precedence in their intercourse with the father. The guests might be expected about that time. He would hear nothing, so long as he took his nap in the second story, and from seven to eight he was sure to take his walk. He might even escape by way of the terrace if he had a mind to.

“Oh!” Cornelius remarked, as much as to say: “You exaggerate.”

Then Bert added, so as to have his say: “It’s the only evening in the whole week on which Van doesn’t have to play. He has to leave at half past six on every other day. That would be painful to all participants.”

“Van” was Ivan Herzl, the popular juvenile leading man of the National Theatre. He was a great friend of Bert and Ingrid, who frequently took tea at his flat and visited him in his dressing-room. He was an artist of the new school, and adopted poses on the stage which reminded the professor of a dancer, so precious and artificial did they seem, as he stood there and yelled tragically. A professor of history is sufficiently immune to that sort of thing, but Bert had succumbed greatly to Herzl’s influence and had even taken to darkening his lower eyelids, which had led to certain drastic but futile scenes with his father. Bert, with the ruthlessness and utter disregard of the young for the feelings of their elders, declared that he would not only take Herzl for his prototype in case he should decide to become a dancer, but that in the event of his becoming a waiter in Cairo he was determined to move, professionally, precisely in the same way.

Cornelius bowed slightly to his son, his eyebrows a trifle raised, signifying that proper diffidence and self-control suited to his generation. The pantomime was devoid of obvious irony and had a universal application. Bert might have related it to himself as well as to his friend’s talent for expression.

The master of the house inquired who else was coming. Several names were mentioned, more or less known to him. There were names from the world of suburban villas, from the city, names of schoolmates of Ingrid’s from the upper grade of the girls’ high school⁠—there was still some telephoning to be done. For example, there was Max to be rung up, Max Hergesell, a student of engineering, whose name Ingrid forthwith pronounced in that drawling and nasal tone which, according to her, was common to the mode of speech of all Hergesells. She proceeded with this parody in such a comic and realistic manner that her parents from sheer laughter were in danger of choking over the wretched pudding. For even in times such as these one was forced to laugh when something comic cropped up.

Then the telephone tinkled in the professor’s study and the Big Ones raced over to it, for they knew that the summons was for them. Many people were forced to give up the telephone after the last increase in taxes, but the Cornelius family had just managed to keep theirs, just as they had managed to keep the villa which they had built before the war, by virtue of the fact that the professor’s salary was increased in proportion to the inflation of the mark. This suburban house was elegant and comfortable, even though a bit neglected, since repairs had become impossible through lack of materials, and though disfigured by iron stoves with long pipes. But all this had served as the frame for the life of the upper middle class of prewar times, and life went on in this frame, though in a manner no longer suited to it⁠—that is, in a needy and difficult way, in worn and turned clothes. The children had never known anything else; for them this was quite the normal order of things, they were born proletarians of the villa. The question of clothes disturbed them little. This generation had invented a costume suitable to the times, a product both of poverty and the standards of the Boy Scout; in summer it consisted chiefly of a belted jacket of linen and a pair of sandals. The bourgeois Old Ones faced greater difficulties.

The Big Ones had hung their napkins over the backs of the chairs in the adjoining room and were talking over the telephone to their friends. They who had rung up were invited guests. They were bent on accepting or declining the invitation or upon discussing this or that matter. The Big Ones negotiated with them in the jargon of their circle, a kind of slang full of bounce and queer turns of phrase, of which the Ancients seldom understood a word. The Ancients, on their part, were discussing the refreshments to be offered. The professor displayed the pride and ambition of the middle classes. He declared that there ought to be a cake or something similar, following upon the Italian salad and the black-bread sandwiches of the evening meal. But Frau Cornelius declared that this would go too far⁠—the young people expected nothing of the sort, and the children supported her after they came back and had sat down to finish their pudding.

The housewife, whom Ingrid, though taller, resembled, was seedy and exhausted owing to the insane difficulties of the household. She ought to have gone to some health resort, but the quaking of the solid ground underfoot, the dropping-out of the bottom of things, had made this impossible for the time being. She thought of the eggs which must be bought today without fail, and began to speak of them: of the eggs at six thousand marks apiece which could be had only at a certain shop and only on this day⁠—the shop was about fifteen minutes distant. And only a certain number of eggs were sold to each customer, so the children would have to go there at once after lunch. Danny, the son of a neighbour, would come to fetch them, and Xavier, in civilian clothes, would also accompany the young people. For this shop sold only five eggs per week to one single household, and for this reason the young folks, each assuming a different name, were to enter the shop, one after the other, in order to capture a total of twenty eggs for the Villa Cornelius. This was great sport for the participants each week, including Xavier the muzhik-like, but especially for Ingrid and Bert, who were particularly bent upon mystifying and misleading their fellow beings, for the pure love of it, on every possible occasion, even when it was not a question of getting eggs.

They were fond, for example, of pretending in trams that they were somebody quite different, both by indireet means and by acting the part, and they would enter upon long, bogus conversations in a dialect which otherwise they never spoke, conversations which were quite ordinary, such as the common people carry on: the most commonplace stuff about politics and the prices of food and about persons that did not exist, so that the whole tram would listen with interest and sympathy, admiring their unlimited and ordinary glibness of tongue, though with a dark suspicion that something was not quite in order here. And then they would grow still more rash and impudent and begin to tell the most horrible stories about these nonexistent persons. Ingrid, assuming a high, uncertain, vulgar treble, was capable of declaring that she was a shopgirl who had an illegitimate child, a son who was a perfect monster of sadistic cruelty and who had recently tortured a cow in such an indescribable manner that no Christian soul could have looked upon it. The manner in which she would pronounce the word “tortured” in her chirping voice would bring Bert to the verge of exploding, but he would manage to control himself and manifest a kind of ghastly interest. And then he and the unfortunate shopgirl would begin a long and dreadful talk, at once stupid and wicked, as to the nature of such pathological cruelty, until some old gentleman, sitting diagonally opposite, with his tram-ticket carefully folded and tucked between his forefinger and his seal-ring, would discover that the limit had been reached and object publicly to such young people’s discussing themes of this sort in such detail. Ingrid would thereupon pretend that she was about to dissolve into tears, and Bert would apparently be seized by a deadly rage at the old gentleman, which he would be able to suppress only by the greatest efforts, though not for any length of time. He would clench his fists and gnash his teeth, and a trembling would go through his entire body, so that the old gentleman, who had meant well enough (the thing really happened) thought it best to leave the tram hurriedly at the next stop.

Such were the amusements of the Big Ones. The telephone played a prominent part. They rang up all sorts of persons, opera singers, high officials, and princes of the church, introduced themselves as saleswomen or as Count and Countess Mannsteufel, and were very difficult to persuade that they had got the wrong number. On one occasion they emptied the tray of visiting-cards and distributed the cards higgledy-piggledy⁠—but not without a certain feeling for the bewildering half-likelihood of things⁠—in the letterboxes of the quarter, whence proceeded great perturbation, since suddenly God knows who appeared to have visited Heaven knows whom.

Xavier, who had taken off his white cotton serving-gloves, so that the yellow chain-ring which he wore upon his left hand was seen, now entered to clear the table, tossing his hair; and while the professor drank up his “thin beer” at eight thousand marks a bottle, and lighted a cigarette, the Little Ones could be heard scampering downstairs and along the hall. They were coming as usual to greet their parents after lunch, storming the dining-room, battling with the door, to the knob of which they clung both together with their little hands, and then came in stamping and stumbling with hurrying, awkward little legs across the carpet, their feet covered with little red slippers of felt, over which their stockings had crept down in many folds and wrinkles. Each, shouting, explaining, and chattering, steered towards his accustomed goal. Biter headed for his mother and climbed into her lap to tell her how much he had eaten and as if in testimony thereof to show her his distended stomach, while Lorie went to her “Abel”⁠—who was so very much her own because she was so very much his own, and because she sensed the heartfelt and, like all deep emotions, somewhat melancholy tenderness with which he embraced her little feminine person and drank it in smilingly, and also the love with which he regarded her and kissed her exquisitely formed little hands, or her temples, upon which the delicate blue veins made such a tender and moving pattern.

The children revealed the strong yet indecisive similarity of a brother and sister, a likeness which was augmented by similar clothing and arrangement of the hair; and yet again, in the sense of male and female, they differed conspicuously from each other. They were a little Adam and a little Eve, that was clearly evident⁠—evidenced especially on Biter’s side by a certain consciousness and self-reliance; he was more set in his figure, stockier, stronger, and emphasized his four-year-old manly dignity in carriage, mien, and manner of speaking by letting his arms depend athletically from his slightly raised shoulders like a young American, or, when speaking, by drawing down the corners of his mouth and attempting to give his voice a deep, cheery ring. As a matter of fact, all this dignity and manliness was a show rather than an essential part of his nature, for he had been born and nursed in times of frantic upset, and his nervous system was very sensitive and unstable; he suffered severely from the petty annoyances of life, was disposed to be irascible, and often gave way to fits of fury, to embittered and despairing floods of tears over every trifle⁠—and was for this very reason the special pet of his mother. He had a longish little nose, a small mouth, and round eyes of chestnut-brown, which were inclined to squint a little and foretold the early wearing of a pair of corrective spectacles. The nose and the mouth were those of his father, as had become very evident since the professor had shaved off his pointed beard. (He had clung to this pointed beard as long as possible, but even an historical individual must finally make concessions to the customs of the present.) Cornelius held his little daughter upon his knee, his little Eleonore, his little Eve⁠—so much more gracile, so much sweeter in expression than the boy⁠—and, holding his cigarette far away from her, let her finger his spectacles with her delicate little hands, for the lenses, divided into sectors for reading and for vision at a distance, were objects of daily curiosity to her.

At heart he had a feeling that the predilection of his wife was a more magnanimous choice than his own, and that Biter’s difficult masculinity might weigh more in the scheme of things than the harmonious winsomeness of his little girl. But the heart, he reflected, will suffer no dictate, and his heart, after all, had belonged to the little girl ever since she came, ever since he saw her for the first time. And whenever he held her in his arms, that first time came back to him. He remembered the bright room in the Woman’s Hospital in which little Lorie first saw the light⁠—twelve years lay between her coming and that of her elder brother and sister. He had entered the room, and almost at the very moment in which, attended by the smiles of the mother, he had carefully drawn back the curtain of the little canopied doll’s bed that stood beside the larger one, and had become conscious of the tiny marvel which lay there amidst the cushions, so beautifully formed and surrounded, as it were, by a clarity of sweetness and harmonious proportion, with hands which were even then, though on a smaller scale, as beautiful as now, with wide-open eyes which were even then of a heavenly blue and reflected the shining day⁠—at that very moment he had felt his heart seized and made captive. It was love at first sight and forever, a feeling which, unknown, unexpected, and unhoped for⁠—so far as his consciousness was concerned⁠—utterly possessed him and which he at once comprehended, joyfully and with surprise, as being something that would be valid for life.

Doctor Cornelius, moreover, knew that, properly considered, he might have been mistaken as to the utter unexpectedness, the unhoped-for-ness, of this feeling, as well as its complete arbitrariness. He knew at heart that it could not have overcome him by mere chance and become a part of his life, but that somehow, even though unconsciously, he must have been prepared for it, or, more correctly, been ready for it; that something within him was ready to engender it in his heart at the given moment, and that this something, strange to say, was his character as a professor of history. Doctor Cornelius was not wont to say this⁠—he was merely sometimes aware of it, and then he indulged in a mysterious smile. He knew that professors of history do not like history, in so far as it is history that happens, but only as history that has happened; that they hate the upheavals of the present, because they are lawless, disconnected, and impudent⁠—in one word, “unhistorical”⁠—and that their heart is with the coherent, proper, and historical past. And when the professor took his walk along the river before dinner, he was wont to confess to himself that the spirit of the timeless and the eternal lay over the past, and that this spirit was much more congenial to the nerves of a professor of history than all the insolence of the present. The past is perpetuated⁠—that is to say, it is dead; and death is the source of all seemliness and permanent significance. The doctor was secretly convinced of this, when he went walking alone in the dark. It was his preservative instinct, his sense for the “eternal,” which caused him to save himself from the cynical asperities of the times by taking refuge in his love for this little daughter of his. For paternal love and a child at the breast of a mother⁠—these are timeless and eternal and therefore beautiful and holy. And yet, when he pondered in the dark, Cornelius understood that there was something that was not quite right and good in this love of his⁠—he conceded it theoretically for the sake of knowledge. This love of his, judging by its origin, was fettered to a certain tendency; there was hostility in it, opposition to history in the making, and inclination in favour of history that was made⁠—that is to say, death. Extraordinary enough, to be sure, yet true, true to some degree. His passion for this sweet little piece of life and progeny was in some way connected with death; it was a passion that remained faithful to him, and arraigned itself against life, and this, in a certain sense, was not well, not as it should be, although it would naturally have been the maddest kind of asceticism to stifle the purest and loveliest emotion of his heart because of such an occasional and purely scientific insight into things.

He held his little daughter upon his knees, and her thin, rosy little legs hung down beside his own. He spoke to her, his eyebrows raised, in a tone of tender and comic reverence, and listened with rapture to the sweet, piping voice in which she answered him, calling him “Abel.” He exchanged eloquent glances with the mother, who was attending to her Biter and gently advising him to be sensible and well-behaved, for, being unduly vexed by life’s little ironies, he had had another attack of temper today and had acted like a howling dervish. From time to time Cornelius also cast a half-suspicious glance towards the Big Ones, for he felt it not impossible that they were familiar with certain learned analyses in connection with his evening walks. But if this was so, they did not betray it. They stood behind their chairs and leaned their arms upon the backs, regarding this parental idyll benevolently, if not without a trace of irony.

Both children wore thick, embroidered modern “art” dresses of a brick-red colour, which had in their time been worn by Bert and Ingrid, and which were both alike, with the single exception that Biter’s revealed a pair of short tiny trousers under the skirt. Both wore their hair bobbed in precisely the same manner. Biter’s hair was irregularly blond, and still in the process of slowly darkening. It was awkward, stubborn hair, very bristly, and resembled a funny little ill-fitting wig. Lorie’s, on the contrary, was chestnut-brown, silky, and glossy, and as agreeable as her entire little person. It covered her ears, which, as they all knew, were not alike in size, the one being of proper proportions, the other somewhat out of scale, decidedly too large. Her father at times laid bare these ears, and would then express his amazement in loud exclamations, as though he had never before observed this slight defect, something which at once amused and shamed Lorie. Her golden-brown eyes were wide apart, and full of a sweet, soft shimmer and the clearest and most lovable expression. Her eyebrows were fair. Her nose was still pudgy, with nostrils slightly thick, so that the openings were almost round; her little mouth was wide and very expressive, with a finely carved and mobile upper lip. When she laughed and showed her pearly but widely separated little teeth (she had lost only one so far⁠—her father had forced the wobbly thing out with his handkerchief, which had caused her to grow very pale and to tremble), then dimples came into her cheeks, which in spite of their childish softness were given their somewhat hollow form by the slight projection of the lower half of her face. On one cheek, close to the soft fall of her hair, she had a downy mole.

On the whole, she was by no means satisfied with her appearance⁠—a sign that it was a matter of concern to her. Her face, she sadly concluded, must, unfortunately, be regarded as plain; her “figger,” on the contrary, was quite nice. She loved choice, refined little expressions and used them in strings, such as “perhaps, to be sure, in the end.” Biter’s self-critical worries were more concerned with moral factors. He inclined to abject contrition, and considered himself on account of his fits of rage a great sinner who would never go to heaven. Arguments were futile, such as God’s having a great deal of consideration and not being always disposed to even up the odds. Biter would merely shake his head and that ill-fitting wig of his in a kind of obstinate melancholy, and declare that his chances of attaining heavenly felicity were absolutely nil. Whenever he caught cold, he appeared to be entirely full of phlegm, and one had only to touch him to make him wheeze and rattle; he was also disposed to have the highest possible fever at once, so that he panted. The nursemaid Anna was on such occasions inclined to the most sombre predictions in respect to his constitution and vouchsafed the opinion that a boy with such “uncommonly thick blood” might succumb to apoplexy at any moment. One day she thought that this terrible moment had really arrived. Biter, in punishment for a berserker-like fit of fury, had been put into a corner with his face to the wall, and had, upon chance inspection, revealed this face blue all over, much bluer than Anna’s own. She had drummed the whole house together, announcing loudly that the excessive thickness of the boy’s blood had brought about his last hour. The wicked Biter suddenly found himself, to his just amazement, overwhelmed with the tenderest solicitude, until it became clear that the blueness of his features was not due to congestion, but to the calcimined wall of the nursery, which had transferred some of its indigo to his tear-stained face.

Anna the nursemaid had also come in now and stood with folded hands near the doorway⁠—a vision in a white apron, with oily hair, fishy eyes, and an expression revealing the rigorous dignity of her limitations. “The children,” she declared, proud of her care and training, “are deciphering themselves wonderfully.” She had recently had seventeen ragged stumps removed from her jaws, and an even set of yellow artificial teeth with dark-red gutta-percha gums fitted, which now beautified her stolid peasant face. Her mind was beset by the remarkable hallucination that this set of teeth was the talk of the whole neighbourhood, that the very sparrows on the roof had nothing else to chatter about. “There has been a lot of idle talk,” she said, in a severe and mysterious manner, “because, as you know, I have had a set of teeth made.” She had a constant inclination to the use of dark and murky speech, which others were incapable of penetrating, as, for example, concerning a certain Dr. Bleifuss, who was known to every child, “and there are others living in that house,” she said, “who pretend to be him!” One was forced to be lenient and ignore her utterances. She taught the children lovely verses, as, for example:

“Railway-train, railway-train,
Going or still,
Freight-train or passenger,
Whistle it will.”

Or that weekly bill of fare, so full of privations and yet so fitting to the times, which runs:

“Monday morn the week begins.
Tuesday minds us of our sins.
Wednesday is the middle of it.
Thursday brings us little profit.
Friday noon we eat the fish,
Saturday dance round the dish.
Sunday there’s a lovely roast,
And a salad too we boast.”

There was also a quatrain of incomprehensible and insoluble romanticism:

“Throw wide the door, throw wide the door,
Let the big carriage roll.
Who sits within it all in state?
A lord with hair of gold!”

And finally there was an outrageously vivacious ballad of Little Marie, who sat on a stone, a stone, a stone, and combed her likewise golden hair, golden hair, golden hair. And another of Rudolf, who drew a knife, drew a knife, drew a knife out, and who came to a fearful end.

Lorie was able to say and sing all this with her mobile little mouth and her sweet voice⁠—much better than Biter. She was in fact able to do all things better than he, for which he honestly admired her and subordinated himself to her, apart from attacks of rebellion and of choleric combativeness. She often instructed him in a pedagogic sense, explained to him the birds in the picture-book, made them clear to him by vivid names: the cloud-eater, the hail-eater, the raven-eater. She made him repeat these after her. She also gave him pointers about medicine, and illness, such as inflammation of the lungs, inflammation of the blood, “inflammation of the air.” When he did not pay attention or was unable to repeat the words after her, she put him in a corner. Once she even added a box on the ears, but she was so ashamed of this that she went and stood in the corner herself for a long time.

Without a doubt, the children got on splendidly together; they were one heart and one soul. They experienced all things, all adventures, in common. They would come in from a walk and relate in great excitement and as with one voice that they had seen “two moo-moos and a veal” on the country road. With the servants below stairs, with Xavier and with the Hinterhöfers, two once prosperous middle-class sisters who undertook “au pair,” as the expression goes, to fulfil the offices of cook and chambermaid, they were on a most familiar footing⁠—at least they seemed to feel at times a certain likeness between the relation of these subordinates to their parents and their own. Whenever they were scolded, they would go into the kitchen and say: “The master and mistress are real mad!” Nevertheless there was always much more fun playing with those “higher up,” and especially with “Abel,” when he was not obliged to read or write. He always thought of far more wonderful things to do than Xavier or the ladies. They would play at being “four gentlemen,” and go walking. “Abel” would then crook his knees until he was the same height as themselves, and set forth on the walk hand in hand with them, a sport of which they never had enough. They would have been content to go promenading with the diminished “Abel,” five gentlemen all in all, the whole day long, round and round the dining-room.

There was furthermore the extremely exciting cushion game. This consisted of one of the children, usually Lorie, sitting down in a chair at the dining-table, apparently unobserved by “Abel,” and still as a mouse awaiting his coming. Gazing idly about him, amid exclamations which clearly and loudly attested his faith in the comfort of his chair, he would draw near and seat himself on Lorie. “Hello!” he would say, “what’s this?” And then he would squirm back and forth, without hearing the suppressed tittering behind him. “Somebody has put a cushion on my chair! My! what a hard, crooked, awkward cushion it is! How do they expect me to sit comfortably on it?” And then he would begin to slide harder than ever on the strange and awkward cushion, and finally reach behind him right into the midst of all that ecstatic tittering and giggling, until he turned round, and a great climax of discovery and recognition would conclude the drama. This game, too, would lose nothing of its fascinating tension though repeated a hundred times.

Today there was no time for such pleasures. The restlessness of the impending party of the Big Ones hung in the air, and there was also the purchasing to be done beforehand, each enacting his role. Lorie had just finished reciting “Railway-train, railway-train,” and Doctor Cornelius, to her great chagrin, had just discovered that her ears were of different sizes, when Danny, the neighbour’s son, came in to fetch Bert and Ingrid. Xavier had also exchanged his striped livery for an ordinary jacket, which immediately gave him a somewhat bounderish, even though smart and agreeable, air. The Little Ones thereupon ascended to the upper realm, under the wing of Anna. The professor withdrew into his study to read, as was his custom after meals, while his wife, thinking of the anchovy sandwiches and the Italian salad, began to prepare these for guests who would be coming to the dance. She was also obliged to run into town on her wheel before the young people arrived, in order to convert a sum of money which she feared might be suddenly devalued, into table supplies.

Cornelius was reading, leaning far back in his armchair. With his cigar poised between index and middle finger, he was reading in Macaulay about the origin of the English national debt at the close of the seventeenth century, after which he took up a French author and read about the growing indebtedness of Spain towards the close of the sixteenth century⁠—both subjects of his lecture the following morning. He was going to compare England’s surprising commercial prosperity of that time with the fatal results which the national indebtedness had produced in Spain a century before, and analyse the ethical and psychological results of the difference. This would give him an opportunity to proceed from the England of William III, the period actually in question, to the age of Philip II and the Counter-Reformation, which was his particular hobby, and concerning which he had written a book⁠—a much-quoted work, to which he owed his professorship. While his cigar was growing short and somewhat acrid, he revolved in his mind a few sentences tinged with gentle melancholy, intending to visit them upon his students the following morning. These sentences referred to the practically hopeless battle of this slow King Philip against the new era, against the course of history, and the imperially disintegrating force in the Germanic ideal of individual liberty⁠—they dealt with the battle, condemned by life and therefore accursed of God, between obdurate aristocracy and the powers of progress and of change. He found the sentences good and kept on filing away at them, then put the books back into the bookcase, and went up to his bedroom, in order to give a kind of caesural pause to his workday⁠—that treasured hour with closed blinds and closed eyes which had become a necessity to him, and which, as he remembered after his scholarly digression, was to be subjected today to the inroads of festal domestic disquiet. He smiled at the slight perturbation of nerves which this memory aroused in him. The draft of his sentences about Philip clad in black silk mingled itself in his mind with thoughts of the dance that was to be given by his children, and then for five minutes or so he fell asleep.

While he lay there and rested, he heard the doorbell ring repeatedly, heard the garden gate fall to, and each time felt the sting of a slight excitement, of expectation and oppression at the thought that the young people were arriving and were beginning to fill the lower hall. These tiny shocks caused him to smile, and yet he knew that these smiles were essentially only the expression of a nervousness, which was naturally compact also of a certain exhilaration, for who would not feel joy at the prospect of a merrymaking? At half past four (it was already evening) he arose and freshened himself up at the washstand. The washbowl had been cracked for more than a year. It was a hanging basin, made to tip, but the pivot was out at one side and could not be repaired because a workman could not be had, nor could it be replaced, because no shop could supply another. It was therefore suspended provisionally over the outlet on the edges of the marble slab, and could be emptied only by being lifted with both hands and poured out. Scarcely a day passed but Cornelius shook his head over this washbowl, as he again did now. He then finished tidying himself⁠—very carefully⁠—polished his glasses under the ceiling light until they were clear and transparent, and started down to the dining-room.

As he descended the stairs, he heard the voices below, already a medley, and the gramophone already set going. His features assumed a polite and conciliatory company expression. He decided to say: “Please don’t disturb yourselves!” and then to go right into the dining-room and have his tea. This formula appeared to him the proper one in the circumstances, serene and considerate in its external effect, as well as a good defence for himself.

The hall was brightly illuminated; all the electric bulbs of the electrolier were aflame, all save one that was burnt out. Cornelius stood still on one of the lower steps of the stairs and surveyed the hall. It made a pretty picture in the mellow light, with the copy of an old master over the brick fireplace, with the panelling, which was of soft wood, and with the red carpet, on which the guests were standing about, teacup in hand, chatting and eating small sandwiches spread with anchovy paste. The atmosphere was quite festive, a slight aura of dresses, hair, and warm presences pervaded the hall⁠—something that was characteristic and charged with memories. The door of the cloakroom stood open, for new guests were still arriving.

Such social scenes dazzle at first; the professor received only a general impression. He had not noticed that Ingrid, in a dark silk dress with a white accordion-pleated cape-collar and bare arms, was standing close in front of him, surrounded by her friends, at the bottom of the steps. She nodded to him and smiled, showing her fine teeth.

“Have you had a good rest?” she asked softly, as though between themselves. And then, after he had recognized her with a surprise that seemed unjustified, she introduced him to her friends.

“May I introduce Herr Zuber?” she asked. “And this is Fräulein Plaichinger.”

Herr Zuber was not much to look at; the Plaichinger girl, on the other hand, was a valkyrie, blonde, full-bosomed, and loosely dressed, with a pug-nose and the high treble of buxom femininity, as became evident when she replied to the professor’s polite greeting.

“You are surely most welcome,” he said. “It is awfully nice of you to give us this pleasure. You are a classmate of Ingrid’s?”

Herr Zuber was a member of Ingrid’s golf club. He was preparing for a business career, and was employed in the office of his uncle’s brewery. The professor made a few jokes about the “thin beer,” in which he pretended to overrate to an excessive degree the influence of young Zuber upon the quality of this beer.

“Now, don’t let yourselves be disturbed in any way,” he remarked, and was about to cross over to the dining-room.

“And here comes Max!” said Ingrid. “Say, old man, what do you mean, barging in here so late, after the dance is on?”

The “du” or familiar “thou” form of address was common to all these young people, and their forms of intercourse were strange to their elders⁠—there was little trace of strict breeding, gallantry, or drawing-room manners.

A young fellow with an exposure of white shirtfront and a small dress tie advanced from the cloakroom towards the staircase and saluted them. He was dark, but with rosy, smooth-shaven cheeks and with slight sideburns close to his ears, a really handsome youth, not ridiculously nor gaudily pretty, like a gipsy violinist, but masculinely handsome in a very agreeable, well-bred, winning manner, with friendly black eyes. His dinner-jacket still sat a bit awkwardly upon him.

“Now, now, don’t scold me, Cornelia,” he said, using the feminine form of her family name. “It was that confounded lecture.” Ingrid presented him to her father: Herr Hergesell.

So this was Herr Hergesell. He thanked the master of the house in a courteous manner for having invited him, and they shook hands. “I’m a bit late,” he said, jovially; “it happened that just today I had a lecture until four o’clock, and then, of course, I had to rush home and change my clothes.” Then he spoke of his pumps, which had just given him great trouble in the cloakroom.

“I brought them along in a bag,” he said. “I couldn’t expect to go tramping all over your carpets here in my street shoes. But I stupidly forgot to bring along a shoehorn, and, by Jove, I couldn’t get into them at all⁠—imagine the stupid fix! I’ve never had such tight pumps in my life. The sizes are all different now, there’s no depending on them, and then the stuff they use nowadays!⁠—why, it isn’t leather at all, it’s hard as cast iron! I’ve mashed my whole finger.” He showed his reddened forefinger confidentially, and referred to the episode again as a “fix,” and a most disgusting one. He spoke in precisely the way Ingrid had imitated⁠—in a very nasal manner, with a peculiar drawl, obviously without affectation, because it was the habit of all Hergesells to talk that way.

Doctor Cornelius expressed regret that there had been no shoehorn in the cloakroom and manifested due sympathy for the forefinger. “Now, you mustn’t let me disturb you in the slightest,” he said; “auf wiedersehen!” and he crossed the hall to the dining-room.

Here too there were guests. The dining-table had been drawn out full length, and tea was being served at it. But the professor went straight to his own little nook, which was tapestried with embroidery and lighted by its own little ceiling light, where stood the small round table at which he was accustomed to drink his tea. He found his wife there, engaged in conversation with Bert and two other young gentlemen. One of them was Herzl; Cornelius recognized and greeted him. The other was called Möller⁠—a type of the “Wandervogel,” who apparently neither possessed nor cared to possess a suit of ordinary party clothes, bourgeois clothes (the concept really meant very little any more). He was a young fellow who was evidently not at all ambitious to play the “gentleman” (another concept which had become vitiated). He wore a linen blouse with a belt and knickers, a thick mane of hair, and horn-rimmed spectacles. His neck was long and thin. He was engaged in a bank, as the professor discovered, but in addition to this he was also active as a kind of artistic folklorist, a collector and singer of folk-ballads from all zones and tongues. He had brought along his guitar, by special request. It was still hanging in its oilcloth cover in the cloakroom.

Herzl, the actor, was small and slight, but he had a strong black beard, as was evident from too heavy powdering after his shave. His eyes were overlarge, glowing, and melancholy. In addition to the large quantities of powder he had used, he had apparently applied also a bit of rouge⁠—the faint carmine upon his cheekbones was obviously of cosmetic origin. “How remarkable!” thought the professor; one would imagine that he would cling to either one thing or the other⁠—either to his melancholy or to his rouge. Taken together they formed a psychological contradiction. Why should a misanthrope rouge himself? But here, no doubt, was the peculiar, alien form of the artistic nature, which rendered this contradiction possible, or even consisted of it. Well, it was interesting and no real reason for his not being quite hearty with him. It was a legitimate thing, possibly a primitive thing.⁠—“Will you have lemon in your tea, Herr Hofschauspieler⁠—Herr Court Actor?”

Court actors, of course, were a thing of the past, but Herzl was fond of the title, despite the fact that he was a revolutionary artist. And that was another contradiction which was part of his spiritual equipment. The professor had rightly conjectured that this contradiction existed, and hence flattered him, as a kind of reparation for the secret repugnance he had felt upon becoming aware of the light shade of rouge on Herzl’s cheeks.

“My most devoted thanks, my dear Herr Professor,” said Herzl, so hurriedly that he was saved from tangling his tongue only by means of his superb elocutionary technique. His attitude towards his hosts, and especially towards the master of the house, was inspired by the greatest degree of respect; it was in fact almost excessively, even subserviently, polite. It was as though he felt a certain sense of guilt because of the rouge, which some inner compulsion had forced him to apply, but of which he disapproved, for the same reasons perhaps as the professor himself, and sought to conciliate an unrouged world by the greatest modesty he could muster.

Conversation went on, while tea was being drunk, passing from Möller’s folk-songs, from Spanish and Basque folk-songs, to the new production of Schiller’s Don Carlos at the National Theatre, a production in which Herzl was to play the title-role. He began to talk of his interpretation of Don Carlos. “I hope,” he said, “that my Don Carlos will be a perfect unity, an organic whole.” There was also critical talk of the cast, of the values of the scenery, of the atmosphere and the milieu; and almost before he was aware, the professor saw himself steered into his favourite channel, the Spain of the Counter-Reformation, which affected him rather painfully. He was quite innocent; he had done nothing to give the conversation this turn. He was seized by the fear that it might look as though he had sought an opportunity to lecture, began to wonder, and then relapsed into silence. He was glad when the Little Ones, Lorie and Biter, came to the table. They were dressed in blue velvet, their Sunday apparel, and were bent on participating in their own fashion in the fun of the Big Ones until bedtime. They said good evening to the strangers shyly, making big eyes the while, and were then called upon to tell their names and their ages. Herr Möller merely regarded them earnestly, but Herzl, the actor, was entirely carried away by them, enchanted and ecstatic. He almost blessed them, raised his eyes to heaven, and folded his hands over his mouth. There was no doubt that he was sincere in this, but his being accustomed to theatrical conditions and effects caused his words and actions to appear frightfully false. And, moreover, it was as though his devotion to the children was also to serve to reconcile one to the rouge upon his cheekbones.

The tea-table was now deserted by the guests, dancing had begun in the hall, the Little Ones ran to be part of it, and the professor decided to retreat to his own room. “I hope you’ll have a good time,” he said, as he shook hands with young Möller and Herzl, both of whom had sprung to their feet. And then he walked over to his study, to his own fenced-in empire. Here he let down the outer shutters, turned on the writing-table lamp, and sat down to work.

It was work which in an emergency might easily have been done even in an unquiet environment⁠—a few letters, a few quotations. Cornelius, of course, was distrait. He was still haunted by minor impressions, the inelastic pumps of young Hergesell, the high falsetto emanating from the robust body of Fräulein Plaichinger, His thoughts also reverted to Möller’s collection of Basque songs, while he wrote, or, leaning back in his chair, stared at emptiness, and they hovered about Herzl’s humility and exaggerations, “his” Carlos, and the court of King Philip. Conversations, he mused, were strange, mysterious things. They were plastic, and even when undirected, pursued some secret, dominating interest. He seemed to have noticed this frequently. In the intervals he listened to the by no means noisy sounds of the house-dance outside. There was talk to be heard, but not a trace of the shuffling sounds of the dance. But then, they no longer circled and shuffled, they merely walked round the carpet in a peculiar manner, nor were they disturbed by the folds of the carpet. They took hold of one another in a fashion to which he had not been accustomed in his time, and did this to the tunes of a gramophone, tunes which particularly engaged his attention⁠—these peculiar melodies of the New World, the instrumentation of which was jazzy, with all kinds of percussion pieces, which the talking-machine reproduced excellently. There was also the smacking clack of the castanets, but these affected him as merely a part of the jazz noises and not at all as Spanish. No, Spanish they were not. And then he was once more in the midst of his professional thoughts.

After the lapse of half an hour he suddenly remembered that it would be no more than hospitable to contribute a box of cigarettes to the festivities. It would not be proper, he reflected, to have the young people smoke their own cigarettes⁠—though they would think nothing of it. And so he went into the empty dining-room and took a packet from his supplies in a little wall-cupboard. He did not select precisely the best, at least not those which he himself preferred to smoke, but a rather long, thin format, which he was glad to get rid of by this opportunity, for, after all, they were young people. He went into the hall, lifted the box on high with a smile, and placed it open upon the mantelpiece; then, after a brief, swift survey, turned to go back to his room.

Just then came an interval in the dance⁠—the gramophone was silent. The young folk sat and stood about the walls of the hall and chatted, some of them grouped around the heraldic table near the windows, others on chairs in front of the fireplace. Some were perched upon the steps of the built-in staircase, sitting on the rather threadbare plush stair-carpet, and arranged amphitheatrically. Max Hergesell, for example, sat there with the buxom, high-voiced Plaichinger girl, who was looking directly into his face, while he, in a half-reclining posture and with one elbow supported on the step immediately behind him, gesticulated with the other hand while speaking. The main floor-space of the biggish room was empty; only in the centre, directly under the electrolier, the two Little Ones were visible in their blue dresses, awkwardly embracing, gravely and slowly turning about each other. Cornelius, in passing, bent over and, with a gentle word, stroked their hair. But they would not allow themselves to be disturbed in their solemn and infantile undertaking. Looking back from the door of his study, he observed that young Hergesell, probably because he had noticed the professor, had heaved himself up from the step with his elbow, and had come down to take Lorie out of the little arms of her brother, and to dance with her himself in a droll way, without music. His actions were almost like those of Cornelius himself when he went walking with “four gentlemen.” He bent his knees out, and sought to hold her like a grown person, and then made a few shimmy-steps with bashful little Lorie. All those who had observed it were much amused. It was the signal for once more turning on the gramophone and resuming the dance. The professor, with the doorknob in his hand, regarded the scene for a moment, nodding and shrugging his shoulders whimsically, and then entered his room. For some minutes longer his features mechanically retained the smile he had brought in from outside.

He once more began turning over papers under the light of his table-lamp, began to write, and then concluded a few trifling matters. After a time he became aware that the company was leaving the hall and moving over to his wife’s drawing-room, which was directly connected with his study as well as with the hall. Voices were now heard here and the experimental strumming of a guitar. Young Möller was going to sing, was, in fact, already singing. The young bank-clerk was singing a song in an alien language, with a powerful bass voice, and accompanying it with chords from his guitar. The song, which was received with great applause, was possibly Swedish, although the professor, who had listened until the close, was unable to distinguish this with any degree of certainty. For the purpose of deadening sound, a thick curtain hung over the door that led to the drawing-room. Then a new song began and Cornelius went cautiously over to the drawing-room.

Half-darkness prevailed there. Only the draped standing-lamp was lit and Möller sat close to it with crossed legs on a cushion of the antique chest; his thumb wandered among the strings. There was no order in the arrangement of his audience; it bore the impress of chance and help-yourself-as-best-you-may, for there were not enough chairs to go round. Some were standing, though many, among them some of the young ladies, were simply sitting on the floor, on the carpet, clasping their knees with their arms, or even stretching out their legs at full length. Hergesell, for example, was sitting on the floor in spite of his dinner-jacket, close to the legs of the grand piano, and beside him crouched Fräulein Plaichinger. The Little Ones were also there: Frau Cornelius was ensconced in her armchair facing the singer and was holding both of the children on her lap. Biter, the barbarian, began to talk aloud right in the middle of the song, so that it was necessary to intimidate him by “sss-sshes” and by shaking a finger at him. Lorie would never have been guilty of a thing like that; she sat daintily and quietly on her mother’s lap. The professor sought to catch her eye, in order to wave to her in secret; but she did not see him, even though she was not apparently paying any attention to the singer. Her eyes went deeper.

Möller sang the “Joli tambour”:

“Sire, mon roi, donnez-moi votre fille⁠—”

They were all charmed. “How good!” Hergesell was heard to remark in the nasal, somewhat precious, and peculiar manner of all Hergesells. Then came a song in German, for which Herr Möller had composed the melody himself. It was a beggar lied and was hailed by the young with stormy applause:

“The beggar lass is a-goin’ to the fair⁠—
Trala-la-la!
The beggar laddie, he means to be there,
Fol-di-rol, fol-di-rol la!”

Great hilarity prevailed after this merry beggar’s song. “How exceptionally good!” said Hergesell again, true to his manner. Something Hungarian followed, also a great hit⁠—rendered in the outlandish original tongue; Möller was undeniably a great success. The professor participated ostentatiously in the applause. This mixture of culture and of historical-retrospective diversion in art, coming into the middle of this shimmy company, warmed his heart. He went up to Möller, congratulated him, and began to discuss the selections, as well as their sources. These were in a songbook with notes, which Möller promised to lend him for his own inspection. Cornelius was the friendlier because, like all fathers, he compared the gifts of strange young men with those of his own son, experiencing various degrees of disquiet, envy, and shame in the process. “There is this Möller,” he thought, “an able bank official.” (He was by no means certain that Möller displayed great efficiency in the bank.) “And in addition he can show this special talent, to the training of which a good deal of energy and study must have been devoted. Now, there is my poor Bert, who knows nothing and can do nothing, and thinks only of playing the clown, though he hasn’t talent even for that!” He strove to be just, and attempted to assure himself that Bert, after all, was a fine boy, perhaps with more good basic qualities than this successful Möller; that possibly there was the making of a great author in him, or something of the sort, and that his Terpsichorean-waiter ambitions were mere boyish will-o’-the-wispishness, a product of the unrestful hour. Still, his envious paternal pessimism was uppermost. When Möller started in to sing once more, Doctor Cornelius went back to his study.

While he continued to work with divided attention, it drew on toward seven o’clock. He thought of a short, matter-of-fact letter which he could write then as well as not. But writing takes time, and when he had finished, it was almost half past seven. The Italian salad was to be served at half past eight, and so it was in order for the professor to go out, get his quantum of fresh air and exercise in the winter darkness, and throw his letters into the postbox. The dance in the hall was once more in full swing. He would be forced to pass through it in order to get to his overcoat and galoshes, but there was no longer anything exciting about this; he had been a frequent auditor of this youthful jollity, and need no longer fear that he might disturb it. He left his study, having first put his papers in order and picked up his letters. He even lingered a little about the hall, for he found his wife seated in an armchair close to the door of his room.

She sat looking on, visited from time to time by the Big Ones and other young people. Cornelius stood beside her and likewise regarded the turmoil with a smiling eye, for the merriment had now obviously reached its climax. There were other spectators present. Blue Anna, with all her “rigorous limitations” upon her, stood near the stairs, because the Little Ones had not yet wearied of the festivities and because she was obliged to keep an eye on Biter, for fear of his rotating too violently and thus causing his too turgid blood to boil dangerously. The world below stairs was also bent upon seeing something of the dance and pleasures of the Big Ones. The two Hinterhöfer ladies as well as Xavier were standing in the door that led to the pantry and amusing themselves looking on. Fräulein Walburga, the older of the two déclassé sisters and the cooking partner (not to call her the cook, a term she did not like to hear), peered with brown eyes through the thick lenses of her round spectacles, the bridge of which she had wrapped round with a fragment of linen rag in order to keep it from pressing her nose⁠—a genial, good-humoured type. Fräulein Cecilia, the younger, though by no means young, revealed an extremely self-sufficient mien⁠—upholding her dignity as a former member of the third estate. Fräulein Cecilia suffered bitterly over her plunge from this sphere into that of the servant class. She resolutely refused to wear a cap or any other badge or emblem of her profession as a chambermaid. Her greatest ordeal came regularly every Wednesday evening (which was Xavier’s night out), when she was forced to serve at table. She would serve with averted face and turned-up nose, a fallen queen. It was sheer torture and grievous oppression to be forced to contemplate her degradation, and once, when the Little Ones were present by chance at the evening meal, both burst simultaneously into loud crying at the sight of her.

Young Xavier knew no such sorrows. He even served very well at table, with a certain natural as well as acquired skill, for he had once been a “piccolo” or apprentice in a restaurant. Apart from this, however, he was really a perfect ne’er-do-well and a windbag⁠—with certain positive qualities, to be sure, as his modest master and mistress were ready at all times to acknowledge, but none the less an impossible windbag. One was forced to take him as he was and not expect figs from thistles. He was a product and offspring of the disrupted age, a true specimen of his generation, a servant of the revolutionary epoch, a sympathetic Bolshevist. The professor was in the habit of calling him “Master of Ceremonies,” for he proved himself a most useful fellow, obliging and handy, on occasions of special entertainment. But he was totally unacquainted with the notion of duty, and it was as impossible to get him to fulfil the tedious current of daily drudgeries and chores as to teach some dogs to jump over a stick. It was so obviously against his nature that it disarmed one and resigned one to dissatisfaction. He was always ready in the interest of some definite, unusual, and amusing affair to leave his bed at any hour of the night. But he never rose before eight o’clock⁠—he simply would not, would not jump over the stick. But all day long the various expressions of his disrupted existence, the playing of his mouth-organ, his rude but emotional singing, his merry whistling, ascended from the kitchen basement into the upper regions of the house, while the smoke of his cigarettes filled the pantry. He would stand and watch the ladies fallen from high estate, as they worked. In the morning, while the professor was at breakfast, he would tear the leaf off the calendar on the desk, but not do another stroke of work in the room. Doctor Cornelius had ordered him more than once not to tear off the leaves of the calendar, since he was inclined to tear off two leaves at once, and thus ran the risk of creating confusion. But this tearing-off of the leaves had a fascination for young Xavier and he was not going to be done out of it.

Xavier, moreover, was particularly acceptable in that he was a great friend of the children. He would play with the Little Ones in the garden most devotedly, and showed great skill in carving and weaving all kinds of toys for them. At times he would even read to them out of their books, and the accents that fell from his thick lips were wonderful to hear. He was a passionate devotee of the movies, and whenever he had been to a film-play, he would be inclined to melancholy, to vague longings, and to soliloquies. He was moved by an indeterminate hope of one day becoming himself a factor in this magic world, and making his fortune. He based that hope upon his mop of hair and his physical dexterity and recklessness. He would sometimes climb the ash-tree in the front garden, a high but swaying tree, swing himself from branch to branch to the very top, and frighten all who watched him. Having reached the top, he would light a cigarette, swing himself back and forth until the tall trunk shivered to its very roots, and look round for some moving-picture director who might be passing and engage him.

Tonight, if he had taken off his striped jacket and donned civilian clothes, he could easily have joined in the dance without attracting any particular attention. The friends of the Big Ones presented diverse externals; there were several dress-suits in evidence, but these were by no means predominant. Types such as that represented by Möller, the Liedersänger, were among them, female as well as male. The professor, who stood beside the armchair of his wife and contemplated the picture, was casually familiar with the conditions in which this generation was growing up, and much had come to him through hearsay. These girls were schoolgirls and students, arts-and-crafts workers. The male contingent produced strange adventurous types and existences created solely by the times. There was a pale and weedy youth with pearl studs in his shirtfront, the son of a dentist. He was merely a gambler on Change and was able to live, judging by the stories conveyed to the professor, like a second Aladdin with the magic lamp. He kept an automobile, treated his friends to champagne suppers, and was fond of giving them presents on every occasion, precious little souvenirs of gold and mother of pearl. Today, too, he had brought along certain presents for his young hosts, a gold lead-pencil for Bert and a pair of gigantic earrings for Ingrid, real rings and of barbaric size. These, however, thank heaven, were not to be thrust through the lobes of the ears, but merely fastened to them by means of flat-headed little screws. The Big Ones came and displayed their presents laughingly to their parents, who shook their heads wonderingly, whilst Aladdin bowed repeatedly from a distance.

The young people danced with zest, so far as that which took place with such quiet devotion might be called dancing. There was much slow shoving and striding across the carpet, the partners holding each other in new and peculiar ways, the lower part of the body advanced, the shoulders raised, and with a certain swaying of the hips. They did not grow tired, for these movements and steps did not tire. There were no signs of heaving bosoms or of flushed cheeks. Here and there two young girls were dancing together, now and then two young men even⁠—it was all one to them. They strode and stepped to the exotic strains of a gramophone fitted with the loudest needles, which blared forth its foxtrots, shimmies, and one-steps, its double fox, African shimmies, Java dances, and polka creolas⁠—wild perfumed stuff, partly yearning, partly merely exercising, full of an alien rhythm, a monotonous Negro jamboree, tricked out with orchestral effects, percussion notes, tin-panny noises, and odd cluckings.

“What’s the name of that record?” Cornelius asked Ingrid as she went skidding by with the pale-faced speculator. The music was not at all bad; it was full of yearning and provoked one to exercise, and certain passages in it rather pleased him.

“Prince of Pappenheim⁠—‘Lovely Maiden, Don’t Repine!’ ” she answered, and smiled pleasantly, revealing her white teeth.

Cigarette smoke was floating under the chandelier. The fog of festivity had grown thicker⁠—that dry, sweetish, thickish, disturbing festal atmosphere, rich in various ingredients, and so full of memories of early heartaches, especially for one who had overcome an all too sensitive youth.⁠—The Little Ones were still about; they had been allowed to remain until eight o’clock, since the dance gave them such joy. The young people had accustomed themselves to their taking part; in a way and to a certain extent they “belonged.” They had separated by now: Biter was rotating all by himself in his blue velvet tunic in the centre of the carpet; Lorie was comically running behind a sliding couple and trying to hold the gentleman by his dinner-jacket. It was Max Hergesell, with his partner, the Plaichinger girl. They were doing these slidings and glidings very well; it was a pleasure to look at them. One was forced to concede that the dances of the wild new times were capable of being converted into something quite agreeable, when the right people did the converting. Young Hergesell took the lead in an admirable manner, moving freely, and yet, as it seemed, keeping within the rules. How elegantly he executed the backward steps, whenever there was room! But even in a crush he was able to maintain himself in the best taste, supported by the suppleness of a partner who had developed the astonishing grace which women of a full figure are sometimes able to command. They were talking face to face and did not appear to be observing Lorie, who was following them. Others were laughing over the persistence of the little one, and Doctor Cornelius sought to capture her as she passed and to draw her to him. But Lorie disengaged herself with a tortured expression, and wanted nothing to do with Abel for the time being. She refused to recognize him, braced her little arms against his breast, and, averting her little face, struggled to get away from him, nervous and irritated, bent on following her caprice.

The professor experienced a sharp pang, and at that moment hated the party, which bewildered the heart of his darling and alienated it. His love, this love so strange and unconjecturable in its roots and origins, was very sensitive. He smiled mechanically, but his eyes lost their light and settled into a fixed stare upon a pattern in the carpet, between the feet of the dancing couples.

“The Little Ones ought to go to bed!” he said to his wife. But she begged for another quarter-hour for the children. They had been promised that, because they were enjoying the turmoil so greatly. He smiled again and shook his head, remained standing there a moment longer, and then went into the cloakroom, which was overflowing with coats, scarfs, hats, and overshoes.

He had difficulty in dragging his own things out of the confusion. And then Max Hergesell came into the cloakroom, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.

“Herr Professor,” he began in the tone common to all Hergesells, and with a certain youthful reverence, “I see you are going out. These pumps of mine are the limit, they pinch like the very Old Nick. They are really too small for me, as I’ve discovered, quite apart from their hardness. This presses here, so frightfully, on my big-toe-nail,” he went on, standing on one foot, while he held the other in his hand, “that I can’t stand it. I’ve made up my mind to change back into my street shoes.⁠—But wait⁠—can’t I give you a hand?”

“Thank you,” said Cornelius. “Don’t worry about me! You must get rid of your own troubles! It’s awfully kind of you.” For Hergesell had knelt down and had fastened the clasps of the professor’s overshoes.

The professor thanked him again, agreeably affected by so much sincere and respectful solicitude. “You must go and enjoy yourself,” he said, “after you have changed your shoes! It’s impossible that you should continue to dance in shoes that pinch. You simply must change them. Auf wiedersehen!⁠—I must get out for a breath of fresh air.”

“I’m going now to have another dance with Lorie,” Hergesell called after him. “She’ll be a star dancer some day, when she’s old enough. You can bank on that!”

“You think so?” Cornelius asked, standing at the house door. “Well, you are an expert, a champion. But see that you don’t get curvature of the spine bending down to her!”

He waved his hand and went out. “Nice boy,” he thought, as he left the garden. “A student of engineering, sees his way clearly⁠—everything in order there. And then so good-looking and pleasant.” And he was once more seized by paternal envy, because of his “poor Bert”⁠—by strange perturbations which caused him to see the life of this young stranger in the rosiest light, and that of his son in the most dismal. In such a mood he began his evening walk.

He went up the boulevard, crossed the bridge, and then walked upstream for a bit, along the river promenade to the third bridge. It was wet and cold, and now and then there was a flurry of snow. He had turned up the collar of his overcoat, and held his cane against his back, the crook hooked over one forearm, and now and again he drew deep breaths of the wintry evening air. His mind wandered to learned matters, as usual during these walks, to his lecture at the university, to the sentences that he was going to utter tomorrow in relation to Philip’s battle against the revolutionary tendency of the Germanic spirit, sentences which were to be packed with justice and melancholy. Especially with justice, he thought. Justice was the soul of scholarship, the principle of knowledge and of light, and the young people must be shown them in this relationship, not only because of the intellectual discipline, but for human and personal reasons⁠—in order not to offend them nor to antagonize their political opinions, which today, of course, were terribly split up and full of contrarieties; it had all resulted in heaping up a good deal of explosive matter. To draw down the disapproval of one side was easy, and even to cause a scandal, should one take sides in an historical matter. But taking sides, he thought, was also unhistorical; justice alone was historical. Only, to be sure, for that very reason and rightly considered⁠—justice was not hot-blooded youth nor fresh, adventurous faith and resolution; it was melancholy. But as it was melancholy by nature, it naturally and secretly sympathized with the melancholy, the hopeless part⁠—with historical power more than with what is fresh, adventurous, and resolute. Was it possible that in the last analysis this justice consisted of such sympathy and could not exist without it? And possibly, after all, justice did not exist? the professor asked himself, and was so absorbed in this thought that he threw his letters into the letter-box at the bridge almost unconsciously and began to walk back. The thought he had awakened and pursued was a thought disturbing to learning, but the thought itself was part of science, learning, and scholarship, a theme for the intellect and conscience and psychology, and he was in duty bound to accept it without prejudice, whether it disturbed him or not.⁠—It was with such musings that Doctor Cornelius returned home.

Xavier was standing in the arch of the front entrance, apparently on the lookout for him.

“Herr Professor,” said Xavier, in his rich Bavarian accent, moving his thick lips in the dark and giving a toss to his hair, “you’d better go right up and see Lorie. It’s terrible; she’s gone all to pieces.”

“Whats the matter?” asked Cornelius, frightened. “Is she ill?”

“No, not exactly,” replied Xavier. “But she’s upset all right, cryin’ her eyes out. It’s about the gent that danced with her, that one in the dinner-coat, Herr Hergesell. We couldn’t get her out of the hall, not a one of us, and she cried and cried⁠—bucketfuls. She’s all broke up⁠—it’s terrible!”

“Nonsense,” said the professor, who had stepped into the house and tossed his things into the cloakroom. He said nothing further, opened the curtained glass door to the hall, and without even so much as a glance at the company hurried up the stairs to the right. He took the stairs two at a time and hurried across the upper hall and another small space directly into the nursery, followed by Xavier, who stayed at the door.

The nursery was brightly illuminated. There was a gaily coloured paper frieze that ran around the walls, there was a big set of shelves filled with a confusion of toys, a rocking-horse with red-varnished nostrils braced its hoofs against its curved rockers, and other toys⁠—a small trumpet, building-blocks, railroad cars⁠—lay scattered upon the linoleum of the floor. The little white beds with their straight railings stood quite close together: Lorie’s in the corner near the window, and Biter’s a yard from it, both projecting into the room.

Biter was sleeping. As usual he had said his prayers in a loud vibrant voice with the assistance of Blue Anna, and had then fallen instantly into that stormy, red-glowing, tremendously deep sleep from which not even a cannon-shot fired off beside his couch could wake him. His clenched fists, thrown back upon the pillow, were resting on both sides of his head, close to that little wig of his, ruffled by vehement sleep and all tangled and awry.

Lorie’s bed was surrounded by women. There was Blue Anna and there were the Hinterhöfer ladies, standing about the railing of the bed, consulting together. They stepped aside as the professor drew near and he saw Lorie sitting against the middle of her little pillow, pale and sobbing. She cried as Doctor Cornelius had never known her to cry. Her beautiful little hands were resting on the counterpane before her; her little nightgown, trimmed with a narrow edging of lace, had slipped down from her birdlike, slight little shoulders. Her head, that sweet little head that Cornelius so loved, because with the projecting lower part of the face resting upon the thin neck it always reminded him of a flower upon its stem, was inclined to one side, so that her tearful eyes were directed at the angle of the wall and the ceiling. Her huge burden of grief seemed somehow to lie in the same direction, for she kept nodding towards it constantly. Whether as a result of deliberate and conscious expression or as a result of the convulsive movements of sobbing, her little head nodded and shook without ever stopping. Her mobile mouth, however, with its Cupid’s bow of an upper lip, was half open like that of a tiny mater dolorosa, and while the tears poured from her eyes, she uttered monotonous little sounds of woe, sounds which had nothing in common with the angry and superfluous crying of naughty children, but which originated in some real heartache. The professor, who could not bear to see Lorie weep in any circumstances, but who had never seen her weep thus, was wrung with an all but insupportable pity. This pity, however, found its first expression in a sharp and nervous volte-face towards the two Hinterhöfer sisters.

“I am sure,” he said, with more or less feeling, “that there is plenty to do in getting dinner ready. But it seems that it’s left to the mistress to do by herself?”

This sufficed for the finely attuned ears of persons who had once belonged to the middle classes. With a sense of genuine injury they removed themselves, being mocked at in addition by Xavier as they swept through the doorway. For Xavier happened to be born of low estate to start with, and the condition of the fallen dames was a source of perpetual amusement to him.

“Dear, darling Lorie,” said Cornelius in a strained voice, as he folded the suffering little thing in his arms and sat down in a chair beside her small bed. “What’s the matter with my little girl?”

Her tears were falling on his face.

“Abel⁠—Abel,” she sobbed and stammered, “why⁠—isn’t⁠—Max⁠—my brother? Max⁠—ought⁠—to be my brother.”

What a catastrophe, what wretchedness! All the result of the dance and its dangerous psychological possibilities! thought Cornelius, as he glanced up at Blue Anna, who, with her hands folded upon her apron, stood, the very picture of dignified limitation, at the foot of the cot.

“It’s a case,” she said, severely and oracularly, drawing in her under lip, “of that there child having her feminine instincts so strongly developed.”

“Hold your tongue!” answered Cornelius, greatly troubled. He was forced to be content that Lorie did not draw away from him, or thrust him from her, as she had done before in the hall, but clung to him as though seeking help, while she repeated her foolish, distraught wish that Max might be her brother, and desperately demanded to be allowed to go down to him, to the hall, that he might dance with her. But Max was dancing in the hall with the Plaichinger girl, who was a fully developed valkyrie and had legitimate rights to him⁠—whereas Lorie, to the compassionate heart of the professor, had never seemed so frail or so birdlike as just then, pressing herself against him, helpless and shaken by sobs, unaware of what had invaded her poor little soul. She knew nothing of this. It was not clear to her that the plump, full-grown, and duly authorized Plaichinger girl was the cause of her sufferings⁠—the girl that was permitted to dance with Max Hergesell, while Lorie, though incomparably the more lovely of the two, had been permitted to do so only once and that once only in sport. But it was impossible to reproach young Hergesell for that, for it would have implied an insane imputation. Lorie’s grief was incurable and without rights and should have hidden itself. But as it was a grief without understanding, it was also a grief without inhibition, and this produced a great pain. Blue Anna and Xavier were not at all concerned about this pain; they showed that they were impervious to it, either out of stupidity or a matter-of-fact naturalness. But the paternal heart of the professor was lacerated by this misery, by the humiliating terrors of this passion, without rights and without cure.

There was no use in telling poor Lorie that she had a splendid little brother in the person of Biter, who was sleeping so strenuously close by. Through her tears she merely threw a contemptuous and painful look at the cot beside her own and called for Max. Nor was there any use in promising her an extensive “five-gentlemen” promenade round the dining-room, nor was there consolation in the glowing description he gave of the wonderful thoroughness with which the cushion game would be carried out before lunch. She refused to listen to any of this, refused to consider all admonitions to lie down and go to sleep. She did not want to go to sleep, she wanted to sit up and suffer.⁠—And then both of them, Abel as well as Lorie, suddenly caught themselves listening to something wonderful that was now happening, something that was approaching the nursery step by step, double step by double step, and which then overpoweringly put in appearance.

It was Xavier’s work⁠—that was clear at once. Xavier had not remained standing in the doorway, after he had mocked the two expelled lady-helps. He had got under way, he had become enterprising, he had made his arrangements. He had gone down into the hall, had plucked Max Hergesell by the sleeve, whispered something to him with his thick lips, and begged him to do something. And there they both were. Xavier once more took up his station at the door, for he had done his part; but Max Hergesell came straight through the rooms towards Lorie’s bed, clad in his dinner-jacket, with his dark little sideburns by his ears, and his handsome black eyes⁠—came like one visibly conscious of his role as a bearer of happiness, a fairy prince and Lohengrin, as one who says: “Well, here I am, all trouble will now be over.” Cornelius was almost as amazed as Lorie.

“Just look,” he said feebly, “who’s here. Isn’t it nice of Herr Hergesell?”

“It isn’t nice of him at all!” said Hergesell. “It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that I should have another look at my partner and want to say good night to her?”

Then he stepped up to the cot, within which the now silent Lorie sat. She smiled blissfully through her tears. A tiny, high little note, a half-suppressed sob of happiness, came from her lips, and then she gazed silently up at her noble knight-errant, gazed at him with her golden eyes, which, though red and swollen, were so incomparably more beautiful than those of the buxom Plaichinger damsel. She did not lift her arms to embrace him. Her happiness, like her sorrow, was without understanding, but that she did not do. Her pretty little hands remained quietly resting upon the counterpane, while Max Hergesell leaned his arms upon the rail of the cot, as upon the balustrade of a balcony.

“ ‘Just so she need not,’ ” he said, “ ‘sit weeping on her lonely bed throughout the sorrow-laden nights.’ ” And he stole a glance at the professor, that he might win applause for this highly apropos quotation from Goethe. “Ah, ha, ha!” He laughed outright. “At her age! ‘Lovely maiden, don’t repine!’ You are a dear! You’ll do, little one. You need only remain as you are. Ha ha! At this age! You see, I’ve come now. You go to sleep, little Lorie. And don’t you cry any more.”

Lorie looked at him, transfigured. Her small birdlike shoulder was bare; the professor pulled the little lace hem over it. He was forced to think of a sentimental story, of a dying child to whom a clown is brought, one she had remembered with inexpugnable ecstasy from the circus. The clown, clad in his costume, came to the child in its dying hour, a clown embroidered with silver butterflies before and behind, and the child died happy. Max Hergesell was not embroidered, and Lorie, thank God, was not about to die⁠—she had merely “gone to pieces”; but otherwise there was a certain pertinence to the story, a certain relation, and the emotions which the professor felt for young Hergesell, who stood there and gabbled idiotically, more for the father than the child⁠—something which Lorie, however, did not notice⁠—were a strange mixture of gratitude, embarrassment, hatred, and admiration.

“Good night, my little Lorelei!” said Hergesell and held out his hand across the railing of the bed. Her tiny, pretty, white little hand vanished within his large, strong, reddish one. “Sleep well,” he said. “Pleasant dreams! But not about me! Heaven forbid! At your age! Ha, ha, ha, ha!” And thus he concluded his fairy-clown visit and was escorted by Cornelius to the door.

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Not another word!”⁠—such was his polite, magnanimous way of warding off the professor’s thanks on the way to the door. Xavier followed him, in order to start serving the Italian salad downstairs.

Doctor Cornelius went back to Lorie, who had now snuggled down, resting her cheek upon her flat little pillow.

“Well, that was nice!” he said, as he gently smoothed the coverlet over her, and she nodded with a deep half-sobbing intake of breath. He sat there for at least a quarter of an hour longer and watched her go to sleep, watched her drop off the way her little brother had gone to sleep, though so much sooner. Her silken, brown hair took on the lovely tumble of ringlets which it always fell into when she slept; the long lashes lay close upon her eyes, from which so much grief had streamed; the angelic mouth with the arched and curving upper lip was open in sweet contentment, and only an occasional tiny, half-suppressed after-sob trembled through her slow, even breathing.

Her little hands, her rosy-white, flower-like hands⁠—how still they lay there, the one upon the blue coverlet of the bed, the other in front of her face on the pillow! The heart of Doctor Cornelius was surcharged with tenderness, as with wine.

How fortunate, he thought, that every breath she draws in sleep lets Lethe pour into her little soul⁠—that the night of a child establishes so broad and deep an abyss between one day and the next! Tomorrow, he knew, young Hergesell would be only a pale shadow to her, powerless to cause her heart a tremor, and her joy, disembarrassed of memories, would be perfect as she played at the “five-gentlemen” promenade and the fascinating cushion game with Abel and Biter.

Thank Heaven for that!