"Ssh--not so loud," said the latter. "It"s a secret, a dead secret--though I"m sure I don"t know why. Franz----"
At this very moment, Franz himself came into the kitchen. He looked distrustfully at his whispering mother.
"Now then, mother, haven"t you got that beer yet?" he demanded. His genial bonhomie disappeared, as if by magic, when he entered his home circle, and he was particularly gruff with this adoring woman.
"GLEICH, FRANZCHEN, GLEICH," she answered soothingly, and whisked about her work again, with the air of one caught napping.
Maurice followed Furst"s invitation to join the rest of the party.
The folding-doors between the "best room" and the adjoining bedroom had been opened wide, and the guests were distributed over the two rooms.
The former was brilliantly lighted by three lamps and two candles, and all the sitting-accommodation the house contained was ranged in a semicircle round the grand piano. Here, not a place was vacant; those who had come late were in the bedroom, making shift with whatever offered. Two girls and a young man, having pushed back the feather-bed, sat on the edge of the low wooden bedstead, with their arms interlaced to give them a better balance. Maurice found Madeleine on a rickety little sofa that stood at the foot of the bed. Dove sat on a chest of drawers next the sofa, his long legs dangling in the air. Beside Madeleine, with his head on her shoulder, was Krafft.
"Oh, there you are," cried Madeleine. "Well, I did my best to keep the place for you; but it was of no use, as you see. Just sit down, however. Between us, we"ll squeeze him properly."
Maurice was glad that the room, which was lighted only by one small lamp, was in semi-darkness; for, at the sound of his own voice, it suddenly became clear to him that the piece of gossip Frau Furst had volunteered, had been of the nature of a blow. Schilsky"s departure threatened, in a way he postponed for the present thinking out, to disturb his life; and, in an abrupt need of sympathy, he laid his hand on Krafft"s knee.
"Is it you, old man? What have you been doing with yourself?"
Krafft gave him one of those looks which, in the early days of their acquaintance, had proved so disconcerting--a look of struggling recollection.
"Oh, nothing in particular," he replied, without hostility, but also without warmth. His mind was not with his words, and Maurice withdrew his hand.
Madeleine leaned forward, dislodging Krafft"s head from its resting-place.
"How long have you two been "DU" to each other?" she asked, and at Maurice"s curt reply, she pushed Krafft from her. "Sit up and behave yourself. One would think you had an evil spirit in you to-night."
Krafft was nervously excited: bright red spots burnt on his cheeks, his hands twitched, and he jerked forward in his seat and threw himself back again, incessantly.
"No, you are worse than a mosquito," cried Madeleine, losing patience.
"Anyone would think you were going to play yourself. And he will be as cool as an iceberg. The sofa won"t stand it, Heinz. If you can"t stop fidgeting, get up."
He had gone, before she finished speaking; for a slight stir in the next room made them suppose for a moment that Schilsky was arriving.
Afterwards, Krafft was to be seen straying about, with his hands in his pockets; and, on observing his rose-pink cheeks and tumbled curly hair, Madeleine could not refrain from remarking: "He ought to have been a girl."
The air was already hot, by reason of the lamps, and the many breaths, and the firmly shut double-windows. The clamour for beer had become universal by the time Adolfchen arrived with his arms full of bottles.
As there were not enough gla.s.ses to go round, every two or three persons shared one between them--a proceeding that was carried out with much noisy mirth. Above all other voices was to be heard that of Miss Jensen, who, in a speckled yellow dress, with a large feather fan in her hand, sat in the middle of the front row of seats. It was she who directed how the beer should be apportioned; she advised a few late-comers where they would still find room, and engaged Furst to place the lights on the piano to better advantage. Next her, a Mrs.
Lautenschlager, a plump little American lady, with straight yellow hair which hung down on her shoulders, was relating to her neighbour on the other side, in a tone that could be clearly heard in both rooms, how she had "discovered" her voice.
"I come to Schwarz, last fall," she said shaking back her hair, and making effective use of her babyish mouth; "and he thinks no end of me.
But the other week I was sick, and as I lay in bed, I sung some--just for fun. And my landlady--she"s a regular singer herself--who was fixing up the room, she claps her hands together and says: "My goodness me! Why YOU have a voice!" That"s what put it in my head, and I went to Sperling to hear what he"d got to say. He was just tickled to death, I guess he was, and he"s going to make something dandy of it, so I stop long enough. I don"t know what my husband"ll say though. When I wrote him I was sick, he says: "Come home and be sick at home"--that"s what he says."
Miss Jensen could not let pa.s.s the opportunity of breaking a lance for her own master, the Swede, and of cutting up Sperling"s method, which she denounced as antiquated. She made quite a little speech, in the course of which she now and then interrupted herself to remind Furst--who, was as soft as a pudding before her--of something he had forgotten to do, such as snuffing the candles or closing the door.
"Just let me hear your scale, will you?" she said patronisingly to Mrs.
Lautenschlager. The latter, nothing loath, stuck out her chin, opened her mouth, and, for a short time, all other noises were drowned in a fine, full volume of voice.
On their sofa, Madeleine and Maurlee sat in silence, pretending to listen to Dove, who was narrating his journey. Madeleine was out of humour; she tapped the floor, and had a crease in her forehead. As for Maurice, he was in such poor spirits that she could not but observe it.
"Why are you so quiet? Is anything the matter?"
He shook his head, without speaking. His vague sense of impending misfortune had crystallised into a definite thought; he knew now what it signified. If Schilsky went away from Leipzig, Louise would probably go, too, and that would be the end of everything.
"I represented to him," he heard Dove saying, "that I had seen the luggage with my own eyes at Flushing. What do you think he answered? He looked me up and down, and said: "ICH WERDE TELEGRAPHIEREN UND ERKUNDIGUNGEN EINZIEHEN." Now, do you think if you said to an English station-master: "Sir, I saw the luggage with my own eyes," he would not believe you? No, in my opinion, the whole German railway-system needs revision. Would you believe it, we did not make fifty kilometers in the hour, and yet our engine broke down before Magdeburg?"
So this would be the end; the end of foolish dreams and weak hopes, which he had never put into words even to himself, which had never properly existed, and yet had been there, nevertheless, a ma.s.s of gloriously vague perhapses. The end was at hand--an end before there had been any beginning.
"... the annoyance of the perpetual interruptions," went on the voice on the other side. "A lady who was travelling in the same compartment--a very pleasant person, who was coming over to be a teacher in a school in Dresden--I have promised to show her our lions when she visits Leipzig: well, as I was saying, she was quite alarmed the first time he entered in that way, and it took me some time, I a.s.sure you, to make her believe that this was the German method of revising tickets."
The break occasioned by the arrival of the beer had been of short duration, and the audience was growing impatient; at the back of the room, some one began to stamp his feet; others took it up. Furst perspired with anxiety, and made repeated journeys to the stair-head, to see if Schilsky were not coming. The latter was almost an hour late by now, and jests, bald and witty, were made at his expense. Some one offered to take a bet that he had fallen asleep and forgotten the appointment, and at this, one of the girls on the bed, a handsome creature with bold, prominent eyes, related an anecdote to her neighbours, concerning Schilsky"s powers of sleep. All three exploded with laughter. In a growing desire to be asked to play, Boehmer had for some time hung about the piano, and was now just about to drop, as if by accident, upon the stool, when the cry of: "No Bach!" was raised--Bach was Boehmer"s specialty--and re-echoed, and he retired red and discomfited to his Place in a corner of the room, where his companion, a statuesque little English widow, made biting observations on the company"s behaviour. The general rowdyism was at its height, when some one had the happy idea that Krafft should sing them his newest song. At this, there was a unanimous shriek of approval, and several hands dragged Krafft to the piano. But himself the wildest of them all, he needed no forcing. Flinging himself down on the seat, he preluded wildly in imitation of Rubinstein. His hearers sat with their mouths open, a fixed smile on their faces, laughter ready in their throats, and only Madeleine was coolly contemptuous.
"Tom-fool!" she said in a low voice.
Krafft was confidently expected to burst into one of those songs for which he was renowned. Few of his friends were able to sing them, and no one but himself could both sing and play them simultaneously: they were a monstrous, standing joke. Instead of this, however, he turned, winked at his audience, and began a slow, melancholy ditty, with a recurring refrain. He was not allowed to finish the first verse; a howl of disapproval went up; his hearers hooted, jeered and stamped.
"Sick cats!"
"d.a.m.n your "WENIG SONNE!""--this was the refrain.
"Put your head in a bag!"
"Pity he drinks!"
"Give us one of the rousers--the rou ... sers!"
Krafft himself laughed unbridledly. "DAS ICH SPRICHT!"--he announced.
"In C sharp major."
There was a hush of antic.i.p.ation, in which Dove, stopping his BRETZEL half-way to his mouth, was heard to say in his tone of measured surprise: "C sharp major! Why, that is----"
The rest was drowned in the wild chromatic pa.s.sages that Krafft sent up and down the piano with his right hand, while his left followed with full-bodied chords, each of which exceeded the octave. Before, however, there was time to laugh, this riot ceased, and became a mournful cadence, to the slowly pa.s.sing harmonies of which, Krafft sang:
I am weary of everything that is, under the sun.
I sicken at the long lines of rain, which are black against the sky; They drip, for a restless heart, with the drip of despair: For me, winds must rage, trees bend, and clouds sail stormily.
The whirlwind of the prelude commenced anew; the chords became still vaster; the player swayed from side to side, like a stripling-tree in a storm. Madeleine said, "Tch!" in disgust, but the rest of the company, who had only waited for this, burst into peals of laughter; some bent double in their seats, some leant back with their chins in the air.
Even Dove smiled. Just, however, as those whose sense of humour was most highly developed, mopped their faces with gestures of exhaustion, and a.s.sured their neighbours that they "could not, really could not laugh any more," Furst entered and flapped his hands.
"Here he comes!"
A sudden silence fell, broken only by a few hysterical giggles from the ladies, and by a frivolous American, who cried: "Now for ALSO SCHRIE ZENOPHOBIA!" Krafft stopped playing, but remained sitting at the piano, wiping down the keys with his handkerchief.
Schilsky came in, somewhat embarra.s.sed by the lull which had succeeded the hubbub heard in the pa.s.sage, but wholly unconcerned at the lateness of the hour: except in matters of practical advancement, time did not exist for him. As soon as he appeared, the two ladies in the front row began to clap their hands; the rest of the company followed their example, then, in spite of Furst"s efforts to prevent it, rose and crowded round him. Miss Jensen and her friend made themselves particularly conspicuous. Mrs Lauterischlager had an infatuation for the young man, of which she made no secret; she laid her hand caressingly on his coat-sleeve, and put her face as near his as propriety admitted.
"Disgusting, the way those women go on with him!" said Madeleine. "And what is worse, he likes it."
Schilsky listened to the babble of compliments with that mixture of boyish deference and unequivocal superiority, which made him so attractive to women. He was too good-natured to interrupt them and free himself, and would have stood as long as they liked, if Furst had not come to the rescue and led him to the piano. Schilsky laid his hand affectionately on Krafft"s shoulder, and Krafft sprang up in exaggerated surprise. The audience took its seats again; the thick ma.n.u.script-score was set up on the music-rack, and the three young men at the piano had a brief disagreement with one another about turning the leaves: Krafft was bent on doing it, and Schilsky objected, for Krafft had a way of forgetting what he was at in the middle of a page.
Krafft flushed, cast an angry look at his friend, and withdrew, in high dudgeon, to a corner.