The Blue Anchor
I
There was dancing in the salon, but in the darkened smoking-room sat several men who did not dance. The younger ones had white flowers in their buttonholes, the older ones had decorations. In the corner of a sofa sat a man a little apart from the others; he sat very silent and smiled as at a happy dream. His face was brown, but his forehead was white. His frock coat was as correct as anyone else’s, and he had also a white flower in his buttonhole; but his left hand, which hung over the arm of the sofa, was tattooed with a blue anchor.
As a matter of fact it was not a ball; there had merely been a dinner, and afterwards there was dancing.
A man with a decoration was standing in front of him.
“You don’t dance, Mr. Fant?” he inquired.
Fant replied, “I’ve just been dancing with Miss Gabel.”
But as he said this, he felt that he blushed. Why should he have added “with Miss Gabel.” It was surely a matter of indifference with whom he had danced. Because he believed he had said something stupid, he was annoyed with the man to whom he had said it, and set to staring at his decoration without saying anything. Since this was a bogus foreign decoration of the worst sort, the man grew embarrassed, coughed drily, and passed on.
Fant remained seated and stared into a mirror which faced him on an oblique wall. But it was not himself that he saw in the mirror, it was the flooding light of the dancing hall and the sinuous lines of the women. They seemed to move silently in time with the music. Look at their red lips, look at the white curves of their arms!—
There she was again! For the third time she glided past across the mirror. It was her cousin she was dancing with, a boy, lately a student—ah, well!
No, he could not sit still, he could not look on any more. It surely signified nothing that the boy danced with his own cousin, but he could not look on. He rose and went out of the room.
Someone asked, “Who is this Mr. Fant?”
“He has invented something—a gas-burner, I believe. He is already on the way to make a fortune.”
“But did you see,” said the man with the foreign order, “did you see that he has a blue anchor tattooed on one hand?”
They suddenly burst into guffaws.
II
He sauntered back and forth through the rooms. He went out into the corridor. A couple of Knights of Vasa were sitting on the wood-box talking about business while they gesticulated with two big cigars, on which they had left the labels. They grew silent as he passed.
He came into a greenish room that was half dark. From the roof on a narrow cord hung a single electric light, its glow shaded by blue and green fringes. On a dressing-table with a marble top an old Chinese mandarin of porcelain sat sleeping on his crossed legs.
How strangely far off the music sounded, as if from underneath!
He set the mandarin’s head in motion with a little punch of his little finger. Two mirrors repeated in unending succession the pale and lethargic nods of the yellow head.
Now it was quiet, the music.
All at once she stood there, in the middle of the room. He had not heard her enter. She held out both hands to him. He took them and drew her to him for a kiss, but she freed herself almost immediately.
“Somebody’s coming,” she said.
They listened. Voices approached and moved away again.
When all was quiet around them, he pressed her to him in a long kiss. And he thought while she kissed him: This is life! This is eternity!
Far away in the green darkness nodded the pale head of the mandarin.
“No one kisses like you,” he muttered.
“Many kiss like you,” she responded, smiling.
He thought to himself: she’s smiling so that I shall know she’s jesting and that she has never kissed anyone else.
While he caressed her two small hands between his, he noticed that she was looking at his left hand.
“You are looking at the anchor,” he said. “It’s true that it is not handsome. And it won’t come off.”
She took his hand and surveyed inquisitively the blue dots that formed an anchor. But she said nothing.
“It was in Hamburg that was done,” he said. “I was a ship’s boy on a vessel. We had come ashore and gone into a tavern by the harbor. I remember it all so well: the fog, the many masts in the harbor, and the smell of the grease. My comrades were tattooed, on the hands, arms and body, and they thought I ought to have myself tattooed also. I couldn’t refuse, or they would have thought I was afraid of the pain, for it hurt a great deal. But I thought, too, it was stylish; I was hardly fourteen, you know.”
“Are you tattooed on the body as well?” she asked.
Smilingly and somewhat unwillingly he answered, “Yes, I have on the breast a ship and a bird, which is supposed to be an eagle, though it’s more like a rooster.”
She looked long into his eyes, then slowly raised
