And one evening he surprised me still more. Coming to me in my room he told me that he needed twenty francs and would I oblige him? In return he offered that I instead of him should have Maria for the night.
“Pablo,” I said, very much shocked, “you don’t know what you say. Barter for a woman is counted among us as the last degradation. I have not heard your proposal, Pablo.”
He looked at me with pity. “You don’t want to, Herr Harry. Very good. You’re always making difficulties for yourself. Don’t sleep tonight with Maria if you would rather not. But give me the money all the same. You shall have it back. I have urgent need of it.”
“What for?”
“For Agostino, the little second violin, you know. He has been ill for a week and there’s no one to look after him. He hasn’t a son, nor have I at the moment.”
From curiosity and also partly to punish myself, I went with him to Agostino. He took milk and medicine to him in his attic, and a wretched one it was. He made his bed and aired the room and made a most professional compress for the fevered head, all quickly and gently and efficiently like a good sick-nurse. The same evening I saw him playing till dawn in the City Bar.
I often talked at length and in detail about Maria with Hermine, about her hands and shoulders and hips and her way of laughing and kissing and dancing.
“Has she shown you this?” asked Hermine on one occasion, describing to me a peculiar play of the tongue in kissing. I asked her to show it me herself, but she was most earnest in her refusal. “That is for later. I am not your love yet.”
I asked her how she was acquainted with Maria’s ways of kissing and with many secrets as well that could be known only to her lovers.
“Oh,” she cried, “we’re friends, after all. Do you think we’d have secrets from one another? I must say you’ve got hold of a beautiful girl. There’s no one like her.”
“All the same, Hermine, I’m sure you have some secrets from each other, or have you told her everything you know about me?”
“No, that’s another matter. Those are things she would not understand. Maria is wonderful. You are fortunate. But between you and me there are things she has not a notion of. Naturally I told her a lot about you, much more than you would have liked at the time. I had to win her for you, you see. But neither Maria nor anyone else will ever understand you as I understand you. I’ve learnt something about you from her besides, for she’s told me all about you as far as she knows you at all. I know you nearly as well as if we had often slept together.”
It was curious and mysterious to know, when I was with Maria again, that she had had Hermine in her arms just as she had me. … New, indirect and complicated relations rose before me, new possibilities in love and life; and I thought of the thousand souls of the Steppenwolf treatise.
In the short interval between the time that I got to know Maria and the Fancy Dress Ball I was really happy; and yet I never had the feeling that this was my release and the attainment of felicity. I had the distinct impression, rather, that all this was a prelude and a preparation, that everything was pushing eagerly forward, that the gist of the matter was to come.
I was now so proficient in dancing that I felt quite equal to playing my part at the Ball of which everybody was talking. Hermine had a secret. She took the greatest care not
