untried. I’ll write that such things are inartistic. But perhaps it is artistic after all. What is the artist? A clown. Criticism is the highest of all functions. But I cannot write that.” And then he removes himself with his bespattered trousers.
After nine or ten calls the overheated infant prodigy no longer retires behind his screen, but goes down to his mamma and to the impresario in the hall. The people are standing among the disarranged chairs and applauding and pushing forwards in order to have a look at Bibi close at hand. A few also wish to have a look at the princess; two close-packed groups form in front of the platform, around the infant prodigy and the princess, and it is difficult to say which of the two is really receiving. But then the lady-in-waiting is commanded to go to Bibi; she tugs and smoothes his silken jacket a bit, to make him presentable for court, leads him by the arm in front of the princess, and earnestly indicates to him that he should kiss the hand of Her Royal Highness.
“How do you do it, my child?” asks the princess. “Does it come to you by itself, when you sit down?”
“Oui, madame,” Bibi replies. But inwardly he thinks: “Oh, you stupid old princess—!”
Then he turns away with a shy rudeness and goes back to his own people.
Outside there is great confusion at the cloakrooms. One holds up one’s check; with open arms one receives furs, shawls, and galoshes across the table. The piano-teacher is standing there among her acquaintances and criticizing. “He is not very direct,” says she aloud, and looks about her.
A young, aristocratic lady is standing in front of one of the tall mirrors against the wall, and her two brothers, both lieutenants, are helping her with her cloak and her fur overshoes. She is wonderfully pretty, with her steel-blue eyes and her clear, thoroughbred face, a perfect little aristocrat. Done with her dressing, she stands waiting for her brothers.
“Adolf, don’t stand in front of the mirror so long!” she says to one of them in a low, angry voice, for he finds it difficult to tear himself away from the image of his handsome but fatuous face. Well, if that does not beat everything! Surely Lieutenant Adolf has the right to button his overcoat in front of a mirror without her leave! Then they go out, and outside in the street, where the arc-lamps shimmer turbidly through the whirling snow, Lieutenant Adolf begins to cut up a bit—turns up his coat-collar, shoves his hands into the slanting pockets of his overcoat, and begins to execute a short cakewalk upon the snow, for it is very cold.
“A child!” thinks a girl with unkempt hair who walks with dangling arms behind them, in the company of a solemn-looking youth. “A most lovable child! In there everything was full of reverence—” Then with a loud, monotonous voice she says: “We are all infant prodigies, we creators!”
“Well,” thinks the old gentleman who has never been able to get beyond “Three Huntsmen from the Palatinate,” and whose excrescence is now covered by a top hat, “what does she mean? A kind of Pythia, it seems to me.”
But the solemn-looking youth, who understands her every word, nods slowly.
Then they are silent and the girl with unkempt hair follows that aristocratic sister and her brothers with her eyes. She despises them, yet she follows them with her eyes, until they have vanished round the corner.
Tristan
I
So this is the Einfried Sanatorium! White and rectilinear, with its expanse of main buildings and side wings, it lies in the centre of a broad park that is delightfully fitted out with grottoes, arbours, and pavilions made of bark. And above and beyond the slate roofs, the hills rise bulkily against the sky. They are green with pines, and gently irregular.
This institution is still run by Dr. Leander. With his black, double-pointed beard, which is as coarse and matted as the horsehair used for stuffing furniture, with his thick, glistening spectacles and his air of having been chilled by science, hardened, and filled with a subdued, cautious pessimism—with all this he maintains a forceful and conclusive jurisdiction over his patients. His patients—items that were too weak to make laws for themselves and keep them, but had given themselves completely over to him that they might gain support from his rigidity.
As to Fräulein von Osterloh—she functions with an unwearying devotion as housekeeper. Great heavens! how urgently she keeps on rushing upstairs and downstairs, from one end of the institute to the other! She has charge of the kitchen and the storeroom, goes through the wash, gives orders to the servants, and sets the table of the establishment from the standpoints of economy, health, tastiness, and of the outward appearance of things. She manages with an agitated meticulousness; and in her excessive industry there lies concealed a steady reproach for the whole world of men, since it has not yet occurred to anyone of them to take her with him. But in two round crimson spots, the unextinguishable hope glows on her cheeks of ultimately becoming the wife of Dr. Leander. …
Ozone, and quiet, quiet air … in spite of anything Dr. Leander’s detractors and rivals may say to the contrary, Einfried is to be most warmly recommended for consumptives. But there are not only tubercular patients here; there are all sorts of inmates, men, women, and even children. Dr. Leander has results to offer in any number of fields. There are people here with stomach-trouble, as, for instance, the wife of Magistrate Spatz, who in addition has something wrong with her ears. There are gentlemen with bad hearts, paralytics, sufferers from rheumatism and all stages of nervous disorder. One diabetic general is consuming his pension here with a ceaseless grumbling. Several men with fleshless faces jerk their legs about in an uncontrolled manner which by no
