“Ah, just see! ‘Eckhof’ is something quite different. ‘Eckhof’ is even the name of a great actor. ‘Eckhof’ is proper. … You mention only your father. Your mother, then, could she …”
“Yes, my mother died when I was still quite young.”
“Ah. But tell me more about yourself, may I ask? But not if it tires you. If it tires you, you must rest, and I will go on telling you about Paris. But you could speak softly, yes, even if you whisper … that would only make everything the lovelier. … You were born in Bremen?” He put this question almost inaudibly, with an expression of worship and significance, as though there were no other city in the world like Bremen; as though Bremen were a city full of unmentionable adventures and speechless beauties, and to be born there gave one a vague majesty.
“Yes, just think!” she said involuntarily. “I come from Bremen.”
“I was there once,” he remarked thoughtfully.
“Great heavens, you were there, too! Herr Spinell, I believe you have seen everything from Tunis to Spitzbergen!”
“Yes, I was there once,” he repeated. “A few short hours in the evening. I remember an old, narrow street, with a strange moon lying straight above the roofs of the houses. Then I was in a Rathskeller that smelt of wine and must. It is an insistent memory …”
“Indeed? Just where could that have been? … Yes, I was born in just such a one of those dark, gabled houses … in the home of one of the old merchant families, with its reverberating halls and white lacquered portico.”
“Then your father is a merchant?” he asked a bit falteringly.
“Yes. But besides that, and first of all, he is an artist.”
“Ah! Ah! And to what extent?”
“He plays the violin. But that does not mean much. It is the way he plays it, Herr Spinell, that is important! I have never been able to hear certain notes without feeling the tears burn marvellously in my eyes … it is something that I experience in no other way. But you do not believe …”
“I do believe! Ah, as if I could doubt! But tell me: your family is quite old? Many generations have already lived, worked, and died in that dark, gabled house?”
“Yes. But why do you ask that?”
“Because it often happens that a race with dry, practical bourgeois traditions finds itself again toward the end of its days in art.”
“Is that the case? … Yes, as to my father, he is certainly more of an artist than many a man who calls himself an artist and lives on his reputation as an artist. I just play the piano a bit. Now I am not permitted to play, but then, at home, I used to play. My father and I … we played together. Yes, all those years are dear to me. Especially the garden, our garden, to the rear of the house. It was wretchedly grown up in weeds, and surrounded by mossy, crumbling walls; but that was what gave it its charm. There was a spring in the middle, with a thick wreath of irises about it. In the summer I used to spend long hours there with my girl friends. We all sat around the spring on little campstools …”
“How beautiful!” Herr Spinell said, raising his shoulders. “Would you sit there and sing?”
“No, we sewed.”
“Always … always that …”
“Yes, we sewed and chatted, my six girl friends and I …”
“How beautiful! God, just listen, how beautiful!” exclaimed Herr Spinell, and his face was distorted with his enthusiasm.
“What do you find so especially beautiful in that, Herr Spinell?”
“Only this: that there were six beside you, that you were not included in this number, but stood out from the rest like a queen. You were distinguished from your six friends. A little golden crown, quite faint, but significant, shone in your hair …”
“No, nonsense, no sort of crown …”
“Still, it was shining secretly. I should have seen it, should have seen it plainly in your hair, if I had been hidden in the bushes at one of those times …”
“God only knows what you might have seen. But you weren’t hidden there, although one day it was my present husband who stepped out of the bushes accompanied by my father. I am afraid they had overheard a good deal too much of our chatter …”
“Then that was the place you first met your husband?”
“Yes, I met him there for the first time!” she said loudly and cheerfully; and as she smiled, the tiny, pale-blue vein stood out, strained and peculiar. “He had come to see my father on business, you see. The next day he was invited to dinner, and three days later he asked to marry me.”
“Indeed! And it all happened with such extraordinary swiftness?”
“Yes. … Or rather, from then on, things went a little slower. For you must know that my father was not entirely willing at first, and conditioned quite a long delay. In the first place, he wanted to keep me with him, and he had still other reasons. But …”
“But?”
“But I wanted it to happen,” she said with a smile, and again the little light-blue vein gave her face a distressed and sickly appearance.
“Ah, you wanted it to happen.”
“Yes, and I showed a decently steady determination, as you see …”
“As I see. Yes.”
“… So that my father finally had to give in.”
“And then you left him and his violin, left the old house, the luxuriant garden, the spring and your six girl friends, and went your way with Herr Klöterjahn.”
“And went my way. … You have a strange manner of expressing yourself, Herr Spinell! Almost biblical! Yes, I left the house, since that is Nature’s arrangement.”
“Yes, that is Nature’s arrangement.”
“And then, it was a matter of my future happiness.”
“Of course. And it came, this happiness …”
“It came in the hour, Herr Spinell, when they first brought me little Anton, our little Anton, and when he wailed so powerfully with his sturdy little lungs … for he is so strong and healthy …”
“I have heard you speak several times of the health of
