Short Fiction

lady devoted to “erotics” grew dim in a peculiar manner every time the word “chastity” was spoken, and the philosopher with the appearance of a kangaroo now and again described something vague in the air with his long and crooked index finger. The short-story writer had for a long time been seeking in vain some adequate support for his aching back. At ten o’clock he was visited by the vision of a ham sandwich, but he shied this off manfully.

About half past ten one saw that the disciple held the last folio sheet in his red and trembling right hand. He had finished. “Soldiers!” he wound up, with the last ounce of his strength, with a failing voice of thunder, “I deliver unto you to be plundered⁠—the world!” He then stepped down from the platform, regarded everybody with a threatening look, and vanished as violently as he had come, through the door.

The audience remained for a moment immovably in the position which they had last assumed. Then, as with a common resolve, they stood up and went away immediately, after each, with a soft word or two, had pressed the hand of Maria Josefa, who, innocent and calm, again stood in her white collar close beside the door.

The dumb lad was on hand outside. He lighted the guests to the cloakroom, helped them to put on their wraps, and led them through the narrow hall with the staircase, upon which, from the supreme height of Daniel’s realm, the moving light of the candles fell, down to the house door, which he unlocked. The guests, one after the other, stepped out upon the desolate suburban street.

The coupé of the rich lady had halted in front of the house. One saw how the coachman on the box between the two brilliant lanterns touched his hat with his whip-hand. The short-story writer accompanied the rich lady to the carriage door.

“How did you stand it?” he asked.

“I don’t like to express an opinion upon such things,” she replied. “Perhaps he is really a genius, or something similar.”

“Yes, what is genius?” he asked thoughtfully. “All requirements are present in this Daniel⁠—loneliness, freedom, intellectual passion, magnificent visual capacity, belief in himself, even the proximity of crime and madness. What is lacking? Possibly the human? A little feeling, longing, love? But that is an entirely improvised hypothesis.

“Give Sonia my greetings,” he said as she reached him her hand in farewell after seating herself, and he studied her face intently to see how she would take his speaking simply of “Sonia,” not of “Fräulein Sonia,” or of “your daughter.”

She prized his books, and so she suffered it with a smile.

“I’ll do so.”

“Thanks!” said he, and a whirl of hope bewildered him. “And now I’ll eat supper like a wolf!”

He had a certain relationship to life.

How Jappe Fought Do Escobar

I was greatly startled when Johnny Bishop told me that Jappe and Do Escobar wanted to fight each other and that we should go and look on.

It was during the summer holidays, in Travemünde, on a broiling hot day, with a faint land breeze and a flat, wide-ebbing sea. We had been some three-quarters of an hour in the water and were lying under the boards and beams of the bathhouse on the firm sand, together with Jürgen Brattström, the son of the shipowner. Johnny and Brattström lay upon their backs, completely naked. I found it more comfortable to keep my towel wrapped about my hips. Brattström asked me why I did this, and as I had no proper answer forthcoming, Johnny remarked with that winning and winsome smile of his that I was very likely a bit too big to lie about naked. I was actually larger and more developed than he and Brattström, and also, no doubt, a little older⁠—about thirteen. And so I swallowed Johnny’s explanation in silence, even though it implied something derogatory to me. For in Johnny’s company it was easy to cut a comic figure if one happened to be a little less small, a little less delicate and childlike in body than himself, who was all these things to such a high degree. He would then look up at one with his pretty, blue, girlish eyes with an expression at once friendly and full of smiling mockery, as though he would say: “What an overgrown lout you have already become!” The ideal of manliness and long trousers lost its effect in his presence, and this at a time, not long after the war, when strength, courage, and every kind of rude virtue stood in high esteem among us boys, and all kinds of things were considered effeminate. But Johnny, as a foreigner, or half a foreigner, was quite free from this influence. On the contrary there was something about him that reminded one of a woman who has preserved herself well and who is able to make merry at others who are less skilled in this respect. He was also by a long way the only boy in town who was dressed in an elegant and markedly aristocratic manner; that is to say, in genuine English sailor-suits with blue linen collars, sailor’s knots, cords, a silver whistle in his breast-pocket, and an anchor upon the puffy sleeves, which narrowed to a band at the wrists. All this would have been regarded as dandified in any other lad, and punished accordingly. But he carried it off charmingly and as a matter of course, took no harm from it, and was never forced to suffer from it in the slightest.

He looked like a thin little Cupid as he lay there, his arms upraised, his pretty, long, English head, with its soft, blond locks, bedded in his small hands. His father had been a German merchant who had naturalized himself in England and who had died some years before. But his mother was a born Englishwoman, a lady of mild and quiet character, with a longish face, who had