LITMIR.BIZ

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as another woman would for a personal fete; and she watched the candles grow shorter without a tinge of regret. When Franz played at an ABENDUNTERHALTUNG, the family turned out in a body. Schwarz was a god, all-powerful, on whom their welfare depended; and it was necessary to propitiate him by a quarterly visit on a Sunday morning, when, over wine and biscuits, she wept real and feigned tears of gratitude.

      In this hard-working, careworn woman, who was seldom to be seen but in petticoat, bed-jacket, and heelless, felt shoes; who, her whole life long, had been little better than a domestic servant; in her there existed a devotion to art which had never wavered. It would have seemed to her contrary to nature that Franz should be anything but a musician, and it was also quite in the order of things for them to be poor. Two younger boys, who were still at school, gave up all their leisure time to music—they had never in their lives tumbled round a football or swung a bat—and Franz believed that the elder would prove a skilful violinist. Of the little girls, one had a pure voice and a good ear, and was to be a singer—for before this Juggernaut, prejudice went down. Had anyone suggested to Frau Furst that her daughter should be a clerk, even a teacher, she would have flung up hands of horror; but music!—that was a different matter. It was, moreover, the single one of the arts, in which this staunch advocate of womanliness granted her sex a share.

      "Ask Franz," she said to Maurice. "Franz knows. He will explain. All women can do is to reproduce what some one else has thought or felt."

      As an immortal example of the limits set by sex, she invariably fell back on Clara Schumann, with whom she had more than once come into personal contact. In her youth, Frau Furst had had a clear soprano voice, and, to Maurice's interest, she told him how she had sometimes been sent for to the Schumann's house in the INSELSTRASSE, to sing Robert's songs for him.

      "Clara accompanied me," she said, relating this, the great reminiscence of her life; "and he was there, too, although I never saw him face to face. He was too shy for that. But he was behind a screen, and sometimes he would call: 'I must alter that; it is too high;' or 'Quicker, quicker!' Sometimes even 'Bravo!'"

      Her motherly ambitions for Franz knew no bounds. One of the few diversions she allowed herself was a visit to the theatre—when Franz had tickets given to him; when one of her favourite operas was performed; or on the anniversary of her husband's death—and, on such occasions, she pointed out to the younger children, the links that bound and would yet bind them to the great house.

      "That was your father's seat," she reminded them every time. "The second row from the end. He came in at the door to the left. And that," pointing to the conductor's raised chair, "is where Franz will sit some day." For she dreamed of Franz in all the glory of KAPELLMEISTER; saw him swinging the little stick that dominated the theatre-audience, singers and players alike.

      And the children, hanging over the high gallery, shuffling their restless feet, thus had their path as dearly traced for them, their destiny as surely sealed, as any fate-shackled heroes of antiquity.

      Late one afternoon about this time, Franz might have been found together with his friends Krafft and Schilsky, at the latter's lodging in the TALSTRASSE. He was astride a chair, over the back of which he had folded his arms; and his chubby, rubicund face glistened with moisture.

      In the middle of the room, at the corner of a bare deal table that was piled with loose music and manuscript, Schilsky sat improving and correcting the tails and bodies of hastily made, notes. He was still in his nightshirt, over which he had thrown coat and trousers; and, wide open at the neck, it exposed to the waist a skin of the dead whiteness peculiar to red-haired people. His face, on the other hand, was sallow and unfresh; and the reddish rims of the eyes, and the coarsely self-indulgent mouth, contrasted strikingly with the general youthfulness of his appearance. He had the true musician's head: round as a cannon-ball, with a vast, bumpy forehead, on which the soft fluffy hair began far back, and stood out like a nimbus. His eyes were either desperately dreamy or desperately sharp, never normally attentive or at rest; his blunted nose and chin were so short as to make the face look top-heavy. A carefully tended young moustache stood straight out along his cheeks. He had large, slender hands, and quick movements.

      The air of the room was like a thin grey veiling, for all three puffed hard at cigarettes. Without removing his from between his teeth, Schilsky related an adventure of the night before. He spoke in jerks, with a strong lisp, intent on what he was doing than on what he was saying.

      "Do you think he'd budge?" he asked in a thick, spluttery way. "Not he. Till nearly two. And then I couldn't get him along. He thought it wasn't eleven, and wanted to relieve himself at every corner. To irritate an imaginary bobby. He disputed with them, too. Heavens, what sport it was! At last I dragged him up here and got him on the sofa. Off he rolls again. So I let him lie. He didn't disturb me."

      Heinrich Krafft, the hero of the episode lay on the short, uncomfortable sofa, with the table-cover for a blanket. In answer to Schilsky, he said faintly, without opening his eyes: "Nothing would. You are an ox. When I wake this morning, with a mouth like gum arabic, he sits there as if he had not stirred all night. Then to bed, and snores till midday, through all the hellish light and noise."

      Here Furst could not resist making a little joke. He announced himself by a chuckle-like the click of a clock about to strike.

      "He's got to make the most of his liberty. He doesn't often get off duty. We know, we know." He laughed tonelessly, and winked at Krafft.

      Krafft quoted:

      In der Woche zwier—

      "Now, you fellows, shut up!" said Schilsky. It was plain that banter of this kind was not disagreeable to him; at the same time he was just at the moment too engrossed, to have more than half an car for what was said. With his short-sighted eyes close to the paper, he was listening with all his might to some harmonies that his fingers played on the table. When, a few minutes later he rose and stretched the stiffness from his limbs, his face, having lost its expression of rapt concentration, seemed suddenly to have grown younger. He set about dressing himself by drawing off his nightshirt over his head. At a word from him, Furst sprang to collect utensils for making coffee. Heinrich Krafft opened his eyes and followed their movements; and the look he had for Schilsky was as warily watchful as a cat's.

      Schilsky, an undeveloped Hercules—he was narrow in proportion to his height—and still naked to the waist, took some bottles from a long line of washes and perfumes that stood on the washstand, and, crossing to an elegant Venetian-glass mirror, hung beside the window, lathered his chin. It was a peculiarity of his only to be able to attend thoroughly to one thing at a time, and a string of witticisms uttered by Furst passed unheeded. But Krafft's first words made him start.

      Having watched him for some time, the latter said slowly. "I say, old fellow, are you sure it's all square about Lulu and this Dresden business?"

      Razor in hand, Schilsky turned and looked at him. As he did so, he coloured, and answered with an over-anxious haste: "Of course I am. I made her go. She didn't want to."

      "That's a well-known trick."

      The young man scowled and thrust out his under-lip. "Do you think I'm not up to their tricks? Do you want to teach me how to manage a woman? I tell you I sent her away."

      He tried to continue shaving, but was visibly uneasy. "Well, if you won't believe me," he said, with sudden anger, though neither of the others had spoken. "Now where the deuce is that letter?"

      He rummaged among the music and papers on the table; in chaotic drawers; beneath dirty, fat-scaled dinner-dishes on the washstand; between door and stove, through a kind of rubbishheap that had formed with time, of articles of dress, spoiled sheets of music-paper, soiled linen, empty bottles, and boots, countless boots, single and in pairs. When he had found what he looked for, he ran his eyes down the page, as if he were going to read it aloud. Then, however, he changed his mind; a boyish gratification overspread his face, and, tossing the letter to Krafft, he bade them read it for themselves. Furst leaned over the end of the sofa. It was written in English, in a bold, scrawly hand, and ran, without date or heading:

      MY OWN DEAREST

      NOW

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