II
On his way to the Alm he met the fattest man in Marienbad, a former chef of the German emperor, and gave him a friendly salute. He liked to see this monster, who made the scales groan at six hundred pounds, more than double his own weight, for it put him at ease with himself. But this evening he felt uncomfortable. What if he were to reach such a climax in adiposity What if in the years to come he should be compelled, as was the unfortunate man from Berlin, to sit on a chair every five minutes, a chair carried by an impudent boy! What—here his heart sank—if the Fräulein should mock his size! He walked so rapidly at this idea that other victims of rotundity stopped to look at his tall figure and nodded approval. Ach! Marienbad was wonderful!
After he had found a seat at the Alm next to the low wall, across which he could see a vast stretch of undulating country, lighted by a moon that seemed to swing like a silver hoop in the sky, Krayne ordered Pilsner. He was fatigued by the hilly scramble and he was thirsty. Oh, the lovely thirst of Marienbad—who that hath not been within thy hospitable gates he knoweth it not! The magic of the night was making of him a poet. He could see his Tyrolean friends behind the glass partition of the little hall. There would they sing, not in the open. It was nearly the same, for presently the windows were raised and their voices came floating out to him, the bourdon of Röselein's organ easily distinguishable. Love had sharpened his ears. He drained his glass and sent for another. He felt that he was tumbling down an abyss of passion and that nothing in the world could save him.
The intermission! He stood up to attract the attention of Herr Johan Präger. Röselein saw him and at once neared him, but without the basket. This delicacy pleased Krayne very much. It showed him that he was not on the same footing as the public. He made the girl take a seat, and though he felt the eyes of the crowd upon him, he was not in the least concerned. London was far away and the season was too young for the annual rush of his compatriots. Would the Fräulein take something? She accepted coffee, which she drank from a long glass with plenty of milk and sugar. She again gazed at him with such a resigned expression that he felt his starched cuffs grow warm from their contiguity to his leaping pulses.
"Yes, Fräulein," he said, employing the familiar du, "thou hast overcome me. Why not accept my offer?" Was this the prudent Hugh Krayne talking? She smiled sweetly and shook her head. Her voice was delicious in colour and intonation, nor did it betray humble origin.
"I fear, dear sir, that what you offer is impossible. My sister, the soprano, would never hear of such a thing. My brother, her husband, would not allow it. And I owe them my living, my education. How could I repay them if I left them now?" she hesitated.
"Simply enough. You would be a singer at the opera some day, and take them all to live with you. Is there no other reason?" He recollected with a vivid sense of the disagreeable the lively antics of a lithe youth in the company, who, at the close of the concert, executed with diabolic dexterity what they called a Schuhplattltanz. This dance had glued Krayne's attention, for Röselein was the young tenor singer's partner. With their wooden sabots they clattered and sang, waving wildly their arms or else making frantic passages of pretended love and coquetry. It upset the Englishman to see the impudence of this common peasant fellow grasping Röselein by the waist, as he whirled her about in the boorish dance. Hence the clause to his question. She endured his inquiring gaze, as she simply answered:—
"No, there is no other reason." She put her hand on the arm of her companion and the lights suddenly became misty, for he was of an apoplectic tendency. They talked of music, of the opera in Vienna and Prague. She was born in Bavaria, not more than a day's ride from Marienbad. You could almost see her country from the top of the Podhornberg, in the direction of the Franconian Mountains, not far from Bayreuth. The place was called Schnabelwaid, and it was very high, very windy. Since her tenth year she had been singing—yes, even in the chorus at the Vienna opera, with her sister and brother. They were no common yodlers. They could sing all the music of the day. The yodling was part of their business, as was the costume. Later, when she had enough saved, she would study in Vienna for grand opera!
He was enraptured. How romantic it all was! A free-born maiden—he was certain she was reared in some old castle—wandering about earning money for her musical education. What a picture for a painter! What a story for a novelist! They were interrupted. The dancer, a young man with a heavy shock of hair growing low on his forehead, under which twinkled beady black eyes, had been sent to tell Fräulein Röselein that her colleagues were waiting for her. With a courtesy she went away. Krayne now thoroughly hated the dancer.
It was long after eleven when the concert was over and the party started on its homeward trip. Krayne and Röselein walked behind the others, and soon the darkness and the narrowness of the road forced him to tread after the girl. The moon's rays at intervals pierced the foliage, making lacelike patches of light in the gloom. At times they skirted the edges of a circular clearing and saw the high pines fringing the southern horizon; overhead the heavens were almost black, except where great streams of stars swept in irregular bands. It was a glorious sight, Krayne told Röselein—too sublime to be distracted by mere mortal love-making, he mentally added. Nevertheless he was glad when they were again in the woods; he could barely distinguish the girl ahead of him, but her outline made his heart beat faster. Once, as they neared the town, he helped her down a declivity into the roadway, and he could not help squeezing her hand. The pressure was returned. He boldly placed her arm within his, and they at last reached the streets, but not before, panting with mingled fright and emotion, he solemnly kissed her. She did not appear surprised.
"Call me Rösie—thou!" she murmured, and her naïveté brought the ready tears to his eyes. They made a rendezvous for the next morning on the Promenade Platz. The only thing he did not like was the scowling face of the dancer when he said good night to the others under the electric lights of the Kreuzbrunnen. He was correct, then, in his premonition.
That night Hugh Krayne dreamed he was a very skeleton for thinness—not an unusual vision of fat men—and also a Tyrolean yodler, displaying himself before a huge audience of gigantic human beings, who laughed so loudly that he could not open his lips to frame the familiar words of his song. In the despair of a frantic nightmare, his face streaming with anguished tears, he forced his voice:—
La, la, liriti! La, la, larita! Hallali! Then he awoke in triumph. Was he not a yodler?