George arranged the table lamp, took out some music paper and began to write. It was not the scherzo which had occurred to him when he had whizzed through the night with the others under the black tree-tops a few hours ago; and it was not the melancholy folk-ballad of the restaurant either; but a quite new motif that swam up slowly and continuously as though from secret depths. George felt as though he had to allow some mysterious element to take its course. He wrote down the melody, which he thought should be sung by an alto voice or played on the viola, and at the same time a strange accompaniment rang in his ears, which he knew would never vanish from his memory.
It was four o'clock in the morning when he went to bed with the calmness of a man to whom nothing evil can ever come in all his life and for whom neither solitude nor poverty nor death possess any terror.
[1] A special way of wearing a coat affected in Viennese artistic circles.
[2] A company celebrated for its risqué plays.
II
Frau Ehrenberg sat with her knitting on the green velvet sofa in the raised bow-window. Opposite her Else was reading a book. The white head of the marble Isis gleamed from out the far dark part of the room behind the piano, while a streak of light from the next room played through the open door over the grey carpet. Else looked up from her book through the window to the high tops of the trees in the Schwarzenberg Park which were waving in the autumn wind and said casually: "We might perhaps ring up George Wergenthin, to know if he's coming this evening."
Frau Ehrenberg let her knitting fall on her lap. "I don't know," she said. "You remember what a really charming condolence letter I wrote him and what a pressing invitation I gave him to come to Auhof. He didn't come and the coldness of his answer was quite marked. I wouldn't ring him up."
"One shouldn't treat him like other people," answered Else. "He belongs to the people whom one has occasionally to remind that one is still alive. When he has been reminded he is extremely glad."
Frau Ehrenberg went on with her knitting. "It really won't come to anything," she said quietly.