VI.
Is Marienbad cheaper than Franzensbad because it is not so select, or is it less select because it is cheaper? I do not know. But certain it is that Marienbad does not possess the same stamp of distinction as Franzensbad, which latter, together with all the guests, seems about to slowly perish of its excessive distinction. The guests at Marienbad also lack that transparent thinness of the Franzensbad invalids, which so claims sympathy: they all look "not ill but only too healthy."
As the Marienbad invalids do not look like invalids, so Marienbad does not look like a water cure. It wholly lacks that fairylike appearance of a cure where invalidism is an elegant pastime. It is so severely commonplace, so ordinary that one is forced to believe in its reality. Fortunately there is some compensation in the country round about, and when the guests look from the windows of the miserable hotel rooms, beyond the plainness of the dusty streets to the green beautiful woods, the most pretentious are satisfied. The Marienbad woods are so charming, not those barbaric gloomy woods like the Bohemian forests for example, which with their black branches grumblingly bar the way to the sunbeams, and groan so continually that the song birds from pure terror have all died or gone away.
In the woods near Marienbad, the trees sing the whole day in competition with the birds, and the sunbeams fall between gay, dancing, quivering shadows, and the blue sky laughs through a thousand breaks in the lofty, floating leafy roof.
The Harfink family live in the Mühle strasse, and have a view directly into the woods.
It is half past eight in the morning. Papa Harfink, who is taking the cure, and every morning at six o'clock stands beside the spring, has drunk his seven glasses, taken the prescribed walk, and afterwards breakfasted; now he has gone to be weighed. The student, his son, is amusing himself by following a young lady who travels with many diamonds but without a chaperon, and who is entered in the register as a "singer." Linda is still at her toilet. Mamma Harfink is busy in the drawing-room with a medical pamphlet. Then the maid brings her a note. "A messenger from Traunberg brought it; he is waiting for an answer," declared the maid.
Before Mrs. Harfink had opened the letter Linda enters and asks: "We need expect no visitor before twelve o'clock, mamma? If the Baron chances to come, you know where I am--in the Kursaal. At twelve o'clock I take my Turkish bath. Adieu! I shall be back at one o'clock." With that she vanished.
Mrs. Harfink had concealed the letter from her daughter. She secretly suspects that it contains matters of which Linda need know nothing. Scarcely has her daughter vanished when she hastily opens it. In an uncharacteristic handwriting, occupying a great deal of paper:
"My Dear Madam: You have surely already learned from your daughter what has occurred between us. That I ventured, under the circumstances which you, madam, certainly know, to offer her my hand, seems to me now, upon calm consideration, incomprehensible and unpardonable."
Mamma Harfink starts. Will the Baron take back his word? What can he mean by "under the circumstances"? Linda's unprotectedness in the great lonely woods? Or does he, perhaps, refer to his fatal past? She resolves to read further.