Upon this he pressed his hat down firmly on his forehead, nodded to his friend with a comical expression of misery and despair, and dragged Felix with him from the room.
On the stairs he suddenly stood still and said, in a suppressed and mysterious voice:
"Our friend up-stairs has the same trouble worse than I have. He is smitten with the other one; but she is a little saint, as much of a nun, thanks to her education with the English sisters, as my little witch is a child of the world for the same reason. Now just conceive of it, the more my little imp carries on--it will be hard work making a sensible housewife of her--the more zealously does our good Fanny confess and do penance and pray, and it really looks as if she were seriously intent upon gaining a saint's halo. The fact is the girls never associate with sensible people, and for that reason one of us must sacrifice himself so that the ice will at last be broken, although I confess it is pure madness on my part to think of marrying. You have no idea, my dear friend, what extraordinary cobwebs gather in an old Munich burgherhouse like this. Well, a few fresh fellows like us--I imagine it would not take us long to bring new life into it, if we were only once inside!"
He sighed, and appeared not to be in the most courageous mood, notwithstanding his brave words. Felix accompanied him across the street and saw him enter the narrow, arched door next to the glove store, which was closed on account of its being Sunday--going in with an assumed air of boldness, as if he were going to a dance.
Then he himself wandered aimlessly down the street. In what direction should he turn his steps? In the whole city there was no one who would be looking for him to-day, and the one to whom he felt most drawn was, strangely enough, on Sunday afternoons farther out of his reach than at any other time.
He was deliberating whether he should not hire a horse again and dash away across the country, when companionship was unexpectedly thrown in his way, of a kind that a man in his frame of mind could not but welcome.
CHAPTER IX.
His way led him along the Dultplatz, past the beer-garden in which he had sat with his friends on his first Sunday in Munich. The music was playing as before, but the people sat about under the lanterns, that had just been lighted, in rather a sleepy and listless way, for the day showed as yet no sign of growing cooler.
Near the fence that separated the garden from the street, a Dachau peasant-family had taken possession of one of the tables, leaving only one end free. Their extraordinary, ugly costume attracted the attention of Felix as he went wandering by. But his gaze soon turned from their ridiculous dress and fixed on a slim girlish figure, closely wrapped in a dark shawl, who sat at the other end of the table, with a full glass and an empty plate before her, at which she seemed to have been staring for some time, with her head resting on her hands and her elbows planted on the table, as if utterly regardless of what was going on about her. Nothing could be seen of the face, but a little, white, short nose; her straw hat and a veil that hung half down over the little hands threw the rest into shadow. But the little nose, and the thick red hair, carelessly confined by a net, left not a moment's doubt in Felix's mind that this picture of solitary melancholy was no other than Red Zenz.
As he stepped softly up to her, touched her familiarly on the shoulder, and pronounced her name, she looked up with a frightened start, and, with eyes red from weeping, gazed into the face of the unexpected comforter, as if she took him for a ghost. But the moment she recognized him, she hastily wiped her eyes with the back of her little round hand, and smiled upon him with undisguised pleasure. He asked compassionately what it was that made her so heavy-hearted, and why she sat here all alone; and, drawing up a chair, he seated himself between one of the horrible young peasant-girls and the melancholy little Bacchante. Then she told him what the trouble was. "Black Pepi," her friend, the girl with whom she had been living, had suddenly "proved false" to her, because her (Pepi's) lover, a young surgeon, had declared red to be the most beautiful color. He afterward apologized for it by saying that, of course, with his profession, it was only natural that he should prefer the color of the blood to any other. But it had for some time past appeared to Pepi that her faithless lover paid rather more attention to her friend than was permissible in such a case; and so, after a very violent scene, she had not only broken off the friendship, but had given her notice that she could no longer share her quarters with her. Furthermore, inasmuch as Zenz was still owing rent for several months, she had seized upon the few things she had to hold as security, and had then driven her from the house with only the clothes she had on at the time.