by Vicki Baum
Now, at any rate, she looked dazzling. She was beautiful, distinguished, flower-like, resilient. “Elisaveta looks enchanting,” said Witte, with a bow from a past century. He had accustomed himself to the use of studied expressions, firstly in order to conceal his love for Gru, to whom he had been devoted since his youth, and secondly, from the necessity of translating his speeches now into Russian, now into French. Grusinskaya herself slipped continually from one language into another, from Russian into French into English. She could speak German too. She was as fluent in the one as the other, however abusive or however amiable it was necessary to be. It was not always easy to follow her. For example, she was no sooner in her car than she asked: “Do you think, Witte, it was the fault of the pearls?”
“In what sense the pearls? And the fault for what?” asked Witte in dismay—for the second of his questions arose from pure sensitiveness. He knew well enough what Grusinskaya meant. “Mon Dieu, how do you mean—the pearls?” Pimenov asked too.
“Certainly I mean the pearls. They bring me bad luck, those pearls,” she said with childish insistence. Witte folded one old-fashioned glacé kid glove in the other. “But, my dear.” He was disconcerted.
“What!” exclaimed Pimenov. “Why, the pearls have brought you luck all your life. They were your mascot, your talisman. And are you going to say now that they bring bad luck? What an idea, Gru!”
“They do bring bad luck all the same. I’ve been keeping track of it,” Gru said with a self-willed frown between her artificially emphasized eyebrows. “I cannot explain it, but I have been thinking about it a great deal. They brought me luck as long as the Grand Duke Sergei was alive. Voilà! Ever since he was murdered nothing but bad luck have they brought me. In London last year there was the sinew I broke in my ankle. At Nice—a deficit. And on the whole nothing but bad luck. I shall not dance in them any more. So now you know.”
“Not dance in them! But, dear, dearest Gru, you cannot possibly go on without your pearls. All your life long it has been your firm belief that you could not go on without the pearls, and now suddenly—”
“Yes,” Grusinskaya said, “it was just a superstition.”
Witte began to laugh. “Lisa,” he cried, “my dove, my dear little one, why, you’re acting like a child!”
“You don’t understand me. You don’t understand me in the least, Witte. The pearls are no longer suitable. I shall not wear them any more. In the old days, in Petersburg, in Paris, jewels were de rigeur. A dancer had to possess jewels and display them. But now—who wears real pearls today? I am a woman. I have a sense of these things, I have the flair. Michael, are you asleep? Say something.”
Michael, without moving his graceful limbs, said in clumsy French: “If you wish to know, Madame; you ought to give your pearls away for poor children and cripples, to give them away for charity, Madame.”
“What do you mean? Give them away, my pearls?” Grusinskaya cried out in Russian and the word pozertvovatj rang out like a song.
“Here we are,” Pimenov said as the brake was suddenly applied.
“En avant,” Grusinskaya commanded. “We must be beautiful— and enjoy ourselves!”
The door of the house was thrown open, Witte, as he went up the steps behind the dancer, remarked: “Elisaveta Alexandrovna has only one fault. She is in love with the categorical imperative.”
Grusinskaya began to smile and to beam like a light suddenly turned on, and thus beaming and smiling she entered the club where thirty gentlemen in evening dress stood awaiting her entry.
•
Baron Gaigern was the very last to stop clapping; but, as soon as he was sure that the curtain would not rise again, he left the theater with the set face of a man in a hurry. The rain had stopped. White and yellow lights were reflected in the wet surface of the Kantstrasse; policemen were regulating the traffic; the destitute were eagerly opening the doors of cars for those in fur coats to step in. Gaigern threaded his way through the crowd, disregarding traffic regulations at the risk of his life, and hurried into the comparative obscurity of the Fasanenstrasse, where his car—an unobtrusive four-seater—was parked. The chauffeur was smoking a cigarette.
“Well?” asked Gaigern with his hands in the pockets of his blue coat.
“She’s changed her chauffeur again,” said the chauffeur. “It’s an Englishman this time. She picked him up in Nice. His employer went bankrupt and left him stranded there. I’ve had a meal with him, but I can’t get anything out of him.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times to take your cigarette out of your mouth when I’m speaking to you,” Gaigern said.
“Right,” said the chauffeur and threw away his cigarette. “He’s driven round to the theater now to take her to the Stage Society. He doesn’t know yet when he has to take her back.”
“He doesn’t know?” Gaigern replied and struck the palm of his hand reflectively with his gloves. “Right. Then I’ll go across there again. Bring the car round to the theater and wait there.”
Gaigern returned to the front of the theater with the set expression of a man intent on business. He found it dreary and deserted. The electric signs were dark and the placards looked as if they had nothing further to say. The stage door did not open onto the street, but into a courtyard where blank walls gleamed with wet ivy. Gaigern wedged himself among the little crowd of loungers who were waiting for Grusinskaya to emerge. Their eyes were fixed on the frosted-glass panels of the door through which a light was shining. First a detachment of the fire brigade marched out. Next came the stagehands, brawny fellows with pipes in their mouths. Then there was a pause before the door opened once more and out came the ballet girls in twos and threes. Their slim figures were concealed in cheap fur coats; scraps of French, Russian and English eddied around them as they walked off. Gaigern looked after them and smiled. He had known several of them in Nice and Paris. His upper lip shortened when he laughed, like a little child’s. It was charming. Many women at least found it so.
My God, how long it’s taking today—as usual, he thought impatiently, as the courtyard fell asleep again. Nearly a quarter of an hour went by. Then the chauffeur in Grusinskaya’s car stirred like a dog in its sleep and started up the engine. Gaigern had been waiting for this signal. He pressed into the shadow against the wall. When Grusinskaya finally appeared he was invisible. She turned back into the doorway. “Wait here, Suzette,” she said. “I’ll send Berkeley straight back and he will take you to the hotel.” She was cloaked all the way up to her chin in an extremely decorative evening wrap of gold and black and ermine and looked every bit as beautiful at this moment as her photographs in the world’s illustrated papers. Gaigern fixed his eyes on her from his hiding place in the shadow. As she put her silver foot on the running board she opened her ermine collar and Gaigern could see the world-famed long white neck. It looked peculiarly naked and flower-like this evening. Gaigern drew his breath through his teeth in a spasm of delight. He had desired nothing more eagerly than to see this bared neck . . .
She had scarcely driven off when Suzette appeared in the dark and deserted courtyard. The porter followed and shut the stage door behind him. Suzette always looked like an old and faded copy of her mistress, and this was because she wore Grusinskaya’s old clothes and hats when they had long ceased to be the fashion. On this occasion she shuffled across the courtyard in a long bell-shaped skirt over which she wore a buttoned-up cloak with a kind of Byronic collar. Both her hands were laden. In the left she carried a fair-sized flat suitcase, and in the right a small one of black patent leather. Thus encumbered she made her way slowly as far as the iron gateway that separated the theater yard from the street, and there she strolled to and fro in the full light of the streetlamps. Wild thoughts sprang to Gaigern’s mind during these seconds. He stood in his shadowed corner on the tiptoe of suspense, as though making ready for a jump or to start forward at sound of the starter’s pistol. But he attempted nothing, for at that moment that damned fellow Berkeley drew
up at the curb in a masterful turn. Suzette got into the gray car just as it struck half-past twelve from the Gedächtniskirche, and Gaigern, who for the space of a minute had forgotten to breathe, took in a deep breath. He whistled, and his little four-seater came up. “Straight after them to the hotel, hurry.” He jumped in beside the chauffeur.
“Well, any hopes today?” asked the chauffeur. Again he had a cigarette between his lips as he spoke.
“Wait,” Gaigern replied.
“Another whole night of standing by with the car, eh? All the same to you if I ever get another night’s sleep or not, I suppose.”
Gaigern pointed his finger at the gray car, which was taking the little bend round the traffic sign at the Hitzigbrücke Bridge. “Overtake it,” was all he said. The chauffeur accelerated. There was no policeman now on duty at the bridge. The nightlife of Berlin thronged the streets beneath a cloudless red sky, with not a single star to be seen in the spring night.
“It’s enough to make you lose all interest,” the chauffeur went on. “The game’s not worth the candle. The end will be that we’ll go bust.”
“If you don’t like it, you know what to do,” the Baron answered amiably, and his upper lip curled. “If you’re not satisfied, you can take your pay and go.”
“I mean no harm,” said the chauffeur.
“Nor I,” said the Baron.
There was silence till they reached the hotel.
“Park at Entrance No. VI,” said Gaigern as he jumped out. In the revolving door that led from the small entrance lobby into the hall of the hotel, he came upon a comical gentleman. It was Kringelein who had got stuck there owing to the mistake he made in trying to turn the door in the opposite direction. Gaigern gave it an impatient kick and sent the glass merry-go-round, together with its contents, round in the right direction. “That’s the direction,” he said to Kringelein.
“Thank you. Thank you very much,” replied Kringelein, who had wanted to go out and now found himself disgorged back into the hotel again. Gaigern went quickly for his key, and as quickly to the elevator. Arrived at the first floor he told the one-armed elevator attendant to wait a moment. He would be back in one second. He ran along the passage to his room, No. 69, threw down his hat and coat, snatched up a fine orchid spray from a vase and ran along the passage again. “Tell the elevator attendant, please, that I shan’t need him,” he said to the chambermaid, who, half asleep, sidled along past door after door. She gave the message and the man, grumbling, took the elevator down again. When he reached the ground floor, Suzette was there, waiting with her two cases to be taken up. And this was precisely what Gaigern had intended . . .
When Suzette arrived at the door of Room No. 68, the room occupied by Grusinskaya, she saw a charming young man standing behind a palm. His bashful and ingratiating features seemed not unfamiliar to her.
“Good evening, Mademoiselle. Permit me to say one word,” he said in his charming and rather old-world French, the French that is taught in a Jesuit seminary. “Only a word. Madame is not in her room?”
“I do not know, sir,” replied the well-trained Suzette.
“It is only—forgive the presumption—that I should like so much to lay a little flower for Madame in her room. I have so great a veneration for Madame. I was at the theater tonight. I never miss an evening when Madame dances. I have read in the papers, you see, that Madame loves these catleyas—is it true?”
“Yes,” said Suzette, “she loves orchids. We have started the cultivation of orchids in our hothouses at Tremezzo.”
“Ah! Then may I give you my spray and ask you to leave it in Madame’s room?”
“We have had a lot of flowers today. The French Ambassador sent a whole basketful,” said Suzette, who was still smarting from the evening’s dubious success. She looked at the bashful young man with considerable friendliness. But she could not take the spray because she had both her hands full. It was difficult even to get the key into her right hand in order to open the door of Room No. 68. Gaigern, who saw her difficulty, went quickly up to her. “Allow me,” he said and put out his hands to take the two cases. Suzette surrendered the larger one, but she drew back instinctively as she maintained her hold on the smaller one. So the famous pearls are in that one, Gaigern thought, though he kept his thoughts to himself. He opened the door for her and the inner one as well, and with shy and at the same time enraptured steps crossed the threshold of the room where Grusinskaya slept.
The room had the same banal and tawdry elegance as all the others. The cool air inside smelled of a curious aromatic perfume as well as of the bouquets of flowers, and the window onto the small balcony stood open. The bed was turned down, and a pair of little bedroom slippers were by the bed. They were rather trodden down and shabby—the slippers of a woman who is accustomed to sleeping by herself. Gaigern, as he stood by the door, felt a fleeting, tender pity at the sight of these little tokens of resignation on the part of a famous and beautiful woman. He stood in the door holding out his orchids as though begging they be accepted. Suzette put down the smaller suitcase on the dressing table between the three mirrors and at last took the flowers.
“Thank you, Monsieur,” she said, “what name shall I say?”
“What an idea! I am not so presumptuous,” said Gaigern. He looked observantly at Suzette’s wrinkled face and saw a strange resemblance to the face of her mistress. “You are tired,” he said, “and no doubt Madame will be late. Do you have to wait up for Madame?”
“Oh, no, Madame is good. Madame says every night, ‘You can go to bed, Suzette.’ But Madame needs me all the same. So I wait up for her. Madame is never later than two o’clock because she has to start work every morning at nine. And how she works, Monsieur. Oh, mon Dieu! No, Madame is very good.”
“She must be an angel,” said Gaigern ecstatically. (So there is only a bathroom without a window between 68 and 69, he thought, as he said it.) His wandering gaze returned to Suzette’s cavernous yawn.
“Good night and a thousand thanks, Mademoiselle,” he said politely, and with a smile disappeared.
Suzette shut both doors behind him and after putting the orchids in a glass of water, sank, a little shivering heap, into an armchair—to wait.
•
Before one o’clock at night there are very few pairs of shoes to be seen outside the bedroom doors of the Grand Hotel. Everyone is out and about, eagerly savoring the hectic pleasures of the great city in its blaze of electric light. At the end of each passage on every floor a dead-tired chambermaid, faded and virtuous, yawns in her little office. The pageboys come on the night shift at ten, but they too, under their jaunty flat-topped caps, have the feverishly bright eyes of children who ought to have been put to bed long before. The ill-tempered one-armed man at the elevator was relieved at midnight by another equally ill-tempered one-armed man. Hall Porter Senf, too, was relieved by the night porter at about eleven, and went off half-dazed to the hospital, in such a state of anxiety that his teeth chattered. On arriving there he was sent back home by an unfriendly night nurse, who told him that it would be twenty-four hours till the baby was born, but this, of course, was his own affair and did not concern the hotel. The hotel, meanwhile, was in all its glory. There was dancing in the Yellow Pavilion and great inroads had been made on Mattoni’s cold buffet. Mattoni’s eyes were smiling as he shaved off slices of cold beef, or mixed maraschino into iced fruit salads. The electric fans whirred and spewed the bad air out into the courtyards of the hotel, and down below in the servants’ quarters where the chauffeurs sat and talked scandal about their masters. (They are an irritable lot, these chauffeurs, because they are not allowed to drink.) In the Lobby, visitors up from the provinces sat in amazement and mild vexation at the Berlin men who wore their hats on the backs of their heads and waved their hands, and at the Berlin ladies with their painted faces. Rohna, spruce and refreshed by a friction of toilet water, crossed the Lobby, thinking: It is true that our nighttime clientele is not of the first order.
But—que voulez vous? Nowadays only a vulgar clientele puts money in the till.
Just before one o’clock Herr Kringelein landed in the Bar. He was tired, and he sank down at a small table and surveyed the world about him with watery eyes. To tell the truth, Kringelein was utterly tired out, but he had the obstinacy of children on their birthdays— he simply would not go to bed. Moreover he felt that he was asleep already, for everything entered his brain like a confused and feverish dream, and the noise, the perpetual movement, the voices and the music, seemed at one moment quite close and at the next moment very far away and entirely unreal. The world hummed most strangely about his ears and everything combined to produce in him a mysterious state of intoxication. Once, when he was ten years old, Kringelein had played truant from school. In a panic at the thought of a dictation lesson, he had gone out into the warm morning mist along the road to Mickenau. Then he had left the road and lain down in the heat of the day and slept with his head on a cushion of clover. Later he had gone into a grassy hollow by the river and feasted on the raspberries that grew there in immense profusion. All his life he had never forgotten the buzzing of the great gnats that had fastened on his bare legs and his red juice-stained fingers as he pressed in among thorns and nettles to gather handful after handful of raspberries. He felt again, here in the bar of Berlin’s most expensive hotel, the same intoxication, a sense of exuberant plenty as well as of anxiety and alarm, the faint threat haunting the wicked joy of wrongdoing, the excitement of an escapade. It all came back to him as he sat there between one and two in the morning. The stinging gnats were there, too, in a sense. They had taken on the likeness of figures that tormented his brain, the brain of a bookkeeper who had kept accounts all his life long and now could not stop.