22

“DON’T be so depressed, woggy,” she said to him a fortnight later. “I know that it’s all very sad, but they’ve grown to be almost strangers to you; you feel that yourself, don’t you? And of course, they turned the little girl against you. Believe me, I do quite enter into your feelings, although if I could have a child, I’d rather have a boy.”

“You’re a child yourself,” said Albinus, stroking her hair.

“Today of all days we must be in good spirits,” continued Margot. “Today of all days! It’s the beginning of my career. I’ll be famous.”

“Why yes, I had forgotten. When is it? Really today?”

Rex sauntered in. Of late, he had been with them every day, and Albinus had poured out his heart to him on several occasions and told him all that he could not say to Margot. Rex listened so kindly, made such sensible comments and was so sympathetic that the shortness of their acquaintance seemed to Albinus a mere accident in no way connected with the inner, spiritual time during which their friendship had developed and matured.

“One can’t build up one’s life on the quick-sands of misfortune,” Rex had said to him. “That is a sin against life. I once had a friend who was a sculptor and whose unerring appreciation of form was almost uncanny. Then, all of a sudden, out of pity he married an ugly, elderly hunchback. I don’t know exactly what happened, but one day, soon after their marriage, they packed two little suitcases, one for each, and went on foot to the nearest lunatic asylum. In my opinion, an artist must let himself be guided solely by his sense of beauty: that will never deceive him.”

“Death,” he had said on another occasion, “seems to be merely a bad habit, which nature is at present powerless to overcome. I once had a dear friend—a beautiful boy full of life, with the face of an angel and the muscles of a panther. He cut himself while opening a tin of preserved peaches—you know, the large, soft, slippery kind that plap in the mouth and slither down. He died a few days later of blood poisoning. Fatuous, isn’t it? And yet … yes, it is strange, but true, that, viewed as a work of art, the shape of his life would not have been so perfect had he been left to grow old. Death often is the point of life’s joke.”

On such occasions Rex could talk endlessly, indefatigably, inventing stories about non-existent friends and propounding reflections not too profound for the mind of his listener and couched in a sham-brilliant form. His culture was patchy, but his mind shrewd and penetrating, and his itch to make fools of his fellow men amounted almost to genius. Perhaps the only real thing about him was his innate conviction that everything that had ever been created in the domain of art, science or sentiment, was only a more or less clever trick. No matter how important the subject under discussion, he could always find something witty or trite to say about it, supplying exactly what his listener’s mind or mood demanded, though, at the same time, he could be impossibly rude and overbearing when his interlocutor annoyed him. Even when he was talking quite seriously about a book or a picture, Rex had a pleasant feeling that he was a partner in a conspiracy, the partner of some ingenious quack—namely, the author of the book or the painter of the picture.

He watched with interest the sufferings of Albinus (in his opinion an oaf with simple passions and a solid, too solid, knowlege of painting). who thought, poor man, that he had touched the very depths of human distress; whereas Rex reflected—with a sense of pleasant anticipation—that, far from being the limit, it was merely the first item in the program of a roaring comedy at which he, Rex, had been reserved a place in the stage manager’s private box. The stage manager of this performance was neither God nor the devil. The former was far too gray, and venerable, and old-fashioned; and the latter, surfeited with other people’s sins, was a bore to himself and to others, as dull as rain … in fact, rain at dawn in the prison-court, where some poor imbecile, yawning nervously, is being quietly put to death for the murder of his grandmother. The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom, the shadow of many-colored glass balls flying in a curve, the ghost of a juggler on a shimmering curtain.… This, at any rate, was what Rex surmised in his rare moments of philosophic meditation.

He took life lightly, and the only human feeling that he ever experienced was his keen liking for Margot, which he endeavored to explain to himself by her physical characteristics, by something in the odor of her skin, the epithelium of her lips, the temperature of her body. But this was not quite the true explanation. Their mutual passion was based on a profound affinity of souls, though Margot was a vulgar little Berlin girl and he—a cosmopolitan artist.

When Rex called, on that day of all days, he managed to tell her, as he was helping her on with her coat, that he had rented a room where they could meet undisturbed. She flung him an angry glance—for Albinus was patting his pockets only ten paces away. Rex chuckled and added, hardly lowering his voice, that he would expect her there every day at a given hour.

“I’m inviting Margot to a rendezvous, but she won’t come,” he brightly said to Albinus as they were walking downstairs.

“Let her just try,” smiled Albinus, pinching Margot’s cheek affectionately. “Now we shall see what sort of an actress you are,” he added, drawing on his gloves.

“Tomorrow at five, Margot, eh?” said Rex.

“Tomorrow the child is going to choose herself a car,” said Albinus, “so she can’t come to you.”

“She’ll have plenty of time in the morning for choosing. Does five suit you, Margot? Or shall we say six and clinch it?”

Margot suddenly lost her temper. “Idiotic joke,” she said through her teeth.

The two men laughed and exchanged amused glances.

The hall-porter who was talking to the postman outside gazed at them curiously as they passed.

“It’s hardly believable,” said he when they were out of hearing, “that that Herr’s little daughter died a couple of weeks ago.”

“And who’s the other Herr?” asked the postman.

“Don’t ask me. An additional lover, I suppose. To tell the truth, I’m ashamed that the other tenants should see it all. And yet he’s a rich, generous gentleman. What I always say is: if he’s got to have a mistress, he might have chosen a larger and plumper one.”

“Love is blind,” remarked the postman thoughtfully.