Locations The Cheesecake Factory

By Thomas Mann Translation by H. T. Lowe-Porter A GLEAM HUSH! Let us look into a human soul. On the wing, as it were, and only in passing; only for a page or so, for we are very busy. We come from Florence, Florence of the old days, where we have been dealing with high and tragic and ultimate concerns. And and after that——whither? To court, perhaps, a royal castle? Who knows? Strange, faint-shimmering forms are taking their place on the stage.——Anna, poor little Baroness Anna, we have little time to spare for you. Waltz-time, tinkling glasses; smoke, steam, hubbub, voices, dance-steps. We all know these little weaknesses of ours. Do we secretly love to linger at life's silliest feasts simply because there suffering wears bigger, more childlike eyes than in other places? "Avantageur!" cried Baron Harry, the cavalry captain. He stopped dancing and called the whole length of the hall, one hand on his hip, the other still holding his partner embraced. "That's not a waltz, man, it's a funeral march! You have no rhythm in your body; you just float and sway about without any sense of time. Let Lieutenant von Gelbsattel play, so that we can feel the rhythm. Come on down, Avantageur! Dance, if you can do that better!" And the Avantageur stood up, clapped his spurs together, and without a word yielded the platform to Lieutenant von Gelbsattel, who straightaway began to make the piano ring and rattle under the blows from his sprawling white fingers. Baron Harry, we observe, had music in him: waltz music, march music. He had rhythm, joviality, hauteur, good fortune, and a conquering-hero air. His gold-braided hussar jacket suited to a T his glowing young face, unmarked by a single care, a single thought. He was burnt red, like a blond, though hair and mous- tache were dark—a piquant combination that appealed to the ladies——and the red scar across his right cheek gave a bold and dashing look to his open countenance. The scar might be from a wound, or a fall from a horse——in any case it was glorious. He danced divinely. But the Avantageur floated and swayed——to extend the mean- ing of Baron Harry's phrase. His eyelids were much too large, so that he could never properly open his eyes; also his uniform fitted him rather carelessly and improbably round the waist——and God alone knew how he came to be a soldier. He had not cared much for this affair with the "Swallows" at the Casino, but even so he had come to it; he had been careful not to give offence, for two reasons: first, because his origins were bourgeois, and second, be- cause there was a book by him, that he had written or put to- gether, or whatever the word is, a collection of stories, that any- body could buy in a book-shop. It must make people feel a little shy of him, of course. The hall in the officers' Casino was long and wide——much too large for the thirty people who were disporting themselves in it. The walls and the musicians' platform were decorated with imita- tion draperies in red plaster, and from the ugly ceiling hung two crooked chandeliers, in which the candles stood askew and dripped hot wax. But the board floor had been scrubbed the whole fore- noon by seven hussars told off for the job; and, after all, officers in a little hole like Hohendamm could not expect grandeur. Whatever was otherwise lacking to the feast was amply made up by its char- acteristic atmosphere; it hat the sweetness of forbidden fruit, the reckless charm imparted by the presence of the "Swallows." Even the orderlies smirked knowingly as they renewed the sup- plies of champagne in the ice-tubs beside the white-covered tables which stood ranged along three walls of the room. They looked at each other and then down with a grin, as servants do when they assist irresponsibly at the excesses of their masters. And all this with reference to the "Swallows." The Swallows, the Swallows? Well, in short, they were the "Swallows from Vienna." Like migratory birds, thirty in the flock, they flew through the country, appeared in fifth-rate va- riety-theatres and music-halls, where they stood on the stage in easy, unconventional poses and chirped their famous swallows' chorus: "When the swallows come again See them fly, aren't they fly?" It was a good song, its humour was not obscure; it was always re- ceived with warm applause from the more knowing section of the public. Well, the Swallows came to Hohendamm and sang in the Gugel- fing's beer-hall. A whole regiment of hussars were in barracks at Hohendamm, and the Swallows were justified in anticipating a good reception from representative circles. But they got more, they got an enthusiastic one. Evening after evening the unmarried officers sat at the girls' feet, listened to their swallow song, and drank their health in Gugelfing's yellow beer. It was not long be- fore the married officers were there too; one evening Colonel von Rummler appeared in person, followed the programme with the closest interest, and afterwards expressed himself with unlimited approval in various places. So then the lieutenants and cavalry captains conceived a plan to bring about closer contact with the Swallows: to invite a select group of them——say, ten of the prettiest——to a jolly champagne supper in the Casino. The upper orders could not take any public cognizance of the affair, of course; they had to refrain, however sore at heart. Not only the unmarried lieutenants, however, but also the married first lieutenants and cavalry captains took part, and also——this was the nub of the whole matter, the thing that gave it, so to speak, its "punch"——their wives. Obstacles and misgivings? First Lieutenant von Levzahn brushed them all away with a phrase: what else, said he, were obstacles for, if not that soldiers might triumph over them! The good citizens of Hohendamm might rage when they heard the the officers were introducing their wives to the Swallows. Of course, they could not have done such a thing themselves. But there were heights, there were aloof and untrammelled regions of existence, where things might freely com to pass that in a lower sphere could only sully and dishonour. It was not as though the worthy natives of Hohendamm were not used to expecting all sorts of un- expectedness from their hussars. The officers would ride along the middle of the pavement, in broad daylight, if it occurred to them so to do. They had done it. One evening pistols had been fired off in the Marktplatz——nobody but the officers could have done that. And had anyone dared to murmur? The following anec- dote was amply vouched for: One morning, between five and six o'clock, Captain of Cavalry Baron Harry, feeling pretty jolly, was on his way home from a party, with his friends Captain of Cavalry von Hühnemann and Lieutenants Le Maistre, Baron Truchsess, von Trautenau, and von Lichterloh. Riding across the Old Bridge, they met a baker's boy, with a great basket of rolls on his shoulder, taking his way through the fresh morning air and whistling blithely as he went. "Give me that basket!" commanded Baron Harry. He seized it by the handle, swung it three times round his head, so skilfully that not a roll fell out, and sent it flying out into the stream on a great curve that showed the strength of his arm. At first the baker's boy was scared stiff. Then as he saw his rolls swimming about, he flung up his arms with a yell and behaved as though he had gone out of his mind. The gentlemen amused themselves for a while with his childish despair; then Baron Harry tossed him a gold piece which would have paid three times over for his loss and the officers rode laughing away home. Then the boy realized that these were the nobility and ceased his outcry. This story lost no time in going the rounds——but who would have ventured to look askance? You might gnash your teeth over the pranks of Baron Harry and his friends; outwardly you took them with a smile. They were the lords and masters of Hohen- damm. And now the lords and masters were having a party for the Swallows. The Advantageur seemed not to know how to dance a waltz any better than to play one. For he did not take a partner, but going up to one of the white tables made a bow and sat down near little Baroness Anna, Baron Harry's wife, to whom he addressed a few shy words. The capacity to amuse himself with a Swallow was simply beyond the poor young man. Actually he was afraid of that kind of girl; he fancied that whatever he said to one she looked at him as though she were surprised——and this hurt the Avanta- geur. But music, even the poorest, always put him into a speech- less, relaxed, and dreamy mood——it is often the way with these flabby and futile characters; and as the Baroness Anna, to whom he was entirely indifferent, made only absent answers to his re- marks, they soon fell silent and confined themselves to gazing into the whirling scene, with the same somewhat wry smile, strange to say, on both their faces. The candles flickered and sputtered so much that they became quite mis-shapen with great blobs of soft wax. Beneath them the couples twisted and turned in obedience to Lieutenant von Glb- sattel's inspiring strains. They put out their feet and pointed their toes, swung round with a flourish, then glided away. The gentle- men's long legs bent and balance and sprang again. Petticoats flew. Gay hussar jackets whirled in abandon; voluptuously the ladies inclined their heads, yielding their waists to their partners' embraces. Baron Harry held an amazingly pretty young Swallow pressed fairly close to his braided chest, putting his face down to hers and looking unswervingly into her eyes. Baroness Anna's gaze and her smile followed the pair. The long, lanky Lichterloh was trundling along with a plump and dumpy little Swallow in an extraordinary décolletage. But Frau Cavalry Captain von Hühnemann, who loved champagne above all else in life, there she was, dancing round and round under one of the chandeliers, completely ab- sorbed, with another Swallow, a friendly creature whose freckled face beamed all over at the unprecedented honour done her. "My dear Baroness," Frau von Hühnemann said later to Frau First Lieutenant von Truchsess, "these girls are far from ignorant. They know all the cavalry garrison in Germany off by heart." The pair were dancing together because there were two extra ladies; they were quit unaware that the other couples had gradu- ally left the field to them until they were performing all by them- selves. At last, however, they saw what had happened and stood there together in the centre of the hall overwhelmed from all sides by laughter and applause. Next came the champagne, and the white-gloved orderlies ran from table to table pouring out. After that the Swallows were urged to sing again——they simply had to sing, no matter how out of breath they were. They stood on the platform that ran along the narrow side of the hall and made eyes at the company. Their shoulders and arms were bare, and they were dressed like the birds they represented, in long dark swallow-tails over pale grey waistcoats. They wore grey clocked stockings, and slippers with very low vamps and very high heel. There were blonde and brunette, there were the fat good-natured and the interestingly lean; there were some whose cheeks were staringly rouged, others with faces chalk- white like clowns. But the prettiest was the little dark one who had almond-shaped eyes and arms like a child's——she it was with whom Baron Harry had just danced. Baroness Anna, too, found that she was the prettiest one, and continued to smile. The Swallows sang, and Lieutenant von Gelbsattel accompanied them, flinging back his torso and twisting round his head to look, while his long arms reached out after the keys. They sang as with one voice, that they were gay birds, that they had flown the world over and always left broken hearts behind them when they flew away. They sang another very tuneful piece beginning: "Yes, yes, the arm-y, How we love the arm-y," and ending with the same. And in response to vociferous requests they repeated their Swallow song, and the officers, who knew it by now as well as they did, joined lustily in the chorus: "When the swallows come again See them fly——aren't they fly?" The whole hall rang with laughter and song and the stamping and clinking of spurred feet beating out the time. Baroness Anna laughed too, at all the nonsense and extravagant spirits. She had laughed so much already, all the evening, that her head and her heart ached, and she would have been glad to close her eyes in darkness and quiet had not Harry been so zealous in his pleasures. "I feel so jolly today," she had told her neighbour, at a moment when she believed what she said; but the neighbour had answered only by a mocking look, and she had realized that people do not say such things. If you really feel jolly, you act like it; to proclaim the fact makes it sound queer. On the other hand, it would have been quite impossible to say: "I feel so sad!" Baroness Anna had grown up in the solitude and stillness of her father's estate by the sea; she was at all times too much inclined to leave out of consideration such home truths as the above, despite her constitutional fear of putting people out and her constitu- tional yearning to be like them and have them love her. She had white hand and heavy, ash-blond hair——much too heavy for her narrow face with its delicate bones. Between her light eyebrows ran a perpendicular furrow, which gave a pained expression to her smile. The truth was, she loved her husband. You must not laugh. She loved him even for the prank with the rolls. With a cowering and miserable love, though he betrayed her and daily abused her love like a schoolboy. She suffered for love of him as a woman does who despises her own weak tenderness and knows that power and the happiness of the powerful are justified on this earth. Yes, she yielded herself to love and its torments as once she had yielded herself to him when in a brief attack of tenderness he wooed her; with the hungry yearning of a lonely and dreamy soul, that craves for life and passion and an outlet for its emotions. Waltz-time, tinkling glasses——hurly-burly and smoke, voices and dancing steps. That was Harry's world and his kingdom. It was the kingdom of her dreams as well: the world of love and life, the happy commonplace. Social life, harmless, jolly conviviality——what a frightful thing it is, how enervating, how degrading; what a vain, alluring poison, what an insidious enemy to our peace! There she sat, evening after evening, night after night, a martyr to the glaring contrast be- tween the utter emptiness round about her and the feverish excite- ment born of wine and coffee, of sensual music and the dance. She sat and looked on while Harry exercised his arts of fascination upon gay and pretty ladies——not because of their personal charms but because it fed his vanity to have people see him with them and know what a lucky man he was, how much in the centre of things, without one single ungratified longing. His vanity hurt her——and yet she loved it! How sweet to feel how handsome he was, how young, splendid, and bewitching! The infatuation of those other women would bring her own to fever pitch. And when afterwards, at the end of an evening spent by her in suffering for his sake, he would exhaust himself in stupid and self-centred expressions of enjoyment, there would come moments when her hatred and scorn outweighed her love; in her heart she would call him a puppy and a trifler and try to punish him by not talking, by an absurd and desperate dumbness. Are we guessing right, little Baroness Anna? Are we giving words to all that lay behind that poor little smile of yours as the Swallows sang their song? Behind the pitiable and shameful state, when you lay in bed afterwards in the grey dawn, thinking of the jests, the witticisms, the repartee, the social charms you should have displayed——and did not! Dreams come, in that grey dawn: you, quite worn with anguish, weep on his shoulder, he tries to console you with some of his empty, pleasant, commonplace phrases, and you are suddenly overcome with the mockery of your situation: you, lying on his shoulder, are shedding tears over the whole world! Suppose he were to fall ill? Are we right in saying that some small trifling indisposition of his could call up a whole world of dreams for you, wherein you see him as your ailing child; in which he lies helpless and broken before you and at last, belongs to you alone? Do not blush, do not shrink away! Trouble does some- times make us think bad thoughts. But after all you might trouble yourself a little about the young Avantageur with the drooping eyelids, sitting there beside you——how gladly he would share his loneliness with you! Why do you scorn him? Why despise? Be- cause he belongs to your own world, not to that other where pride and high spirits reign, and conscious triumph and dancing rhythm. Truly it is hard not to be at home in one world or in the other. We know. But there is no half-way house. Applause broke in upon Lieutenant von Gelbsattel's final chords. The Swallows had finished their song. They scorned the steps of the platform and jumped down from the front, flopping or flut- tering——the gentlemen rushed up to be of help. Baron Harry helped the little brunette Swallow with the childlike arms; he helped her very efficiently and with understanding for such things. He took her by the thigh and the waist, gave himself plenty of time to set her down, then almost carried her to the table, where he brimmed her glass with champagne till it overflowed, and touched his own to it, slowly, meaningfully, gazing into her eyes with a foolish, insistent smile. He had drunk a good deal, and the scar stood out on his forehead, that looked very white next his glowing face. But his mood was a free and hilarious one, unclouded by any passion. His table stood opposite to Baroness Anna's across the hall. As she sat talking idly with her neighbour she was listening greedily to the laughter over there and sending stolen and reproachful glances to watch every moment——in that painful state of tension which enables a person to carry on a conversation that complies with all the social forms, while actually being elsewhere all the time, and in the presence of the person one is watching. Once or twice it seemed to her that the little Swallow's eye caught her own. Did she know her? Did she know who she was? How lovely she looked! How provocative, how full of fascina- tion and thoughtless life! If Harry had been in love with her, if he had burned and suffered for her sake, his wife would have for- given than, she could have understood and sympathized. And sud- denly she became conscious that her own feeling for the little Swallow was warmer and deeper than Harry's own. And the little Swallow herself? Dear me, her name was Emmy, and she was fundamentally commonplace. But she was wonderful too, with black strands of hair framing a wide, sensuous face, shadowed, almond-shaped eyes, a generous mouth full of shining teeth, and those arms like a child's. Loveliest of all were the shoul- ders——they had a way of moving with such ineffable suppleness in their sockets. Baron Harry took great interest in these shoul- ders; he would not have them covered, and set up a noisy struggle for the scarf which she would have put about them. And in all this, nobody in the whole hall saw, neither Barn Harry nor his wife nor anyone else, that this poor little waif, made sentimental by the wine she had drunk, had all the evening been casting long- ing glances at the young Avantageur whose lack of feeling for rhythm had caused his demission from the piano-stool. She had been drawn by the way he played, by his drooping lids, she found him noble, poetic, a being from a different world——whereas she was familiar unto boredom with Baron Harry's sort and all its works and ways. She was saddened, she was wretched, because the Avantageur cast not a thought in her direction. The candles burned low and dim in the cigarette smoke and blue wreaths drifted above the company's heads. There was a smell of coffee on the heavy air, and odours and vapours of the feast, made still more heady by the somewhat daring perfume affected by the Swallows, hung about the scene; the white tables and champagne coolers, the men and women, flirting, giggling and guffawing, weary-eyed and unrestrained. Baroness Anna talked no more. Despair——and that frightful mixture of yearning, envy, love, and self-contempt which we call jealousy and which makes the world no good place at all to live in——had so subdued her heart that she had not power to counter- feit any more. Let him see how she felt, perhaps he would be ashamed——or at least he would have some feeling about her, of whatever kind, in his heart. She looked across. The game over there was going rather far, everybody was watching and laughing. Harry had thought of a new kind of amorous struggle with the fair Swallow: it consisted in an exchange of rings. Bracing his knee against hers he held her fast to her chair, and snatched and tugged after her hand in a vio- lent effort to open her little clenched fist. In the end he won. Amid noisy applause he wrenched off the narrow circlet she wore ——it cost him some trouble——and triumphantly forced his own wedding ring upon her finger. Then Baroness Anna stood up. Anger and pain, a longing to hide herself away in the dark with her sense of his so dear un- worthiness; a desperate desire to punish him by making a scandal, by forcing him at all costs to acknowledge her presence——such were the emotions that overpowered her. She pushed back her chair, and pale as death she walked across the hall towards the door. There was a great sensation. People were sobered, they looked at one another grave-faced. One or two gentlemen called out Harry's name. All at once it became still in the hall. Then something very odd happened: the little Swallow—— Emmy——suddenly and decisively espoused the Baroness's cause. Perhaps she was moved by a natural feminine instinct of pity for suffering love; perhaps her own pangs for the Avantageur with the drooping lids made her see in the little Baroness a fel- low-sufferer. In any case, she acted——to the amazement of the company "You are coarse!" she said loudly, in the hush, and gave the dumbfounded Harry a great push. Just these three word: "You are coarse." And all at once she was at Baroness Anna's side, where the latter stood lifting the latch of the door. "Forgive!" she breathed——softly, as though no one else in the room were worthy to hear. "Here is the ring," and she slipped Harry's wedding ring into the Baroness's hand. And suddenly Baroness Anna felt the girl's broad, glowing face bend over this hand of hers; she felt burning on it a soft and passionate kiss. "Forgive!" whispered the little Swallow once more, and ran off. But Baroness Anna stood outside in the darkness, still quite dazed, and waited for this unexpected event to take on shape and meaning within her. And it did: it was a joy, so warm, so sweet, so comfortable that for a moment she closed her eyes. We stop here. No more, it is enough. Just this one priceless little detail, as it stands: there she was, quite enraptured and en- chanted, simply because a little chit of a strolling chorus-girl had come and kissed her hand! We leave you, Baroness Anna. We kiss your brow and take our leave; farewell, we must hurry away. Sleep, now. You will dream all night of the Swallow who came to you, and you will have a gleam of happiness. For it brings happiness, it brings to the heart a little thrill and ecstasy of joy, when two worlds, between which longing plies, for one fleeting, illusory moment touch each other. 1904 

From Thomas Mann: Stories of Three Decades, Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Copyright, 1930, 1931, 1934, 1935, 1936, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The Modern Library edition, Random House, Inc. pp. 273—282.
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