With quiet dignity the woman extracts _four_ roses from my bunch and I am too humble and intimidated to protest.

But my bunch is still rich and full and I am consoled to think that a wooing prince cannot do better.

Five minutes past seven I stand before her door.

Need I say that my breath gives out, that I dare not knock, that the flowers nearly fall from my nerveless hand? All that is a matter of course to anyone who has ever, in his youth, had dealings with faeries of Thea's stamp.

It is a problem to me to this day how I finally did get into her room.

But already I see her hastening toward me with laughter and burying her face in the roses.

"O you spendthrift!" she cries and tears the flowers from my hand in order to pirouette with them before the mirror. And then she a.s.sumes a solemn expression and takes me by a coat b.u.t.ton, draws me nearer and says: "So, and now you may kiss me as a reward."

I hear and cannot grasp my bliss. My heart seems to struggle out at my throat, but hard before me bloom her lips. I am brave and kiss her.

"Oh," she says, "your beard is full of snow."

"My beard! Hear it, ye G.o.ds! Seriously and with dignity she speaks of my beard."

A turbid sense of being a kind of Don Juan or Lovelace arises in me.

My self-consciousness a.s.sumes heroic dimensions, and I begin to regard what is to come with a kind of daemonic humour.

The mist that has. .h.i.therto blurred my vision departs. I am able to look about me and to recognise the place where I am.

To be sure, that is a new and unsuspected world--from the rosy silken gauze over the toilet mirror that hangs from the beaks of two floating doves, to the row of exquisite little laced boots that stands in the opposite corner. From the candy boxes of satin, gold, gla.s.s, saffron, ivory, porcelain and olive wood which adorn the dresser to the edges of white billowy skirts which hang in the next room but have been caught in the door--I see nothing but miracles, miracles.

A maddening fragrance a.s.saults my senses, the same which her note exhaled. But now that fragrance streams from her delicate, graceful form in its princess gown of pale yellow with red bows. She dances and flutters about the room with so mysterious and elf-like a grace as though she were playing Puck in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," the part in which she first enthralled my heart.

Ah, yes, she meant to get tea.

"Well, why do you stand there so helplessly, you horrid creature?

Come! Here is a tablecloth, here are knives and forks. I'll light the spirit lamp in the meantime."

And she slips by me not without having administered a playful tap to my cheek and vanishes in the dark room of mystery.

I am about to follow her, but out of the darkness I hear a laughing voice: "Will you stay where you are, Mr. Curiosity?"

And so I stand still on the threshold and lay my head against those billowy skirts. They are fresh and cool and ease my burning forehead.

Immediately thereafter I see the light of a match flare up in the darkness, which for a moment sharply illuminates the folds of her dress and is then extinguished. Only a feeble, bluish flame remains.

This flame plays about a polished little urn and illuminates dimly the secrets of the forbidden sanctuary. I see bright billowy garments, bunches of flowers and wreaths of leaves, with long, silken, shimmering bands--and suddenly the Same flares high....

"Now I've spilt the alcohol," I hear the voice of my friend. But her laughter is full of sarcastic arrogance. "Ah, that'll be a play of fire!" Higher and higher mount the flames.

"Come, jump into it!" she cries out to me, and instead of quenching the flame she pours forth more alcohol into the furious conflagration.

"For heaven's sake!" I cry out.

"Do you know now who I am?" she giggles. "I'm a witch!"

With jubilant screams she loosens her hair of reddish gold which now falls about her with a flaming glory. She shows me her white sharp teeth and with a sudden swift movement she springs into the flame which hisses to the very ceiling and clothes the chamber in a garb of fire.

I try to call for help, but my throat is tied, my breath stops. I am throttled by smoke and flames.

Once more I hear her elfin laughter, but now it comes to me from subterranean depths. The earth has opened; new flames arise and stretch forth fiery arms toward me.

A voice cries from the fires: "Come! Come!" And the voice is like the sound of bells. Then suddenly the night enfolds me.

The witchery has fled. Badly torn and scarred I find myself again on the street. Next to me on the ground lies my play. "Did you not mean to read that to some one?" I ask myself.

A warm and gentle air caresses my fevered face. A blossoming lilac bush inclines its boughs above me and from afar, there where the dawn is about to appear, I hear the clear trilling of larks.

I dream no longer.... But the spring has come....

Chapter IV

And again the years pa.s.s by.

It was on an evening during the carnival season and the world, that is, the world that begins with the baron and ends with the stockjobber, floated upon waves of pleasure as bubbles of fat float on the surface of soup.

Whoever did not wallow in the mire was sarcastically said not to be able to sustain himself on his legs.

There were those among my friends who had not gone to bed till morning for thirty days. Some of them slept only to the strains of a world-famous virtuoso; others only in the cabs that took them from dinner to supper.

Whenever three of them met, one complained of shattered nerves, the second of catarrh of the stomach, the third of both.

That was the pace of our amus.e.m.e.nt.

Of mine, too.

It was nearly one o'clock in the morning. I sat in a _cafe_, that famous _cafe_ which unacknowleged geniuses affirm to be the very centre of all intellectual life. No spot on earth is said to have so fruitful an effect upon one's genius. Yet, strangely enough, however eager for inspiration I might lounge about its red upholstery, however ardently aglow for inspiration I might drink expensive champagnes there, yet the supreme, immense, all-liberating thought did not come.

Nor would that thought come to me to-day. Less than ever, in fact. Red circles danced before my eyes and in my veins hammered the throbs of fever. It wasn't surprising. For I, too, could scarcely remember to have slept recently. It is an effort to raise my lids. The hand that would stroke the hair with the gesture of genius--alas, how thin the hair is getting--sinks down in nerveless weakness.

But I may not go home. Mrs. Elsbeth--we bachelors call her so when her husband is not by--Mrs. Elsbeth has ordered me to be here.... She intended to drop in at midnight on her return from dinner with her husband. The purpose of her coming is to discuss with me the surprises which I am to think up for her magic festival.

She is exacting enough, the sweet little woman, but the world has it that I love her. And in order to let the world be in the right a man is not averse to making a fool of herself.

The stream of humanity eddies about me. Like endless chains rotating in different directions, thus seem the two lines of those who enter and those who depart. There are dandies in coquettish furs, their silk hats low on their foreheads, their canes held vertically in their pockets. There are fashionable ladies in white silk opera cloaks set with ermine, their eyes peering from behind Spanish veils in proud curiosity. And all are illuminated by the spirit of festivity.

Also one sees shop-girls, dragged here by some chance admirer. They wear brownish cloaks, ornamented with knots--the kind that looks worn the day it is taken from the shop. And there are ladies of that species whom one calls "ladies" only between quotation marks. These wear gigantic picture hats trimmed with rhinestones. The hems of their dresses are torn and flecked with last season's mud. There are students who desire to be intoxicated through the l.u.s.t of the eye; artists who desire to regain a lost sobriety of vision; journalists who find stuff for leader copy in the blue despatches that are posted here; Bohemians and loungers of every station, typical of every degree of sham dignity and equally sham depravity. They all intermingle in manicoloured waves. It is the mad masque of the metropolis....

A friend comes up to me, one of the three hundred bosom friends with whom I am wont to swap shady stories. He is pallid with sleeplessness, deep horizontal lines furrow his forehead, his brows are convulsively drawn. So we all look....