The little one is coming out next carnival. The boys run errands. But now I must go and look for your luggage.”

Andreas, left alone, threw back the shutters and fixed them. The hasp of one was broken: he made up his mind to have it seen to at once. Then he put all the remaining paint-pots and brushes outside the door and, with a linen rag he found lying under the bed, scoured the paint spots off his table till it shone clean. Then he carried the paint-stained rag out of the room, looked for a corner to hide it in, and discovered a twig broom, with which he swept out his room. When he had finished he put the pretty little mirror straight, drew the bed-curtains, and sat down on the single chair at the foot of the bed, his face towards the window. The kindly breeze came in, stroking his young face with a faint smell of seaweed and sea freshness.

He thought of his parents and of the letter he would have to write to them in the coffee-house. He resolved to write something in this fashion:

My kind and honoured parents,

I have safely arrived in Venice. I have taken a cheerful, very clean and airy room with a noble family who happen to have it to let. The room looks on to the street, but instead of the earth, there is water below, and the people go about in gondolas, or, if they are poor, in great barges rather like the Danube ferry-boats. These boats take the place of porters, so that I shall be very quiet. There is no cracking of whips or shouting.

He thought he would mention too that there were messengers in Venice so clever that they could recognize a mask by his gait and shoe-buckles. That would please his father, who was very eager to collect the peculiarities and oddities of foreign lands and customs. He was in doubt whether to say that he was living quite close to a theatre. In Vienna that had been his dearest wish. Many years ago, when he was ten or twelve years old, he had two friends who lived in the Blaue Freihaus in the Wieden, on the same staircase in that fourth courtyard where the theatre was set up in a shed. He remembered how wonderful it was to be visiting them towards evening, to see the scenery carried out—a canvas with a magic garden, a bit of a tavern inside, the candle-snuffer, the murmur of the crowd, the mandoletti sellers.

More poignant than all the rest, the confused hum of the instruments tuning up—to this day it went to his heart to think of it. The floor of the stage was uneven, the curtain too short in places. Jackboots came and went. Between the neck of a bass fiddle and the head of a fiddler a sky-blue shoe, embroidered with tinsel, once appeared. The sky-blue shoe was more wonderful than all the rest. Later a being stood there with this shoe on—it belonged to her, was one with her blue and silver gown: she was a princess, dangers surrounded her, an enchanted wood closed round her, voices sounded from the branches, monkeys came rolling fruit along, from which lovely children sprang, shining. All that was beautiful, but it was not the two-edged sword which had pierced his soul, from the tenderest delight and unutterable longing to tears, awe, and ecstasy, when the blue shoe lay alone beneath the curtain.

He made up his mind not to mention that the theatre was so near, nor even the strange costume of the gentleman who had brought him to the house. He would have had to say that the man was a gambler who had played away everything, down to his shirt, or else go out of his way to conceal that detail. He would not, of course, be able to tell about Esterhazy, and that would have pleased his mother. He was quite willing to mention the rent, two sequins a month—it was not much, considering his means. But what was the good of that, seeing that he had, in a single night, by a single act of folly, lost half his journey money? Never would he be able to confess that to his parents, so what was the good of boasting about his thrift? He was ashamed in his own sight and did not want to think of the three disastrous days in Carinthia, but the face of the rascally servant already stood before him, and, whether he would or no, he had to recall it all minutely and from the very beginning: every day, morning or evening, it would all come back to him.

ONCE MORE he was in the inn Zum Schwert in Villach after a hard day’s travelling, and was just going up to bed when, on the very staircase, a man stood offering himself as servant or courier. He: he needed nobody, was travelling alone, looked after his horse himself during the day, and the ostler would do so at night. The other would not leave him, went sidling upstairs with him, step by step, as far as his room, then stepped into the doorway, standing square in it, so that Andreas could not shut the door: it was not fitting for a young gentleman of quality to travel without a servant: it would look paltry down in Italy, they were infernally nice on that point.