Please don't be so foolish.«

»Here and here only!« She indicated the exact spot and dropped quite beautifully, lying motionless.

»Very well,« I said, »faint away; but please hurry over it.«

She did not move. I began to walk home, but each time I looked behind me I saw the dark form of the modern soul prone before the hairdresser's window. Finally I ran, and rooted out the Herr Professor from his room. »Fräulein Sonia has fainted,« I said crossly.

»Du lieber Gott! Where? How?«

»Outside the hairdresser's shop in the Station Road.«

»Jesus and Maria! Has she no water with her?« – he seized his carafe – »nobody beside her?«

»Nothing.«

»Where is my coat? No matter, I shall catch a cold on the chest. Willingly, I shall catch one. ... You are ready to come with me?«

»No,« I said; »you can take the waiter.«

»But she must have a woman. I cannot be so indelicate as to attempt to loosen her stays.«

»Modern souls oughtn't to wear them,« said I. He pushed past me and clattered down the stairs.

 

When I came down to breakfast next morning there were two places vacant at table. Fräulein Sonia and the Herr Professor had gone off for a day's excursion in the woods.

I wondered.

 

 

At Lehmann's

Certainly Sabina did not find life slow. She was on the trot from early morning until late at night. At five o'clock she tumbled out of bed, buttoned on her clothes, wearing a long-sleeved alpaca pinafore over her black frock, and groped her way downstairs into the kitchen.

Anna, the cook, had grown so fat during the summer that she adored her bed because she did not have to wear her corsets there, but could spread as much as she liked, roll about on the great mattress, calling upon Jesus and Holy Mary and Blessed Anthony himself that her life was not fit for a pig in a cellar.

Sabina was new to her work. Pink colour still flew in her cheeks; there was a little dimple on the left side of her mouth that even when she was most serious, most absorbed, popped out and gave her away. And Anna blessed that dimple. It meant an extra half-hour in bed for her; it made Sabina light the fire, turn out the kitchen and wash endless cups and saucers that had been left over from the evening before. Hans, the scullery boy, did not come until seven. He was the son of the butcher – a mean, undersized child very much like one of his father's sausages, Sabina thought. His red face was covered with pimples, and his nails indescribably filthy. When Herr Lehmann himself told Hans to get a hairpin and clean them he said they were stained from birth because his mother had always got so inky doing the accounts – and Sabina believed him and pitied him.

Winter had come very early to Mindelbau. By the end of October the streets were banked waist-high with snow, and the greater number of the »Cure Guests,« sick unto death of cold water and herbs, had departed in nothing approaching peace. So the large salon was shut at Lehmann's and the breakfast-room was all the accommodation the café afforded. Here the floor had to be washed over, the tables rubbed, coffee-cups set out each with its little china platter of sugar, and newspapers and magazines hung on their hooks along the walls before Herr Lehmann appeared at seven-thirty and opened business.

As a rule his wife served in the shop leading into the café, but she had chosen the quiet season to have a baby, and, a big woman at the best of times, she had grown so enormous in the process that her husband told her she looked unappetising, and had better remain upstairs and sew.

Sabina took on the extra work without any thought of extra pay. She loved to stand behind the counter, cutting up slices of Anna's marvellous chocolate- confections, or doing up packets of sugar almonds in pink and blue striped bags.

»You'll get varicose veins, like me,« said Anna. »That's what the Frau's got too. No wonder the baby doesn't come! All her swelling's got into her legs.« And Hans was immensely interested.

During the morning business was comparatively slack. Sabina answered the shop bell, attended to a few customers who drank a liqueur to warm their stomachs before the midday meal, and ran upstairs now and again to ask the Frau if she wanted anything. But in the afternoon six or seven choice spirits played cards, and everybody who was anybody drank tea or coffee.

»Sabina ... Sabina ...«

She flew from one table to the other, counting out handfuls of small change, giving orders to Anna through the ›slide,‹ helping the men with their heavy coats, always with that magical child air about her, that delightful sense of perpetually attending a party.

»How is the Frau Lehmann?« the women would whisper.

»She feels rather low, but as well as can be expected,« Sabina would answer, nodding confidentially.

Frau Lehmann's bad time was approaching. Anna and her friends referred to it as her ›journey to Rome,‹ and Sabina longed to ask questions, yet, being ashamed of her ignorance, was silent, trying to puzzle it out for herself. She knew practically nothing except that the Frau had a baby inside her, which had to come out – very painful indeed.