Unknown - Isherwood, Christopher (The Berlin Stories - The Last of Mr Norris - Goodbye to Berlin) (TXT)

“You know, Fritz darling,” said Sally, puckering up her nose at me, “I believe the trouble with you is that you’ve never really found the right woman.”

“Maybe that’s true—” Fritz took this idea very seriously. His black eyes became liquid and sentimental: “Maybe I’m still looking for my ideal… .”

“But you’ll find her one day, I’m absolutely certain you

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will.” Sally included me, with a glance, in the game of laughing at Fritz.

“You think so?” Fritz grinned lusciously, sparkling at her.

“Don’t you think so?” Sally appealed to me.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said. “Because I’ve never been able to discover what Fritz’s ideal is.”

For some reason, this seemed to please Fritz. He took it as a kind of testimonial: “And Chris knows me pretty well,” he chimed in. “If Chris doesn’t know, well, I guess no one does.”

Then it was time for Sally to go.

“I’m supposed to meet a man at the Adlon at five,” she explained. “And it’s six already! Never mind, it’ll do the old swine good to wait. He wants me to be his mistress, but I’ve told him I’m damned if I will till he’s paid all my debts. Why are men always such beasts?” Opening her bag, she rapidly retouched her lips and eyebrows: “Oh, by the way, Fritz darling, could you be a perfect angel and lend me ten marks? I haven’t got a bean for a taxi.”

“Why sure!” Fritz put his hand into his pocket and paid up without hesitation, like a hero.

Sally turned to me: “I say, will you come and have tea with me sometime? Give me your telephone number. I’ll ring you up.”

I suppose, I thought, she imagines I’ve got cash. Well, this will be a lesson to her, once for all. I wrote my number in her tiny leather book. Fritz saw her out.

“Well!” he came bounding back into the room and gleefully shut the door: “What do you think of her, Chris? Didn’t I tell you she was a goodlooker?”

“You did indeed!”

“I’m getting crazier about her each time I see her!” With a sigh of pleasure, he helped himself to a cigarette: “More coffee, Chris?”

“No, thank you very much.”

“You know, Chris, I think she took a fancy to you, too!”

“Oh, rot!”

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“Honestly, I do!” Fritz seemed pleased. “Eventually I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of her from now on!”

When I got back to Frl. Schroeder’s, I felt so giddy that I had to lie down for half an hour on my bed. Fritz’s black coffee was as poisonous as ever.

A few days later, he took me to hear Sally sing.

The Lady Windermere (which now, I hear, no longer exists) was an arty “informal” bar, just off the Tauentzienstrasse, which the proprietor had evidently tried to make look as much as possible like Montparnasse. The walls were covered with sketches on menu-cards, caricatures and signed theatrical photographs—(“To the one and only Lady Windermere.” “To Johnny, with all my heart.”) The Fan itself, four times life size, was displayed above the bar. There was a big piano on a platform in the middle of the room.

I was curious to see how Sally would behave. I had imagined her, for some reason, rather nervous, but she wasn’t, in the least. She had a surprisingly deep husky voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse what people thought of her. Her arms hanging carelessly limp, and a take-it-or-leave-it grin on her face, she sang:

Now I know why Mother Told me to be true; She meant me for Someone Exactly like you.

There was quite a lot of applause. The pianist, a handsome young man with blond wavy hair, stood up and solemnly kissed Sally’s hand. Then she sang two more songs, one in French and the other in German. These weren’t so well received.

After the singing, there was a good deal more hand-kissing

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and a general movement towards the bar. Sally seemed to know everybody in the place. She called them all Thou and Darling. For a would-be demi-mondaine, she seemed to have surprisingly little business sense or tact. She wasted a lot of time making advances to an elderly gentleman who would obviously have preferred a chat with the barman. Later, we all got rather drunk. Then Sally had to go off to an appointment, and the manager came and sat at our table. He and Fritz talked English Peerage. Fritz was in his element. I decided, as so often before, never to visit a place of this sort again.

Then Sally rang up, as she had promised, to invite me to tea.

She lived a long way down the Kurfürstendamm on the last dreary stretch which rises to Haiensee. I was shown into a big gloomy half-furnished room by a fat untidy landlady with a pouchy sagging jowl like a toad. There was a broken-down sofa in one corner and a faded picture of an eighteenth-century battle, with the wounded reclining on their elbows in graceful attitudes, admiring the prancings of Frederick the Great’s horse.

“Oh, hullo, Chris darling!” cried Sally from the doorway. “How sweet of you to come! I was feeling most terribly lonely. I’ve been crying on Frau Karpf’s chest. Nicht wahr, Frau Karpf?” She appealed to the toad landlady, “ich habe geweint auf Dein Brust.” Frau Karpf shook her bosom in a toad-like chuckle.

“Would you rather have coffee, Chris, or tea?” Sally continued. “You can have either. Only I don’t recommend the tea much. I don’t know what Frau Karpf does to it; I think she empties all the kitchen slops together into a jug and boils them up with the tea-leaves.”

“I’ll have coffee, then.”

“Frau Karpf, Leibling, willst Du sein ein Engel und bring zwei Tassen von Kaffee?” Sally’s German was not merely

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incorrect; it was all her own. She pronounced every word in a mmcing, specially “foreign” manner. You could tell that she was speaking a foreign language from her expression alone. “Chris darling, will you be an angel and draw the curtains?”

I did so, although it was still quite light outside. Sally, meanwhile, had switched on the table-lamp. As I turned from the window, she curled herself up delicately on the sofa like a cat, and, opening her bag, felt for a cigarette. But hardly was the pose complete before she’d jumped to her feet again:

“Would you like a Prairie Oyster?” She produced glasses, eggs and a bottle of Worcester sauce from the boot-cupboard under the dismantled washstand: “I practically live on them.” Dexterously, she broke the eggs into the glasses, added the sauce and stirred up the mixture with the end of a fountain-pen: “They’re about all I can afford.” She was back on the sofa again, daintily curled up.

She was wearing the same black dress to-day, but without the cape. Instead, she had a little white collar and white cuffs. They produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in grand opera. “What are you laughing at, Chris?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. But still I couldn’t stop grinning. There was, at that moment, something so extraordinarily comic in Sally’s appearance. She was really beautiful, with her little dark head, big eyes and finely arched nose—and so absurdly conscious of all these features. There she lay, as complacently feminine as a turtle-dove, with her poised self-conscious head and daintily arranged hands.

“Chris, you swine, do tell me why you’re laughing?”

“I really haven’t the faintest idea.”

At this, she began to laugh, too: “You are mad, you know!”

“Have you been here long?” I asked, looking round the large gloomy room.

“Ever since I arrived in Berlin. Let’s see—that was about two months ago.”