29. Doktor Graesler
Badearzt
A. — ad 2 —. a — G u — K. — GI
60
CUTHBERT WRIGHT
ocrities unheroically growing old. Yet even in this discouraging
atmosphere the delicate romanticism of the Viennese novelist mani¬
fests itself slvly. Over the flats and across this backwater of
existence floats faintly the sound of a waltz by Strauss. Those
bored chaste sands keep the impress of the cloven hoof. What a
printer recently misspelled the erratic motive in modern literature
trembles in the nervous and sensitized prose. It is so hard to grow
old (the novelist seems to tell us) so hard, and so exciting. Turn¬
ing forty plays strange tricks with the soul and the organism more
stimulating than any which accompany the ready-made adventures
of youth. Contemplate with the eyes of sympathy those dull
sands, sprinkled with unromantic figures in black coats and wheeled
chairs, and you discover that bencath the rigid fronts and chaste
bosoms, beat the unvanquished instincts of centaurs and nymphs.
This novel about an aging doctor is, in a spiritual, but none the
less, real sense, the afternoon of a faun.
Only like Mallarmé’s faun, he chooses to go to sleep again in
the clearing. Alife’s work has tired him prematurely, and he has
become too much the man of umbrellas and coal-fires to love over¬
much the open air. Twice the little gods, who arrange these things
somewhat in the air, offer him a supreme opportunity to live, and
it is twice rejected. The first opportunity presents itself in the
person of a girl, Sabine, whom he meets in a medical capacity at
the spa. She is beautiful, pure, ardent, the sort of nice girl one
meets in the excessively romantic pages of Mr Sinclair Lewis. He
loves her; and while he is playing with the supreme hope and half¬
consciousness that at last he loves truly, ardently, appropriately,
and is loved in return, he receives a letter in which she in effect
gives herself to him:
Well then, dear Dr Graesler, dear friend, here I am writing
.to tell you that I should not take it amiss were you to ask
me to be your wife. I feel a great cordial friendship for you such
as I have not felt for any human being before. Not love.
not yet. But something akin to love, something which may well
grow into love. During the last days, when you spoke of your
impending journey, I lad a strange feeling at my heart.?
Here, at the point when an American novelette would probably
box 4/9
Badearzt
A. — ad 2 —. a — G u — K. — GI
60
CUTHBERT WRIGHT
ocrities unheroically growing old. Yet even in this discouraging
atmosphere the delicate romanticism of the Viennese novelist mani¬
fests itself slvly. Over the flats and across this backwater of
existence floats faintly the sound of a waltz by Strauss. Those
bored chaste sands keep the impress of the cloven hoof. What a
printer recently misspelled the erratic motive in modern literature
trembles in the nervous and sensitized prose. It is so hard to grow
old (the novelist seems to tell us) so hard, and so exciting. Turn¬
ing forty plays strange tricks with the soul and the organism more
stimulating than any which accompany the ready-made adventures
of youth. Contemplate with the eyes of sympathy those dull
sands, sprinkled with unromantic figures in black coats and wheeled
chairs, and you discover that bencath the rigid fronts and chaste
bosoms, beat the unvanquished instincts of centaurs and nymphs.
This novel about an aging doctor is, in a spiritual, but none the
less, real sense, the afternoon of a faun.
Only like Mallarmé’s faun, he chooses to go to sleep again in
the clearing. Alife’s work has tired him prematurely, and he has
become too much the man of umbrellas and coal-fires to love over¬
much the open air. Twice the little gods, who arrange these things
somewhat in the air, offer him a supreme opportunity to live, and
it is twice rejected. The first opportunity presents itself in the
person of a girl, Sabine, whom he meets in a medical capacity at
the spa. She is beautiful, pure, ardent, the sort of nice girl one
meets in the excessively romantic pages of Mr Sinclair Lewis. He
loves her; and while he is playing with the supreme hope and half¬
consciousness that at last he loves truly, ardently, appropriately,
and is loved in return, he receives a letter in which she in effect
gives herself to him:
Well then, dear Dr Graesler, dear friend, here I am writing
.to tell you that I should not take it amiss were you to ask
me to be your wife. I feel a great cordial friendship for you such
as I have not felt for any human being before. Not love.
not yet. But something akin to love, something which may well
grow into love. During the last days, when you spoke of your
impending journey, I lad a strange feeling at my heart.?
Here, at the point when an American novelette would probably
box 4/9