VII
IMMA
FRÄULEIN VON ISENSCHNIBBE had been well informed. On the very evening of the day on which she had brought the Princess zu Reid the great news, the Courier published the announcement of Samuel Spoelmann’s, the world-renowned Spoelmann’s, impending arrival, and ten days later, at the beginning of October (it was the October of the year in which Grand Duke Albrecht had entered his thirty-second and Prince Klaus Heinrich his twenty-sixth year), thus barely giving time for public curiosity to reach a really high point, his arrival became a fact, a plain actuality on an autumn-tinged, entirely ordinary week-day, which was destined to impress itself on the future as a date to be remembered for ever.
The Spoelmanns arrived by special train—that was the only distinction about their debut to start with, for everybody knew that the “Prince’s suite” in the “Spa Court” Hotel was by no means dazzingly magnificent. A few idlers, guarded by a small detachment of policemen, had gathered behind the platform barriers; some representatives of the press were present. But whoever expected anything out of the ordinary was disappointed. Spoelmann would almost have passed unrecognized, he was so unimposing. For a long time people took his family physician for him (Doctor Watercloose, people said he was called), a tall American, who wore his hat on the back of his head and kept his mouth distended in a perpetual smile between his close-trimmed white whiskers, the while he half-closed his eyes. It was not till the last moment that people learned that it was the little clean-shaven man in the faded overcoat, he who wore his hat pulled down over his eyes, who was the actual Spoelmann, and the spectators were agreed that there was nothing striking about him. All sorts of stories had been in circulation about him; some witty fellow had spread the report that Spoelmann had front teeth of solid gold and a diamond set in the middle of each. But although the truth or untruth of this report could not be tested at once—for Spoelmann did not show his teeth, he did not laugh, but rather seemed angry and irritated by his infirmity—yet when they saw him nobody was any longer inclined to believe it.
As for Miss Spoelmann, his daughter, she had turned up the collar of her fur coat, and stuffed her hands in the pockets, so that there was hardly anything to be seen of her except a pair of disproportionately big brown-black eyes, which swept the crowd with a serious look whose meaning it was hard to interpret. By her side stood the person whom the onlookers identified as her companion, the Countess Löwenjoul, a woman of thirty-five, plainly dressed and taller than either of the Spoelmanns, who carried her little head with its thin smooth hair pensively on one side, and kept her eyes fixed in front of her with a kind of rigid meekness. What without question attracted most attention was a Scottish sheep-dog which was led on a cord by a stolid-looking servant—an exceptionally handsome, but, as it appeared, terribly excitable beast, that leaped and danced and filled the station with its frenzied barking.
People said that a few of Spoelmann’s servants, male and female, had already arrived at the “Spa Court” some hours before. At any rate it was left to the servant with the dog to look after the luggage by himself; and while he was doing so his masters drove in two ordinary flies—Mr. Spoelmann with Doctor Watercloose, Miss Spoelmann with the Countess—to the Spa-Garden. There they got out, and there for six weeks they led a life the cost of which it did not need all their money to meet.
They were lucky; the weather was fine, it was a blue autumn, a long succession of sunny days from October into November, and Miss Spoelmann rode daily—that was her only luxury—with her companion, on horses which she hired by the week from the livery stables. Mr. Spoelmann did not ride, although the Courier, with obvious reference to him, published a note by its medical colleague according to which riding had a soothing effect in cases of stone, owing to its jolting, and helped to disperse the stone. But the hotel staff knew that the famous man practised artificial riding within the four walls of his room, with the help of a machine, a stationary velocipede to whose saddle a jolting motion was imparted by the working of the pedals.
He was a zealous drinker of the healing waters, the Ditlinde Spring, by which he seemed to set great store. He appeared first thing every morning in the Füllhaus, accompanied by his daughter, who for her part was quite healthy, and only drank with him for company’s sake, and then, in his faded coat and with his hat pulled over his eyes, took his exercise in the Spa-Garden and Wandelhalle, drinking the water the while through a glass tube out of a blue tumbler—watched at a distance by the two American newspaper correspondents, whose duty it was to telegraph to their papers a thousand words daily about Spoelmann’s holiday resort, and who were therefore bound to try to get something to telegraph about.
Otherwise he was rarely visible. His illness—kidney colic, so people said, extremely painful attacks—seemed to confine him often to his room, if not to his bed, and while Miss Spoelmann with Countess Löwenjoul appeared two or three times at the Court Theatre (when, in a black velvet dress with an Indian silk scarf of a wonderful gold-yellow colour round her fresh young shoulders, she looked quite bewitching with her pearl-white complexion and great black pleading eyes), her father was never seen in the box with her. He took, it is true, in her company one or two drives through the capital, to do some shopping, get some idea of the town, and see a few select sights; he went for a walk with her too, through the park and twice inspected there the Schloss Delphinenort—the second time alone, when he was so much interested as to take measurements of the walls with an ordinary yellow rule, which he took out of his faded coat.… But he was never seen in the dining-room of the “Spa Court,” for whether because he was on an almost meatless diet, or for some other reason, he took his meals exclusively with his own party in his own rooms, and the curiosity of the public had on the whole remarkably little to feed on.
The result was that Spoelmann’s arrival at the Spa at first did not prove so beneficial as Fräulein von Isenschnibbe and many others beside her had expected. The export of bottles increased, that was certain; it quickly rose to half as many again as its previous figure, and remained at that. But the influx of foreigners did not increase noticeably; the guests who came to feast their eyes on so abnormal an existence soon went away again, satisfied or disappointed, besides it was for the most part not the most desirable elements of society that were attracted by the millionaire’s presence. Strange creatures appeared in the streets, unkempt and wild-eyed creatures—inventors, projectors, would-be benefactors of mankind, who hoped to enlist Spoelmann’s sympathies for their hobbies. But the millionaire made himself absolutely inaccessible to these people; indeed, purple with rage, he howled at one of them who made advances towards him in the park, in such a way that the busybody quickly skedaddled, and it was often said that the torrent of begging letters which daily flowed in to him—letters which often bore stamps which the officials of the Grand Ducal post-office had never seen before—was at once discharged into a paper-basket of quite unusual capacity.
Spoelmann seemed to have forbidden all business letters to be sent him, seemed determined to enjoy his holiday to the utmost, and during his travels in Europe to live exclusively for his health—or ill-health. The Courier, whose reporter had lost no time in making friends with his American colleagues, was in a position to announce that a reliable man, a so-called chief manager, was Mr. Spoelmann’s representative in America. He went on to say that his yacht, a gorgeously decorated vessel, was awaiting the great man at Venice, and that as soon as he had finished his cure he intended to travel south with his party.
It told also, in answer to importunate requests from its readers—of the romantic origin of the Spoelmann millions, from their beginning in Victoria, whither his father had drifted from some German office stool or other, young, poor, and armed only with a pick, a shovel, and a tin plate. There he had begun by working as help to a gold-digger, as a day labourer, in the sweat of his brow. And then luck had come to him. A man, a claim-owner on a small scale, had fared so badly that he could no longer buy himself his tomat
oes and dry bread for dinner, and in his extremity had been obliged to dispose of his claim. Spoelmann senior had bought it, had staked his one card, and, with his whole savings, amounting to £5 sterling, had bought this piece of alluvial land called “Paradise Field,” not more than forty feet square. And the next day he had turned up, a foot under the surface, a nugget of pure gold, the tenth biggest nugget in the world, the “Paradise nugget,” weighing 980 ounces and worth £5,000.
That, related the Courier, had been the beginning. Spoelmann’s father had emigrated to South America with the proceeds of his find, to Bolivia, and as gold-washer, amalgam-mill-owner, and mine-owner had continued to extract the yellow metal direct from the rivers and the womb of the mountains. Then and there Spoelmann senior had married—and the Courier went so far as to hint in this connexion that he had done so defiantly and without regard to the prejudices generally felt in those parts. However, he had doubled his capital and succeeded in investing his money most profitably.
He had moved on northwards to Philadelphia, Pa. That was in the fifties, the time of a great boom in railway construction, and Spoelmann had begun with one investment in the Baltimore and Ohio Railway. He had also leased a coalmine in the west of the State, the profits from which had been enormous. Finally he had joined that group of fortunate young men which bought the famous Blockhead Farm for a few thousand pounds—the property which, with its petroleum wells, in a short time increased in value to a hundred times its purchase price.… This enterprise had made a rich man of Spoelmann senior, but he had by no means rested on his oars, but unceasingly practised the art of making money into more money, and finally into superabundant money.
He had started steel works, had floated companies for the turning of iron into steel on a large scale, and for building railway bridges. He had bought up the major part of the shares of four or five big railway companies, and had been elected in the later years of his life president, vice-president, manager, or director of the companies. When the Steel Trust was formed, so the Courier said, he had joined it, with a holding of shares which guaranteed him an income of $12,000,000. But at the same time he had been chief shareholder and expert adviser of the Petroleum Combine, and in virtue of his holding had dominated three or four of the other Trust Companies. And at his death his fortune, reckoned in German currency, had amounted to a round thousand million marks.
Samuel, his only son, the offspring of that early marriage, contracted in defiance of public opinion, had been his sole heir—and the Courier, with its usual delicacy, interpolated a remark to the effect that there was something almost sad in the idea of any one, without himself contributing, and through no fault of his own, being born to such a situation. Samuel had inherited the palace on Fifth Avenue at New York, the country mansions, and all the shares, Trust bonds, and profits of his father; he inherited also the strange position to which his father had risen, his world-fame and the hatred directed by his out-distanced competitors against the power of his gold—all the hatred to allay which he yearly distributed his huge donations to colleges, conservatories, libraries, benevolent institutions, and that University which his father had founded and which bore his name.
Samuel Spoelmann did not deserve the hatred of the out-distanced competitors; that the Courier was sure of. He had gone early into the business, and had controlled the bewildering possessions of his house all by himself during his father’s last years. But everybody knew that his heart had never been really in the business. His real inclinations had been, strange to say, all along much more towards music and especially organ music—and the truth of this information on the part of the Courier was certain, for Mr. Spoelmann actually kept a small organ in the “Spa Court,” whose bellows he got a hotel servant to blow, and he could be heard from the Spa-Garden playing it for an hour every day.
He had married for love and not at all from social considerations, according to the Courier—a poor and pretty girl, half German, half Anglo-Saxon by descent. She had died, but she had left him a daughter, that wonderful blood-mixture of a girl, whom we now had as guest within our walls and who was at the time nineteen years old. Her name was Imma—a real German name, as the Courier added, nothing more than an old form of “Emma,” and it might be remarked that the daily conversation in the Spoelmann household, though interlarded with scraps of English, had remained German. And how devoted father and daughter seemed to be to each other! Every morning, by going to the Spa-Garden at the right time, one could watch Fräulein Spoelmann, who usually entered the Füllhause a little later than her father, take his head between her hands and give him his morning kiss on mouth and cheeks, while he patted her tenderly on the back. Then they went arm-in-arm through the Wandelhalle and sucked their glass tubes as they went.…
That is how the well-informed journal gossiped and fed the public curiosity. It also reported carefully the visits which Miss Imma kindly paid with her companion to several of the charitable institutions of the town. Yesterday she had made a detailed inspection of the public kitchens. To-day she had made a prolonged tour of the Trinity Almhouses for old women, and she had recently twice attended Privy Councillor Klinghammer’s lectures on the theory of numbers at the university—had sat on the bench, a student among students, and scribbled away with her fountain-pen, for everybody knew that she was a learned girl and devoted to the study of algebra. Yes, all that was absorbing reading, and furnished ample food for conversation. But the topics which made themselves talked about without any help from the Courier were, firstly, the dog, that noble black-and-white collie which the Spoelmanns had brought with them, and secondly, in a different way, the companion, Countess Löwenjoul.
As for the dog, whose name was Percival, generally shortened to Percy, he was an animal of so excitable and emotional a disposition as beggared description. Inside the hotel he afforded no grounds for complaint, but lay in a dignified attitude on a small carpet outside the Spoelmanns’ suite. But every time he went out he had an attack of lightheadedness, which caused general interest and surprise, indeed more than once actual obstruction of traffic.
Followed at a distance by a swarm of native dogs, common curs which, incited by his demeanour, assailed him with censorious yaps, and which caused him no concern whatever, he flew through the streets, his nose spattered with foam and barking wildly, pirouetted madly in front of the tramcars, made the cab-horses stumble, and twice knocked Widow Klaaszen’s cake stall at the Town Hall down so violently that the sugar cakes rolled half over the Market-place. But as Mr. Spoelmann or his daughter at once met such catastrophes with more than adequate compensation, as too it was discovered that Percival’s attacks were really quite free from danger, that he was anything but inclined to bite and steal, but on the contrary kept to himself and would let nobody come near him, public opinion quickly turned in his favour, and to the children in particular his excursions were a constant source of pleasure.
Countess Löwenjoul on her side supplied food for conversation in a quieter but no less strange way. At first, when her personality and position were not yet known in the city, she had attracted the gibes of the street urchins, because, while out walking alone, she talked to herself softly and deliberately, and accompanied her words with lively and at the same time graceful and elegant gestures. But she had shown such mildness and goodness to the children who shouted after her and tugged at her dress, she had spoken to them with such affection and dignity, that her persecutors had slunk away abashed and confused, and later, when she became known, respect for her relations with the famous guests secured her from molestation. However, some unintelligible anecdotes were secretly circulated about her. One man told how the Countess had given him a gold piece with instructions that he should box the ears of a certain old woman who was understood to have made some unseemly proposal or other to her. The man had pocketed the gold piece, without, however, discharging his commission.
Further, it was declared as a fact that the Countess had accosted the sentry in front of the Fusiliers’
Barracks and had told him at once to arrest the wife of the sergeant of one of the companies because of her moral shortcomings. She had written too a letter to the Colonel of the regiment to the effect that all sorts of secret and unspeakable abominations went on inside the barracks. Whether she was right in her facts, heaven only knew. But many people at once concluded that she was wrong in her head. At any rate, there was no time to investigate the matter, for six weeks were soon past, and Samuel N. Spoelmann, the millionaire, went away.
He went away after having had his portrait painted by Professor von Lindemann—an expensive portrait too, which he gave to the proprietor of the “Spa Court” as a memento; he went away with his daughter, the Countess, and Doctor Watercloose, with Percival, the chamber-velocipede, and his servants; went by special train to the South, with the view of spending the winter on the Riviera, whither the two New York journalists had hastened ahead of him, and of then crossing back home again. It was all over. The Courier wished Mr. Spoelmann a hearty farewell and expressed the hope that the cure would be found to have done him good.
And with that the notable interlude seemed to be closed and done with. Everyday life claimed its due, and Mr. Spoelmann began to fade into oblivion. The winter passed. It was the winter in which her Grand Ducal Highness the Princess zu Ried-Hohenried was confined of a daughter. Spring came, and his Royal Highness Grand Duke Albrecht repaired as usual to Hollerbrunn. But then a rumour cropped up amongst the people and in the press, which was received at first with a shrug by the sober-minded, but became more concrete, crystallized, took to itself quite precise details, and finally won itself a dominant place in the solid and pithy news of the day.