“Yes—if! If I hadn’t run off to Vienna after Henrietta Sontag!”
“She must have been beautiful, wasn’t she?”
“I don’t even know that, absolutely,” burst forth Beneš with a lightness that was plainly feigned. “She was and she wasn’t. When I met her by accident in a Prague company I accompanied her on the piano for the first time and when she looked at me, all was over. Dear God, those blue eyes of hers! I would have followed those eyes further than Vienna!”
No one questioned him further, but Beneš, nevertheless, did not remain silent. It seemed as if something goaded him on to speaking jocularly and lightly of that subject.
“It didn’t even worry me that others also had come here on her account—a young lancer, for instance. I knew she was as pure as an angel. Dear God, those eyes so soft, so heavenly! Why shouldn’t I say so now? What does it matter? I was insanely in love with her and I acted like a madman. I kept silent. She herself cured me. Suddenly she disappeared—it was said, on account of attacks from certain court circles on her virtue and for me she left this written message, ‘I thank you fervently for your services and please accept enclosed three hundred as a reward for your difficult work of accompaniment.’ So then at last I saw what I was to her—an accompanist! But for the first time in my life I had three hundred and—”
He intended to say something humorous, but sud-
