# The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 73/Doctor Graesler

DOCTOR GRAESLER
BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Translated from the German by Paul Bloomfield Zeisler
THE steamer was about to weigh anchor. Doctor Graesler, clad in a dark suit and an unbuttoned grey overcoat with a black arm-band on one sleeve, stood upon the deck. The hotel-director faced him bareheaded, his smooth-combed brown hair scarcely ruffled by the soft coast-breeze.
"My dear Doctor," the director remarked in that peculiar tone of condescension which had always affected Doctor Graesler so unpleasantly, "let me repeat that we are definitely counting on having you back again with us next season, in spite of the deplorable misfortune that has befallen you here."
Doctor Graesler did not reply. Misty-eyed, he looked across towards the shore of the island where the big hotel with its white window-shutters, closed tight to keep out the heat, glared in the dazzling sun. Then his gaze swept farther, over the sleepy yellowish houses and the dust-baked gardens sloping indolently upward, in the mid-day vapour, until they reached the scant old remains of stone and mortar that festooned the hills.
"Our guests," the director continued, "of whom a number will probably return next year, have come to esteem you, my dear Doctor, and so we confidently hope that, in spite of the sad memories it holds for you, you will again occupy the little villa"—he motioned towards a modest, bright cottage in the vicinity of the hotel—"the more so as you realize, of course, that we could not possibly put Number 43 at your disposal during the height of the season." And ​as Graesler gloomily shook his head and, taking off his stiff black hat, ran his fingers through a shock of coarse, slightly greying blond hair, the director added:
"Oh, my dear Doctor, time works wonders. And if, by any chance, it's solitude you dread in that little white house, why, there's always a remedy for that. Why not bring along a nice little wife from Germany?" And as Graesler responded with a timid stare, the director continued in a lively, almost peremptory fashion:
"Come, come, their name is legion. A nice little blond wife—or, for that matter, a brunette would do—that's very likely the one thing you need to make a complete man of you." Doctor Graesler lifted his eyes reflectively, as though to seek vanishing pictures in the past.
"Well," the director concluded affably, "whatever you decide, one way or the other, single or married, you will be welcome here in any case. And, if you please, by the twenty-seventh of October, as arranged. Otherwise, in view of the steamer-connexions, which, despite all our efforts, are regrettably still rather unsatisfactory, you might not arrive until the tenth of November; and as we open on the first"—and now he assumed the somewhat twangy accents of the army-lieutenant which the doctor found totally intolerable—"that really would hardly suit us."
He shook the doctor's hand with an excessive show of heartiness—a habit he had brought with him from the United States—exchanged a hasty greeting with a passing ship's-officer, hurried down the steps, and was shortly to be seen walking down the gang-plank, whence he again nodded a good-bye to the doctor who stood rather dejectedly, hat in hand, against the deck-rail. A few minutes later the steamer made clear of the shore.
On the trip home, which was favoured by beautiful weather, Doctor Graesler often recalled the parting words of the director. And afternoons, when, with his Scotch plaid steamer-rug spread over his knees, he slumbered gently in his comfortable deck-chair on the promenade, there sometimes appeared to him, like a vision, a plump, attractive woman in white summer-clothes, gliding about through the house and in the garden—a pink-cheeked woman with a doll's face which he seemed somehow to know, not actually, but perhaps from some picture-album or some illustrated family-magazine. This creature of his dreams possessed, however, the mysterious ​power of banishing the apparition of his dead sister, so that she now seemed to have departed the world longer ago, and in a somewhat more natural manner, than had in reality been the case. There were, to be sure, also other hours, wakeful and heavy with memories—hours in which the thought of that fearful event assailed him with almost intolerable distinctness and immediacy.
The disaster had occurred a week before Doctor Graesler left the island. While in the garden after lunch, he had, as sometimes happened, fallen asleep over his medical journals; and when he woke he saw from the palm-tree’s long shadow, which had run past his feet and across the entire breadth of the gravel walk, that he must have rested at least two hours—an accident which put him out of sorts because at his age—he was forty-eight—he was tempted to ascribe to it undue significance as an indication of the failing vigour of youth. He arose, pocketed his papers, and, with a deep longing for the rejuvenating spring air of Germany in his heart, strolled slowly towards the little cottage which he inhabited with his slightly older sister. As he approached he saw her standing at a window, and this in a measure struck him, since at this sultry hour all the shutters were usually closed; when he came nearer he noticed that, though he had, while yet at a distance, thought to observe Friederike smiling at him, she was, on the contrary, standing absolutely motionless, her back turned to him. With a certain feeling of uneasiness for which he could not entirely account, he hurried into the house; and swiftly approaching his sister who seemed still to lean against the window without stirring, he was horrified to see her head sunk upon her breast, her eyes wide open, and twisted about her neck a rope which had been attached to the cross-bar of the window. He cried out her name, at the same time reaching for his pocket-knife and cutting the sling, whereupon the lifeless body sank heavily into his arms. He shouted for the servant, who presently came from the kitchen and was utterly incapable of realizing what had happened. With her help he laid his sister upon the divan, and began immediately to apply, such means of resuscitation as were familiar to him from his professional experience. In the meantime the servant had rushed off to get the director; but just as the latter entered the room, Doctor Graesler, recognizing the futility of all his efforts, sank exhausted and distraught upon his knees beside the corpse.
​At first he was at a loss to find an explanation for the suicide. That this serious-minded spinster of mature years, with whom, as recently as their last luncheon, he had conversed on such a commonplace topic as their imminent departure, should suddenly have gone insane, seemed to him improbable. He found it much more natural to assume that Friederike had brooded upon suicide for a long time, perhaps for years, and that for some reason she had deemed just this peaceful hour of the afternoon suitable to the execution of her slowly ripened plan. That she might be hiding a gentle sadness beneath her uniformly quiet disposition had at times fleetingly crossed his mind, although his professional duties had made such extraordinary claims upon his time that he had never concerned himself greatly with the thought. Indeed, there grew upon him only gradually the consciousness that since her childhood he had scarcely ever seen his sister really cheerful.
Of her years of early womanhood he knew little, since, in his capacity as a ship's-doctor, he had passed that period in almost constant travel. When, some fifteen years before, he had retired from service in the Lloyd, his parents had just died in rapid succession; and it was shortly thereafter that she had left the town of her birth and the home of her childhood, and had joined him in order to attend him as his housekeeper in the various places of his sojourn. Though she was then considerably past the age of thirty, her figure had retained such youthful charm, her eyes such a dark and enigmatic glow, that she did not lack marked attentions; in fact, Emil sometimes had good reason to be apprehensive lest she might be carried off into a late marriage by some one of her admirers. When, with the years, the last prospect of this kind had vanished, she seemed to submit to her fate without complaint; and yet her brother now thought that he could remember many a mute look from her eyes, directed at him in silent reproach as though he, too, were somehow answerable for the haplessness of her existence. So, by and by, the consciousness of a wasted life had, perhaps, asserted itself, growing stronger as it was less outspoken, until she had finally preferred a swift end to the gnawing torment of such a confession. She had, to be sure, reduced her unsuspecting brother—and this at a period of life generally unfriendly to the formation of new habits—to the necessity of concerning himself with affairs of domestic economy—a necessity which Friederike's ministrations had up to ​this time spared him. And though he mourned his sister none the less, there crept into his heart, during the last days of the steamer-trip, a somehow soothing and consolatory feeling of estrangement from the departed who, without so much as a farewell, had left him, wholly unprepared, alone in the world.
II
After a short stay in Berlin, where he brought himself to the attention of a number of clinical professors who were in a position to favour him during the approaching season at the health-resorts, Doctor Graesler arrived on a beautiful May day in the little watering-place, surrounded by woods and hills, in which he had for the past six years been practising his profession during the summer months. He was greeted with cordial sympathy by his landlady, the elderly widow of a merchant, and was pleased at the modest wild-flowers with which she had decorated the dwelling in honour of his arrival. Not without trepidation did he set foot in the little room which his sister had occupied the previous year, but he found himself not so deeply affected as he had really feared. For the rest, life made itself tolerable from the very first. The sky was uniformly clear and soft; the air had the mildness of Spring. And sometimes, for instance when he was at the neatly set breakfast-table on his little balcony and saw there, glistening in the sun, the white, blue-flowered pot—from which, to be sure, he now had to pour his own coffee—there came over him a feeling of contentment such as, at least in latter years, he had not enjoyed in the company of his sister. His other meals he took in an imposing hotel, the best in the town, in the company of several estimable citizens whom he had known before and with whom he could chat without reserve, at times even very entertainingly. His practice, moreover, got under way quite promisingly, and this without unduly burdening his sense of professional responsibility with cases of especial seriousness.
And so the early summer had passed without noteworthy event, when on an evening in July after a rather busy day a messenger, who withdrew as quickly as he had appeared, brought Doctor Graesler a call to The Range, which lay a good hour's drive from the town. The doctor rejoiced little in this turn of affairs; indeed, ​he had no sort of predilection for resident patients because their treatment usually brought him neither much glory nor much gain. But as he rode up the valley in the mild evening air, smoking a good cigar, and along a lovely road dotted on either side with pretty country-houses, then on between yellow fields lying in the cool shadow of the hills, and finally through a grove of tall box-wood trees, he began to feel more contented; and when at last he caught sight of The Range, whose charming location he recollected well from many of his walks in bygone years, he almost regretted that the trip was so soon over. He bade the driver stop at the edge of the road, and took the narrow meadow-path winding up through the young pines towards the house, which seemed to give him friendly greeting with its blinking little windows, its huge pair of antlers hung above the narrow front door, and the glow of the evening sun on its reddish roof. Down the wooded steps leading to the comparatively spacious side-terrace there advanced to meet the doctor a young lady whose appearance seemed to him familiar from the very first glance. She shook hands with him, and then reported that her mother had been taken ill with indigestion.
"She has been sleeping quietly now for an hour," she went on. "The fever has evidently gone down. At four o'clock it was still up to a hundred and one and a tenth. And as she has been feeling miserable since yesterday evening, I took the liberty of asking you to come here, Doctor. I hope it will turn out to be nothing serious." At the same time she cast at him a look of demure entreaty, as though the further development of the case depended entirely on his decision.
He returned her gaze with becoming, but gentle, gravity. To be sure, he knew her. He had encountered her several times in town, but had always taken her for a summer guest.
"Well, if your mother is now sleeping quietly," he said, "it can hardly be anything serious. Perhaps you might give me some of the details, Fräulein, before the patient proves, after all, to have been awakened unnecessarily."
She invited him to walk up with her, went on ahead to the veranda, and offered him a chair while she remained leaning against the jamb of an open door leading into the interior of the house. In a strictly objective fashion she gave him an account of the course of the illness, and there soon remained no doubt in Doctor Graesler's mind that here there was no question of anything more than a ​passing upset of the stomach. He felt himself, nevertheless, obliged to put all manner of medical questions to the young lady, and was surprised by the extraordinarily unembarrassed way in which she recounted and elucidated certain processes of nature with an ingenuousness he was quite unaccustomed to in young ladies; and while he listened, he asked himself casually whether she would have expressed herself with as little hesitation in the presence of a younger physician. He would have taken her to be hardly less than twenty-five, had it not been for the calmness of the look in her large eyes, which somehow gave her an expression of greater maturity. In the braids of her blond hair, which she did up well towards the top of her head, she wore a plain silver comb. She was dressed simply, but in a thoroughly provincial style; her white girdle was fastened with a decorative gilt buckle. What impressed the doctor most, nay, even seemed to him somehow suspicious, were the very elegant light-brown buckskin half-shoes, which in colour exactly matched her stockings.
But she had not yet completed her report, nor the doctor his observations, when from the interior of the house someone called "Sabine." The doctor rose and the young woman showed the way through the ample, already half-dark dining-room and into the lighter apartment adjoining; here he saw the ailing parent, in a white bed-jacket and a white cap, sitting upright in one of the two beds. As he entered, she greeted him with a somewhat astonished, but rather alert and almost merry look.
"Doctor Graesler," Sabine introduced him, and then walked quickly to the head of the bed and felt tenderly of her mother's forehead. The latter, who appeared well-nourished, pleasant, and far from old, shook her head disapprovingly.
"I'm very happy to make your acquaintance, Doctor," she said, "but why, my dear child—"
"It really seems to me," remarked the doctor as he took the hand his patient held out to him and at the same time felt her pulse, "that I am by way of being rather superfluous here, the more so as your daughter"—and here he smiled politely—"would appear to have at her command a simply amazing knowledge of medicine. But as long as I have come all this way, you know—"
And while the lady seemed with a shrug of her shoulders to be resigning herself to her fate, he undertook a more detailed examination, followed attentively by Sabine's calm eyes. When he had ​finished he was in a position to set at rest, so far as this was at all necessary, the minds of both the patient and her daughter. Certain difficulties were encountered, however, when Doctor Graesler wanted to put the former on a strict diet for the next few days, for against this she protested most vehemently. She maintained that in former years she had speedily cured just such attacks as these—which she designated as of nervous origin—by partaking of pork and sauerkraut, and of a particular kind of fried sausage which was unhappily not to be procured here; and only for this once had she permitted herself to be enjoined by Sabine from doing full justice to a hearty meal that very noon—an act of renunciation which, she averred, had very likely brought about the fever. The doctor, who had at first taken these remarks for jests, perceived during the further course of the conversation that, in contrast to her daughter, the lady held thoroughly unprofessional, not to say heretical, views on the science of medicine, and this the more so as, later on, she would not cease making contemptuous remarks about the efficacy of the mineral springs in the near-by watering-place. Thus she affirmed that, for purposes of export, the bottles were filled with ordinary spring-water to which were added salt, pepper, and probably also still other even more doubtfully salubrious spices; so that Doctor Graesler, who had always felt that he had an interest in the reputation of any spa in which he happened at any particular time to be practising and that he was in part responsible for its curative successes and failures, could not entirely repress some sign of having been offended. Yet he did not seriously contradict the mother, but rather contented himself with exchanging a smile of understanding with her daughter—a gesture with which he believed he had sufficiently, and with dignity, secured his position in the matter.
Later, as he walked forth into the open accompanied by Sabine, he again emphasized the complete innocuousness of the case—a conclusion with which Sabine declared herself in perfect agreement. And yet, she added, one had, in the case of persons of advanced age, to give some heed to attacks which in younger people were quite without significance; and it was for this reason, she declared, and more especially in view of the absence of her father, that she had felt in duty bound to send for a doctor.
"Your father is, I presume, on a tour of inspection?" the doctor suggested.
"How do you mean, Doctor?"
​"On a tour of inspection of the preserves?"
Sabine smiled. "My father is not a ranger. It is a long time since this has really been 'The Range.' It is only called that because, up to six or seven years ago, the ranger of the county lived here. But just as, hereabouts, they still call the house The Range, so in town they always call my father The Ranger, although he has never in his whole life been anything remotely resembling that."
"You are the only child?" asked Doctor Graesler while, as though it were a matter of course, she accompanied him through the young pines, on the narrow path to the highway.
"No," she replied, "I have a brother. He is much younger than I, though—only fifteen. When he is home on his vacation, of course he beats about in the woods all day long. Occasionally he even sleeps out in the open." And as Doctor Graesler shook his head somewhat critically, she added, "Oh, that's nothing; I used to do that myself, sometimes. Not very often, to be sure."
"But only just near the house," said the doctor, slightly worried, "and"—he added hesitantly—"only as a little girl?"
"Oh, no, I was already seventeen when we moved here. Before that, you see, we did not live in this vicinity, but in the city of—in different cities."
As she expressed herself with so much reserve, the doctor thought it proper not to inquire further. They stood at the edge of the road. The driver was ready to start off. Sabine held out her hand to the doctor. Something prompted him to add another word.
"If I am not mistaken, we have already run across one another several times in town."
"Certainly, Doctor. I have known you quite a while. Of course it is sometimes weeks before I get in. Last year, by the way, I had the pleasure of meeting your sister, but only quite casually, at Schmidts—the merchant, you know. She is here with you again?"
The doctor only stared at the ground. His eyes chanced to fall on Sabine's shoes, and he gazed past them.
"My sister did not come with me," he said. "She died three months ago in Lanzarote." He felt an ache about his heart; yet that he had had occasion to utter the name of the distant island brought him some little indemnity for his pain.
Sabine said "Oh," and nothing more. And so they stood in silence for a while, until Doctor Graesler constrained his features to a somewhat formal smile and held out his hand to Sabine.
​"Good night, Doctor," she said gravely.
"Good night, Fräulein," he replied, and climbed into the carriage.
Sabine stood there for a moment until the carriage had got under way; then she turned to go. Doctor Graesler looked back after her. Head slightly bowed and without turning around, she walked up through the pines and towards the house from which a beam of light shimmered along the path. A bend in the road, and the picture had vanished. The doctor leaned back and gazed up at the sky, which hung above him in the cool dusk, sparsely studded with stars.
He thought of distant times, of younger, happier days, when many a pretty creature had been bound to him by love. First there came to him the widow of the engineer from Rio de Janeiro; in Lisbon she had left the steamer on which he was, in his capacity as ship's-doctor, her fellow-traveller—had left it, ostensibly in order to make some purchases in the city, and, in spite of the fact that her ticket was good to Hamburg, had not returned on board. He saw her still before him, dressed in black—saw her as she nodded to him pleasantly from the carriage which was conveying her up to the city from the harbour—saw her as, at a street-corner, she vanished from his sight for ever. He further called to mind the lawyer's daughter from Nancy, to whom he had become engaged in St Blasien, the first watering-place in which he had ever practised, and who had then to make a sudden trip to France with her parents because of an important law-suit and had left him to that very day without advice of her safe arrival at home, without word of any kind. His mind also went back to Fräulein Lizzie and his student days in Berlin; she had gone so far as to shoot herself, somewhat, on his account, and he remembered how she had reluctantly shown him the smoke-blackened wound under her left breast, and how he had nevertheless been quite unmoved by this and had, indeed, been sensible rather of a certain vexation and of a feeling of ennui. Nice, domestic little Henriette he recalled, too; for many years, whenever he had returned to Hamburg from his ocean trips, he had found her in her tiny dwelling overlooking the Alster—found her as cheerful, as unruffled, as available, as when he had last left her, and this without his ever learning, or at all seriously bothering himself about, what in the interval she had been doing or feeling. Divers other affairs crossed his mind as well, among them several ​which had not been so very pretty, and some which, in a different way, had been even downright dangerous and of which he could not rightly conceive to that very day how he had come to let himself in for them. It seemed to him sad, however, that youth had passed, and that with it he had forfeited the right still to expect something beautiful from life.
The carriage travelled on through the fields; the hills rose darkly around him and seemed higher than by day; from the little villas lights glimmered across to him; against the railing of a balcony a man and a woman were leaning silently, pressed closer to one another than they would, very likely, have dared to be in daylight. From a veranda on which a small company sat at their evening meal, came the sound of loud speech and laughter. Doctor Graesler began to be aware of his appetite; he found no small joy in the prospect of the supper which he made it a habit to take at the Silver Lion, and urged the leisurely driver on to greater speed. At the table reserved for the regular guests he found his acquaintances already gathered. He drank one more glass of wine than usual, because, as he knew from past experience, life had a way of appearing to him, through the consequent, almost imperceptible numbing of his faculties, as somehow sweeter and more bearable. At first he had intended telling about his day's visit at The Range, but, for some reason which was not entirely clear to him, he let it be. The wine failed of its effect, however, on this occasion, and Doctor Graesler arose from the table even more melancholy than he had sat down, and took himself off, with a slight headache, to his home.
III
During the next few days, in the vague expectation of meeting Sabine, Doctor Graesler took more frequently than usual the opportunity of wandering up and down the main street of the little town. Once during his office-hours, when the waiting-room happened by chance to be empty, he rushed down the steps as though seized by a sudden presentiment, and vainly took a hurried walk down as far as the pump-room and back again. That evening among his friends at the inn he mentioned, as though incidentally, that he had recently been called to The Range, and then listened tensely, even a trifle combatively, to hear whether someone would perhaps let fall a light word about Fräulein Sabine, such as is sometimes uttered, even ​without the slightest justification, by any one of a company of men in high spirits. But the feeble echo of his remark disclosed to the doctor that the Schleheim family aroused no interest whatsoever; and only quite cursorily did conversation touch upon some of the so-called ranger's relatives, with whom the daughter,—evidently no one in the gathering considered her remarkably pretty,—was supposed now and then to have spent the winter months.
Late one afternoon, shortly thereafter, Doctor Graesler determined upon a walk which took him gradually into the vicinity of The Range. From the road he saw it lying silent in the shadow of the woods, and even perceived on the veranda the form of a man whose features he could not at that distance distinguish. He stopped for a moment, violently tempted to walk up towards the house straight-way and inquire after Frau Schleheim's health, as though he had only just accidentally been passing by there; but he quickly reflected that such a move was hardly compatible with his professional dignity and might possibly be misconstrued. From this walk he came home more fatigued and out of temper than he would have thought possible after such a trivial disappointment; and when he did not meet Sabine in the spa even during the next few days, he began to hope that she was out of town or that she had perhaps even disappeared from there for good and all—a consummation which appeared to him, in the interest of his own equanimity, really desirable.
As he sat one morning on his sunny balcony taking his breakfast, which he had long ceased to enjoy as he had the first few days, he was informed that a young man wished to see him. Directly there appeared on the balcony, clad in knickerbockers, a tall, handsome youth whose carriage and cast of countenance so unmistakably resembled those of Sabine that the doctor could not refrain from greeting him as an acquaintance.
"Young Herr Schleheim?" he said in a tone which carried more of conviction than of inquiry.
"Yes, that's me," the young fellow replied.
"I recognized you immediately from your resemblance to your—eh—mother. Won't you sit down, young man? I am still at my breakfast, as you see. What's the trouble? Your mother ill again?" He felt somehow as though he were talking to Sabine.
Young Schleheim remained standing, holding his cap politely in one hand. "Mother's all right, Doctor. Ever since you appealed ​to her conscience in the matter, she has become somewhat more careful."
The doctor smiled. It was immediately clear to him that, for the purpose of making a stronger impression, Sabine had ascribed to him, as the physician, an expression of her own apprehensions.
Suddenly it occurred to him that it might this time be Sabine herself who was sick, and he perceived from the unexpected quickening of his pulse how dearly he had the welfare of the young lady at heart. But before he could inquire further, the boy said:
"This time it's my father."
Doctor Graesler drew a sigh of relief. "What is the matter with him? Nothing serious, I hope."
"Ah, if one only knew, Doctor. He has changed so, lately. Perhaps it isn’t a case of sickness at all. You see, he's already fifty-two years old.”
The doctor knit his brows involuntarily. He asked somewhat coolly: "Well, what symptoms give you occasion for anxiety?"
"Latterly, Doctor, father has had attacks of vertigo, and yesterday evening, when he wanted to get up from his chair, he nearly fell over and only steadied himself with great difficulty by holding on to the edge of the table. And then, when he takes hold of his glass in order to drink—this we've been noticing for some time—his hands tremble."
"Hm." The doctor looked up from his coffee-cup. "I suppose your father takes hold of his glass quite often, eh? And I presume there isn't always water in the glass either, is there?"
The boy dropped his eyes. "Well, of course, Sabine thought that might have something to do with it. And then, besides, father smokes all day."
"Well, now, my dear young man, these don't necessarily seem to be symptoms of old age. However—your father wishes me to call?" he added courteously.
"Unfortunately that isn't so simple, Doctor. Father mustn't on any account know that you are coming because of him. You see, he never wanted to have anything to do with doctors. And Sabine was wondering whether we couldn't manage to make your visit appear accidental."
"Accidental?"
"Well, for instance, if some time soon you were to pass by The Range again, just as you did the other afternoon, why then Sabine ​would nod to you or hail you from the veranda, and you would come up—and—and then we'd have to see what came after that."
The doctor felt himself blushing to the roots of his hair. He stirred his spoon around in the empty cup and said:
"Of course it is not very often that I have time to take a walk. The other day, to be sure, I—why, yes, come to think of it, I did pass rather near The Range." At last he gathered courage to look up, and saw to his relief that the boy was gazing at him quite innocently. He continued in a businesslike tone:
"If it can't be done in any other way, why then I shall accept your— Of course, a talk on the veranda will not do very much good. Without a thorough examination, you understand, nothing can really be determined."
"That goes without saying, Doctor. We hope, you know, that father will even make up his mind to that, too, after a while. But if you'd only just see him once, first! You've got so much experience. Perhaps you could make it possible, Doctor, one of these days after your office-hours— Of course, we’d like it best if you could even do it to-day—"
"To-day," Graesler repeated to himself. "This very day I could see her again! How wonderful!" But he kept silence, turned the pages of his notebook, shook his head dubiously, seemed to be encountering insurmountable difficulties—until at last he picked up a pencil of a sudden, resolutely ran a line through something that was not there at all, and, as that word happened to be the first to occur to him, wrote down on the next page, "Sabine." He announced his decision pleasantly, but a little coolly.
"Very well, then. Let us say, this evening between half past five and six. Is that all right?"
"Oh, Doctor—"
Graesler rose, checked the boy's outburst of thanks, asked to be remembered kindly to his mother and sister, and at parting shook hands with him. Then he left the balcony and entered his room, and watched at the window as young Schleheim came out of the vestibule with his bicycle, pulled his cap well down on his head, swung himself nimbly and skilfully on, and had soon vanished around the next corner. "If I were only ten years younger," the doctor thought to himself, "I might be justified in imagining that the whole thing is nothing but a pretext of Fräulein Sabine's to arrange to see me again." And he sighed softly.
​Dressed in a light grey suit, which, however, preserved in the black band on its left sleeve some sign of his being in mourning, he drove off shortly after five o'clock. It had been his intention to let the carriage drop him near the range; but soon after he had left the villa district and long before he reached his destination, he was agreeably surprised to see Sabine and her brother coming to meet him on the narrow meadow-path that wound along beside the highway on which he was slowly driving up the valley. He jumped out of the carriage and shook hands first with Sabine and then with the boy.
"We have to beg you to forgive us," Sabine began somewhat agitatedly. "You see, we didn't succeed in keeping father at home, and I'm afraid he will hardly be back until late in the evening. Please don't be angry with me, Doctor."
The doctor would have liked to appear annoyed, and even tried; but he did not succeed and so said lightly, "Oh, that's all right." He glanced at his watch with a frown, as though it were now necessary to arrange the rest of his day anew. Then he looked up and had to smile at Sabine and her brother, who stood at the edge of the road much like two school children waiting to be punished. Sabine wore a white dress; a broad-brimmed straw hat hung down from her left arm on a loose yellow ribbon, and she looked much younger than the other time.
"And on such a hot afternoon," said the doctor almost reproachfully, "you came all this way on foot to meet me! That was really not at all necessary."
"First of all, Doctor," she rejoined, in some confusion, "in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I want to state expressly that this unsuccessful visit must, of course, be considered as professional—"
The doctor hastily interrupted her. "Now, please, Fräulein. Even if our plot had succeeded to-day, there could not possibly be any question of a professional visit. What is more, I beg you to consider me, for the present, as an accomplice in your designs."
"If you take the matter in that way, Doctor," Sabine responded, "you make it simply impossible for me—"
Doctor Graesler interrupted again. "It had been my intention to take a drive to-day, anyhow. And perhaps, as things have turned out this way, you will allow me to place the carriage at your disposal for the ride home, won't you? And if you are willing to take me along, I might perhaps take this opportunity of inquiring after ​the health of your mother." He felt himself a man of the world, and hastily resolved to try a larger watering-place in which to practise his profession the following summer, although he had theretofore never had good luck in such places.
"Mother is doing splendidly," said Sabine. "But if you already count the evening lost, Doctor, what do you think, Karl—" and she turned to her brother—"of showing the Doctor our woods?"
"Your woods?"
"That's what we call them," said Karl. "They do really belong to us alone. None of the patients at the resort ever get out this far, you know. There are lots of beautiful walks—some just like in a virgin forest."
"Well, of course, we'll have to have a look at one of those. I accept with pleasure."
The carriage was ordered to proceed to The Range in any case, and under conduct of brother and sister Doctor Graesler started off along a lane so narrow that they had to walk single file, at first through corn-stalks as high as a man’s head, then across meadowland, and finally into the woods.
The doctor mentioned that he had been coming here every summer for six years and yet had no real acquaintance with the region. But then, that was his fate. Even when he was a ship's-doctor he had seen only the coast, or, at best, the harbour-towns and their immediate environs; for his duties had nearly always prevented him from roaming farther inland. As Karl made known, through repeated questions, his interest in sea-voyages and distant lands, the doctor named at random several maritime cities to or through which his profession had years before led him; and the thought that he might thus be accounted a much-travelled man lent to his speech a liveliness and a good humour that were otherwise not always at his command. Through a clearing they caught a delightful view of the little town, and saw the glass roof of the pump-room glistening in the evening sun. They decided to rest a while. Karl stretched out at full length in the grass. Sabine sat down on a barked and chopped-off tree. But Doctor Graesler, who did not want to expose his light grey suit to any kind of peril, remained standing and continued to tell of his travels; his voice, usually somewhat husky despite frequent clearings of the throat, seemed to him to have a new, or at least unfamiliar, soft ring, and he found himself listened to with an attention such as he had not for a long time enjoyed. He ​finally offered to accompany brother and sister home, so that their father, should he be already returned, would without more ado credit the story of an accidental meeting; in this manner, also, their acquaintance would naturally occur. Sabine nodded shortly, in a way which was peculiar to her and which appeared to the doctor to imply a more definite approval than words could have conveyed. They went along the gently sloping and constantly widening woodpath and it was principally Karl who now led the conversation, developing plans of travel and of discovery; in his childish spirit of adventure there showed unmistakably the effects of juvenile books which he had recently read. Sooner than the doctor expected they had reached the garden hedge, and through the tall pines saw the back of the house, with its six narrow uniform windows shimmering in the waning light. On the trampled lawn between the house and the hedge stood a long, rough-timbered table with a bench and chairs. As Karl had run ahead to reconnoitre, the doctor stood for a moment under the pines with Sabine. They looked at one another and the doctor smiled, a little embarrassed; but Sabine remained grave, and, after turning his gaze slowly about in all directions, the doctor remarked, "How peaceful it is here!" and cleared his throat softly. Karl appeared at an open window and beckoned vigorously. The doctor summoned professional gravity to his countenance and followed Sabine through the garden and on to the veranda, where the ranger and his wife were just listening to their son's report of the story of the afternoon's meeting. Graesler, still confused by the erroneous designation of the man as a ranger, had expected to see before him a rough, long-bearded man with a pipe in his mouth, and perhaps dressed in hunting costume, and was astonished to find him a slender, smooth-shaven gentleman with carefully combed hair only just turning from black to grey, who greeted him pleasantly, but with an air of distinction that affected him as somehow theatrical. Doctor Graesler began by extolling the beauty of the woods, with all whose glories Karl and Sabine had just been acquainting him; and while they carried on a conversation about the slowness with which, despite its charming surroundings, the watering-place nearby showed signs of growth, Doctor Graesler by no means neglected to set about his professional observations of the head of the house. He could at first discover nothing striking about him except a certain restlessness of eye as well as a recurring, half-contemptuous twitching of the corners of his mouth. When ​Sabine announced dinner, Doctor Graesler wanted to take his leave; but the ranger, with an exaggerated show of courtesy, refused to allow this, and so the doctor was soon sitting with the parents and the children at the family board, over which a green-shaded lamp hung from the panelled ceiling. He mentioned the imminent gathering of the Saturday Club at the casino, and, turning to Sabine, asked her whether she sometimes took part in affairs of that sort.
"Not in the last few years," she replied. "Before, when I was younger—"
And in response to the doctor's deprecatory smile she added immediately and, as it seemed to him, not insignificantly, "You know, I'm already twenty-seven."
Her father interposed a sarcastic remark about the petty pursuits of the little watering-place and began to speak animatedly of the magic of large cities and the stir of cosmopolitan life, and one gathered, as he continued, that he had been an opera-singer and had not relinquished that career until long after his marriage. While he was mentioning the names of many artists with whom he had appeared, of patrons who had esteemed him highly, and finally of doctors to whose faulty methods of treatment he, claimed to owe the premature loss of his baritone voice, he emptied one glass after another until he suddenly seemed quite exhausted and looked, all at once, like an old and worn-out man. The doctor now thought it about time to take his leave. Karl and Sabine escorted him to his carriage, and inquired anxiously as to the impression he had got of their father's condition. Although Doctor Graesler already felt competent to pronounce any serious illness out of the question, he expressed the intention of finding an opportunity for further observation and, even better, for a regular examination—without which, as a conscientious physician, he could make no definitive statement in the case.
"Doesn't it seem to you," Karl said to his sister, "that father was more talkative this evening than he has been for a long time?"
"Yes, I guess that's true," she replied in confirmation. And then, turning towards Doctor Graesler with a look of gratitude, she added, "He took to you immediately; one could see that very clearly."
The doctor made a gesture of modest deprecation, promised upon their entreaty that he would repeat his visit in the near future, and ​climbed into the carriage. Brother and sister both remained standing at the edge of the road, gazing after him. In the cool dusk, beneath a starry sky, the doctor rode homeward. Sabine's confidence in him filled him with contentment, all the sweeter as he allowed himself to think that her confidence was due not to his professional abilities alone. He knew very well that, particularly in recent years, he had become more tired and indifferent—had, indeed, often been positively deficient in the merest human sympathy with his patients and their ills. And for the first time in many a day there dawned upon him again the nobleness of a profession which he had chosen with enthusiasm in the years of his youth, but of which it was certain that he had not at all times, and in a like manner, proved himself truly worthy.
IV
The next day when Doctor Graesler opened the door to his waiting-room, he saw to his amazement, sitting among the other patients, Herr Schleheim; who, being the first arrival, immediately followed the doctor into his consultation-room. First of all, the singer demanded that his family never be informed of his visit, and on having exacted this promise he was prepared at once to recite his complaints and to submit to an examination. Doctor Graesler was unable to discover any serious physical ailment, but there was unmistakably present a deep spiritual depression, not surprising in a man who, while still in the prime of life, had been forced to abandon an outwardly brilliant profession for which he was incapable of finding sufficient compensation either in domestic concerns and love of family or in any inner wealth. It visibly benefited him to be able, for once, thoroughly to unbosom himself to someone. And so he took it very kindly of the doctor when the latter explained that he could really not at all consider him as a patient, and with humorous adroitness besought him for permission to drop in at The Range on his occasional strolls, to chat with him there.
When, on the following Sunday morning, he was making use of this permission, he at first came upon the singer alone and was immediately informed by him that he had after all thought it wiser to apprise the "family"—as he always, thus collectively, referred to them—of the examination which had taken place and of its ​favourable issue, if only so as not to have to see any longer their worried countenances, which were offensive to him, and to hear their tedious gossip, which had been driving him to despair. When, thereupon, the doctor was disposed to laud the solicitude of the children, exaggerated, to be sure, but nevertheless really touching, the father concurred in a measure and explained that he found nothing at all to criticize in them other than just that they were such good and exemplary persons.
"That," he added, "is why neither of them will get much out of life; very likely they will not even get to know it." And in his eyes there shimmered a pale light of reminiscence of remote and iniquitous adventure.
They had sat only a short while on the bench before the front door when the remaining members of the Schleheim family approached, all dressed somewhat in Sunday-go-to-meeting fashion and looking for this very reason more countrified than usual. Sabine, who seemed to be aware of this, directly took off her beribboned hat and then, as though relieved, ran a hand over her simple coiffure. The doctor was persuaded to stay for dinner; conversation during the meal kept strictly to the surface of things, and when the talk chanced to turn to the fact that the director of a sanitarium in the neighbourhood of the spa entertained some thought of retiring, the mother incidentally asked her guest whether he was not tempted by such a position, in which he might, as she said, very possibly be offered the opportunity of turning his famous hunger-cures to systematic account. After Graesler had smilingly parried the jest he remarked that he had never been able, theretofore, to reconcile himself to the idea of a position of that sort.
"I cannot forego the consciousness of my own freedom," he said. "And even though I have already practised down there in town for half a dozen seasons in succession and in all probability shall continue to return in coming years, yet constraint of any kind would be sure to disturb considerably my delight in this neighbourhood, nay, even in my profession."
Sabine seemed anxious to express through a barely noticeable nod her appreciation of this attitude. She showed herself, moreover, well instructed in the conditions at the sanitarium and declared them far more tolerable than they had been in a previous period under another director, an old man grown indolent. She also ex​pressed the opinion that being active in a sanitarium was much to be desired by every doctor, if only because nowhere else were there offered conditions favourable to a really lasting relation between doctor and patients and, in addition, the opportunity of applying reliable, because constantly controllable, curative methods.
"To be sure, there is a great deal in that," said Doctor Graesler, in a tone of such reserve as he thought proper in an expert among laymen. Nor did this escape Sabine, who remarked quickly, with a slight blush:
"I happen to have engaged in nursing for a while myself, in Berlin."
"You don't mean it!" the doctor cried, and did not at first know what attitude he ought to take towards this disclosure. He therefore remarked somewhat indefinitely:
"A splendid, a noble profession. But dismal and difficult. And I can readily understand that you were soon drawn home again to the fresh air and the woods."
Sabine did not reply, and the others kept silence also; but Doctor Graesler suspected that conversation had just passed hard by the spot where, perhaps, the modest riddle of Sabine's existence lay hidden.
After dinner Karl insisted on his traditional right to a game of dominoes in the garden. The doctor was invited to join in; and soon—while the mother, reclining in a comfortable chair beneath the pines, gradually fell off into slumber over the needle-work which she had brought with her—the game was rattling cheerfully along. Doctor Graesler recalled certain gloomy hours spent with his dejected sister on Sunday afternoons in other years. He seemed to himself to have escaped miraculously from a melancholy and oppressive period of his life; and when Sabine, becoming aware of his abstraction, reminded him with a smiling glance or even with a light touch upon his arm to make another move, these little intimacies encouraged him to a mild and indefinable hope.
The dominoes were cleared away and a flower-embroidered cloth spread on the table; and as no carriage could that day be procured, the doctor had only time to drink a hasty cup of coffee with the others if he was to visit his patients (who could, of course, not dispense with him on Sundays) before late that evening. He took with him the memory of Sabine's smile and of a squeeze of her ​hand; and the afterglow of so much happiness would have left him indifferent to the tediousness and toil of tramping along an even dustier highway than that on which he took his way home.
Nevertheless he thought it proper to let some time pass before again making his appearance at The Range. It was easier for him than he had expected, as his profession began, even inwardly, to occupy him again. He not only treated his patients with the most scrupulous care, but also took pains to fill in as far as possible, by the study of medical works and periodicals, the gaps which had gradually developed in his theoretical knowledge. But even if he was fully conscious that all this was to be traced to the effect upon him of Sabine's personality, he continued, notwithstanding, to defend himself against the rise of any serious hope of possessing the young girl. And even when he let his thoughts play gently over the possibility of a wooing and sought to picture in imagination the outcome of marriage to Sabine, there appeared to him unsummoned the figure—highly disagreeable in this connexion—of the hotel-director in Lanzarote, smiling impertinently as he received the elderly doctor and his young bride at the door of the hotel; and this apparition presented itself to him as regularly as though Lanzarote were the only place in which Graesler could practise his profession during the winter, and the director the only living being who could compromise his budding matrimonial fortunes.
One morning towards the end of the week Graesler met Sabine in town, where she had been attending to some purchases. She asked him why he had not come to see them for such a long time.
"So few people come to visit us," she said, "and it is only to a few of them that you can talk sensibly. Next time you must tell us some more about your life. One likes to get a chance to hear about all that sort of thing." Her eyes shone with a gentle longing.
"If you believe, Fräulein Sabine, that life out there in the world has so many more interesting things to offer, how does it happen that you stay here so quietly?"
"Perhaps it will not always be like this," she replied simply. "And there was once a time when things were a little different. Besides, for the present I can hardly wish for anything better than I have." And the light of longing died out in her eyes.
To be continued
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