"Crash!"
Among my numerous friends in Vienna, there is one
who is an author, and who has always amused me by
his childish idealism.
Not by his idealism from an abstract point of view,
for in spite of my Pessimism I am an absurd Idealist,
and because I am perfectly well aware of this, I as
a rule never laugh at people’s Idealism, but
his sort of Idealism was really too funny.
He was a serious man of great capabilities who only
just fell short of being learned, with a clear, critical
intellect; a man without any illusions about Society,
the State, Literature, or anything else, and especially
not about women; but yet he was the craziest Optimist
as soon as he got upon the subject of actresses, theatrical
princesses and heroines; he was one of those men,
who, like Hacklaender, cannot discover the Ideal of
Virtue anywhere, except in a ballet girl.
My friend was always in love with some actress or
other; of course only Platonically, and from preference
with some girl of rising talent, whose literary knight
he constituted himself, until the time came when her
admirers laid something much more substantial than
laurel wreaths at her feet; then he withdrew and sought
for fresh talent which would allow itself to be patronized
by him.
He was never without the photograph of his ideal in
his breast pocket, and when he was in a good temper
he used to show me one or other of them, whom I had
never seen, with a knowing smile, and once, when we
were sitting in a cafe in the Prater,
he took out a portrait without saying a word, and
laid it on the table before me.
It was the portrait of a beautiful woman, but what
struck me in it first of all was not the almost classic
cut of her features, but her white eyes.
“If she had not the black hair of a living woman,
I should take her for a statue,” I said.
“Certainly,” my friend replied; “for
a statue of Venus, perhaps for the Venus of Milo,
herself.”
“Who is she?”
“A young actress.”
“That is a matter of course in your case; what
I meant was, what is her name?”
My friend told me, and it was a name which is at present
one of the best known on the German stage, with which
a number of terrestrial adventures are connected,
as every Viennese knows, with which those of Venus
herself were only innocent toying, but which I then
heard for the first time.
My idealist described her as a woman of the highest
talent, which I believed, and as an angel of purity,
which I did not believe; on that particular occasion,
however, I at any rate did not believe the contrary.
A few days later, I was accidentally turning over
the leaves of the portrait album of another intimate
friend of mine, who was a thoroughly careless, somewhat
dissolute Viennese, and I came across that strange
female face with the dead eyes again.
