With absurd, solicitous gravity, the dancers performed their intricate evolutions, showing in their every movement a consciousness of the part they were playing. And the saxophonist, letting his instrument swing loose from the ribbon around his neck, advanced to the edge of the platform with his little megaphone:
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Sie werden lachen,
Ich lieb’
Meine eigene Frau… .
He sang with a knowing leer, including us all in the conspiracy, charging his voice with innuendo, rolling his eyes in an epileptic pantomime of extreme joy. Bobby, suave, sleek, five years younger, handled the bottle. And meanwhile the two flaccid gentlemen chatted to each other, probably about business, without a glance at the night-life they had called into being; while their women sat silent, looking neglected, puzzled, uncomfortable and very bored.
Frl. Hippi Bernstein, my first pupil, lives in the Grünewald, in a house built almost entirely of glass. Most of the richest Berlin families inhabit the Grünewald. It is difficult to understand why. Their villas, in all known styles of expensive ugliness, ranging from the eccentric-rococo folly to the cubist flat-roofed steel-and-glass box, are crowded together in this dank, dreary pinewood. Few of them can afford large gardens, for the ground is fabulously dear: their only view is of their neighbour’s backyard, each one protected by a wire fence and a savage dog. Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire’s slum.
When I rang the bell at the garden gate, a young footman came out with a key from the house, followed by a large growling Alsatian.
“He won’t bite you while I’m here,” the footman reassured me, grinning.
The hall of the Bernstein’s house has metal-studded doors and a steamer clock fastened to the wall with bolt-heads. There are modernist lamps, designed to look like pressure-gauges, thermometers and switchboard dials. But the furniture doesn’t match the house and its fittings. The place is like
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a power-station which the engineers have tried to make comfortable with chairs and tables from an old-fashioned, highly respectable boarding-house. On the austere metal walls, hang highly varnished nineteenth-century landscapes in massive gold frames. Herr Bernstein probably ordered the villa from a popular avant-garde architect in a moment of recklessness; was horrified at the result and tried to cover it up as much as possible with the family belongings.
Frl. Hippi is a fat pretty girl, about nineteen years old, with glossy chestnut hair, good teeth and big cow-eyes. She has a lazy, jolly, self-indulgent laugh and a well-formed bust. She speaks schoolgirl English with a slight American accent, quite nicely, to her own complete satisfaction. She has clearly no intention of doing any work. When I tried weakly to suggest a plan for our lessons, she kept interrupting to offer me chocolates, coffee, cigarettes: “Excuse me a minute, there isn’t some fruit,” she smiled, picking up the receiver of the house-telephone: “Anna, please bring some oranges.”
When the maid arrived with the oranges, I was forced, despite my protests, to make a regular meal, with a plate, knife and fork. This destroyed the last pretence of the teacher-pupil relationship. I felt like a policeman being given a meal in the kitchen by an attractive cook. Frl. Hippi sat watching me eat, with her good-natured, lazy smile:
“Tell me, please, why you come to Germany?”
She is inquisitive about me, but only like a cow idly poking with its head between the bars of a gate. She doesn’t particularly want the gate to open. I said that I found Germany very interesting:
“The political and economic situation,” I improvised authoritatively, in my schoolmaster voice, “is more interesting in Germany than in any other European country.”
“Except Russia, of course,” I added experimentally.
But Frl. Hippi didn’t react. She just blandly smiled:
“I think it shall be dull for you here? You do not have many friends in Berlin, no?”
“No. Not many.”
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This seemed to please and amuse her:
“You don’t know some nice girls?”
Here the buzzer of the house-telephone sounded. Lazily smiling, she picked up the receiver, but appeared not to listen to the tinny voice which issued from it. I could hear quite distinctly the real voice of Frau Bernstein, Hippi’s mother, speaking from the next room.
“Have you left your red book in here?” repeated Frl. Hippi mockingly and smiling at me as though this were a joke which I must share: “No, I don’t see it. It must be down in the study. Ring up Daddy. Yes, he’s working there.” In dumb show, she offered me another orange. I shook my head politely. We both smiled: “Mummy, what have we got for lunch to-day? Yes? Really? Splendid!”
She hung up the receiver and returned to her crossexamination:
“Do you not know no nice girls?”
“Any nice girls. …” I corrected evasively. But Frl. Hippi merely smiled, waiting for the answer to her question.
“Yes. One,” I had at length to add, thinking of Frl. Kost.
“Only one?” She raised her eyebrows in comic surprise. “And tell me please, do you find German girls different than English girls?”
I blushed. “Do you find German girls …” I began to correct her and stopped, realizing just in time that I wasn’t absolutely sure whether one says different from or different to.
“Do you find German girls different than English girls?” she repeated, with smiling persistence.
I blushed deeper than ever. “Yes. Very different,” I said boldly.
“How are they different?”
Mercifully the telephone buzzed again. This was somebody from the kitchen, to say that lunch would be an hour earlier than usual. Herr Bernstein was going to the city that afternoon.
“I am so sorry,” said Frl. Hippi, rising, “but for to-day we
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must finish. And we shall see us again on Friday? Then goodbye, Mr. Isherwood. And I thank you very much.”
She fished in her bag and handed me an envelope which I stuck awkwardly into my pocket and tore open only when I was out of sight of the Bernsteins’ house. It contained a five-mark piece. I threw it into the air, missed it, found it after five minutes’ hunt, buried in sand, and ran all the way to the tram-stop, singing and kicking stones about the road. I felt extraordinarily guilty and elated, as though I’d successfully committed a small theft.
It is a mere waste of time even pretending to teach Frl. Hippi anything. If she doesn’t know a word, she says it in German. If I correct her, she repeats it in German. I am glad, of course, that she’s so lazy and only afraid that Frau Bernstein may discover how little progress her daughter is making. But this is very unlikely. Most rich people, once they have decided to trust you at all, can be imposed upon to almost any extent. The only real problem for the private tutor is to get inside the front-door.