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Updated: June 4, 2025
Although Krayne had asked Rösie to buy a first-class compartment on the railroad trip over and back, they went in a third-class car. Präger declared that it was good enough for him, and he didn't wish to spoil his troupe! His wife now held the purse-strings, as Rösie was too engrossed with her art and Hugh too absorbed in his love to notice such mere sublunary matters.
He walked so rapidly at this idea that other victims of rotundity stopped to look at his tall figure and nodded approval. Ach! Marienbad was wonderful! After he had found a seat at the Alm next to the low wall, across which he could see a vast stretch of undulating country, lighted by a moon that seemed to swing like a silver hoop in the sky, Krayne ordered Pilsner.
Krayne and Röselein walked behind the others, and soon the darkness and the narrowness of the road forced him to tread after the girl. The moon's rays at intervals pierced the foliage, making lacelike patches of light in the gloom.
There was a family consultation, and despite the surly opposition of the dancer, Hugh Krayne was welcomed as a member of the Präger Bavarian Sextette company. Forgetting the future he had arranged for Rösie, he began his vocal lessons immediately. In July he sang for the first time in public at Eger. He was extremely frightened, but as it was only a duo he managed fairly well.
The dancer, a young man with a heavy shock of hair growing low on his forehead, under which twinkled beady black eyes, had been sent to tell Fräulein Röselein that her colleagues were waiting for her. With a courtesy she went away. Krayne now thoroughly hated the dancer. It was long after eleven when the concert was over and the party started on its homeward trip.
Behind them marched several burly chaps, in all the bravery of the Austrian Tyrol the green alpine hat, with the feather at the back, the short gray jacket, the bare knees, and the homespun stockings. Krayne regarded curiously this strolling band of singers. Their faces seemed familiar to him, and he rapidly recalled souvenirs of Salzburg and an open-air concert.
"With such a teacher?" he had exclaimed, and his gesture was so impassioned that the promenaders, with their shining morning goblets of water, were arrested by the spectacle. Wonderful, wonderful Marienbad! was the general comment! But Krayne was past ridicule. He already saw Röselein his bride. He saw himself a yodler. The cure? Ay, there was the rub. He laid bare his heart.
That night Hugh Krayne dreamed he was a very skeleton for thinness not an unusual vision of fat men and also a Tyrolean yodler, displaying himself before a huge audience of gigantic human beings, who laughed so loudly that he could not open his lips to frame the familiar words of his song. In the despair of a frantic nightmare, his face streaming with anguished tears, he forced his voice:
The remorseless rain had washed anew the face of the dark blue sky that domed Marienbad and its curved chain of hills. Hugh Krayne threw open his window and, leaning out, exclaimed, as he eagerly inhaled the soft air of an early May morning: "At last! And high time!"
Then came a zither solo that abominable instrument of plucked wires, with its quiver of a love-sick clock about to run down; this parody of an æolian harp always annoyed Krayne, and he was glad when the man finished. A stout soprano in a velvet bodice, her arms bare and brawny, the arms of a lass accustomed to ploughing and digging potatoes, sang something about turtle doves. She was odious.
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