The Green Face by Gustav Meyrink Read Free Book Online Page A

as if death dwelt in those rooms.
    The comer house at the end of the alley seemed relatively
innocuous, a mixture of music-hall and restaurant, to go by the
posters on the walls.
    Hauberrisser went in; a room packed with people eating and
drinking at round tables with yellow tablecloths met his eye.
    At the back was a stage where a dozen or so artistes - singers
and comics - were sitting in a semicircle waiting until it was
time for their number.
    An old man with a spherical belly, a pair of false goggle-eyes,
a white handlebar moustache and his incredibly thin legs encased in green tights with webbed feet was sitting, casually waggling his toes, in apparently serious conversation with a French
chanteuse in the extravagant costume of the Directoire. The
audience, meanwhile, was listening in mute incomprehension
to a German monologue delivered by a character actor dressed
as a Polish Jew in caftan and high boots. Brandishing a small
glass syringe for rinsing out the ears such as can be bought at any
chemist’s, he declaimed his interminable poem, breaking into
a grotesque jig between each verse, to which he sang in a nasal
voice:

    Hauberrisser looked round for an empty seat; everywhere the
diners - they mostly seemed to be respectable locals - were
packed tight; only one table in the middle of the room stood out
by having a few empty chairs leant against it. Three corpulent
ladies of mature years and one old one with an austere look and
horn-rimmed spectacles perched on her aquiline nose were
sitting around a coffee-pot sporting a gaily-coloured woollen
cosy, busily knitting socks, an island of domestic calm amid all
the noise and bustle.
    With friendly nods the four ladies granted Haubenisser permission to sit at the table.
    His first thought had been that it must be a mother with her
widowed daughters, but a second glance told him that they could
hardly be related. Although they did not look alike, the three
younger ones were similar in that they were all of the Dutch type
- roughly forty-five years old, blonde, fat and of a bovine stolidity - whilst the white-haired matron clearly came from the
South.
    The waiter set his steak in front of him with a half-concealed
grin, and the people at the tables around were casting covert
glances at the table, grinning and exchanging quiet remarks:
what did it all mean? Hauberrisser was completely baffled; he
gave the four ladies a quick scrutiny -no, impossible, they were
very pillars of society. Their age alone almost guaranteed their
respectability.
    Up on the stage a scrawny, redbearded man with a starspangled top hat, tight, blue and white striped trousers, an
alarm-clock dangling from his green and yellow checked waistcoat and a strangled goose in his coat pocket, had just split open
the skull of the ancient frog-man to the ringing tones of `Yankee
doodle’, and now a rag-and-bone couple from Rotterdam were singing - “with piano accompaniment” - the melancholy song
of the vanished `Zandstraat’:

    As solemnly as if it were a hymn - tears glistened in the eyes
of the three fat Dutch ladies - the audience joined in:

    The programme was a mish-mash of acts, changing constantly like the brightly-coloured patterns in a kaleidoscope:
babyfaced English girls with curly locks and a terrifying innocence, Parisian gangsters with long red scarves, a Syrian
belly-dancer with wobbling intestines, four men imitating bells
and the melodic burping of a Bavarian yodelling song.
    This meaningless hodge-podge calmed Hauberrisser’s
nerves with an almost narcotic effect; it was not unlike the
strange magic emanating from children’s toys, which often
exercise a greater healing power over a heart wearied by life
than the most sublime work of art.
    Hauberrisser lost all track of time, and when the grand finale
came and the whole company marched off waving the flags of
all nations - presumably symbolising the return of peace - and led by a negro