Hanno’s Doll Read Online Free PDF Page A

and texture. So I became her friend. I began to love. I helped her. We were married—you understand there was no time to waste. I hoped to be father to the baby she was carrying, but when I found this was impossible … I helped her. To me, you see, it would have been a child, but to her … Well, the real father had injured her too desperately. To her, it was no baby in her, it was treachery, it was betrayal. If she held this baby in her arms, she could only be a little stone image of motherhood. When I saw this I gave her what she wanted. I helped her in that. I helped her in everything.” He took the photograph and gave it to the K.K.K. to look at while he talked.
    â€˜I called myself Pygmalion, you notice. I said I turned stone into flesh. Anni—Anni Leopold … Anni thought of it differently. She said I fancied myself a Svengali, a regular fat Svengali! You know the story? It is called Trilby . Trilby is a London drudge and Svengali, by magic, I suppose, takes this little drudge with a cockney voice like a crow and makes a glorious singer out of her. But she can only sing when he is there with the baton, conducting her.” He did a conductor and Mr. Starter looked up from Puppchen’s photograph to grin at him and then looked back at the picture. (Naturally, Hanno thought.)
    â€œAnni says that this notion was irresistible to me. And it was, of course. She was right in that. Only she thinks I should have resisted. Anni disapproves. It is wrong to make a Trilby who can only sing when Svengali raises the baton. She has a tongue, Anni! It is wrong that when I am there Puppchen can be gay with the college boys, she can flirt and play prom girl and giggle, but if I am not there, she turns to stone again. Mixed metaphor … mixed heroines … but you see what I mean.
    â€œDo you think you wipe out the effect of her history in less than two years? Of course you can’t! The poor little doll feels safe for the first time in her life only because I am holding her in the palm of my hand. She is just beginning to be sure that I am not like the others, that I will not open my hand and drop her the first time it suits my convenience. For a year and a half—no, a year and four months, because the first two months I was acting and busy … for a year and four months, then, I gave her what she needed. For that time, she was my production. I wrote the play, directed it, costumed it, lighted it, did the sets and arranged for the publicity and worked up the theatre parties. And then I got hold of another script, damn good script, too. There was no part for me … how can there be a really first-rate play with a part for someone who who looks like me? Falstaff excepted, of course. So I fall in love with the play. Puppchen too, at first. We are a ménage à trois , the play, Puppchen and myself. She is going to be my girl Friday, but this doesn’t work out. The poor child doesn’t have it in her.
    â€œI have it in me. I am in it. I am in it twenty-four hours out of twenty-four. Opening night becomes more important than the Day of Judgment. Opening night becomes the Day of Judgment. Prepare! Prepare! It is later than you think. Perhaps you do not know how theatre people can be, Mr. Starter?
    â€œHow she worried, my poor Puppchen! She knew, even if I had forgotten, that I am a fat fifty-seven. I forgot I was a man—a director only. And I wouldn’t listen to her warnings to be moderate. With an opening? I forgot my calories.… You know what you eat when you eat in Joe’s Delicatessen. When you do eat, that is, because there are days you don’t. So I collapsed. A charming sight for Puppchen. She was right there. Charming!” He made himself sawdust and collapsed.
    â€œOne minute I was dunking a drugstore doughnut into drugstore coffee … wolfing it … that being one of the days I had forgotten to eat … the next I was vomiting. I had broken a