Five Women by Robert Musil Page B

was only reduced to proper proportions after he came on the scene.
    Tonka was not her real name. At her baptism she had been given the German name Antonie, and Tonka was the abbreviated form of the Czech diminutive Toninka. The inhabitants of those back streets talked a queer mixture of the two languages.
    But where do such thoughts lead? There it was, she had been standing by a hedge that time, in front of the dark open doorway of a cottage, the first in the village as one came out from town. She was wearing laced boots, red stockings, and a gaily-coloured, stiff, full skirt, and as she talked she seemed to be gazing at the moon, which hung pale over the corn stooks. She was at once pert and shy, and laughed a lot, as though she felt protected by the moon. And the wind blew across the stubble fields as if it were cooling a plate of soup. Riding home, he had said laughingly to his comrade-inarms, young Baron Mordansky: "You know, I shouldn't at all mind having an affair with a girl like that, only it's too dangerous for my liking. You'd have to promise to make up a threesome, to keep me from going sentimental." And Mordansky, who had done a spell as a trainee in his uncle's sugar-mill, had thereupon told him about how, when the time came round for digging the beets, hundreds of such peasant girls laboured in the fields belonging to the mill, and it was said they were as submissive as black slaves to the supervisors and their assistants. And once, he remembered quite distinctly, he had cut short a similar conversation with Mordansky because it was an affront to his feelings. Yet it had not been at that time, he knew—what was now trying to impose itself on him as a memory was really something else, the tangle of thorns that had later grown inside his head.
    In reality it was in the Ring that he had first seen her, in that main street with the stone arcades where the officers and the gentlemen who worked in the government offices stood chatting at corners, the students and young business men strolled up and down, and the girls wandered along in twos and threes, arm in arm, after the shops closed, or the more curious of them even during the lunch-hour. Sometimes a well-known local lawyer would make his way slowly through the crowd, lifting his hat to acquaintances, or a local deputy, or, say, a respected industrialist; and there were even ladies to be seen, on their way home after shopping. There her glance had suddenly crossed with his, a merry glance, lasting only for the briefest moment—like a ball accidently landing in a passer-by's face. The next instant she had looked away, with a feigned air of innocence. He had turned round quickly, supposing that now the usual giggling would follow, but Tonka was walking on, looking straight ahead of her, rather tensely. She was with two other girls, and taller than either of them. She was not beautiful, but her face had a clear-cut, definite quality. There was nothing in it of that petty, cunningly feminine look which seems to result from the face as a whole; in this face mouth, nose, and eyes were each something clearly in their own right and could stand up to being contemplated separately, delighting the beholder simply by their candour and the freshness irradiating the whole face. It was odd that so gay a glance should stick fast like a barbed arrow, and she herself seemed to have hurt herself with it.
    So much was now clear. Well, then, at that time she had been working in the draper's shop. It was a large shop, employing a great many girls to handle the stock. Her job was to look after the rolls of material and get the right one down when it was asked for, and the palms of her hands were always slightly moist because of the irritation from the fine hairs of the cloth. There was nothing dream-like about that, and her face was guileless. But then there were the draper's sons, and one of them had a moustache like a squirrel's, turned up at the ends, and always wore patent-leather