Pretty creatures

"Pretty creatures" by William Alexander Gerhardie is a collection of short stories written in the early 20th century. The book offers satirical, bittersweet portraits of love, vanity, and social pretense across European and English settings. Its figures include the earnest American Mackintosh Beck circling a Salzburg beauty and her grandiose father, a Tyrolean seamstress measuring her drummer fiancé, and an English author whose moral debates spiral into calamity.

The opening of this collection first follows Mackintosh Beck in Salzburg as he is shepherded toward the beautiful Irmgard Schulz by the meddling Frau von Kranich, dazzled by Irmgard’s vain, self-mythologizing father, and humiliated at dances despite frantic waltz lessons; a forgotten vanity-bag exposes Irmgard’s real suitor, and Beck flees, only to be breathlessly seen off by the loquacious Herr Schulz at the station. It then shifts to Innsbruck, where a modiste doubts the spirit of her fiancé Otto, a timid big-drum player, until a Strauss potpourri swells into a march and his pounding beat suddenly crowns him, in her eyes, as leader and hero. Finally, it begins a darker English tale: the writer Proudfoot and the dentist Weaver spar over love, hate, and hanging on a Sunday outing; a heated gesture with a stick kills Weaver, and Proudfoot stumbles through shock, arrest, and the first, surreal movements of trial. (This is an automatically generated summary.)