Part 16

From his balcony, Frank could see the scullery girl swish with her bare legs through the wet grass, and come back with a basket full of fruit. He cut across to meet her. He had a terrible longing to speak to her, but he could not find words to say to her. Because she was desirable, though her face was objectionable, she seemed to him (as women do seem when they are desirable) to be endowed with a critical and sensitive intelligence which might resent a clumsy overture, or an approach that was not plausible. And so he walked towards her with a casual and indifferent air. But when she smiled at him his shyness left him suddenly and he asked her what the joke was.

“Ach, to-day,” she said, “I must laugh, because I look so funny in these boots.” How ugly her face was! And yet how desirable that body!

Herr Kogl, at the door, found words to say to him. Herr Kogl always found words to say to everybody. It was his only occupation. When he wasn’t either eating or drinking, he stood in the yard and exchanged remarks with visitors and casual passers-by. No one had ever seen him take a drop of wine in public, and he affected to disdain it, though he had blood-shot, oily eyes which betrayed him. “Wine? Why, there’s nothing in it,” he would say. “I--never--have--any.” But every time he went down into the cellar to fill the decanter, he first filled himself and then the decanter.

Now he stood in the doorway, red and obese, and addressed a small, fluffy old dog of a nondescript breed and an incredible filthiness. “Rags has been and had a puppy--a little ragamuffin like herself, what! Rags, you bad thing! Rags, you dirty tyke! Rags, you immoral old bitch! For shame! I shouldn’t have thought it of you, at your age!” And he dug his crooked forefinger into Dickin’s chest, as he was wont to do when emphasising a point; especially in moments of hilarious recollection, as when, for instance, he might say: “Oh _that_ thing! Well, of course!” At such moments he would dig even a little lower than the ribs, because the joke addressed itself to a more central part of you--the abdominal part, wherein all jokes are seated; or so at least we must suppose, because when men laugh too heartily they protect and support these, their boilers, from bursting.

Again, as he stood there, Frank caught a glimpse of the scullery maid’s bare legs, as she went out to hang out some linen. “What are you smiling for?” he asked, overtaking her, Herr Kogl now having turned in.

“Ach! Herr Dickin,” she said, “when you speak to me I must always laugh. I don’t know why.”

He looked round. There was no one about. “When do you finish your work?”

“I go to bed at half-past ten.”

“Won’t you come and see me before going to bed?”

“Where?” she asked.

“In my room.”

“What shall I do in your room?”

His blood coursed feverishly through his veins; his brain was on fire at the thought of what they could not do in his room. “Keep me company,” he said.

She nodded assent and went in with the dry linen. Returning, he ran into Herr Kogl, who came out of the cellar with the decanter, licking and smacking his thick ruby lips. “Herr Kogl, will you have a glass of wine with me?”

Herr Kogl shook his head slowly, closing his eyes. “I--never--have--wine. I--consider--that--there--is--nothing--in--it. Oh, yes.” His diction was distinct, correct, precise, deliberate, and slow.

“Well, you are certainly setting an edifying example to your boy, aren’t you, Herr Kogl?”

“My boy,” said Herr Kogl, “is all right.”

With a mystic, an unearthly, look Herr Kogl retired to the safe behind the counter, and came back with a large sheet of parchment in his big shaking red hands. “His college certificate,” he said, turning away to hide his emotion and to give the visitor the opportunity of ascertaining for himself the high standard of Herbert’s scholastic achievements:

Calligraphy--proficient; Arithmetic--good; Cooking--very satisfactory; Slaughtering--praiseworthy; Waiting at table--very good; Deportment--excellent; General conduct--excellent.

“Eminently satisfactory,” said Dickin, returning the document.

“He is at the Hotel and Restaurant Institute in Vienna,” the father said proudly, “and I afford him practical opportunities for perfecting his studies when he is here for his summer vacation by allowing him to wait at table. Of course, under my supervision,” he added.

“You ought to be very proud of him.”

“Proud? Why?”

“Of course you ought to be! You _are_ proud!”

“Well, of course--proud--why not? You wouldn’t think, would you, eh? A Tyrolese poodle like he, now would you?... attain such distinction in Vienna itself!...” And two large beads stood in Herr Kogl’s jaundiced blood-shot eyes.

At lunch, in the large panelled room looking out on the old archducal Schloss beneath, steeped in the foliage of its enormous and forsaken park, Frank found himself seated facing a Lutheran pastor from Germany, who had large sad eyes, a quiet, melancholy voice, and helped himself without cease to the _Kalter Aufschnitt_. He thought the world was all right, the Church all right, and nothing wanted changing. Among the guests was a Russian Grand Duke who turned out to be the cousin of Frank’s one-time opponent who had hit him on the ear with an umbrella at the Kiss-Lick Club. The Grand Duke’s cousin was killed in a motor smash in Poland. His own brother was assassinated elsewhere. An uncle died in mysterious circumstances. It seemed, of the old guard, there remained only Frank and he, and over a decanter of Tyrolese wine consumed together, they relinquished their claim to the throne of Russia in each other’s favour.

“Ah! you are a writer!” the Grand Duke exclaimed happily. “You write in English? Ah, well! I’ve my own theories about English literature. I am obstinate in the belief that in the portrayal of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde did not mean to depict his own personality, so to speak.”

Frank sounded the Grand Duke as to his further opinions. Wordsworth? No, he hadn’t heard of Wordsworth. Keats?--No: who was he? No, he preferred the moderns. There was one modern writer--German, he believed--who amused him. Bernhard Schau.... Oh, he was British? How interesting! He had bought quite a number of his works in Berlin, and enjoyed dipping into them--he liked him for the wit salted with cynicism. Did his Highness read any other English authors? The Grand Duke considered for a moment, wrinkling his brow.--Of course--Byron! Who did not love that stupendous genius, the greatest the world has yet produced? _Childe Harold_.... Ah! The Grand Duke thought he himself was a little like that--like Byron and Lermontov--romantic, rebellious, seeking something (he made a gesture to the heavens)--dissatisfied with his surroundings--that’s it, and seeking a meaning in life. Yes, he was a lover of literature--though he preferred sport--riding and hunting, drinking, too, he was not averse to. He considered, as if struck by a sudden idea. “Have a drink,” he said.

They passed into the lounge, into which Herr Kogl burst periodically, to explain the working of the electric stove, which could be switched on at will but must not be, he cautioned, switched off without a preliminary intimation to Herbert, in charge of the electric supply station, because a sudden superfluity of electricity sent the dynamo into commotion. Here Frank perceived a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman looking like a gipsy. “Frau König!” he exclaimed. “By heaven! this is unexpected!”

Frau König, on the other hand, did not appear to regard this meeting as unexpected, but at once proceeded to recount her life at the point at which his knowledge of it had been interrupted. “My fiancé, alas, has failed again in his examinations at the University, and that has put us back for another couple of years and deferred our hope of establishing the knitting factory. He says the Paris professors have been prejudiced against him on account of his Russian nationality and vented on him their bitterness over the Russian State Bonds they had acquired and lost in the Revolution, and agreed to plough him.” And she introduced him to Frau Professor Koch who occupied the room next to his own and owned a dachshund, on whose account she felt concerned and diffident, for, “He has inflammation of the lungs,” she said, “and his cough is terrible.”

It rained. By the electric stove, Baby played chess with the bank clerk, whose holiday was up and who that night was going back to Vienna. During lunch, when Baby had anxiously eyed him, he had talked to the table at large, explaining how the new divorce law was operating in Vienna--he talked of divorce, while she wanted to be united to him for the rest of existence! She had better, now that time was getting short, try and talk to him--difficult though it was--in French. What had she better say to him? How draw him? How tell him? She thought hard.

“Do you ski in Austria with a horse?” she asked at last.

He did not understand.

The rain poured down straightly and beautifully, shooting through those myriad trees on the mountain sides. The bank clerk saw in Frank his natural successor, and hated him. The company constrained him.

But a quarter of an hour before he was driven down to the station in the little red car, they ran away hand in hand into the Schloss park, and came back dripping with wet. She stood at the window and waved to him shyly: “Good-bye,” as the little red motor buzzed off.

Good-bye! Good-bye!

How grey, how monotonous mountain scenery looked in the rain! “Well, Baby, how do you like this place?” Frank asked.

She loved it, she said, but complained that there were fleas in her bed. Frau Kogl, to whom the complaint was made, said that it was “ausgeschlossen”--quite out of the question. “Das gibt es nicht”--it isn’t done. But the “boots” with the green apron was philosophical. Fleas--well, what about it? They existed. There were fleas in the carpet--fleas everywhere--between bedclothes--in a word, in nature. Fleas, he implied, were in the scheme of things. God had so ordained it. The “boots’” attitude, like that of the modern philosophers’, was one of acceptance; he accepted all evil and all good in life with equal grace. Herr Kogl ordered him to go to the chemist and buy a preparation notoriously fatal to fleas, and the “boots” came back carefully carrying a small bottle, in whose efficacy he did not believe.

At dinner, Frank found himself seated among a group of German tourists. Herr Nikulitsch, despite his Czech name, was a German--corpulent, spectacled, with a large, square, short-cropped blond head; in fact so typical a German that had he had the luck to be in England between the years 1914 to 1918, he would have been arrested without provocation. His wife had eyes which were so queerly adjusted that when she talked to you she seemed to be looking at someone else. Frank was faced by this cow of a woman who could only understand the German point of view about the war; and two Scottish old maids who could only understand the British point of view about the war; neither of whom could understand each other. The Scottish old maids complained derisively about the _Kalter Aufschnitt_: “The idea of giving you cheese without biscuits! Ha!” They shook their heads and smiled malignantly. They marvelled at these foreigners! The more they saw of them, the more they marvelled!

“The Germans,” said Frau Nikulitsch, “are good people. We are good people at heart. Any one of good will will admit that we are good people. But the French are a nation of sadists.”

“Yes,” said the Frau Pastor, “we are a thoroughly good people, devoid of all guile. We haven’t an ungracious thought.”

Baby listened politely. It was not what she had read in _The Daily Mail_. “Tricking Huns. Once a German, always a German. Blond beasts,” were phrases that occurred to her. Frank was talking to the Frau Pastor now, and because he wanted to be sympathetic, and to show off his own broadmindedness and the tolerant, liberal spirit of his countrymen, he told her, with a smile (as if making light of it) that our own royalty was mostly German; and he felt that it was strange that she thought nothing of it, a little churlish of her even--it was as though she made light of his kindness and that of his countrymen who bore this alien taint with good grace. The Frau Pastor seemed to think England was rather lucky.

And why, she asked, was England supporting the Russian claim to Eastern Prussia, and simultaneously supporting the Finnish claim to Northern Russia?

It was, said Frank, in pursuance of an ideal to keep alive the feeble flame of patriotism in the face of a growing international revolution. Men were losing interest in their countries, so you had to tread on their toes to keep up their national pride.

“And the English,” said the Frau Pastor (living up to the ideal), “behaved worst of all in the last war.”

Frank thought of showing her a 1920 copy of _The Daily Mail_ (Continental edition), in which was set forth what Poincaré thought of the German evasion of the Allied (just) demand for reparations. The extremity of the shock brought him back to sanity. When he listened to one German after another who told him that if Germany had been arming it was because the Entente Cordiale was stifling them by a tightening ring of alliances (to whom he had said that if the Entente Cordiale _was_ stifling them by a tightening ring of alliances it was because Germany had been arming), who were convinced that we had started the war as we were convinced that they had provoked it, the thought struck him: “Of course they must be convinced. When A is roused to a pitch where he will do B in, and face the risk of being done in by B in the doing, he is sincere in believing B to be in the wrong. This is the shady side of faith. Frank looked to the Pastor to display some soothing impartiality, and gave him a lead. “All nations are very much alike and equally unjust to foreigners,” Frank said. But to all such overtures the pastor, who thought the world was all right, the Church all right, and nothing wanted changing, replied: “We Germans are well known to be over-indulgent to foreigners. Germany is too idealistic a people.”

“Patriotism,” said Frank, “is like wine--a good thing when you haven’t had too much of it.”

“You don’t understand,” said the Frau Pastor. “Only a German can understand what we feel about these things, only a German who has gone through what we have gone through and who knows what we know.”

There is a limit to an intelligent man’s enjoyment of the irony of being regarded as an imbecile by fools. And it is soon reached. A new war was starting before the discords of the old have had time to resolve themselves, and, identifying a nation of sixty million people with the two who had displeased him, Frank felt that they deserved it and hoped that they would be beaten!

“And what ridiculous names these foreigners have!” remarked one of the Scottish old maids, when the Germans had left the table. “That Viennese lady opposite--Frau von Endte! I don’t know much German, but I know that much: that Ente means duck! It’s as if she called herself: ‘Mrs. de Ducke’!”

Frank strolled away into the hills. The night was calm and benignant; the stars whispered; and all this rocky waste listened, moonlit and silent, to God. At every corner, a crucifix. Green lights and blue lights and red lights illumining the twisted naked body of Christ, with red blood flowing from the wounds. Yet curiously enough, Christ’s message had not been understood, he thought, and looking back at the bloody centuries which followed on the crucifixion and at Christ’s tortured body, so shamelessly paraded, it occurred to Frank that Christians generally may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick from the beginning, inferring that it was blood-letting that He meant and advocated to us. On consideration, Frank thought the world was well ripe for destruction.

Above and beyond, what peace! All desire abated, in the soft ablution of the moon. O Lust, where is thy sting, and Satiety thy victory?

A figure in the dark. “Hello, is that you? Oh, Frau König! All my homages.”

Frau König, with a preoccupied air, took him down the mountain track into the thicket, the while saying: “I don’t deny. I don’t deny how hard it is for a woman who had contracted certain habits in marriage suddenly to find herself without a man. Well, here I am. Here I am, I say! Here I am; you may have what you wish. But my condition”--she touched his wrist--“is that you are to take me out into society.”

“I do not wish it. I mean I do not wish what you wish me to wish. You make me feel good, Frau König, and that’s the truth.”

“I do not understand you. I have gone as far as I can.”

“That’s the truth. Do not go further.”

“But--”

How could he explain? How could he tell her that where unattractive women were concerned he was a prude and a puritan? For all sexual morality, if we examine it more closely, is founded on aversion. It pleased him to recall to her an ideal of womanhood which she was in no mood to follow; of reticence and chastity, which he counselled her to practise. “Not in abandon, but in restraint and self-discipline, Frau König,” he said, leading her out of the thicket into the open road, “lies the hope of a sane and healthy mankind.”

“If,” she said, “my fiancé does not come soon, I shall go mad.”

As they turned into the _pension_ courtyard, they passed the apoplectic Baron’s bungalow, who peeped through the window and, though it was evening, wished them: “Good morning.” The Baron’s knowledge of English must have been very slight, because every time Frank passed him in the morning, the Baron touched his cap and said: “Good evening.” In the big barn, an automatic barrel organ played excruciating music, and Herr Kogl explained that it had been a first-class barrel organ till the Italians--a nation, as all knew, of organ grinders--spoilt it during their occupation of the town in the war by over-taxing its musical capacity.

“How very inconsiderate!”

Several couples were dancing. Herbert, removing his waistcoat, danced in his braces and shirt sleeves with Lina, the bare-legged scullery maid, at a considerably accelerated pace, as if to show them all what he could do. “Our Herbert,” Herr Kogl, pointed with his chin towards him, “once he starts dancing, outstrips them all.” Frank stood and watched till it would be time for Lina to go up to bed. Heavens of ecstasy, oceans of rapture awaited him. The Kogls sat there as always: Herr Kogl; Herr Spatz, a fat, rough man of the same proportions as the host himself; the policeman; the policeman’s wife, who was a waitress; and drank wine. The policeman’s little boy slipped in and out between their legs and ran about all day long, and they christened him “Quicksilver.” Herr Kogl alone did not drink. The cook, a bewildered-looking old woman, who was never seen about during the week, drank, after good takings, on a Sunday night with Frau Kogl. Herr Kogl watched them drink, but refused to participate. His maudlin eyes were fixed on the dog to whom he would talk for hours at a stretch: “Rags, you wretch! Rags, you immoral little bitch!”

“Nice old doggie, what?” Frau Kogl would remark.

Herr Kogl would shake his head. “It’s not a dog--kein Hund, sondern ein Skandal!”

The dog was very old, toothless, and refused all food but chocolate. The Frau Wachmann, the policeman’s wife, a young shrew, shouted and cursed at her husband, a shy middle-aged upright man, because he would not go to bed immediately, but preferred to play cards with the others of a Sunday evening. Herr Spatz thundered forth as he played: “Two aces! Bang! Ha-a-a!--Queen of Clubs! Bang! Bang!” with his fist, so that all the glasses on the table jingled nervously. He had once spent nine months in Turkey, and he looked, with his clean-shaven head and his mouthful of glittering white teeth himself like a Turk, and behaved like one, or at least, as you would imagine “The Turk” to behave in his more lustful moments. Frau Kogl, drunk, attempted to sing, but it came out very badly and dismally and she stopped, ashamed of herself.

“To hell with Czecho-Slovakia!” Herr Spatz was saying to a relative who, thanks to the Treaty of Versailles, has become Czecho-Slovakian and now said he was proud of the great country. “Great country!” roared Herr Spatz. “I’ve lived nine months in Turkey: who can talk Czecho-Slovakian there? Answer me that!”

“Who will drive the van to town to-morrow morning, that is what I wish to know?” Herr Kogl interjected.

“Willy.”

“Hm!--Hm!” distrustfully from Herr Kogl.

“Why?” from Herr Spatz, whose son Willy happened to be.

Herr Kogl looked on the ground. “Willy! Willy is not Herbert, that’s why!”

At long last the clock on the Schloss tower struck half-past ten, and Herr Kogl was locking up. Frank paced his room up and down; every moment the door might open and Lina come in, and then--.

From time to time, unable to stand the suspense, he would go out and wait for her in the corridor. Simultaneously, the door opposite would open, and the Pastor and Frau Pastor peep out, again and again, as if to put out their boots: but surely, Frank thought, they could not have so many boots to put out. Then, as he stood in the corridor, the adjacent door opened, and the Frau Professor peeped out to ask if her dachshund’s coughing had not, perchance, disturbed his sleep. “He has acute inflammation of the lungs,” she said, “and I am very anxious to know what the specialist will say to-morrow morning.”

“I am very sorry,” Frank said, “for you both.” And while he stood there assuring Frau Professor Koch of his complete sympathy, and the Frau Pastor peeped out of her room to put out another pair of boots, the bare-legged Lina slipped into his room.

He forgot everything, looked at her intently, grasped her eagerly, savagely, asked: “Yes?”

“Why?” she parried.

“Because.”

“Because what?”

“Because--because we’re young, and because life isn’t for ever.”

She bent down her look and was silent.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

She had said it so quietly and convincingly that his soul was devastated by certitude. He was as certain of his reward as one is certain of money placed to the credit of one’s current account, once receipt of it has been acknowledged by the bank. It would take place all right. It was indeed as though it had already taken place; and she seemed to him like some tedious acquaintance; he asked her tedious questions, and asking them, had not the patience to concentrate upon her tedious replies. “Are both your parents alive?”

“Yes, both my parents are alive.”

“Have you any brothers or sisters?”

“Yes, two sisters and one brother.”

From outside came the sound of tears and choking. “I suppose,” said Frank, “that is the policeman’s wife, by the sound of it.”

“No, it’s he--the policeman.”

“What! Sobbing like that? Why?”

“She curses him dreadfully: that’s why. It’s the same every Sunday night because she wants him to go to bed at once, whereas he, poor chap, wants to sit out with the others and play cards. He’s an upright, decent, quiet man; it’s a shame the life she leads him!”

It did not interest him. The wind that bellied out his sails had suddenly ceased, and his soul flopped down like a flag on a flagstaff. He, she, and the world, seemed as flat as a pancake--as flat and as unprofitable.

“You--you--you!” she gasped. In this “you” was all her being, her illusory love, her reunion with him, the dissolution, the loss of her “I” in his “you.” But he thought he had squeezed her leg and said: “I beg your pardon? Did you say anything?”

She shook her head.

“That’s all right, then.”

She had begun to look forward, and he went to sleep at once. She waited awhile, scanning his face with hatred. Then shook him by the shoulder. “You _ninny_!” Then dressed herself and went out.