Читать книгу Old Wine - Bottome Phyllis - Страница 10

Table of Contents

As Otto Wolkenheimb strolled to and fro in his library, he was intensely conscious of the effect of his background. He was not easily impressed by backgrounds; but he was vividly conscious of the impressions they made upon others. He knew that, to anyone who lived in a dingy little room, the lofty ceiling with its beautifully moulded cornices would give a bewildering sense of space; and he was glad that the splendid crystal candelabra shone like some trophy from a palace. The room was free of little things, and the few pictures (dull, Otto personally considered) had good names attached to them and were satisfactorily darkened by the tone of time. Seen through the large north windows, the towers of the Votiv Kirche occupied the vacant space between the bookshelves and his old English writing desk as if they were part of his furniture. Otto leaned out of the open window and looked down upon the broad glistening avenue of the Universitätsstrasse, across the gardens to the pink crenellated barracks and over countless irregular roofs to the distant blue hills. The air came fresh from the Wiener Wald, and carried with it a breath of pines. It stirred in Otto memories of his home at Trauenstein. Otto loved his home, but he loved it with a certain impatience. It had been spoiled for him, like everything else he valued, by the changes of the Breakdown. His peasants no longer revered and admired him. They claimed as rights what he had given them as privileges or what he would have given them as privileges if he had been rich enough to afford his own instincts of generosity. What Otto disliked most about the new order of things was the way in which it upset his sense of his own virtues. He knew that he was a generous and considerate landlord; but when he was suddenly pinched and driven by the loss of more than half his fortune, was it the moment for his peasants to rise up and chivy him into allowing them the same indulgence which (in the goodness of his heart) he had conceded to them in the days of his prosperity? Yet his peasants entirely ignored the goodness of his heart—they said they were ruined too, and they demanded higher wages and lower rents. In many cases Otto had had to give way or lose their labour altogether, but the struggle had cost him his amiability and left him with no desire to revisit Trauenstein unless he should once more become its master. He strolled back from the window and looked with sardonic eyes at the Oriental vases full of expensive flowers which he had ordered to welcome the first visit of Elisabeth Bleileben. He knew that she would like expensive flowers: mauve orchids and strong-smelling lilies. Otto had studied women all his life with an untiring pertinacity. He understood their differences of time and type.

Elisabeth had the disadvantage of her years; but she had also the acquiescences. She would take things for granted, and be grateful for what she got. In his relations with women Otto was seldom dominated by passion; not at least by a passion for the women themselves. The passion which ruled him was a much deeper affair, and women were merely its priestesses. The master passion of Otto’s life was his deep personal vanity. Each new woman, over whom he acquired the influence of possession, showed him himself afresh. They were like a series of mirrors in a magic gallery; from each one he flashed back upon himself at a different angle. He was at his best when he came fresh to a love affair. As time went on repetition dulled the brightness of his image. It was an effort to appear always charming and never to take the ease of a moment’s selfishness. Generally Otto became quickly disillusioned with the uninspired Priestess who allowed the reproduction of himself to fade. There was no woman with whom he could always be so interesting as in the first half-hour of their intimacy. Sooner or later her attention waned or she advanced some awkward claim of her own and spoiled the delicacy of his romance. It had been Otto’s experience that women were less disinterested than men. Their very sympathies had tentacles with which to grasp more effectually what they wanted. It was a pity, Otto often felt, that he was forced by his fastidious nature into taking a sentimental view of love. It would have been far simpler if, like most men, he had been purely sensual. The attitude of the gourmand is always much less expensive than that of the gourmet and on the whole more satisfactory. Material gratifications are not exhilarating, but they frankly cure simple wants by simple remedies. The trouble with Otto was that he had not got any simple wants. This business of Elisabeth Bleileben, for instance, stuck in his throat. He knew what he could give her; and he knew that besides the substantial gain to his fortune he would get a certain amount of interest, even a certain amount of pleasure, from the effect he was going to produce upon Elisabeth. She was going to be very useful to him, and as a reward he was going to transform her life. He felt no scruples at all in persuading her to give up her respectability; on the contrary the thought of her discarded virtue, preserved for thirty-eight years, exceedingly amused him; but the fact that he was about to make love to a woman who scarcely attracted him struck him with acute shame. ‘Interest! Interest!’ he muttered disconsolately to himself as he looked down at the curved sinister leaves of the mauve orchids. ‘Isn’t that after all a little too base? To place one’s kisses like fortunate investments? No! Eugen is right. There is something very ugly in this new life after all! But we must live—we must live, and if one is to live at all, it must be comfortably!’ Otto heard the distant thrill of an electric bell, and a moment later Elisabeth was announced.

In an instant his facile, dramatic mind had changed. He was back in the magic gallery of mirrors again seeking once more, with the old eagerness, the charm of his new presentment.

Elisabeth came forward slowly, a little timidly, into the great room. It was, as she had expected, very quiet and mysterious. The forms and colours of the furniture were too harmonious to catch the eye; they seemed to withdraw themselves from any intrusion upon the inhabitants and melt into a common background. Only the heavily scented flowers with their strange tortured outlines impressed themselves vividly upon her senses. The room seemed full of old silences, broken long ago by voices different from her own. The distance between her and Otto Wolkenheimb felt insurmountable. In another moment he was beside her laughing down into her eyes. Elisabeth was grateful that he attempted no embrace. He kissed her hand gallantly and lightly, and led her to the corner of the sofa which Rosalie had for so long adorned. He did not do this purposely to introduce a comparison, but because it was the most becoming seat in the room for a woman who had reached an age when she looked her best with her profile merged into the background of cushions. But when Otto saw Elisabeth there he thought of Rosalie, and the thought pricked him suddenly and made it difficult to keep the light of admiration in his eyes. Fortunately this was a woman of intelligence, and Otto could appeal first to her brain. He made her laugh, and he made her say something to make him laugh. Slowly the immensity of the distance between them grew less. Otto gave her tea, beautifully scented Russian tea, and her nerves sank into quiet. Then bit by bit Otto built up her confidence in herself. He made her forget that her clothes were not what he was used to; that she was just a funny little Jewess, and that no funny little Jewess had ever penetrated into this room before; and as her sense of value increased in her own eyes, the importance of her respectability waned. Otto’s laughing face seemed to say to her through the screen of his careful speech, ‘My dear child, it’s such a little thing, isn’t it? Less, I assure you, than the difference between having a cup of tea or doing without.’ Whether he talked to Elisabeth of the awful conditions of Vienna or of the amusing domestic complications of the Mandelbaums did not matter; it was what, under the veil of words, he was doing for her that mattered, and—even more—that Elisabeth understood triumphantly what this was and let herself go to meet it. She was not too old or too stiff, after all, for that delicate manipulation. He was making her what he wanted, and she was going on with it to the end. If she had any ruthlessness left (and it really seemed to Elisabeth as if it had all melted away like the last patch of snow on the mountains under an insidious sun) it lay in the fact that nothing—nothing on earth—should prevent her from going on with this experience to the end. Her eyes met his brilliantly, provocatively. Suddenly they stopped talking. The room filled once more with silences that were not their own. But Elisabeth’s intensity broke through the alien silences; it seized upon Otto with a force that brought him to his feet. He stood in front of her biting his lips and smiling; then very gently he laid his hands on her shoulders. Elisabeth stood up to face him. She was not swept off her feet, she was drawn very slowly off them, but the force of her own feeling made her unaware of how anything took place. She only knew that her consent was there. Far, far deeper than Otto’s demand was Elisabeth’s consent. The passion that met Otto was so fierce that for a moment it lighted his own. There was no mistaking the image in this particular mirror; it shone upon him as if he were a god. He held his breath at the sudden exposure of his beauty; and then, like Narcissus, he plunged into the fateful waters to clasp his own image to his heart.