Читать книгу Old Wine - Bottome Phyllis - Страница 7

Table of Contents

They were immaculate in person; no one in the smartest London club ever had fairer or more highly glazed linen, cloth of finer texture or a surer cut. Their boots had the lustre of black pearls; their studs gleamed with austere brilliance, and their fur-lined coats were magnificent and orthodox. Their hearts were full of bitterness; and they sat side by side in a tram. It was a tram that had long ago seen its better days slip into worse ones, and its worse ones lose the last of their blighted security. How it kept going at all on its worn uneven lines was a wonder. Insufficient currents of electricity sent it forward in a series of jerks and whines. The interior of the tram was stuffy, cold and dirty; and it was over-filled with people who shared these disadvantages, and accentuated them. They had long ago ceased to care how they looked; their clothes were all survivals from the days before the War; their faces were lined and drawn with hardships that had sunk into habit, and habits which had lapsed beneath hope. Nevertheless neither Otto nor Eugen felt the slightest sympathy for them. The common misfortune of defeat does not bind people together, it disintegrates them, for misery is more individual than joy. If they felt anything at all for the emaciated, lack-lustre beings who hung on straps above them or pressed their dingy persons closer together on the hard wooden seats, it was rage against them for having, as they would have put it, ‘driven away their Emperor’. Their pity was for themselves; that they should have to sit in a tram surrounded by a half-starved populace was the sharpest of tragedies. They were both miserable, but Eugen was far more under the spell of his misery than Otto. Otto had his schemes before him; they fluttered beyond the screeching trams and rested in luxurious limousines. ‘Enough!’ Eugen ejaculated harshly, and staggered, in and out of a line of scarecrows, to the door. ‘But we are not there yet,’ objected Otto, who had followed him in astonishment. ‘It is true,’ agreed Eugen, letting himself down heavily on to the broken pavement, ‘but I have sat in this Chariot of Demos long enough. There was a time when the imagination of Tiberius and Caligula seemed to me a little extreme. I confess now I find these remarkable men to have been misjudged.’ ‘We shall arrive late,’ said Otto indifferently; ‘however, on the way I can explain to you a little about our fellow guests, which is perhaps an advantage. Our talk after dinner with Mandelbaum will be a simple affair; he will try to get us into his hands, and he will find, I think, perhaps with some surprise, that he has not. I ask nothing of you but to watch me play my hand and when I signal to you, you will reinforce me with whatever card you see that I want. But the earlier part of the evening should be amusing. Have you ever heard of Elisabeth Bleileben? She is a very clever woman, and, as you know, I do not use this expression lightly. She is at the head of half the Charities in Vienna, and at the throat of the other half. Her virtue is so far above suspicion, but I believe she did very well out of her charities. I have met her once or twice; she has great energy and a brutal wit. She is so vivacious that I have not yet been able to discover if she is good-looking or not. Her general appearance is that of a slightly excited leopard!’ ‘I know whom you mean,’ assented Eugen; ‘they made her husband a Minister because he could speak English. Before the Downfall, he might have been a shoe-maker—never, I think, a good one. I hear he is getting over his surprise at being a Minister, but with other people the astonishment is permanent. No doubt his wife bluffed him into the appointment. Be careful of her, Otto. Women who make stupid men a success, may be dangerous to clever ones. What part do you suggest her playing in our concerns?’ ‘It is impossible she should still be in love with her husband,’ replied Otto, ‘and if she is not, she might assist me in making use of his position. I should like to have at least two Ministers under our influence so as to play one off against the other. This is always a good arrangement. Do you not agree with me?’ ‘Possibly,’ said Eugen cautiously. ‘You say that she has been known to do very well out of her charities. Is this merely a pious rumour on the part of the other charities less ably run than her own, or can it be proved? I do not ask if the rumours are true since that is a minor matter; but successful concealment is a major one.’ ‘Have I not told you that she is intelligent?’ said Otto brusquely; ‘nothing can be proved against her—except her husband!’ ‘Then if she is discreet,’ said Eugen indifferently, ‘it becomes merely a matter of taste. It is superfluous to ask to what race she belongs since she is a philanthropist who has not suffered pecuniarily from her exertions.’ ‘Of course she is a Jewess,’ said Otto moodily. ‘But would Rosalie be capable of lifting a finger to help me? I shall have to teach Elisabeth how to dress, and how to sit still. Her feet are as solid as tomb-stones. She walks like a duck approaching a worm. One knows that she will not fail to get the worm, but one resents her not making the approach a trifle more seductive. Still a clever woman learns fast, and when she wants to attract she learns even faster. I think I may say that she already wishes to attract me. This evening I propose to make her take a decision about it.’ Eugen shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is your affair,’ he muttered; ‘I, as you know, prefer the gutter where it is, to seeing it transferred to the drawing-room.’ ‘We are not all so fortunate as you,’ replied Otto suavely, ‘able to unite in the person of a cook both our affections and our conveniences!’ There was a short silence. Then Otto laid his hand lightly on his friend’s arm. ‘Now, my dear Eugen,’ he said persuasively, ‘we come to a business in which I shall need your help. There is to be an American heiress at Mandelbaum’s to-night who is attached to the Relief Mission. She owns a newspaper. I have arranged with Mandelbaum that you are to take her in to dinner. Find out for me if she will be at all possible as a wife. I have come to the conclusion that I must marry foreign money.’ ‘What will your mother say to an American?’ demanded Eugen, standing still. ‘The Gräfin as you know is not international. I fancy that if she thinks of America at all she supposes it to be inhabited by Italian organ-grinders and Red Indians!’ ‘My mother’, said Otto, ‘will have to become reconciled to any wife who will enable me to keep Trauenstein, and you will find that when she has set her mind at rest on this subject her manner to my future wife will be beyond reproach.’ ‘Here’, said Eugen, feeling under a brilliant lamp for a bell draped in ivy, ‘is the goal of your ambitions. Go a little slowly with the Elisabeth if you wish to impress the American favourably. I understand their strong point is the Puritan instinct.’

Frau Mandelbaum was waiting for her guests with that slight thrill which, even after twenty years of solid entertaining, still played upon her lethargic senses. She liked to put on her best clothes, to sit at the head of a well-furnished table, and watch Julius take people in. Frau Mandelbaum did not call it taking people in, she called it entertaining them, but she knew very well that Julius never entertained people whom he did not propose sooner or later to take in. Frau Mandelbaum played a very innocent part on these occasions. She provided excellent food and paid great attention to the points Julius told her to make. To-night he had explained to her that the head of the English Mission was her principal guest. She would have to talk English to him, but she wouldn’t have to talk very much. She must say that Austria would perish without an English credit, but she needn’t try to explain why, she should just mention that Julius himself knew all the reasons better than anyone else. Frau Mandelbaum had a very fine white neck on which Julius had hung a string of medium-sized pearls. Her mouth always went down at the corners when she thought of these pearls, because they might have been much larger if Julius had not given pearls to other ladies on whose necks they had no legal right to hang. All her guests except Graf Wolkenheimb and his cousin arrived punctually. They sat about the brilliantly lighted, freshly upholstered room as if they had met by chance at a railway station and had begun to be a little uneasy at the lateness of their trains. Julius took them in turns through his three reception rooms and showed them several square yards of newly bought impressionist pictures. Frau Mandelbaum bought the carpets; they were rather like the pictures. She had never met Otto or Eugen before, nor except for the Downfall would it have been possible for her to meet them; but Julius had told her that everything was altered, Otto Wolkenheimb would be glad to get a good dinner, and she needn’t go out of her way to be polite to him. Still when he did arrive, distinguished and bland, about twenty minutes late, she felt obliged to go a little out of her way.

Frau Mandelbaum was thankful that Dr. Simmons sat on her husband’s left hand, as far off from her as possible. She was frankly terrified by the head of the Relief Mission. This lady wore what is known as a ‘djibbah’, a formless garment which fell from her shoulders to her feet in one straight line. A good deal of coffee-coloured lace was wound rather cheerlessly about her throat. She was even more alarming than she looked. She had already revealed to her hostess that she did not care for food and that she was uninterested in the servant problem, except to think that servants ought to have more freedom and higher wages. She had no children and—in spite of being called a doctor—no husband. When she said she hadn’t got a husband, she looked as if she didn’t want one. Even Julius was not quite at his ease with her. When he paid her a long and flowery tribute upon her generosity as a Relief worker, she looked at her plate as if she didn’t like what was on it, and said in the driest of tones that she was interested in the results of malnutrition. It was a great relief for Frau Mandelbaum to have Sir Roger Colet to talk to, and to observe that he gave his unswerving attention to her rather than to the shocking child on his other side, who had sat on the sofa before dinner (that shrine sacred to the persons of married Excellenzen) showing an expanse of French silk stockings (quite unsuitable in a Relief worker) beneath her sheath-like skirt. Carol saw only Sir Roger’s rather high shoulder and round red neck, and her notice, insufficiently claimed by these features, rested instead on the sallow sardonic Austrian who had taken her in. He had very thick black eyebrows and was much interested in his soup. Carol was not sure how to begin a conversation with him, so she gave a fleeting glance across the table at poor Dr. Jane Simmons who was trying to discover, without committing herself, if there was the slightest sincerity in the disinterested offers of help her host persisted in thrusting upon her. Jane didn’t want to be insular and suspicious, but she had lived long enough in a world, whose corners had struck her as sharp, to distrust at sight any lavish offer of assistance. Rich people of course often did want to help poor ones, sometimes they even (though this was a rarer manifestation of their generosity) knew how to do it, but they seldom proclaimed their intentions with so much insistence the first time you met them. Eugen raised his head abruptly from the mushroom soup. ‘That English lady is your friend?’ he asked Carol. ‘She appears to be in trouble, and I find it wise that she should take that view. It is always well to be a little alarmed when business men take to philanthropy.’ ‘Yes, she’s my friend,’ agreed Carol; ‘at least I hope she’d say so, but one never knows with the English. They’re so kind, half the time you can’t tell whether they like you or not.’ ‘And the other half of the time?’ Eugen inquired politely. ‘Well—the other half they’re just as cold and stand-offish as fish,’ said Carol, with decision. ‘She says I mustn’t call her Jane because I’ve only known her a month—don’t you call that freezing?’ ‘It seems to me’, said Eugen, after a searching glance across the table, ‘even stranger that you should wish to call her “Jane”. It is a liberty that I should not have ventured upon had our parents vowed us to each other from our cradles.’ ‘I like to get to know people,’ said Carol firmly; ‘it’s no use trying to be distinguished with me; either I’m all in or I’m all out. With Jane I’d like to be all in. With the Mandelbaums I’m not so sure—by the by, are you any relation to either of them?’ Eugen gave a low prolonged chuckle. ‘That privilege’, he said, ‘has been denied me. I have been a fortunate man in many ways. I am as great a stranger in this house as you are yourself, but as I am a good Viennese, and therefore fond of gossip, I could easily tell you the life history of our hosts and their fellow guests.’ ‘I wish you would,’ said Carol eagerly. ‘I think life histories are the nicest kind of conversation, don’t you? Who wants to know what people think! Do begin with the man opposite, the one who looks like an English Prime Minister—with the high up eyes and the dinky side whiskers?’ ‘Ah! I see whom you mean,’ said Eugen, lifting his glass and screwing it carefully into the socket of his eye and looking fixedly at Otto. ‘I know everything about him, so you will excuse me if I tell you very little. Especially as he doubtless hopes to be more communicative himself. He is the cleverest man in Austria. His family have always played a distinguished part in our history. Graf Wolkenheimb himself has been the trusted councillor of Emperors. At the present moment he is explaining to our hostess how to make marmalade which tastes like oranges without using oranges. The rest of his life will probably consist of variations upon this experiment; but I think he will not always be so generous as to explain how he does it! Frau Mandelbaum, whom he is addressing, is a lady who has substantial compensations for one great disadvantage. That disadvantage, as perhaps I need hardly point out to you, sits at the bottom of the table. The lady upon Graf Wolkenheimb’s other side is very remarkable. As a young girl she married beneath her; that in itself was an achievement, for her family was already so insignificant that one would not have supposed a mésalliance to be possible. Her husband is one of those men whom nobody notices unless their hats blow off. She has made him a Minister. I understand that she now possesses all that she wants to possess, and that she has never had to pay for it. She is an admirable organizer of Charity; and her generosity in giving to others what she has no further need of herself has made her universally respected. Do you not think that so much orange velvet is a little fatiguing to the eyes?’ Carol laughed: it was a clear springing laugh which made Otto glance across the table with appreciation. ‘I should think you must have the most unpleasant tongue in Wien,’ she said, ‘but do go on; you’re the only ill-natured Austrian I’ve met and I’d hate to waste you.’ ‘You shall not waste me,’ said Eugen, with unswerving gravity. ‘Beyond the Jewish lady, of whom we have been speaking, is the richest banker in Wien. He has also this to attract your attention: he is, let us hope, the ugliest man in existence. I see you shudder as you look at him. He resembles, does he not, those animals we blush to look on as our relations? Animals who sit in trees and who look pleasanter with a good deal of foliage distributed about their person. His father was a great rascal and made an enormous fortune. The present Baron is a very little rascal; only sufficiently so to retain the fortune left him by his father. Your friend Dr. Simmons is sitting on his other side. It is impossible to tell what any lady so distinguished and intellectual thinks, but we may at least imagine that any passion aroused in her by our worthy host, she will manage to control. We come then to our host himself. I am a deeply religious man, and I prefer not to criticize the works of my Creator. Still one must admit, there has been a little inadvertence somewhere. Perhaps he mistook his rôle and should have appeared on one of the earlier days of creation? One sees him as a wolf, for instance, without that slight effort which is required to accept him in evening clothes. Now we must lower our voices to touch upon my lovely neighbour, although fortunately I have ascertained that she does not talk English. She is just observing that she likes her oysters large and fat, and I think that the subject interests her so deeply that she will not suspect us of talking about her. She is easily the most beautiful of the lower classes of Wien. Her mother married her at sixteen to the banker opposite, whose appearance so greatly attracted you. It was thought that at that age it would not be so startling. All the great bankers of Wien have good-looking wives. This is a mystery which you as a woman can doubtless explain better than a poor little bachelor like myself. The Baronin, however, loves her husband; many interested people have ascertained, and regretted, this extraordinary fact. In Wien beautiful wives are not, thank God, rare; but beautiful wives who love their husbands (the cause for gratitude is even greater) are practically non-existent. We do not encourage such an economy. On the other side of you sits the head of the English Mission. We like him. When we might have suffered even more than we have suffered by the revolution which upset our dynasty, Sir Roger Colet kept us safe by insisting on a general amnesty. It is owing to his efforts that the head which is now at your disposal is not reposing somewhere near Beethoven, in the cemetery which you must visit, even before it is necessary to lay a commemorative offering upon my grave. I could tell you many things rumoured about this Englishman, but I will content myself by saying that he likes good wine, treats women as well as they deserve, and prefers sport to any other religion.’ ‘And now you may tell me about yourself,’ said Carol, meeting his eyes fully. ‘Do you say unkind things because you are unhappy, or because you have an unkind heart?’ Eugen paused for a moment; the directness of her speech evidently struck him favourably, for he smiled for the first time before he answered her. ‘Does not America have to be called in to explain all the little problems of Europe?’ he asked her. ‘It is enough for me to tell you that I am a nobody, who was once attached to a somebody, and who is now entirely at your service. At the same time I am going to be unselfish enough to suggest that you address a few words to your other neighbour; he is in need of compensation, poor fellow; I see he has just tasted our host’s manufactured burgundy. The grapes that went into these bottles appeared in an earlier life as gooseberries.’ As Carol obeyed him she again observed Otto’s eyes resting on her with approval. ‘You seem to admire that girl’s dress,’ Elisabeth remarked to Otto a little tartly, ‘or is it that you like a woman to be shaved like a poodle? This is the third time you have looked across the table at her.’ ‘It enchants me,’ said Otto, ‘that you should have taken the trouble to notice my discretion. I do my best, you see, to hide the distraction caused me by your company.’ Frau Bleileben shot a glance of suspicion at him out of her tawny eyes. She would have given a great deal—and hers was a nature careful in its generosities—to discover how much meaning lay behind the screen of Otto’s philandering. ‘When a man always knows what to say, is one not right in supposing that his feelings hardly exist?’ she said in a low voice. ‘On the contrary,’ said Otto, ‘words cover feelings, they do not destroy them. Sometimes they even reveal them. Where is your husband to-night?’ ‘In Paris,’ said Elisabeth dryly, ‘pleading the cause of Austria.’ ‘We shall look for an improvement in our condition then,’ said Otto smoothly. ‘Your husband’s career must be a source of great interest to you?’ ‘There are women’, said Elisabeth, ‘who even in this benighted country, might prefer to have a career of their own!’ ‘That you already have,’ replied Otto, ‘but it would interest me very much to know if charity implies a private life equally devoted to the cause of morality? One looks at the good English lady over there who appears to unite the virtues of an angel with the garments of some obscure period in history—and one has no doubts. But I find myself as my eyes come back to you—wondering if you are satisfied simply to represent civic virtue?’ ‘One makes the best of one’s convictions,’ said Elisabeth. ‘I have never pretended to any great love of my kind. I dislike disorder, disease and waste; and I have tried to remedy them. In my private life I do the same.’ ‘You speak as if no such thing as pleasure existed,’ observed Otto thoughtfully. ‘Is making the best of one’s convictions incompatible with the lighter side of life?’ ‘To tell you the truth,’ said Elisabeth, ‘I have my little jokes, but I have very few pleasures. Perhaps I am not easily satisfied, or perhaps my circumstances don’t provide me with what I should look upon as pleasures.’ ‘One can supplement one’s circumstances,’ said Otto gently. ‘Not if one is a woman,’ said Elisabeth; ‘one’s circumstances are bounded by one’s married life.’ ‘But—a—surely’, murmured Otto, ‘one can supplement one’s married life?’ Elisabeth shot a keen mocking glance at him, ‘Is your suggestion purely benevolent?’ she demanded. Otto’s eyes lingered on hers for a brief significant moment. ‘The purest type of benevolence,’ he observed, ‘in fact, the only one I am inclined to trust, is the expression of a mutual interest. You are a woman in a million. What could I not have done if I had only had the happiness of meeting you at some freer period of your life!’ Elisabeth hesitated. ‘If you had met me before my marriage,’ she answered, ‘you would have tried to do what you are trying to do now. You would have tried to turn my head—and who knows, perhaps you would have succeeded?’ ‘My heart would have been at your feet,’ said Otto softly. ‘At how many feet has your heart been already, and at each foot how long has it remained?’ Elisabeth demanded. Otto smiled imperturbably. ‘As long’, he said, ‘as the temporary owner had the brains to keep it. You can measure therefore how long in your case my heart would remain. Life is a short period in comparison.’ ‘You are serious?’ asked Elisabeth incredulously. ‘I was never more serious,’ replied Otto calmly. ‘You are the one woman in the world for me. J’y suis, j’y reste.’ Elisabeth laughed again a little uncertainly, and returned to her dinner. For years she had been the faithful wife of her uninteresting husband. She had made up her mind to make the best of him, and she had made it. It was not a very good best, but she had thought at least all there was of him was her own, and lately she had found that he was hers no longer. His Excellenz Bleileben, infatuated by his sudden promotion, had decided that he was attractive. It was not true, but at that time in Vienna all men who had any fortune were attractive enough. Elisabeth, who flew into rages at the slightest opposition to her domestic sway, was hushed before this tremendous burst of insubordination. She hid her knowledge of it until she had decided upon what course to take. She had been sick of her husband for a long time; she was thirty-eight and there would not be many years left in which being sick of her husband would leave her with any agreeable alternative. Then she met Otto—Elisabeth knew her values. Otto was a real ‘piece’, belonging to the best period. As a gentleman and an aristocrat he was flawless. It had always been Elisabeth’s secret dream to have an aristocratic lover, but only if the advantages were mutual. She did not intend to run any danger of finding herself the weaker party. Her eyes flickered, and her vivid face, with its thick nostrils, slanting eyebrows and lips, became more than ever like that of a slightly excited leopard. ‘How does one know what answer to make to such an observation?’ she murmured. ‘If you do not mean what you say, it is an insult, and if you do mean it—is it any the less an insult?’ ‘Such an offer on the part of a man of the world to a woman of your capacity’, said Otto, ‘is a serious compliment. You are a charming and delightful woman. I shall learn much from you, but you will also learn something from me. You see I am quite frank with you. I admit that you have something to learn. A woman without a lover is as incomplete as a sail without a breeze.’ ‘It is true,’ said Elisabeth with sudden humility, ‘I have a great deal to learn. I am surprised by your suggestion, but I am not shocked nor am I displeased.’ ‘I hope I know better’, said Otto gently, ‘than to make such a suggestion to any woman whom it would displease. I am neither a Prussian nor a Turk!’ ‘No,’ said Elisabeth, ‘but that is what puzzles me. You are an Austrian noble, and I am a Jewess. I am also a woman of virtue. My life has not been spent in attracting men, it has been spent in doing business with them.’ ‘You shall do business with me too,’ said Otto, smiling, ‘but you won’t do your business any less well because I find you attractive.’ Elisabeth without answering turned away for a time to her other neighbour. She talked to the Baron for ten minutes without her accustomed verve, and as she turned away Otto observed with satisfaction that Eugen was managing to entertain the little American very successfully. She had a charming smile and her hands were dainty and well manicured. Elisabeth’s were overdone; they were not the hands to sustain the attention they provoked. ‘One is rather reversing the order of things,’ Otto said to himself. ‘I should have kept the little one, who is delightful, for my mistress, and Elisabeth who will be very useful, for a wife. Still it would tire me to have too useful a wife.’ He was not impatient for his answer. If it had been unfavourable, he knew that it would have come earlier—it would, in fact, have come before his offer had been made. He went on entertaining his hostess until he was aware that he had kept Elisabeth waiting. The dessert was on the table; in a moment Julius’s sharp green eyes would be used like missiles in the direction of his wife. Thirty seconds before this silent signal took place, Otto turned again to Elisabeth. ‘I do not know,’ she said in a low voice, ‘even how such affairs take place.’ ‘But nothing in the world is easier than to find out,’ said Otto, ‘and for such a discovery, I put myself entirely at your disposal.’ ‘Very well then,’ said Elisabeth slowly, ‘I consent.’

Frau Mandelbaum sighed luxuriously. She had eaten an excellent dinner, and she sighed partly because she had eaten it and partly because, since it had been excellent, there would be no reproaches from Julius. ‘I wish,’ she said to Otto, as she rose a little ungracefully from her chair, ‘that I had met you before, Graf Wolkenheimb. It is really wonderful what you told me about that orange marmalade. It tastes as if it were made of oranges, and there is no orange in it—nothing but a little lemon peel and very careful cooking! Wonderful! But I have always said that with careful management of materials one can do anything.’