A Legacy (13 page)

"Sessions?" said Julius.

"Petty-Sessions. Not before after the summer Recess. The Courts don't sit in August and their lists are pretty heavy."

"I used to give very nice suppers Chez Maxim's, and at the Cafe de la Paix. Ask the head waiters," said Emil. "But that was a long time ago."

"When he was young," said Grandmama.

"And rich," said Friedrich.

"I never regretted it."

"You didn't have to," said Cousin Markwald, whom a different course had brought to a similar fate.

"This is Emil's home," said Grandmama.

"Your brother and your cousin made it that," said her husband.

"I am going to have asparagus for dinner," said Grandmama. "Flora's Max sent the first today. There's enough for one." Flora's husband, a recently ennobled banker, had also bought himself a country place. The shoot and hothouses supplied the tables of his relatives.

"Do I have to stay?" said Julius.

"Unless you want to lose a thousand thaler bail," said Friedrich.

"Was it as much as that?"

"That's what we arranged with your bankers."

"You mean I have to stay? Stay here?"

"Fortunately, there are inducements," said Gottlieb.

"You missed your turn again, young man," said Grandmama.

"I am so sorry."

"Wonder where the Threes are?" said Grandmama, looking at her bottom cards.

"Oh, one can look at one's stockpile?" said Julius. "Not usually," said Melanie.

It was she who at last took the initiative, and found herself backed by the butler.

"Mama—I don't think Jules really wants to finish the game."

"May I suggest a brief rest, ma'am, before dressing?"

"Melanie, show Baron Felden the conservatory," said Emil.

"I want to finish the game," said Grandmama.

"We musn't let our little pleasures interfere," said Gottlieb.

She rose. He followed her out of the room. His step was light. His coat hung beautifully, his back was noncommittal.

Flowers in the house gave Grandmama Merz a headache, but the conservatory was kept stocked by a visiting florist. They stood among the ferns and azaleas in great fear. He saw the threat to his existence, a cloud moving in that would engulf his private, careful life, a threat of which this house, this town, these people, were at once the portents, the tools and the reality. He felt caught up with, brought by the incomprehensible enmeshment of events to the brink, once more, of change; felt he must give battle or become submerged, felt submerged already by his own depression and forebodings. He stood with a smooth face, intent on managing the weight upon his chest and throat; he was then already suffering, or thought he did, from bronchial asthma, and he held himself quite still, coaxing, shifting, balancing the burden with false calm. Melanie moved before him: not anything like pacing, taking small steps from flower-tub to windowseat; her feet were delicate, her dress swished a little, she managed her skirts well. He was not aware of her at all.

Her fear was large and simple. She wanted to cry out, he doesn't love me any more, and knew already as
clearly as if she had been taught that she must not. She felt that something was missing and did not know what it was; that something was wrong and did not know why; knew that she would fight, and did not know what or how. She was twenty; she had never asked a question; she took for granted what she had been told, that her home was the best of possible homes and hers the best of lives, and if often she had been listless and a little sad, then that was what the best of lives must be. Her mother had wanted some small thing or other at every moment of her many days, whereas Melanie had everything she wanted and had wanted nothing very much. Now her need was entire, and it was everything. She had not heard of the relativity of love, and perhaps what animated her was not relative; her future, or the lack of one, proved it to have been the one directed longing of her body, will and pliant heart. This soft creature was discovering the necessity of courage, and found courage—she pressed aside the immediate claims of her anxiety and turned to Julius with a well-bred smile that bore no trace of either intimacy or strain.

"J'ai tant regrette d'apprendre que vous avez fait un si mauvais voyage," she said in pretty, tripping French. Her ear was good and had retained the sounds of the French governess; in the South Jules had praised her accent; since her return she had worked hard; yet the effort of making this gentle bid was tremendous and her fingers were opening and shutting on the handkerchief behind her back.

He did not notice the switch of language which to him was natural. He said, "Eh bien, ce n'etait surtout pas commode pour ces pauvres betes."

She realized then that they were not there.

He explained about his difficulties over the right food at an hotel, about their restlessness, about exercising them—

Melanie bent her head and listened. She always listened, to her uncles, to her father, to her brothers. . . .

Julius spoke for himself. "The Tier gar ten in the morn-

ing—people stare so and we have to keep to those ugly walks. They like to pick their own peaches— The man said they weren't allowed on the grass, so unfair. It isn't as if they wore boots."

"Nobody here is allowed on the grass," she said.

"Oh," he said, "is that it? Why?"

Melanie did not know.

They dropped this subject.

"Edu and Uncle Emil are persuading Papa to let me have the riding lessons."

"Ah yes," he said, "riding. ... Do you get much of it here?" He had forgotten that it was he who had urged that course, as he had forgotten that he found it odd that this was necessary.

She wanted to stretch out her hand, say, My dear, what is it? Speak to me, my dear.

He said, "The weather has not been good."

"In the South?"

"Here."

"We've not been out this week," she said. It could not come into her mind that someone so splendid was able to feel unhappiness, but she saw that he must want his house, his things, the sun— And when she saw this, she saw further—it was her habit to love her parents and to defer to them, and it did not occur to her to criticize them now, she was merely ready, if at all expedient, to throw her mother and her father to the wolves.

"It was cold this morning."

"I don't like the cold," she said.

"Of course not."

"It will not always be like this," Melanie said, her eyes on him. He did not see her, and it was possible. He does not like it here. He is not himself. This smote her. Something else entered in her feeling and, for the first time, her heart expanded in tenderness. Do not worry. It will be different soon. She was less afraid for herself now. / will find a way. It will be different when we have a house of
our own. A house where you want it. But she shrank from speaking words that included his future in her own. She found it difficult to think of more conversation, and her mind, having got hold of something, was already giving itself to practicalities. Yet they must not stay silent. "My sister Flora has a bicycle now," she said, not adding, since she's married.

Her new-found heroism kept it up, adequately; but when some time later Sarah came in, Sarah everywhere herself, in a smart grey tailor-made, three egret feathers tipping from an enormous hat, Julius turned to her in absolute relief.

^Julius borrowed pen and ink from the floor waiter and wrote to his sister-in-law. He told her that he was entangled with the Prussian law and unable to move, and would she ask her brother, Conrad Bernin, who knew about such things, to do something about it.

Clara and Gustavus, and Count Bernin poised between two offices, were at Sigmundshofen winding up the late Count's affairs. They had not seen Julius since the week when in due course and having lived rather longer than he had expected Baron Felden died and was buried by his weeping tenantry. Julius had arrived from Madrid in time to stand in the autumnal graveyard with Gustavus and the three Bernins. He was overcome, and said a word to Clara afterwards about the untrustworthiness of life. Gustavus was irreproachable, and held himself thus. Clara had masses said all over the country for the old Baron's repose; Count Bernin arranged for an income paid to Julius out of his estate. This was now nine years ago, Julius had returned to Spain but not to his post, and the Bernins only learnt from the German Foreign Office of the vague and definite letter he had sent saying he must leave them.

"The Prussian law? What can he mean?" said Count Bernin.

"We must find out, Conrad," said his sister.

"Of course," said Count Bernin.

Count Bernin in nearly all respects had become exactly like his father. (He even had the same bearing, voice and

profile, and their hair was the same grey.) So much so, that in later years very young and very old people, and the public who had watched that long career, took them to have always been the same person. Nevertheless, there was a difference, and perhaps it was that of being born in 1850 rather than in 1810. The younger Bernin, from the cradle, had breathed the air of universal suffrage. He was a shade drier, a shade less high-handed, a shade more prudent than had been his father—it was all a bit toned down; and although in the course of years he too became involved in almost everything that was going, he never saw himself as a prestidigitator. He was devoted to Clara and liked to have her about (he never married); and sometimes he accepted her advice. Clara looked up to her brother—who was two years younger—and was in his regard quite without that tinge of misgiving that had so cleft her conscience in her youth.

Count Bernin also lacked one of his father's most serviceable gifts—he was no man's fool, but he did not have the old Count's dead-plumb insight into character and motive. And this, in his turn, the old man had not realized. Thus Bernin saw his brother-in-law as what he largely was: dullish, idle, punctilious, vain; not a bad sort, not incapable of taking pains—Clara's husband, rather nil, rather decent, mildly useful. The old Count had seen Gustavus whole, and had failed to impart this knowledge to his son. Throughout his life, the Count had had to pay for his repeated failure to communicate an essential fact at the right time. Here, he had not spoken merely because he did not know that this was necessary; he saw Conrad as he saw himself, he did not conceive that anything he found obvious was not obvious also to his son.

"Why Berlin?" said Count Bernin.

"I don't know," said Clara, to whom one place was much like another.

"You didn't see him there—the time Papa was trying to smooth things for him. How he carried on— He could not

understand why he had to come at all. It worried him; he had wanted to leave straight from Bonn to London. I can't think what they made of him at the Wilhelmstrasse."

"He never really passed those exams," said Gustavus.

"Oh exams," said Count Bernin.

"London was a splendid first post for so young a man, quite unexpected. I believe he owed it entirely to your father, Clara."

"Poor Jules, I remember how disappointed he was. He had been so certain that it would be Spain."

It had once been one of Count Bernin's schemes to create precedent by inserting the thin wedge of undemon-stratively catholic young Catholics into diplomatic posts in countries fidgety about that faith; and indeed Julius had caused no scandal at the Court of Queen Victoria in so far as he had never thought to mention that he was a member of the Roman Church at all.

"He enjoyed it in the end," said Count Bernin. "At least he ought to have, he went down so frightfully well. The English adored him."

"He said he liked the houses and the horses," said Clara; "he said it was all very much like being at Landen."

"He was good at knowing where people's silver and things came from, and he never talked politics."

"Count Helmholz told me they couldn't get Jules to do any work," said Gustavus.

"Well he wasn't expected to do that."

"They also said he was wonderfully discreet."

Count Bernin sighed. "It was his great talent. Quite wasted unfortunately—sheer hypocrisy."

"You will help him?" said Clara.

"My dear: does one tamper with the Prussian law? Que diable allait-il chercher dans cette galere?"

"I don't suppose one could ask?" said Gustavus.

"Why not?" said Clara. "I will. If you really wish to know, Conrad?"

"Do," said Count Bernin.

To the point-blank question Julius replied one sentence: He was in Berlin because he had been supposed to get married.

"How very, very nice for Jules," said Clara.

"To whom?" said Gustavus.

"In Berlin?" said Count Bernin.

"We must hope that hers is a solid faith. Anything less would be fatal for both of them."

"Well, people tend to have that in partibus"

Before writing again to Jules, Clara withdrew to the oratory and gave herself to thankfulness.

"We ought to do something to take them off poor Jules's hands," said Sarah, buttoning long gloves. "I'm going to that sale. Andirons and pewter this afternoon. Gothic. Well— Jules said he'd look in if he could manage. I also refuse to have them in the house, but perhaps we can organize something?"

"Why don't you send the girls with Miss Mills, they can go to a bun shop or the zoo or something," said Edu.

"I did. It was not a success. Nobody was the right age."

"Tell you what, I'll get Papa to take them on his drive. Fraulein von Tschernin can't mind; after all she gets paid."

"Miss Mills minded. She told me."

Grandpapa Merz and Fraulein von Tschernin called for Robert and Tzara in the landau. The four of them drove along the Lenee Strasse and the Viktoria Strasse and the Liitzow Ufer; they had bought a bag of nuts, and Grandpapa soon picked up the trick of aiming shells at the hats of the passers-by. Giesela von Tschernin had had a pony and once reared a wolf cub in her mortgaged home by the Vistula, now she inhabited a faded chambre de jeune fille on the second-floor flat of a civil-service uncle, and her numbed heart stirred once more with happiness.