Irretrievable (24 page)

“Well,” said the Princess, “that is certainly rather more complicated but still far from requiring me to be invoked as a bogy of prudery, as my dear Schleppegrell seems to have done this morning. And apropos of prudery, yesterday I was reading in a French book that prudery when one is no longer young and beautiful is like a scarecrow that has been left standing after the harvest. Not bad: the French understand such matters. But to return to our subject, as far as the story of King Christian's exclusion from his bedroom is concerned, I should be only too glad if all our stories of kings and princes were equally harmless, for nowadays they seem to deal mainly with the opposite process. I am sure that Count Holk shares my view. Tell me, Count, what do you think of the story?”

“To tell the truth, my dear Princess, I find it rather petty and somewhat trivial.”

“Trivial?” echoed Ebba. “Now there you must let me join issue with you. The paying of the wages on Saturday was trivial, but not this. A grim and sour woman is never trivial and when her bad humour goes so far as to exclude her husband from her bed (I regret to have to mention this but history demands that the truth be unveiled, not hidden), then it is most definitely not trivial. I call my gracious Princess as witness and shall seek refuge in her protection. But men are like that today; King Christian had the event engraved in stone as something remarkable to go down to distant posterity and Count Holk considers it trivial and rather petty.”

Holk saw that he was being driven into a corner and realized at the same time that the Princess was clearly in a mood to support Ebba. He therefore hummed and hawed a little and tried to adopt a half serious, half ironical attitude, pointing out that in such matters one must distinguish between the private and the historical viewpoints; from the private point of view, such an event was something most regrettable and almost tragic, but for a king thus to be shut out of his wife's bedroom was something quite inadmissible which should never have taken place and if history nevertheless recorded it, then it was losing its grandeur and dignity and degenerating into what, rightly or wrongly, he described as “petty.”

“Bravo, Holk,” cried the Princess. “A most elegant evasion. Now Ebba, it's your turn.”

“Yes, Your Highness, I shall do as you say and if I cannot do it as a German, then I shall try to do so as a pure Scandinavian.”

Everyone was amused.

“As a pure Scandinavian,” repeated Ebba. “Of course, on my mother's side, which is the decisive factor here. The father is never really of any importance. And now to our thesis. What was Count Holk saying? Well, from his Schleswig-Holstein point of view, he may be right in his preference for grandeur, for his protest against the petty can only mean, of course, that he prefers the grandiose. But what is this grand style exactly? It merely means ignoring everything that really interests normal people. Christine Munk interests us and her ill humour interests us and the results of that ill humour on that remarkable evening, that interests us still more …”

“And Fräulein Ebba interests us most of all in her saucy mood today …”

“Although I feel rather less saucy at the moment than I do normally. I really am being quite serious. In any case, I assert with all possible seriousness and sincerity, and I am prepared to have a vote taken in every girls' school in the country, that King Henry VIII with his six wives will carry the day in any competition concerning the grand manner, not because of his couple of beheadings, you can find those anywhere, but because of the complicated little bagatelles that preceded those executions. And after Henry VIII comes Mary Stuart and after her comes France with its plethora of heroines from Agnès Sorel onwards up to Pompadour and du Barry, and Germany lags far behind. And last of all, there comes Prussia with a complete blank in this sphere. This no doubt explains why a few women writers of genius have, in desperation, been forced to attribute half a dozen love affairs to Frederick the Great merely because they felt that, without something of the sort, it was not possible for him to be considered great.”

Pentz nodded in agreement, while Holk shook his head.

“You seem to have doubts, Count, and perhaps, above all, doubts as to my sincerity, but I am speaking nothing but the truth. The grand style! Bah, of course I know that people ought to be virtuous but they are not, and if you accept this, on the whole things are better than when morality is a mere façade. Loose living only harms morals but the pretence of being virtuous harms the whole man.”

As she was speaking, a wax angel fell from one of the Christmas trees standing round the table just where Pentz was sitting. He took it up and said: “A fallen angel; signs and portents are occurring. Who can this be?”

“Not I,” laughed Ebba.

“No,” confirmed Pentz and the tone in which he said this made Ebba change colour. But before she could retaliate for this impertinence, a pattering of feet was heard behind the screen of firs and cypresses, orders were given in a whisper and children's voices started singing. It was a song specially composed by Schleppegrell for this pre-Christmas celebration which now rang out through the gallery:

This small
pre-Christmas celebration, which ended in conversation round the fireplace, with Grundtvig as the principal topic, lasted until dark and the company finally dispersed after being together for more than six hours. The Princess withdrew to her rooms and Holk once again accompanied the Schleppegrells, this time, however, as far as the town itself, and returned to his tower-room, after having given his word to visit the pastor's house next time he was free in order to see Schleppegrell's collection. Returning to his room, he wrote several letters, to Asta, Axel, and to Fräulein Dobschütz. He had received a note from the latter on the previous day, just before the departure of the court for Fredericksborg; in it she informed him that Christine would not be writing, as she was unwell. It cannot be claimed that this information caused Holk much disappointment. Although he was aware of his wife's love of the truth, he said to himself: “She must be in a bad temper and calls it being unwell. If one wants, one can always become ill and enjoy the privilege of being able to justify any whim.”

Next morning was again bright and cloudless; the air was still and Holk, who was to report for duty at noon, was sitting by the window looking over to Hilleröd church with its weather-cock glittering in the sun. All the houses lay still and silent, the roofs spick and span, and but for the smoke rising from the chimney-pots, one might have thought that the whole town was under a spell. No trace of any people. “How happy one would be to live amid such quiet,” he said to himself; and then, realizing that Holkenäs was just as quiet, he added: “Yes, as quiet but not as peaceful. How I envy the pastor the life he leads! He has his parish, his prehistoric tombs, his excavations in the peat, quite apart from Herluf Trolle, and he lets the world go on its way. Hilleröd is his world. It's true that no one can know what his inner life is like. He seems so restful, so limpid, so completely at peace, but is he? Even if it is true that three princesses fell in love with him one after the other, or perhaps all together, his present idyllic existence seems to me a doubtful sort of happiness as the outcome of it all. Marrying a princess is an even more doubtful happiness, I know, but when you have been prudent enough to avoid it and then have only the provincialism of Hilleröd as sole reward for your pains, you must often feel a sort of yearning for the past. An excellent little woman, that dumpling of a wife but quite unsuited to help a man like Schleppegrell to forget the past. After all, everyone has his particular form of vanity and pastors are said not to be deficient in this respect.”

He continued musing in this strain for a while and, while doing so, went once more over all the events and experiences of the past twenty-four hours: the walk towards Fredericksborg, the ferry with the cable to cross the moat, the wonderful view of the back of the castle with its steep roof and its towers and finally the stone inscription and his conversation with Ebba. “Ebba never speaks with any affection for the Princess, which is another proof that wit and gratitude make bad bed-fellows. If she wants to say something caustic, then she says it, and any sense of obligation is buried and forgotten. I don't want to bring up the Stockholm affair again, it's better to let the matter rest, although there may well be grounds for gratitude there as well; but even now, when the Princess is spoiling her so thoroughly in all that she says or does, Ebba merely takes everything for granted, not only as something quite normal, but almost as if she feels herself superior to the Princess. But she is not superior, it's merely that the Princess is less sophisticated in her way of speaking. For example, when we were talking about old Grundtvig yesterday, how excellent were all the remarks she made, from the wealth of her wide experience—which reminds me that I might use them as a postscript for my letter to Julie, since it turned out to be a trifle thin, in any case.”

He sat down at the desk beside the window and wrote on the side that was still blank: “A short postscript, my dear Julie. Amongst other subjects of conversation yesterday was Grundtvig. Schleppegrell was trying to make him out to be a plaster-saint, in which he was supported, ironically of course, by Pentz and Fräulein Rosenberg. But the Princess took it all quite seriously and said: ‘Grundtvig is an important person whom we have a right to be proud of, as Danes. But he has one fault: he always tries to hold aloof and dissociate himself from the rest of mankind, even including the Danes, and though people say that his opinion of Denmark is so high that he seriously believes that God speaks Danish, yet I am certain that if that opinion were ever to be generally accepted, from that day forth he would endeavour to maintain and prove conclusively that God doesn't speak Danish but Prussian. Grundtvig can't bear to find anyone agreeing with him!' This gives an excellent idea, my dear Julie, of the tone of our conversation at table and in the evening and I add this little postscript to my letter with all reservations, because I know how great is Christine's interest in pastoral anecdotes and theological controversy. And the question as to God's private language surely comes under that heading, I think. Once again, my heartiest greetings. I shall write to Christine tomorrow, if only a few lines.”

He had just placed this letter, and those to Asta and Axel, in their envelopes when there was a knock on the door. “Come in!” But the knock was merely repeated and Holk went to see who it was. Outside stood Karin, looking embarrassed, although embarrassment was the least of her accomplishments. She handed Holk some papers and letters which the postman had, in his hurry, left below with Fräulein Ebba, to save time. Fräulein Ebba sent her compliments and was planning to take a walk with Baron Pentz as far as “the stone”; the Count would know which stone she meant. Holk smiled, made his excuses, and sat down again to see what the latest post had brought. He pushed aside the newspapers as being not very promising, in view of the momentary political calm, and examined the addresses on the letters. They were all easily recognizable: one was from Petersen, another from his gardener, and the last from his brother-in-law Arne, as the Arnewieck postmark testified.

“From Alfred? What can he want? He usually interprets his free hand as major-domo broadly enough not to bother me with any queries. And it's a good thing that he does and, in general, is the sort of man that he is, for I've no desire while I am here to be worried about wool-prices and how many fat sheep are to be shipped to England. That's his business or Christine's and both of them know more about it than I do; the Arnes have always been big farmers, which is more than I can say of the Holks; I've never really done much more than play at farming. So what does he want?” Realizing the pointlessness of further conjecture, he took the letter and slit open the envelope with a small ivory paper-knife, slowly because he had a premonition that the letter contained nothing very agreeable.

He read: