The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (33 page)

Herr Aarenhold blinked. His wife was impossible. She was small, ugly, prematurely aged, and shrivelled as though by tropical suns. A necklace of brilliants rested upon her shrunken breast. She wore her hair in complicated twists and knots to form a lofty pile, in which, somewhere on one side, sat a great jewelled brooch, adorned in its turn with a bunch of white aigrettes. Herr Aarenhold and the children had more than once, as diplomatically as possible, advised against this style of coiffure. But Frau Aarenhold clung stoutly to her own taste.

The children came: Kunz and Märit, Siegmund and Sieglinde. Kunz was in a braided uniform, a stunning tanned creature with curling lips and a duelling scar. He was doing six weeks' service with his regiment of hussars. Märit made her appearance in an uncorseted garment. She was an ashen, austere blonde of twenty-eight, with a hooked nose, grey eyes like a falcon's, and a bitter contemptuous mouth. She was studying law and went entirely her own way in life.

Siegmund and Sieglinde came last, hand in hand, from the second floor. They were twins, the youngest of the children, slender as willow wands, and with immature figures despite their nineteen years. She was wearing a Florentine cinquecento frock of claret-coloured velvet, too heavy for her slight body. Siegmund had on a grey jacket suit with a tie of raspberry shantung, patent-leather shoes on his narrow feet, and cuff-links set with small diamonds. He had a strong growth of black beard but kept it so close-shaven that his sallow face with the heavy gathered brows looked no less boyish than his figure. His head was covered with thick black locks parted far down on one side and growing low on his temples. Her dark brown hair was waved in long, smooth undulations over her ears, confined by a gold circlet. A large pearl – his gift – hung down upon her brow. Round one of his boyish wrists was a heavy gold chain – a gift from her. They were very like each other, with the same slightly drooping nose, the same full lips lying softly together, the same prominent cheekbones and black, bright eyes. But the closest resemblance lay in their long slim hands, his no more masculine than hers, save that they were slightly redder. And they went always hand in hand, untroubled by the fact that the hands of both tended to become sweaty.

The family stood about awhile in the lobby, scarcely speaking. Then von Beckerath appeared. He was engaged to Sieglinde. Wendelin opened the door to him and as he entered in his black frock-coat he excused himself on all sides for his tardiness. He was a senior civil servant and came of a good family. He was short of stature, with a pointed beard and a very yellow complexion, like a canary. His manners were punctilious. He began every sentence by drawing his breath in quickly through his mouth and pressing his chin on his chest.

He kissed Sieglinde's hand and said:

‘And you must excuse me too, Fraulein Sieglinde – it is so far from the Ministry to the Tiergarten –'

He was not allowed to say the familiar
du
to her – she did not like it. She answered briskly:

‘Very far. Supposing that, in consideration of the distance, you left your office a bit earlier?'

Kunz seconded her, his black eyes narrowing to glittering slits:

‘It would no doubt have a most beneficial effect upon the tempo of our domestic arrangements.'

‘Oh, well – business, you know what it is,' von Beckerath said dully. He was thirty-five years old.

The brother and sister had spoken glibly and with point. They may have attacked out of a habitual inward posture of self-defence; perhaps they deliberately meant to wound – perhaps again their words were due to the sheer pleasure of turning a phrase. It would have been pedantic to hold it against them. They let his feeble answer pass, as though they found it in character; as though cleverness in him would have been out of place. They went in to lunch; Herr Aarenhold led the way, eager to let von Beckerath see that he was hungry.

They sat down; they unfolded their stiff table-napkins. The immense room was carpeted, the walls were covered with eighteenth-century panelling, and three electric chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The family table, with its seven places, was lost in the void. It was drawn up close to the large French window, beneath which a dainty little fountain spread its silver spray behind a low lattice. Outside was an extended view of the still wintry garden. Tapestries with pastoral scenes covered the upper part of the walls; they, like the panelling, had been part of the furnishings of a French château. The dining-chairs were low and soft and cushioned with tapestry. A tapering glass vase holding two orchids stood at each place, on the glistening, spotless, faultlessly ironed damask cloth. With careful, skinny hands Herr Aarenhold settled the pince-nez half-way down his nose and with a mistrustful air read the menu, three copies of which lay on the table. He suffered from a weakness of the solar plexus, that nerve centre which lies at the pit of the stomach and may give rise to serious distress. He was obliged to be very careful what he ate.

There was bouillon with beef marrow, sole
au vin blanc,
pheasant, and pineapple.

Nothing else. It was a simple family lunch. But it satisfied Herr Aarenhold. It was good, light, nourishing food. The soup was served: a dumb-waiter above the sideboard brought it noiselessly down from the kitchen and the servants handed it round, leaning forward, concentration written all over their faces in a kind of passionate service. The tiny cups were of translucent porcelain, whitish morsels of marrow floated in the hot golden liquid.

The warmth of the soup caused Herr Aarenhold to bring up a little wind. He carried his napkin cautiously to his mouth and cast after a means of expressing what was on his mind.

‘Have another cup, Beckerath,' he said. ‘A working-man has a right to his comforts and his pleasures. Do you really like to eat – really enjoy it, I mean? If not, so much the worse for you. To me every meal is a little celebration. Somebody said that life is beautiful, in that it is arranged so that we can eat four times a day. He's my man! But to do justice to the arrangement one has to preserve one's youthful receptivity and not everybody can do that. We get old – well, we can't help it. But the thing is to keep things fresh and not get used to them. For instance,' he went on, putting a bit of marrow on a piece of roll and sprinkling salt on it, ‘your situation is about to change, the plane on which you live is going to be a good deal elevated' (von Beckerath smiled), ‘and if you want to enjoy your new life, really enjoy it, consciously and artistically, you must take care never to get used to your new situation. Habit means death. It is ennui. Don't become settled, don't let anything become a matter of course, preserve a childlike taste for the sweets of life. You see  …  for some years now I have been able to command some of the amenities of life' (von Beckerath smiled), ‘and yet I assure you, every morning that God lets me wake up I have a little thrill because my bed-cover is made of silk. That is what it is to be young. I know perfectly well how I did it; and yet I can look round me and feel like an enchanted prince.'

The children exchanged looks, so openly that Herr Aarenhold could not help seeing it; he became visibly embarrassed. He knew that they were united against him, that they despised him: for his origins, for the blood which flowed in his veins and through him in theirs; for the way he had earned his money; for his fads, which in their eyes were unbecoming; for his valetudinarianism, which they found equally annoying; for his weak and whimsical loquacity, which in their eyes traversed the bounds of good taste. He knew all this – and in a way conceded that they were right. But after all he had to assert his personality, he had to lead his own life; and above all he had to be able to talk about it. That was only fair – he had proved that it was worth talking about. He had been a worm, a louse if you like. But just his capacity to realize it so fully, with such vivid self-contempt, had become the ground of that persistent, painful, never-satisfied striving which had made him great. Herr Aarenhold had been born in an out of the way place in the east, had married the daughter of a well-to-do tradesman, and by means of a bold and shrewd enterprise, of sharp practice on a grand scale which had as its object a new and productive coal-bed, he had diverted a large and inexhaustible stream of gold into his coffers.

The fish course descended. The servants hurried with it from the sideboard through the length of the room. They handed round with it a creamy sauce and poured out a Rhine wine that prickled on the tongue. The conversation turned to the approaching wedding between Sieglinde and von Beckerath.

It was close at hand, it was to take place in the following week. They talked about the trousseau, about plans for the wedding journey to Spain. Actually it was only Herr Aarenhold who talked about them, supported by von Beckerath's polite acquiescence. Frau Aarenhold ate greedily, and as usual contributed nothing to the conversation save some rather pointless questions. Her speech was interlarded with guttural words and phrases from the dialect of her childhood days. Märit was full of silent opposition to the church ceremony which they planned to have; it affronted her highly enlightened convictions. Herr Aarenhold also was privately unenthusiastic about the wedding ceremony. Von Beckerath was a Protestant and in Herr Aarenhold's view Protestant ceremonial was without any aesthetic value. If von Becklerath had belonged to the Catholic faith, now that would have been a different matter altogether. Kunz said nothing, because when von Beckerath was present he always felt annoyed with his mother. And neither Siegmund nor Sieglinde displayed any interest. They held each other's narrow hands between their chairs. Sometimes their gaze sought each other's, melting together in an understanding from which everybody else was shut out. Von Beckerath sat next to Sieglinde on the other side.

‘Fifty hours,' said Herr Aarenhold, ‘and you are in Madrid if you like. That is progress. It took me sixty by the shortest way. I assume that you prefer the train to the sea route via Rotterdam?'

Von Beckerath hastily expressed his preference for the overland route.

‘But you won't leave Paris out. Of course, you could go direct to Lyons. And Sieglinde knows Paris. But you should not neglect the opportunity  …  I leave it to you whether or not to stop before that. The choice of the place where the honeymoon begins should certainly be left to you.'

Sieglinde turned her head, turned it for the first time towards her betrothed, quite openly and unembarrassed, careless of the lookers-on. For quite three seconds she bent upon the courteous face beside her the wide-eyed, questioning, expectant gaze of her sparkling black eyes – a gaze as vacant of thought as any animal's. Between their chairs she was holding the slender hand of her twin; and Siegmund drew his brows together till they formed two black furrows at the bridge of his nose.

The conversation veered and tacked to and fro. They talked of a consignment of cigars which had just come by Herr Aarenhold's order from Havana, packed in zinc. Then it circled round a point of purely abstract interest, brought up by Kunz: namely whether, if
a
were the necessary and sufficient condition for
b, b
must also be the necessary and sufficient condition for
a.
They argued the matter, they analysed it with great ingenuity, they gave examples; they lost the thread more and more, attacked each other with steely and abstract dialectic, until feelings began to run just a little high. Märt had introduced a philosophical distinction, that between the actual and the causal principle. Kunz told her, with his nose in the air, that ‘causal principle' was a pleonasm. Märit, in some annoyance, insisted upon her terminology. Herr Aarenhold straightened himself, with a bit of bread between thumb and forefinger, and prepared to elucidate the whole matter. He suffered a complete rout, the children joined forces to laugh him down. Even his wife jeered at him. ‘What are you talking about?' she said. ‘Where did you learn that – you didn't learn much!' Von Beckerath pressed his chin on his breast, opened his mouth, and drew in breath to speak – but they had already passed on, leaving him hanging.

Siegmund began, in a tone of ironic amusement, to speak of an acquaintance of his, a child of nature whose simplicity was such that he had managed to remain in ignorance of the difference between an ordinary jacket and a dinner jacket. This Parsifal actually talked about a checked dinner jacket. Kunz knew an even more pathetic case – a man who went out to tea in a dinner jacket.

‘Wearing a dinner jacket in the afternoon!' Sieglinde said, making a face. ‘Only animals do that.'

Von Beckerath laughed assiduously. But inwardly he was remembering that once he himself had worn a dinner jacket before six o'clock. And with the game course they passed on to matters of more general cultural interest: to the plastic arts, of which von Beckerath was an amateur, to literature and the theatre, which in the Aarenhold house had the preference – though Siegmund did devote some of his leisure to painting.

The conversation was lively and general, the young people taking a dominant part in it. They talked well, their gestures were highly strung and self-assured. They marched in the van of taste, and demanded the ultimate. For the vision, the intention, the labouring will, they had no use at all; they ruthlessly insisted upon power, achievement, success in the cruel trial of strength. The triumphant work of art they recognized – but they paid it no homage. Herr Aarenhold himself said to von Beckerath;

‘You are very indulgent, my dear fellow; you speak up for intentions – but results,
results
are what we are after! You say: ‘Of course his work is not much good – but he was only a peasant before he took it up, so his performance is after all astonishing.' Nothing doing. Accomplishment is absolute, not relative. There are no mitigating circumstances. Let a man do first-class work or let him shovel coals. How far should I have got with a good-natured attitude like that? I might have said to myself: ‘You were nothing but scum originally – wouldn't it be wonderful if you manage to set up your own business.' Well, I'd not be sitting here! I've had to force the world to recognize me, so now I won't recognize anything unless I am forced to! This is Rhodes, why then, so dance!'