The Light Heart (29 page)

Phoebe found that her lack of easy conversation German was no drawback, as everybody spoke fluent if somewhat Miltonian English with a strong German accent. Precedence removed her from her host’s side at the lengthened dinner table, and dealt her Uncle Eugen as Rosalind had feared, and his behaviour seemed likely to develop along the lines Evelyn had complained of. He was a gigantic, pudgy man who ogled Phoebe unmercifully from the beginning and addressed her
facetiously as Missy, being under the impression that in America that was a form of pet-name. When he unfolded his napkin at table his wandering hand beneath the cloth sought for Phoebe’s garter, and he sniggered joyfully when she gave him a look of outraged incredulity—and in jerking her knees away from Uncle Eugen she bumped them into Cuno von Tiefenfurt’s on the other side, and instantly received an answering,
sympathetic
pressure. In the drawing-room Uncle Eugen still pursued her, professing not to believe that all that so beautiful hair was real,
hein?

The company had now increased to fourteen, with Uncle Eugen’s wife, Aunt Nini, their married son and his wife, their unmarried son aged seventeen, and two nondescript female cousins beginning with
von,
who were travelling with them. When Phoebe attempted to avoid Uncle Eugen she finally found herself in the sheltering proximity of
Prince Conrad with unmixed relief. She asked him rather faintly if he would mind opening a window, as she was not accustomed to so much cigar smoke. He gave her a knowing smile like a wink, and turned at once to the heavy brocade curtains behind him, which had been drawn against the cool mountain air.

“Is Uncle Eugen too much for you?” he asked in a colloquial aside as she stood at his elbow waiting for a chance to breathe. “You have made a lasting impression, I see.”

“Can’t you save me?” she asked, and at the intimate amusement in his glance wished she hadn’t and remembered that she was disgusted with him too.

“I thought an American miss was always capable of saving herself,” he murmured.

“Now, don’t
you
start!” she bade him crossly, and inhaled.

“I may say it, then—your so delightful little name—Phoebe?”

“Yes, of course. And I shall call you Conrad. It would be very silly if we go on being formal, I think.”

“Thank you.” And he made her a small, ironic bow, with implications.

“I never saw such a country for compliments,” she
complained
.
“It’s enough to make one quite vain, except I think you do it automatically.”

“But we have not always so much cause,” he remarked with a gallant smile.

“You’re just as bad as the rest of them, aren’t you,” said Phoebe cruelly. “Not much more subtle, really, than young Cuno. I’m getting most awfully tired of him.”

“Then he shall be removed,” Conrad assured her at once. “I thought he amused you.”

“You thought nothing of the kind, you enjoyed seeing me try to cope with both of them. I warn you, I’ll cope with Uncle Eugen in a way you won’t like if you don’t tone him down some.”

Conrad threw back his head and laughed, so that Aunt Christa looked round inquisitively and said something behind her fan to Aunt Nini.

“Behave yourself, you’ll have them all down on me,” Phoebe said in a savage undertone.

“Oh, they are that already,” he told her cheerfully. “In the first place, you are beautiful, foreign, unmarried, famous—you dress expensively, you travel alone, with money in your own right. Well, obviously, you cannot be all that and virtuous too!” He laughed again at her expression of angry, speechless surprise. “But you must not blame the boys too much,” he went on. “It is naturally beyond their comprehension that a woman like yourself should be, by choice, without a lover.” His look, direct and piercing under lazy lids, gave the word a capital letter. “They are anxious to convey to you that such a sad state of affairs need not continue—indefinitely.”

Phoebe looked at him straightly and then said between her teeth, “For two cents I’d scratch your eyes out.”

“My dear Phoebe, I hope you have not misunderstood me,” he murmured, and she wavered, wondering if she had, and he added unexpectedly, “I have read that new book of yours you brought to Rosalind. And I should like to ask how you know so much about what goes on inside a man’s head and heart. It is
presumptuous for any woman to be so clever about a man. You have never been married?”

“No. And because you are dying to ask, I have never lived with one either.”

His gaze rested on her thoughtfully, encompassing without the need of shifting its focus her shining, brushed brown hair, her sweet, serious eyes, that full lower lip, that young throat, and the slim bare arms in the low cut gown.

“What a waste,” he said regretfully.

“Conrad, can you not close the window now?” Aunt Christa’s querulous voice came across the room. “It is foolish extravagance to open windows when a fire is burning. The English, of course, prefer to live in a draught, and that is why they have so many weak chests, like King Edward, who died of it. Is it true, do you think, that the new King will be more lenient towards Germany than his father? Nini says that in Berlin there is now some hope that all this nonsense in London about our building a fleet to attack England will cease. Everyone in Germany knows that we must have a fleet to defend ourselves, or even to be a valuable ally to England, yes, in the event of a war.”

“A war with whom?” Phoebe asked interestedly, glad of an opportunity to slip into a chair next to Aunt Christa, where she should be comparatively safe from Uncle Eugen’s attentions. “Why should there be war in Europe?”

“Why, indeed?” said Aunt Christa with a shrug. “But one hears nothing else these days, and everyone knows that Germany is encircled by hostile nations who fear her as never before.”

“Encirclement is becoming a fashionable word in Berlin,” Prince Conrad said quietly. “As a matter of fact, Germany has been encircled ever since the Treaty of Verdun a thousand years ago. There is of course always the danger of coalitions, which was Bismarck’s nightmare, but I am sure everyone agrees that a European war now would be an unspeakable calamity.”

“Now,
Conrad, without doubt,” said Uncle Eugen’s married son with unmistakable emphasis. “We are not at present in a
position to come out of a fight with—let us say England—as victors. But in two or three years, when our fleet is built, then we can talk seriously to England.”

“Say four or five years,” said Uncle Eugen judicially. “When our arrangements in Heligoland are completed. Say about 1915.”

“I am convinced that England will never attack Germany alone,” said Prince Conrad conclusively. “And I do not think she will find allies in such an enterprise. In which case there will be no war.”

“And anyway, the British Empire is breaking up,” Uncle Eugen’s married son assured them comfortingly. “Canada wants to join on to America, as everyone knows—Australia is going to declare her independence, I can promise you—India is seething to be free of British rule—things are brewing up against England all over the world. We have only to wait a bit. Soon we shall have nothing to fear from that quarter. They have no notion of administering colonies, and their economic system at home is childish—just one long bungle.”

“Like their cooking,” nodded Aunt Nini. “They have for a sweet a thing called gooseberry fool—ugh!—it is a good name!’ She cackled delightedly at her joke. “Nothing they eat is not a fool!”

“When were you in England last?” asked Phoebe politely.

“Never!” said Aunt Nini with a sweeping-away gesture. “I would not go to England, there is nothing to see there.”

“If England has so many shortcomings one wonders how it ever came to be a nation at all,” Phoebe remarked recklessly, aware that Rosalind had warned her and was even now trying to catch her eye, and not caring.

“England has arrived where she is by seizing unlawfully everything she could get her hands on,” said Uncle Eugen petulantly. “Now it is going to be our turn.”

“To do the same?” Phoebe asked at once.

“To become great and powerful and rich,” said Uncle Eugen, though he would have denied in the next breath that
England was any of those things. “No young miss from America, however pretty, can have any idea of such matters. All you know of England is the hunting balls and the shops in Bond Street,
hein?”
He rumbled with his unctuous chuckle, bending towards her to shake a playful finger. “And the flirtations,
hein?
How about young Cuno, here—have you seen in the English Army anything finer than our German lieutenants, Missy, answer me that one! No doubt you and Cuno have already much in common,
hein?
Ah, but if I were only Cuno’s age, then you would have to watch out!”

“Eugen,” said Aunt Nini, but without real reproof, seeming rather pleased than not that her husband was causing the American miss some embarrassment. “And will you be in
Germany
long, Fraulein?” she added to Phoebe somewhat pointedly.

“Not long now,” said Phoebe with sweet obtuseness. “I have an aunt at Cannes, and I expect to go on there.”

“It will be the wrong time of year for Cannes,” Aunt Nini objected patronizingly. “It will be hot.”

“I’m a southerner,” Phoebe told her. “I like heat.”

“Summer is the time to visit our German spas,” Aunt Nini said. “And you should see our winters. You do not have such winters in America! Snow—you never saw such snow! And you should but witness a German Christmas—such toys—such music—such cooking—”

“I should like very much to have a Christmas here,” Phoebe agreed, seizing a safer topic. “Perhaps sometime I can come again at Christmas time and see Rosalind handing out gifts to the schoolchildren—how many people was it you shook hands with once, Rosalind, and all of them belonging to the estate? You wrote the most fascinating letter, I remember, all about the reception down in the riding-school, and the children singing carols and the tree—and then how you had your own private English Christmas in your own rooms afterwards, with crackers and plum pudding from London, and your maid and the Scottish gardener’s family in to share it.”

There was suddenly an awful silence. Rosalind sat motionless,
looking down at her clasped hands in her lap, while every eye in the room came to rest on her. Phoebe realized too late that she must have given something away, and glanced appealingly at Conrad. The look he gave her was remote, inscrutable, almost expressionless. She wondered if even Conrad had known about the English Christmas in Rosalind’s rooms, with only a few homesick servants to share it.

“When was this, Rosalind?” Aunt Christa asked when the silence had lasted long enough.

“Oh, years ago,” Rosalind said hastily, and it was impossible to explain to Aunt Christa that it was the year when Conny was spending all his time with the Grand Duchess Franziska and took no
interest in how his wife spent hers, waiting for Victor to be born. “Conny said I might if I liked. He wasn’t there.”

“Why was I not told?” Aunt Christa demanded.

“I don’t remember. Perhaps I thought you wouldn’t be interested. It was so long ago the gardener’s children who came to pull crackers that night are quite grown up now and have probably forgotten all about it.”

“But it seems to me a very curious thing to do,” persisted Aunt Christa offendedly. “To entertain the servants privately, behind my back, in your husband’s home.”

“I wasn’t plotting to overthrow the Kingdom of Prussia, Aunt Christa,” Rosalind said, goaded out of her better
judgment
. “It was just that I had hoped to go home that Christmas and it proved to be—inconvenient. So I—”

“
Home,
your home is
here,
how many times must I tell you, Rosalind, her husband’s home is the only one a married woman has to call her own?” thundered Aunt Christa. “Always you speak of England as though you had left it last week, and for a visit only. You have a German husband, lucky for you, and a German son, and consequently a German
home.
England you have finished with, and England is finished, you will see! Give thanks that you live here in Germany where the future of the world will be born—for your children to inherit.”

Again there was the silence, and they all seemed to be waiting
for something, their eyes boring into the slim figure of Conrad’s wife, who sat very still looking down at her hands in her lap. Again Phoebe stole a glance at Conrad, but his gaze was fixed on the ash of his cigar, poised in a steady, well-kept hand. A little muscle twitched rhythmically in his cheek, indicating suppressed anger—with whom? When the silence had become quite unbearable—

“Yes, Aunt Christa,” said Rosalind, very low, without moving.

“‘
Yes,
Aunt
Christa!
’” mimicked that implacable woman, red and angry and restless in her chair. “Lip service! And behind my back—drinking champagne with gardeners and ladies’ maids! What will our own servants think? What an example to set to Conrad’s children!”

“Victor wasn’t born!” cried Rosalind, and bit her lip.

“Or doubtless his English nursemaid would also have been invited to drink Conrad’s champagne!” Aunt Christa took it up. “Our honest German nurse-girls are not good enough for the children of
die
Engländerin!
We must have one over from London, in a fancy cap, who will raise us up milksops to play cricket—”

“
Quatsch!
” said Prince Conrad suddenly, and it was the first and last time Phoebe ever heard him use a German word in conversation.

Every head in the room turned to him as with that stupendous rudeness he rose and strolled easily, but with purpose, to his wife’s chair and paused behind it, one hand resting lightly on its back, as he faced his astonished relations.

“I myself had an English nurse, as you know very well as did Cuno, and the Emperor himself, for that matter,” he
continued
with a parade ground rasp in his usually quiet voice. “Are
we
milksops? Do
we
play cricket? It is good for languages. And it is good for manners.” He ran a cold, critical eye over Uncle Eugen’s unmarried son, who was certainly not notable for grace of manner. “When Victor is told to do a thing, he obeys already like a soldier—thanks to that Englishwoman in a fancy cap, whose name is actually Smith. The English know
how to bring up children. They do not know how to train an army, but their nurseries know discipline. With us, it is the other way around. Victor will have the advantage of both, and will do us all credit by the time he is commissioned—eh, Aunt Christa?”