Adelsverein

by Celia Hayes

  In frozen silence, Hansi led his wife towards the carriages. Peter offered his other elbow to Magda and whispered impishly to Anna, “Silk sheets . . .interesting.”

  “Shush!” Anna hissed in reply and called for Christian and Harry to follow. Magda did not look back; she assumed the two brothers were still sitting there, under the tree in front of that tiny cottage.

  Hansi lifted Liesel into the coach and stepped up himself, saying, “Magda—I will stay with my wife and solace myself with her company this time. You should enjoy yourself in the open air, for once.” He pulled the little door closed after himself with a bang and the coach was away with a lurch.

  “Oh, yes, Mama, come with us,” Lottie said gaily as she and Grete climbed into the barouche and settled their skirts. “I felt so sorry for you, not seeing anything around! How Onkel Hansi and Aunt Liesel can endure it on a day like this!”

  “Guess he doesn’t always need the silk sheets, then,” Peter whispered, and laughed as Anna struck her closed parasol against his shoulder. They talked of practically anything else on their return to Ulm, and Harry insisted on sitting up with the driver.

  “It was so small,” Anna said only. “I didn’t think it would be so small, or so shabby.”

  “Everything looks large and grand to a child,” Magda said, adding to herself, And sometimes to an older person, also.

  Chapter Twenty: The Enchanted Island

  Magda rejoiced at returning to their comfortable rooms in the Stephanienbad; almost like returning home, after that uncomfortable interlude in Albeck. How peculiar it was to feel so, when she had always thought of Albeck as home. No matter how far they had traveled or how well they had lived, there was some corner of her mind that considered it as such, always some thought that someday they might return and step into those rooms again. But now they had returned, and discovered that not only was Albeck small and poor, but they were no longer welcome. We are not the persons we once were, Magda thought. She picked up her treasured silver hairbrush and began brushing out her hair in front of the dressing table mirror. We have changed into someone else, without recognizing this until now.

  Behind her, she could see the heavy velvet drapes that closed over one of the tall windows in her room, fashionable sage green, and underneath it were filmy embroidered net curtains that turned the sunshine spilling through the glass into something misty and insubstantial. Her bed was made with fine linen and an elegant coverlet that matched the drapes; everything within sight being of the finest quality and most exquisite taste. How could she be one and the same as the person who had shared a tiny room under the eaves with her sister, slept on a mattress stuffed with straw and milked cows every morning, scattered grain to the chickens in the afternoon?

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a light tap on the door. “Mama, are you dressing for dinner?” Lottie asked.

  “Yes, I am, dear-heart,” she answered. “Come in, help me do up the back of my dress, as soon as I have done my hair.”

  Lottie opened the door further and slipped inside. “You know. Auntie Liesel’s maid will help you put yourself together, Mama,” she said with affection.

  “I know that, dear-heart,” Magda replied. “I suppose I hate to think that I need help getting dressed, or that my clothes are so complicated that I need anyone’s help . . . other than to do up the buttons I cannot reach! You look very elegant, Lottchen—almost a young lady.”

  Over her shoulder, Lottie smiled at her own reflection in the mirror. She wore a ruffled dress of pale yellow, with a modest neckline and elbow-length sleeves; appropriate for a girl of her age, dining in an elegant spa-hotel. Her hair was tied back with a matching silk ribbon.

  “When might I put up my hair and wear long skirts, Mama?” she asked. Lottie’s own skirt reached only to halfway between her knees and ankles.

  “When you are sixteen, Lottchen,” Magda answered. “And I would advise you to enjoy the freedom of not having your skirts trail after you, all through the dust.”

  Lottie took the hairbrush out of Magda’s hand and drew it through the spill of her mother’s hair. “But you look very nice in your faille evening dress,” she said, and she tilted her head to one side and surveyed her parent critically. “And I think you could wear colors, Mama; half-mourning at the very least. You would look so well in dove-gray or lavender.”

  “No, Lottie, I think not,” Magda answered with a sigh. “Lise vexes me endlessly on this matter; I had hoped I would not hear such from you as well.”

  “Yes, Mama,” Lottie yielded in good temper. “But may I do your hair with some clips that Dolph and I bought for you last week? They are trimmed in jet,” she added hastily as Magda opened her mouth, “and look so very elegant, in the latest fashion from Paris, so they said in the shop! We must hurry then—Peter and Anna have already gone downstairs!”

  Magda acquiesced; it would please the child that she loved so dearly to do so. Lottie floated away to fetch the clips from her room. For a moment, Magda stared at her own reflection in the pitiless glass, wondering exactly when it was that she had become old. She was fifty-three, and her hair was still mostly black, although lightly sprinkled with gray in places. She had never been thought beautiful, so she did not have the fear of seeing her looks melt away in the face of passing years. There were shadows under her eyes and a faint dark scar on her cheekbone shaped like a half-moon. Her eyes themselves were still the same, dark gray—nearly black in some lights—and shrewd; but not even in kindly candlelight would anyone think her any younger than she was. Sighing, she stood and shed her loose wrap. The gown she would wear to dinner was already laid out across the foot of her bed; a princess-cut gown that Liesel had insisted she have made for her in New York while they were waiting for the packet. The back of the skirt was drawn up with a complicated series of tapes and ties, falling in a graceful cascade to train after her, unless she used one of those clever little dress-holders to loop it up. “Not the sort of dress to wear when milking a cow or digging in the garden!” Magda observed aloud to her own reflection, just as Lottie returned with a tiny gold paste-paper box in her hand.

  “I’ll do your hair first,” Lottie sounded terribly bossy. “And you ought to have a lap dog, if you keep on with this habit of talking to yourself, Mama! At least then you can say you are talking to the dog. And Auntie is loaning you her white opal necklace for the evening. We must hurry, Dolph has already gone downstairs to wait for us.”

  As soon as her hair was done, swept up onto the top of her head and fastened with the jet hair clips that Lottie affixed with all the care of a sculptor finishing her greatest masterwork, Magda stepped into her dress. She pulled it carefully up over her hips, and the little pad tied at the back of her over-petticoat which would make the dress drape as beautifully as a waterfall.

  Lottie fastened up the buttons and stood back, biting her lip. “Just one moment,” she said. Lifting the hem of Magda’s train, she made some adjustments to the tapes that gathered the back of the dress. “There. Here’s Auntie’s necklace. Fasten it quickly, and let us go, Dolph will be wondering what is keeping us! You look very nice, Mama. If it weren’t for Dolph and Onkel Hansi, your path would be thick with gentlemen admirers.” Lottie added, with an air of world-weary sophistication which sat very oddly with her youth, “Rich widows are terribly attractive to the gentlemen who come to Baden!”

  Magda laughed. “I am sure it is the rich part which forms all the attraction, Lottchen.”

  The grand lobby of the Stephanienbad began to fill early in the evenings. Guests returning from a day at the baths, or excursions in the park, met and mingled with friends lingering over a late tea, or with other friends who planned to dine together. They circled gracefully, like golden fish in a placid pool—or, thought Magda irreverently, like the cattle in her husband’s pasture—lazily wandering here and there, gathering with their fellows in some choice spot among the potted palms and cushioned settees, and then moving onward. Gentlemen in severe black evening dres
s, or uniforms hung with gaudy rows of medals, bowed over the hands of ladies in elaborate evening dresses with ruched and ruffled trains, all the colors of the flowerbeds outside. They glittered with jewels hanging around their throats, from their ears, on their wrists, and in their elaborately piled hair. Magda had not yet tired of watching them, such a flock of glorious birds—birds that she had no wish to fly among. Other ladies had just returned and hadn’t changed for dinner, but their day dresses were no less elaborate and just as colorful.

  Magda and Lottie looked for her son as they came down the grand main staircase. Here, where there were so many other tall and fair-haired men, he and Peter were not as easily picked out.

  “Oh, Mama—is that Dolph with that Russian princess?” Lottie breathed.

  “I might have expected it,” Magda answered, “because of the dogs.”

  The old lady sat bolt upright in the middle of one of the window settees, as proud as a queen on her throne. Dolph was down on one knee, among her dogs. Only three of them this afternoon; all of them seeming quiet and well-behaved, fawning for his regard and attention. The boldest of the three stood up with its front paws on Dolph’s knee, begging for caresses. The Princess and Dolph were laughing companionably together. When Dolph saw them on the stairs, he gave the dog one last pat, excused himself to the Princess with a respectful kiss of her hand, and came to meet them.

  “Nice old girl,” he remarked by way of explanation. “She wanted to thank me for rescuing her precious little fur ball. You remember we saw her in the station on the day we arrived? We talked some about her dogs—I was curious. They are a queer breed from China, meant only to be the pet of royals. They call them lion dogs, because they are actually quite fearless and very wise. The princess says they are fiercely loyal to their owners and want to be with them at all times.”

  “I’m not sure what use such a dog like that would have,” Magda said, “aside from hunting rats, maybe!”

  “Companionship,” Dolph answered. “The littlest of the breed are carried around in the Emperor’s sleeve. The Princess said they are also trained to carry his robes and sometimes little lanterns. The Princess rather likes them—she says they have the courage and heart of a wolfhound. Like me, she finds that dogs are better company than most humans she knows.”

  Magda thought nothing of that conversation, until several days later, as she waited for Liesel in the veranda of one of the spa-baths. The day was warm and she fanned herself and wondered how much longer Liesel would take, getting dressed after a prolonged soak in the waters.

  “Your son is a delightful young man,” remarked a voice at her back. Magda started to her feet, more in respect to age than to nobility, for which Vati had never had much good to say. The Princess had obviously finished her treatment for the day. Out in the gravel forecourt, one of the Princess’ menservants waited with her wheeled invalid chair. Princess Cherkevsky leaned on a silver and ebony cane. “Manly without being a brute boor, courteous and well-mannered without being epicene. You did very well with him, Madame Becker. Alas that I am not thirty years younger, I might very well be tempted.” Her bright old eyes flicked up and down Magda’s figure, doubtless taking in every detail of her dress, the book she had been reading, and her fingers lightly stained with ink from writing Hansi’s letters. The Princess spoke proper German; her voice had the deep timbre of an old bronze bell with a crack in it, the voice of a trained singer or an actress, perhaps. “You are one of those Americans, aren’t you? I had never talked at length with an American woman before. American men, many times, but their wives bored me.”

  “I am sorry, Princess. I shall probably bore you also,” Magda answered. Amusement flashed like summer lightning in the Princess’ extraordinary eyes, a peculiar hazel-green, like new birch leaves and they were slanted almost like an oriental’s. Her face was as wrinkled as an old apple and offered a jolting contrast to her hair, dyed vividly red and piled up in a complicated arrangement of rolls and knots under a small and fashionable hat tilted rakishly forward.

  “I think not,” Princess Cherkevsky replied thoughtfully. “I have noticed that you dress to suit and please yourself—not milord Worth and the other couturiers favored by the ton. It argues an independent mind, one not easily swayed by the herd. You have well-spoken children and devote yourself equally to the welfare of your sister and her husband’s business.” The princess chuckled knowingly. “Now, he would be a boyar in the old days, a swashbuckler and an adventurer. Rather a pirate, I think. New enough to riches to enjoy it thoroughly, clever enough to be welcome among those to whom it has grown to be something that has always been there. He would amuse me, and so would you, Madame Becker. Life can become very boring, once one has lived as long as I have.”

  “Princess,” Magda began, feeling rather as if she had been run over by a stampeding herd of cows.

  The old woman merely laughed. “You may call me by my name—Irina.” Those wickedly knowing old eyes crinkled in amusement, “And I was not always a princess, my dear Madame Becker. I only married a prince after having been his mistress for years! So long ago that everyone has forgotten the scandal. I sang in the opera, not very well, I must confess. Another sort of career seemed to be a good idea. I think you also must have had an interesting life . . . a different life, anyway. You should tell me of it, little by little as we come to know each other better. I would very much like it if you would come to call on me, tomorrow, after breakfast.”

  Irina Cherkevsky consulted the little gold watch that hung from the lapel of her bodice-jacket on a gold pin shaped like a bow of ribbon. “They tell me that your family has interests in cattle in Texas, that you went from Germany to live there some years past—the servants do gossip, you know. And I am intrigued. There are so very few original people in my circle these days. Baden has become terribly dull, now that gambling is forbidden and all the most amusing visitors have fled! Will you pay a call on me, Madame Becker?”

  Magda hesitated but a moment, drawn irresistibly by the lively curiosity and the charm in those eyes, queerly seeming as young and lively as Lottie’s in her age-ruined face. “Then I shall, Madame Irina.”

  “Good! Until tomorrow then,” and the Princess stumped down towards her waiting invalid chair and settled herself into it with the assistance of the manservant who sprang into assiduous attention as soon as the old woman emerged from the porch. He wheeled her away, just as Liesel emerged from the depths of the bath, apologizing for having been so delayed.

  “You were not bored, Magda?” she asked anxiously, fanning herself vigorously with an ivory-handled fan.

  Magda answered, “Oh, no, I brought a book and one of the other hotel guests struck up a conversation with me. The Russian princess with all the dogs. You remember, Lise—from the railway station.”

  “Oh, my!” Liesel fanned herself even more vigorously. “What would Vati have thought! You on easy terms of conversation with a princess! What did she say to you, then?”

  “That she wishes for me to call on her,” Magda answered and Liesel’s eyes rounded in astonishment. “She says she would like very much to make our acquaintance. She is bored with the sameness of things.”

  “I think Vati would call her a sensation seeker,” Liesel said, censoriously. “Aren’t you afraid that she only wishes to make mock of us? Some of the others do, you know. I have heard them talking among themselves,” and the familiar tears trembled on Liesel’s eyelids. “They say we are naught but violent and vulgar, new to riches and quite without intellectual understanding of the world. The shopkeepers were so rude and disobliging, once they knew us to be Americans! I would rather not endure any more of such, Magda.”

  “I don’t think that of her,” Magda answered, thinking again of Irina Cherkevsky’s lively green eyes. Dolph liked her for her love of dogs, and called her a ‘nice old girl.’ What had she said of herself—that she was an opera singer who married a prince, so long ago that everyone had forgotten the scandal of it? “I rather liked her, Lis
e. She was not snobbish like what I had expected of the Firsts. And she said nice things of my children.”

  “Oh, that would do it,” Lise laughed, although her eyes still appeared worried. “The way to our heart—say flattering things of our children!”

  In the morning—and as it turned out, many mornings after that—Magda went to Princess Cherkevsky’s suite. The Princess’ elderly senior maid admitted her to the chamber where Irina Cherkevsky sat in her chair, being made ready to face the day through the labors of three hovering maids. The dogs romped around through the Princess’ rooms, a cacophony of shrill soprano barks greeting her; all but the fat one, who Magda now saw was a mother, nursing a litter of small, blind pups in an elaborate padded basket beneath the dressing table.

  “Such labors, in making one fit to face the public,” the Princess allowed with an oddly girlish chuckle to Magda. “Really, it’s like being made fit to face an audience upon the opera stage. Would you care for some coffee?” Without waiting for an answer, she clapped her hands and spoke sharply to the most junior maid, who set aside the garments she was folding and left the room. Presently she returned bearing a silver coffee pot on a tray with two cups. “One of life’s pleasures,” the Princess sighed with frank delight as she took her own cup in her bejeweled hand, “the first drink of coffee of a morning! The second and third do not taste so sublime. I have always wondered why?”

  “We were deprived of this during the last years of the war,” Magda offered, by way of making genteel conversation. “And to have it again was such a joy for us, after drinking roasted acorns! To me now, the second and third cup always tastes as fine as the first.”