The Stories of William Sansom

by William Sansom

  De Broda was enjoying himself. He felt relaxed and blank-minded and light-headed. Occasionally he tried to pull himself—as he called it—together. How could the hour be improved? Once, he remembered that Count Czernin’s shooting-box stood along the valley: and he began to speak of this. But he soon stopped.

  Suddenly Laure put her arm round his neck and kissed him.

  It was at the end of a song which she had been humming to herself, smiling down at the wine-flask. The song ended with three long waltz-beats. On each chord she gave him a long decided kiss on the lips.

  De Broda was surprised to find himself not at all astonished. It seemed the most normal thing. Not, indeed, that it was unusual for a couple to kiss at a time of music and wine. Nor, very naturally, was it unexciting. No, it was exciting. But still—normal, as though it had been ordained, as though it might already have happened before.

  As the songs were sung, as the wine-flasks emptied, they kissed again. De Broda, for once speechless, murmured only her name. Laure said nothing. She was by no means drunk: but there was about her a carelessness and a flushed bright enchantment. She seemed full of secret thoughts—secrets that made her blush and smile into herself. Now and then she held her head back from de Broda and looked at him carefully, her lips parted in peculiar interest, half-closed eyes seeming to measure him.

  They left, and arm in arm walked down the snowy hill-road. At the escarpment edge Gastein came into view, they were just above the huddled high roofs—it looked a strange metropolis huddled in the moonlit gorge. Nearby the waterfall drummed. They left the road and stamped through moss-mounds of snow to the bridge over the fall. There they stood and gazed with wonder and with fear at the spectacle beneath.

  Wide in front the moonlit valley—white and wide, with the mountainsides tinselling their firs into blue black distance. But just beneath only darkness and the cold roar of ceaseless water. Sound echoed from the rock walls round them, such a weight of water has a machine roar, the light wooden bridge itself seemed to drum with the sound. De Broda put his arm round Laure. They stood close together moved by the great beauty around them, close too against the beautiful greatness of the fearful thing below them.

  The cold air exhilarated, it was sparkling clear and mixed wonderfully with the warm wine-fumes. A great joy seemed to swell within de Broda’s breast, he bent closer to her profile, so sadly, so beautifully incised in the moonlight—and with a blessed sense of release the words of a proposal rose to his lips.

  ‘Laure, dearest Laure….’ he whispered.

  She turned to him.

  And then suddenly the long elegant worm inside rose, the delicate worm bit him. As it bit, his lips made themselves thinner, he felt his eyes focus clearer. ‘No,’ murmured the cold emotionless worm. ‘No. Don’t be overtaken by events. You did not decide to do this yet. You decided to take exactly your own time, chose your hour, seek your setting. In another couple of days, you said.’

  ‘Laure,’ de Broda said, ‘let’s go.’

  *

  The next morning he came down late, enquired for Laure, and was told she had already left for a walk. It had become their custom to spend their mornings together, and he was a little irritated. However, he blamed himself for rising so late, put on his coat and went out.

  It was a beautiful morning. He decided to descend the steep paths by the waterfall itself, and found himself in strange country. Great conduit pipes like sleeping boas wandered among the snow and jagged rocks; rusted winches and lock-gates draped their curtains of icicle: such a vast old machinery astounded, and steam from the hot spring rose all around against the snow. Down there, deep in the gorge, the roar of the torrent drowned all other sound. De Broda was fascinated; but not for more than a quarter-hour. Normally he enjoyed a solitary walk, normally he was delighted to escape companionship. But not that day. He began to find himself uneasy for Laure’s company.

  She did not appear at luncheon.

  He spent the afternoon wandering from hotel to hotel in the hope of seeing her. He ended the afternoon with a book, and went up to his bath early.

  But once more the comfort of those waters put him at his ease, and it was in good temper that he descended to dine.

  For a number of reasons—because until the previous night they had not been on intimate but only on familiar terms, because also de Broda had been taking his time and had wished to maintain some independence, and moreover because the very size of the great mirrored and pillared dining-hall suggested a propriety that linked each table privately with each guest—they had not dined at the same table. So, since that evening Laure came down late, they did not meet until after dinner.

  De Broda was careful to seem unconcerned. He waved an invitation to her from his coffee-table—the distance of manners between the lounge and the dining-room, in fact no more than an inch of curtained glass door, might have been a mile—and Laure smiled her way over.

  He did not ask her anything, but entered instantly into a discourse upon his own day:

  ‘… one might have been on a harbour quay, such extraordinary machinery for controlling the water, and on each side the hotel walls, like wharves …’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘… and far, far above, against the sky, our bridge …’

  ‘Our bridge?’

  ‘I mean, the bridge we stood on last night.’

  ‘Oh, my dear, of course.’

  A pause. De Broda risked a tender look. He felt truly tender: only his mind, his mind layered with experience, made it a risk.

  Laure smiled brightly back. There was something inside her bubbling to come out. Suddenly it came:

  ‘You know,’ she said—and her lips dropped as though she ought not to say it—‘at least you don’t know, you’d never guess where I’ve been today!’

  Desperate to control himself, de Broda made a blank, bored face that in other circumstances might have looked plain rude. But Laure was too concerned to notice.

  ‘I daren’t tell you,’ she said. ‘I daren’t!’

  He managed a smile: ‘Then you must keep it a dead secret. No! Not a word!’

  Laure’s mouth hung still half-open. She stopped, astonished. Then a look of such disappointment came into her eyes that even de Broda saw he was being too cruel. He leaned closer, and making a play of conspiracy, whispered: ‘A secret—but let me into it.’

  She took a deep breath:

  ‘I’ve been ski-ing!’

  It was so much a reverse of all he wished for that he forgot himself.

  ‘Ski-ing! Why? Who on earth with?’

  ‘Oh …’

  She pretended nonchalance:

  ‘Herr Hörnli.’

  ‘Who …? Oh, that young Swiss?’

  ‘Yes. He passed the hotel earlyish—long before you were up. (How’s the head, by the way?) We talked a few minutes. Then he said why didn’t I ski, and he would teach me. It was such a beautiful morning I went.’

  De Broda regained himself with a pale smile: ‘So you went up and I went down.’

  ‘Can’t say I didn’t go down once or twice too,’ she giggled. De Broda laughed uneasily.

  ‘But you enjoyed yourself?’

  ‘Mm. It was lovely.’

  And she went on to tell him all about it. She told him how fine the air was, what fun it had been, where they had lunched, how they had tobogganed home.

  ‘It was difficult again at first,’ she finished. ‘But I’ll soon get used to it.’

  De Broda had been thinking—in the tolerance of his chair and the coffee and the lovely brightnesses of her smile and her hair—thinking how after all a day out must have made a refreshing change. But at her last words he properly flinched:

  ‘Get used to it?’

  ‘Yes. I’m going to concentrate.’

  ‘But Laure—you’ve only four days left!’

  ‘That’s exactly it. Only four days. I’ll have to work hard.’

  ‘You’re going ski-ing every day?’

 
‘Oh yes.’

  ‘But Laure—our walks together, we were going …’

  ‘Ludwig dear—please. You know I was supposed to be having a holiday. It’s as much for my health as anything. After being cooped up in that … in Vienna. I really owe it to myself.’

  ‘Then I won’t be seeing much of you.’

  ‘Oh, Ludwig—yes. In the evenings.’

  ‘It’s not much.’

  ‘So you don’t want to see me in the evening?’

  ‘You know I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘But you said so.’

  ‘No. Please, Laure dearest—how can I put it—I meant …’

  And for a few minutes they lightly quarrelled. De Broda grew more flustered and more apologetic. With fine petulant logic she undressed all his well-meaning. De Broda found himself physically sweating and gasping a little for breath.

  Laure relaxed. And de Broda was so much relieved that together they spent a quiet pleasant evening.

  Yet every so often de Broda remembered the kisses of the night before, and glanced at her curiously. How could she seem to forget so quickly? How retreat so easily to her earlier distance from him? Retreating to lead him on? It didn’t feel like it.

  The wine? Perhaps. But he thought not. And he contented himself by shaking inside his polite face a worldly wise head. ‘Women!’ his wisdom said. It explained nothing. It excused everything. ‘Women—they’re unpredictable!’ he repeated, and felt much better.

  *

  Had he been alone, that is truly alone, he would have delighted in the great blue winter weather and enjoyed a long walk on the white mountainside. But he was less alone than lonesome. So the next day found him impatient of the mountains and simply drifting about the small centre of Gastein itself. He knew he was alone until the evening, the whole day was free—but he could make no decision. In fact, what he had to do was simply wait until she returned. Until that time life had no moment. It was much the same, though much magnified, as the empty endless day before a long anticipated treat, before a ball.

  So he wandered round the hotels and cure-houses and the little shops. Gastein is small. One can wander from end to end in ten minutes. And back. And back again. Neither the antlers on the Villa Solitude nor the wild bulk of the Grand Hôtel de 1’Europe nor the glass canopy of the art nouveau fashion arcade, nor the damask and great brass hatpegs of the Mozart any longer entranced him. Finally he thumped the snow off his boots, entered enormous swing-doors, took a chair in an immense empty lounge and ordered a glass of active water.

  The waiter—one waiter for a hundred empty chairs—approached and receded soundlessly on thick carpet. He came and went like a figure projected, magnified and then minimized, on a screen of empty air. All one side of the lounge was glass. A long way away rose a splendid view of the mountains. But inside at the tables one felt more the glass than the view—which lay back removed like a picture. Glassy cold light like water filled every corner of the lounge. Nowhere the comfort of a dark warm shadow.

  Far away, through pillars and down marble steps, the majestic door occasionally revolved, a hushed conversation whispered at the desk with its shaded light, and some other lonely traveller passed on quiet carpets into tall corridors and away. Occasionally a bell buzzed somewhere: one expected, somehow, a sort of answer to this discreet summons: but none was heard.

  De Broda’s little bottle of water bubbled silently. But it made the only movement, and a fierce one, in the room. He himself sat absolutely still. He was engraved in the solitude—any movement would ricochet painfully in such quiet. The noise of movement would stamp too severely, then echo, then vanish to reinforce the vacuum: its shape of movement would jitter slyly in mirrors all around. For there were many mirrors—the great hall was built at a time when opulence mattered more than taste. Many styles were mixed—gilt, marbles, mirrors, plushes, brasses fought for stately precedence. It was indistinguishable from the hotel hall of a capital railway terminus anywhere. And in it de Broda began to feel as lonely as a waiting traveller. Of course, he was one.

  He sighed to his glass of water. He looked round for a paper: there was none. He looked round to see if, finally, the great room was empty: it was. He looked down at his fingers—it might be an idea to manicure his nails: but they were already done. He thought he would run over whatever papers might be in his wallet, and he felt in his pocket: but it was not there. He remembered, as one can know with instant certainty the difference between a lost and left wallet—leaving it in the hotel. But in this he was nearly saved. For a moment he became anxious. Ordering a drink without money! Would they think—? How would he convince them? But wearily the moment subsided, he had remembered how well known he was.

  And minute by minute the loneliness grew—he could quite easily have called for a paper, but his mood and the silence forbade it—and that strange feeling of ‘having no name’ returned. Ludwig de Broda, he said it to himself, Ludwig de Broda. It seemed absurd—or less than that, meaningless. He looked down at his paunch. There was certainly someone there, a slimmish someone who kept unbuttoned the lowest button on his waistcoat, and that someone was, as he knew, himself. But was it Ludwig de Broda? No.

  That Ludwig de Broda was a nothing. A little fearfully, the man in the chair tried to substantiate him. He racked his mind for scenes where de Broda had figured. The film, not in monotone as so often in a dream, but in full colour as flesh and clothes flashed across his mind. De Broda waving goodbye to a girl from the deck of a steamer leaving Budapest: de Broda in the Dolomites, a small lungfresh figure alone with a huge view: and for no particular reason de Broda in a narrow alley in Vienna, and again at some party, and in a room full of flowers lifting the hem of a housemaid’s skirt, and so on.

  He watched this de Broda in flashes through his life—until he entered the last ten years, the years of aestheticism. And now as he watched that figure of himself in picture galleries, or watching the Belvedere die in the winter sun, or standing in a railway terminus evoking its rampant days—now the character of the figure converged with his own actuality in the sort of railway hotel lounge where he was sitting and he grew more apprehensive as still it stayed separate. It seemed always to be someone else. He tried to shake the thought away, he sat up and concentrated on what was around him.

  It was, of course, the hall of a railway terminus. That had dovetailed nicely: so then he shook the terminus away, and made himself see that he was in Bad Gastein and nowhere else. But rather than bringing him to his senses, this instead reinforced the abysmal sense of loss into which he had drifted. For now again, examining a frieze of plaster amorini, feeling the long dusted drift of the great tasselled curtains, realizing the brass double eagle worked into the fender by the great fireplace—he was again back in the past century. And, whatever melancholy pleasures he derived from the paradise past, he suffered three distinct and almost material losses whenever he thought of it.

  First, the appalling notion that he had just missed all that—not by any acceptable stretch of time, such as a hundred years—but by a single generation. He had just missed it—and this easily led to a feeling that it had been purposely done to him, that he had been left out.

  Secondly, there was the suspicion that life then had been all right. As in our personal memories we usually tend to isolate and picture not times of distress but scenes of happiness or elation—how equally natural is it to conjure up and exaggerate the best of a whole period of the past! He saw in the decade of that brass double eagle only amplitude and finesse. It made today worse. So—he had been robbed, he was lost in the daylight present.

  And thirdly, thinking of the fin de siècle, he had an impression always of people in groups, never single. The group of the family—when homes were spacious and by whole households lived in. And the larger groups of occasion: the full house of the opera, the fashionable drives of the Ringstrasse seemed to have been peopled not by individuals about their own pursuits but by a gathering of people framed in a picture of united
purpose. And in the country, or in such a hotel as that in which he now sat, he saw large groups at the tables, parties of people always, and always at some height of laughter or private festival. Now, of course, there were no groups, there was neither fulness nor purpose. There was only loneliness.

  But already it was one o’clock. An hour for luncheon, and it would be two o’clock. The long hours until he would see Laure again were lessening. He cheered up a little.

  *

  After his bath, the day over, fresh and expectant, he was delighted to find Laure down in the lounge early.

  Her orange head was bent over a writing-desk. When he went over to her she looked up happily. Her face still held the flush of the snows, she had the cool radiant certainty of a woman who has just descended from the bedroom mirror. She looked up and smiled:

  ‘I’m just writing home—to plead for another two days.’

  ‘Good! Excellent!’

  ‘What they’ll say I don’t know! Still, I’ll risk it. You didn’t know I worked in a shop, did you?’

  ‘Well … no … you never told me….’

  Interesting. But de Broda was too pleased by this sudden present of a longer stay to pay much attention to it. Vaguely he thought of her as the manageress, the director of the shop: though he would in fact have scarcely been troubled by the knowledge of her more humble position. It was not unusual. Besides, his snobberies were of a different kind.

  ‘It’s a cake-shop,’ she said. And with a flourish of signature, ‘There! Either the mine goes up or it doesn’t.’

  She was in high spirits. They spent a pleasant half-hour together and then parted to dine. During dinner, exhilarated by her company after the lonely hours, he decided to make his proposal that evening. He was quite sure he was infatuated, he suspected it might be love. He considered where his words might best be said—over a bottle of wine in the Mozart? On the Wilhelm Promenade, with the great snowbound valley beneath? Mm. Or—or in a double-bath, perhaps? He chuckled. Then he thought of the high bridge over the waterfall. That was plainly the answer.