After dinner they had coffee together. Then, after some twenty minutes, Laure took out a mirror, patted her hair and said: ‘Nine o’clock! I must go.’
Unconcerned her fingers smoothed the button on a gold lipstick case and the little red knob slid out. She raised it to her lips. For a moment de Broda could say nothing. He sat quite still, only his eyes widened in dread. Then he blurted:
‘Going? Going? Going where….?’
‘I have an appointment.’
‘But—but I thought we were going to spend … you said …’
‘Did I? But we made no arrangement.’
She was still looking in the mirror. Her fingers moved too steadily, her face showed too little expression—it was plain she avoided looking at him.
He leaned forward, grasped the arm of her chair:
‘You said we could spend the evenings together. When we talked about your ski-ing. And tonight—tonight’s very important….’
‘Oh? How?’
‘Well …’
‘But look, Herr de Broda,—or should I say Bobby …?’
Now she did look at him, her teeth and the little mirror’s teeth smiling bright malice, and the red lipstick point like a sweet poison in between:
‘… look, we’re not exactly living together, are we? And you never never said: Fräulein Laure, I beg you to enchant me with your company between the hours of nine and twelve o’clock tonight! No no! Nothing like that from Bobby! As a matter of fact, I’m going out to dance.’
‘Laure!’
‘Bobby!’ she mimicked.
He got angry. He decided to put his foot down once and for all.
‘Who are you going out with?’
She frowned:
‘That sounds rather a demand. Really, Ludwig!’
He gripped the arm of her chair harder and leant his pale face earnestly towrads her. A touch of rose fevered his cheekbones. He said very softly:
‘Tell me!’
She laughed, a little frightened: ‘Well—if you must know, it’s Peter.’
‘Peter?’ His voice rose. ‘What Peter?’
‘Peter Hörnli.’
He raised his eyebrows—his one joined eyebrow. Then drawled, more comfortably: ‘Oh him—the ski-boy.’
Her voice was sharp. ‘And what’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing.’
Then he leant closer towards her, he lost his anger, he spoke earnestly and sincerely:
‘Laure dear. Don’t go. I’ve got—so much to tell you. Laure—Laure darling…. I love you. I want you, Laure—I want you to be my wife.’
The lipstick dropped away. Her hardness dropped away. Her eyes softened, but she still frowned.
She just said: ‘Oh.’
‘Laure—put him off. I wanted to tell you—to ask you later. When we were walking somewhere … not here. But now I’ve had to …. Laure,’ he took a deep and terrible breath, ‘will you be my wife?’
She said nothing. Only her eyes searched his face anxiously, as though she were looking not for love but for a sign of illness—and carefully her hand was placing the lipstick on the table.
He went on, talking quickly. ‘Laure—it’s only Hörnli. You can easily leave a note. Do, darling, write one now, we can go out the other way—he’s calling for you, I suppose?’
Slowly she said: ‘But Ludwig—Ludwig—I—I can’t marry you.’
His mouth pursed into a smile, as at some little puzzle he shook his head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m already engaged.’
She put her hand softly over his. It was no touch, it was a compress.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘To Peter Hörnli.’
His hand loosened on the arm of her chair. He looked simply puzzled.
‘I’m so sorry, Ludwig.’
There was a small commotion by the inner swing-doors: a stamping of snow, beating of gloves.
‘There he is already—Ludwig, you don’t want to meet … no … of course. No—I must go.’
She rose and left him. She did not look back.
De Broda sat quite still. More than anything—he was seized with wonder. He simply could not understand. An old feeling overwhelmed him—of being in class and not knowing the lesson. Blankly and almost casually, as if there was no hope of solving the problem, as if that Hörnli were a puzzle of white numerals on a blackboard, he tried to examine him. Standing there by the swing-doors he looked young—unbelievably young. Could he then be not a boy but a man? De Broda had imagined him as eighteen or so. But he remembered how as one grows older ages in both directions become muddled—and saw he might be at least twenty-five, more. And his haircut—like an American advertisement. He was still in his ski-trousers, yet with some sort of belted loose coat: these were clothes de Broda could not understand, they came from another world. In fact, the New World—over his gestures, which were properly German-Swiss, there ran a veneer of American posture, frank agilities of the collegiate, laconicisms of the film. To de Broda’s older culture such mannerisms were still confounding, though he had seen them extend through many European cities. But he deduced from them neither the levelling of false emotions nor the destruction of class patronage that at their best they represented—he deduced simply bad boorish manners. He saw only the bravo-me of it. It was alien to his heart.
So that now watching this Hörnli greeting Laure—with a strange nonchalant ease as if there were time only for the broadest smile, a large effusion all at once for they must be getting on, getting places—he was even more astounded that Laure should take such a man seriously. That brash boy with his easy smile? That cock-a-hoop young nothing? That figure of all unsubtlety, swaggerer of dance-halls, that sportsman?
That sportsman put on his hat at a gay angle and wheeled Laure, laughing Laure, through the swing-doors and out. Slim-hipped, loose-shouldered, his back covered Laure like the curtain of a play, and then that too was gone and the vestibule left empty.
For some minutes de Broda was unable to gather himself. He had not moved, his face hung almost in a smile. It was unbelievable. Then slowly he rose and walked up the stairs to his room.
He went to the mirror. He looked at his face. It looked no different. At forty he saw the face of thirty, the age-marks over the well-known shape he treated as no more than a mist on the mirror. He looked down at his hands—his slender, washed, workless fingers that could speak subtleties unknown to mouths. Further down—to the suit he wore, to its civil suavity, its politely traditional cut. To his shoes, sober and elegant. And up to the mind behind his face—a mind tutored in graces of good taste, a mind of knowledge and sometimes wit but always of culture and taste. Vain, he thought. Quite a few faults, of course. But really—how could she?
It all seemed so absurd. There in his bedroom, alone, he gave a shrug to his shoulders and smiled. Then suddenly—half-way between the mirror and the bed—he stopped dead. Half-way across the bedroom carpet, isolated on that carpet, the full realization of what had happened fell upon him. Its appalling echo rang round the room, sang in his empty ears. She had refused him! She had left him! She had preferred someone else to him! Nothing he could ever do would revise it. To him, him, she had preferred that boy….
He grasped for his overcoat and left that room quickly. But at the head of the stairs paused—ashamed to be seen by the people in the lounge below. Then his shoulders straightened and he descended, went quickly through and out into the snow. It was a clear night, the snow glowed white everywhere. Sometimes a lighted window showed a yellow square, festive and telling of warmth within. But de Broda saw nothing, he did not know where he was walking. Through his mind there raced backwards the perspective of events—too clearly he saw the answers to questions he had chosen to ignore. The episode with that party from Vienna—of course that was what she really wanted: and her abrupt interest in the ski-run: and, most bitter of all, the way she had kissed him on that magic evening in the zither-tavern—he saw how this was no more than a kind of overflow of her exhilar
ation with Hörnli, it had been a gesture of gaiety embracing not him but the idea of love.
The snow made no noise beneath his slow trudging boots: he felt that love for him had passed forever. Past the mauve light of a Kurhaus, past a man hacking ice from a wooden sledge—the white road leading uphill looked as uneventful and empty as his own life would henceforth be. At least the road twisted, and it rose higher to some horizon … but his life? Nothing appeared there—only a level road, unposted, with neither turning nor end nor anything ever to happen on it. As he watched his dark boots on their lonely procession, as if they covered no flesh of his but were boots of a warder taking him along that road, he lost the last of his spirit. He felt old and finished.
He saw sadly that those two together told no more than an old and simple tale—youth to youth. They shared together energies and vitalities he would never know again. And they shared together a spirit of the times, an acceptance of the present that he would never understand, a modern spirit strange as a foreign language. A thousand small utterances of day-to-day life separated him from that bounceful, youthful spirit: they would not think twice of, say, the look of a bottle of medicine—whereas he would long for the scrolled designs of older ointments; they would drive to Grinzing on a motor-bicycle and love it: they would accept, accept, accept—yes, they would enter into things. How simple—yet how strange! How strange that however one might groom oneself, however fine a taste and a culture and a manner and all urbanity one might achieve—and however young one still felt and even almost looked—one could never be accepted exactly as a fellow-being by youth.
The dark firs rose above him like bird-giants, their branches ridged like feathers, their topmost tufts sly as little heads. Ice on the road gleamed its cold. What might have been a magical winter’s night looked only forlorn—it was a scene only of cold desolation. The wide valley stretched below, like something seen not now but in a long and snowbound time ago. De Broda lifted his eyes from his boots and looked curiously around him. He found these very boots had led him near to where that high bridge hung across the ravine and its rocky torrent.
Then two things happened. Small matters—but the kind that grow large in a grieving mind. Over the crest of the hill a motor came whirring its chains on the ice. It bore down towards de Broda. Quite normally he had to step to the side to let it pass. It passed, and, with its lights and air of company, disappeared. De Broda stood in the thick snow at the side of the road—again alone on a lonely road—and felt the motor had pushed him there with personal intent, with a jeer.
And then, when he had moved on a step, suddenly the door of a villa opened. It was a villa standing alone and the door lay along a short path. But quite visibly in its rectangle of yellow light stood the figure of a woman. She leaned forward slightly, she seemed to be peering out on to the snow, perhaps on to the road, perhaps at him. Quite suddenly, she closed the door again: and all was again dark.
De Broda turned away and hurried towards the bridge.
His mind was quite made up. He hurried with his head butting forward, with his mind in fact bowed towards the bridge and away from all light and sound and people.
But not all sound: for there came towards him the dark shuddering murmur—at first only a vibration through the snow—of the waterfall. He hurried faster to meet it. Ice caked under his heels. He slipped, he lurched as he ran. He passed into the belt of firs that with their wet dark leaves guarded that place. Then his hands gripped wide on the wooden balustrade, he looked down. It was suddenly quite dark, a cloud passed over the moon.
Foam splashed white somewhere deep in the darkness, it was difficult to see where, it was like looking down to the bottom of a well. The rock face fell vertically, stone echoed a watery roar through darkness all around; yet there grew down the sides, on every ledge, less like trees than something poisonous, the firs—dark-draped ladies suckled by rock and spray and shadows. Their arms dripped water. Sound of water echoed everywhere. Water flooded with the nightmare sound of a vast dam breaking, rearing its black smooth mass like a wall to pour down forever over everything.
De Broda stood there gritting his teeth, the muscles in his arms clenched ready. The sound below, the feel of flat water beneath hummed dragging at his mind, he leaned nearer the desirable, the terrible—then suddenly sobbed and flung himself on the ground. Breathing with fear, very slowly and carefully he crept off the little bridge on his knees.
He lurched up and stumbled into the surety of the trees: then stopped, and still breathing hard, looked back. The sound had receded, the bridge without its fall looked sure and graceful, a rustic affair among snowy firs. Without questioning himself, instantly bold again, he sneered at it within himself and began to return: but as the roaring sound grew he stopped, tried another step—then his heart altogether failed him, he turned and walked quickly away. Yet he refused to feel defeated, Vertigo, he thought. And quite natural. A matter difficult to imagine, easy to experience.
He reached the road, and heard voices. Two people were leaving the villa whose door he had seen open. Their voices came clearly across on the frosty air, he was instantly on his guard. Perhaps it had not been vertigo? Perhaps he had been simply afraid to finish what he had in mind? The doubt grew as those voices approached. He walked quicker to be ahead of them—not to be seen aimless, slinking off the road. The voices receded, he felt bolder. His figure straightened, he felt they could still see him, but they were safer and further away. He’d show them—an abrupt blood of revenge rose and gritted his teeth. And with it came a sudden idea that turned his footsteps fast down towards his hotel. Water, he thought, there was water without vertigo, the place was running with water! Revenge then, on the waters, on the voices. Revenge the proud way, a Roman revenge!
Immediately he was in he ordered the bath and went to his washstand for a razor. He could even smile as he remembered that of course there was only a safety razor. And the man’s face engraved on the little packet of blades bore an expression hardly adequate to the situation. He tore the face off the packet and extracted several blue-black, carefully greased little blades from their envelopes. He wondered how many to take and then took two—with some idea of two wrists. He put the blades in his dressing-gown pocket and left for the bathroom.
The maid had already filled the bath. The water lay quite still. But it steamed slightly from its surface, it had a presence of movement like an animal asleep. When de Broda shut and bolted the thick white door he was alone with it, he was insulated from the passage and all sound and all people: such near-marine doors fit exactly.
Casually, almost as though he were in fact going to shave—for he moved slow under the weight of self-pity and revenge—he placed the two little blades down on the floor-edge of the bath. He took off his dressing-gown and approached the steps naked. The water in those square pools lies below the level of the floor, there are steps and a steadying hand-rail down into it: and thus de Broda had time, approaching the head of the steps, exactly to feel himself naked. He felt unprotected. He had a moment to realize that people must come eventually and find him thus. He paused in shame. He looked back along the tiles to his dressing-gown. But he had brought no underclothes in, it would mean drenching that gown. It was unthinkable. He turned again to the steps. So they’d find him naked? Well, the more shame on them, the more revenge.
And then down into the warm still water, down into the green receiver among the white clean tiles.
First to soak, to get heat into the veins. He lay back floating with his shoulders resting on the marble step. The bath was wide, the sense of luxuriance pleased him. This was fitting. He took a wrist from the water and examined it curiously. He had never noted it so closely before; so hairless, such soft flesh: he saw how blue veins crossed above the tendons—so many brittle tendons, like the thin bones in a chicken’s leg. with veins crossing them like soft blue bridges. He tried to remember where the pulse was, remembered not to use his thumb, found it; and found his other hand holding his own
wrist delicately as though it were someone else’s. He had been five minutes in the bath. He turned to the razor-blades.
It was difficult to pick them off the tile. They lay flatly, they were sharp, he did not want to cut his thumb so he got one up with his finger-nails, his nails pincered it up like a magnet picking a weight of steel.
He held the little blade carefully. He remembered sharpening pencils with such double-edge blades, how they were greased and could slip back into the hand—and he pressed the ball of his thumb hard into the little range of slots to fasten his grip. That was in his right hand. Easing himself up to sit steadily on the step, he raised his left wrist. He turned the underside of the wrist upwards—he felt for a moment he was looking at a wristwatch—and his eye wandered over the blade and saw the second one resting on the bath-side. He saw that instinctively thinking of two wrists he had brought two blades. That was unnecessary, absurd—but it produced another problem. Which to cut first? Now that the right hand held the blade, and thus the left wrist should be the first to be cut—would not the left and weaker wrist be too weakened by the cut to manage the blade for the right? Perhaps the left hand should cut first—the stronger right one would withstand the wound better? Very carefully, careful not to cut himself, he exchanged the little blade between his fingers and thumbs.
But now holding it in his left hand—and feeling thus insecure, for the left was not used to such precise movement—a further trouble showed itself. It was very important to be both exact and quick: but that meant changing over the blade quickly and cutting fast with the right hand before it was weakened. Would it be shocked numb for those vital seconds? He thought—and then saw that after all his instinct had been right, there was no reason why he should not hold a second blade ready in the right hand. It would avoid the delicate change. He turned and, again very carefully, pincered the second blade off the tiles. Precariously holding the left hand away from his body, he nearly slipped. And that made him suddenly think: what if the shock made the right-hand fingers open and that blade dropped away down in the water?
The Stories of William Sansom Page 31