Elsa came from a place called Mistelbach. All Viennese policemen were facetiously supposed to come from there, apparently because the name meant something like ‘dung-heap’. But there was nothing of that suggestion about Elsa, who was as fresh as the May. She was a peasant girl, used to hard work, and her arrival in the Ötzeltgasse was a consequence of Frau Weber’s enhanced sense of unwonted prosperity – which in turn flowed from the substantial weekly sums coming to her from the Herren Russell, Read and Merton. Hitherto Frau Weber had relied for domestic assistance upon a nameless old woman, perhaps a poor relation of the Pförtnerin, who had come in by the day. But now the Elsa, having been hired for heaven knew what pittance, was established in one of the low-hutched attics that went along with the Webers’ top-floor apartment dwelling. The enormity of implication inherent in this fact came to the young men at once. The wench was inside, not without, the ring-fence system of things insisted upon by the paternalistic Emperor Francis Joseph. Unfortunately Frau Weber was far from unaware of the possibilities thus opened up. The little internal staircase communicating with the attics (learnedly described by Olly as the aedes annexae) was guarded by a door which the mistress of the establishment simply locked at night, so that the poor girl was incarcerated as if in gaol until liberated in the morning. What would happen if there were a fire and she was forgotten about it wasn’t nice to imagine. But David did sometimes dream of a heroic and spectacular rescue effected by himself. The Elsa would cling deliciously round his neck as he staggered downstairs with her through the smoke and flame – this after he had kicked through the door in a masterful fashion.
Certainly the locked door was a challenge; had it not been locked, the young men might not have let their minds go to work as they did. The door was fair game, and somehow made the girl fair game too. Olly was the first to feel matters in this way. Tim held back for a time; then, with a disconcerting abruptness as if something had snapped in his head, became brutally predatory in everything he said. David was a misdoubting partner all the way through – or at least until the climax of the affair.
Had the Elsa been a modest girl, nothing might have taken place. But she was something headier and different: at once virginal-seeming and ripe for mischief. Back in Mistelbach, she must have put in time imagining all sorts of shameless things about life in Vienna.
The boarders began flirting with her in various ways. Quite soon they were snatching kisses (a good literary phrase) in corridors and also in their own chaste sleeping quarters when she came to make the beds. Even David kissed her, and she was certainly neither upset nor surprised. They got round to spanking her, gamesomely and vulgarly, as she leant invitingly out of the window in the standard Viennese employment of disposing the voluminous bed Decken to air. The atmosphere, like one’s body under those mountains of feathers, hotted up. They provided themselves with French letters from an automatic machine they had discovered in a public lavatory.
Frau Weber seemed unaware of this scandalous course of things. They weren’t so sure about Lotte and Pfiffi – Sin and Death. The daughters of the house were certainly less and less nice to their serf.
This produced a kind of ganging-up effect. The young men were on the Elsa’s side, and were going to get her her due. An unedifying moral confusion thickened. It so thickened that Olly presently did a quite extraordinary thing. He abstracted the key of the attic door (which remained in place during the day) and had a copy expeditiously made by a local locksmith. This was real intrigue at last.
But there was now a real problem too – undreamt of at that remote time when lots had been drawn to decide who should share a bedroom with whom. The girl was prepared for almost anything – it had got to that – but not for receiving nocturnal visitors in her own narrow quarters. She seemed to think of the young men as enormous blundering creatures not to be trusted to achieve any cat-like tread along the marble-floored corridors of the Weber home. But she was quite ready to make her own way to an assignation downstairs. But where? And with whom?
This unreal and dream-like situation (it wasn’t yet a nightmarish one) persisted for some time. Olly and Tim became rather secret together; they even whispered to one another in their room. David had a dim sense of their planning something attractively extreme, and was content himself to draw apart a little, and let be. Or almost content. If something really happened, and he was excluded from it, he would resent being relegated to the role of what his Italophil parents would call a terzo incomodo.
What did happen he didn’t expect. He woke up abruptly in the middle of one night, aware of a strange weight on his bed. He thought of a cat: the Webers had several of these creatures, inconvenient though they were on a top-floor flat. He sat up abruptly and turned on his bedside lamp. A hand appeared on it and turned it off again, but not before he had seen that Elsa was perched beside him.
David was terrified. His knees trembled – which knees usually do only when you’re standing up and about to be beaten or obliged to make a speech – something like that.
The girl was giggling in the dark. She was whispering, and he found that – amazingly – he had put an arm round her. There was only something very thin indeed between his hand and her flesh. She whispered that Olly and Tim were expecting her. Olly had given her the key. She’d had another idea.
The idea plainly was to slip into David’s bed. But before she could do that he had pulled her there. He had read in his books of a misfortune called ejaculatio praecox, and he was urgently feeling the point of it. But all went well, most amazingly well. He was astounded, as the hours went by, at the reach of his own virility. The dawn – ah God! – the dawn it came too soon. But the moment the Elsa did depart David fell asleep.
He woke up in broad daylight to the staggering memory. He had done it! He believed himself to be blissfully happy.
VI
But not so on the following night. During the day he had kept mum, given nothing away. Olly and Tim were both in a bad temper, but they said nothing either. It ought to have been rather comical, this situation like a bawdy tale in the Decameron. But in fact it was uncomfortable. Why weren’t they all roaring with laughter, why did they distrust looking straight at one another? Life isn’t like the Decameron. Far from it at times. The three young men weren’t on a collision course. But they were on a drifting-apart one.
The Elsa wasn’t visible. Perhaps it was her day off or something. Or had he conceivably injured her? Things like that happen. This morbid notion, although David didn’t know it, was prelusive of dire nemesis to come. A portentous chronicler might assert, indeed, that here was to be an instance of that favourite mechanism of the tragic poets whereby a more or less venial and trivial fault on the hero’s part is disproportionately visited with titanic disaster.
David went to bed early, but of course he didn’t go to sleep. Would the Elsa, so handsomely entertained twenty-four hours before, come to him again now? Or was it possible—
The obvious happened, as it so commonly does. A little after midnight David’s strained ear heard a door softly open and close. He lay still for a time, feeling slightly sick, and trying to hear more. But no further sound penetrated across the corridor from his friends’ room. He got out of bed, with the strangest sense of a physical struggle not to do so, and opened his door and crept out. At least the Webers couldn’t come upon him shamefully employed; their rooms were far away on a branching corridor at the other end of the apartment. He tiptoed to the door beyond which he had to imagine Olly, Tim and the girl. Cautiously he located the keyhole with a finger. And then he put his ear to it and listened.
He heard what he deserved: the Elsa’s giggle, the creaking of a bed, a kind of scuffling almost of a skylarking sort, smothered laughter, the slapping of hands on bare flesh. There then followed, very predictably, heavy breathing and panting at an accelerating pace. But these sound-effects ceased abruptly, to be succeeded by others which were odd and not easily to be interpreted. At this David straightened up and groped his way bl
indly back to his own room. He could hardly believe he’d done the demeaning thing he had.
In bed he calmed down. It would be absurd to be jealous of Olly and Tim – and, after all, he’d been there himself first. And fairly normal people probably give way to prurient curiosities from time to time. He’d tell them what he’d done. What he’d done both tonight and the night before. Nothing had happened not of a sort that they’d concocted cheerfully indecent chat about often enough. In fact hadn’t they arrived, all three, at what might be a very snug little ménage? There seemed not to be any reason – or any rational reason, since perhaps it mightn’t feel too nice – why a sleeping dictionary shouldn’t be fixed up on a polyandrous system. But then was the Elsa unalphabetic? She almost certainly was . . . Thus David Read under his Decke, having become quite the man of the world. He fell asleep imagining himself fondling the Elsa’s breasts and behind.
On the next morning he expected Olly and Tim to be jubilant and assertive, and he looked forward to deflating them a little by revealing that they hadn’t been first in the field – unless, indeed, they’d extracted this information from the Elsa already. But it didn’t work out like that. Both his friends were in a much worse temper than they had been after the previous night when the Elsa had failed them. And now they had failed her. This (as their overall sense of the conclusion of the occasion) emerged at once as an amazing truth that Olly was much too angry and confused to conceal. David’s disgusting eavesdropping (which he confessed) had been delusive or too soon given over. His Elsa, it was clear, hadn’t been the Elsa revealed to Olly and Tim. She had typed David, accurately enough, as romantic and innocent, and had played up to that. Quite inaccurately, and perhaps as a result of the other two young men having made it a joint enterprise, she had concluded them to be revolting roués, and had behaved accordingly.
Olly was utterly confused and incoherent about this. In a state of violent reaction from his proposed libidinous courses, he could only exclaim that the girl had turned out – had turned out in the end – a filthy little bitch. Mistelbach must be bloody well named, after all.
There ought to have been something comical in this picture of a hopeful young rake getting more than he’d bargained for. But David was at once merely horrified; was perhaps already obscurely glimpsing what was coming at him. He turned to Tim for explanations. Tim, although equally in a state of shock, was at his coldest and most cynical. He was also quite articulate.
‘We just weren’t on her wave-length,’ he said. ‘Not as the pleasant occasion developed, that is. Our imaginations were defective, Olly’s and mine. Or utterly old-world. It never occurred to us, for instance, not just to take turns. Sancta simplicitas! The angel-child had other ideas about threesomes.’
David tried to say, ‘It damn well served you right.’ The thing was utterly beastly, but ought to be controlled and played down. He found himself, however, incapable of speech.
‘The loathsome pox-ridden trollop!’ Olly burst out. And he stormed from the room.
These had been fatal words. Before the door banged the terror had fallen upon David. He remembered reading in one of his authorities – Havelock Ellis, perhaps, or the translation of Krafft-Ebing – that it was maid-servants, hotel chambermaids and the like who were the prime dispensers of horrible diseases. Later he was to remember that Freud, here in Vienna, had discovered that half his psycho-neurotic patients had fathers who suffered from syphilis. Within an hour, David’s phobia was fully established.
It was a hell extending beyond the reach of imagination, and so is not to be described. And it was his secret, for he simply couldn’t divulge it to Olly and Tim. He seemed to live inside it as if it were a physical integument, with everything beyond grown shadowy and insubstantial. His only gleam of comfort lay in the intellectual perception that, if he ever escaped it, he would never be thus terrified by anything again. Should he die in old age, he would remember it as the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
A lot of time passed – or it may have been almost no time at all. An aunt of David’s, an admirable woman, turned up in Vienna, with a vague plan for taking her favourite nephew on a short spring cruise down the Dalmatian coast. Seeing within minutes that something was very badly wrong, she put the proposal into operation at once. David was helpless. They took train to Trieste and boarded a Yugoslavian steamer. The change of scene didn’t help David a bit. The food was very good, but he couldn’t eat it. His aunt sat in the stern, making watercolour sketches. There was nothing to do but stare out at an interminable barren coast, just here and there beginning to be dotted with little pleasure resorts. Finally, David broke down entirely. At Spalato, bang in the middle of the ruins of Diocletian’s palace, he wept, and told his aunt the truth. She said composedly that they must return to England at once. David refused; he couldn’t face up to his parents with this shame upon him. So she took him back to Vienna by train, and within hours he was in the presence of a specialist in venereology. Examinations and tests happened. Time was utterly hazy still.
‘Gott sei dank, Herr Read!’ a benevolent old gentleman was saying to him. ‘Keine Spur, keine Spur!’ And he added that marriage was the best thing for a young man’s Gesundheit.
Just as if the nice old man had been a mesmerist, David believed the verdict implicitly. The phobia departed as it had arrived: instantaneously. David’s aunt departed too. She had done her job. In her heart she had been shocked and displeased by this aberration of late adolescence. As soon as she got to England she paid a visit to David’s home, but with no informative intention. She wrote David a prompt letter, full of news about dogs and ponies. She had been to the vicarage too. The vicar’s younger daughter, just ‘out’, was prettier than ever, and extremely charming.
VII
Amazingly, life in the Ötzeltgasse resumed its even tenor. Olly and Tim, if they knew or suspected anything, said nothing. David reported favourably on Spalato as a nice place for a holiday. He would have reported favourably on anywhere short of Gehenna. He wasn’t even euphoric in an unstable fashion. He was simply happy. The Elsa had vanished, being replaced by a second old crone. It was conceivable that David’s aunt had enjoyed – or at least firmly undertaken – some conversation with Frau Weber. Lotte and Pfiffi were more devoted than ever. It was a pity that the whole thing would soon be coming to an end. The tiresome business of adopting honourable professions was now looming up before all three young men.
But the inconceivable seemed to have the habit of turning up in the Ötzeltgasse. It became known to David that Olly had made Pfiffi his mistress. Tim must have been aware of this rather earlier. It was, after all, from the chaste bed he shared with Olly that Olly had to slip in order to make his way to his charmer’s chamber. Tim didn’t appear interested. His reclusiveness was growing on him. David sometimes wondered whether he was next in line for a bout of madness. As for Olly’s affair, David thought it horribly depraved. Freud came into his head again. He had read some severe critic of Freud who maintained that the lunatic pansexualism of psychoanalytic theory was a function of the pervasively corrupt society in which this undeniably great savant had formed his ideas. And it was very disgraceful to seduce a daughter of the house, particularly in quest of nothing but second-rate cold pleasure. It was worse than the Elsa business by a long way.
Olly began to insist that Lotte must be accommodated too. Lotte was madly jealous, and it simply wasn’t fair on her. She was pretty well panting for a lover of her own. David didn’t know whether this was true, although observation constrained him to the view that there was something in it. He felt the threat of nightmare on the horizon again. And, sure enough, they all presently went mad. It became established that there was only one humane and decent course for Tim and David to adopt. They must toss up for Lotte. It was like the affair of drawing lots for the beds again. Lots for Lotte.
Tim made no objection. He might have been Macbeth, resigned and indifferent before the necessity of one more murder. There really was some
thing very odd about Tim’s make-up. To David himself the thing came as a dare – and as a dare demanding heroism. He had decided, and without being unhappy about it, that what lay ahead of him could only be a celibate life. Get into bed with any woman, and an irrational guilt would take the form of landing him once more where he had been. He had given up the mother-refuge theory as half-baked. The thing would have been part of his constitution if he had been a creature spontaneously generated from the sea or the mud.
Lotte fell to David – Olly having meanwhile played some inconceivable Pandarus-role that fixed everything up. What sort of a female could Lotte be to submit to such a scheme of things? He remembered grimly that if Pfiffi was Sin, Lotte was Death. And if it didn’t turn out to be death exactly, wouldn’t it almost certainly be fiasco? Was there the slightest chance that, on his own part, the necessary physiological phenomenon would take place? What was ahead, at best, was a specific humiliation that no young man cares to contemplate. He lay in bed, imagining with all his might making gradual, or abrupt, or delirious love to Lotte. He awaited some result.
Nothing took place. Limp as a worm, he told himself – thus anticipating by some years the poet Yeats.
He went along. That was the only way to express it: he went along in total darkness to Lotte’s room, having previously measured his path and located all the hideous objects – the Webers only went in for massively hideous furniture – that he mustn’t blunder into. He wished with all his heart that Frau Weber would be alerted, and would emerge as with a flaming sword to banish him whence he had come. She seemed to be a mysteriously unsuspicious woman. Or was it possible—? He didn’t let his mind dwell on this.
The Bridge at Arta Page 22