A legacy; a novel

by Bedford, Sybille

  And so in this manner, on a sultry day in July, Julius Maria von Felden and Melanie Ida Merz were made man and wife.

  Julius had given his parents-in-law a pair of seventeenth-century Persian china cats. They were large, bright yellow, upright animals with turquoise spots and glinting jewelled eyes, and they were stood on pedestals opposite each other in the first anteroom at Voss Strasse, where they gleamed, monstrous, beautiful and alien, for many years. They were very rare, and supposed to be most valuable. Sarah, who had been given nothing and had coveted them on sight, passed them on her way out after the young couple had left, and felt vaguely mystified and quite cross.

  Julius and Melanie stayed on in Spain. They discussed no plans; the future was not broached. Julius took another whitewashed house, left the garden and the patio as they were, slowly filled the cool bare vaulted rooms with things—sombre ornamental furniture, great looking-glasses, extravagant statuary, arriving laboriously from Granada by carter over the brilliant roads: carved Vermillion folds and gilt scrolls white with dust exposed above the wide-spread horns of oxen; packing cases from Seville shaped like harps, and packing cases marked fragile, large as boulders, swaying up the magnolia alley above the invisibly placed steps of an ant-line of packmules. From behind shuttered windows, Melanie was watching.

  "Oh, Jules, what's that? Where does it come from?

  "Won't they drop it?

  "Can we have it out at once? Where are you going to put it?"

  Julius liked to be alone for the unpacking.

  He engaged manservants, arranged for fruit and fowls; got a pharmacist at Rhonda interested in composing weekly a lump of butter for Melanie's maid whose complaints centred round the oil. This butter, a softish fragment of uncertain colour, afloat in a large sealed tank, was borne one early morning up the drive like a tabernacle in procession by its creator, his boy assistant and a crowd. Melanie seemed ready to stay idle. Her maid, also, whom the lower servants assumed to be a lady and the upper ones their mistress's old wet-nurse, was expected to do no work. But Marie, ignoring a prejudice that went

  against her every fibre, went about a hundred unwanted tasks in stays and starch with compressed lips. Julius felt her as a part of his new burden, wondered if there were no means of making away with her, was not displeased when his valet hinted that there were, yet, his mind on bravos, honestly strove to feed her according to her lights. The slow posts caught up with them and catalogues, dealers' announcements and trade journals reached him once more, as did the boots from Paris, sherry from the South, shirts from Madrid. He missed his monkeys, but realized that they were happy and active in their larger sphere. He now had a new marmoset, some tame cock pheasants and a straggle of ailing beasts. The gardener had an angora goat with two white kids; the carrier kept a styful of donkeys. None of these were looked after as they should have been. Julius went round bribing peasants, arguing with muleteers. He bought off caged rabbits, watered cattle, whisked flies off horses' faces, treated harness sores— the animals were the one heartbreaking thing in this country, he told Melanie and he told her often. Melanie listened because she liked to be spoken to; she had learnt to look at certain animals with pleasure, she often stroked the golden pheasants by the fountain and she was sure it was all dreadful, but what really frightened her was the beggars. She was much alone.

  Julius came and went. He spent the night at Seville, a day or two at Algeciras, stayed at some estate, had an errand at Cadiz, and he looked up startled when she asked him where he was going and when he might return. It was the look that came over him in mid-morning, when they met, both exquisitely dressed, in the latticed penumbra of the sala and she never failed to ask him how he had slept.

  He was not unkind.

  Melanie, sensitive to his every sign, sensitive as the savage to the weather, was not equipped to help him. She was ready to be shaped; at the flicking of his hand. He

  let her pick up a few tricks of taste. She was easy enough to have about; how easy, having no points of comparison, he did not know; and very pretty; and this, coming in sometime at twilight from the Granada road, he could see again. After the brief greeting, after his bath, after the first glass of manzanilla by himself, pale, light, lightly iced, coming down again at that hour when the heat of day still rises from the earth and walls, and cool is divined already in the veins and skin, he would find her in the opened loggia in muslin and ribbons, her shoulders bare, her hair high, the small, shod, pointed feet visible on the chaise longue, and make his own entrance like a man at the play into his box, during the second act, before the aria by the new soprano.

  Sometimes Marie appeared on the terrace where they had been dining, stepped from the bushes in the garden. "Fraulein Melanie, Frau Baronin I should say, I've brought you a shawl." And Julius rose, displayed watches, remarked that, perhaps, it was not too late yet for the Circle. . . .

  Of course she never went out. Perhaps the course of their life together was really set by Julius's choice of place. The South of Spain in the Eighteen-Nineties was not a woman's country, and emphatically not a lady traveller's one. Julius did not take her anywhere. If it wasn't the flies, it was the dust, the heat— There was nowhere to go, it was not suitable (a word he had lately come to use), she was sure not to enjoy it—

  There was the heat. Julius wore a silk veil from the back of his hat at midday, had a system about the windows, compared thermometers; said it was the reason one could not keep a dog. She took to it. It was a very different thing from the Riviera winter sunshine she had loved so well, but it suited her: she was not happy, but she felt in health. She had not forgotten the drives, the pretty clothes, the watching people—the picture in her mind of the South and life; yet here, another layer of her opened to the blanching blaze, the bone-dry, crackling desert air, ex-panded in the alternate refuge of the siesta, the slow slothful even hours in the dimmed and spacious house. But in the evening she felt restless.

  Julius did not seem to know anybody, or at least he said so, though he was always running into people who lived in villas or meeting a man he used to know—ages ago, my dear . . . Madrid very likely . . . yes, yes, en poste; and he was asked to shoot or dine or stay. Melanie was never included. If his hosts were aware that he had a woman living in the house, they took his discretion at its face value and assumed they were not really married, a view that was also discussed among their own servants. Melanie was placid over these single invitations, she was used to her mother going nowhere, but she would have liked to have her share by being told.

  "Jules—Pedro says he remembers you when you were here before."

  "Pedro?"

  "He used to see you riding."

  "It was none of his business."

  "He said you looked very splendid and the horse was grey."

  "You have not been talking to the servants?"

  "No—yes—not really."

  "It is most unwise."

  "Yes, Jules."

  "You do not know this country."

  "No, Jules."

  "This kind of thing won't do here." In the last weeks Julius had developed something he had never shown before, irritability; and he could not stop.

  "It was only because Pedro speaks a little French," said Melanie.

  She was at sea about much else. She moved through the days confused by a sense of the familiar, with a twist to it that eluded her experience. Her life had been spent in an atmosphere of selfishness combined with material solicitude. Her family could not be called tender, large-hearted or gay—they were often peevish and generally complaining—but they had the grunting contentment of people settled in their ways, and they were all very fond of each other's company. Melanie had been cherished; and in a hothouse existence the attention of the keepers counts. What they took for granted they took for granted and this gave them solidity, and their daughter had no key to Julius's capricious gloom. In her room now, in Andalusia, stretched rigid on the sofa, when Marie crept in to bathe her eyes, she formed at last the un
wonted question—Why?

  September too was full summer, though the night fell early. One evening Julius came into the drawing room and found Melanie on the balcony, the light behind her.

  Below somewhere, from under dark trees, from the earth, rose a sudden wail, a splintering spiral of sound, yet a voice.

  "Jules—listen . . . !"

  "The windows," said Julius.

  She did not hear him.

  "Mosquitoes," said Julius. "The screens open, the most dangerous hour. How often have I told them."

  Below the voice rent the night, the air, the sinews—

  She called him. "Come out! Tell me—this music—?"

  "Gypsies." Julius, brought up on Lully, Couperin and a little Haydn, who thought the modern piano loud, though he rather liked an organ, stepped forward and shut the windows.

  "No," cried Melanie. "No."

  "The foreigners always like it," he said.

  "Jules—"

  "My dear?"

  "One could dance."

  "They do," he said. "Very picturesque. Such good-looking people. And now you must come in."

  "Jules."

  "Yes?"

  "Jules?"

  "So imprudent," he said. "Malaria. You'll be having them all over the house. Nobody seems to have any sense. Well I shall have to be going."

  "Going?"

  "You will see that everything is shut before you go upstairs?"

  "Jules don't go."

  "I must," said Julius.

  "Don't go—"

  "Alas . . ."

  "Jules please don't go—"

  "My dear." He picked up his hat and gloves.

  "Jules!" She wheeled and stood before him, her eyes on his face.

  He turned away. She touched his coat.

  He disengaged himself.

  "Jules!"

  He stopped short, and looked at her in consternation. He said, "My dear—do you want me to ring for your maid?"

  She sprang at him, blazing. Her right hand, clawed, flew out.

  Julius stood still. Then he got out a handkerchief, put it to his cheek, turned once more and left the house. He was still carrying his hat.

  Melanie stayed behind and consumed herself in a fury of weeping that turned quite soon to terrified remorse. She waited up for Julius, but when she heard his steps, she had recovered her instincts enough not to throw herself into his arms. Indeed she did not show herself at all, and instead offered him at noon a tempered version of her apologies which he accepted with stiff grace. Julius was shaken and had spent a wretched evening, but he bore no grudge against Melanie; women were supposed to be subject to incomprehensible attacks—as a matter of fact she began to remind him a little of Tzara and one of his father's mares.

  Nothing of the kind happened to them again. Julius passed a pleasant autumn and winter in a place he loved, on the track of many acquisitions.

  When Melanie was with child, first she was not certain, then she did not tell him. Nor did she mention it in the notes with which she kept her family at bay. At last her maid spoke to Julius and at the same time wrote Frau Edu. Once he had to believe it, Julius recognized it as the next trick of fate. "Voila," he said, "tout s'ecroule. I knew it."

  "You did?" said Melanie.

  "The gods—"

  He rushed into Granada to fetch a doctor, walked out of his office because he saw it was dirty, was directed to the English doctor, found an old man, shaking and inane, lost his nerve and came back alone. A letter from Voss Strasse crossed with his, urging return.

  Melanie saw no reason for not staying where they were.

  He told her this was folly; visions of foul stables rose before him.

  "You would come with me?"

  "Naturally. I shall take you to your mother in Berlin."

  "No," said Melanie. "No. ... If we cannot stay here, we could go to France. To your house?"

  Julius said it was too small. Besides it was up for sale. The Riviera was not at all suitable, he said; what they wanted now was un endroit serieux.

  "Paris?" said Melanie.

  Not Paris, said Julius. The country. A place to put one's things.

  The idea took root. Among his dealers' letters there was a photograph of a house in the Sologne. It had a brick front, sixteenth-century, but not in the Chambord style he disliked, and a water-piece, and it was to let. Julius took it by telegraph.

  The Merzes did not interfere. Flora, their eldest daughter, had not been well all winter, the doctors were ordering her abroad, and they were flustered.

  Julius and Melanie had a frightful journey to Madrid, and a better one from there to San Sebastian. Julius was admirable over pillows and mineral water, though himself devoured by a hundred and ten anxieties. At Bordeaux they were met by the French maid he had engaged; Marie, by mutual consent, was put on a steamer bound for Germany; Julius became animated and took Melanie to dinner, he said, at one of the world's two best restaurants. The other was at Brussels. He told her that really he must take her there again when game would be in season, and Melanie repaid him by living only in the present.

  Next morning they went on to Tours, where they stayed long enough to see a specialist who told Melanie that everything was splendid, continued to Beaugency, crossed the Loire, and from there by carriage towards Romarontin. Clusters of brown rabbits bobbed up at their passage. The Sologne as the crow flies is only a few miles east of the great rivered valleys of Touraine. It might be hundreds of miles. There is no resemblance to the open calm green rolling prospects between the Indre and the Cher. It is flat, still country of unmoving water and pine-soft ground, a hidden province, unvisited, of serried shallow ponds and scrub enclosed by forest, a water landscape without vistas, the cache of multitudes of small wild harmless animals. The sparse inhabitants raise asparagus and marrows; in many a clearing there stands reflected on the filmy surface of the girdling waterpiece the handsome walls of a gentil-hommiere in disrepair; but the chief sounds throughout these woods are those of frog and duck and hare.

  "Here?" Melanie said.

  And at the end of the afternoon, by way of Veilleins, Mur-de-Sologne, le Lude, Chartraine, les Touches, la Dauphinerie; la Ferte-Boisrenard and la Ferte-la Malzone, TEtang de Vol a Voile and l'Etang du Grand Corbois; by

  Crouy, Cicogne, les Anges, Breaux and Lanthenay, they arrived at the Chateau de la Souve. It was March and they were surprised by the cold. The facade was all that had been promised; unruffled geese were cruising along the sides; there was grass on the drive and thistles on the lawn, the house had long stood empty and, inside, it was damp.

  Julius took his wife's condition seriously and she led a careful and secluded life. He began alterations on the house, and again was much away. A long wet spring turned without transition into a summer of close steaming heat. In Spain, life had still racketed below her windows; here all was silence and her view was shuttered by a fringe of pines. Melanie gave herself to waiting.

  They were all a little out about the time, and she was delivered one night in September by an excellent practitioner from Blois. Up to the end she had shown few signs of her condition; all was well over by the time Julius returned and she had a quick recovery, making no great case over her part in the whole thing. The child born to them in the heart of France was a girl. They called her Henrietta, after her grandmother, not the lady with the handsome profile and the many languages of whom the Merzes never thought and Julius had not heard. When Clara wrote proposing herself as obvious godmother, her name with Melanie's was added. Henrietta Clara Melanie was a hideous little thing, underweight, with a wizened face and sparse black hair; Julius had foreseen nothing, and a boy. Her mother looked at it with sporadic bewilderment and limp affection, Julius was seized by passionate interest. Was so helpless a creature meant to live—? He fussed nurse and midwife, and would have thought it natural if they had let him have its basket in his room. Melanie reverted to the more apathetic mood of her girlhood.

  It was at this point that the out
side world might have bustled in on them: relatives, a christening, neighbours, on a newly-married couple, newly settled in these parts (rumour would have them buy La Souve), the natural seclusion of their Spanish journey and the last few months naturally at an end.

  Melanie's sister Flora was very ill indeed now and had been taken to Switzerland. Her husband had written to expect the worst. The old Merzes would not envisage that, and thus felt no need to suppress anxiety. They were very anxious and quite miserable.

  "Slow," said Grandpapa.

  Sarah, who had seen her sister-in-law in summer and then again some weeks ago, looked up.

  "I wish I could go with Arthur and Jetta," said Emil.

  "You could. Friedrich, you are going with your parents, aren't you?"

  "Papa thinks it would be too much for Mama."

  "A big journey," said Grandmama.

  "Can't see the sense of it," said her husband.

  "Well I don't know—" said Edu.

  "Papa," Sarah said, "you know that Flora's condition is serious?"

  "Too serious for visits."

  "Max writes there is not much hope," said Markwald.

  "Not much hope. . . ." said the old lady, tears trickling down her puckered cheeks. "Not much hope now till poor Flora's better."

  "You know," Clara said to her brother, "I had the trunks out. But Gustavus won't hear of it. Not that / don't agree with him. What use are we to a child of that age? Our presence cannot affect the efficacy of the sacrament. I always think it does not matter where very young children are, or who is with them. . . . You remember we were put out with the wet-nurse till we spoke enough to be