He would have to marry again, said Clara. A woman of his own faith.
Sarah remarked that this excellent project could hardly be put under way in the next few weeks.
Indeed not, said Clara.
"And what does he propose to do until this woman—of his own faith—has materialized?"
"Do?"
Sarah sat back.
"Oh, I see," said Clara. "Naturally I offered to take the child meanwhile, my godchild. Naturally. It would not be easy; at my age. I am forty-nine. And my time is not my own. But you know, he won't hear of it? He seemed surprised. He says he's going to look after it himself. He's attached to it already. His father was like that."
"And where is he going to live this parental idyll?"
"Where? Oh France I expect, or Spain. Yes, Spain very likely. I should think they'll be leaving us quite soon."
"Baroness," said Sarah, "your brother-in-law won't be at all well off now."
"Jules? I suppose not. There never was much to the Felden property. They are not men attached to money."
"It is what men live on."
Here Clara made the movement of her mouth that had contributed so much to the boredom of Gustavus's life.
Sarah began again. "I don't think you quite realize the position. When Jules was married to my sister-in-law, it was arranged that they receive an annual income from her parents. This was in the form of an allowance to their daughter; no independent provision was made for Jules at the time."
"I'm afraid I do not understand about such matters," Clara said. "If there is anything your husband would wish to say to mine—"
Anger now gained Sarah. She half rose; desisted. Even sitting, both women were tall; both would as lief have stood. "I see it's no use," she said. "What do you expect them to say to each other—?" Then she subsided. "I was trying to help. . . ."
Clara flung out her fine hands. The swift gesture from that rigid body brought out something excessive. "Forgive me—of course one must speak. It is only that I do not understand about settlements. What is it that you want to say to me?"
"I don't know," said Sarah.
"Jules will have less money now than when his wife was alive? That is not hard to say."
"I never thought she would die," said Sarah.
"Didn't your
Again impatience swept her. "Let us keep to the point," she said. Then, "Less money? Possibly none."
"He'll still have his own."
"That was gone long ago."
"No, no. How could it?"
"It wasn't a great deal to begin with and he spent too much."
"He spent too much," said Clara. "One does do that."
"I believe you're the most frivolous woman I've ever met," said Sarah.
"Then you say Jules will be in actual want?"
"Your words." Sarah thought of Frankfort; of her father: in his study explaining to them all exactly where they stood. Questions—answers. She looked again at her Pissarro. Her father would not have bought it. She had never liked Frankfort.
"Do you like this picture?" she said.
Clara stabbed her lorgnette in the direction of the wall. "What is the subject?" she asked.
"A farmyard in Normandy, if you like."
"I do not see the use of these things," said Clara. "Is it not insisting on error, this making images of what is itself illusion?"
"What?" said Sarah. "Is that how you see it? All of it? Illusion. You may be right; for me it is this that can make a farmyard real."
Clara made another attempt at looking. "Surely not? Oh I cannot believe that—this is a harmless painting. We could ask him to live with us at Sigmundshofen only that the house is to be shut up. It's so very large. Now that my brother is to be in the cabinet again—he doesn't want me to talk about it, but why not? as it is true—we shall all be moving to Berlin. Yet I don't see why we could not leave some rooms open for Jules, and the child. There'd be the caretaker. The farm is rented, though we seem to be getting eggs— I'm afraid there wouldn't be any actual money. There're so many claims on mine—Gustavus never seems to have any either; my brother has been very generous but I really don't think I can come to him again ... I daresay Jules will be all right. There's the Catechism and school I built on the grounds, that will be convenient later on. We'd be coming down every year for the Landtag Elections, perhaps Jules could give my brother a hand— In Lent we open the house to the Saint-Eustatius Association for their retreat."
"Has Jules stayed with you before?" said Sarah. "We asked him; I don't think he ever came."
The next day Sarah took him to Voss Strasse. On their way in she stopped. "Oh look at them! So beautiful. Your cats."
He seemed taken aback. He glanced at the yellow creatures on their pedestals. "I'd forgotten about them," he said.
"They give me pleasure every time. I really must see that they're left to me."
"Oh I shouldn't," he said.
"I ought to have warned you. One is not supposed to mention anything, anything that's happened. I find it ghastly. But don't."
"Naturally," said Julius.
They all lunched together. Afterwards Jules went up to the nursery.
In the evening Sarah said to him, "You really enjoy, do you, the company of this baby?"
"Well, yes."
"They'll never let her go. You see they are afraid."
"It's my child; I could take her away."
"Perhaps you could. I see great trouble ahead. They connect abroad with illness— The child's a German subject. They could do many things. Perhaps these places were not healthy—"
"What can I do?" said Julius.
"How sad you look," said Sarah.
He stood facing her. She got up. "I should wait a bit," she said, turning to the window. "On Wednesday they're all leaving for Bad Kreuznach; it's their date for the cure. Why don't you go with them?" She pulled the curtains. "It's not a bad little Spa . . . They've taken a whole floor. . . . They might as well begin to get used to you."
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. . . . Life, in the neat sad dry little French phrase that bundles it all into its place, life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks. La vie, voyez-vous ga n'est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu'on croit. Never as bad, never as good. . . . When? At the instant of calamity, at the edge of fear? when the bad news is brought, and the trap felt sprung, or the loss strikes home? At low ebb, in tedium, in accidie? In the moments of renewal? the transfiguration of love, the flush of work, the grace of a new vision, the long-held now? Or later, when the doors shut, one after another, and regret moves in the heart like a steel coil? Never as good, never as bad, but a drab, bearable half-sleep banked by a little store of this and that, subsiding after visitations and alarms, a drowsing, often not uneasy, down the years, an even-paced irreversible passage—life, the run of lives, the sum of life? Is it consoling? is it the whole truth? Is it inevitable? The years that followed the death of her husband's sisters cannot have been happy ones for Sarah—Edu's gambling, Edu's waxing debts, Edu's unchanging nature: the whole repeated cycle that had pressed her into a graceless self-reliance; she was growing old; time was passing; everything that happened, or not happened, could be seen as adding to the final shape; and as we know her she must have been living on her own close terms with disillusionment. Her children were growing up. Into stiff, matter-of-fact, secretive girls, unlike the girls of her own youth, curiously out of sympathy with their parents and their time. When they had been small she had looked forward to the future when they would be old enough for her to love them; meanwhile, she had seen that they were given everything she believed they ought to have, had indeed watched over them with almost compassionate concern, prospecting their evolving looks as one scans a company report. She had a great fellow-feeling for women and was resolved that her daughters should have everything from straight backs and teeth to interests, to prepare them for their lot; now it was found they could not love her. What she had done to Edu, she had largely done for them; perh
aps they judged her, took their father's side; she could not tell. What did they say about it to each other? did they talk? did they get on? There was about these young creatures a hardness and sufficiency that puzzled and intimidated Sarah who did not know that it was said to come from her. She admitted to herself another disappointment —their minds had not grown interesting. Yet what grieved her most was that she saw in both of them signs of the sources of her own frustration.
Of none of this she spoke. Few people were at ease with her; nobody laughed with her at her jokes. For the two or three eminent men who came to her house, and for the painters who dined with her and whose studios she visited, she was too rich, too idle, her manners remained too uncompromising, to think of her as anything but a hostess or a patron. They blossomed under her Midas's touch; her most intimate conversations were with her brother-in-law's mistress, and her most refreshing talks were with lawyers.
Yet throughout her troubles Sarah never took her hand off Julius. When they were both in Berlin he was her constant companion. Whenever her consciousness was startled again, as it occasionally was, into attention to his idiosyncrasies, he exasperated her and she showed him the impatience one shows to an otherwise well-kempt and handsome dog who has once more dragged the same old bone into the drawing room. Yet as a rule his presence soothed her; she liked being chaperoned by him in auction rooms, she had come to see him as the pleasant person to have in one's family, and she could assure herself that she had shepherded his existence into a predictable, and not intolerable, course. He had his flat in Paris, was courted by the dealers quite as much as she was, took a house in February wherever he wished to, in Morocco, in Corsica, in Spain; seemed attached, as far as she could make out, to a series of agreeable women. Had the old Merzes not continued to pay Melanie's allowance year in year out, quarter after quarter, into his account, and not as much as mentioned it? Had they not once cr twice paid a mild miscellany of debts? He spent less time in Germany than she did. He stayed at Voss Strasse for Christmas and in summer followed them en villegiature; otherwise he came and went as often or as little as he believed he must or dared, and to see his daughter, the ugly, cosseted, ignorant little girl, wrapped in muffs and ermine, on whom he seemed to bestow the same exaggerated devotion already bestowed on her by Emil, Gottlieb, Marie, Grandmama and Grandpapa.
At times, rather wistfully, Julius talked to Sarah of remarriage. He still saw himself as tragically widowed, and had come to look upon the married state as a haven of liberty and safety. He had got it into his head that if only he produced a mother he would be allowed to take his child abroad and live with her there forever after; and one year some such project actually came up. He told Sarah he had decided to get married to a Frenchwoman of his own age with a child of her own. Madame Dupont her name was, or so Sarah believed she had heard him say; he conveyed that he had known her for some time, and said that with her he would be comfortable. Sarah took this to mean money.
The old Merzes pounced on the fact to their advantage, the existence of another child. Julius told Sarah that this was most awkward as Madame Dupont—was it Dupont?—
for whom life no longer quite held all it used to hold, was looking forward precisely to making a home for her own girl.
This had puzzled Sarah with her sense of house property. "She cannot be looking to you for one, Jules? Did I hear you say she had an hotel Avenue du Bois? and a place at Cannes?"
"You see," Julius said, "it hasn't been convenient for her so far to have the child with her."
"Oh the convent system," said Sarah. "Clara Felden once explained to me about that."
"En nourrice —" said Julius.
"Those Catholics," said Sarah, dismissing it from her mind.
The step-sister alarm at Voss Strasse put a quick end to Julius's plan. For a long time afterwards, however, he remained insistent and quite sad, telling Sarah how comfortable they would all have been. Grandpapa, betraying an awareness of money passing, increased the amount of it that was finding its way into Julius's bank.
"You know what?" Edu said to his wife, "it's now up to what it was before Melanie's second christening, and he's only one now."
"Your words," said Sarah, "are food for thought."
When Julius and Sarah both were fifty, Voss Strasse staged a joint celebration. The idea was thought to have originated with Gottlieb.
Their birthdays fell within a few months of each other. Sarah had believed Jules to be about a year or two older than herself, a view that was not generally shared; Julius had not envisaged the question of her age at all, though if asked would readily have given her a decade more. Voss Strasse had kept count.
"Perhaps the Eumenides were rather like the Merzes," said Sarah.
Julius looked at her with distaste. "Must we?" he said, "do we have to?"
"Attain to this noticeable age? We must. And we have." "Not I," said Julius. "Not until July." "It's in the Kreuz-Zeitung/' said Edu. "Milestones." "This fete —" said Julius.
"You will be hard put to cling to your conviction, Jules dear," Sarah said.
As they came up the stairs the number ^J J large and round greeted them from everywhere. Festooned with paper garlands, framed by leaves of extraordinary deadness, gloss and durability, in icing, in marzipan, in electric candles, in candied fruit; 5 and o cut out in tin foil and wired between the antlers of the nineteen-ender stag sent, not shot, by Max from his Silesian estate, a trophy that reclined on the carpet in the antechamber at the foot of an altar of offerings, attentions to Merz from Merz connections—poultry in their feathers, hares in fur, strings of partridge, a dozen brace of this and a dozen brace of that, crayfish clambering weakly through damp seaweed, Westphalia hams, snake-lengths of smoked eel, great glistening lumps of sheer boned goose flesh sewn into its own faultless skin, five-pound tins of caviar afloat in silver coolers, Strasbourg terrines large as bandboxes, hothouse asparagus thick as pillars, fifty plover's eggs in a nest of bronze twigs, and rising Pelion upon Ossa, tier on tier, crested at the apex by the plumes of massed heads of pineapple, corbeille upon box on box on case on satined case, Port and Havanas, Arabian Mocha, Smyrna figs, grapes in cotton wool, Turkish delight, marrons glaces, Sacher cake and Karlsbad plums. The presents proper were laid out in the ballroom; and through the salons to the dining room there stretched a buffet displaying the substances of the antechamber at a stage nearer to, indeed already surpassing, the customary degrees of comestibility. Supremes and Fondants, Velours and Claires, Masques and Glazes, en Bellevue, en Chartreuse, en Savarin, en Bouquetiere, Sure-leves and Richelieus, Figaros and Maintenons, Niagaras and
Metternichs and Miroites—en Grenadin; en Favorite; en Chambertin; en Financiere; en Chasse, en Croise, en Frappe, en Triple-Eau, en Glissade, en Diademe; en Sainte-Alliance, en Belvedere, en Ballonne, en Demi-Deuil and Demidoff: Gramonts, Chimays, Souvaroffs, Albufera and Tivoli.
"There's a corner of France for you, Baron," said a guest.
"By way of the Eastern Empire," said Sarah.
"I beg your pardon?"
Henrietta, dressed as Hermes, recited some verse in honour of the celebrees; Grandpapa made a speech that began with nel mezzo del cammin and ended in safe harbour. Both were almost word perfect. Their efforts had been composed for them by the Poet Jubilate, a literary gentleman, now of advanced age himself, who had officiated at such functions in certain Berlin circles as long as anybody present could remember. This status was nonpro, that is he did not publish (although some of his vers de circon-stances occasionally found their way into the social columns) but was rewarded in the manner of some eminent consultants at the door by an enveloped honorarium changing hands between him and the master of the house. At the end of the day another well-known face appeared, and presents, food and buffet were cumbersomely photographed from under a black veil.
It was at the end of that year that Sarah set about to pay her husband's debts for the last time. During the same winter their youngest girl was caught having tea in a public pl
ace alone with a young man, a trotting-horse trainer from a nearby course. The girl, not yet fifteen, was alive to the enormity of her conduct and relieved rather than anything else by being packed back to school in mid-holiday, but Sarah who had wished to meet the man—a near-gentleman found to have been dismissed for laziness and betting—felt she had seen a ghost.
Once she had completed her arrangements, she settled down to waiting for what she knew was bound to come. She foresaw the mechanics; saw that her course would not be popular, was convinced of its justice and necessity, and a little concerned about the fascination it revealed itself to hold for her. Months, a year, another year, passed in the expectation of this full-dressed shape, this half-conjured future, and as she waited it was not always with composure. Once or twice she believed it to be imminent; often, she hoped so; but when one morning in May Edu came home from the club having left behind him that enormous IOU, when he came through the door into her room to tell her, she realized she had been certain it would not be for that summer. The temptation came to her that she could still leave everything unhappened—quickly take out the cheque-book, write the figure, bid Edu to be gone, see him streak out—and she in her light room with her pictures and the tray, the tea hardly less warm than before. . . . What she said was, "Will you please go away now, I want to get dressed; I shall be ready to speak to you in half an hour."
Everything thereafter took place much as she had envisaged it. But that long rehearsal did not spare her the emotions of the performance, step by step, and the stale-ness, the sense of deja-couru, did not lessen the indignity of the stings. One or two points surprised her; the length of the unrolling—there was so much more of everything: conferences, talk, paperwork, waiting, waiting for the courts; and it was spread over more time. And she was baffled also by the tenacity of hope; she had believed to have discounted Edu, yet when Edu showed himself without a shred of either grit, grasp or change, she felt desolate.
A legacy; a novel Page 15