Perhaps his hesitation prompted the siege. Using diabolical initiative, they would isolate him in one or other part of the house, or at some unexpected moment during a family outing, parading their undeniable charms and their several armouries of artifice, so that week by week, almost day by day, they began to deflect him from his work at the yard or his absorbing involvement with Max Körner's experiments and even, on occasion, to invade his sleep in a way that troubled him and left him at odds with himself. His brief encounters with them, from being light and inconsequential, began to take on a measure of exciting and deliberately contrived experimentation that would almost surely have been resolved one way or another had the field been less open, or the competition less keen and watchful. Once, in an alcove on the landing, he was embracing Sophie when Gilda swooped on them from the back staircase, shouting with glee at his embarrassment. Another time Valerie succeeded in enticing him into the bedroom and she might have won the contest there and then had not Marta, the maid-of-all-work in the Körner household, appeared unexpectedly on the landing with clanking bucket and mop, so that George slipped away while Valerie was sending her about her business. It could not last, however, and he was all too aware of this, for he was honest enough to see himself as a willing victim to the spirited, three-pronged attack. At times like these, he would take refuge in the grain-store where the girls could not follow him. Here, with a kind of sullen resignation, he would go to work on a set of cogs, or a wheel-clamp, telling himself yet again that if he had the sense he was born with he would make a choice between turning his back on the Körners or paying regular visits to the city joy-house, recommended by the director at the yard.
He was in just such a mood one mild spring evening when Max found him banging away at one of the new springs they had designed, glowering at the strip of steel held in the bench vise as though it was the embodiment of all his physical and spiritual frustrations. The old man watched him for a while in silence, puffing away at his heavy, drooping pipe, so that George, laying aside the hammer, was glad to put Gilda out of mind in favour of the less demanding subject of under-springing the metal container they had bolted to the chassis, in preference to the clumsy wooden structure of the original model.
He said, “Three thicknesses will absorb a good deal of shock, Max. Is that what you had in mind?” and Max, smiling, said it was not and that what he had in mind at that moment was his young friend's abstractions and what, if anything, was to be done about them.
“Come, my boy,” he said, genially, when George growled that he had no idea what the old man was referring to, “you are a long way from home and I would be flattered if you regarded me in loco parentis, as they say. It is a woman, is it not? You are in love, perhaps?”
“If I was in love,” George muttered, disarmed by the old man's affability, “I could at least isolate the girl.”
“Ach, so! My granddaughters continue to plague you, no doubt?”
“Who else?”
“I have long been of the opinion,” said Max, with a sigh, “that there are far too many petticoats about this house. It is a pity that my son Albrecht did not leave six boys instead of four girls and two boys, both of whom, I regret to say, will live and die as peasants, like their good mother. However, I understand your problem better than you think. I may devote most of my thoughts to that,” and he nodded briefly at Maximus, “but I am not blind, and I was young myself half a century ago. I assure you, my young friend, you have few secrets from me, or from those artful hussies either. At your time of life, distractions from the serious business of life are inevitable. How long is it since you paid a visit to the city?”
“I went there once,” George admitted, “but it didn’t help much, Herr Körner. Some men are made one way, some another, I imagine.”
“That is a simplification,” Max replied, thoughtfully. “I had forgotten that the Puritan instinct is inbred in most Englishmen. It has a way of denying them the easy solution to the problem of the young.”
He sat down on a bench, relit his pipe, and puffed away meditatively, as though his assistant's preoccupation was at one with those arising out of modifications and adjustments to the big, silent machine that all but filled the store. It occurred to George then that this might be an opportunity to warn Herr Körner, in a tactful way of course, that he was in danger of either losing his apprentice or having his hospitality abused, and he was wondering how he could put this into suitable words when Max said, calmly, “The girls will surely seek to exploit the situation, and their mother also, no doubt. But that does not mean you have to accommodate them, or encourage them in their conceits. It has not escaped my attention that they have beset you, to the exclusion of the other young men in the district.”
“The fact is,” George blurted out, seeing a fancied opening, “I’ve come to the conclusion it would be best for all concerned to cut my visit short and head for home,” and was dismayed to see the old man's features assume a frown of extreme displeasure.
“Leave me? Before we have made a second test run? I won’t hear of it, Herr Swann, not merely for my sake but for your own.”
“It's you I’m thinking of,” George said, “you and Frau Körner. You’ve both gone out of your way to show me kindness and hospitality and well…” He shrugged, not liking to spell out the situation as it was resolving itself from the daily skirmishes on the stairs, landings, and in the outbuildings of the old house. But then his sense of chivalry reminded him that it wouldn’t do to implicate the girls specifically and added, “It's mostly my own fault. I’ve encouraged them, no doubt, and they’re gay and lively, far more so than girls of their age in my country. Maybe it's the climate,” he concluded, lamely, and realised then how fatuous his excuses must sound, for Max was smiling now, and it was clear that he regarded the whole thing as a rich joke.
“Ja, they are young and high-spirited, my friend, and winsome, too, no doubt. But so are you, are you not? And you are a man, with a man's capacity to give his mind to matters of real importance. So let me give you an old man's advice. If you have need of them, and they are as venturesome and impudent as I suspect, with their frills, flounces, and saucy looks, then use them. Take your pleasure in them, and be damned to their tears or squabbles.”
“You give me that kind of advice? You, their grandfather?”
“Why not? Your presence here is more important to me than the virtue of those hussies. For one I would happily sacrifice the other, my friend. Besides, youth is a short run. One day it is there and the next it is gone, leaving nothing but responsibilities.”
“But look here, Max… I mean to say, I couldn’t behave in that way, or not under your roof. I can’t swear that I won’t sooner or later, and as to responsibilities, one or other of them might find herself saddled with more responsibilities than she bargained for! You wouldn’t give advice of that kind in their mother's hearing, would you?”
“Gott in Himmel,” Max said, explosively, “of course I would not, for women are not equipped to reason like men. For all that, Frau Körner would not stand in the way of the girls, having regard who you are, and the likelihood of a settlement.”
“Settlement? You mean marriage, if it became obligatory?”
The old man's jaw dropped. “Marriage, you say? Marriage to one of my granddaughters? Ach, du meine Güthe! Herr Swann, that is not to be thought of! Your father will find a wife with a sizeable dot, no doubt, and among your own people. These girls of mine have no patrimony. Their mother has Albrecht's pension, and I have nothing to leave them, nothing but that machine over there and a handful of crowns saved over the years. Marriage? The idea is preposterous!” And he sucked his long teeth and beat a rapid tattoo on his upturned heel with his pipe, so that a shower of sparks scurried before the draught from the door.
“But what you suggest…”
“Is unworthy? Base? Ach, perhaps, to a gentleman reared in a hot-house among Puritans. But to me? It is no more than practical and of small importance. I am not a re
ligious man, Herr Swann. I have not been seen at mass since they brought me news of my son's death in that stupid quarrel with the Prussians. Neither am I concerned with the virtue of a flock of peasant girls, even women of my blood. My virtue, such as it is, stands there, under those coverings, and so, perhaps, does yours, for a man cannot hope to perfect more than one thing in his time on earth. For the rest, praise or blame, he must take his chance. That is why I say to you make free with them if that is the price you ask for your service to me over the next few months!”
For George, notwithstanding the initial shock, it was not as cynical as it sounded. He was learning about life and one of the things he had learned down here, in the company of Maximilien Körner, was that there were variants of the word “dedication.” Dedicated men, epitomised by enthusiasts like his father or Max Körner, arranged their priorities according to their own set of values. Adam Swann had never made a secret of putting the network before wife and family all these years, so was it so odd that this gaunt old Austrian, who had laboured at one idea all his adult life, should do the same concerning his pretty granddaughters?
And yet he knew well enough that he could not strike that kind of bargain, not in cold blood and with a total disregard for the consequences. Neither, for that matter, did Max's cynical proposal have much relevance to his own immediate needs. Had they done, a weekly jaunt to the joy-house district of the city would have served and in this context the old man seemed to have misunderstood him, was probably incapable of understanding him. He saw then that he could not hope to communicate to such an obsessive mind the stresses and subtleties of the deep personal loneliness he had experienced so often during his wanderings, all the way from the Polygon, in Lancashire, to this stone house beside the Danube; or that such stresses and longings were unlikely to be eased for more than an hour or so by spending himself in the body of an immature girl, or exercising a transitory physical dominance over one or all four of Herr Körner's pretty granddaughters. For all that he still felt drawn to the man and involved, more deeply than ever, in his dream. He said, briefly, “Leave it then. I’ll stay and see it through, Herr Körner, at least until we can make another road test, for the truth is that contraption is as much mine as yours now and I think I’ve more faith in its future. As to the girls, forget I was fool enough to mention them.”
The old man, however, seemed indisposed to dismiss the topic so arbitrarily. He said, mildly, “It's true, then? You have no special preference? They are as one to you?”
“Any one of them will make someone a good wife when the time comes.” He looked carefully at the old man, now occupied with filling his pipe. “Perhaps I should start giving you advice, Herr Körner. Perhaps you should spend less time in here and more out looking for husbands.”
“Ach, that is their own and their mother's concern,” he replied, impatiently, “but since you have lumped them together, and speak of their marriage prospects, I take issue with you on one account. If I were a young man about here, with his way to make, I would not give the younger trollops a second glance. I would make myself agreeable to Gisela, who is worth more than her brothers and sisters combined. As a wife, surely, but also as a mistress if I know women, and I should, set down here among so many of them. Gisela has brains and you are too young to understand that a woman takes her brains to bed with her and they are still there in the morning. She could have married more than once. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t,” admitted George and his mind conjured, for the first time, with the sacrifices the years must have demanded of Gisela, who seemed older than any of them and yet, when one thought about it was just as pretty and only a year or two older than Sophie, of the swaying walk.
“There's no need for Gisela to become an old maid on the family's account,” he said. “They’re old enough to look for themselves now, aren’t they?”
“She will stay for all that,” Max said, “until the others are married, and the two boys done with their apprenticeship.”
He stood up, knocking his half-smoked pipe on a piece of cowling that he used as an ashtray. “So too will you, Herr Swann. A little longer, perhaps, until we get that monster on the road again. But let me say this. If you are restive, and this time-wasting beast does not dominate you entirely when the picnic season is upon us once more, give a thought to Gisela. You would, perhaps, find her more rewarding than those other minxes.”
He shuffled out on this, leaving George to lock the storehouse door. It was an improbable conclusion to what George thought of as a curious discussion between two people of widely separated generations, linked by a common obsession with an array of nuts, bolts, cogs, cranks, and levers that added up to Maximus.
6
The discussion had one decisive result. In the light of what the old man had said, George became increasingly aware of the self-effacing Gisela, as she went about her work in the house. He had assumed, up to that time, that she was already on the way to becoming a facsimile of the placid Frau Körner, always busy, often perspiring gently over the stove, but never occupied with anything not directly associated with running what amounted to a youth hostel. But he was learning about women and came to the conclusion that Gisela's abstraction was due to something less definitive than the preparation of endless meals and garments, that she had access to a world of her own behind the habitually amiable expression in her china-blue eyes, gentle mouth, and high white brow, that had a way of wrinkling in a manner that suggested a restrained impatience with the sustained clamour of the family. Little by little he came to see her as the central but unobtrusive prop of the household, without which there might be no high spirits, no shameless shirking of domestic chores, and certainly no skilful catering for the picnics and outings along the Danube, across to Labau, into the Wienerwald, and on the wooded slopes of the Kahlenberg.
Their relationship was friendly but more of a brother and sister than that existing between George and the other girls. There was no tension here. He never flirted with her—she was too dignified for that—and he never teased her, as her sisters often did, but without in any way disturbing her equanimity. All the same, he found himself watching her closely and it came to him that maybe the old man was right, and that she had a well-stocked, well-ordered mind, sealed off by what she accepted as her duty to a widowed mother, an ageing, eccentric grandfather, and five younger brothers and sisters, all of whom appeared to take her very much for granted.
She, for her part, did not unbend towards him, as all the others had by this time. To her he was still a gentlemanly English student, who brought distinction on the house by staying here and taking such an interest in grandfather's invention, so that it was difficult to establish the free and easy access he had won so effortlessly in the case of Sophie, Valerie, and Gilda. When this did happen, he discovered that the old man's guess had been shrewd. Gisela was rewarding in a way that the other girls were not, for all their gaiety and accessibility.
It came about by chance, when the family, including for once Max, had made a Sunday crossing of the short arm of the Danube to Lobau. They were playing some childish game (the Viennese adults, he had discovered, were much addicted to what he thought of as childish games) akin to hide-and-seek, among the oaks and chestnuts of the island.
He had just “caught” Gisela, who had been hiding in a hollow tree some five feet from the ground, and as she clambered down to surrender he took advantage of her landing to embrace her, a little objectively, as though to decide how she would react.
Her response surprised him very much. Instead of simulating protest, as Valerie or Sophie would have done, or subsiding gleefully, as he had come to expect of Gilda, she took control of the embrace, as though resolved to make the very most of it. As they were screened by a cluster of oaks and waist-high bracken, she was able to bring so much enthusiasm to the contact that he found himself being kissed in a way he had never been kissed by her sisters, not even the venturesome Gilda. She kissed him with parted lips, using her tongue
, and she used her body too, exerting so much pressure with her thighs that they parted and enfolded his braced leg so that he was reminded instantly of Max's dictum concerning women who took their brains to bed with them. But the disturbing result of this was that it reawakened in him all the bittersweet longings of his first weeks away from Rosa Ledermann, making his impersonal hankerings after Sophie, Valerie and Gilda seem relatively adolescent. The scent of her hair, the flickering movement of her tongue, and, above all, the sustained pressure of her thighs drove him wild and he thought, savagely, “If I don’t get a woman of my own I’ll go berserk…” But then her abandon touched some spring of tenderness in him and he spoke her name, three times, four times, and raised the hand that was beginning to caress her body to her hair, stroking it gently at the back of her head where it parted to divide into two thick, swinging plaits. They heard the family hallooing for them from the adjacent glade and presently they separated and walked back wordlessly and a little shyly, keeping their distance. But the sharp-eyed Max, puffing away at his pipe where he sat on a log, looked up smiling as he saw them emerge from the thicket and conveyed what he had seen by winking at George over the shoulders of Frau Körner, who was kneeling before the picnic hamper that always accompanied the Körners on these occasions. There was no immediate sequel to this encounter, although sometimes, when Gisela was coming and going about her work, they would exchange a level glance, as though each knew something the others did not. But then, like a summer storm that blew up out of the sky over the looming Alps, the pleasant rhythm of the Körner household was shattered.
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 50
