by Jane Arbor
'I did, and do—if I can be assured-of your whole ear, not merely half of it, and if I can appeal to whatever goodwill you have towards your friend, the Baronin.'
That brought Juliet up short. Discarding flippancy, 'Magda?' she said. 'You are asking me something for her? About her?'
'If you'll let me.'
'Go on, please.'
He paced away from her, hands in pockets, paced back. 'She is returning to the Schloss tomorrow, as I daresay you know?' At Juliet's nod, he went on, 'And since she has been away, Ilse Krantz has made some necessary changes in the hotel. Changes which the Baronin may not care for, but which she ought to approve in the interests of its future '
'Just a minute. What kind of changes? Major ones? Minor? Where? How?' Juliet cut in.
'For instance, Ilse is bringing in younger staff, updating the furnishings, introducing buffet meals in place of the old-fashioned waiter service. Those dreary potted palms have gone; in future, the hotel flowers will be done professionally—and so on.'
With difficulty Juliet did not shout her dismay. 'You are saying that Frau Krantz is carrying out this— this wretched face-lift without the Baronin's knowing; in her absence and without her consent? Is that so?'
'Necessarily so, Ilse says. Persuasion and advice get nowhere with the Baronin's diehard attitudes, and myself, I'd be inclined to trust Use's knowledge and experience of the modern tourist against hers.'
'Oh, you would?' Juliet flung at him. 'You'd back
your—you'd back Frau Krantz against Magda's experience of the clientele she cultivated and kept for as long as she wanted, and you'd encourage a mere manageress to change everything in sight without the agreement of her chief? And more than that, to do it in secret? Would you?'
Karl said obliquely, 'When I appoint a manager, I expect him to manage.'
'But not to override you, surely?'
'When mine is the better judgment of a given situation, no.'
'Which I'm sure you'd claim it always is.' She could not resist the sneer. 'But even if you conceded for once that he was right, at least you'd expect him to consult you, get your consent? Whereas '
'Whereas,' he took her up, 'Ilse has acted solo, rightly or wrongly, and the consequence of that, as I see it, is where you come in.'
'Where I come in?'
'If you will.' He looked down into her troubled angry face. 'That's what I came to ask of you— whether, for your friend Magda's sake, you'd do what- you can to soften whatever blow she is bound to suffer from all this; try to make her see that Ilse knows what she is about, and that it's probably for the best. What do you say?'
'In other words, Ilse Krantz baulks at facing Magda herself, and has roped you in to persuade me to play f go-between and troubleshooter-in-chief ? 1 see V
'You don't,' he scorned. 'As usual, you see only what your stiff-necked hostility chooses to see. So you'll probably refuse also to believe that Ilse has no idea I'm appealing to you. In your view, she and I are ganging up against the Baronin and using you as a kind of cats- paw in our defence. Isn't it so?'
'Well, aren't you?' Juliet retorted. 'And whether or not Ilse Krantz enlisted you on her side, the result is going to be the same, isn't it? I take the brunt of all Magda's dismay and impotence in face of a fait accompli in her own hotel, while you aid and abet and applaud Ilse for about as high-handed a bit of chicanery as I ever met. And if that can't be described as ganging up, I don't know what can!'
'Just as I don't know what there is to Ilse which arouses you to such fury,' he remarked. 'For you dislike her heartily, don't you, and I wonder why?'
'It's mutual. She dislikes me just as much.'
'Yes.'
His flat, brief agreement was a surprise. Juliet snapped, 'Oh, you know? But she keeps you wondering as to why?'
'In her case, I don't have to wonder. I think I can guess. But that's by the way. Meanwhile, can I hope to convince you that Ilse isn't trying to make you her front man to shelter her from the consequences of what she has done and means to do? She is prepared to stand by that, and all I—just I, no one else—am asking of you is that you use your friendship for Magda von Boden to ease her into accepting Use's better judgments, that's all.'
'Interlarding my sympathy with little snippets of advice—"It's done, so put a good face on it, Magda dear." "A manager should be left to manage, didn't you know?" Well, let me tell you—Magda has never presumed to offer me advice in any crisis I've known, and I wouldn't dare to do any differently by her!' Juliet defied him.
'Interlarding nothing!' he exploded. From two or three paces away he strode to her to clamp his hands upon her shoulders in a grip which hurt. 'I give up. I quit,' he said. 'I shouldn't have expected you would listen to me. And if there's one thing I've learned about you this afternoon, Juliet Harmon, it is that you don't do anything merely to annoy. With anyone you count as your enemy, you act out of a sour,' calculating, ingrown malice that you don't even try to resist. It probably goes too deep, anyway. It's second nature to you now.'
She looked up into his eyes, their blue now hard as stone. 'Seeing yourself as one of my enemies at the receiving end of all this venom, I suppose?' she taunted.
'Knowing you see me so.' His hold had tightened even further and, angry, hurt and shamed to her core, a demon within tempted her to drive him to the limit of his patience, wherever that might be.
She lifted her shoulders, braced them. 'Go on,' she "urged. 'Shake me if you feel you must; if doing something physically crude is the only way you know of getting your contempt of me out of your system—go on!'
For an instant she thought she had succeeded. Instead he thrust her from him, making a significant business of dusting off his hands.
( As he turned to go, 'I wouldn't stoop to it,' he said. 'Shaking is for naughty children. For a woman like you '
Juliet watched him walk away from her. She longed to dare to answer the unspoken threat of that with a provocative 'Yes-?' which might have brought him back to her, to treat her—how? But the word was choked in her throat by the great lump which rose and throbbed there and which turned to tears; angry, humiliated tears at first, and then of utter desolation and regret.
Why, why, why? If she really hated Karl, was repelled by everything about him, she couldn't have played the vixen better. But she loved him! And now he had left her in no doubt that he hated her. Why, why, why?
Chapter Eight
The Baronin did not drive her own car. When she used it one of her garden-men acted as her chauffeur, and it was so that she came to see Juliet on the evening after her return home. Usually she invited Juliet to the Schloss, and it was a pointer to her need for privacy that she had chosen to come instead to the School. She had brought Juliet a present from Bonn, a cut glass goblet with a design of vine leaves, and Juliet's delighted thanks for it went a little way towards relieving the tension of their meeting.
But the moment had to come. When Magda asked the dreaded question. 'You know what has been happening at the hotel while I have been away?'
Juliet said, 'Something about it, yes.'
'How? You have been up there and seen for yourself?'
'No, I heard it from Karl Adler. He—came to see me to tell me.'
'Made a point of telling you? Why should he have done that?'
This was difficult. What was the truth of it? Had Karl really acted, as he claimed* out of compassion for Magda, or was he only Use's stooge? Long thought and remorse inclined Juliet to give him the benefit of her doubt. But how to justify his motives, whatever they were, to Magda? 'I think ' Juliet began.
'Just so. You need not tell me,' Magda cut in, her voice harsh with unwonted anger. 'Use, knowing she would have to defend what she has done, needed you to persuade me that she was right. She would not come to you herself because she is jealous of our friendship, and if you hadn't discouraged every overture Karl Adler has made you, I suspect she could even be jealous of you over him. However, she doesn't hesitate to use both him and you for
her own ends. She did send him to you, did she not?'
Juliet said, 'I thought so, but when I accused him of it, he claimed she knew nothing of his coming to me. All he wanted, he said, was to believe I would help you to accept anything Ilse Krantz had done which it was too late to undo; just to be at your side, as it were. And though I was too angry at the time either to want to or to try to believe him, I think I begin to now.'
'You have changed your mind since? Why?'
'I think—because he was so angry too that he may have been sincere. He gave up, he said, meaning he gave up any hope that I would understand his reasons for coming to me. And I doubt now whether he would have rounded on me as savagely as he did, if he had been lying.' Remembering the scorn of his 'For a
woman like you ' Juliet added, 'He wouldn't have dared.'
Magda sighed. 'And so you parted at cross-purposes —as usual?'
'More than that this time. This time there were no holds barred.'
'And all because of me.'
'No. Or only indirectly,' Juliet disagreed. 'That man and I have a history of antipathy that anything, anything could spark off. Which makes your idea that Ilse Krantz could be jealous of me really rather funny, and if she ever heard how he uses any time or attention he has given to me, it would give her quite a giggle of her own. If she wants him, she has nothing to fear from me.'
Magda sighed again. 'You are bitter, dear. But perhaps it's no wonder, and I shouldn't add to your difficulties by unloading my troubles on you.'
'But of course you should,' Juliet assured her. 'Tell me, what can you do about all this?'
'Very little, I'm afraid, except to stop the rot from going any further. What hurts and dismays me most is the length of time it must have been planned. One little fortnight! Fourteen days and nights of my absence, and my hotel's face and habits have changed out of recognition. It couldn't have been done if it hadn't been plotted beforehand. Imagine, Julie! My guests are expected to stand in line to choose their own food, with scarcely one knowledgeable wine waiter in sight! And there is also a newly-imported Dirndl of a cigarette girl with a tray on a cord round her neck, a fixed smile like a Dutch doll's and a skirt as brief as a tutu! And that is not all. There are plans for a steel band to come out on two nights a week from Munich to play on converted oil-drums, if you please, for Latin- American dancing. Ilse Krantz pours scorn. I am altmodisch, out of date, out of tune with the times. But so is my dear Schloss, I reply—out of date by some seven hundred years, and there is nothing, nothing at all she can do about that,' Magda concluded on a more spirited note.
'Good for you,' Juliet applauded. 'And where do things go from here? At least you can cancel that outlandish band.'
'Yes indeed. Calypsos—compared with our tradition of real music! But that is a minor problem. The major one—how do I attract and keep the kind of people who want to visit an ancient Bavarian castle because it is a castle and has always been someone's home, not a cross between a dance-hall, a self-service restaurant and rooms furnished with so-called "units", instead of honest tables and chairs and beds? Tell me that?'
For all her dismay Juliet had to smile at her friend's vehemence, causing Magda to smile ruefully too: 'I get carried away,' she apologised. 'Up till now I don't think I've let even you guess how much I regret having engaged Ilse Krantz on Karl Adler's advice. Almost on sight I think I sensed that her ideas and mine might prove to be poles apart. But a new lease of life for the hotel was tempting, and in his recommending her as manager, I'm sure he meant well for me. It wasn't until I had seen them together, and had learned of their earlier association, that I saw the advantage to them both of my having taken her on. That must have counted with him too—that he should have her near him if they were taking up old threads again. They were once engaged, you see, before she married the husband she divorced in America.'
'Oh ' Juliet's thoughts had flown to the photograph of Ilse on Karl's bureau in his apartment. Did it belong to that period of their closeness or to this?
There was no telling. 'How do you know?' she asked Magda.
'Karl told me himself. Just stated the fact, without any details. I don't know what conclusions he expected me to draw from it, but I do think Ilse would like to make herself necessary to him again ' Magda broke off suddenly, scolding herself, 'There! I am gossiping, and I claim to disapprove of people who do.' Standing up, 'I must go, dear,' she added.
'But what can I do to help? I want to,' Juliet urged.
'And you have, by listening to my tirade and understanding how I feel. But I'm afraid it's a problem I must solve for myself.'
'How? Could you consider breaking whatever contract you have with Use?'
'Difficult, and I should only find myself back at Square One—unable to "carry" the hotel alone again and with no manager. No,' Magda mused, 'for the moment I must accept matters as they are. Unless of course—yes, that might bring things to a head.'
'What might?'
'Well, if Ilse succeeded in marrying Karl Adler, she would probably graciously quit the post herself, though that also would leave me in a quandary and would be a solution I'd deplore.'
'Would you? Why?' asked Juliet dully.
'Because, whatever you may think of him, Julie dear, and whether or not he had his own reasons for thrusting Ilse on me, I like the man. And what's more, Julie'—Magda pointed her words with a forefinger thrusting at the level of Juliet's collarbone—'if you had ever troubled or had had patience enough, you might have learned to like him too!'
'Always supposing he had ever troubled or had patience enough to care a hoot whether I liked him or not. Not to mention that at the outset, he was determined not to like me.'
'Which I've always been unwilling to believe, as you know.'
'Because you always look for the best in people. You'd hate to admit, as I have to, that he feels he has to revenge my treatment of Gerhard Minden, and to get even with me for my defiance of him over my lease.'
Magda frowned. 'Gerhard? But that's all in the past! And about your lease, you are fully within your rights. He couldn't be so unjust! Besides——'
Juliet prompted her pause, 'Besides what?'
'Nothing, I realised that what I was about to tell you was a business confidence between him and me, and I hadn't the right to mention it yet, even to you.' Then her goodnight for Juliet was a 'Bless you, dear, for the staunch young friend you are, and don't let your prejudice against Karl, Adler get you down. You could be mistaken about him, you know.'
To which Juliet returned an ironic, 'Could I?' inevitably reflecting after Magda had gone how largely the name of Karl Adler had come to dominate all their affairs—her own, Magda's, Ilse Krantz's, the School's; his influence an ever-deepening shadow on the Lake region, changing it out of all recognition.
It was a couple of weeks later that two events broke, at the outset apparently-unrelated, but then dovetailing together.
The first began as a rumour but turned into hard fact—the truth of it being the news which, Magda now told Juliet, she had had to honour as a confidence earlier. But now it could come out—she and Karl, in the name of Adler Classics, had successfully concluded the lease to him of an area of level land at the far end of the lake from Rutgen village, out of sight of the accepted beauty spots and vistas, for the purpose of building—could Julie guess?—a sawmill for processing the von Boden timber!
Juliet found herself tongue-tied. 'Then ? You mean ?' she stammered, and had to be helped out by Magda's gently chaffing,
'Exactly, dear! You are being so lucid! For you are agreeing, aren't, you, that Karl Adler isn't the ravening wolf you thought him, that he doesn't plan to raze the School or its neighbours to the ground, that ?'
Juliet cut in, 'I—I suppose so. Or no, I don't know that I do agree. No'—more firmly—'I'd say it's much more likely that he has decided to give us best and climb down; admit that we have won our case.'
She heard Magda sigh at the other end of the telephone line. Magda said, '
Very well, think like that if you must, dear, though I shouldn't like to witness Karl's reaction if you told him so.'
Would-be jauntily, 'You mean, if he were forced to admit I was right?' Juliet asked. .
'I mean—if you drove him to the point of having to convince you that you have won no confrontation with him, but that he has given you your reprieve.' More gently Magda added, 'Try to believe that it is so, Julie—if only for your own peace of mind.'
And how Juliet longed to know that in this big issue between them Karl had acted generously, had been concerned enough for her dilemma to decide to solve it in a way with which she could have no quarrel! But dared she hope so? She feared not.
Magda could only be right if, without having actually to like her, he at least respected her. That wouldn't be much—a mere crumb of reassurance. But she hadn't even that. From his first learning who she was and how she stood in his way, he had made little secret of his contempt for her. Here and there, admittedly, he had been carelessly gallant—with a gift of a little bunch of violets, by saving her from the pestering attentions of that—what was his name?—Johan Seiber. But even then he had blamed her for encouraging the tipsy lout, and when he had forcibly kissed her himself, he had done it with accusing, spurious passion; angry with her, hating and punishing her for a jilt and a cheat. He had said so, and nothing had changed or bettered for them since. No. Whatever had caused him to change his building plans, she had no reason to hope it had been out of mercy for her. Meanwhile Magda would expect her to accept the reprieve with as good grace as she could, and she meant to try—until the second happening of that week served to destroy even the little faith she had to believe that Karl meant well by her.
