The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  Toby started his business life a wealthy man. He arrived while the Austrian exchange was still in chaos, when men and women on fixed salaries were starving and all but the hardiest of the leisured class were dead. There was none but the foreigner to keep alive what remained of luxury in Vienna. For the first month he lived cautiously, being uncertain how far his salary would go. Then Irma von Karlskreuz taught him how rich he really was.

  He was placed next to her at a lunch at the Consulate. It was a charity lunch; that is to say, there were two elderly and well-connected governesses, an incredibly respectful and patriotic Londoner in a wig and threadbare frock coat who had been, Toby gathered, a dental mechanic or photographer at the court of Franz Josef, and Irma. She was treated with a slightly snobbish deference, but it was evident that she had been invited for the first, and probably the last time on the strength of some letter of introduction.

  She ate casually in small mouthfuls, answering Toby’s conversation with eyes and smile rather than words. Her face was given character by a long and tender space between nose and mouth, beneath which the lips were set like an inverted bow, thin and wide, with very sensitive corners that perfectly expressed pleasure and melancholy by their tiny movements. Her grey eyes were dark-circled. When his arm touched hers, he could feel her trembling. A girl, he thought, under the stress of some unbearable emotion.

  He was fascinated by her. She was about eighteen, dressed in cheap blue serge that she had cut close to her figure, hoping that the slim, ethereal body within would give some suggestion of elegance to its wretched covering. It was evident that the consul’s wife felt that her guest would have presented a more seemly appearance had she worn corset and brassière; but Irma had little on which to hang either of those garments, and aesthetically no need of them. Already late for his afternoon’s session at the bank, Toby took a taxi and gave her a lift as far as the Kohlmarkt. Greatly daring—for the emancipation of the unmarried girl had not progressed very far in the Austrian families that he knew—he suggested a dance-tea on the following Saturday afternoon.

  “I should love it,” Irma said, “but—”

  “May I call on your mother?” Toby added hastily. “She would perhaps come too?”

  Irma laughed.

  “No! I was only going to say that I’m not very strong. I should be better later in the day.”

  “Let’s dine together then,” he suggested.

  Irma nodded.

  “And don’t dress,” she said. “And let’s go somewhere quiet.”

  Toby decided on a cellar restaurant behind the cathedral, where the proprietor, a bald-headed Hungarian Jew gnawed by continual dyspepsia, was initiating him into the mysteries of food and drink and taking a vicarious pleasure in Toby’s virginal enjoyment of delicacies that he no longer dared to eat himself. Toby’s proposal was caviare, blue trout and roast hazel hen. Bernstein asked if his guest would be hungry.

  “I don’t know,” said Toby. “She doesn’t look as if she could eat a lot.”

  “It is as well to suppose that everyone is hungry,” replied Bernstein. “May I advise you?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Then no caviare. I will make you a little dish of eggs—I will choose how after I have seen the lady. Then your trout and hazel hen and a châteaubriand to follow.”

  “Dear God!” said Toby. “It’s a little maiden.”

  “Little maidens have big stomachs. And it is better that we should be found prepared than wanting. You will see.”

  Irma ate her way through the menu steadily, and with the same disinterested, small mouthfuls. Again she let Toby do the talking, but answered him now with gay laughter as well as the smiles that had already conquered him. She left the wine in her glass untouched until the arrival of a steak that had the proportions of a small joint: then sipped her claret and attacked the meat with an appearance of natural good appetite.

  “It’s good,” she said.

  “I’m glad. I was so afraid you wouldn’t like the place.”

  “I love it. It’s a dear place,” Irma answered decisively with her mouth full, and choked.

  “Don’t put in such a big piece!” he laughed.

  “Why shouldn’t I now?”

  “I don’t know why you shouldn’t,” said Toby, “if you want to, now or any other time.”

  “Don’t you? Haven’t you seen people eat when they are hungry?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “I wonder. I mean, when they are really hungry. They tear their food. It’s ugly—horrible! And I won’t do it! I won’t do it!”

  “But were you hungry?”

  “I’d had nothing to eat but cabbage soup for a week before that lunch where I met you. It was so hard to be decent.”

  “My God! That’s why you trembled!” Toby exclaimed.

  “Did I tremble?”

  “Yes. I never dreamed you were hungry.”

  “Really? You mean it?” asked Irma anxiously, as if he had paid an unconscious compliment to her beauty rather than her self-control. “And to-night too? I was just as hungry.”

  “There wasn’t a sign of it. But why didn’t you tell me?”

  Irma smiled at him and made no reply.

  “Well, I suppose I should be as proud myself,” said Toby.

  “No. I think you’d be much franker about it. After all, it’s easier for a man.”

  “But you’re not alone in Vienna?”

  “Yes. I live with an uncle and aunt, but they don’t count. I mean—I have always lived with uncles and aunts.”

  Irma began to talk of herself. She was basking in a sense of well-being. Her body rested after its heavy meal and the few drops of generous wine as if in the relaxation of sleep, while her mind sought for companionship. Any shock of personalities would have instantly driven it into hiding, but of this Toby was aware. He was tender when he spoke and his eyes showed his interest in her, but he instinctively avoided any expression of pity with its inevitable hint of patronage.

  Irma responded eagerly to his English detachment. She was used to young men who had the cynicism of despair or carried into their conversation the misery of continual self-analysis. With them she could not talk, for she too was devoured by uncertainties; with Toby, positive but alive, she could. She told him how her father had committed suicide before the war, having sold his last estate and lost the proceeds at baccarat. Her mother, nursing in a war hospital, had died of typhus, a victim of the untrumpeted battle fought to keep the lice of gallant little Serbia south of the Danube. Then Irma had gone to the house of her youngest uncle, a professor of economics at Heidelberg and the only member of her distinguished family to live within his income and to earn it. She had passed the war in Germany and returned to Vienna in 1920, invited by a feckless pair of relations who had a vast flat in the Schmerlingplatz and a firm conviction that they could avoid the continual fall of the exchange by the scientific backing of horses. By 1922 they still had a roof over their heads and such food as could be obtained by the sale of the last bits of furniture. Irma, her uncle and her aunt occasionally did odd jobs of translation or house-work for their friends, but could not find steady employment; it was not to be found, even by the more efficient. They were not yet desperate, but becoming physically weak.

  Toby and Irma went on to a theatre, to a cabaret, and to a quiet and comfortable suite in an hotel. After they had danced together, neither doubted how the evening would end. They did not want to be parted and there was no reason why they should be. Irma’s uncle and aunt were not, she said, inquisitive about each other nor about her. All three went their own way, using the enormous empty flat as general headquarters.

  They awoke most happily to the Sunday morning, laughing at the red and gold bedstead, the dead leaves that danced against the window, the tangle of golden-brown hair with which, awaking a little before dawn, she had
bound them both together. Irma was pitiably thin—a wraith of a girl, but so exquisitely proportioned that the too prominent bones merely emphasised her structural beauty. She was shy in daylight; not that she had any false modesty, but that she remembered what her body had been—a regret that could easily be charmed away by the insistent enthusiasm of a lover. Her skin had but one blemish: her thighs were pitted and scarred by healed wounds. Toby asked her the cause. After a month of Central Europe he had no fear that such a question would embarrass her. The curses of Job were no matter for shame when everybody had known what it was to go unwashed and to eat whatever they could compel their stomach muscles to keep down.

  “Ulcers,” Irma answered. “Plenty of children had them in Germany during the war. It was the bad feeding.”

  “But didn’t you get enough to eat even then?” asked Toby, forgetting that every day for four years the papers had joyfully prophesied the imminent collapse of the enemy through starvation.

  “But of course not,” she replied wonderingly. “Didn’t you know?”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose I did.”

  “You ought to. It won the war for you.”

  “What did?”

  “The blockade.”

  “It worked? I thought that was just a government lie.”

  “Of course it worked. It didn’t hurt grown-ups so much, but people couldn’t go on seeing their children die. They couldn’t get enough fats or milk or anything. My dear, I was always, always hungry. And when I was thirteen I got these ulcers. They wouldn’t heal.”

  “God!” Toby exclaimed. “And we talked of atrocities!”

  He turned away from her and burst into tears. It was as if all the bitternesses of the war, the lies and taboos and legends, on which, in spite of himself, he had been brought up, had suddenly overwhelmed him. He realised the iniquity of Europeans with that same agony with which in terrible and private moments of remorse he had realised his own. The storm of emotion swept over him while Irma, deeply caring and vaguely understanding, held him close to her naked side and murmured comfort.

  For the sake of the uncle and aunt and the Danube & Ottoman, Irma and Toby did not set up house together, but took a tiny corner flat, looking west down the long vista of the canal, where they spent together as many evenings and nights as could discreetly be managed. Toby found that he could afford all the few luxuries that they could use. His first evening with Irma, for example, had cost him a little under a pound, including dinner, theatre, a champagne cabaret and the hotel bill. Thereafter whatever amusements they wanted, they had. His chief care was not economy but to avoid offending Irma.

  Money she would not take. Presents had to be inexpensive and amusing. A few clothes she accepted: underclothes, since it was Toby who would appreciate them; a frock, so long as he pretended that it had just caught his eye in a shop and he had bought it because he liked it. She kept him away from the uncle and aunt, preferring frankly not to mix her two lives. She would accept gifts for them such as a ham, a dozen of wine, a brace of birds or an entire cheese, but would refuse a leg of mutton, an account at the dairy or a ton of coal. Toby finally worked out the principle. Gifts that one landowner might reasonably send to another she would take home. Gifts that might be given by a landowner to a poorer dependent she would not. What lies she told them he never knew.

  Irma, well fed, was utterly lovely. Her waist remained so slim that she could lie back in his elbow crooked at a right angle. The long line of her hips started from a curve instead of a ridge. Her breasts, set curiously low upon the cage of her ribs, no longer allowed his lips to feel the bone beneath them. When he was not in the bank, Toby saw no one but her. He was neither happy nor unhappy. He lived in and for his desire for her, and thanked his parents and even compulsory games for a constitution that was equal to all demands he made on it. Passion, accompanied by every refinement that the two highly civilised children could contrive, should have paid a price of jealousy and hysterical quarrels, but it did not. Both of them were too glad to live from day to day. Irma had known little peace and little beauty. She was so content with what she had that she did not worry, as would a woman who had ever experienced a settled life, whether the peace was merely temporary.

  After two months Irma had reason to believe that she was pregnant. Both of them refused to take it for granted until the calendar again confirmed that it was highly probable. Toby begged her to marry him and bear the child. He could not conceive that he would ever tire of her, and it seemed sacrilege that the body he so loved should go through objectless pain. But Irma insisted on an abortion. It was, she said, no world into which to bring children. She was as much in love with Toby as he with her, but children and marriage seemed to her to mean the end of a dream, a return to the reality of aunts and uncles and the atmosphere of pride and desperation and scraping garbage-cans for to-morrow’s meal. In vain Toby swore that it would mean nothing of the sort, that he had no objection to being drawn into the lives of her relatives nor to helping them; if she morbidly felt that there could be no true life for her in Vienna, then they would go somewhere else; the Danube & Ottoman would transfer him to Rumania or Albania or any of their less desirable posts. But he had to give way to her.

  It was the end of the affair. Had either of them foreseen that they would lose the splendour of their passion, they would have married unquestioningly; but now it was too late. Irma, so sensitive to pleasure, had no less exquisitely tasted pain; she was afraid. Believing that marriage would recapture their bliss, Toby insisted and argued. She defended herself by telling him that she did not love him. Her agony of tears convinced him that it was a lie, or at any rate a neurotic underestimate of love, but he could not shake her. Since the workings of her passion were temporarily upset, she would not trust her instincts and was thrown back upon her traditions. They were no help. She had been brought up to believe that marriage was an alliance between two families, which might or might not be romantic but most certainly depended on the desire for children and the willingness to take a long view of life. She had neither. It was not that she could not face twenty years with Toby. She could not face the thought of twenty years at all. To make plans imprisoned one in that world where plans were brought to nothing.

  The lack of harmony between them was exaggerated by their isolation. When Irma received a letter from a maiden aunt in Prague, asking her to come and act as her companion, she accepted. Czechoslovakia was already the only state of Balkanised Europe to be showing signs of normal life, and at least there was some promise of escape from poverty. With the hardness of blank misery, she said good-bye to Toby and left. He could not, in after years, blame himself for having let her go. To handle her needed a firmness, even a brutality, that was beyond the experience of a boy of twenty-two caught up in the emotional conflicts of a highly intelligent mistress.

  He found forgetfulness in working resentfully, then eagerly, at the routine of the office. Up till then he had been written off as a failure; he had taken no interest in learning his job, nor had he been at all a social asset to the bank. His superiors had already reminded him that he was paid a large salary in order to be well and frequently seen in diplomatic and business circles, and to pick up friends and information. Their surprised appreciation of his new efficiency showed him in what little esteem he had been held. Toby was ashamed and set himself to master his trade with all the desolate energy released by the disappearance of Irma.

  He had carried with him to Vienna the magnificently imperial idea that in any business which employed Englishmen they were at the head by divine right and absolute merit. To find the chiefs of departments of several nationalities was a shock. He obeyed them, since obedience to authority was second nature to him as to most men of his upbringing; but it was a year before he could clearly admit to himself that the only manager who could answer questions limpidly and intelligently was a Frenchman, that the most considerate was an Austrian, that for speed, courage and r
eadiness to take any and every responsibility the head of the Foreign Exchange department, a Polish Jew, was a model for empire builders, and that two at least of the half-dozen stolid English bankers were chiefly remarkable for their waspish jealousy of the rest.

  During the next three years his tentative cosmopolitanism became a reality. He had no homesickness for England. He spent there no more than a week of each leave, cursing his relative poverty and the climate, and the rest within the bounds of the old Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire. He cultivated an air of solidity which made his very real discretion appear genuine even to the conventional. He called punctiliously on the diplomats and the Austrian politicians, passed round teacups at his legation, and developed his head for liquor to such a point that he could fortify himself against boredom at public dinners and yet keep his wit within bounds. He steadied; he was responsible; he did in fact become that sound citizen which Chesterfield had endeavoured to make him. In his own eyes as well as those of society Toby was the correct young banker that he appeared to be.

  His ambition was to be on the board of the Danube & Ottoman in his late forties and meanwhile to be respected for his dignity and common sense. He began to think of settling down and imagined himself, with a good deal of satisfaction, in a home of his own with a cool cellar, a good cook and a wife who would preside over his hospitality and share his bed with orderly enthusiasm. His prospects were brilliant and his salary now £750 a year; he could take his pick of eligible daughters. Their mothers, however, found him unreasonably difficult for a bachelor at the impressionable age of twenty-five. His standard was too high. Irma and after her a procession of Russian, Transylvanian and Croat émigrés had taught him to use great gentleness towards women, and he was continually hoping that a child in her teens would respond to it with the same instant appreciation as some lovely and unhappy creature in her thirties. But a girl with the world at her feet had more need of a playmate than a young man of disconcerting cleverness. The marriageable daughters were inclined to find Toby conceited without seeing the reason for the conceit.