"I liked it," I said. The Professor had explained how St. Peter’s, as originally designed by Michelangelo, had been crippled by additions tacked on to the façade by a succession of lesser architects.
"And I can tell you this about St. Peter’s," said my mother, "now that we are alone. When I went up there, two years ago, and was climbing those never-ending inside stairs up to the dome, the guide put his hands on my bosom from behind. He said he had to steady me. If he does that with me, at my age, where would he put his hands with a young girl? You ask the Professor. From me. When you go in. And remember I’m not at home."
As I returned to the drawing room the Professor was saying, "No, dear madam. Haussman did have a sad fate, granted. But with Dalibor it was destiny— No, please, let me finish. You’ve only read the papers and what the papers said was true and wasn’t true."
I thought, True and not true, why can’t he make up his mind? He really can make you hit the ceiling. My face must have betrayed me, for my grandmother gave me a reproving look.
"No, please," he repeated, and I realized that he couldn’t leave Dalibor alone, even in death, because he could not forgive his having captured the Cardinal Archbishop.
He said, "It’s come to me through a grapevine that starts with those friends of his in Paris. But the story doesn’t start in Paris; it starts in Zurich. It starts with Dalibor, who wants to get a break from his hard work in Prague and so he goes to Zurich. In Zurich—he must have felt pretty low— he goes to a fortune-teller. I can understand this. I do not find it silly. That’s where his naughtiness comes in. I mentioned it once before, to madam your daughter. And to Miss Edith here."
"Yes, you did," I said.
"As I was saying, he likes to flirt with the irrational. Or maybe he thinks of it as just an entertainment, his kind of entertainment. Pretending he takes the fortune-teller seriously, while he’s jeering at her. But she turns the tables on him. She asks him point-blank how soon will he be going to Paris. He says he isn’t going to Paris, hasn’t been there for ages, and doesn’t intend to go.
"She doesn’t stop. ‘But I see you going to Paris. You must go to Paris! The event of the greatest magnitude in your life is waiting for you in Paris.’
"Now, these friends of his from his own homeland, Burgenland or somewhere, are in Paris, and he thinks, Why not? I’ll look them up. When he told them that he had decided to visit them because of this fortune-teller rigmarole, they didn’t know what to make of it. They even suspected it was one of those stories of his he liked to make up. His friends said, afterward, that he wasn’t his usual self. He was morose and restless. They put it down to overwork— artists are moody, that kind of thing.
"He couldn’t stay at home, they said. Kept going out and about, wandering, not knowing where he wanted to go.
"On that day, about five in the afternoon, he is on the Champs-Elysées. The storm brews up. At that time, there were people all around him, hundreds of them, milling about. It hadn’t started raining yet, but the wind came up all at once. The tree didn’t crash—it couldn’t. Such an enormous tree doesn’t keel over in a flash.
"You could see it swaying and bending. You could hear it sighing, groaning, grinding. And Dalibor was standing quite far away from it. Everybody—but everybody who witnessed it, they were unanimous about it—said they all knew what was coming and ran away from it. There was plenty of time. No one else got so much as a scratch. And in the scramble, Dalibor walks up slowly to the tree, stands under it, and waits to be killed. Fulfilling his destiny."
"Irresistibly," I said.
They both turned their heads to me, astonished and reproachful. Astonished that I was there, reproachful because I had spoken. They had both forgotten my presence.
The Professor said slowly, "Yes, Miss Edith is right. Irresistibly."
He was not looking at me, though, but at my grandmother, and she was looking at him, each in a fashion that wholly excluded me. He said, "Destiny is what we make ourselves. Because our destiny is always irresistible to us." Her lips were half parted, and she bore that unfathomable expression of haughty, triumphant satisfaction that I recognized, at last, from her portrait.
The Dress Rehearsal
I was watching the group of nuns at the far end of the passage, and I noticed how oddly they resembled gentlemen in evening dress— a party company in white tie and tails. Then I saw one nun walking away from them, accompanied by a man. They stopped and faced each other. She raised the rosary swinging from her belt and swished it, laughing, against his sleeve. He kissed her hand, and she, still laughing, came toward me, turning her head and calling after him, "Be quiet now. I shan’t listen to another word."
As she approached, I recognized my mother. I gazed at her with disgust and admiration—disgust because of her behaving in this worldly manner, so outrageously ill-fitting to her costume, and admiration because it suited her so well.
"You look wonderful, Mama," I said. "I’m staggered. I never thought you’d look so well in this getup."
"That’s what I always tell you whenever there is a new fashion and you complain it will be unbecoming," she said. "It doesn’t matter. An ugly woman remains ugly and a pretty woman remains pretty. Never be afraid of a change in fashions, Edith. Let it be a lesson to you for life."
"Yes, Mama," I said, "but why have you got your outfit on already and we haven’t been promised ours till just before the dress rehearsal? It isn’t fair."
"Naturally," said my mother. "Your smocks are easy to make, and they don’t have to fit, either, because they’re loose. That’s not a problem. We’ve got priority because they can’t direct us if we don’t walk and move properly, and in modern clothes we are hopeless. I’ve got to be back now. I think they’ll want us to walk onstage any minute. You haven’t performed yet, have you?"
"We did the May song in a little room, round the piano," I said, "and they are very decent and don’t mind us singing out of tune. Because we are supposed to be natural. Like real children. They are waiting for the maître de ballet now—the real one, not just a dogsbody assistant—to go over the dance round the Maypole with us."
"It’s a ridiculous waste to get the maître de ballet to make you hop round the Maypole," said my mother. "If at least he’d teach you something of enduring value while he’s at it, like the steps of the tango."
"We are supposed to be real children," I said.
"Well, so long, now," said my mother. "Go on being a real child. And when you have been, don’t wait for me. I told Emma to be here at five to fetch you."
"Yes, Mama," I said, and I watched her going back to her group of nuns. Like her, they were society ladies of Prague who had agreed to take part in the gigantic crowd scenes of The Miracle, a fake medieval play under the direction of Max Reinhardt, which had been a sensational spectacle in Vienna, and which now, in this year of 1929, Reinhardt was taking for single-night performances to every capital city in Europe. The Miracle was eminently suited for international showing, because it enacted a legend with a scandalous content and a pious message, and because it was done in mime. The only spoken words were in the May song of my own group, and in the Latin prayers and litany during the church and convent scenes.
Reinhardt brought only his staff of assistants and his star actors with him to Prague, and enlisted, for unpaid crowd work, children from schools, undergraduates from universities, and members of the idle rich. For most of us, it was a unique adventure, but this was not the real reason my mother and her friends had consented to take part. What had drawn them was the brilliance that radiated from one of the two female stars, who were supposed to, and really did, look so alike onstage that one could not tell which was which. One was the American actress Rosamond Pinchot; the other was the young Lady Diana Manners, the daughter of the Eighth Duke of Rutland. If Lady Diana was willing to display herself before the world, the fashionable women of Prague were delighted to give support.
After leaving my mother, I walked to the end of the passa
ge, past the last few entrance doors to the boxes, rounded a curve, and began to ascend one of the twin stairs that led to the dress circle, the first-floor boxes, and the bar and smoking rooms. We had been told to assemble in the anteroom opening onto the bar. Before this, I intended to lean over the red plush ledge of the first row in the dress circle and watch the proceedings on the stage. I found it frightening to sit downstairs, listening at close quarters to the yelled orders and the furious answers that continually passed from the stalls to the wings. I was halfway up the stairs when someone came skipping past me. As he passed, I saw it was a young man. He suddenly turned and barred my way, leaning against the balustrade.
"I have been wanting to speak to you," he said. "I saw you yesterday. I watched you for half an hour, by the piano, doing the May song."
"I didn’t see you," I said.
He was dressed in flannels and a dark-red pullover. Over the arm that rested on the top rail was draped a green fur-bordered cape, and in his other hand he carried a blue-plumed hat. Clutched to his side, within the crook of his elbow, was some kind of silvery weapon, probably a sabre. He looked to be in his twenties, but he was not boyish. There was no softness in his countenance, no hesitance, none of the wide-eyed look that goes with youth. He had dark wavy hair and deep-set eyes, which were too small for his lean, strong-chinned face. He looked at me intently, seriously, searchingly. I could not imagine him smiling.
"I didn’t see you," I repeated.
"I know you didn’t," he said. "I was standing behind the open door."
"They are very decent here about the singing," I said. "At school, in music lesson, they never let me sing with the others, because I can’t sing in tune. Here they don’t mind. I do mind, myself, though. I can hear myself doing it wrong, and I know when it’s flat, and yet I can’t get it out right."
He said, "This happens often in life. In all kinds of circumstances."
"What do you do?" I asked.
"I study medicine," he said. "I’m in my last year."
"I didn’t mean it that way," I said. "I meant what do you do in the play?"
"I’m in the tavern scene," he said. "I am one of the roistering fellows who chuck the wenches through the air and catch them as they come down. We’ve been picked for our strong arms and steady hands. It’s nerve-racking, and on top of it we’ve got to look abandoned with joy. We rub our palms with chalk before we go on. It’s slippery work, making the girls go from hand to hand. They are Corps de Ballet, though, thank God. They are used to sorrow."
"I’ve never watched it," I said. "I can’t ever stay as long as I’d like, because Emma always comes to fetch me."
"How old are you?" he asked. "Twelve?"
"Yes," I said.
"Hold this for me," he said. "And this here," and he handed me the hat and the weapon, and flung the cape over one shoulder. I watched him lighting a cigarette. We both remained silent. His conversation seemed to have run out, and I reflected that he would not be "an ornament in anyone’s drawing room," as my mother always said. He had spoken the last words in the tone of a matter-of-fact order, and had not even said, "will you, please?" Now he lounged against the balustrade with one foot on a lower step than the other, and in this half-crouching position he still barred my way.
"You are enchanting," he said at last. "You are utterly lovely and enchanting. I could not stop myself looking at you yesterday, all that time."
I looked at him, aghast. There was nothing lovely about me, either in face or in figure. Moreover, if he had been watching my group in search of enchantment and loveliness, he would have surely remarked two of my classmates, both conspicuously good-looking and seeming older than their years, who never failed to be praised by a chorus of mothers and governesses when we were fetched from school. Then it occurred to me that there was one part of me that my mother and Emma always said was fine and graceful, and this was what they called the "décolleté”—that composition of throat, neck, arms, and shoulders revealed when one wore evening dress. But this was for later on, they told me, when I would be going to balls. It was like having a savings account in the bank, and he could not have guessed it in any case, since I was clad in a long-sleeved dress of brown-and-blue tartan plaid with a close-fitting white collar.
"You’ve got it all wrong," I said.
"No," he said. "But of course you yourself don’t know how ravishing you are."
I shook my head, and glancing over his shoulder, I could see a few girls of my group running up the other stairs. "I must go now," I said.
"Go," he said, but he did not move for a while and kept looking at me, with his long, full lips slightly parted, as though he still intended to speak. Then he straightened himself with an abrupt movement, took the hat and sabre from me, and stepped aside. I had forgotten that I had been holding them.
I saw him at the next rehearsal and talked to him, and at every rehearsal after. I never looked for him, and I never met him walking toward me, but he always caught up with me, coming from behind and then turning and barring my way. My feeling that he was not accustomed to drawing rooms became a conviction. He was too silent, too grave, and too straightforward. In drawing rooms, one had to converse unceasingly, speaking in bantering, joking fashion, and one had to laugh often, even when nothing witty was being said. One behaved obliquely, as though standing a few paces apart from oneself, observing oneself speak and the impression one made on others.
He told me at every one of our meetings that I was enchanting, but he did not seem much interested in my circumstances, and he did not ask about Emma, either. This annoyed me, because Emma was pretty remarkable, and on our third meeting I gave him the information on my own. I said, "I must go now. Emma will be waiting for me downstairs in the foyer, and she’ll be huffy if I let her go hanging about. It’s not really her job—she’s not my governess, she’s our parlor maid, but you’d never think so if you saw her on her day off, in a tailor-made and a black fox fur. I haven’t got a governess anymore. I haven’t had one for the last six years, though most of the girls in my class still have one. We can’t afford it now. My mother hasn’t got a lady’s maid anymore, either. We’ve only got a cook and a scullery maid and an in-between maid and Emma, and to make up for the lady’s maid the hairdresser comes every day at noon, and the seamstress every fortnight for a few days, but it isn’t the same thing, of course. Before this, we had much more money, and the last governess I had was English, and she’d been with the Prince Windischgraetz before she came to us—the one who was the nephew of the Emperor Franz Josef. And do you know what was the Prince Windischgraetz’s favorite dish?" I paused, and said triumphantly, "boiled beef with bread dumplings and tomato sauce. Shattering, isn’t it?" I watched him closely, waiting for his astonishment.
He did not show it. He said, "It’s you who are shattering. Shatteringly enchanting." He stepped aside, and I walked away without saying good-bye.
THE REHEARSALS for the crowd scenes went on for three weeks, with one of the young assistant directors standing in for whatever single role was required. I watched him celebrating a Mass, and I was much impressed with his acting. While he uttered the litany of the mater dolorosa, he seemed to be struggling, wheedling, and bargaining with the Holy Virgin. My mother, too, was full of admiration. "What a superb talent!" she said that night while we were at dinner. "And what a pity he isn’t an actor. Nobody could possibly do any better. When the famous Reimers arrives, from the Burgtheater, from Vienna, to take over, he’ll be a letdown, you’ll see." The famous Emerich Reimers, a cadaverous and magnetic figure who had won an immense following for his performances in the plays of Goethe, Schiller, Schnitzler, and Shakespeare, arrived two days before the full dress rehearsal, and I sat in the stalls, watching him. He went onstage as an elderly, haggard, careworn mediocrity, rattling off his prayers in the most businesslike fashion, tired, irritable, impatient to be done. He was the kind of priest we all knew. He was the only possible priest.
During dinner that night, my m
other said with a sigh, "Did you see Reimers? Weren’t you shattered? And do you remember what I said before? I take it back now, utterly. When you see someone like him, it makes you realize that famous actors aren’t famous for nothing."
"Yes, Mama," I said. "I was shattered, too. Golly."
"There you are," said my mother, and then changing from noble melancholy to brisk animation, she added, "It really boils down to what I always say: You see a dress in the Jardin des Modes and you think it’s most satisfactory, and then you come across a model dressed in Lanvin or another of the great leading lights of this world and only then do you realize. Say what you will, people like Lanvin don’t ask ridiculous prices. They give something others can’t give. Let it be a lesson for life to you, Edith."
"Yes, Mama," I said.
"You needn’t look so worried about it," said my mother. "At twelve years old, you are not expected to face the burden of these problems. You wait till you get to my age."
"Yes, Mama," I said.
"And apropos problems," said my mother. "I’ve asked Dr. Hofmann, the lawyer, for dinner tomorrow, and I hope you will be on your best behavior. Don’t sit there again looking like a sheep when it thunders. Be friendly and sunny. If you must look like a sheep, look like a sunny sheep. Even if you think he’s ghastly. Do it for my sake."
"Yes, Mama," I said.
My mother’s exhortation to be "friendly and sunny" toward a male guest was nothing new to me. Nor was "Do it for my sake." It had been like that ever since I could remember. The first instance of this trouble had taken place during my first school holidays, in the summer when I was six years old, while we were staying at an elegant lakeside resort in Carinthia. I had no governess then, and my mother had brought Emma along with us. She and Emma were the same age, and Emma had entered my mother’s service as a parlor maid soon after I was born. I was proud walking about with Emma, who was much more decorative than any governess. She looked neat and glossy, as though carved out of wood and freshly varnished, with her massive, gold-blond plaits twisted into a heavy switch, and she carried her tall, narrow-boned figure in an exceedingly upright manner peculiar to her. She was resplendent in a dark-blue rose-sprigged dirndl costume with white cambric sleeves and scarlet satin apron, which my mother had had made for her so as to avoid the awkwardness of making her wear a maid’s uniform or having her dress like a poor imitation of a lady. One morning, while we were in the bathing establishment built on wooden struts over and into the lake, where I went to have my daily lesson with the swimming teacher, Emma and I made the acquaintance of a man who was lounging near us on a towel spread over the rough-hewn planks that made up the floor. He was in his late forties and had the ungainly, plump-fleshed body of a person who has been weak and skinny in his youth. Though he was wearing only his bathing suit, he seemed fussily overdressed. He had an unfashionable mustache, a gold-rimmed pince-nez, dense and dark freckles on his shoulders, and a gold watchband, through which he had drawn a handkerchief whose colored border matched the color of his bathing suit. It was not Emma he wanted to engage in conversation; it was me. He wanted to know how old I was, how long I was going to stay. As he went on, my manner grew more and more contemptuous, while his became progressively more humble and more admiring. Banal as his questions were, they were delivered with a disturbing, beseeching pressure, to which I was unaccustomed.
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 8
