Authors: Elswyth Thane
If the war had not happened, she supposed she might have lived out her whole life as Conrad’s wife—lonely always, frightened often, angry now and then, but trapped and helpless and docile. But the war did come, and with it Conrad’s appointment to the Kaiser’s staff, changing irretrievably their fundamental attitude towards one another, emphasizing their differences, raising new barriers, creating dreadful, humiliating scenes with his German relatives, and even, in the privacy of their own rooms, with him.
Standing now at the window of her bedroom in the dower house at Cleeve, waiting for Victor to be announced, Rosalind heard a quiet step at the threshold and turned with that slight quickening of the heart which the arrival of Charles after even the briefest absence always brought her. He stood in the doorway, his kind, blunt face a little anxious, his eyes searching her composure. He wore rough country tweeds, well-aged, and carried his cap and gloves.
“I’m just off to the south farm,” he said in his low, unhurried voice. “Are you going to be all right here?”
“Yes, of course.” She came to him, smiling, slim and straight in her soft dark gown.
“Sure you wouldn’t rather I was somewhere about this afternoon?”
“I think it would be better not, my dear. I must see him alone.”
“I could keep well out of sight, of course.” He lingered.
“Charles, darling, he won’t want to kidnap me!”
“Well, how do you know? I would, in his place.”
She put both hands on his shoulders, looking up, and his arms went round her lightly.
“Yes, dear, but no German would have me now as a gift,” she said.
“Then what
does
he want, do you think?”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine. That’s one of the reasons I must see him. Perhaps Conrad left some kind of message or—obligation, which he must discharge. It’s the only guess I have, and it’s probably wrong.”
“You’re minding it rather a lot, aren’t you.”
“Yes, I am. More than I expected, really. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“Sure you don’t want me to see him for you? Tell him you aren’t well, or something?”
She shook her head and leaned against him, in his arms, her cheek against his coat.
“This is real,” she said. “This moment now. The other was the bad dream. It’s over.”
“Darling—” he began, and she straightened.
“No, Charles—you go along to the south farm. By the time you come back he will be gone.”
“If that’s the way you want it—”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said, reasoning with herself as well as with him. “This is England. There’s no Gestapo here.”
“True,” he agreed. “But I wish I knew what brought him here.”
A maid came to the door with Victor’s card on a salver, and Rosalind said that she would come down at once. When they were alone again she turned to Charles and lifted her face for his kiss. And when he had given it, and found her lips cold, he said, “I’ve changed my mind,” and dropped
his cap and gloves on a chair. “I’m not going. I shall wait here.”
She stood a moment with a rueful smile.
“I’m afraid I wanted you to all along,” she said. “I’ll tell them to bring you some tea.”
This is England, she said again to herself, fiercely, as she descended the staircase. I’m shaking just the way I used to do, and this is my own house, with Charles in it, and my own country, and Conrad is dead. There is nothing to be afraid of, there is nothing they can do now….
She entered the room where Victor waited.
“You will forgive me if I stare at you,” he said after a moment. “But you are not—not at all what I thought to see.”
“Perhaps I had the advantage of you there,” she smiled, and offered her hand. “You are very like your father.”
He bent formally and kissed her hand, which was at once withdrawn.
“But you are so young,” he said, almost with a stammer. “It leads me to think—perhaps there is some mistake? You are—you were the wife of Prince Conrad zu Polkwitz-Heidersdorf?”
“For thirteen years.”
“But you—must have been married very young!”
“Yes. Girls were, in those days.” She sat down beside a table already laid with a silver tea-service where an alcohol lamp burned under a steaming kettle, and motioned him to a chair on the other side of it. “We had very little to say about it, and we naturally made some mistakes. Your father was a fine man in some ways, but—we were not suited to each other.”
“Please, if you do not mind—we do not discuss today my father.”
“As you please,” she assented, bewildered anew, for it seemed to remove at once the only possible reason for the interview. “Milk or lemon?”
“Nothing, please—just as it pours.” He accepted his cup with a formal little bow. And when he had sat down again he was silent, watching her intently as she prepared her own cup, and
she dreaded that he would perceive that her hands were not quite steady. The silence lengthened between them. He neither drank his tea nor took his eyes from her face. She could hear the clock on the mantelpiece ticking.
“If we are not to speak of your father,” she said at last, with a composure she did not feel, “why is it that you have come to see me?”
“Now that I see you I begin to understand so many things,” he said, which was no real answer.
“How do you mean?” She had to meet his intent, almost defiant stare. “What sort of things?”
“Myself, first. It is your blood in mine that makes me so constantly battle myself. That I did anticipate. But not in the same way it transpires.”
“I don’t quite understand,” said Rosalind faintly, wondering how long this must go on.
“You are
soft
,”
he said, and the word rasped in his throat. “
You
are my weakness. That I knew, it was only logical. But now it is not the same. You are so different from what I supposed.”
“How did you suppose I would be, then?”
“Like other shameless women!” he cried, and Rosalind blinked. “Painted—pretty—self-satisfied—cheap. But no, you are soft and sweet and kind—yes, you are good. It is going to be so much more simple than I had thought.”
“More simple?” she echoed, as many times she had heard herself blankly echo Conrad’s mental involutions.
“That we should be friends,” he explained coolly.
“Am I to take it that your—mission here is to fraternize with the English?” she asked ironically.
“To overcome prejudice,” he corrected politely. “To win confidence. For why should our two great nations not be friendly? There is no quarrel between us, if we can but understand each other. And where could I start better to understand the English, and vice versa, but with my own mother?”
“Well, as for my part in your programme,” she said gently,
“we see almost no one here at Cleeve. I’m afraid it will be very little use your coming here again.”
His face changed suddenly into a scowl, for he recognized dismissal.
“You mean—”
“My life in Germany is behind me. I would rather leave it there.”
“You dislike me—your son?”
“How can I tell, in a few minutes?”
“Well, then—let us get acquainted!”
“Why?” she said. “Because you are here on orders from your government to make use of your English connections?”
“But I did not say—”
“You didn’t have to
say.
Victor, I have married again. We live very quietly here, managing the home estate. We have no—influence, anywhere. This is all we want, all we are able or willing to undertake.”
“You have then no human feelings?” he reproached her. “You not only abandon your home in Germany, you repudiate your son. And
yet you do not appear to be a heartless woman.”
“I don’t think I am,” she replied, determined to hold on to things, marvelling again at the way they could always put you in the wrong. “I don’t think it’s necessary in the circumstances to go into the reasons for my leaving Germany as I did. It is a long time ago now. You must try to realize it was a very complicated situation, with my husband’s country at war with all the things I had grown up accustomed to, and—there was also a very acute personal aspect.” (I’m talking the way
they
do, she thought—in rounded periods—it’s impossible to be natural with them—impossible to make oneself understood without resorting to banalities like theirs. It is not a mere question of language, it goes deeper than that. It is a state of mind.) “We had very little to say to each other, you and I, even when you were little,” she reminded him.
“You were
die
Engländerin
,”
he said. “I was always warned that you did not understand our ways because you were
English and so not quite responsible. I used to wonder why, if that were the case, my father had brought you to live with us.”
“I used to wonder too,” she nodded, and there passed between them an unexpected, rather rueful smile.
“Now that I am a man myself, I can see why,” he said. “You have allure. He was bewitched.”
“Perhaps that was it,” she said, trying to speak lightly, aware of the first faint glimmer of a possible relationship between them, recognizing with amazement a hint of humour and warmth behind his woodenness. Like Conrad, she thought in bewilderment. Like Conrad, over again.
“But you were not happy,” he said, as though thinking it out in a new light.
“No, I was not. And the war made it suddenly much worse.”
“You were not happy even before the war began.”
“No.”
“A pity.”
They looked at each other across her tea-table, and now there was something in the air between them that might have been the blood tie—an absence of defensiveness and hostility, rather than the presence of anything so positive as a liking for each other—a moment’s truce in which understanding, even sympathy, might take root.
“But why should you hold that against me, your son?” he asked then, reasonably.
“I don’t, Victor, believe me, I don’t,” she said earnestly, and made a half gesture towards him of apology and appeal. “There is nothing to hold against you—or against him, now. But neither is there anything for us to say to each other, you and I.”
“I never thought to care about that,” he said.
“Nor I,” she answered, her eyes resting, honest and troubled, in his. There had been moments like this with Conrad too, in the beginning—moments when one almost hoped for something more, when a strong, exciting attraction existed, briefly, and then was slain, sometimes it seemed inadvertently, as though by a boot heel.
“I wonder what it is,” he said, as though to himself, and he set down his cup and rose and walked away from her down the room, and then turned and came back and stood looking down at her. “Camilla—Evadne—and now you—headstrong, wilful, undisciplined women, very foolish, very beautiful, yes, but very—Why is one so attracted?”
“Evadne?” said Rosalind, and her eyes clouded. “I don’t see how she comes into it.”
“This Cause she talks about—this belief in absolute love and fellowship, and in a personal, articulate God’s will—it is an interesting idea, isn’t it? Revolutionary, isn’t it? It might lead to—almost anything.”
“But, Victor, I don’t think you quite understand. It is not representative—that is, it has nothing to do with the Government policy.”
“Perhaps better if it had.”
“How do you mean that?”
“Only that it might save—a lot of trouble.”
“You mean that if it were universal, there would be no more aggression—and so no more wars.”
“But if there were no
resistance
,”
he corrected gently, “there would also be no more wars.”
The quiet words, in their flagrant casuistry, lay between them. Perceptibly the atmosphere had changed again. She was on guard, he was the invader, as in the beginning.
“Evadne is young and—very impressionable,” said Rosalind carefully. “You mustn’t take what she says too seriously.”
“But she is serious, surely.”
“Oh, yes. But she has no influence. She is only—”
“So pretty a girl as that, with her family position, is bound to have influence.” He spread his hands with a small, knowing, smile for her comprehension. “Even she influences me,” he pointed out, with charm.
“Now, Victor—”
“Evadne said, for instance, that you would be proud to have a son like me.”
“Yes, I suppose I—”
“I am very healthy and well educated,” he suggested.
“I’m sure you are, but—”
“There is nothing, except perhaps the way I speak English, which could perhaps be improved on, that you would feel necessary to apologize for.”
“No, except—”
“Except—?” he prompted, as she did not go on.
“You are German, Victor.”
“Yes. And so?” The lift of his chin was arrogant.
“We do not—quite like the way things are going in Germany.”
“Well, as for that—it is Germany’s business, surely. And this new Naval Agreement shows clearly that your Government is on our side now against the French.”
“No, Victor, that is a wrong impression, I assure you—”
“Well, let us not trouble ourselves with that now,” he interrupted with a little too much haste. “It is after all no concern, shall we say, of you and Evadne whom I admire so much.”
“You
admire
Evadne?”
“I do indeed. So much that I am reminded already of how so nearly I made a fool of myself about Camilla only a few years ago in France. I had not then heard of this new so-called religion.”
“Neither had Camilla.”
“No, Camilla had not Evadne’s sincere wish for a mutual understanding between Germany and England.”
The afternoon sunlight had faded from the windows of the room, cut off by the high box hedge which bordered the garden on that side. Steam still came from the silver kettle over the spirit-lamp, though tea was forgotten. Rosalind leaned forward and blew out the flame, and it was as though somewhere a door had closed, a bolt had gone home, a light was out.
“If you have some idea of taking advantage of Evadne’s rather childish enthusiasms—” she began, and his voice cut in, cool and hard.
“I wonder why it is that every time this Naval Agreement is mentioned, you British all draw the blinds,” he said. “It is
entirely honest and open—a just recognition of Germany’s rights under the sun. Why are you angry with me now?”