To Journey Together (9 page)

After breakfast, Rudi spent a delightful morning holding court. He lay in a long chair on his balcony and almost everyone in the hotel visited him to commiserate with him and hear details of the accident.

Elinor was, reluctantly, an exception, because there was some work sent by Kenneth from Munich, and, by some obscure action of conscience, she felt bound to attend to this first before going to see Rudi. Had Kenneth been there to say that work must come before visits, she might even have argued the point.

But, as he was not, she felt bound to be specially scrupulous.

She promised herself a visit after lunch, but then Rudi was resting, on the doctor's orders, and so it was late afternoon before Elinor finally went to make enquiries and express her sympathy.

He had evidently not long woken up, because he gave her a lazy, singularly sweet smile that made her heart beat unusually quickly, and said with rather less than his customary alertness and vitality, "Come in, Liebling"—which even Elinor knew meant nothing more nor less than "darling". "I thought you were not coming to see me at all. Everyone else seems to have been torn with anxiety about my state of health, but you very properly dismissed my sprained knee as a minor matter. Is that it?"

"No, of course not." She stood smiling down at him, as though she could not help smiling when she looked at him. "I had some work to do and "

"Work—work!" he mocked. "Does that always come first with you? Are your poor friends nowhere?"

"Don't exaggerate," Elinor told him equably, refusing to take his reproaches seriously. "Of course I found out from Ilsa at breakfast how you were. And, judging from the number of people who seemed to want to commiserate with you, I should think it was just as well that one person at least put off the visit until the afternoon."

"But did it have to be the one person I most wanted to see?" countered Rudi, his fine dark eyes sparkling with reproachful amusement.

"I suppose you would have kept that nice little speech for whoever came last," Elinor retorted. But she coloured a trifle, in spite of herself, and hastily changed the subject by enquiring how he was feeling.

"Wonderful, since you have come!" he told her. "And I hear you were also inordinately kind to my dear sister when she most needed it last night."

"I hardly did anything," Elinor assured him, "except make a little fuss of her and see she had a hot drink and let her talk a bit. She had had a mild shock, you know, and didn't want to be alone. I

know—I have two younger sisters who get like that when anything goes wrong."

"And younger brothers too?" he wanted to know, with a smile.

"Well, my younger brother is the most self-sufficient of us all. He doesn't often need anyone to whom to pour out his heart," Elinor explained, recalling Henry with a smile. "My elder brother does, though. He's rather inclined to fall in and out of love at the moment. I usually hear of the advent of each new divinity—and sometimes a little about her departure too."

Rudi laughed aloud at this, which made Elinor laugh too.

"I almost wish you were my sister," he said. "Except that it's nicer to have you someone else's sister."

She refused to take up the implication of that. Instead, she said lightly, "Would you tell me about your falling in and out of love, if I were your sister, then?"

"I might. Except that I don't often do it." "No?"

Perhaps she looked faintly sceptical, because he said, "Does that surprise you?"

"A little. You look the romantic kind who might," Elinor told him candidly. "If I may say so," she added demurely.

"Indeed you may say so." He laughed again, rather delightedly. "You are enchanting when you say these things. But let me convey a hint of cynical wisdom to you, mein liebes Kind. The people who look romantic are nearly always the most
hard-headed
, hard-hearted creatures on God's earth."

She looked at him consideringly, and, for a moment, her clear grey eyes showed that she was weighing him up in real earnest.

"Are you hard-headed and head-hearted, Rudi?" she asked, with such a calm assumption that he would tell her the truth that, for the space of a few seconds, his laughing gaze wavered.

"Do I answer that in all seriousness?" he wanted to know.

"There is no point in answering it any other way," Elinor told him. "Since you yourself brought it up, that is. You were going to impart some cynical wisdom to me, you remember."

"You little wretch, you are laughing at me!" "No. Or only a bit. But you are hedging now, and trying not to answer my question."

"Am I hard-headed and hard-hearted?" he repeated slowly, that slight smile of something like self-mockery just touching his handsome mouth. "I suppose I am a little of both, Elinor. And not quite enough of either."

"And what do you mean by that, exactly?"

"Oh, dear child! If one can be entirely hard, one can do very well for oneself, even in the world that has been left us. If one can be good and gentle and well-wishing like you, then at least the decisions are made for one. But if one is neither one thing nor the other " He broke off suddenly, frowned, then laughed and said, "Here, how did we come to talk like this, anyway?"

"I think," Elinor said gently, "I asked you a probing question. And you were kind enough to reply quite seriously."

"Not too seriously," he countered quickly. "You must never take anything that we—Ilsa and I—say with complete seriousness, you know."

"But why not?"

"Oh—" he ran a hand through his thick, dark hair, making it stand up rather boyishly—"we rather feel that anyone who takes this crazy life quite seriously must either be mad or go mad. So mostly we live and think and feel on the surface. It saves one from crashing too badly when the disasters come?"

"But do they have to come?"

The moment she had said that she would have liked to recall it. In some way, she knew it was the easy generalization of one who had never had to face stark disaster.

But Rudi smiled at her, and again it was that smile of unusual sweetness.

"Perhaps they don't have to come to everyone," he said, and he put out his hand and touched her cheek gently. "Never, I hope, to you. But Ilsa and I are almost the sole survivors of our family. We have seen our people, our home, our class and our country go. Better to live on the surface after that and pretend that nothing matters very much."

"You " Elinor stared at him, and, without her even knowing it, tears filled her eyes and spilled over on to her cheeks. "You say that—that

"Don't," he exclaimed almost roughly. "You're crying. Why are you crying?"

She put up her hands and was surprised herself to find that her cheeks were wet.

"I--don't know," she began. And then—"Yes, of course I do. It was because of what you said. The completeness of it. About—about everything going."

"Oh, my child " He put out his arm and drew her to him. "Does anyone still weep for the heartache of others? How very foolish and sweet and touching of you." And then he kissed her.

Unspeakably moved, Elinor kissed him quite naturally in return. She even hugged him for a moment in an impluse of unspoken sympathy. Neither of them noticed the slight knock on the door. And both of them started apart as they realized that someone had come into the room—a completely strange girl, who said, "Oh, excuse me—" and prepared to depart once more.

Naturally it was Rudi who recovered first and, with sufficient presence of mind to try to make the episode seem of no special significance, he said quite calmly, "No, do come in. Were you looking for me?"

"Yes, I—as a matter of fact, I came to make my apologies in person. I'm afraid it was I who knocked you down with my car last night."

"O-oh." Rudi was completely himself again, and eyed the girl with a quizzical smile which had no trace of embarrassment in it, while Elinor, covered

with confusion, would willingly have fled from the scene. Her more experienced companion, however, had no intention of letting her impart an air of guilt to a basically innocent occasion, and, with a slight gesture of his hand, he detained her when she would have slipped away. To the other girl he said, "Do sit down. I was told that my aggressor was a wild American girl. But now I see that she is neither wild nor, I think, American."

"No, certainly not." The girl, who was very pretty and self-possessed, laughed too. "I had come straight out from London, and I'm afraid that, after two long days' driving, I was probably just that little bit less than careful."

"Not quite the moment to come charging into an unknown village at sixty miles an hour, Fraulein," Rudi said dryly.

"It was nothing like sixty!" the girl exclaimed indignantly.

"It felt like a hundred when you sent me flying," Rudi assured her.

"I am sorry! I came to apologize and so I won't argue about speeds. But I thought I had really just cleared you."

"You very nearly had. It was only a glancing blow from your mudguard. Otherwise," he added cheerfully, "you would probably be bringing a handsome wreath instead of your personal apologies."

The girl shuddered a little. But more for effect than from genuine dismay, Elinor thought.

"Please don't say such things."

"No? But surely the remark is the measure of my good fortune in escaping," Rudi said carelessly. "It was kind of you to come and apologize in person. Did you stay on in Ehrwald specially to do so?"

"Not exactly. I expected to meet a friend here. But, as a matter of fact, he had left. I shall probably stay for a day or two, all the same."

"Then I hope I shall see you again, Fraulein."

It was second nature to Rudi to make himself agreeable in this way, but Elinor experienced a slight stab of something almost like jealousy when she

heard him being so nice to someone else. Someone who had knocked him down with her car too!

The girl, however, took the remark as a friendly dismissal—as indeed it was—and rose to go.

"The doctor tells me that you'll be laid up for a few days " she began. But Rudi interrupted her with a smile.

"You are too kind! Do you mean that you have actually already discussed your victim with the doctor?"

"Of course. There's the question of my responsibility for extra expenses incurred, you know."

"Fraulein, I don't think we shall quarrel over those." Rudi held out his hand to her. "It is true that your—intervention prevented my going to Vienna today, as I had intended. But, in that admirable mood known to the British as 'making the best of it', I have come to the conclusion that, after all, what I really want to do is to stay on here. I am indebted to you for making this clear to me."

The girl laughed at that and, as though she could not help it, her glance slid for a moment to Elinor, standing silent and as inconspicuous as she could make herself in the background.

"Well," she agreed good-humouredly, "things do sometimes work out that way. But it is generous of you to regard my carelessness in that light. Please express my regrets to your—other sister. The one I also knocked over."

"Thank you, I will," Rudi said gravely. And then the girl inclined her head to Elinor and went out.

"Why did you let her go away thinking I was your sister?" Elinor blurted out.

"It hardly seemed
worthwhile
undeceiving her in the circumstances," Rudi replied calmly. "She will be here only a day or two. We shall probably never meet again. If she likes to think that she came in to find me affectionately kissing my sister, well and good. If she even mentions the fact to anyone, no one will be the wiser. Altogether a very satisfactory solution of a slightly tiresome problem."

"I don't think she really believed I was your sister," Elinor could not help saying.

"Very likely not," Rudi agreed carelessly. "That also doesn't much matter, I think. We just found a pleasant formula of words which covered the slight embarrassment of us all."

Elinor could not help feeling that her own embarrassment had been increased, rather than reduced, by the final subterfuge, but she felt it would be ungracious to press her own views further, when Rudi evidently thought he had saved her rather neatly. At least the girl was a complete stranger.

"You don't even know her name, do you?" she asked rather anxiously.

"I did hear it last night, but I don't know that I recall " He frowned and made an obvious effort to remember. "Rosalind something. Rosalind-Rosaline- No! Rosemary—that was it. Rosemary Copeland. Quite a charming name. It suits her somehow."

"Rosemary?" Elinor said slowly, passing the tip of her tongue over her lips and finding them unnecessarily dry. "Are you sure it was—Rosemary?"

"Quite sure." Rudi seemed rather pleased with himself for having remembered it. Then he glanced at Elinor. "Why? Do you know the name?"

"No," Elinor said quickly. "I really must be going now. Lady Connelton may be needing me."

Rudi bade her a lazy, almost affectionate farewell, evidently believing that no further embarrassment could possibly result from the scene. Elinor hoped he was right.