So far they had been able to hide themselves completely. Rudi read the
papers in a small coffee-house on the _Kochgasse_ and had found a
position doing clerical work in a factory making glassware.
But the longing for his old kind was strong. One evening he sought a
larger coffee-house, frequented by the smart Austrian officers, on the
Kaerntnerstrasse, and put down his newspaper to see sitting at his table
watching him the little envoy with the pigs’ eyes.
“So!” said the little man. “We meet again, sir.”
“I have not had the pleasure, I think,” Rudi said stiffly.
“Let me refresh your memory, then,” said the little man, watching him
intently. And was quite explicit.
“Who then,” he went on, “would have foreseen the great tragedy to
follow! So young and lively a girl, and apparently so—sane.”
“Yes,” said Rudi, with stiff lips.
The little man leaned over and lowered his voice, still watching warily.
“There are rumours of an escape,” he said. “From Italy. But doubtless
you, as one of her oldest friends, have already heard it.”
“I am but recently returned from Africa,” Rudi observed, and calling the
_Kellner_ paid his bill.
“Very soon, however,” said Clotilde, “he realised that he was followed.
He did not dare to go home. But he had not fought in Africa for nothing,
and finally he threw them off.”
They fled to England, and from that time on life was a series of alarms
and escapes. In London, for instance, the Queen met the Ambassadress of
the velvet tunic over plaid face to face on the street. The enormous
drapery at the back had given way to the pinched-in waist and padded
hips of that period, and the mass of wadding, topped with a tiny bonnet,
stood like a quivering wall before her.
“You need not deny your identity, madame,” said the Ambassadress. “I
have had too much misery through you to forget your face.”
“I deny nothing,” said the Queen haughtily, “except your right to detain
me on the street.”
She went on, leaving the creature staring after her, but quite sick
herself with terror and shock. And as soon as possible they slipped out
of England to the Continent again . . .
The old Archduke died. He sat in his bed propped up with pillows and saw
the Archduchess come in the door to fetch him.
“I’m quite ready, my dear,” he said. “Why should a man live on when his
bowels have turned to jelly?” He chuckled, and held out a skinny hand.
“I’ve missed you, my dear,” he said. “But don’t look so damned beatific.
It isn’t natural.”
Then he died and all his money went to distant relatives. The Queen, of
course, could not touch it. They were very poor.
But aside from all this was their own inner problem; each trying to
fight down the love for the other. There was a day when Rudi, desperate,
came and stood before the Queen and said he was going away.
“I can’t go on,” he said doggedly. “I have loved no other woman in my
life and there will be no other. But either you are my wife or you are
not.”
“What was marriage to us was not marriage to the church,” she said, very
pale.
“If you believe that, you believe that our boy is—”
“Oh, no!” she cried, and could only avoid that issue by pleading with
him to stay.
Rudi, poor devil, stayed on, and at the end of three years one bit of
comfort came to at least two of them. It was announced that the Queen
had died at her villa in Italy and the court entered into a period of
mourning.
Clotilde entered her room one morning in Brussels to find her staring at
the announcement of her own death.
“I am twenty-four, Clotilde,” she said, “and I am dead.” Then she broke
into terrible weeping. “My baby thinks I am dead,” she said. “My baby
thinks I am dead . . .”
She had not seen the boy since the day the King had brought him in from
the balcony, and for six years she had fed on the husks she could gather
from the press. All that time a craving just to see him had been growing
in her.
“She asked very little,” Clotilde said softly. “She could never hold him
or even touch him, and she knew that. But just to see him—I cannot tell
you how she yearned to see him.”
And finally Rudi agreed that they should make the attempt.
They chose the day of the boy’s seventh birthday, when he was to ride
through the capital in an open carriage with the King. They left
Brussels one rainy morning by train, the Queen heavily veiled and Rudi
with a soft hat to pull down over his face. For once Clotilde was not
with them. They were making their pitiful pilgrimage alone.
“Perhaps you did not know Europe before the war,” said Clotilde. “But
such events were gala occasions. The buildings were decorated and the
streets were always crowded. There was great public rejoicing.”
They found, it seems, a good position near a lamp-post and waited.
Finally there came into sight the King’s own regiment of hussars, and
following that the lancers of the Crown Prince. Then the palace guards,
and after that the carriage containing the King and Crown Prince.
The boy was standing in the carriage, bowing and smiling, looking about
with Rudi’s eyes, smiling Rudi’s smile. And on his left arm he wore a
band of mourning!
Rudi put his arm around the Queen to steady her. And the carriage went
on.
X
All this time the Queen had been known as Rudi’s wife. It simplified
things in their roving lives. And it was as Madame W—— that I first
met her in London. She gave me French lessons, coming daily to my
apartment at Claridge’s. She was extraordinarily beautiful, even in the
plain black she wore for the street, and she had a curious habit of
fingering and occasionally staring at the only ornament she ever wore,
an amethyst cross on a fine gold chain.
That was during the period when Rudi and Clotilde were hunting her all
over Europe.
I suppose there comes a time when every woman questions the love that
surrounds her, when tenderness and self-sacrifice seem merely kindness
and tolerance, when motives appear twisted and even a caress can be felt
a betrayal.
And the Queen was a woman now. She knew that Rudi was leading an
unnatural life and she seems to have brooded over it. While Rudi had
taken Clotilde for granted, the Queen could so take neither of them any
longer. The thought that Rudi was giving her everything and she giving
nothing in exchange grew increasingly bitter to her.
When I met her she had run away.
“She had begun to feel she was a burden,” was Clotilde’s explanation.
“She could not see that she was our universe. And then”—she glanced at
me—“you know how women are. She thought if she went away Rudi could
claim his father’s estate and marry me.”
And there had been a precipitating cause at the end. Clotilde had been
“silly enough” to have a crying spell over something or other, and Rudi
had become sufficiently conscious of her for the moment to try to
comfort her.
“He put his arm around me, as a brother would,” she explained. “But she
happened to come to the door just then and—she went away that night.”
So the Queen taught me French, and Rudi agonised again. It was during
this interval, I believe, that he entered into the conspiracy to
overthrow the King, but seems never to have gone very far with it; it
was more an outpouring of his hate of the King than any political
conviction.
But her flight brought about a curious meeting, and I was an unconscious
witness to it.
She left it to me to choose the subject for the day and I idly selected
the royal wedding at Windsor.
“One wonders,” I said, in my laborious French, “whether these marriages
are ever truly happy. They can know so little of each other.”
Her face set somewhat.
“Some adapt themselves. Others perhaps—cannot.”
“The King of —— is at Windsor,” I struggled on, “but his entourage is
here. Also the little Crown Prince.”
“Here!” she said, and slowly got to her feet. “Here!”
“Across the hall.”
She went to the window and stood looking out on that vista of dingy
slate roofs and old chimneys which the upper floors of Claridge’s offer
to its guests, and when she turned around I could see that she was oddly
pale.
“A long time ago,” she said, “I—knew the Crown Prince as a baby. If I
could only see him now—”
“He is in and out quite often.”
“Would you mind if I leave the door a little open? I could sit here
quietly and—if it would not disturb you, mademoiselle.”
There was no more French lesson. I think she had quite forgotten why she
came. I was—Heaven forgive me—a trifle amused and maybe a bit bored.
All week I had seen the London crowds trampling and crushing to catch a
glimpse of visiting royalties. I had seen Madame Tussaud’s almost mobbed
while a group of maids of honour inside had visited the waxworks. And
now my lesson was ended.
She sat, her hands clenched in her lap, and bent a bit forward. During a
half hour or so she did not move at all. And at last at dusk we heard
the elevator and a boyish voice and clatter coming along the hall. She
got up then and the boy came in sight.
“Toto!” she said softly.
The boy stopped and peered into the darkness of the room.
“Somebody called me,” he said to the tutor who accompanied him.
“Nobody called you.”
“It said ‘Toto,’” the child insisted.
She stood, her whole body tense, but she did not speak again, and then
the tutor opened the door across and took the boy inside. When I turned
from lighting the lamps she had closed the door and stood fingering and
staring at the little cross.
“Shall we have the lesson to-morrow at the usual time, madame?” I asked.
“The lesson?” she said vaguely. “Ah, yes, of course. If the hour is
convenient to you.”
But there never was another lesson. Later on, years later, I was to
learn from Clotilde that she was run down that night in the crowd at
Oxford Circus and very badly hurt. Maybe it was an accident—suicide was
a mortal sin to her—but it may not have been. The closing of that door
across the hall had been too significant; just a good substantial door,
like everything in Claridge’s, but its quiet closing had somehow spelled
finality.
But when she thought she was dying she sent for Rudi.
“And he saved her,” Clotilde said. “You see, he promised her the boy.”