GREAT PROMOTION.
I should be doing injustice to my manners and (a more serious offence)
distorting truth, if I represented myself as a shy gaby, afraid or
ashamed to make love because people knew the business on which I was
engaged. Holding a position like mine has at least the virtue of curing
a man of such folly; I had been accustomed to be looked at from the day
I put on breeches, and, thanks to unfamiliarity with privacy, had come
not to expect and hardly to miss it. The trouble was unhappily of a
deeper and more obstinate sort, rooted in my own mind and not due to the
covert stares or open good-natured interest of those who surrounded me.
There is a quality which is the sign and soul of high and genuine
pleasure, whether of mind or body, of sight, feeling, or imagination; I
mean spontaneity. This characteristic, with its included incidents of
unexpectedness, of suddenness, often of unwisdom and too entire
absorption in the moment, comes, I take it, from a natural agreement of
what you are with what you do, not planned or made, but revealed all at
once and full-grown; when the heart finds it, it knows that it is
satisfied. The action fits the agent--the exercise matches the faculty.
Thenceforward what you are about does itself without your aid, but
pours into your hand the treasure that rewards success, the very
blossom of life. There may be bitterness, reproaches, stings of
conscience, or remorse. These things are due to other claims and
obligations, artificial, perhaps, in origin, although now of binding
force. Beneath and beyond them is the self-inspired harmony of your
nature with your act, sometimes proud enough to claim for itself a
justification from the mere fact of existence, oftener content to give
that question the go-by, whispering softly, "What matters that? I am."
By some such explanation as this, possibly not altogether wide of the
mark, I sought to account for my disposition in the days that followed
Elsa's arrival. I was conscious of an extreme reluctance to set about my
task. I have used the right word there; a task it seemed to me. The
trail of business and arrangement was over it; it was defaced by an
intolerable propriety, ungraced by a scrap of uncertainty; its stages
had been marked, numbered, and catalogued beforehand. Bederhof knew the
wedding-day to within a fortnight, the settlement to within a shilling,
the addresses of congratulation to a syllable. To this knowledge we were
all privy. God save us, how we played the hypocrite!
I am fully aware that there are men to whom these feelings would not
have occurred. There are probably women in regard to whom nobody would
have experienced them in a very keen form. Insensibility is infectious.
We have few scruples in regard to the unscrupulous. We feel that the
exact shade of colour is immaterial when we present a new coat to a
blind man. Had Hammerfeldt left as his legacy the union with some rude
healthy creature, to follow his desire might have been an easy
thing--one which, on a broad view of my life, would have been
relatively insignificant. I should have disliked my duty and done it, as
I did a thousand things I disliked. But I should not have been afflicted
with the sense that where I endured ten lashes another endured a
thousand; that, being a fellow-sufferer, I seemed the executioner; that,
myself yearning to be free, I was busied in forging chains. It was in
this light that Elsa made me regard myself, so that every word to her
from my lips seemed a threat, every approach an impertinence, every hour
of company I asked a forecast of the lifelong bondage that I prepared
for her. This was my unhappy mood, while Victoria laughed, jested, and
spurred me on; while William Adolphus opined that Elsa must get used to
me; while Cousin Elizabeth smiled open motherly encouragement; while
Princess Heinrich moved through the appropriate figures as though she
graced a stately minuet. I had come to look for little love in the
world; I was afflicted with the new terror that I must be hated.
Yet she did not hate me; or, at least, our natures were not such as to
hate one another or to be repugnant naturally. Nay, I believe that we
were born to be good and appreciative friends. Sometimes in those early
days we found a sympathy of thought that made us for the moment intimate
and easy, forgetful of our obligation, and frankly pleased with the
society which we afforded one another. Soon I came to enjoy these
intervals, to look and to plan for them. In them I seemed to get
glimpses of what my young cousin ought to be always; but they were brief
and fleeting. An intrusion ended them; or, more often, they were doomed
to perish at my hands or at hers. A troubled shyness would suddenly
eclipse her mirth; or I would be seized with a sense that my cheating
of fate was useless, and served only to make the fate more bitter. She
seemed to dread any growth of friendship, and to pull herself up
abruptly when she felt in danger of being carried away into a genuine
comradeship. I was swiftly responsive to such an attitude; again we drew
apart. Here is an extract from a letter which I wrote to Varvilliers:
"MY DEAR VARVILLIERS: The state of things here is absurd enough.
My cousin and I can't like, because we are ordered to love; can't
be friends, because we must be mates; can't talk, because we must
flirt; can't be comfortable alone together, because everybody
prepares our _tête-à-tête_ for us. She is in apprehension of an
amourousness which I despair of displaying; I am ashamed of a
backwardness which is her only comfort. And the audience grows
impatient; had the gods given them humour they would laugh
consumedly. Surely even they must smile soon, and so soon as they
smile I must take the leap; for, my dear friend, we may be
privately unhappy, but we must not be publicly ludicrous. To-day,
as we walked a yard apart along the terrace, I seemed to see a
smile on a gardener's face. If it were of benevolence, matters
may not advance just yet; if I conclude that amusement inspired
it, even before you receive this I may have performed my duty and
she her sacrifice. Pray laugh at and for me from your safe
distance; in that there can be no harm. I laugh myself sometimes,
but dare not risk sharing my laugh with Elsa. She has humour, but
to ask her to turn its rays on this situation would be too
venturous a stroke. An absolute absorption in the tragic aspect
is probably the only specific which will enable her to endure.
Unhappily the support of pure tragedy, with its dignity of
unbroken gloom, is not mine. I forget sometimes to be unhappy in
reflecting that I am damnably ridiculous. What, I wonder, were
the feelings of Coralie at the first attentions of her
big-bellied impresario? Did stern devotion nerve her? Was her
face pale and her lips set in tragic mode? Or did she smile and
yawn and drawl and shrug in her old delightful fashion? I would
give much to be furnished with details of this parallel.
Meanwhile Bederhof tears his hair, for I threaten to be behind
time, and the good Duchess tells me thrice daily that Elsa is
timid. Princess Heinrich has made no sign yet; when she frowns I
must kiss. So stands the matter. I must go hence to pray her to
walk in the woods with me. She will flush and flutter, but, poor
child, she will come. What I ask she will not and must not
refuse. But, deuce take it, I ask so little! There's the rub! I
hear your upbraiding voice, 'Pooh, man, catch her up and kiss
her!' Ah, my dear Varvilliers, you suffer under a confusion. She
is a duty; and who is impelled by duty to these sudden cuttings
of a knot? And she does a duty, and would therefore not kiss me
in return. And I also, doing duty, am duty. Thus we are both of
us strangled in the black coils of that belauded serpent."
I did not tell Varvilliers everything. Had I allowed myself complete
unreserve I must have added that she charmed me, and that the very charm
I found in her made my work harder. There was a dainty delicacy about
her, the freshness of a flower whose velvet bloom no finger-touch has
rubbed. This I was to destroy.
But at last from fear, not of the gardener's smiles, but of my own
ridicule, I made my start, and, as I foreshadowed to Varvilliers, it was
as we walked in the woods that I began.
"What of that grenadier?" I asked her--she was sitting on a seat, while
I leaned against a tree-trunk--"the grenadier you were in love with when
I was at Bartenstein. You remember? You described him to me."
She blushed and laughed a little.
"He married a maid of my mother's, and became one of the hall-porters.
He's grown so fat."
"The dream is ended then?"
"Yes, if it ever began," she answered. "How amused at me you must have
been!"
Suddenly she perceived my gaze on her, and her eyes fell.
"He was Romance, Elsa," said I. "He has married and grown fat. His
business now is to shut doors; he has shut the door on himself."
"Yes," she answered, half-puzzled, half-embarrassed.
"He had an unsuccessful rival," said I. "Do you recollect him? A lanky
boy whom nobody cared much about. Elsa, the grenadier is out of the
question."
Now she was agitated; but she sat still and silent. I moved and stood
before her. My whole desire was to mitigate her fear and shrinking. She
looked up at me gravely and steadily. It went to my heart that the
grenadier was out of the question. Her lips quivered, but she maintained
a tolerable composure.
"You should not say that about--about the lanky boy, Augustin," said
she. "We all liked him, I liked him."
"Well, he deserved it a little better then than now. Yet perhaps, since
the grenadier----"
"I don't understand what you mean about the grenadier."
"Yes, don't you?" I asked with a smile. "No dreams, Elsa, that you told
to nobody?"
She flushed for a moment, then she smiled. Her smiling heartened me, and
I went on in lighter vein.
"One can never be sure of being miserable," I said.
"No," she murmured softly, raising her eyes a moment to mine. The glance
was brief, but hinted a coquetry whose natural play would have
delighted--well, the grenadier.
She seemed very pretty, sitting there in the half-shade, with the sun
catching her fair hair. I stood looking down on her; presently her eyes
rose to mine.
"Not of being absolutely miserable," said I.
"You wouldn't make anybody miserable. You're kind. Aren't you kind?"
She grew grave as she put her question. I made her no answer in words; I
bent down, took her hand, and kissed it. I held it, and she did not draw
it away. I looked in her eyes; there I saw the alarm and the shrinking
that I had expected. But to my wonder I seemed to see something else.
There was excitement, a sparkle witnessed to it; I should scarcely be
wrong if I called it triumph. I was suddenly struck with the idea that I
had read my feelings into her too completely. It might be an
exaggeration to say that she wished to marry me, but was there not
something in her that found satisfaction in the thought of marrying me?
I remembered with a new clearness how the little girl who rolled down
the hill had thought that she would like to be a queen. At that moment
this new idea of her brought me pure relief. I suppose there were
obvious moralizings to be done; it was also possible to take the matter
to heart, as a tribute to my position at the cost of myself. I felt no
soreness, and I did no moralizing. I was honestly and fully glad that
for any reason under heaven she wished to marry me.
Moreover this touch of a not repulsive worldliness in her sapped some of
my scruples. What I was doing no longer seemed sacrilege. She had one
foot on earth already then, this pretty Elsa, lightly poised perhaps,
and quite ethereal, yet in the end resting on this common earth of ours.
She would get used to me, as William Adolphus put it, all the sooner. I
took courage. The spirit of the scene gained some hold on me. I grew
less repressed in manner, more ardent in looks. I lost my old desire not
to magnify what I felt. The coquetry in her waged now an equal battle
with her timidity.
"You're sure you like me?" she asked.
"Is it incredible? Have they never told you how pretty you are?"
She laughed nervously, but with evident pleasure. Her eyes were bright
with excitement. I held out my hands, and she put hers into them. I drew
her to me and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She shrank suddenly away
from me.
"Don't be frightened," I said, smiling.
"I am frightened," she answered, with a look that seemed almost like
defiance.
"Shall we say nothing about it for a little while?"
This proposal did not seem to attract her, or to touch the root of the
trouble, if trouble there were.
"I must tell mother," she said.
"Then we'll tell everybody." I saw her looking at me with earnest
anxiety. "My dear," said I, "I'll do what I can to make you happy."
We began to walk back through the wood side by side. Less on my guard
than I ought to have been, I allowed myself to fall into a reverie. My
thoughts fled back to previous love-makings, and, having travelled
through these, fixed themselves on Varvilliers. It was but two days
since I sent him a letter almost asserting that the task was impossible
to achieve. He would laugh when he heard of its so speedy
accomplishment. I began in my own mind to tell him about it, for I had
come to like telling him my states of feeling, and no doubt often bored
him with them; but he seemed to understand them, and in his constant
minimizing of their importance I found a comfort. I had indeed almost
followed the advice he would have given me--almost taken her up and
kissed her, and there ended the matter. A low laugh escaped from me.
"Why are you laughing?" Elsa asked, turning to me with a puzzled look.
"I've been so very much afraid of you," I answered.
"You afraid of me!" she cried. "Oh, if you only knew how terrified I've
been!" She seemed to be seized with an impulse to confidence. "It was
terrible coming here to see whether I should do, you know."
"You knew you'd do!"
"Oh, no. Mother always told me I mightn't. She said you were--were
rather peculiar."
"I don't know enough about other people to be able to say whether I'm
peculiar."
She laughed, but not as though she saw any point in my observation (I
daresay there was none), and walked on a few yards, smiling still. Then
she said:
"Father will be pleased."
"I hope everybody will be pleased. When you go to Forstadt the whole
town will run mad over you."
"What will they do?"
"Oh, what won't they do? Crowds, cheers, flowers, fireworks, all the
rest of it. And your picture everywhere!"
She drew in her breath in a long sigh. I looked at her and she blushed.
"You'll like that?" I asked with a laugh.
She did not speak, but nodded her head twice. Her eyes laughed in
triumph. She seemed happy now. My pestilent perversity gave me a shock
of pain for her.
When we came near the house she asked me to let her go alone and tell
her mother. I had no objection to offer. Indeed I was glad to escape a
hand-in-hand appearance, rather recalling the footlights. She started
off, and I fell into a slower walk. She almost ran with a rare buoyancy
of movement. Once she turned her head and waved her hand to me merrily.
I waited a little while at the end of the terrace, and then effected an
entry into my room unperceived. The women would lose no time in telling
one another; then there would be a bustle. I had now a quiet half-hour.
By a movement that seemed inevitable I sat down at my writing-table and
took up a pen. For several minutes I sat twirling the quill between my
fingers. Then I began to write:
"MY DEAR VARVILLIERS: The impossible has happened, and was all
through full of its own impossibility. I have done it. That now
seems a little thing. The marvel remains. 'An absolute absorption
in the tragic aspect'--you remember, I daresay, my phrase; that
was to have been her mood--seen through my coloured glasses. My
glasses! Am I not too blind for any glasses? She has just left me
and run to her mother. She went as though she would dance. She is
merry and triumphant. I am employed in marvelling. She wants to
be a queen; processions and ovations fill her eyes. She is happy.
I would be happy for her sake, but I am oppressed by an
anticipation. You will guess it. It is unavoidable that some day
she will remember myself. We may postpone, but we can not
prevent, this catastrophe. What I am in myself, and what I mean
to her, are things which she will some day awake to. I have to
wait for the time. Yet that she is happy now is something, and I
do not think that she will awake thoroughly before the marriage.
There is therefore, as you will perceive, no danger of anything
interfering with the auspicious event. My dear friend, let us
ring the church bells and sing a _Te Deum_; and the Chancellor
shall write a speech concerning the constant and peculiar favour
of God toward my family, and the polite piety with which we have
always requited His attentions. For just now all is well. She
sleeps.
"Your faithful friend,
"AUGUSTIN."
I had just finished this letter when Baptiste rushed in, exclaiming that
the Duchess had come, and that he could by no means prevent her entry.
The truth of what he said was evident; Cousin Elizabeth herself was hard
on his heels. She almost ran in, and made at me with wide-opened arms.
Her honest face beamed with delight as she folded me in an enthusiastic
embrace. Looking over her shoulder, I observed Baptiste standing in a
respectful attitude, but struggling with a smile.
"You can go, Baptiste," said I, and he withdrew, smiling still.
"My dearest Augustin," panted Cousin Elizabeth, "you have made us all
very, very happy. It has been the dream of my life."
I forget altogether what my answer was, but her words struck sharp and
clear on my mind. That phrase pursued me. It had been the dream of Max
von Sempach's life to be Ambassador. There had been a dream in his
wife's life. It was the dream of Coralie's life to be a great singer;
hence came the impresario with his large locket and the rest. And now,
quaintly enough, I was fulfilling somebody else's dream of life--Cousin
Elizabeth's! Perhaps I was fulfilling my own; but my dream of life was a
queer vision.
"So happy! So happy!" murmured Cousin Elizabeth, seeking for her
pocket-handkerchief. At the moment came another flurried entry of
Baptiste. He was followed by my mother. Cousin Elizabeth disengaged
herself from me. Princess Heinrich came to me with great dignity. I
kissed her hand; she kissed my forehead.
"Augustin," she said, "you have made us all very happy."
The same note was struck in my mother's stately acknowledgment and in
Cousin Elizabeth's gushing joy. I chimed in, declaring that the
happiness I gave was as nothing to what I received. My mother appeared
to consider this speech proper and adequate, Cousin Elizabeth was
almost overcome by it. The letter which lay on the table, addressed to
Varvilliers, was fortunately not endowed with speech. It would have
jarred our harmony.
Later in the day Victoria came to see me. I was sitting in the window,
looking down on the river and across to the woods of Waldenweiter. She
sat down near me and smiled at me. Victoria carried with her an
atmosphere of reality; she neither harboured the sincere delusions of
Cousin Elizabeth nor (save in public) sacrificed with my mother on the
shrine of propriety. She sat there and smiled at me.
"My dear Victoria," said I, "I know all that as well as you do. Didn't
we go through it all before, when you married William Adolphus?"
"I've just left Elsa," my sister announced. "The child's really half off
her head; she can't grasp it yet."
"She is excited, I suppose."
"It seems that Cousin Elizabeth never let her count upon it."
"I saw that she was pleased. It surprised me rather."
"Don't be a goose, Augustin," said Victoria very crossly. "Of course
she's pleased."
"But I don't think she cares for me in the very least," said I gravely.
For a moment Victoria stared. Then she observed with a perfunctory
politeness:
"Oh, you mustn't say that. I'm sure she does." She paused and added: "Of
course it's great promotion for her."
Great promotion! I liked Victoria's phrase very much. Of course it was
great promotion for Elsa. No wonder she was pleased and danced in her
walk; no wonder her eyes sparkled. Nay, it was small wonder that she
felt a kindliness for the hand whence came this great promotion.
"Yes, I suppose it is--what did you say? Oh, yes--great promotion," said
I to Victoria.
"Immense! She was really a nobody before."
A hint of jealousy lurked in Victoria's tones. Perhaps she did not like
the prospect of being no longer at the head of Forstadt society.
"There's nobody in Europe who would have refused you, I suppose," she
pursued. "Yes, she's lucky with a vengeance."
I began to laugh. Victoria frowned a little, as though my laughter
annoyed her. However I had my laugh out; the picture of my position,
sketched by Victoria, deserved that. Then I lit a cigarette and stood
looking out of the window.
"Poor child!" said I. "How long will it last?"
Victoria made no answer. She sat where she was for a few moments; then
she got up, flung an arm round my neck, and gave me a brief
business-like kiss.
"I never knew anybody quite so good as you at being miserable," she
said.
But I was not miserable. I was, on the whole, very considerably
relieved. It would have been much worse had Elsa really manifested an
absolute absorption in the tragic aspect. It was much better that her
thoughts should be filled by her great promotion.
I heard suddenly the sound of feet on the terrace. A moment later loud
cheers rang out. I looked down from the window. There was a throng of
the household, stable, and garden servants gathered in front of the
window of my mother's room. On the steps before the window stood Elsa's
slim graceful figure. The throng cheered; Elsa bowed, waved, and kissed
her hand to them. They cried out good wishes and called blessings on
her. Again she kissed her hand to them with pretty dignity. A pace
behind her on either side stood Princess Heinrich and Cousin Elizabeth.
Elsa held the central place, and her little head was erect and proud.
Poor dear child! The great promotion had begun.