Irretrievable (10 page)

The countess's face lit up.

“Yes, Christine, all things considered, you are a very lucky woman. Holk is straightforward and trustworthy and even if one out of every three women in Copenhagen was a Potiphar's wife, you could still be sure of him. And after all, Christine, even if in spite of everything you still had doubts …”

“Yes?”

“Then you ought to suppress them and use all your affection and common sense to persuade yourself that it is not true. It is trust that makes people happy and kind and restores their confidence, whereas horrible suspicions can spoil everything.”

“Ah, my dear Julie, you can talk like that because, although you know so much about our life and our home, you still don't properly understand—you were only saying so yourself a moment ago—you don't understand what is happening inside me. You know everything and yet not enough. I think that only husbands and wives themselves can ever know what a marriage really is and sometimes even they do not know. An outsider sees every moment of pique and hears every argument, for strangely enough married couples don't generally hide all their disagreements and quarrels from others, yes, it sometimes seems almost as if others are meant to hear them, as if all the most violent things were intended especially for them. But that gives quite a false picture, because as long as some love still remains, marriage always has another side to it. You see, Julie, when I want to talk to Helmut about something and go and look for him in his room and see that he is writing or working on something, I pick up a book and sit down opposite to him and say: ‘Don't let me disturb you, Helmut, I can wait.' And then, while I'm reading or pretending to read, I often look over the top of the book and it makes me so happy to see his dear, kind, face and I want to run over to him and say: ‘My darling husband.' You see, Julie, that happens as well but no one ever sees or hears it.”

“Ah, Christine, I can't tell you how glad I am to hear that out of your own mouth. I have often been worried for you both and for your happiness. But if everything is as you say …”

“It is, Julie, exactly—and sometimes even in spite of myself. But because it is like that, you are still wrong to advise me always to think nothing but good and sometimes even to close my eyes. If you love someone, that is impossible. And then, Julie dear, you are also wrong or half wrong at least, in what you said about Helmut. He is kind and loyal, the best husband in the world, that's all quite true, but he is still weak and conceited and Copenhagen is not the sort of place to give strength to a weak character. You see, Julie, I know that you are defending him and that you believe in him, but even you spoke of certain possibilities and it is just these possibilities that are preying on my mind at the moment.”

Fräulein Dobschütz was endeavouring to reassure her further when Philip brought a letter which had just arrived by messenger from Arnewieck. The countess assumed that it was from her brother but, glancing at the address, she saw that it came from Schwarzkoppen. She read:

“Now Julie, this has come just at the right time. I rely implicitly on our friend in this question and my husband has given me a free hand. What a good thing it is that we now have some definite plans. We must make a list this very day of what each of the children needs. There will be so many things. And then there will be the journey and of course you must come with us. I am looking forward immensely to seeing my beloved Gnadenfrei again and I know that you will enjoy it, too. And when I think how my brother came and fetched me, oh, so long ago, with Helmut …. It was almost like the lighthouse from which Captain Brödstedt brought home his girl from Bornholm. Yes, it certainly was a lighthouse for me and for you, a real beacon for life and, I hope, till death.”

The crossing
was smooth and it was not yet nine o'clock in the evening when the
King Christian
turned into Copenhagen harbour between Nyholm and Tolboden. Holk was standing on deck enjoying the magnificent scene; overhead, the stars were twinkling almost as brightly as in winter, and the harbour lights were reflected beside them on the shimmering surface of the water. Shipping agents and harbour officials pushed forward, the coachmen raised their whips and waited to be beckoned. However, Holk preferred to walk the few hundred yards to Dronningens-Tværgade, and so, rejecting all offers of service, he merely asked the chief steward to send his luggage as soon as possible to Frau Hansen's. Then he went off along the quayside as far as St. Anne's Square, where he turned off towards Dronningens-Tværgade in which stood his landlady's two-storeyed house immediately on the left-hand side of the street. In a few minutes he came in sight of his lodging and he was delighted to see how clean and attractive it all looked. The first floor, where his two rooms were, was already lit up and the sash-windows open to let in the fresh air. “And I bet there's a fire as well. The perfect landlady.” And with this reflection, he crossed the street and knocked on the door, not too loudly and not too softly. The door was opened at once by Frau Hansen, a widow of close on fifty, still handsome, who greeted the count with great cordiality and said how pleased she was to see him again so soon, after not having expected him again until the New Year at the earliest. “Fancy Baron Bille catching measles! But such is life and it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.”

As she was speaking, the widow had retreated into the hall to show the count up to his room. He followed her but at the foot of the stairs he stopped for a moment, with every justification in view of the sight that met his eyes. The back of the rather narrow hall lay almost in darkness but at the far end a door stood open, presumably leading to the kitchen, and in the light shining from it into the hall, a young woman was standing, perhaps in order to see but more probably in order to be seen. Holk, a trifle embarrassed, said: “Is that your daughter? I have already heard of her and was told that she had not sailed with her husband this time.” Frau Hansen replied affirmatively but briefly, presumably not wanting to spoil the effect of the tableau by a lengthier explanation.

In his room upstairs, thickly carpeted and richly, though not extravagantly, adorned with vases and other
orientalia
, everything was as Holk had imagined: lamps were lit, a fire blazed in the hearth, and there was fruit on the sofa-table, no doubt rather to enhance the still-life effect than to be eaten. Beside the fruit-dish lay the visiting cards of Baron Pentz and Baron Erichsen who had called an hour ago to ask after the count. “They would be back.”

At this moment voices were heard in the hall. “That will be my things,” said Holk and, still preoccupied by the vision of the young woman below, was half expecting her to appear together with his luggage. But instead in came the two barons. Holk greeted them both, Pentz cordially and jovially, Erichsen formally and with some reserve. Frau Hansen made as if to go, stopping merely to ask what the count would like for his supper. Holk was about to reply when Pentz interrupted: “Dear Frau Hansen, for this evening Count Holk desires nothing further than to come with us to Vincent's. You must allow us to drag him from you straightaway, from you and your lovely lady daughter. And that reminds me, is there any news of Captain Hansen, that most enviable and foolhardy of husbands? If I had such a wife, I should have chosen a career that kept me at home twenty-four hours a day. In any case, ship's captain would have been my very last choice.”

Frau Hansen was visibly amused, but drawing herself up with some difficulty, she replied, rather solemnly and with an attempt at maternal dignity: “Ah Baron, when you are always thinking of your husband, you never have time to think of anyone else. My late lamented husband was a captain too, and I never thought of anyone but him …”

Pentz laughed: “Well, Frau Hansen, we are taught to believe everything a woman tells us, are we not? So I shall try to do so now.”

So saying, he took Holk by the arm to lead him off to supper and the inevitable gossip at Vincent's restaurant. Baron Erichsen followed with an expression on his face that seemed to disapprove of Pentz's banter with the landlady, although he knew well enough that Pentz always behaved in this way. Frau Hansen for her part had already removed the shade from one of the two lamps and was holding it up for them until the three men had left the house.

Pentz and Erichsen were contrasts, which did not prevent them from being on excellent terms with each other. In any case, everyone was on good terms with Pentz because not only did he wholeheartedly follow the proverb, “Be surprised at everything and angry about nothing” but he had pushed this precept even further and ceased being surprised at anything either. He believed above all in
ride si sapis
and saw everything from its funny side. In life, politics, and religion he gave the broadest possible interpretation to Pontius Pilate's words: “What is truth?” and to become heated over moral questions—in the discussion of which he used regularly to quote the Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Circassians as representatives of
every
trend in life and love—seemed to him merely proof of an inadequate education and lack of familiarity with the “changing forms of human association,” as he liked to put it, holding up his gold-rimmed spectacles. Every time he did this you would see his tiny eyes gleaming quizzically and with a look of superiority. He was a bachelor in his sixties and, of course, a
gourmand
. The Princess liked him because he never bored her and because he discharged his functions, which were no sinecure, as if they were child's play, yet with the greatest punctilio. This made it possible to disregard many other things about him and principally the fact that, in spite of all his merits, he was, in appearance, a figure of fun. As long as he was sitting at table, it was all right; but when he stood up, it could be seen that nature had treated him, in one sense, too meanly and, in another, too generously. His pedestal left much to be desired or, as the Princess expressed it, she had never seen a human being “who was less stilted than Baron Pentz.” As she never made this statement except when he had just said something that was, morally speaking, most “unstilted,” she was thus able to enjoy the double pleasure of ridiculing him and flattering him at one and the same time. He was an extremely nimble man and might, for this reason, have seemed destined for a long life but for his stoutness, his short neck, and his ruddy complexion, three things which betray the apoplectic. Erichsen could be considered Pentz's exact counterpart: if the latter was an apoplectic, the former was a born hectic. He sprang from a consumptive family which, being very wealthy, had furnished the cemeteries of every health resort in the world with memorials in marble, syenite, and bronze. On these memorials the symbols of immortality were always the same: in Nice, San Remo, Funchal, and Cairo, yes, prosaically enough, even in Görbersdorf, a butterfly could be seen soaring heavenwards as if it were the armorial bearings of the Erichsens. Our present Erichsen, the gentleman-in-waiting, who had been in the Princess's service for some ten years, had undergone the full treatment but with more success than others of his ilk. From the age of forty onwards he had settled down to live a restful life, a principle that he observed with such thoroughness that he hardly ever left Copenhagen. He had had enough of travel but at the same time, from his long periods of abstinence under doctor's orders, he had acquired a dislike of all excess which he had carried over into his life at court. Accustomed to living on milk, breast of chicken, and Vichy water, his lanky figure, shaped rather like an exclamation mark, had, as Pentz used to say, only one role to play at any feast or banquet: “a dreadful warning against Bacchic indulgence.” “Erichsen the Conscience” was one of the many nicknames that Pentz had bestowed on him.

It was only five minutes' walk from Frau Hansen's house to Vincent's restaurant in Kongens Nytorf. Pentz sent Erichsen ahead to prospect because “as a six-footer, he would be better able to survey the seating position at Vincent's.” There was good reason for these cautious instructions, however jokingly made; for when Pentz and Holk followed Erichsen into the restaurant a minute later, it seemed impossible to find a free table. Finally, they managed to discover quite a pleasant corner that not only had comfortable seats but was a good point of vantage to survey the room.

“I think we'll start with a medium-full Rüdesheimer. Dr. Grämig, at the moment one of the most cheerful men alive, was saying recently how remarkable it was that I still hadn't got gout, for which I have every medically and historically justified qualification, not only through my way of life but also my attitude to life. But the more he seems likely to be right, the more I'm determined to make good use of what little time remains. Erichsen, what may I order for you? Some Vichy or soda—or perhaps a little iron phosphite? …”

A waiter came and soon they were all three drinking together out of their magnificently cut hock-glasses, for even Erichsen had taken some of the Rüdesheimer, having first made sure that he was provided with a decanter of water.