Roots of Evil (17 page)

The irony was that while the film-makers’ money solved one set of problems, it set up a whole new set of difficulties of its own. Alice Wilson, that sheltered English girl, had never in her life seen a bank cheque, and when the first one was given to her, at first she had no idea how to deal with it. Her parents had said banks were not for such as them; servants were paid their wages on each Quarter Day in the year, as was right and proper, and their own tiny pension was brought to them on the first of each month by his lordship’s agent, who counted it out on the kitchen table and then made them sign a piece of paper. Alice’s mother had always maintained that it was not for women to know about money; Alice had found this slightly exasperating at the time, but looking back she found it rather sad.

In Miss Nina’s employment she had been paid the princely sum of £40 a year, ten shining sovereigns on
each Quarter Day, together with a Christmas gift of two dress lengths of cloth, one of wool, one of muslin, and a stout pair of leather shoes. This was all that any servant, fed and housed and wanting for nothing, could possibly need or expect. But now Alice would have to deal with banks whether she wanted to or not, because the film people assumed she had a bank account into which she would pay their cheques. They also expected her to sign what Alice uneasily suspected to be legal documents – contracts and agreements requiring her to act in a specific number of films for them over the next two years. This was gratifying, but it was also worrying. She could not possibly sign her real name to the contracts, but she was afraid that signing her false name might constitute the committing of a crime.

In the end she took the problem to Conrad, who said, Pouf, it was a matter easily dealt with. He took her to the offices of a discreet Viennese lawyer who drew up something called a Deed Poll that made her new name legal. She could be called anything she liked, said the lawyer, and once the appropriate documents were signed and witnessed, all would be entirely legal and proper.

When Alice said, But what about the title? the lawyer had said,
zut
, what, after all, was a title? Nothing but what someone created for you, or that you created for yourself. Sign here, Madame Baroness, and you have created it. Alice had thought: yes, creating it is exactly what I have done. I have created a person out of dreams and fears and shadows and hopes, and now that person is real. I really am a King – I mean a Queen – in Babylon.

The accent that most people found so fascinating had
needed no legal documents. Alice’s mind was quick and inquiring, and she had acquired a good smattering of German since she had been in Austria with Nina’s family. The housekeeper had marvelled at how she could get her tongue round the heathenish foreign words: would you just listen to that Alice Wilson gibbering and gabbering away – better than a music hall turn, it is! Now, living among German-speaking people, Alice was daily more fluent. She spoke the language with an accent, and she did not make any attempt to smooth it out. Viennese society adored it and thought it seductive.

It was Conrad who said that the illusion required an occasional display of temper in public; it would be expected of her. All great artists succumbed to temperament. Nonsense, of course she could do it.

But while the baroness’s occasional displays of fiery anger became legendary, what also became legendary was her unfailing habit of afterwards making some lavish, generous gesture of reparation towards those who had suffered the most. A gift of wine or perfume, or a dress-length of expensive silk. Cuban cigars or supper at one of Vienna’s sumptuously expensive restaurants. Who minded the scenes when they were followed by such prodigality? And one had to remember all that Romanian passion. Oh – was the baroness not Romanian? Well, Hungarian then, or Russian. Or something. Who cared.

The première of
Alraune
was a glittering occasion.

Alice wore a Chinese silk gown in a rich dark wine colour. It turned her shoulders and arms the colour of polished ivory, and clung sinuously to her figure. Black
jewellery to set it off – could she manage that? Yes, she could. Ebony and jet earrings and a long rope of black pearls twisted negligently around her neck.

‘Pearls for Madame von Wolff?’ the jeweller had said, beaming. ‘But of course. A very great pleasure, and here are some exceptionally fine stones…Ah yes, they are quite superb worn like that…The cost? Oh,
zut
, the cost will be arranged to please all parties.’

The black pearls were stunning and exotic. Alice had studied them longingly, thinking, Of course I can’t possibly afford them. And then – oh, be blowed to the cost. She had left the shop with them coiled in a plush velvet-covered box.

On her hands she wore two large rings of ebony. She enamelled her nails to match the wine silk gown and painted her lips the same colour. Over the dark red gown she draped a cloak of mink edged with sable tails dyed a glowing crimson to match the gown. (‘Four times she returned it to be re-dyed!’ the designer had said, weeping hysterically. ‘
Four times!
’) The cloak was slightly too long for her – the edges would trail on the ground when she walked, which pleased her greatly. I am so rich, you see, that I do not give a second thought to the hem of my furs becoming draggled in the gutter. The practical side observed that luckily it was a fine, dry night, with no rain-puddles anywhere.

Conrad was at her side, dressed in exceedingly well-cut evening clothes, his eyes bright with delight and expectation. He was overjoyed to see his little English sparrow tasting this success. Pouf! who were this Clara Bow and this Marlene Dietrich! Alice would show all of
Austria and all of Germany – all of the world! – that she could out-act every one of them.

He had written the music for tonight, of course – Alice did not think he would have allowed any other composer to do so – and he was pleased with the results. His music would make a fitting background to Alice’s fine performance, he said. There would, of course, be a gramophone recording of it later.

There were posters and photographs outside the film theatre near to Vienna’s famous Opera House.
‘Lucretia von Wolff as the mysterious, sinister
Alraune,’ they said. And,
‘The Baroness von Wolff IS Hanns Heinz Ewers’ astonishing creation of soulless evil
…’
‘Von Wolff is the definitive child of the mandragora root
…’

There were illustrations of mandragora – the plant said to grow in the shadow of the gallows – and there were brief descriptions of the legend.

‘All to do with the fable of the hanged man,’ Conrad had said, when Alice cautiously broached this subject once, wanting clarification, not wanting to appear naïve before the film-makers or her fellow actors. ‘It is told that mandrake root – mandragora – grows beneath the gallows because of the seed spilled by the men hanged there.’

‘And – does it?’

‘Who knows?’ He had smiled at her. ‘There is a lewd old belief that when a man is hanged, semen is forced from him by the death spasms he endures. So to the legend of the half-mythical mandrake root growing where the seed spills—’

‘And so,’ Alice had said thoughtfully, ‘to Herr Ewers’
book, and Alraune’s conception. Yes, I see. It’ll be interesting to see how they deal with that aspect for the film’s publicity, won’t it?’

But in fact the posters merely said, quite decorously, that mandragora was said to possess powers to enhance men’s prowess as lovers, and mentioned, as a chaste afterthought, that the roots were said to shriek when torn from the earth.

‘A model of restraint and purity,’ said Alice drily, reading this as the taxi drew up before the theatre and the driver leapt to open the doors.

She took a deep breath, and, remembering to let the sables trail negligently on the ground, swept into the auditorium on Conrad’s arm.

She had seen rushes of the film, but tonight, for the first time, she saw the finished article flickering across the screen in its proper sequence; edited and trimmed and polished. It was astonishing and shocking but it was also utterly compelling.

The opening scenes were of Alraune’s macabre conception in the shadow of the gibbet. The gibbet itself dominated the first few frames: it was black and forbidding and it cast its unmistakable outline on to the patch of scrubland, and on to the figure of the unstable brilliant scientist as he scrabbled in the earth for the phallus-shaped mandrake roots.

Mandragora officinarum
, thought Alice, who had managed to read up on some of the legends by this time. Sorcerer’s root. Devil’s candle. And mandrakes live in the dark places of the earth – they drink the seed spilled
by dying men in their last jerking agonies, and they eat the flesh of murderers. Myths and old wives’ tales, of course, but still…

Now came the furtive meeting between the scientist and the prostitute and the prostitute’s unmistakable greed as he offered her money. She tucked the money into her bodice in the age-old courtesan’s gesture, glanced about her as if making sure there were no watchers, and then lay on the ground, her arms automatically held welcomingly out, but her eyes weary and bored. The camera moved away at that point – the censor would not have permitted anything explicit – but the director had focused on the uprooted mandragora roots, subtly suggesting movement from them, and this was so strongly symbolic, Alice wondered if the censor had missed the significance altogether.

It had been hoped to indicate a resemblance between Alice and the actress playing the prostitute, and Alice thought this had been reasonably successful, although the woman looked blowsy and over-painted on the screen. What Alice’s mother might have called laced mutton, although whatever you called it, it was to be hoped that Alice herself did not look the same in a few years’ time. I’ll cut down the kohl on my eyes when I’m thirty-five, promised Alice. I really will. Or could I stretch that to forty? But I think I’d rather become a plump grey-haired grandmother-figure than look so tawdry.

The audience stirred expectantly at the baroness’s first appearance, which was the grown-up Alraune being incarcerated inside a convent so that the scientist could study her as she grew up. Do they like me? thought Alice
glancing round the theatre. Or are they simply curious?

Here was the brief scene with the music-master, with whom Alraune had her first real taste of passion. There had been some anxious moments about the timing of this, and Conrad had threatened to walk angrily out of the theatre if his music did not synchronize perfectly with the actor’s simulated playing of a violin, but Alice knew he would not do so, because he would not spoil her night.

But it was all right. The music – beckoning and faintly sinister – came in exactly on cue, and the scene moved from the music room to the bedroom, the bed discreetly veiled in gauze drapings, again in deference to the censor. It was a sumptuous setting, and Alice was still surprised that no one had seen anything bizarre about having such a sensual scene inside a convent.

The story spun itself on to the discovery by Alraune of her own heredity, and to the first unfolding of the black and bitter hatred. Alice remembered that scene very vividly indeed; she had found it almost impossible to imagine how a girl of sixteen or so would react on learning she had been conceived in such circumstances. The pain and the self-loathing all looked convincing on the screen though; in fact they looked frighteningly real, and Alice was again aware of a sense of deep unease. Where did I get those emotions from? Supposing such feelings don’t always come out of the past or the present? Supposing they sometimes come from the future…?

The writers had added a scene in the fourth reel, in which Alraune, now eighteen, destroyed the damning evidence of that grotesque conception. Alice watched critically as the camera moved to the tall old house where the
prostitute lived. In an upstairs room, stuffed into an old bureau, were the letters exchanged between the scientist and the prostitute, clearly testifying to their dark pact. A good scene, the writers had said, pleased. A shocking and dramatic scene. Herr Ewers had been consulted, partly as a courtesy, but mostly because of copyright, and he had approved the scene. Entirely in character for Alraune to do that, he had apparently said. Very good indeed.

As the cloaked and hooded outline that was Alraune crept up the stairs of the house, casting its own distorted shadow on the wall, Conrad’s music began to trickle in again. At first it was so fragile it was barely audible – no more than a wraith of sound, tapping gently against your mind. But then it began to take on strength and substance, becoming rhythmic and menacing. The beating of a hating heart…

As the fire, ignited to burn the letters, blazed up, the camera panned outwards to take in the whole house front, and there, at one of the windows, surrounded by the leaping flames, was the terrified figure of the prostitute. Alraune’s mother. Trapped in the burning building, her hair already alight and blazing, her mouth wide open in a silent cry for help…
Get-me-out
…
Get me out before I burn alive
…

There was a brief shot of Alraune standing in front of the house, her eyes on the trapped figure of her mother, her eyes huge with terror, thrusting her fist into her mouth to force back her own screams. And then the music spiralled upwards, shrieking out panic-notes like sirens, throbbing like the boiling blood in a burning woman’s veins…The flames blazed into the night sky
– a matchwood house frontage had been built for the scene and then set alight, and the prostitute was a dummy-figure, manipulated on the end of a long steel rod. Everyone had been a bit worried about how it would look, but Alice thought it looked convincing.

And now, at last, here was the room that Alraune had prepared for the scientist: the room with the velvet hangings and the trailing greenery framing the silken couch. The film slid seamlessly into the second of the scenes written in – that of the darkened and altered climax to Ewers’ book. Despite herself, Alice felt again the sick apprehension at the sight of Alraune approaching the prepared death-chamber, the glittering stiletto in her hand. Take it slowly, they had said to her when they shot that. Go catlike and menacingly towards the door. There won’t be any sound, of course, but let people
feel
your footsteps.
Pad-pad, I’m-going-to-kill
…Hold the stiletto up as you go along, let’s see it catch the light, let’s signal to the audiences that you’re intent on murder.