XXIV
Crammon had determined to stay only one week at the Villa Ophelia. In the first place he did not like to prolong the family idyl beyond decent and appropriate limits. In the second place his programme, which he was not in the habit of changing except for catastrophes, demanded his departure for England. But the one week merged into a second, and the second into a third. At the end of the third week he was still unable to come to a decision.
He was rancorous against his surroundings and against himself, and as whimsical as a woman. He blamed himself, accused himself of senile indecision, and was full of bitter dissatisfaction with the slovenliness of the countess’s establishment. The cuisine was, in his view, too greasy, and threatened to upset his sensitive digestion; the servants were not properly respectful, because their wages were too often in arrears. The constant stream of guests was generally lacking in nothing so much as in distinction. There were second-rate musicians and poets and painters, and women of the same calibre. Furthermore there were aristocrats of doubtful reputation. In brief, a gathering of parasites, the thriftless, the unprofitable.
Among them Crammon had the appearance of a relic of an exalted and hieratic age.
One day the two nephews of the countess, Ottomar and Reinhold Stojenthin, appeared. They had succeeded in getting leave of absence for two months. Leave of absence from what? Crammon inquired with raised brows. They wanted to accompany Letitia to Munich. “They are splendid chaps, Herr von Crammon,” said the countess. “Do take them under your protection.” Crammon was vexed. “I’ve always lived in perfect dread of some one’s discovering my hidden talent for the rôle of a governess. The achievement was reserved for you, countess.”
His relations to Puck, the Pekingese, were strained. The little animal enraged him inexplicably. Whenever he saw it his eyes grew round and his face scarlet with anger. Perhaps it was the dog’s deep tawny coat; perhaps it was its sleepiness; perhaps he suspected it of maliciously feigning a delicate state of health so that it could sprawl on silken couches and have tidbits stuck into its mouth. The anxious care that Letitia gave the creature annoyed him. Once the little dog had gotten up from the carpet and, wheezing asthmatically, had slipped out through the door. “Where is Puck?” Letitia asked after a while from the depth of her armchair. Puck wasn’t to be seen. “Do whistle to him, Bernard,” she begged in her flute-like voice. “You can do that yourself,” said Crammon quite rudely. Letitia, calmly pathetic, dreamily preoccupied, said: “Please do it for me. I can’t whistle when I’m excited.”
So Crammon whistled to the hateful beast.
Still, a decision had to be arrived at. “Are you going to Munich with me?” the siren Letitia cooed, and laughed at his anger. To her aunt she said: “He’s still raging, but he’ll go with us in the end.”
Crammon nursed an ethical intention. He would influence Letitia to her own advantage. He could open her eyes to the dangerous downward slope of the path which she pursued with such unfortunate cheerfulness. She could be helped and supported and given a timely warning. Her extravagance could be checked, and her complete lack of judgment could be corrected. She was utterly inexperienced and thoughtless. She believed every liar, and gave her confidence to every chatterer. She was enthusiastic over any charlatan, held all flattery to be sincere, and provided every fool who paid court to her with a halo of wisdom and of pain. She needed to be brought to reason.
Crammon was quite right. Yet a mere smile of Letitia would silence him. She blunted the point of the most pertinent maxims and of the soundest moralizing by holding her head a little on one side, looking at him soulfully and saying in a sweetly and archly penitential tone: “You see, dear Bernard, I’m made this way. What’s the use of trying to be different? Would you want me to be different? If I were, I’d only have other faults. Do let me be as I am.” And she would slip one hand through his arm, and with the other tickle his almost double chin. And he would hold still and sigh.
The following persons started on the journey to Munich: Letitia, her personal maid, the nurse Eleutheria, the twins, the countess, Fräulein Stöhr, Ottomar and Reinhold, Crammon, the Pole Stanislaus Rehmer. Also the following animals: Puck, the Pekingese, a bullfinch in one cage and a tame squirrel in another. The luggage consisted of fourteen large trunks, sixteen hand-bags, seven hat-boxes, one perambulator, three luncheon baskets, and innumerable smaller packages wrapped in paper, leather, or sack-cloth, not to mention coats, umbrellas, sticks, and flowers. In the train the countess wrung her hands, Puck barked and whined pathetically, Letitia made a long list of things that had been forgotten at the last moment, the maid quarreled with the conductor, the twins screamed, Eleutheria offended the other passengers by baring her voluminous breasts, Fräulein Stöhr had her devout and patient heavenward glance, Ottomar and Reinhold debated some literary matter, the Pole spent his time gazing at Letitia, Crammon sat in sombre mood with legs crossed and twiddled his thumbs.
With the exception of the Stojenthin brothers, who went to a more modest hostelry, the whole company took rooms in the Hotel Continental. The bill which was presented to the countess at the end of each day was rarely for less than three hundred marks. “Stöhr,” she said, “we must find new sources of help. The child suspects nothing, of course. It would break her heart if she had an inkling of my pecuniary anxieties.” Fräulein Stöhr, without abandoning her air of virtue, succeeded in implying her doubt of that.
A lawyer of the highest reputation was entrusted with the suit against the Gunderams. The representative of the defendants had been instructed to refuse all demands. There were endless conferences, during which the countess flamed with noble indignation, while Letitia exhibited an elegiac amazement, as though these things did not concern her and had faded from her memory. Her statements as to what she had said and done, concerning agreements and events, were never twice the same. When these contradictions were brought to her attention, she answered, ashamed and dreamy and angry at once: “You’re frightfully pedantic. How am I to remember it all? I suppose things were as you’ve said they were in your documents. What are the documents for?”
The old litigation concerning the forest of Heiligenkreuz was also to be accelerated. The countess’s hopes in this matter were justified in no respect. Nevertheless she felt that she was a wealthy landowner, and sought capitalists to finance her on the security of this dusty and hopeless claim. She failed, yet her faith was unshaken. She even prevailed upon herself to enter places that she considered unhygienic, and chaffer with persons who were not immaculate. “Don’t worry, my angel,” she said to Letitia. “Everything will turn out well. By Easter we shall be rolling in money.”
Letitia did not, indeed, worry. She enjoyed herself and was radiant. Every day was so full of delight and pleasure that it seemed rank ingratitude to think of the morrow except under the same aspect. Life clung to her as pliantly and adorningly as a charming frock. Since her inner life was unshadowed and all men smiled upon her, she believed the world at large to be in a lasting condition of content. Rumours of pain and misfortune, she thought, must somewhere have their ground in reality. But by the time that a knowledge of them reached her, they were transformed into the likeness of beauty and legend.
She read the books of poets, listened to music, danced at balls, chatted and walked, and everything was to her a mirror of her loveliness and a free, playful activity. She was quite free, for she never felt the impulse toward restraint. She had time for every one, for the moment was her master. And so she was most disarmingly unpunctual, and so innocent in her faithlessness that those whom she betrayed always ended by consoling her. Her affairs were quickly going from bad to worse. She knew nothing of it. She created an unparalleled confusion among men, but she was quite unconscious of it. Whoever spoke to her of love received love. She was sorry for them. Why not share one’s overflowing wealth? Six or eight passionate wooers could always simultaneously boast of weighty evidences of her favour. If any one reproached her, she was astonished and not seldom on the verge of tears, like some one whose pure intentions had been incomprehensibly misunderstood.
One of the twins fell ill, and a physician was summoned. He delayed coming, and she sent for another. Next morning she had forgotten both, and sent for a third, simply because his name in the telephone directory had pleased her. The consequence was confusion. It happened too that she would fall in love with one of the physicians for a few hours. Then the confusion was heightened.
She accepted three separate invitations for Christmas week, and promised to go at the same time to Meran, Salzburg, and Baireuth. When the time came she had forgotten all three, and went nowhere.
Her maid was discovered to be a thief. A dozen girls presented themselves for the vacant position. She took a liking to the last, and forgot that she had already taken a liking to the first and had hired her.
She was invited to luncheon and appeared at tea. A sum had been scraped up to pay pressing bills. She loaned it to Rehmer, who was poor as a church mouse and needed new clothes. The confusion grew and grew.
But it did not touch her. Her mood was exalted and festive, her gait a little careless, her head charmingly bent a little to one side. Her soft, deer-like eyes were full of expectation and delight and just a shade of cunning.
Crammon could not possibly approve this state of affairs. It was a topsyturvy world, in which all rules were trodden under foot. A very dainty, very pretty foot, no doubt, but the result was enough to frighten any one. He growled his complaints like Burbero in Goldoni’s play. He said things would come to a bad end. He had never known such slovenliness in all things not to come to a bad end. His horror was that of a bourgeois who sees his pet virtues outraged. Fascinated and frightened by the spectacle of Letitia’s gambols on the edge of an abyss, he denied his own past, forgot his follies, his adventures, his freebooting days, his greed and varied lusts, and the remnants of them that accompanied him even now. He forgot all that. He complained.
One evening he was dining alone with the countess. Letitia had gone to a concert. The countess had something on her heart, and his suspicions were vigilant. Her ways were mild and she served him the best of everything. She spoke of the change of domicile that had been planned, and said that she and Letitia had not yet been able to agree whether it were better to spend the coming months in Wiesbaden or Berlin. She asked Crammon’s advice. He begged her to permit him not to interfere in the controversy. He had other plans of his own, and no desire to witness a noisy débâcle.
At that the countess began to lament her pecuniary embarrassment and complain of the impatience of her creditors. For the dear child’s sake she had determined to ask him for a considerable loan. She would give him any security he desired, provided her name and person and reputation did not suffice. Nothing, of course, could greatly mitigate the painfulness of having to make such a request. Yet the sense of asking the father of her darling did console her for her suffering.
Her red round cheeks did, in fact, become a shade less rosy, and in her forget-me-not blue eyes shimmered a tear or two.
Crammon laid down his knife and fork. “You misjudge me, countess,” he said with the melancholy of a Tartuffe. “You misjudge me gravely. Never in my life have I loaned out money—neither at interest nor out of friendship. Nothing could move me to change my principle. You probably fancy me well off. That is a most astonishing error, countess. I may give that impression, but you must not draw false inferences. I have had the art of thrift and frugality, that is all. I have been careful in the choice of my associates—men as well as women. If ever I had two invitations, one from the East and one from the West, and the Eastern invitation was issued by an unquestionably wealthier source, my decision was immediate and unhesitating. Thus I was guarded from scruples and regrets. All that I call my own is a little farm in Moravia that yields a most modest revenue—a little grain, a little fruit, and an old ramshackle house in Vienna with a few sticks of worm-eaten furniture, which is guarded for me by two rare pearls of the female sex. No one, countess, I assure you, has ever before made the quaint mistake of asking me for money. No one.”
Sadly the countess leaned her head upon her hand.
“But my conscience would forbid my acquiescence in this case even had I the ability,” Crammon continued morosely. “I would never forgive myself for having been the banker of the follies that are perpetrated here, or the financier of mad extravagance. No, no, countess. Let us talk of more cheerful things.”
He was still up when, at midnight, he heard a tapping at his door. Letitia entered. She sat down beside him, and said to him with a wide-eyed gentle look: “It wasn’t nice of you, Bernard, to treat auntie so cruelly. Neither you nor I can let a thing like that go. Are you stingy? For heaven’s sake, Bernard, don’t tell me that you’re stingy! Look me in the eyes, and tell me if such a thing is possible. My dear, I’d have to disown you!”
She laughed and put her arms about his neck, pulled his hair and kissed the tip of his nose, and was, in a word, so arch and so irresistible that Crammon’s cast-iron principles were fatally shattered. He revoked his refusal and promised to pay Letitia’s debts.
Once again the breath and speech of a woman had power over him. But it was late, and the sweetness was shot with pain. For he was no more the robber but the victim. Ah, it was time to practise modesty and renunciation. No longer did one bite into a juicy pear. No longer did one eat; one was eaten.
Letitia determined to go to Berlin. After some vain refusals, Crammon consented to accompany her.