“I will show Captain Brand to his rooms.”
Brand wondered at her quickness in knowing his name after one glance at his billeting-paper, and said, “Please do not trouble, gnàdiges Fraulein,” when he saw a look of disapproval, almost of alarm, on the mother’s face.
“It will be better for Truda to show the gentleman to his rooms. I will ring for her.”
Elsa von Kreuzenach challenged her mother’s authority by a smile of amusement, and there was a slight deepening of that delicate colour in her face. “Truda is boiling the usual cabbage for the usual Mittagessen. I will go, mother.”
She turned to Brand with a smile and bowed to him.
“I will act as your guide upstairs, Captain Brand. After that you may find your own way. It is not difficult.”
Brand, who described the scene to me, told me that the girl went very quickly up a wide flight of stairs so that in his big riding boots he found it difficult to keep pace with her. She went down a long corridor lined with etchings on the walls, and opened a white door leading into a big room furnished as a library. There was a wood fire burning there, and at a glance Brand noticed one or two decorations on the walls—a pair of foils with a fencing-mask and gauntlets, some charcoal drawings—one of a girl’s head, which was this girl’s when that gold hair of hers hung in two Gretchen pig-tails—and some antlers.
“Here you can sit and smoke your pipe,” said Elsa von Kreuzenach. “Also, if you are bored, you can read those books. You see we have many English authors—Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Kipling—heaps. My brother and I used to read all we could get of English books.”
Brand remembered that Franz von Kreuzenach had read Kipling. He had quoted “Puck of Pook’s Hill” to Eileen O’Connor.
“Now and then,” he said, “I may read a little German.”