Andreas (2 page)

O
NCE MORE
he was in the inn
Zum Schwert
in Villach after a hard day’s travelling, and was just going up to bed when, on the very staircase, a man stood offering himself as servant or courier. He: he needed nobody, was travelling alone, looked after his horse himself during the day, and the ostler would do so at night. The other would not leave him, went sidling upstairs with him, step by step, as far as his room, then stepped into the doorway, standing square in
it, so that Andreas could not shut the door: it was not fitting for a young gentleman of quality to travel without a servant: it would look paltry down in Italy, they were infernally nice on that point. And how he had done little else all his life but ride abroad with young gentlemen—his last was Freiherr Edmund von Petzenstein, and before that the canon, Count Lodron—Herr von Ferschengelder must know them. How he had ridden ahead as travelling courier, ordered everything, arranged everything, till the count was speechless with amazement, “he had never travelled so cheap,” and their quarters were of the best. How he spoke Flemish and Romansch and Italian, of course, as fluently as you please, and knew all about the money, and the tricks of
inn-keepers
and postilions—nobody could beat him there; all they could say was: “There’s no coming at your gentleman. He’s in safe hands.” And how he knew all about buying a horse, so that he could get the better of any horse-dealer, even the Hungarians, and they were the best, let alone the Germans or Walloons. And as for personal service, he was valet and barber and perruquier, coachman and huntsman, beater and loader, knew all about hounds and guns, correspondence, casting accounts, reading aloud, writing
billets
in all languages, and could serve as interpreter or, as the Turks say, dragoman. It was
a marvel that a man like him was free, and indeed the Freiherr von Petzenstein had wanted his brother to have him
à tout prix
, but he had taken it into his head to be servant to Herr von Ferschengelder—not for the wages—that was of no matter to him. But it would just suit him to be of assistance to a young gentleman making his first tour, and to win his affection and esteem. It was confidence he had set his heart on, that was the reward that a servant like him looked for. What he wanted was friendship and trust, not money. That was why he had not been able to hold out in the Imperial Cavalry, where there was nothing but tale-bearing and the stick—no trust. Here he passed his tongue over his moist, thick lip like a cat.

At this point Andreas stopped him, saying that he thanked him for his obliging offer, but did not mean to hire a servant then. Later, perhaps, in Venice, a paid lackey—and here he made as if to shut the door, but the last sentence was already too much; that little flourish—for he had never thought of hiring a footman in Venice—took its revenge. For now the other, feeling in the uncertainty of his tone who was the real master in the dispute, blocked the door with his foot, and Andreas could never make out later how it was that the ruffian forthwith, as if the matter were already settled between them, spoke of his
mount—there would be a bargain that day the like of which would never come again. That very night a horse-dealer was passing that way: he knew him from his time with the canon—not a Turk, for once. The man had a little Hungarian horse to sell which might have been made for him. Once he got that between his legs, he would make a high-stepper of it inside of a week. The bay was priced, he thought, at ninety
gulden
for any one else, but at seventy for him. That was because of the big horse-deal he had put through for the canon, but he would have to clinch the bargain that very day before midnight, for the dealer got up early. So please would his honour give him the money at once, out of his waist-belt, or should he go down and bring up his portmanteau or his saddle, for he would have his capital sewn up there—a gentleman like him would only carry the bare necessary on him?

When the wretch spoke of money, his face took on a loathsome look; under the impudent, dirty blue eyes little wrinkles twitched like ripples on water. He came close up to Andreas, and over the protruding, moist, thick lips floated a smell of brandy. Then Andreas pushed him out over the threshold, and the fellow, feeling the young man’s strength, said no more. But again Andreas said a word too much, for he felt too rough handling the intruder thus
ungently. Count Lodron would never have been so rough, he thought, or laid his hands on him. So he added, partly by way of dismissal, that he was too tired today, they could think about it next morning. In any case, nothing had been settled between them for the moment.

He meant to leave without further discussion next morning as early as possible. But in that way he merely twisted the rope for his own neck, for in the morning, before it was even light and Andreas was awake, there was the fellow already standing at the door, saying that he had already saved five
gulden
cash for his honour, had bought the horse—a beauty—it was standing down in the courtyard, and every
gulden
Herr von Ferschengelder should lose when he got rid of the horse in Venice was to be struck off his own wages.

Andreas, looking out of the window, drunk with sleep, saw a lean but spirited little horse standing down in the courtyard. Then the conceit seized him that it would be, after all, a very different matter to ride into towns and inns with a servant riding behind him. He could lose nothing on the horse—it was certainly a bargain. The bull-necked, freckled fellow looked burly and sharp-witted, nothing worse, and if Freiherr von Petzenstein and Count Lodron had had him in their service, there must be something in him.
For in his parents’ house in the Spiegelgasse, Andreas had breathed in with the air of Vienna a boundless awe of persons for rank, and what happened in that higher world was gospel.

So there was Andreas with his servant riding behind him, carrying his portmanteau, before he even knew or wanted it. The first day everything went well, and yet it seemed ugly and dreary to Andreas as it passed, and he would have preferred not to live through it again. But it was no use wishing.

Andreas had intended to ride to Spittal, and then through the Tyrol, but the servant talked him into turning left and staying in the province of Carinthia. The roads, he declared, were much better there, and the inns without their like, and life far merrier than among those blockheads in the Tyrol. The Carinthian maids and millers’ daughters had a way with them, and the roundest, firmest bosoms in all Germany—there was a saying about them, and many a song. Didn’t Herr von Ferschengelder know that?

Andreas made no answer; he shuddered hot and cold beside the fellow, who was not so much older than he—five years at most. If he had known that Andreas had never seen, let alone touched, a woman without her clothes, some shameless jeer would have been forthcoming, or talk such as Andreas could not even imagine, but then he would have torn him from
his horse and set upon him in a fury—he felt it, and the blood throbbed in his eyes.

They rode in silence through a wide valley; it was a rainy day, grassy hill-slopes rose right and left, here and there a farm, a hayrick, and woods high above on which the clouds lay sluggishly. After dinner Gotthilff grew talkative—had the young master taken a look at the landlady? She was nothing much now, but in ’69—that was nine years ago, when he was sixteen years old—he had had that woman every night for a month. Then it had been well worthwhile. She had had black hair down to below the hollows of her knees. And he urged on his little horse and rode quite close to Andreas, till Andreas had to warn him not to ride him foul—his chestnut could not stand it. In the end she got something to remember him by, it had served her right. At the time he had been with a countess’s waiting-woman, as pretty as a picture, and the landlady had smelt a rat and gone quite thin with jealousy, and as hollow-eyed as a sick dog. At that time he had been courier to Count Porzia—it was his first place, and a fine surprise it had been for all Carinthia that the Count had made him his huntsman at sixteen, and confidential servant into the bargain.

But the Count knew very well what he was doing, and whom he could trust, and he had good need
of somebody who could keep his mouth shut, for the Count had more love-affairs than teeth in his head, and many a married man had sworn to kill him, gentlemen and farmers too, and millers and huntsmen. Just then the Count was carrying on with the young Pomberg Countess—she was like a vixen in love, but she was no more in love with the Count than her maid was in love with him, Gotthilff. And when her husband had had the shoot in Pomberg the Countess had stolen to Count Porzia’s stand—crawling along on all fours, and meanwhile the Count had given him his piece and told him to shoot for him, so that nobody should notice, and nobody had noticed, for he was just as good a shot as the Count. And once, he had brought down a fine deer at somewhere about forty paces, through undergrowth: he had caught a glimpse of its shoulder in the dusk. Then the animal had collapsed under his fire, but at the same time a woeful cry had come out of the thicket—it sounded like a woman, but directly afterwards all was still again, as though the wounded woman had held her mouth shut with her own hand. Of course, he could not leave his stand then, but the next day he had paid a visit to the landlady and had found her in bed with wound-fever. And he had been smart enough to find out that she had been driven into the
wood by jealousy, because she thought the
waiting-woman
was out with him and that she would find them in the undergrowth together. He had split his sides with laughing, to think she had got something to remember him by, and from his own hand, and all the same couldn’t upbraid him with it, but had to listen to his jeers, and sharp ones too, and hold her tongue to everybody, and lie herself out of it by saying that she had fallen on the scythe and cut herself over the knee.

Andreas pressed on, the other too; his face, close behind Andreas’s, was red with wild, shameless lust, like a fox in rut. Andreas asked whether the Countess was still alive. Oh, she? She had made many a man happy, and still looked no more than twenty-five, and for that matter the ladies in the big houses here, if you only knew how to take them, where a countrywoman would only give her finger, would give their whole hand, and all the rest with it. Now he was riding close behind Andreas, but Andreas paid no heed. The wretch was as loathsome to him as a spider, yet he was but twenty-two, and his young blood was afire with the talk, and his thoughts were wandering elsewhere. He might, he thought, be arriving himself at Pomberg Castle that evening, an expected guest along with other guests. It is evening—the shoot is over, he was the best shot:
wherever he fired something fell. The lovely Countess was at his side as he fired, her eyes playing with him as he with the life of the wild creatures. Now they are alone—an utterly solitary room, he alone with the Countess, walls a fathom thick, in deathly silence. He is appalled to find her a woman, no longer a Countess and young cavalier—nothing gallant nor fine about it all, nor beautiful either, but a frenzy, a murdering in the dark. The ruffian is beside him, emptying his gun on a woman who has crept to him in her nightdress. He has started back to the dining-room with the Countess, his thoughts dragging him back to the lighthearted decency there—then he felt that he had pulled up, and at the same moment his servant’s nag stumbled. The man cursed and swore, as if the rider ahead were not his master, but someone he had fed swine with all his life. Andreas let it pass. He felt a great lassitude, the broad valley looked endless under the sagging clouds. He wished it were all over, that he were older and had children of his own, and that it was his son who was riding to Venice, but a different man from him, a fine fellow, and that the world was clean and kindly, like Sunday morning with the bells ringing.

The next day the road mounted. The valley narrowed, steeper slopes, from time to time a church on a height, far below them rushing water.
The clouds were on the move, now and then a shaft of sunlight shot down to the river, where, among willows and hazels, the stones gleamed livid, the water green. Then gloom again, and gentle rain. A hundred paces further the new-bought horse fell lame, its eyes were glazed, its head looked aged, the whole beast changed. Gotthilff broke out that it was small wonder, when the horses were tired in the legs and a man pulled up his beast on the road in the twilight, without a by your leave, so that the man behind could not help stumbling. He had never seen such manners; in the cavalry he would have been put in irons for it.

Again Andreas let it pass; the fellow knows something about horses, he said to himself, he thinks he’s responsible for the horse, that’s what maddens him. But he wouldn’t have taken that tone with the Freiherr von Petzenstein. It serves me right. There’s something about a great gentleman that a lackey respects. There’s nothing of the kind about me: if I tried to put it on it wouldn’t suit me. I’ll take him along with me till Saturday, then I shall sell the horse, though I lose half the money, and pay him off; a man like that will find ten places for one he loses, but he needs a firmer hand than mine.

Soon they were riding at a foot-pace; the horse’s head looked thin and jaded, and Gotthilff’s face
bloated and furious. He pointed to a big farm in front of them, to the side of the road—there they would stop: “I’m not going to ride a dead-lame beast a step further.”

T
HE HOMESTEAD
was more than substantial. A square of stone wall ran round the whole, with a stout turret at each corner; the gate was framed in stone, with a coat of arms above. Andreas thought it must be a gentleman’s house. They dismounted, Gotthilff took the two horses—he had to pull rather than lead the bay through the gate. The courtyard was empty save for a fine big cock on a dunghill, surrounded by hens; on the other side a little stream of water flowed from the fountain, and made its way out under the wall, among nettles and briars: ducklings were swimming on it. There was a tiny chapel, with flowers against it growing on trellises, and all this was within the wall. The path leading across the farmyard was flagged, the horses’ hoofs clattered on it. The path led straight through the house under a huge vaulted archway. The stables must be behind the house.