Elective Affinities (11 page)

‘As we expected!’ said Eduard, to whom the letter had been handed, turning to Charlotte. ‘The Count is not going to fail us. He is coming tomorrow.’

‘In that case the Baroness cannot be far away either,’ Charlotte replied.

‘She isn’t!’ Eduard answered. ‘She’s arriving tomorrow too. They ask if they can stay overnight. They want to leave together the day after,’

‘Then we will have to make arrangements in good time, Ottilie!’ said Charlotte.

‘What do you want arranged?’ Ottilie asked.

Charlotte said what she wanted arranged and Ottilie went away.

The Captain inquired what the relationship was between these two. He knew about it only vaguely. Already married, they had fallen passionately in love. Two marriages were broken up, not without scandal. They thought of divorce; it was possible for the Baroness, for the Count not. They had to pretend to part but their relationship remained what it was; and if they could not be together in the winter in the Residenz, they made up for it in the summer on pleasure trips and taking the waters. They were both somewhat older than Eduard and Charlotte and in earlier days they had all been close friends at court. They had always remained on good terms, even if you could not always approve of everything about your friends. Only this time Charlotte found their arrival somewhat inopportune and if she had to say why she found it inopportune she would say it was on Ottilie’s account. The good pure child ought not to have such an example put before her at so early an age.

‘They could have left it for a couple of days,’ said Eduard as Ottilie came back, ‘until we have settled the farmstead sale. The contract is ready. I have one copy here but we need a second and our old clerk is ill.’ The Captain offered to do it, Charlotte also offered; but he raised objections to their offers. ‘Just give it to me!’ Ottilie cried suddenly.

‘You will not be able to get it finished,’ said Charlotte.

‘I would have to have it the day after tomorrow, first thing, and there is a lot to copy,’ said Eduard. ‘It shall be ready,’ Ottilie cried. She already had the paper in her hands.

Next morning, as they were looking out of the upper floor windows so as not to miss seeing their guests arrive and going to meet them, Eduard said: ‘Who is that riding so slowly down the road?’ The Captain described the figure in more detail. ‘Then it
is
him,’ said Eduard. ‘The details, which you can see better than I, accord with the general picture, which I can see very well. It is Mittler. But how does he come to be riding so slowly?’

The figure came closer and it was Mittler. They received him affably as he came slowly up the steps. ‘Why didn’t you come yesterday?’ Eduard called to him.

‘I do not like noisy festivities,’ he replied. ‘But today I come to celebrate my friend’s birthday with you quietly.’

‘But how can you manage to find time?’ Eduard asked, joking.

‘You owe my visit, for what it is worth, to a thought I had yesterday. I spent half the day very pleasantly in a home to which I had brought peace, and then I heard that birthday celebrations were going on over here. I thought to myself: it could be called selfish, when all’s said and done, to enjoy yourself only among people to whom you have brought peace. Why don’t you go for once and enjoy yourself with friends who have never needed peace brought to them because they keep it themselves! No sooner said than done! Here I am, as intended.’

‘Yesterday you would have found a large company here,’ said Charlotte, ‘today you will find only a small one. You will find the Count and the Baroness, with whom you have already had some dealings.’

The strange gentleman the four were welcoming jumped away with the sudden celerity of irritation. He looked round for his hat and switch. ‘An evil star unfailingly appears above me as soon as ever I decide to relax and do myself a favour! But why do I go against my own nature? I ought not to have come, and now I am being driven away. For I will not stay under one roof with that pair. And you watch out for yourselves too: they bring nothing but harm! They are like a leaven that spreads and propagates its own contagion.’

They tried to appease him but tried in vain. ‘Whoever attacks marriage,’ he cried, ‘whoever undermines the basis of all moral society, because that is what it is, by word not to speak of by deed, has me to reckon with. Or if I cannot get the better of him I have nothing further to do with him. Marriage
is the beginning and the pinnacle of all culture. It makes the savage gentle, and it gives the most cultivated the best occasion for demonstrating his gentleness. It has to be indissoluble: it brings so much happiness that individual instances of unhappiness do not come into account. And why speak of unhappiness at all? Impatience is what it really is, ever and again people are overcome by impatience, and then they like to think themselves unhappy. Let the moment pass, and you will count yourself happy that what has so long stood firm still stands. As for separation, there can be no adequate grounds for it. The human condition is compounded of so much joy and so much sorrow that it is impossible to reckon how much a husband owes a wife or a wife a husband. It is an infinite debt, it can be paid only in eternity. Marriage may sometimes be an uncomfortable state, I can well believe that, and that is as it should be. Are we not also married to our conscience, and would we not often like to be rid of it because it is more uncomfortable than a husband or a wife could ever be?’

He would probably have gone on talking in this energetic vein for a long time more if the sound of coach horns had not announced the arrival of the Count and the Baroness. They drove into the courtyard from either side at the same time as if it had been prearranged. Our friends hurried to meet them and Mittler hid himself and had his horse brought him and rode off in annoyance.

CHAPTER TEN

T
HE
guests were welcomed and conducted in. They were very happy to be again in the house and the rooms where they had spent so many good days and which they had not seen for a long time. The Count and the Baroness were both of that tall well-formed type of person you almost prefer to see in middle age than in youth: if they have lost something of their first bloom, they now excite not only affection but a decided feeling of trust and confidence. This couple too were very easy to get along with. Their easy manner of accepting and dealing with life’s circumstances, their cheerfulness, their apparent unaffectedness communicated themselves right away, and their whole deportment was characterized by a noble decorum untouched by any sense of constraint.

This effect made itself felt immediately. The new arrivals had come straight from the great world, as you could see from their dress, their effects and everything else about them, and they supplied a kind of contrast to our friends, with their country ways and their secluded passions. But this was soon dissipated as old memories and present interests mingled, and they were quickly united in lively conversation.

But before long they separated again. The ladies retired to their wing, where they found plenty of entertainment in exchanging confidences and criticizing the latest fashions. The men busied themselves with the coaches and horses and were soon horse-trading and horse-exchanging.

They first reassembled at table. They had dressed and in this too the new arrivals showed themselves to advantage. All they wore was new and so to speak unseen, and yet already tried out and therefore comfortable and familiar.

Conversation was lively and varied: when people such as
this are present everything and nothing seems to be of interest. They spoke French so as to exclude the servants, they chattered gaily about the affairs of the great world and the not so great. But on one point their talk stayed with a subject longer than might seem proper, and that was when Charlotte inquired after a friend of her youth and learned with some surprise she was about to be divorced.

‘Disagreeable,’ said Charlotte, ‘to think your absent friends are safe, a friend you love is well taken care of, and before you know it to hear her fate is in the balance, to hear she is about to enter on to a new road and perhaps an uncertain one.’

‘Actually, my dear,’ replied the Count, ‘it is our own fault if we are surprised in this fashion. We do so like to imagine that earthly things are so very permanent, and especially the marriage tie. And as to that, we are misled by all those comedies we see so much of into imaginings which are quite contrary to the way of the world. In a comedy we see a marriage as the final fulfilment of a desire which has been thwarted by the obstacles of several acts. The moment this desire is fulfilled the curtain falls, and this momentary satisfaction goes on echoing in our minds. Things are different in the real world. In the real world the play continues after the curtain has fallen, and when it is raised again there is not much pleasure to be gained by seeing or hearing what is going on.’

‘It cannot be as bad as all that,’ said Charlotte, smiling, ‘since you see actors who have retired from this stage glad enough to get back on to it.’

‘You cannot take objection to that,’ said the Count. ‘To assume a new role may be a very pleasant thing. When you know the world you see that in the case of marriage too it is only this fixed eternal duration amid so much change that has something inappropriate about it. A friend of mine whose humour usually takes the form of suggesting new laws used
to say marriages ought to be contracted for only five years. He said this lovely odd and sacred number and the length of time measured by it would suffice for getting to know one another, producing a few children, separating and, what would be the best of it, becoming reconciled again. He used to say: What a happy time you would have at first! Two or three years at the least would be spent in contentment. Then one of the parties would be interested in seeing the relationship protracted, would grow more and more attentive as the end drew closer. The indifferent or even discontented party would be propitiated and won over by this behaviour. As you forget the time when in good company, so they too would forget the passage of time and would be most pleasantly surprised to notice after the term was up that it had already been silently prolonged.’

This was all very clever and merry, and Charlotte was not unaware the joke could be given a profound moral meaning, but she found such utterances unpleasant, especially on account of Ottilie. She knew well nothing is more dangerous than too free conversation in which a culpable or semiculpable situation is treated as normal, commonplace, or even praiseworthy; and anything that impugns the marriage tie certainly comes into this category. She tried with all her skill to turn the conversation elsewhere; she was unable to do so, and she was sorry Ottilie had arranged everything so well that she had no occasion to leave the table. The quietly observant child was directing the steward merely by glances and gestures and everything was going splendidly, even though a couple of the liveried servants were new and awkward.

And so, oblivious of Charlotte’s effort to change the subject, the Count went on talking about marriage. As a rule he was in no way given to monopolizing the conversation, but this theme weighed too heavily on his heart, and the difficulties living apart from his wife involved him in had embittered him against everything connected with the marriage tie, although
this did not prevent his very keenly desiring to marry the Baroness.

‘That friend of mine,’ he went on, ‘made a further suggestion for a marriage law. He suggested a marriage should be regarded as indissoluble only if both parties or at any rate one of them marries a third time. A person who marries three times incontestably confesses that for him or her marriage is something indispensable. It would already be known from how he or she had behaved in previous marriages whether or not the party possessed those qualities which often give more cause for separation than do downright bad qualities. Reciprocal inquiries would have to be made. You would have to keep as close an eye on the married as on the unmarried, because you could never know how each case would turn out.’

‘That would certainly make society more interested in us,’ said Eduard. ‘As things are now, once we are married no one bothers himself further about either our virtues or our shortcomings.’

‘Under such an arrangement,’ the Baroness interposed, smiling, ‘our dear host and hostess would already have surmounted two stages with flying colours, and could be preparing for the third.’

‘They have been fortunate,’ said the Count. ‘Death has done for them what the courts are usually reluctant to do.’

‘Let us leave the dead alone,’ said Charlotte, not altogether in jest.

‘Why,’ the Count replied, ‘when we can think nothing but good of them? They were modest enough to content themselves with a few years of life in return for the manifold good things they left behind them.’

‘Which would be very fine,’ said the Baroness with a suppressed sigh, ‘if it were not that in such cases it is the best years of life that have to be sacrificed.’

‘True,’ replied the Count; ‘it would reduce you to despair
were it not that in this world in general so little turns out as you hope it will. Children do not fulfill their promise; young people do so very rarely, and when they do keep their word the world does not keep its word to them.’

Charlotte, who was glad the conversation had taken another direction, replied cheerfully: ‘Well, we are in any case compelled soon enough to take the good things of life in bits and pieces and learn to enjoy them in that condition.’

‘Certainly you two have enjoyed some good times,’ the Count replied. ‘When I think back to the years you and Eduard were the handsomest couple at court! Such brilliant times and such fine people are a thing of the past now. When you danced together all eyes were on you. And how you were sought after, while you had eyes only for one another!’

‘Since so much is changed,’ said Charlotte, ‘perhaps we can accept such compliments without immodesty.’

‘I have often thought Eduard was to blame for not being more persistent,’ said the Count. ‘His eccentric parents would have given in in the end, and to gain ten years of youth is no small thing.’