Victoria (11 page)

“Yes, we know each other,” Camilla said candidly. “It was here you fished me out of the water that time.”

She was young and fair, lively, dressed in pink, in her seventeenth year. Johannes clenched his teeth and laughed and joked. Gradually her cheerful words really began to revive him; they talked for a long time, his palpitation calmed down. She had kept from her childhood the charming habit of tilting her head and listening expectantly when he said something. He recognized her, all right; she was no surprise to him.

Victoria came in again; taking the Lieutenant’s arm, she pulled him along and said to Johannes, “Do you know Otto—my fiancé? I suppose you remember him.”

The gentlemen remembered each other. They speak the necessary words, make the necessary bows, and part company. Johannes and Victoria are left by themselves. “Was that the surprise?” he says.

“Yes,” she replies, pained and impatient. “I did the best I could, I didn’t know what else to do. Now, don’t be unreasonable, rather say thank you; I could see you were pleased.”

“Thank you. Yes, I was pleased.”

A hopeless despair descended on him, his face turned deathly pale. If she had ever hurt him, he was now amply compensated and comforted. He was sincerely grateful to her.

“And I notice you’re wearing your ring today,” he said in a muffled voice. “Now, don’t take it off again.”

Pause.

“No, now I’m not likely to take it off again,” she replied.

Their eyes met. His lips quivering, he turned his head in the direction of the Lieutenant and said, in a hoarse, gruff voice, “You have good taste, Victoria. He’s a handsome man. His epaulets give him a pair of shoulders.”

She retorted with great composure, “No, he’s not handsome. But he is a well-bred man. That counts for something too.”

“That was for me. Thank you!” Laughing aloud, he added rudely, “And he’s got money in his pockets, that counts for even more.”

She abruptly walked away.

He drifted about from wall to wall like an outcast. Camilla spoke to him, asking him about something, but he neither heard nor answered. She said something again, touching his arm as she repeated her question, but to no avail. “Ah, he’s busy thinking,” she cried, laughing. “He’s thinking, he’s thinking!”

Victoria heard her and said, “He wants to be left alone. He sent me away too.” But suddenly she stepped right up to him and said aloud, “No doubt you’re trying to dream up an apology. Don’t trouble yourself. On the contrary, I owe you an apology for sending you the invitation so late. It showed great negligence on my part. I forgot about you till the very last moment, I nearly forgot about you altogether. But I hope you will forgive me, I had so many things on my mind.”

He stared at her, speechless. Even Camilla seemed amazed as she looked from one to the other. Victoria was standing directly in front of them, a satisfied look on her cold, pale face. She had had her revenge.

“That’s our young gallants for you,” she said to Camilla. “We mustn’t expect too much of them. Over there sits my fiancé talking about moose hunting, and here stands the poet absorbed in thought. . . . Say something, poet!”

He gave a start; the veins in his temples turned blue.

“Very well. You are asking me to say something? Very well.”

“Oh, don’t strain yourself.”

She made as if to leave.

“To come straight to the point,” he said slowly, with a smile, though his voice trembled, “to start with the crux of the matter: Have you been in love recently, Miss Victoria?”

For a few seconds there was total silence; all three of them could hear their hearts pounding. Camilla offered timorously, “Victoria is in love with her fiancé, of course. She’s just become engaged, don’t you know?”

The doors to the dining room were thrown open.

 

Johannes found his place and stopped in front of it. The whole table was rocking up and down before his eyes; he saw a great many people and heard a murmur of voices.

“Yes, that’s your place, so please,” the hostess said amiably. “If only everybody would sit down at last.”

“Pardon me!” Victoria said of a sudden from just behind him.

He stepped aside.

She took his card and moved it several places, seven places down, next to an old man who had once been a tutor at the Castle and had a reputation as a tippler. She brought another card back and sat down.

He stood there watching it all. The hostess, feeling uncomfortable, made herself busy on the other side of the table and avoided his glance.

Shaken and more bewildered than ever, he went to his new place; one of Ditlef’s city friends, a young man with diamond studs in his shirtfront, moved into the original one. On his left sat Victoria, on his right Camilla.

The dinner began.

The old tutor remembered Johannes as a child, and a conversation started up between them. He related that he too had pursued the art of poetry as a young man; the manuscripts were still lying around, he would let Johannes read them some day. And now he had been summoned to this house on its day of rejoicing so he could share in the family’s happiness at Victoria’s engagement. The master and mistress of the house had prepared this surprise for him for old times’ sake.

“I haven’t read any of your things,” he said. “If I want to read something, I read my own things; I have both poems and stories in my drawer. They are to be published after my death; I do want the public to know who I was, after all. We who’ve been in the profession somewhat longer aren’t in such a hurry to bring everything to the printer’s as they are nowadays, alas. Skoal!”

The dinner goes forward. The host taps his glass and rises. His lean, aristocratic face is quick with emotion, and he gives an impression of being extremely happy. Johannes bends his head very low. His glass is empty and no one offers him anything; he fills it to the brim himself and again lets his head droop. Now it would come!

The speech was nice and long and was received with a good deal of noisy cheer; the engagement was announced. Lots of good wishes for the host’s daughter and the chamberlain’s son poured in from every corner of the table.

Johannes emptied his glass.

A few minutes later his agitation is gone, his composure has returned; the champagne burns with a low flame in his veins. Then he hears the chamberlain speak, followed by renewed shouts of bravo and hurrah and the clinking of glasses. He casts a glance to where Victoria is sitting; she’s pale, seems anguished, and doesn’t look up. Camilla, however, nods to him and smiles, and he nods back.

The tutor goes on talking beside him. “It’s beautiful, beautiful, when two people find one another. That was not my lot. I was a young student, good prospects, great gifts; my father had an ancient name, a large house, wealth, many, many ships. So it would be no exaggeration to say I had
very
good prospects. She was young too, and high up in society. Well, I come to her and open my heart. ‘
No,
’ she says. Can you understand her? No, she didn’t want to, she said. I did what I could, got on with my work and took it like a man. Then came my father’s lean years, the shipwrecks, the surety claims, in short, he went bankrupt. And what did I do? Took it like a man again. But now the girl, the one I’m talking about, no longer shuns me. No, she comes back, looks me up in town. What was she after, you’re going to ask. I was poor, with only a small teaching job, all my prospects gone and my poems put away in a drawer. But now she came and wanted to. Yes, she wanted to!”

The tutor looked at Johannes and asked, “Can you figure her out?”

“And then it was you who didn’t want to?”

“Could I? I ask. Penniless, naked and exposed, with a teaching post, tobacco in my pipe on Sundays only—what do you imagine? I couldn’t do that to her. I’m simply asking, can you figure her out?”

“And what became of her afterward?”

“Good Lord, you’re not answering my question. She married a captain. That was the following year. A captain of artillery. Skoal!”

“Certain women, they say, are looking for a chance to exercise their compassion,” Johannes remarked. “If the man does well, they hate him and feel superfluous; if he does poorly and buckles under, they crow and say, ‘Here I am.’ ”

“But why didn’t she accept me when things were going well? I had the prospects of a demigod.”

“Well, she wanted to wait until you were brought low. God knows.”

“But I was not brought low. Never. I kept my pride and turned her down. What do you say to that?”

Johannes didn’t answer.

“But perhaps you’re right,” the old tutor said. “By God and all his angels, you’re right in what you’re saying,” he exclaimed, suddenly animated, and took another drink. “In the end she took an old captain; she nurses him, cuts up his meat for him, and wears the pants in the house. A captain of artillery.”

Johannes looked up. Victoria sat with her glass in her hand, staring in his direction. She raised her glass high in the air. He felt a jolt go through him, and he too picked up his glass. His hand was shaking.

Then, bursting into laughter, she called aloud to his neighbor; it was the tutor’s name she called.

Humiliated, Johannes put down his glass, giving a perplexed, empty smile. Everybody had had their eyes on him.

The old tutor was moved to tears by this friendly attention from his pupil. He quickly emptied his glass.

“And here I am, an old man now,” he continued, “here I am, walking the earth alone and unknown. That became my lot. No one knows what I’ve got in me, but no one has heard me grumble. By the way, are you familiar with the turtledove? Isn’t it the turtledove, with its great penchant for mourning, that muddies the clear, bright spring water before drinking?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, indeed. It is, though. And I do the same. I didn’t get the one I was supposed to have; still, my life is anything but lacking in pleasures. But I muddy them up. I always muddy them up. Then the disappointment can’t get the better of me afterward. Look at Victoria there. She just drank a toast with me. I used to be her tutor, now she’s getting married and I’m happy for her; it makes me feel a truly personal happiness, as if she were my own daughter. Some day, perhaps, I’ll tutor her children. Yes, life still offers quite a few pleasures, it certainly does. But what you said about compassion and women and buckling under—the more I think about it, the more I think you are right. God knows you are. . . . Excuse me a moment.”

He rose, picked up his glass and went up to Victoria. He was already a bit unsteady on his legs and walked with a marked stoop.

There were some more speeches; the Lieutenant spoke, the neighboring landowner raised his glass to the fair sex, to the lady of the house. Suddenly the gentleman with the diamond studs rose and mentioned Johannes’ name. He had received permission for what he was doing: he wished to salute the young poet on behalf of youth. His words, spoken in a spirit of pure friendship, were offered as a well-meant thank-you from his contemporaries, full of recognition and admiration.

Johannes could barely believe his own ears. “Is he giving a speech for me?” he whispered to the tutor.

“Yes,” the tutor replied. “He forestalled me. I was going to do it myself; Victoria asked me to already this afternoon.”

“Who asked you, did you say?”

The tutor stared at him. “Nobody,” he answered.

During the speech all eyes turned toward Johannes; even the host nodded to him, and the chamberlain’s wife put on her pince-nez and gazed at him. When the speech was over, they all drank to him.

“Now you must return the favor,” the tutor said. “He was giving that speech for you. It ought to have fallen to an older member of the profession. Besides, I didn’t at all agree with him. Not at all.”

Johannes cast a glance along the table toward Victoria. It was she who had made the gentleman with the diamond studs speak; why had she done it? At first she had approached someone else, she had harbored the thought already early in the day. Why? Now she sat looking down, with a facial expression that betrayed nothing.

Suddenly his eyes become misted with a deep and intense emotion; he could have thrown himself at her feet and thanked her, yes, thanked her. He would do so later, after dinner.

Camilla was talking right and left, her face all smiles. She was contented, her seventeen years had brought her nothing but pure joy. She nodded repeatedly to Johannes and made signs to him to stand up.

He stood up.

He spoke briefly, his voice deep and trembling with emotion: The festivity with which the family was celebrating a happy event had also brought him, though a complete outsider, out of his obscurity. He wished to thank the person who had originally come up with this amiable idea, as well as the one who had said so many agreeable things about him. Nor could he omit expressing his appreciation for the kindness with which the entire company had listened to his—the outsider’s—praises. The one and only claim he had to be present on this occasion was that he happened to be the son of the Castle’s neighbor in the woods—

“Yes!” Victoria suddenly cried, her eyes blazing.

Everyone turned to look at her. Her cheeks were flushed and her breast heaving. Johannes paused. An embarrassing silence ensued.

“Victoria!” her father said, astonished.

“Go on!” she cried. “That is your only claim, but go on talking!” Then her eyes suddenly went dead, she began smiling helplessly and shaking her head. Afterward she turned to her father and said, “I only meant to exaggerate. After all, he stands there exaggerating himself. I didn’t mean to interrupt. . . .”

Johannes listened to this explanation and found a way out; his heart was beating audibly. He noticed that the hostess was looking at Victoria with tears in her eyes and with infinite forbearance.

Yes, he said, he had exaggerated; Miss Victoria was right. She had kindly reminded him that he was not only the neighbor’s son but also the Castle children’s playmate from early on, and it was to this latter circumstance that he owed his presence here now. He thanked her, she was right. He belonged to this place; the Castle woods were once his entire world, and behind them, in the blue distance, was the unknown—fairyland. But in those days he would often be asked by Ditlef and Victoria to come along on an excursion or to play a game—these were the great experiences of his childhood. After thinking it over, he had to admit that those times had meant more to him than anyone knew, and if it was true—as had just been said—that what he wrote occasionally
sparkled,
it was because his memories of that time fired him; it was a reflection of the happiness his two friends had given him in his childhood. Therefore they too had a large share in what he accomplished. And so, to the general good wishes on the occasion of the engagement, he would like to add his personal thanks to both of the Castle children for those good childhood years, when neither time nor circumstance had come between them, for that brief, happy summer’s day. . . .