I'll have to make quite sure that I know what it is she does want, he thought. I'll have to do my best, otherwise... Otherwise he could quite imagine that she might raise a fat ringed hand and say to one of the tall, muscular footmen: 'Take him and throw him over the battlements.'
It's ridiculous, thought Stafford Nye. Such things can't happen nowadays. Where am I? What kind of a parade, a masquerade or a theatrical performance am I taking part in?
'You have come very punctual to time, child.'
It was a hoarse, asthmatic voice which had once had an undertone, he thought, of strength, possibly even of beauty. That was over now, Renata came forward, made a slight curtsy. She picked up the fat hand and dropped a courtesy kiss upon it.
'Let me present to you Sir Stafford Nye. The Gr?fin Charlotte von Waldsausen.'
The fat hand was extended towards him. He bent over it in the foreign style. Then she said something that surprised him.
'I know your great-aunt,' she said,
He looked astounded, and he saw immediately that she was amused by that, but he saw too, that she had expected him to be surprised by it. She laughed, a rather queer, grating laugh. Not attractive.
'Shall we say, I used to know her. It is many, many years since I have seen her. We were in Switzerland together, at Lausanne, as girls. Matilda. Lady Matilda Baldwen-White.'
'What a wonderful piece of news to take home with me,' said Stafford Nye.
'She is older than I am. She is in good health?'
'For her age, in very good health. She lives in the country quietly. She has arthritis, rheumatism.'
'Ah yes, all the ills of old age. She should have injections of procaine. That is what the doctors do here in this altitude. It is very satisfactory. Does she know that you are visiting me?'
'I imagine that she has not the least idea of it,' said Sir Stafford Nye. 'She knew only that I was going to this festival of modern music.'
'Which you enjoyed, I hope?'
'Oh enormously. It is a fine Festival Opera Hall, is it not?'
'One of the finest. Pah! It makes the old Bayreuth Festival Hall look like a comprehensive school! Do you know what it cost to build, that Opera House?'
She mentioned a sum in millions of marks. It quite took Stafford Nye's breath away, but he was under no necessity to conceal that. She was pleased with the effect it made upon him.
'With money,' she said, 'if one knows, if one has the ability, if one has the discrimination, what is there that money cannot do? It can give one the best.'
She said the last two words with a rich enjoyment, a kind of smacking of the lips which he found both unpleasant and at the same time slightly sinister.
'I see that here,' he said, as he looked round the walls.
'You are fond of art? Yes, I see you are. There, on the east wall is the finest Cezanne in the world today. Some say that the - ah, I forget the name of it at the moment, the one in the Metropolitan in New York - is finer. That is not true. The best Matisse, the best Cezanne, the best of all that great school of art are here. Here in my mountain eyrie.'
'It is wonderful,' said Sir Stafford. 'Quite wonderful.'
Drinks were being handed round. The Old Woman of the Mountain, Sir Stafford Nye noticed, did not drink anything. It was possible, he thought, that she feared to take any risks over her blood pressure with that vast weight.
'And where did you meet this child?' asked the mountainous Dragon.
Was it a trap? He did not know, but he made his decision.
'At the American Embassy, in London.'
'Ah yes, so I heard. And how is - ah, I forget her name now - ah yes, Milly Jean, our southern heiress? Attractive, did you think?'
'Most charming. She has a great success in London.'
'And poor dull Sam Cortman, the United States Ambassador?'
'A very sound man, I'm sure,' said Stafford Nye politely.
She chuckled.
'Aha, you're tactful, are you not? Ah well, he does well and he does what he is told as a good politician should. It is enjoyable to be Ambassador in London. She could do that for him, Milly Jean. Ah, she could get him an Embassy anywhere in the world, with that well-stuffed purse of hers. Her father owns half the oil in Texas, he owns land goldfields, everything. A coarse, singularly ugly man. But what does she look like? A gentle little aristocrat. Not blatant, not rich. That is very clever of her, is it not?'
'Sometimes it presents no difficulties,' said Sir Stafford Nye.
'And you? You are not rich?' 'I wish I was.'
'The Foreign Office nowadays, it is not, shall we say, very rewarding?'
'Oh well, I would not put it like that... After all, one goes places, one meets amusing people, one sees the world, one sees something of what goes on.'
'Something, yes. But not everything.'
'That would be very difficult.'
'Have you ever wished to see what - how shall I put it - what goes on behind the scenes in life?'
'One has an idea sometimes.' He made his voice noncommittal.
'I have heard it said that that is true of you, that you have sometimes ideas about things. Not perhaps the conventional ideas?'
There have been times when I've been made to feel the bad boy of the family,' said Stafford Nye and laughed.
Old Charlotte chuckled.
'You don't mind admitting things now and again, do you?'
'Why pretend? People always know what you're concealing.'
She looked at him.
'What do you want out of life, young man?'
He shrugged his shoulders. Here again, he had to play things by ear.
'Nothing,' he said.
'Come now, come now, am I to believe that?'
'Yes, you can believe it. I am not ambitious. Do I look ambitious?'
'No, I will admit that.'
'I ask only to be amused, to live comfortably, to eat, to drink in moderation, to have friends who amuse me.'
The old woman leant forward. Her eyes snapped open and shut three or four times. Then she spoke in a rather different voice. It was like a whistling note.
'Can you hate? Are you capable of hating?'
'To hate is a waste of time.'
'I see. I see. There are no lines of discontent in your face. That is true enough. All the same, I think you are ready to take a certain path which will lead you to a certain place, and you will go along it smiling, as though you did not care, but all the same, in the end, if you find the right advisers, the right helpers, you might attain what you want, if you are capable of wanting.'
'As to that,' said Stafford Nye, 'who isn't?' He shook his head at her very gently. 'You see too much,' he said. 'Much too much.'
Footmen threw open a door.
'Dinner is served.'
The proceedings were properly formal. They had indeed almost a royal tinge about them. The big doors at the far end of the room were flung open, showing through to a brightly lighted ceremonial dining-room, with a painted ceiling and three enormous chandeliers. Two middle-aged women approached the Gr?fin, one on either side. They wore evening dress, their grey hair was carefully piled on their heads, each wore a diamond brooch. To Sir Stafford Nye, all the same, they brought a faint flavour of wardresses. They were, he thought, not so much security guards as perhaps high-class nursing attendants in charge of the health, the toilet and other intimate details of the Gr?fin Charlotte's existence. After respectful bows, each one of them slipped an arm below each shoulder and elbow of the sitting woman. With the ease of long practice aided by the effort which was obviously as much as she could make, they raised her to her feet in a dignified fashion.
'We will go in to dinner now,' said Charlotte.
With her two female attendants, she led the way. On her feet she looked even more a mass of wobbling jelly, yet she was still formidable. You could not dispose of her in your mind as just a fat old woman. She was somebody, knew she was somebody, intended to be somebody. Behind the three of them he and Renata followed.
As they entered through the portals of the dining-room, he felt it was almost more a banquet hall than a dining-room. There was a bodyguard here. Tall, fair-haired, handsome young men. They wore some kind of uniform. As Charlotte entered there was a clash as one and all drew their swords. They crossed them overhead to make a passageway and Charlotte, steadying herself, passed along that passageway, released by her attendants and making her progress toward a vast carved chair with gold fittings and upholstered in golden brocade at the head of the long table. It was like a wedding procession, Stafford Nye thought. A naval or military one. In this case surely, military, strictly military but lacking a bridegroom.
They were all young men of super physique, none of them, he thought, was older than thirty. They had good looks, their health was evident. They did not smile, they were entirely serious, they were - he thought of a word for it - yes, dedicated. Perhaps not so much a military procession as a religious one. The servitors appeared, old-fashioned servitors belonging, he thought, to the Schloss's past, to a time before the 1939 war. It was like a super production of a period historic play. And queening over it, sitting in the chair or the throne or whatever you liked to call it, at the head of the table, was not a queen or an empress but an old woman noticeable mainly for her avoirdupois weight and her extraordinary and intense ugliness. Who was she? What was she doing here? Why?
Why all this masquerade, why this bodyguard, a security bodyguard perhaps? Other diners came to the table. They bowed to the monstrosity on the presiding throne and took their places. They wore ordinary evening dress. No introductions were made.
Stafford Nye, after long years of sizing up people, assessed them. Different types. A great many different types. Lawyers, he was certain. Several lawyers. Possibly accountants or financiers; one or two army officers in plain clothes. They were of the Household, he thought, but they were also in the old-fashioned feudal sense of the term those who 'sat below the salt'.
Food came. A vast boar's head pickled in aspic, venison, a cool refreshing lemon sorbet, a magnificent edifice pastry - a super millefeuille that seemed of unbelievable confectionary richness.
The vast woman ate, ate greedily, hungrily, enjoying her food. From outside came a new sound. The sound r of a powerful engine of a super sports car. It passed the hall in a white flash. There came a cry inside the room from the bodyguard. A great cry of 'Heil! Heil! Heil Franz!' The bodyguard of young men moved with the ease of military manoeuvre known by heart. Everyone had risen to their feet. Only the old woman sat without moving, her head lifted high, on her dais. And, so Stafford Nye thought, a new excitement now permeated the room.
The other guests, or the other members of the horseshoe, whatever they were, disappeared in a way that somehow reminded Stafford of lizards disappearing into the cracks of the wall. The golden-haired boys formed a new figure, their swords flew out, they saluted their patroness, she bowed her head in acknowledgment, their swords were sheathed and they turned, permission given, to march out through the door of the room. Her eyes followed them, then went first to Renata, and then to Stafford Nye.
'What do you think of them?' she said. 'My boys, my youth corps, my children. Yes, my children. Have you a word that can describe them?'
'I think so,' said Stafford Nye. 'Magnificent.' He spoke to her as to Royalty. 'Magnificent, ma'am.'
'Ah!' She bowed her head. She smiled, the wrinkles multiplying all over her face. It made her look exactly like a crocodile.
A terrible woman, he thought, a terrible woman, impossible, dramatic. Was any of this happening? He couldn't believe it was. What could this be but yet another festival in which a production was being given.
The doors clashed open again. The yellow-haired band of the young supermen marched as before through it. This time they did not wield swords, instead they sang. Sang with unusual beauty of tone and voice.
After a good many years of pop music Stafford Nye felt incredulous pleasure. Trained voices, these. Not raucous shouting. Trained by masters of the singing art. Not allowed to strain their vocal cords, to be off key. They might be the new Heroes of a New World, but what they sang was not new music. It was music he had heard before. An arrangement of the Preislied, there must be a concealed orchestra somewhere, he thought, in a gallery round the top of the room. It was an arrangement or adaptation of various Wagnerian themes. It passed from the Preislied to the distant echoes of the Rhine music.
The Elite Corps made once more a double lane where everybody was expected to make an entrance. It was not the old Empress this time. She sat on her dais awaiting whoever was coming.
And at last he came. The music changed as he came. It was a motif which by now Stafford Nye had got by heart. The melody of the Young Siegfried. Siegfried's horn in all its glory and its triumph, its mastery of a world in which the young Siegfried came through the doorway, marching up between the lines to conquer.
Out of what were clearly his followers, came one of the handsomest young men Stafford Nye had ever seen. Golden-haired, blue-eyed, perfectly proportioned, conjured up as it were by the wave of a magician's wand, he came forth out of the world of myth. Myth, heroes, resurrection, rebirth, it was all there. His beauty, his strength, his incredible assurance and arrogance.
He strode through the double lines of his bodyguard until he stood before the hideous mountain of womanhood that sat there on her throne; he knelt on one knee, pressed her hand to his lips, and then rising to his feet, he threw up one arm in salutation and uttered the cry that Stafford Nye had heard from the others. 'Heil!' His German was not very clear, but Stafford Nye thought he distinguished the syllables 'Heil to the great mother!'
Then the handsome young hero looked from one side to the other. There was some faint recognition, though an uninterested one, of Renata, but when his gaze turned to Stafford Nye, there was definite interest and appraisal. Caution, thought Stafford Nye. Caution! He must play his part right now. Play the part that was expected of him. Only - what the hell was that part? What was he doing here? What were he or the girl supposed to be doing here? Why had they come? The hero spoke.
