The Exiles Return (19 page)

Two or three days went by, two or three of the other students tried to speak to her, but she looked so aloof, in fact some thought she looked haughty, that they felt rebuffed and left her alone. And then on the third day of what she felt to be her ordeal, as she was coming out of the lecture room with her books under her arm, who should be coming along the corridor towards her but Lucas Anreither! He held out both his hands towards her, one to grasp hers, the other to relieve her of her books.

‘Resi, what a surprise to find
you
here! Fancy you being in the University. I should never have imagined it. Come along, where shall we go?’ In fact Lucas’s surprise was disingenuous. He had found out that Resi was in Vienna and what she was doing and he had come to find her, cunningly waiting a couple of days for her to feel bewildered and out of her depth, as indeed she did. A smile and a warm greeting were his reward.

‘Oh, Lucas, how nice to see you!’ Here was a familiar face, an anchor in an unknown sea. He drew her arm through his.

‘It’s a lovely day, let’s go and walk in the gardens.’

Some of the other young people who had made unsuccessful attempts to strike up an acquaintance watched them go. ‘So that was who she was waiting for – that young man was Austrian.’

The two of them sat on a bench in the gardens next to the University and chatted as old friends. Resi was happy. She knew Lucas, he was someone from Wald, someone with whom she felt at home. Then he took her into the Inner City and showed her quaint little streets and street corners, the ‘real Vienna’, he called it, ‘I’ll leave the monuments and show-places to your sightseeing guides,’ he said. Lastly, he took her to a coffee house and they sat in the window drinking coffee out of small cups which was served with accompanying glasses of water. It was real coffee which Lucas had ordered at an exorbitant price, but it was worth it to him just to be with her.

From now on they would walk about the town every afternoon and almost always end their strolls in a coffee house. Without Lucas, Marie-Theres would probably never have had any experience of Vienna, never overcome her bewilderment, she would have rejected her surroundings almost without taking them in. For in those early post-war years, and in the autumn, the city was grey, in the public gardens the trees were shedding their leaves. But with Lucas at her side Resi felt safe. Her anxiety at being alone was allayed, her fear subsided and made way for curiosity, even for the willingness to take in what she saw. She began to understand what her mother had told her and to search within herself for the affinities she had inherited. ‘This is the Palais Altmannsdorf,’ Lucas had said on one of the first days of these wanderings, and she had stood looking up at the wide grey facade, with its high shuttered windows and the crumbling corner of its damaged roof, fearfully as if she was seeing a ghost. After that she had insisted on walking past there again and again. Fear and attraction, some obscure stirring of the blood, arose within her when they turned into that narrow street, and she would press Lucas’s arm, as if to steady herself until they were out again on the broader thoroughfare where there were shops and people on the pavement.

Lucas was delighted to feel this token of her dependence on him. Ever since that day on the Bichl Alm, his love for her had deepened from a mere summer flirtation to an intense, incandescent passion, and he was determined to woo her. He was elated not only by being ‘in love’, but by a sense of mission and historical fulfilment. He saw Resi in the context of her background and himself in the context of his own. He, too, looked up at the imposing façade of the Palais Altmannsdorf. Resi was a daughter of this house, only two generations removed from the grand old man, her grandfather, who had been the master of his own grandfather. Yes, they had been master and servant, that was the stark truth, however much the relationship had been mellowed by benevolence into the semblance of ‘almost’ friendship. ‘Almost’, that was the poisonous word in which his parents still revelled and which he so bitterly hated. ‘Almost’, that was why he himself was treated by the princesses, the daughters, almost as an equal, almost as one of the family. ‘Almost’, what a hidden sting there was in that word. It had been newly envenomed only a few days ago when he had asked Resi: ‘Have you told your aunt that you are seeing so much of me, that you go out with me almost every day? Doesn’t she object?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Resi replied, ‘I have told her, why not? She doesn’t object at all, she’s pleased. You see she knows who you are. She’s far more suspicious of the people I meet at my lectures, she’s always asking Georg Corvinus, Hanni’s fiancé, to find out who their families are, in case I get involved with one of them. She says that’s because she is “responsible” for me. She keeps on saying that. But she knows who
you
are, Lucas.’

Indeed she does, thought Lucas, I’m old Anreither’s grandson and as safe to be her niece’s escort as a footman would be. An Altmannsdorf couldn’t get ‘involved’, as you call it, with
me.
But you are mistaken, my lady, I, the grandson of Prince Altmannsdorf’s forester, am going to
marry
the Prince’s granddaughter and become one of the family as of right and as an equal, not
almost.

There was a slight tinge of disappointment for him in the fact that the road had been smoothed for him by Resi’s father, who himself was not a nobleman, but, as he heard, a farmer’s son. It would not give him quite the same satisfaction to say to Mr Larsen, ‘I want to marry your daughter’, as if the father had been a Prince Altmannsdorf or a Count Lensveldt, as Hanni’s father was. It was actually Count Lensveldt whom Lucas had in his mind’s eye when he pictured the scene in which he would be demanding Resi’s hand in marriage, not a nebulous American scientist who would probably not realise the boldness and the implications of the request. If he ever did stop to think that Peter Larsen, as a young man, had taken this same bold step in marrying an Altmannsdorf daughter, he explained it away by telling himself that Larsen had been a foreigner and that the circumstances leading to that match had been exceptional and peculiar, due to the upheavals of the First World War. And he also knew, through his close association with the Lensveldts, that for many years Resi’s mother had been an outcast, that reconciliation had only come about when she and her husband emigrated to America. Also, that they had married abroad.

That was not going to happen to Lucas. He would not go to America to marry Resi, he would marry her here in Vienna, or better still in the village church at Wald. A charming little church, whitewashed inside and out, with as much paint and gilt on its saints and around the altar as the village could afford, and in which, from his early childhood, he knew every carved pew-end, every crack in the flagstone floor, and how the light fell on the Sunday mornings on the brass of the altar rail. Now, of course, he was a socialist, an agnostic, a ‘Red’ as Count Lensveldt called him, but his parents were ‘Black’ church-going people. How delighted they would be about the marriage, how they would enjoy the wedding, and how he himself would chuckle inwardly at this little footnote to the dialectic of history.

Meanwhile, with such thoughts at the back of his mind, Lucas looked lovingly at Resi, who looked back at him with her candid blue eyes and not many thoughts behind them except that he was as nice to be with as Budd had been. In fact, while she was with Lucas her thoughts often strayed to Budd, and she promised herself to make an effort to write to him in answer to some of those unopened letters which she really must –
must
– open one of these days.

*   *   *

They were again sitting by the window in Lucas’s favourite coffee house, looking out on the broad avenue of the Ring where the trees had now all shed their leaves and the light was failing earlier every day. ‘I shall have to go home,’ Resi said, ‘my aunt does not like me to be out alone in the dark and I am frightened. The Parkgasse is so badly lit.’

‘You will not be alone, I’ll take you right up to your front door, so we still have plenty of time.’

‘Then if you have plenty of time, Lucas, why don’t you come up to my aunt’s apartment? I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you came – she knows who you are.’

‘She does, but I don’t want her to know me on those terms. And I don’t want you to think of me as your aunt does. I want to be my own real self and I want you to understand me as I really am. We never talk about serious things, and I couldn’t talk about them in your aunt’s room, even if she invited me in. So let me try to tell you about them now, and I’ll try to explain in the simplest words I can, and if you’ll have patience and listen to me, you will begin to see the world as I do and that will mean so much to me. So very, very much, Resi.’

Thus, on that afternoon and on many following ones, Lucas attempted to woo Resi by teaching her the philosophy of historical materialism. ‘You are being taught history, Austrian history, I suppose, in that lecture room of yours, all about the dukes and counts and archdukes, their wars and marriages amongst themselves and with foreign princes and princesses; but all these things are not important, they are but the ripples on the surface of history. It is the social conditions and the economic forces which shape the world. Power lies in the hands of those who own the means of production. And in the old days, when the nobility seemed so important, it was land, land that brought forth the crops and it was the nobility who owned the land.’

These were the words and other dry ones like them that he spoke with his lips, but his eyes burned with passion as he discoursed on the feudal system long since superseded and of which only empty symbols remained. All that, he said, was done away with in the French Revolution and was never transplanted into America where, as your glorious constitution declares, all men are born equal. But alas, the economic forces had their way and the power that was wrested from the nobility fell into the hands of those who owned money, the capitalists.

‘Yes,’ said Resi dreamily, getting a little bit bored with this kind of talk, but trying her best to make some response to the efforts she felt Lucas was making on her behalf, ‘yes, I suppose it’s not quite true that all men are born equal, because some have rich parents and some have poor. But then everyone can get rich, even if they are born poor, but not everyone can be a prince if he is born that way.’

‘What do you know about princes, Resi? Aren’t they just ordinary people, like you and me? I know your grandfather was a prince, and your aunts are princesses, and your mother too, but isn’t she proud of being just an ordinary American citizen? Mrs Larsen? And your uncle and aunt at Wald who are just nice people, do you think they are so very special because they are a Count and Countess? They have no
power.
They are just ordinary people. A prince doesn’t mean anything, nowadays.’

‘I do know a prince, and he is not at all ordinary,’ said Resi.

‘And who is he?’

‘Nina’s brother, Bimbo Grein.’

‘Oh, so you have met Lori Grein, have you? That degenerate playboy.’

‘What does “degenerate” mean? It’s something unpleasant, by the way you say it. And you don’t know him, because you call him Lori. None of his friends do.’

‘No, I don’t know him, and I don’t want to. It’s a good thing he and his like are no longer of any account in the world. It’s the money-men who have their power now, the capitalists. It needs another revolution to get rid of them, like the Russian Revolution.’

Oh, Resi, adorable Resi, Lucas said in his heart, I wish I could just say how much I loved you instead of trying to make you understand. It is only when you understand my view of the world and are able to share my thoughts that there will be no barrier between us and you will be able to love me as I love you.

It was his way of wooing her, this teaching of economic history, for he believed that only when he had made her think as he did would she accept love from him. ‘No, my dear,’ he said, ‘it’s a question of power. Those who have money, the capitalists, own the means of production, and they exploit the poor who have nothing but the work of their hands to live on. It needed a revolution to get rid of the feudal system; it needed another revolution to get rid of capitalism: the Russian Revolution. They have abolished the money-power, the capitalists in their country. That is what we must strive for now in the world, that is how history moves on.’

But here Lucas had done his cause a signal disservice. For at the mere mention of the Russians, Resi was roused from the dreamy acquiescence with which she had been half-listening to Lucas’s dissertation and looked up at him with dismay.

‘Oh no Lucas, not the Russians, not what they have done, not what they want to do. If you believe that, then you really are a Red as Uncle Poldo said. Then you are – dangerous.’ And she looked around the peaceful coffee house where only two elderly gentlemen and a harmless-looking couple were sitting with their coffee cups, reading the newspapers on bamboo frames. Did Lucas carry a bomb in his brief case? Lucas bit his lip. He had allowed himself to be carried away by his own logic, or rather by the logic of his theory, and by the simplifications forced on him by the use of such elementary language as he felt Resi could understand. He put out his hand to touch her arm and gave an awkward little laugh.

‘Of course I’m not dangerous. I’m not a revolutionary myself, I was speaking in general terms, to explain to you what history is about, that’s all. All I want to do is to vote at elections to abolish the iniquitous money-power, the capitalist system, and if that is what Count Lensveldt calls being a Red, well, so be it. In time you will come to understand.’

But Resi, though she did not understand, thought that it might be better if she saw a little less of Lucas, however nice he was, and she began to make excuses to avoid meeting him quite so often, with the result that his love for her grew even more passionate. He had not known how much he loved her. What at Wald had seemed a delightful, affectionate, slightly amusing attachment to this beautiful girl, amusing because of her naivety and ignorance of the most elementary facts of the modern world, was developing into a burning, soul-searching love, a desire to possess her body and soul, but soul even more than body, to make her his own by impregnating her with his own mind and ideas and views of life. She was malleable, she could be formed, indeed she
would
be formed by any man who could capture her imagination and win her love. And he was determined he would be that man.