Theirs Was The Kingdom (55 page)
3
The firm of Hoffman and Sina, renowned for the quality of their heavy-goods waggons and excellence of the riverboats they built in a recent extension to their premises opposite the wooded island of Lobau, was a much larger concern than he had anticipated.
All told it covered about twenty acres, stretching eastward from the left bank of the river and the setting, like so many semi-industrial patches on the outskirts of Vienna, had remained rural, so that it could have been mistaken at a distance for a huge farm composed of innumerable barns, sheds, and outbuildings. The clamour that prevailed there, however, reminded George of a factory.
His letter of introduction seemed to carry more weight here than in any of the industrial centres he had visited so far, perhaps because it had been underwritten by Blunderstone, the famous London coachbuilder, from whom his father bought all his vehicles. Blunderstone was apparently well-known here as a craftsman who employed coachbuilders able to hold their own with the best engaged by Hoffman, the founder, or Sina, his son-in-law and successor, names synonymous with high quality products throughout the empire.
At his previous ports of call he had presented himself as a courtesy student, content to hang around watching and occasionally contributing to the output, but without a salary. Here he soon found himself on a very different footing and regarded as the emissary of a well-known British haulier travelling under the patronage of an internationally respected coachbuilder, so that he was accorded, from the very first day, a status he had not enjoyed in Paris and Munich.
After the inevitable tour, accompanied by an English-speaking director, he was placed in the charge of one Maximilien Körner, a tall, spare, rather forthright man in his late sixties, who was not only his guide but also his landlord. George took an instant liking to Max, whom he thought of as the equivalent of a senior foreman in an English waggon yard, and as a craftsman of great repute, who had worked for a number of important German coachbuilders before returning to Vienna on the death of his son and accepting responsibility for his widow and children.
Max was a man of moderate means. The house he and his family occupied, in the neighbouring village of Essling, had once been a granary, a large stone building that had been used, so Körner said, as a strongpoint by Napoleon’s troops during the Danubian campaign of 1809. It was commodious and well-appointed, and besides Frau Körner, sheltered seven children, whose ages ranged from the fifteen-year-old apprentice Rudi, born after his father’s death at the battle of Sadowa against the Prussians, to twenty-three-year-old Gisela, eldest of four pretty daughters of Körner Junior.
There was something inevitable, George told himself, about his gravitation to lodgings spilling over with women. There had been the Broadbent family in the Polygon. There had been the household of Madame Drouet and her daughters in Paris. And more recently, the delectable Rosa Ledermann, who had headed him this way, to be lodged alongside four granddaughters of the patriarchal Maximilien Körner, who lost no time in instructing the family to accord him the honours due to a distinguished stranger.
Perhaps George was still excessively naïve in at least one respect. It never occured to him that, on the strength of his spending habits alone, he would be likely to be regarded a good catch by any observant mamma. He had been taken unawares by Broadbent’s efforts to embroil him with Lizzie, and slow to awaken to Madame Drouet’s efforts to secure him as a son-in-law in Paris, but he could be forgiven for taking the welcome given him by the Körners at face value, for the Viennese seemed to him exceptionally happy-go-lucky people disinclined to take anything seriously, unless it was their cuisine and the beauty of the lovely Wienerwald, a sacrosanct girdle of woodland and meadow where they spent their Sundays and holidays.
The area, George thought, remembering the urban sprawl of Lancashire and London, was like a garland, reaching from the river and the Nussdorf vineyards to the forested slopes of the Kahlenberg. On one of the first of the Körner picnics he was taken here and on to the adjacent Leopoldsberg, where there were any number of enchanting little taverns selling the local wine and he could look down, from flower-decked gardens, on a magnificent view of the Danube, with smoke-plumed steamers chugging upstream and down and spring sunshine flooding the baroque splendours of the old city. The tempo of life here was very different from that of Britain, France, or even Bavaria, inasmuch as the Viennese were the first people he had ever lived among who could laugh at themselves as well as their social betters, represented by the fusty aristocracy of the top-heavy empire, already, so Körner told him, well-advanced on the road to dissolution and decay. Everyone seemed to live for the moment and the Körner household was fully representative of the prevailing Viennese mood. To George it seemed to sparkle and crackle in a way that was unique in his experience, although Tryst had been a lively, outward-looking home in his childhood and boyhood. Even at Tryst, however, an awareness of belonging to a master race, dedicated to commerce and high moral values, was inescapable, and George never recalled his brothers, sisters, or associates making light of their tribal destiny in a way that happened here whenever the conversation broke from the magic circle of food, wine, music, dancing, family outings, and dressmaking—the one art, perhaps, that the Körner girls pursued with any degree of diligence.
From the moment he was introduced to them by the ageing Max (the one serious-minded member of the family) he told himself he had never met so many handsome, congenial people under a single roof, and his arrival seemed to begin a nonstop firework display of teasing mischief on the part of the girls, who were given free rein by the placid, ever-smiling Frau Körner. Once home, George noticed, Maximilien the dedicated craftsman tended to efface himself completely, generally disappearing into one of the old granary buildings where, so the girls told him, he had a private workshop dedicated to a mysterious “engine” he was inventing. The one prohibition existing in the Körner household concerned this patch of privacy. Everyone was enjoined not to enter, not because Grandfather Max would resent intrusion but because what he had there was said to be dangerous to anyone but an expert.
George’s extreme curiosity concerning the nature of Max’s invention remained unsatisfied for several months, the old man ignoring his veiled questions regarding what he was inventing. He was free with other information, however, notably the history of the locality and the various projects in train at the yard of Hoffman and Sina.
George had always been interested in the mechanics of the haulier’s trade and spent long periods in the coachbuilders’ yard, the boatshed, and wheelwrights’ sheds, where it seemed to him they used old-fashioned tools and very traditional apparatus, but he had to admit they produced magnificent vehicles, capable of bearing heavy loads over all the unpaved roads of the empire, where gradients, particularly south and west, would have presented insoluble problems to men like Blunderstone.
Everything that emerged from the yards of Hoffman and Sina was built for strength and durability and looked as if it was, and when George commented on this Maximilien told him that the Austrian railways had been slow to adapt to the local terrain, particularly in the dependent states of the Dual Monarchy. Habsburg industrialisation, he said, was decades behind that of Britain, Germany, and even America.
“ We left it too late,” he explained, “and now, with only Russia at our heels, we are last but one in the queue. Our economy is still predominantly agricultural. Sometimes I think we are all waiting for something of great significance that will change the lives of all of us. By that I mean not solely we Austrians, and those arrogant devils over in Hungary, but all our subject races—Czechs, Slovenes, Croats, Ruthenians and other minorities. One day they will all go their own way, and thumb their noses at the Hofburg and that dry old stick of an Emperor, who sits there working his fourteen-hour stint on a diet of cabbage soup so they tell me. He will be the last Emperor. No one expects much of Rudolph, his son, who devotes himself to debauchery, like his cousins. As to the Empress, she is not often here but roving about Europe, trying to stay beautiful and find a horse she cannot master. One day she will, no doubt, and it will break her back. That is where our trouble lies, to my way of thinking. Old Franz should never have married a Wittelsbach. All the Wittelsbachs are mad and since that rascal Bismarck hitched us to the Prussian war-chariot we have given up trying and live, as you see, for the moment only.”
“It seems an extraordinarily jolly way to live,” George commented, remembering the terrible moral earnestness, social posturing, and unabashed greed he had seen in the north of England, and the thirst for revenge that obsessed the French, but the old man shook his head.
“I am nearly seventy. I can remember a time when the Habsburgs amounted to something. But that was before Sadowa, and the humiliations in Italy, and the industrialisation of your country and Prussia. In those days, in my youth that is, it was a fine thing to be an Austrian. Culture and civilisation lived here beside the Danube. We should have moved forward into the century of invention then, as your countrymen did, instead of trying to preserve the past. You will understand I am not typically Austrian. I began as a craftsman but I have allowed my mind to conjure with new ideas, new thoughts, new ways of developing trade. But that is a private dream, of which I prefer not to speak. My son, Albrecht, shared it, but those rascals the Prussians shot off his head, and I was obliged to return to see that his wife and children did not starve.”
George would have liked to have asked him more about his private dream and how it was linked to the technological progress of engineering craftsmen in Britain, France, and Germany, but Maximilien abruptly changed the subject. He conducted George on a tour of the Marchfield, where Napoleon fought the great battle of Wagram, and after that showed him landmarks of the battle of Aspern-Essling, that was fought about here and drove the first nail in the coffin of the Grande Armée.
He was an excellent guide, both here and in Vienna, but he rarely accompanied George and the family on their picnics, preferring to shut himself up in the old granary with his invention and staying out of sight until they returned sun-tired and wine-merry at dusk. Then he would emerge smelling of an engine oil that George could not identify, for it was more pungent than any of the oils they used at the yard.
There was a timelessness about those first sunlit months beside the Danube and sometimes, absorbed in everything he did and saw, and carried along on the current of the younger Körners’ ebullience, George not only ceased to yearn for the charms of Rosa Ledermann but lost his identity to some degree, giving hardly a thought to home and family, and none to his immediate future. The main reason for this, of course, was his preoccupation with the Körner girls, all but the eldest of them, who was more withdrawn than her sisters and was moving towards a maturity that put her on a level with Frau Körner. It was easy to see why this had happened. Although pretty and, if possible, even more amiable than her three sisters, Gisela had begun to share with her mother and grandfather the work of rearing the family when she was scarcely more than a child herself and had since been unable, or possibly unwilling, to match their high spirits. She would smile tolerantly at the endless junketings and mock quarrels of her brothers and sisters but rarely participated, preferring to busy herself preparing the picnic hamper, or set about cutting, stitching, and embroidering one of the traditional blouses the girls wore on holiday occasions.
This blouse was a confection of billowing georgette, muslin, lace, or silk, richly embroidered and much approved of by George, who thought all the Körner girls looked stunning in their frills, Mozart ruffs, jabots, plastron-fronted bodices, hip-bags, and intricately pleated skirts. They were not given, he noticed, to wasting materials on garments not for public display. Indeed, judged on standards of modesty, they were a great contrast to the girls at home and the bourgeois Drouet girls in Paris. Once, when two of them tumbled upside down on a punt after a head-on collision in the shallows, they displayed a glorious profusion of white thighs and pink buttocks without the least loss of composure, either on their part or that of other male witnesses save George. Notwithstanding his six-months’ apprenticeship under Frau Ledermann, he found it difficult to equate horseplay of this kind with the ladylike qualities Phoebe Fraser had been at pains to instil into his sisters at home.
He got used to it, however, and was soon on kissing terms with all three, although he could never decide which of them exerted the greatest fascination over his senses.
There was Sophie, who followed the more restrained Gisela; Valerie, a year younger; and Gilda, the seventeen-year-old, so that like Butes, fairest of all mortal men, he was always poised to dive overboard and swim towards the Sirens, careless of any risk he ran of being gobbled up by one or all of them. For that, he thought cheerfully, was a fate some of the high-collared young men at home might envy.
Sophie was tall and slender and wore her light chestnut hair in finely plaited coils over her small, pink ears. She had a spellbinding, swaying walk, as though, wherever she went, she carried a saucer of cream on her head, and her soft, tinkling laugh was the most musical sound George had ever heard. Valerie, nearly nineteen, wore her corn-coloured hair in a bang, with a bewitching fringe low on her broad forehead, and her eyes were as blue as iris petals. She was an inch shorter than Sophie but charmingly proportioned, her waist taking precedence over the daily measurements of her sisters, hovering around the seventeen-inch ideal. How she achieved this in view of her lust for confections of every kind, George never discovered. Gilda, the seventeen-year-old, was the most forward of the trio, and reckoned a prodigious flirt by all the young men in the village. It was perhaps George’s gentlemanly inclination to give the local boys a clear field that caused Gilda to take the lead in a spirited but amiable contest for his favours.