Theirs Was The Kingdom (56 page)

He remained uncommitted, however, flattering himself that he had learned something useful during his sojourn in Munich, but to some extent his attitude was governed by his deep respect for Maximilien and Frau Körner, who had used him so kindly from the moment of his arrival on their doorstep. Nevertheless, he was able to indulge himself in a galaxy of perfectly splendid fantasies involving all three girls, individually and even collectively, for he had a conviction that, had he presented himself in their communal bedroom when the coast was clear (as it almost invariably was in the Körner household) they would either draw lots for him or agree to share and share alike.

As time went on, and he became familiar with the local dialect, the strain of living up to his obligations as a trusted guest in the house became the one arduous aspect of life spent in such enchanting company. Charming little idiosyncrasies of one or other of the girls tormented him and sometimes filled his mind, to the exclusion of all the technical information he was daily imbibing down at the yard. For who the devil could concentrate on subjects like axle stress and cubic capacity in the presence of Valerie’s tantalising wiggle retreating in the near distance, or Sophie’s pretended pout at some fancied frustration, or Gilda’s taut blouse outlining her firm young breasts when she was working the pump handle in the yard? His profound restlessness could be traced, or so he assured himself, to his recent experiences in Munich, for he reasoned that he had never been bothered in this way before Rosa Ledermann’s brawny arms had enclosed him. It would have been wiser, no doubt, to have sought lodgings with a couple of spinsters or pensioners rather than settle here where, sooner or later, he would surely be tempted to commit an indiscretion that would leave him no option but to plump for one or other of the girls as a wife.

The prospect of marriage, certainly marriage to a foreigner, would have been unthinkable a few months ago. Until then George had seen no reason why, with shrewd planning on his part, this richly rewarding travelling scholarship could not be prolonged for years. But the regular embraces of Rosa Ledermann, and the possibility that he had fathered a child on her, had wrought subtle changes in George Swann. Women were becoming absolutely necessary, he discovered, to his peace of mind, and wherever he was, and whatever he was doing, he was sharply aware of all women had to offer, not merely physically, but as dispensers of comfort, gaiety, and solace in a world organised and dominated by men dedicated to the pursuit of wealth and ambition.

His abrupt removal from young people of his own generation when he left school and plunged into the network may have helped to promote this state of mind. In England and, to a degree, over here, he moved for the most part among the staid and the middle-aged, where his natural high spirits found no sounding board and were necessarily bottled up during working hours, but there was more to it than that. George had discovered that he possessed great reserves of natural affection that needed some kind of regular outlet; over and above all this, there was a vague and largely undefined yearning to be petted, cossetted, and fussed over, perhaps to compensate him for growing up in a large family where the attentions of mother and governess had to be shared among so many. Further than that he had always sensed that Henrietta’s affections had been centred on his father, whereas Phoebe Fraser had invariably put duty before sentiment and had, moreover, a strict North Country upbringing that made a display of affection a sure indication of Sassenach sentimentality. Between the ages of twelve and seventeen he had lived in an exclusively male community, so that he had a compulsion to catch up on lost time, and where better than here, cheek by jowl with three pretty and vivacious girls?

All the same, it wasn’t as easy as all that, or not if one did not wish to act like a cad. He wished, sometimes, that someone had taught the Körner girls (and Rosa Ledermann, for that matter) the trick of restraining natural impulses, in the way that was obligatory among the English. They were all good Catholics, of course, but religion seemed to sit so much more lightly upon them than upon the Protestant girls at home or, for that matter, the Drouet girls in Paris, and the daughters of a number of Lutherans he had met in his travels about Germany. Instead they had a propensity to display their charms, and Frau Körner seemed almost to encourage them with warm, placid smiles and fond maternal gestures, as though she took it for granted that one or other of them would be certain, given time, to capture the gentlemanly English boy, who had appeared out of the west with a pocket full of crowns and the signal advantage of a father who was a famous English merchant.

In the circumstances it was as well, perhaps, that charm, pertness, red lips, nubility, gently undulating bottoms, and tautly stretched blouses were shared so equitably among the sisters, for the gentlemanly English boy was permanently occupied in the delightful business of making up his mind which of the three exerted the stronger claim on his susceptibilities. It was a decision that would have taxed the wits of a more experienced man than George, whose yardstick in these matters was limited to his brief encounter with Laura Broadbent and a thirty-six-year-old widow who had taken pity on his innocence.

George, however, was by nature an experimenter, and made the most of his numerous opportunities during that gay if slightly troubled spring and summer in this enchanting land. At a picnic on Lobau one sultry afternoon, he isolated Sophie for a rewarding half-hour and later, during an expedition to the pinewoods on the Kahlenberg slopes, he ensured that he and Valerie took a wrong turn at a junction of forest rides. A week or so later, in the course of an evening punt ride down the river, he arranged it so that he was left ashore two miles downstream and obliged to walk home in the company of Gilda. Sophie’s lips, he discovered in the course of these tentative experiments, were every bit as warm and inviting as they looked when they parted to emit one of her low-pitched musical laughs. Valerie, on the other hand, was even more forthcoming and engaged him in a prolonged wrestling match among the ferns that might have resolved matters there and then had the ferns grown under the pines instead of in a clearing where they were soon located by fellow picnickers. But it was the more enterprising Gilda who might well have captured him on the moonlight walk home across the water-meadows, if he had been better acquainted with the local dialect, enabling him to follow more than the drift of her conversation between sighs as they stood together under a chestnut tree within sight of the lights of the village. As it was, he could not be absolutely sure he understood what she was proposing, but close and sustained contact with her deprived him of at least two hours’ sleep and it was probably on her account that he paid a visit to a high-class brothel off the Ringstrasse, recommended by one of the directors of Hoffman and Sina on his arrival, rather in the way a thoughtful host might give a guest directions to the water closet.

It was a chastening experience. Regretfully George decided that this was not what he sought and that the impersonality of these establishments, together with the mechanical performance of a thorough but unsmiling partner, was disappointing and depressing.

It was borne upon him then, regretfully but with a degree of certainty, that he was ripe for marriage, notwithstanding his footloose status and lack of independent means. The act of pulling up stakes and going home, far from solving his personal dilemma, would gain him nothing, for he did not see his father or his mother taking kindly to such a step until he was absorbed into the business. He could, of course, look around more cynically in search of a wife, perhaps someone who could bring him a dowry, but girls with sizeable
dots
, he reasoned, would be unlikely to possess the charms of the Körner sisters.

He wondered, forlornly, if most young men were as subject to these distractions as he was. All the same, there was some consolation in finally coming to terms with himself. With marriage half in mind, he could afford to be bolder in his experiments and this, in turn, communicated itself to all three girls, although it did nothing, at that stage, to advance the claims of one over the other.

What might have happened had not his attention been sharply diverted is difficult to say. He might have committed himself on impulse. Or he might have established a kind of menage à quatre, in the heart of the Körner household, had not Herr Körner, at this juncture, introduced a fourth mistress; no other in fact than his mysterious invention, housed in the former grain store across the yard, where no female was permitted to penetrate on pain of the patriarch’s displeasure.

4

It happened one wet Sunday when an outing of any kind was out of the question. Maximilien, who had been looking very thoughtful of late, suddenly issued an invitation amounting to an order that George should accompany him to the grain store and here, as the barn doors swung open, he had one of the most salutary surprises of his life.

He had made many guesses concerning the nature of Maximilien’s invention, but his wildest surmises did not prepare him for what he saw when the old man stripped away capacious canvas wrappings to reveal what George could only think of in terms of Wellington’s funeral carriage, seen in the crypt of St. Paul’s.

There it stood, a huge, unwieldy juggernaut built of iron, tin, brass, copper, and baulks of timber, looking so powerful, so vastly complicated, that the imagination boggled at its purpose, providing of course that it had a purpose and was not some kind of god assembled by a tribe of Baal-worshipping heathens.

It was as large or larger than a hay-wain, and looked second-cousin to one as far as its basic structure was concerned. It had four immense wheels, rimmed with iron like cart wheels, but padded with what looked like endless strings of sausages, each string having a diameter of about eight inches. The upper rear half, a sort of overall casing, was a container of some sort, with a hinged backboard of the kind seen on a brewer’s dray, but what he at once thought of as the brain of the machine, housed in the lower forepart of the works, defied description. It seemed to consist of an intricate network of brass rods and steel couplings, interspersed, here and there, with any number of ponderous levers and belts of cross-stitched canvas. Towards the front, where there was a sort of brass honeycomb, was a much broader, stronger belt, linking two cogs of different sizes, one being about twice the diameter of the other. It was clearly a vehicle of some kind, for it had steering apparatus consisting of rigid rods branching from a central rod and meeting in another pair of interlocking cogs below the front axle.

George gaped at it for a full minute whilst Max dragged the coverings into a corner. Then, without taking his eyes from the monster, he said, “What… what
is
it?

What does it
do
?” Max replied, gravely, “It has no name but you can think of it as a mechanical waggon. You will have heard, no doubt, of your countryman Trevithick’s horseless carriage, the one that was warned off the roads a century ago?”

George said that he had, adding that he had seen an illustration of Trevithick’s invention, but it had not resembled this in the least, save for the fact that it had wheels.

“Does it… is it meant to… to
go?”
he asked, and Max said that it was not only meant to but almost certainly would. That, indeed, was why he had invited George to inspect it, for he had reached the stage where it needed a road trial but he hesitated to make the experiment alone.

“I need not only help but a witness, Herr Swann,” he said. “I have been secretive about it all this time for fear of ridicule. Four years of my life have gone into assembling this carriage, and there are very many adjustments to be made before I can consider applying for a patent. In the meantime, however, it has proceeded as far as possible in here and the time has come to put it to a practical test, first on level ground, then on a gentle incline.”

He then became impatient with George’s expression of incredulity and added, testily, “Come, my young friend, the theory of horseless carriages, of automatically propelled vehicles, cannot be strange to the son of one of England’s greatest carters. Experiments of one kind or another are being made in all the capitals of Europe but machinists, in the main, have been concentrating on what I think of as ingenious toys, capable of conveying one, or at most two, persons from one point to another. This is not designed for that purpose. I have in mind a vehicle capable of doing the work of a team of ten draught horses, and in less than half the time. It is possible that Karl Benz, with whom I have worked in the past, and Gottlieb Daimler, whom I once heard lecture on the possibilities of steam propulsion, have conceived something similar, and if they have I honour them. The time will come when carriages of this kind will cease to be diversions and become the apparatus of merchants in all industrialised cities. You will have heard of Benz and Daimler, I trust?”

George had, now that he came to think of it. In Munich he had read an article in a technical transport magazine, describing the experiments of Benz, who had claimed that he could, given time and capital, produce an oil-driven carriage capable of travelling at the speed of fifteen road miles an hour. Either in that journal or some other he had read of Daimler, at work on a similar project. Someone called Barnett had built an engine that ran on coal gas, another called Brayton had done the same for a contrivance that used engine oil, and a third, whose name George had forgotten, had invented a form of transport that ran on a specially refined oil of some kind.

The sudden recollection of all this, particularly of oil as a source of propulsion, reminded him of the pervading smell in the grain store that he now identified as the smell that clung to Maximilien’s clothes whenever he returned to the house after working here.