Theirs Was The Kingdom (58 page)

“Not with that weight behind it,” George said, but the old man waved his hand. “A team of your father’s horses, hauling on a metalled road, could average nearly twice that speed. It is a promising beginning but no more. Come, harness up, and let us get the machine behind locked doors before the rumour-mongers begin to swarm.”

“You can’t possibly keep a thing like this a secret for long, Herr Körner, and why should you try? You’re entitled to credit for making it go at all, aren’t you?”

“I look for none,” the old man said, “until I can haul the equivalent of a loaded four-horse waggon from one point to another in half the time. Besides,” and here he smiled, “what artist wants the world to see a half-finished painting? Many would destroy it rather than have judgement pronounced before it was completed and this, I feel, will not be accomplished in my lifetime. Come, my friend, get the horses and let us go home.”

5

The trial was another crossroad in the life of George Swann, star boarder of the Körner family at Essling, beside the Danube. Its first effect was to deepen the relationship between master and apprentice, converting it into that of grandfather and favourite grandson based on mutual involvement with a great variety of technical problems resulting from repairs and modifications rendered imperative by the road test. All manner of unsuspected weaknesses in design and structure had been exposed, but Maximilien’s main concern was to develop twice or thrice the thrust of the engine whilst, at the same time, halving its overall weight and reducing the danger of overheating.

At first they tinkered, replacing a part here, enlarging and strengthening another there, but soon it became obvious that a complete redesign was necessary if the machine was ever to emerge as a serious competitor to anything more than a one-horse van in speed or carrying capacity.

By now George was so deeply involved in the project that he began to spend most of his spare time in the grain store, but this was not solely on account of his genuine interest in Max’s invention, or his faith that, ultimately, a marketable prototype would emerge. In another way he used Maximus, as he came to think of the ungainly monster, as a safety valve from emotional pressures building up within him on account of the continued presence and apparent availability of the Körner girls, pressures that sometimes seemed so intolerable that he began to think seriously of returning home or moving on, and this despite his intense interest in Max’s experiments.

It was as though the three younger Körner girls had entered into friendly competition with one another to corner him in the way Lizzie Broadbent had come near to doing in the Polygon, and Madame Drouet had tried to achieve in Paris, but there was a difference. Half of him delighted in the prospect of being trapped. Half of him (he liked to think of it as the baser half) yearned for some cosy arrangement, of the kind he had enjoyed in Munich, but common sense told him that this time there would be no easily obtained reprieve, of the sort made available to him by the accommodating Rosa Ledermann. Once committed to Sophie, Gilda, or Valerie, his obligation under existing circumstances, would be clear. One way or another the close-knit family would absorb him and although, in so many ways, he longed to be so absorbed, instinct warned him that committal on his part would be folly, for he was clearly not in love with any one of them. Had he been, he assured himself, he would have stopped vacillating and established a serious relationship, even if it was no more than a trial relationship, with one sister to the exclusion of the other two.

Perhaps his hesitation prompted the siege. Using diabolical initiative, they would isolate him in one or other part of the house, or at some unexpected moment during a family outing, parading their undeniable charms and their several armouries of artifice, so that week by week, almost day by day, they began to deflect him from his work at the yard or his absorbing involvement with Max Körner’s experiments and even, on occasion, to invade his sleep in a way that troubled him and left him at odds with himself. His brief encounters with them, from being light and inconsequential, began to take on a measure of exciting and deliberately contrived experimentation that would almost surely have been resolved one way or another had the field been less open, or the competition less keen and watchful. Once, in an alcove on the landing, he was embracing Sophie when Gilda swooped on them from the back staircase, shouting with glee at his embarrassment. Another time Valerie succeeded in enticing him into the bedroom and she might have won the contest there and then had not Marta, the maid-of-all-work in the Körner household, appeared unexpectedly on the landing with clanking bucket and mop, so that George slipped away while Valerie was sending her about her business. It could not last, however, and he was all too aware of this, for he was honest enough to see himself as a willing victim to the spirited, three-pronged attack. At times like these, he would take refuge in the grain-store where the girls could not follow him. Here, with a kind of sullen resignation, he would go to work on a set of cogs, or a wheel-clamp, telling himself yet again that if he had the sense he was born with he would make a choice between turning his back on the Körners or paying regular visits to the city joy-house, recommended by the director at the yard.

He was in just such a mood one mild spring evening when Max found him banging away at one of the new springs they had designed, glowering at the strip of steel held in the bench vise as though it was the embodiment of all his physical and spiritual frustrations. The old man watched him for a while in silence, puffing away at his heavy, drooping pipe, so that George, laying aside the hammer, was glad to put Gilda out of mind in favour of the less demanding subject of under-springing the metal container they had bolted to the chassis, in preference to the clumsy wooden structure of the original model.

He said, “Three thicknesses will absorb a good deal of shock, Max. Is that what you had in mind?” and Max, smiling, said it was not and that what he had in mind at that moment was his young friend’s abstractions and what, if anything, was to be done about them.

“Come, my boy,” he said, genially, when George growled that he had no idea what the old man was referring to, “you are a long way from home and I would be flattered if you regarded me in loco parentis, as they say. It is a woman, is it not? You are in love, perhaps?”

“If I was in love,” George muttered, disarmed by the old man’s affability, “I could at least isolate the girl.”

“Ach, so! My granddaughters continue to plague you, no doubt?”

“Who else?”

“I have long been of the opinion,” said Max, with a sigh, “that there are far too many petticoats about this house. It is a pity that my son Albrecht did not leave six boys instead of four girls and two boys, both of whom, I regret to say, will live and die as peasants, like their good mother. However, I understand your problem better than you think. I may devote most of my thoughts to that,” and he nodded briefly at Maximus, “but I am not blind, and I was young myself half a century ago. I assure you, my young friend, you have few secrets from me, or from those artful hussies either. At your time of life, distractions from the serious business of life are inevitable. How long is it since you paid a visit to the city?”

“I went there once,” George admitted, “but it didn’t help much, Herr Körner. Some men are made one way, some another, I imagine.”

“That is a simplification,” Max replied, thoughtfully. “I had forgotten that the Puritan instinct is inbred in most Englishmen. It has a way of denying them the easy solution to the problem of the young.”

He sat down on a bench, relit his pipe, and puffed away meditatively, as though his assistant’s preoccupation was at one with those arising out of modifications and adjustments to the big, silent machine that all but filled the store. It occurred to George then that this might be an opportunity to warn Herr Körner, in a tactful way of course, that he was in danger of either losing his apprentice or having his hospitality abused, and he was wondering how he could put this into suitable words when Max said, calmly, “The girls will surely seek to exploit the situation, and their mother also, no doubt. But that does not mean you have to accommodate them, or encourage them in their conceits. It has not escaped my attention that they have beset you, to the exclusion of the other young men in the district.”

“The fact is,” George blurted out, seeing a fancied opening, “I’ve come to the conclusion it would be best for all concerned to cut my visit short and head for home,” and was dismayed to see the old man’s features assume a frown of extreme displeasure.

“Leave me? Before we have made a second test run? I won’t hear of it, Herr Swann, not merely for my sake but for your own.”

“It’s you I’m thinking of,” George said, “you and Frau Körner. You’ve both gone out of your way to show me kindness and hospitality and well…” He shrugged, not liking to spell out the situation as it was resolving itself from the daily skirmishes on the stairs, landings, and in the outbuildings of the old house. But then his sense of chivalry reminded him that it wouldn’t do to implicate the girls specifically and added, “It’s mostly my own fault. I’ve encouraged them, no doubt, and they’re gay and lively, far more so than girls of their age in my country. Maybe it’s the climate,” he concluded, lamely, and realised then how fatuous his excuses must sound, for Max was smiling now, and it was clear that he regarded the whole thing as a rich joke.

“Ja, they are young and high-spirited, my friend, and winsome, too, no doubt. But so are you, are you not? And you are a man, with a man’s capacity to give his mind to matters of real importance. So let me give you an old man’s advice. If you have need of them, and they are as venturesome and impudent as I suspect, with their frills, flounces, and saucy looks, then use them. Take your pleasure in them, and be damned to their tears or squabbles.”

“You give me that kind of advice? You, their grandfather?”

“Why not? Your presence here is more important to me than the virtue of those hussies. For one I would happily sacrifice the other, my friend. Besides, youth is a short run. One day it is there and the next it is gone, leaving nothing but responsibilities.”

“But look here, Max… I mean to say, I couldn’t behave in that way, or not under your roof. I can’t swear that I won’t sooner or later, and as to responsibilities, one or other of them might find herself saddled with more responsibilities than she bargained for! You wouldn’t give advice of that kind in their mother’s hearing, would you?”

“Gott in Himmel,”
Max said, explosively, “of course I would not, for women are not equipped to reason like men. For all that, Frau Körner would not stand in the way of the girls, having regard who you are, and the likelihood of a settlement.”

“Settlement? You mean marriage, if it became obligatory?”

The old man’s jaw dropped. “
Marriage
, you say? Marriage to one of my granddaughters?
Ach, du meine Güthe!
Herr Swann, that is not to be thought of! Your father will find a wife with a sizeable
dot
, no doubt, and among your own people. These girls of mine have no patrimony. Their mother has Albrecht’s pension, and I have nothing to leave them, nothing but that machine over there and a handful of crowns saved over the years. Marriage? The idea is preposterous!” And he sucked his long teeth and beat a rapid tattoo on his upturned heel with his pipe, so that a shower of sparks scurried before the draught from the door.

“But what you suggest…”

“Is unworthy? Base? Ach, perhaps, to a gentleman reared in a hot-house among Puritans. But to me? It is no more than practical and of small importance. I am not a religious man, Herr Swann. I have not been seen at mass since they brought me news of my son’s death in that stupid quarrel with the Prussians. Neither am I concerned with the virtue of a flock of peasant girls, even women of my blood. My virtue, such as it is, stands there, under those coverings, and so, perhaps, does yours, for a man cannot hope to perfect more than one thing in his time on earth. For the rest, praise or blame, he must take his chance. That is why I say to you make free with them if that is the price you ask for your service to me over the next few months!”

For George, notwithstanding the initial shock, it was not as cynical as it sounded. He was learning about life and one of the things he had learned down here, in the company of Maximilien Körner, was that there were variants of the word “dedication.” Dedicated men, epitomised by enthusiasts like his father or Max Körner, arranged their priorities according to their own set of values. Adam Swann had never made a secret of putting the network before wife and family all these years, so was it so odd that this gaunt old Austrian, who had laboured at one idea all his adult life, should do the same concerning his pretty granddaughters?

And yet he knew well enough that he could not strike that kind of bargain, not in cold blood and with a total disregard for the consequences. Neither, for that matter, did Max’s cynical proposal have much relevance to his own immediate needs. Had they done, a weekly jaunt to the joy-house district of the city would have served and in this context the old man seemed to have misunderstood him, was probably incapable of understanding him. He saw then that he could not hope to communicate to such an obsessive mind the stresses and subtleties of the deep personal loneliness he had experienced so often during his wanderings, all the way from the Polygon, in Lancashire, to this stone house beside the Danube; or that such stresses and longings were unlikely to be eased for more than an hour or so by spending himself in the body of an immature girl, or exercising a transitory physical dominance over one or all four of Herr Körner’s pretty granddaughters. For all that he still felt drawn to the man and involved, more deeply than ever, in his dream. He said, briefly, “Leave it then. I’ll stay and see it through, Herr Körner, at least until we can make another road test, for the truth is that contraption is as much mine as yours now and I think I’ve more faith in its future. As to the girls, forget I was fool enough to mention them.”