Wayward Winds (25 page)

 46 
A Talk

How are things progressing with your cousin?” Gifford Rutherford asked his son one evening as they enjoyed a brandy together after Martha had retired to her room.

Geoffrey shrugged and muttered a noncommittal reply.

“You do not sound hopeful,” rejoined the father in a concerned tone. “It was my understanding she was gradually being drawn more closely into our family's life.”

“She is,” replied Geoffrey. “She and Mother are together often enough, I suppose.”

“And you?”

“I see her when I can.”

“You don't sound enthusiastic. Have you forgotten Heathersleigh? Now that you have succeeded in winning her confidence, it is time for you to seal her affections.”

Geoffrey stared down, sloshing the amber liquid about in his glass.

“What is it, my boy?” persisted Gifford. “Something is obviously on your mind.”

“It's that blasted Halifax fellow!” replied Geoffrey with a boyish whine.

“The journalist you told me about? I thought you said he and Amanda hardly knew one another.”

“That was before. They more than know each other now, that's for sure. He hangs around everywhere—she's
always
with him.”

“Hmm . . . I hadn't realized the situation had grown so precarious.”

Gifford took a sip of his brandy.

“What do you know about him?” he asked after a moment or two's reflection.

“Just what I told you earlier—that he works for the
Mail
.”

“Well, we'll have to scuttle it somehow.”

“How? I can't exactly go along with them when they're together.”

“I'll see what I can learn about him.”

“I don't see what good that will do.”

“Everybody's got a skeleton in their closet,” replied Geoffrey's father. “If we can find his, that might be all we need.”

“And if he doesn't?”

“Everybody's got something. If we can't find one, we'll
put
a skeleton in his closet. In the meantime, do what you can to increase the girl's dependence on you.”

“But how? I've tried everything, but she's always short with me. She doesn't like me, that's all there is to it.”

“Have you taken her flowers?”

“Flowers!” exclaimed Geoffrey.

“Certainly—a guaranteed way to a woman's heart.”

“She would laugh at me if I tried that. Or throw them back in my face.”

“Don't be too sure, my boy. Talk to her—women like that.”

“
Talk
to her . . . about what?”

“Serious things.”

“Like what?”

“Ask her what she thinks about things. Act interested.”

“That's not so easy to do with Amanda.”

“You can do it, my boy. It's what must be done.”

 47 
Nr. 42 Ebendorfer Strasse

Late in the seventeenth century the magnificent Austrian city of Vienna was besieged by the Turks and Hungarians under Turkish Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa. But with the aid of Polish forces, the Habsburg dynasty was saved. The defeat of the Turks began the slow process of driving back the powerful Ottoman Empire, and eventually ousting it from Europe altogether.

Not only was the city of Vienna preserved—events of the siege produced an unexpected result destined to alter the entire course of western civilization, at least insofar as concerned its morning routine.

A certain Pole by the name of Kolchitizky, a spy during the siege, managed to make off with a sack of coffee beans from Turkish soldiers. Inside the city, his boasting of the feat was laughed at by the Viennese, who, after one look at the contents of his bag, concluded it full of camel fodder. But Kolchitizky knew the secret of roasting and grinding the precious beans to create a strong, black, aromatic, and invigorating brew. Thus was coffee introduced to Vienna.

An Armenian immigrant, one Johann Diobato, immediately perceived the commercial possibilities. He obtained the first official right from Vienna's ruling council to prepare and serve “the Turkish beverage.” The year was 1865, two years after the Turkish siege. Diobato's coffeehouse was followed by many others, and soon became an institution in the Austrian capital.

By the opening of the twentieth century a hundred or more Viennese cafés had become the center and focus of the city's early-morning social life. Every political or intellectual group frequented its own particular café—from the Café Griensteidl to the Herrenhof to the Café Central. Whatever one's preferred coffee mixture, whether
Kleiner Schwarzer, Einspänner, Melange
, or
Kapuziner
, and whether it was ordered with croissant or other pastry, coffee always came with a newspaper. For besides pleasant conversation, cigarettes, and pipes, the men of Vienna mostly frequented their favorite coffeehouse to pore over the day's news.

Students had their favorite cafés, old retired men had theirs, laborers had theirs, socialists had theirs. One or two had even begun catering specifically to women, where the thick haze of tobacco was replaced by talk of women's issues, news of which had now reached this far east.

Every café had its own specialty—from billiards, to cards, to chess. Certain coffeehouses were frequented by musicians, others by painters, others by journalists. Vienna's musical tradition had been well established since Haydn and Mozart, up to the days of Beethoven and Schubert. And now the ghosts of recent legends Johannes Brahms and Johann Strauss—not the only composer whose early melodies were scratched upon some scrap of paper on a coffeehouse table—were gradually giving way to the new peculiar harmonies of Arnold Schönberg and the Vienna School. Such developments in many other fields of discipline, besides music, were frequently discussed at various of the city's coffeehouses, for Vienna was for centuries one of the creative, intellectual, and artistic centers in all of Europe. One of Vienna's rising men of prominence, however, Dr. Sigmund Freud, whose house was situated not far from the university, was rarely to be seen in such establishments. He was too busily engaged in analyzing the human psyche to allow his own to be taken up with such a mundane affair as keeping up on the day's news.

In a small café in an out-of-the-way street two or three blocks from the university, several young men were engaged in an earnest conversation around a table filled with empty coffee cups. The subject usually under discussion these days at the
Kaffe Kellar
was not music or architecture, not women's suffrage, nor psychoanalysis . . . but revolution. Here gathered students, many of them Russian, and idealists and socialists from throughout Europe. One or two Serbs
and a Bosnian were present, and the heated discussion had alternated between the tenets of communism and the future independence of the Balkan states.

“I tell you, the enemy to our future is Austria,” one particularly passionate youth, who appeared no older than sixteen, was saying.

“Keep your voice down, Princip,” said another in a thick Serbian accent, in scarcely more than a whisper.

“I don't care who hears me,” rejoined the first, who had already had far too much to drink of a brew even stronger than the coffee. “You are right in what you say about our enemy, and I say it is the emperor Franz Joseph.”

Sensing that the conversation might begin to get out of hand, one of the men seated around the table glanced at his watch, then nodded to a colleague. The two rose, excusing themselves, and left the café. The evening was already late and dusk was well advanced. They made their way along Alser Strasse, then right onto Ebendorfer Strasse. It was about a ten-minute walk from the Kaffe Kellar to the stone building which at last loomed before them. Guests were expected, and they should not be late.

The four-story grey stone building on Ebendorfer Strasse, whose side door they entered, gave no evidence to the passerby that it was any different from five hundred similar buildings in central Vienna constructed just prior to the neoclassical period sometime in the late eighteenth century. Situated as it was almost between the comparatively new and lavish Rathaus, or City Hall, and the buildings of Universität, it passed itself off as containing offices of some kind on the ground floor, and residential apartments on the three upper floors. From the third floor, looking west, the grounds of Rathaus Park were visible, and beyond them, from the windows on the fourth, the wide boulevard surrounding the Old City known as “The Ring,” one of Europe's widest and most elegant thoroughfares.

Most assumed that whatever activities went on behind the stone walls of the unassuming edifice were in some way connected with the university. Several students and two or three professors did in fact reside at Nr. 42 Ebendorfer Strasse. But the comings and goings from the side door of the building that opened toward Grillparzer Strasse, often at night, as in the case of the two young men who had just entered, sometimes more resembled the activities of a hostel than an apartment building. Indeed, those who did make this their
residence entertained frequent visitors from all over Europe. There were a half dozen guest rooms which were always prepared, along with a full kitchen and staff, whose duties were to accommodate the unseen business of the place.

As they unlocked the door and entered, the two newcomers nodded to a lady in her mid-forties seated in a small parlor adjacent to the outside door. Through its thin curtains the window at which she sat maintained a clear view of the street and approach to the building. Though she was sipping a cup of tea and nonchalantly browsing through a newspaper, the woman was in fact the doorkeeper. This parlor was occupied, and the private entrance thus attended to, twenty-four hours a day.

“Are they here?” asked one of the coffeehouse arrivals.

“About ten minutes ago,” answered the lady. “They're waiting for you upstairs.”

 48 
A Country Ride

When the telephone call came to the Pankhurst home, Amanda assumed it to be Ramsay.

“Who is it?” she asked Sylvia.

“I don't know—a man. He didn't identify himself.”

With reluctance Amanda went downstairs to answer the call. Something about the evening with Ramsay at the theater had left her inexplicably unsettled. After the hypnotic trance of the evening wore off, by the next afternoon the memory of it gave her a funny feeling, almost of defilement, of having been somewhere she shouldn't have been.

She didn't want to talk to Ramsay right now. Was the bawdiness of the theater and play bothering her? Or was it Ramsay's familiarity with the actress? Was she jealous of the woman's presumed friendship with Ramsay?

She
 . . . jealous? Amanda hated even the thought of admitting to such a weakness. The reminder of the evening made her feel strange, weak, vulnerable . . . and she did not like the sensation.

Was she perhaps closer to falling in love than she realized? If so, why these peculiar feelings of hesitation and reluctance . . . almost caution? Why wasn't she running down to the phone with heart pounding,
hoping
it was Ramsay!

She lifted the telephone receiver, sighed inwardly, then answered.

“Amanda . . . hello,” said a voice that for an instant she did not recognize. “It's Geoffrey.”

More inexplicable even than her hesitation to answer the phone when she thought it was Ramsay was the brief surge of relief which filled Amanda at the sound of her second cousin's voice.

“Good morning, Geoffrey,” she replied, in as pleasant a tone as she had ever managed to generate toward him.

“It promises to be a beautiful Saturday afternoon,” Geoffrey went on. “I wondered if you might like to go for a drive in the country.”

“Your family is planning an outing?”

“No, just the two of us. Mother and Father are staying in the city.”

A brief pause on the line followed. There was a suffragette march planned for the afternoon in which she knew she was expected to participate.

The next words out of her mouth surprised Amanda as much as they did Geoffrey.

“Yes . . . yes, I think I would,” she said. “That sounds like it might be fun.”

Two hours later, with Geoffrey at the wheel of his convertible, the two cousins motored their way along the Thames, finding themselves inwardly surprised at the relatively pleasant conversation they had enjoyed thus far.

“Tell me, Amanda,” Geoffrey was saying, “do you really go along with all that suffragette business?”

“I believe that women ought to have the right to vote, if that's what you mean.”

“I mean the wild antics, the violence?”

“I don't suppose I like it all,” she answered. “But the Pankhursts think that's the only way to be heard, that the cause will be ignored otherwise.”

“What do
you
believe?” he said.

Amanda glanced over across from where she sat. Geoffrey was looking forward, eyes on the road ahead, and did not see her momentarily probing his face. As she stared at his profile, the most peculiar sensation came over her, a feeling of familial bond, of relationship, almost of camaraderie by virtue of shared heritage and roots.

In the most obscure way, Geoffrey's nose and chin and jawbone reminded Amanda . . . of her father.

She glanced away. But then just as quickly she returned her gaze to his face. The faint similarity was still there—there could be no mistaking it. And why not? Their fathers were first cousins. They shared the same grandparents, she and Geoffrey the same great-grandparents. Why shouldn't there be a family resemblance? Why, then, did the look so startle her?

The silence lasted only a second or two.

“I suppose I think there might be other methods,” Amanda replied to Geoffrey's question.

The uncharacteristically thoughtful exchange between the two—whose conversations till then had been what might best be called an antagonistic verbal sparring, almost as if they were playing a game with each other, and both knew it—sobered both. They drove on for several miles in silence. What each was thinking, the other couldn't have remotely begun to guess.

“What's your father like, Geoffrey?” Amanda asked at length. Once again, the words out of her mouth surprised her. She had not anticipated the question. All of a sudden, there were the words hanging in the air between them.

“What do you mean, what is he like?” replied Geoffrey. “You know my father as well as I do.”

“That can hardly be.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I'm not sure I do. But what I meant is, what kind of man is he? Is he your friend? Do you like him? What do you and your father talk about?”

“Of course I like him,” replied Geoffrey. He could hardly tell Amanda the subject of their discussion the last time they spoke together! Reminded of his father's words upon that occasion, Geoffrey fumbled to heed his advice.

“But what about you, Amanda,” he said. “What is
your
father like?”

“Now I might turn your own words back on you and say that you know him as well as I do. But I won't because that would be ridiculous.”

“All right, then, tell me why you left Heathersleigh. Is it because you don't like your father?”

She paused and grew serious.

“I don't know that I ever thought about it in quite those words,” Amanda said. “Maybe I
don't
like him, I don't know. It's just that he never understood me, or even tried to understand what I was thinking and feeling. He wanted me to be just like the rest of them and believe all the same things and act the same way. But I couldn't.”

“What about your mother?” asked Geoffrey.

“I love my mother,” replied Amanda. “But she went along with my father about everything. She would never side with me. And when she starting talking about the absurd idea of submitting to him as her
head
, as she called it, that's when I realized any hope I might have had of her understanding what I was thinking and feeling was gone. That's when I knew I had to get away from Heathersleigh eventually.”

“But you like Heathersleigh, don't you?”

“I hate the very thought of Devonshire.”

“But it's not so bad a place. Might you not someday want to get married and go back there to live, back to the old family estate, as it were?”

“What are you talking about? When and if I get married, I certainly wouldn't go back to Heathersleigh. Why would I do that?”

Geoffrey did not answer. He had inadvertently overplayed his hand. Best to change the subject.

“Uh . . . what do you think of the situation on the Continent?” he asked feebly.

“Oh, Geoffrey—heavens . . . who cares!”

“I don't know, I just thought maybe you'd be interested in all that, since your father used to be in politics.”

“I used to be, not anymore.”

“Actually, I'm not either. I was just trying to make conversation.”

Amanda glanced over at him again with a curious expression.

“Why, Geoffrey,” she said, “—why were you trying to make conversation?”

“I don't know . . . I suppose because it seems like we ought to be able to talk together intelligently, without always sniping at each other.”

He glanced toward her uncertainly. She was still looking at him. Her expression caught him off guard, and he forced a somewhat nervous smile. She returned it with a smile and nod of her own.

“Perhaps you are right, Geoffrey,” she said. “Perhaps we should.”

The rest of the afternoon passed more pleasantly than either would have anticipated when the day began.