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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
A wonderfully gossipy novel that whisks readers through the glamorous worlds of turn-of-the-century Vienna, Paris, and London. The Rakonitz family - rich, cosmopolitan, and Jewish - is ruled over by the indomitable will of the matriarch, Anastasia. From her exotically furnished house in west London, Anastasia holds court over her children, grandchildren, and vast extended family. For someone must resolve the quarrels, celebrate the births, deaths, engagements, bankruptcies, artistic triumphs, and explain the only way to prepare a delicious Crème Düten. With the dawning of the twentieth century, a series of scandals and financial catastrophes strike the Rakonitzes, threatening the family ties and calling into question the legacy that binds them together. 'There is wealth here, and gaiety. There is middle European style, and food in abundance. It is very un-English, and enormously attractive.' - Julia Neuberger
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‘There is wealth here, and gaiety. There is middle European style, and food in abundance. It is very un-English, and enormously attractive.’ Julia Neuberger
The Matriarch
G. B. STERN
with an Introduction byLINDA GRANT
DAUNT BOOKS
TO JOHN GALSWORTHY
Contents
INTRODUCTION by Linda Grant
In 1938, G. B. Stern threw a dinner party at Quaglino’s restaurant in Soho. Her guest list included the actress Elinor Glyn, the travel writer Rose Macaulay, the playwright Max Beerbohm and the novelists Somerset Maugham and J. B. Priestley. Gladys Stern had been a wow from the beginning. Her first written work, a stage play, was produced in 1911 when she was only twenty-one. She was friends with Rebecca West and H. G. Wells, advised Noël Coward to name his own play ‘Cavalcade’, and was a gregariously social figure who wrote dozens of novels, many bestselling, as well as plays and volumes of short stories. For a time, she was a screenwriter during the golden age of Hollywood.
Forty years after her death, almost everything but this novel is out of print, a warning from the past to the future that little in literature survives to the next generation. The stars of today, even the Booker prize-winners, may be fated to live out half-lives in second hand bookshops. At the time of her death in 1973, The Times obituary noted that her work was ‘too studiously light and amusing’, a literary taste which it thought then completely extinct. This makes Stern’s fiction and plays sound like the drawing-room comedies of the twenties and thirties, the ‘anyone for tennis’ theatre annihilated by the Angry Young Men. It is true that Stern is a highly amusing writer and The Matriarch finishes with a flourish of ironies. Whatever darkness could have been present, isn’t. Even the Great War passes with little death and much honour. Is there any more to it than that?
Edmund de Waal in his recent family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, described one of Europe’s cosmopolitan, wealthy Jewish families flung across the globe, first by trade, then by persecution. The Matriarch, originally published in 1924 as Tents of Israel: A Chronicle, is in fictional form, the story of growing up in such a family; one dominated by strong, opinionated, talkative and extravagantly-dressed women presiding over abundant tables of food.
She was born Gladys Bertha Stern (she seems to have altered Bertha to the more romantic Bronwyn) in Kensington in 1890 and as a child watched Queen Victoria’s funeral procession pass. The family came from Austria and Germany, and there was a great-aunt she described as ‘too despotic to love’ on whom the matriarch of the title is based.
The emancipation of European Jews began with Napoleon, and so does this novel; with Babette Weinberg, aged fifteen, walking with two of Napoleon’s officers, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and empire line dress above black shoes and white stockings ‘and just that dangle of the scarf over the back in a half-moon from the elbows.’ But pretty Babette has no chance of being wooed by flashing swords and manly gold braid epaulettes for she has been promised by her father to Simon Rakonitz. And so is established ‘a family of women buccaneers. They were thrown forward, and the men receded a very little bit into dependency.’
As each decade passes, religious duty weakens; in 1868, Babette ‘eyes bright with curiosity’ sits down to her first meal of ham. Anastasia is born, the matriarch of the title. In 1870, escaping the siege of Paris, the family moves to London. Now, a teeming picture presents itself of multiple cousins arguing in opulent surroundings. The family is completing the process of assimilation into English life, with Christmas celebrated, but in such a cosmopolitan atmosphere of languages and jewels and rows that no one could mistake it for its English counterpart:
All the Rakonitz women were happiest in Cosmopolis. Imagination cannot easily picture them in a setting of brown ploughed field on a whipped grey morning after a storm. Instead, spacious drawing-rooms, with parquet floor throwing back the glitter from the Venetian crystal candelabra, brocade hangings, and a polished grand-piano – these were more natural than nature to Babette and her descendants.
It takes a while for the main characters to emerge distinctly, as if they were lost in the crowd of objects on Anastasia’s over-set dining table, lulling the reader into thinking that nothing is ever going to happen apart from more descriptions of heavy meals. Slowly, Toni and her cousin Danny, grandchildren of Anastasia, take centre stage. And like Stern’s own family, who lost everything in the Vaal River diamond smash just before the First World War, the Rakonitzes are suddenly penniless and start to move once more nomadically, not across the great capitals of Europe, but across London into a series of smaller and smaller houses.
Stern spoke of her own childhood as being ‘a sanctuary free from pogroms or rumours of pogroms … and no strict religious upbraiding … it did not occur to me for many years that there were disadvantages in being a Jew.’ The disadvantage now was a family used to opulence having to work for its living, and Toni commences a career as a commercial traveller for a fashion house while her cousin Danny goes off to join the army. Between these two characters there is a conflicting pull: Toni stubbornly insists on maintaining the family honour and in particular the discharge of a financial debt left unpaid after the crash; Danny on the other hand is exulted by his liberation from the claustrophobia of family life and responsibilities. The post-war battle is over the family’s preservation and in what form it will go on into the future.
The Matriarch is a more light-hearted, Jewish Buddenbrooks; Thomas Mann’s novel of the decline of a great nineteenth-century German commercial family. Stern is more joyous, a writer with an appetite for life, for language, for acute observations of the many family members she must have felt suffocated by. Part of the novel’s fascination is in the account of how a Jewish family, a century away from caftans and sidelocks, can dissipate that Jewishness and assimilate into the English middle and upper classes until nothing is left but the trace of a name that bears some marks of Anglicisation.
Five years after its first publication, the novel was such a success that a stage adaptation opened at the Royalty Theatre in London, with one of the greatest actresses of her day, Mrs Patrick Campbell, in the leading role of Anastasia. There were a number of sequels, each embodying the strength of the Rakonitz women, one matriarch succeeding another. Stern went on publishing novels until her mid–seventies. She married, but the relationship broke down after a number of years and she devoted the rest of her life to travel and parties.
Literary reputation is one of the cruellest of enemies. The chances of remaining in print even in one’s own lifetime are slim. Ninety years after its first publication The Matriarch reminds us that prodigious gifts can fall out of fashion, and sometimes come back in again, in an era in which too much angst in an age of austerity depresses the soul, and lost worlds are longed for. But it is also a novel about immigration, and exile, and is contemporary in that sense. It is a novel above all about women, strong women, domineering women, with little outlet for power apart from inside their own families. A feminist classic whose time has come, perhaps? I think so.
PREFACE
Some people are fascinated by a genealogical table; and I, myself, like to study the intricate relationships of a large family. But some are bored and bewildered by it. So to the latter I would mention that it need not upset their understanding of this story, in the very slightest, if they cannot follow the who-is-who of the first chapter. The only individual characters who are going to be important are those printed in capital letters for that very reason: the Matriarch, who is Anastasia, and her children and grandchildren … ‘the oldest of the oldest of the oldest of the oldest,’ as Toni described them.
I introduced an enormous amount of aunts and cousins and great-uncles and so forth, in the first chapter, because I wanted to show Anastasia, and later on, Toni, against a crowded background, and not descended along a single thread. But Toni herself, and Val, and Maxine, the ‘younger ones’, never bothered to know exactly how their relations were related. They just called them, in a lump, ‘the family’; or else classified them, casually, as ‘the Paris lot’ or ‘the Vienna lot’.
For this is partly a true chronicle.
G. B. STERN
I am young, and ye are very old … Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement.
THE BOOK OF JOB
CHAPTER 1
1
Since memory itself is but a picture-book, we can, if we turn back among the chronicles of the Rakonitz family, catch and loop into a frame, that sudden vision of Babette at fifteen, walking demurely with two of Napoleon’s officers on her right, and three on her left. For when, in 1805, Napoleon came to Pressburg, he found no one in all the town who could interpret between the troops and the natives, until he heard of the young girl, Babette Weinberg, and her marvellous gift of languages, and gave orders she was to come to the camp, morning and evening. Imagine the horror of Babette’s mother; the indignation of her father! Napoleon’s messages became more respectful; he quite understood the objections, and would send, as invariable escort, five officers; the child should not go through the streets of Pressburg without protection. Strangely enough, Babette’s parents saw safety in five officers, and so we get our picture again – Babette, very much envied of her friends, who, to be sure, began to see some use in the study of languages, after all; pretty Babette in a broad-brimmed hat tied under her firm little chin; straight, high-waisted bodice and wide skirt – I think it must have been green – black shoes strapped quaintly over her white stockings, and just that dangle of the scarf over the back in a half-moon from the elbows. It would be pleasant to know whether she kept her eyes primly downcast, or whether she chattered gaily to her escort; and by what caprice she selected the arm on which she leant. Five of them, a straight row of ten white trouser legs, grotesquely long and tight, broken only by Babette’s green gown. She found the red and yellow coats very dashing, no doubt, and boasted of them afterwards to her friends, Carlotta, and Minna, and Lili.
I cannot clearly see Babette at the camp among the raw-tongued troops; only afterwards, in the evening, in her comfortable home, being questioned anxiously by her mother: ‘And I hope you have remembered, my little girl, that you are promised to Simon Rakonitz, the son of your father’s old friend; and that, though it is an honour to be chosen for what you are doing, yet the French army will move on and go away; and that – and that—’ she has not yet asked what is truly troubling her mind, and Babette’s blue eyes are still hidden under their lids. It is so queer that she should have been given blue eyes, and a straight, almost impertinent, nose. No one would have guessed her race if it were not for the address in the ghetto, and the surname so recently purchased – Weinberg, ‘wine on a hill’ – Babette’s father was a wine-merchant growing his own vines.
When old Ladislas Weinberg died, a year or two later, and his wife stoutly went on with the business – and, good fellow, how annoyed he would have been to know that she was so very much more competent than he! – she kept open house, as she could well afford; so that when the peasants came to Pressburg for the fairs, and to sell produce and grapes for her, she commanded mattresses to be spread on the floor of her great hall, where they could sleep, to save them the expense of going to an inn; and she gave them a good dinner, over which she presided, a large hospitable figure, with spreading flounces of silk, and an elaborate cap on her modish arrangement of flat curls. This is the moment to catch sight of her, carelessly spilling a glassful of wine in a red stain across the cloth, so that her guests may not feel uncomfortable if they should clumsily stain the cloth afterwards. A very great hostess, this mother of Babette; and Anastasia Rakonitz, who stands midway between the old family and the new, granddaughter of Babette, and grandmother of today’s Toni, she too has been famous, all her life long, for hospitality, unchecked by every sensational rise or fall of her fortunes.
For Babette is married now; Babette and Simon Rakonitz – already they sound like ancestors; already we can see them, as hereafter Derek and Maxine and Iris saw them, during their three meals a day; a comely old lady and a genial old gentleman, in heavy gold frames, hanging on the dining-room wall. But Babette could not have felt very solidly an ancestor, as a frightened child of seventeen, waiting in a state of ridiculous innocence for Sigismund to be born; and her thirteen-year-old sister, lent to her for company, was so very much more innocent, that she rushed to the window and shouted: ‘fire’ … and thus, fantastically, the young gentleman was born with firemen in attendance. I wish we knew what costume firemen wore in Pressburg in the early years of the nineteenth century, for then we could have visualised them being indignantly shooed from the room by Babette’s mother or Babette’s old nurse, who must surely have arrived by then to take charge; and, indeed, I cannot think where Simon, her husband, could have been – tending his grapes, perhaps? (he, too, was in the wine business) – yet one could have understood better his absence at the birth of Rachel, the fourteenth of his children, than of Sigismund, the first. One of the firemen, himself a father, threw a kindly look back at the girl in the great canopied bed, under the big pillow eiderdown.… Everybody was scolding, and little sister was weeping because she had made such a silly mistake, and Babette’s blue eyes were frightened, and the doctor said ‘Na, na, na …!’
2
Sigismund, Ludovic, Daniel, Andreas, Eugène, Lena … and then the Rakonitz family moved up the Danube, from Pressburg to Vienna. There is a tribal feeling about the manner of their travellings, and of their settlings.… The history of the Israelites was just at that time shaping and hardening in Hungary and Austria; and it was Simon who had first won for the ghetto folk the right to vote in Pressburg, and had founded their first good school. But even then, Pressburg was just beyond the outer gates of Vienna; the gates of Vienna itself were still closed to the Jews; and only under preference of being attached to and in the service of some Austrian nobility high in favour, were the Chosen People allowed to dwell within the town. It is easy to imagine, however, that when the careless young Austrians wanted money they were ready enough to announce almost any eligible family as in their service. So the Jews came up the Danube from the east, lingering for awhile in the small Hungarian villages, and there picking up and proudly bearing their first surnames, a privilege only recently awarded. In this fashion had Simon’s father chosen to be known as Rakonitz. Indeed, it must have been awkward, if picturesque, to have been accosted for so many generations as ‘Simon, the son of Nathan, the son of Abraham, the son of Simon … ’
The words ‘tribe’ and ‘Jew’ and ‘ghetto’ carry an inevitable significance of greasy ringlets, hooked noses, and ancient fur-trimmed gaberdines; of a dark archway opening on to a huddle of dark houses; and of swarming dark children, complete with business instincts of how to get the better of the Gentile. But it is to have been misled from the start, to form such an idea of the Rakonitz personality. The distinctive feature which has slipped down from generation to generation of the family is a pair of bright blue eyes under a queer haughty twist of eyebrow, a straight delicate nose, and a mouth which is lifted at the corners into a crescent, so that it seems to smile even when it is unsmilingly in repose. The Rakonitzes do not live in a huddle; in fact, there is no record that they have ever been housed otherwise than spaciously. And as for their business instincts, there are no good careless fools like the Rakonitz men have been; fools, absolute fools! – generous and extravagant on the swooping up-curve of their fortunes; plausible optimists on their heavy dramatic plunges down. Nor is there much inherited melancholy about them; heavens, how Babette could laugh! And how Anastasia, Sigismund’s eldest daughter, could make the room brilliant with her wit, her diverting anecdotes with herself figuring as buffoon! And Haidée of the next generation, and Toni of the next, their instincts flew straight to pleasure, as the arrow hums towards the gold – that special lightness and brightness of pleasure which old Vienna created best of all the cities of the world. They did not bother to sit and brood over their persecuted race, nor to mourn for so much longer than was necessary the subjection to Pharaoh or the betrayal of Esau. The Rakonitzes were a gay family, with waltz tunes in their blood.
3
… Sigismund, Ludovic, Daniel, Andreas, Eugène, Lena, Albrecht, Grethe, Isidore, Rachel…. And then Babette, still mourning for the four who had died, feeling that the faces of ten children round her table were still too few, adopted the two orphans, Karl and Léon, of Simon’s late partner, Konrad Czelovar.
And now, at Paul’s birth in 1832, here is Babette, a grandmother! How much more often we talk of Babette than of Simon; how much more often we shall talk of Anastasia than of her husband Paul; of Toni than of her brother Gerald. And yet, in a typical chronicle of the Israelites, it would be taken for granted that the girls did not count at all; they are not recognised; they do not have their places in the synagogue, nor are they seen at funerals; officially they receive no names; if they give birth to a boy who will grow into a man, they have fulfilled their destiny in the only possible way. But later on, when you have heard more about the adventure of being a Rakonitz, or, indeed, a Czelovar or a Bettelheim, whose names intertwine so confusedly with the Rakonitz genealogical tree, you will recognise why I have called them the very topsy-turvydom of Jews. It was a family of women buccaneers. They were thrown forward, and the men receded a very little bit into dependence. Matriarchy – and Anastasia was to be the Matriarch of all the family. It is time that Anastasia, Sigismund’s daughter, was looped into a picture…. For she was born in 1835. And six months later she was suddenly missing.
For two days her parents were frantic about her, and sought her everywhere. It seemed incredible that a child of that age, with her nurse and her perambulator, could be so completely lost; still more incredible that she should have eventually been found where one expects to find the family prodigal after he has come of age and wasted his substance on riotous living…. Yes, peacefully, drunkenly asleep at an inn on the road that led out of Vienna towards Semmering.
… ‘Anastasia’s nurse had abundant hair, and dressed it beautifully’ – Truda, telling the story, in after years, to Toni and Val and her own Maxine, always put in that little bit about the hair, in just this place. ‘But she was very wicked to have taken the baby to the inn, and to make her drunk so that she should keep quiet, and afterwards to abandon her!’ And yet, glancing at the future of Anastasia, one cannot help feeling that she knew what she was about, and that her fantastic, rollicking, arrogant career was even then in her system, groping its way towards a first assertion of self. If her mother had watched her very carefully while she gurgled and crowed with other Viennese babies during the few days following her spree, it is quite likely that she would have seen Anastasia boasting, slapping herself metaphorically on the chest as a three-bottle baby.
She grew up a great favourite with her grandmamma Babette; even after other grandchildren, Simone, Felix, Dietrich and Maximilian, were born in that tall, old house looking on the Danube, Anastasia still continued the favourite. Simon and Babette lived, as a matter of course, in the same house as their eldest son Sigismund and his wife, who had been Olga Bettleheim; one of the tough Bettelheims, bringing their special quality of long life to strengthen the Rakonitz fibre. The Bettelheims were so unreceptive of death as to appear almost uncanny to their more vulnerable contemporaries, as they swung merrily along for ten and fifteen and twenty years beyond their three-score-and-ten, and gave no sign of weakening. True, Olga died early, but she was killed in a carriage accident. Her sisters, Hermina and Gisela, reached their hundreds.
Sigismund’s younger brothers, Andreas and Eugène, were soon to be spreading away from Vienna towards other capitals, Madrid, Cairo, Paris and Constantinople, like spokes from the hub. But Ludovic, the only Rakonitz who was not a nomad, faithfully married a real Viennese little lady, Wili Taliman, and vowed that nothing would ever make him move away from where he could see the spire of his beloved Stefanskirche. They had all contrived, however, to be still in Vienna for Daniel’s wedding, the first in that family; and for Sigismund’s, three years later. Then must have been great festivities; any casual disposal of such occasions was contrary to their tenaciously clannish instincts and love of merrymaking. Much laughter, united with great doings in the kitchen; gallantry, and kissing of ladies’ hands, and luscious tears of sentiment. Grandfather Bettelheim travelled up from Constantinople, where he sold amber. And large cinnamon cakes were baked, and a Pflaumentorte as big as an island.
4
Ludovic and Wili took a summer-house at the Semmering one year, and all the brothers and their wives, and, of course, Simon and Babette and their still unmarried daughters, Lena and Rachel, were invited to come too; and they lived on different floors, and ran up and down to see each other. It would have been unheard of, in the earlier chronicles of the Rakonitz tribe, if friends had been invited, and relations ignored. Maybe relations agreed more felicitously then, than now; at any rate, there were peals of laughter and clear, high voices in that house on the Semmering. Eugène was the special butt of their amusement – Eugène, the gay bachelor brother, who used to come home every night very late, but always swore that he came home early, and that they were already in bed…. Now it happened that Wili, Ludovic’s wife, had been ordered by her doctor to suck raw eggs, pricking them at each end; and one night, when the young dandy stealthily let himself in and stealthily walked upstairs, crack – crack – crack – All the doors opened at the sound, and a lively, pretty, young sister-in-law was standing at each, dark curls and mischievous sleepy eyes and a candle held high: ‘Eugène, Eugène, do you know that it is two o’clock?’ … Broken eggshells all up the stairs, and spread around the feet of the hero of too many revels, as he leant, somewhat dazed, against the balustrade, feeling rather foolish, too, at being thus caught out in his escapade; not far from anger, and perhaps a little too far from sobriety; and yet, being a Viennese (and he must have looked a true son of the Biedemeyer period, in his long, tight pantaloons, his cambric frills and double-breasted white silk waistcoat) he cannot but have blended with his annoyance, a whimsical appreciation of the charming picture they made – Olga and Wili and Lisa – disarrayed and triumphant.
And yet again Eugène, in Constantinople now, somewhat wiser, but still a scapegrace, boasting to a white-haired old Greek, of some transaction in mother-of-pearl which he had just completed; but the old man shook his head, and said slowly: ‘Young man, you are in too much of a hurry. You should take to smoking cigarettes of your own making; and if you are offered a parcel of precious stones, take out your tobacco-box and then your cigarette papers, tear one off and put some tobacco in and roll it and re-roll it and then stick it down; get out your matches without any hurry, young man, without any hurry, and light the cigarette and take three puffs – and by then give your answer … and you will find the merchandise will be cheaper.’ Thus Eugène was made free of the East … and settled there, and married Chryse Stefanopoulos, and did not come back – no, not even for Grethe’s wedding, nor for Lena’s, to the consternation of his mother. And no more was heard of Eugène … till forty years later, when Neil and Sylvia Czelovar, leaning from the window of their London nursery, saw a pale, shabby little old woman in black ringing at the front door bell; and saw her go away an hour later, most astonishingly, with a bottle of wine under each arm; and were told by their mother that it was their Tante Eugène from Athens, and that they were not to ask silly questions. Neil was rather surprised that she did not look more like the statue of Pallas Athene on the Acropolis, of which he had seen pictures.
Andreas also slipped into legend, and took no more part at Rakonitz weddings, nor at Rakonitz funerals, nor at those supreme affairs when a Rakonitz or a Czelovar or a Bettelheim reached the age of seventy and was not yet dead. Indeed, most of the women would have thought it shame to be dead at seventy – a slur on their vitality. The men died earlier. It is a fact, in natural history, that the female spider attains to the closest of all possible unions with her mate, by gradually absorbing and swallowing him; about the Rakonitz happy marriages, was the same effect of complete oneness. When they did not marry each other, or a Czelovar, or a Bettelheim, thus ravelling relations into a tighter and more intricate tangle, then the tribe of whoever was not a Czelovar nor a Bettelheim, dropped out and ceased to count; and the intruder himself, when he spoke of ‘the family’, meant that unwieldy bulk of Rakonitz. ‘The family’ to Wili, for instance, never meant the Talimans. Never.
Andreas went to Spain; and his only touch with the Rakonitz children of a future generation, was when Val got hold of a story, less tragic and more grotesque than the swift tableau of Tante Eugène and her bottles, that a nephew-in-law of Andreas, Pinto Panja, was exhibiting, in his capacity as professional showman, an idyll of connubial domesticity from Burmah: ‘King Theebaw’s Hairy Family’. Val was immensely delighted at the thought of the unique connection between herself and the Hairy Family, and she drew a series of spirited sketches for the benefit of Danny and Toni, showing how the various members of Rakonitz would behave on welcoming the Hairy Ones to London; especially Uncle Maximilian, whose nickname was le Grand Seigneur, and who was so tall and aristocratic, and had such a straight and delicate nose. You know, the family were proud of that nose …
5
But Babette – and we are back again in a room of the tall old house by the Danube, where Simon smoked the meerschaum with the amber mouthpiece, of which Grandpapa Bettelheim had sold so many, and his wife knitted in the other armchair by the big black stove – Babette mourned heartily over the defection of Andreas and Eugène; and told Anastasia, sitting dutifully beside her, long tales of their good looks, and their talents, and that gifted quality about their pranks which made them different from all other boys’ pranks. She did not own to her grandchild what she knew well enough herself, that Andreas and Eugène were of weaker material than her daughters Grethe and Lena and Rachel, and of weaker material than herself. She did not say it, partly because Simon was sitting there too, and it was her duty to uphold the prestige of man, whatever she was secretly aware of to the contrary; and partly because she had never quite forgiven Grethe and Lena and Rachel for being girls; and also she thought it unnecessary that ’Stasia, aged twelve, should learn to exalt her aunts above her uncles. Anastasia marvelled that Grandmamma should be so persistent in mourning. She could not see ahead, of course, to a little oval picture of the future, slipped in, by accident, among these miniatures of the Rakonitz past…. Anastasia herself, looking startlingly like Babette, and with the same obstinate up-curving lips and deep-set blue eyes, imperiously ordering off young Danny Maitland, her grandson, Sophie’s boy, to South America on a wild-goose chase after his errant uncle Ludovic, who had not been heard of for at least six years, but who, of all Anastasia’s children, happened to be the one most indispensable to her happiness …
During the daytime, Sigismund’s children loved their home on the Danube; they could run about and pick up tiny shreds of amber and opal; and, without telling their parents, sell them to passers-by for a few kreutzer, and buy plums. But at night the high rooms were gloomy, menaced from the corners by tall iron stoves; the chairs and windows heavily upholstered in plush; every chair antimacassared; every bed a cave. It was curious from what solid, sombre, settings glittered those jewels the Viennese held most precious: wit and elegance and lightness of heart. The long double windows were seldom open; and mostly looked out on courtyards which were in themselves rooms without a ceiling; but the curtains remained nearly always a formidable barrier between inside and outside. Babette and Simon had reached the age where they talked a lot of warm sentimentalities about comfort and peace, and their grandchildren around their knees. Unfortunately for them, the end of their long string of children was still lively; Isidore and Rachel, their two youngest, had by no means consented to quiet obedience; in fact, Isidore’s reluctance ever to go to bed at all before dawn, might have been a premonition of what next year would bring, of sleep and sleep and eternal sleep for him. How the Viennese, of all people, must have hated to die, when there were balls at the Hofburg; and riding down six straight miles of Prater; supper after the opera at Sacher; and when, every first of May, the beautiful Empress drove round the Ringstrasse wearing a white dress as a sign that Spring was there and that it was time to wear white! … But Simon and Babette sat in front of the stove, with Anastasia between them, winding her grandmother’s wool; and they wondered why young people could not be content.
Came a ring at the door, and loud knocking; and Babette laid down her work and said: ‘Du lieber Gott! but who can this be at such a time of night?’ and Simon, who was a little deaf, said that he had heard nothing and that she was full of fancies. ‘I have heard a lot of moving about for the last hour or two,’ said Anastasia, ‘bumping and bustling – there goes Friedel to the door.’ The old manservant, in slippers, shuffled down the stairs, and along the stone hall, and a minute later threw open the doors –
… And the truth was that Isidore and Rachel had sent out invitations for a surprise ball for that very night, and here were the first of the guests, Ottilie and Adèle, two such pretty girls, delicately holding their lacy handkerchiefs by the middle, letting the corners drop from a bent wrist, smilingly conscious of their blue and white brocade party-dresses, full skirts and short puffed sleeves, their hair festively arranged, with fringes of grass that hung down each side.
The grandparents, caught in their homely employments, rise in consternation, chairs pushed back, mouth and eyes open, full of welcome and hospitality – yes, but – but – these dresses? Ottilie, who was a little the older, apologises charmingly, shyly – they had not worn their very best silks because Isidore and Rachel had given them such short notice…. More ringing at the door, more and more guests! Anastasia, who unwittingly had assisted the conspirators, by keeping Grandmamma entertained and at her stories while the ballroom and buffet were being prepared, was now sent in a hurry, pirouetting and skipping with joy, to fetch Sigismund and Olga, Ludovic and Wili, and the culprits, Lena, Isidore, and Rachel. But it was unfair to blame Lena; she had disapproved; she told Babette so at once, whereat the old lady replied tartly that her brother Isidore was perfectly entitled to give parties whenever he wanted to, and that she liked plenty of young people in the house. And here were the musicians on the doorstep, in mufflers and mittens, carrying their heavy cases; here was the wine being carried up from the cellar. Isidore had seen to it all. More than thirty couples already swaying to the magic of Schubert and Strauss – that Johann of the ‘Blue Danube’. And Babette, suddenly young again, and secretly rejoicing, being scuffled into her black moiré with the lace fichu, fastened grandly by a brooch large enough to clasp pieces of hair belonging to Sigismund, Ludovic, Daniel, Andreas, Eugène, Lena, Albrecht, Grethe, Isidore, and Rachel, and of those four who had died…. A most overwhelming brooch, more treasured by her than even the signet ring which Napoleon had left her in recognition of those daily promenades with the five officers of his camp!
6
Four years later, and little Anastasia, who had twirled gaily with the rest, in her short skirts, curls flying, eyes a brilliant blue under that peculiar Rakonitz twist of eyebrow, was demanding her father’s consent to her marriage.
‘You are too young,’ thundered Sigismund, but without very much conviction, for the semi-Oriental idea still prevailed, that a maiden in her first bloom was a maiden ripe for marriage. Twenty-two and twenty-three were anxious ages; a daughter of twenty-four unmarried, and the parents became feverishly uneasy; twenty-five, and she was done for – on the shelf – without hope. But what really disturbed Sigismund, was that Anastasia should have dared to choose, instead of waiting until he should choose for her. And then, to face him herself! It was unheard of. Where were all the slow and formal preliminaries? Where was the young man’s father, with courteous approach, and careful enquiries as to settlements? Where, in fact, was the young man? Who, in fact, was the young man?
Then a shock awaited Sigismund. The young man’s father was playing dominoes at the coffee-house round the corner; it was his own brother Daniel. Anastasia and young Paul, first cousins, had fallen headlong in love.
Sigismund was a sensible man, but with a fierce and autocratic manner. His sense foresaw disaster in such a marriage, his autocratic manner forbade it, without deeming it necessary to give the reason. Anastasia, his eldest daughter, who at sixteen was confident, as she still would be at sixty, that she could manage her father, her grandparents, her uncle Daniel, the whole household, the whole clan, all the Czelovars and the Bettelheims, and Maria the cook into the bargain, Anastasia defied him. She was going to marry young Paul, even though he was her first cousin, whom she had only met once since he had been grown-up! … The girl was on her hands and knees, a blue cloth bound tightly round her head, polishing the parquet floor; the young man in his heavy travelling coat, just back from his counting-house in Egypt, stood in the doorway, his feet very much in the way of her brisk movements, hopelessly infatuated at first sight; suddenly she looked up; the two pairs of eyes are ridiculously alike, as they meet; and the two long obstinate chins; they might have been brother and sister …
‘How funny!’ mused Toni, coming across photographs, in the old family album, of Paul and Antasasia at about this stage, ‘to fall in love with somebody so awfully the same as oneself!’ …
Anastasia carried it through. It took her a year; and each scene she had with her father was like a crisis in Greek tragedy, so fierce and eloquent were the speeches, and so universally comprehending the past and the future of Rakonitz, reaching back three and four and five generations, and pointing warningly forward to Anastasia’s problematical grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Councils of the entire family were called; or, at least, of those branches still in Vienna. Anastasia’s mother should have raised her voice dramatically at these councils, but she had died two years ago; so that Sigismund might have pleaded with his daughter, had he not been too proud, that there was no one, if she went, to look after his household, and to look after his other children, Felix, Simone, Dietrich and Maximilian. Little Maximilian was a delicate child and always weeping, but I doubt if Anastasia would have stayed in her course for that; though when, seven years afterwards in Paris, Paul wanted to celebrate a stroke of financial luck by giving her a pearl necklace, she asked instead that Maximilian, as a present, should be allowed to come and live with them, at her expense, and be trained to enter Paul’s business; a proof that there was nothing hard and cold about Anastasia, nor anything lacking in sentimental devotion to her family. Nevertheless, she went her way, and nothing stopped her, not even disaster. So, to the wailing of her aunts, Gisela and Hermina Bettelheim, who had married Czelovars, uncle and nephew, she lengthened her skirts, rolled up her heavy dark mane into a sagging net between her shoulders, and announced her engagement.
In a year she was still Anastasia Rakonitz, but she was Paul’s wife, and so entitled to wear, at seventeen, a bonnet that would cover her back hair, and that was to be bought in Paris.
But, hearing that her beloved Anastasia was going to live in Paris, Babette decided, for Simon and herself, that they would give up their rooms in Sigismund’s house in Vienna, and go to Paris too, where Babette’s daughter Lena was already established, with her husband, Jules Dupont, and two children, Berthe and Rosalie. Except Albrecht, all Babette’s children were married by now, and zig-zagging about the world; Grethe, long ago, to Enrico Salsoni, of San Remo; Rachel, the youngest, had made a brilliant conquest on the very night of the surprise ball, and was now the Countess Yanoshaza, and had gone back down the Danube again, past Pressburg, where her father had been born, to the Castle Yanoshaza outside Buda-Pesth.
Simon was a simple, kind, good-tempered man, with a broad, jolly face, and as much ever-present admiration for his wife, Babette, as all five officers of her youthful romance could have had if compressed into one. He was looking forward, as eagerly as a child, to their residence in a different city, in a different country; though quite willing that Babette should travel ahead with old Maria, to meet Anastasia and Paul, and find a flat.
Cholera broke out in Vienna, and Simon was one of the victims.
7
Sigismund was now left alone in the house by the Danube, with his four remaining children. He was lonely, and all his relations said to him encouragingly: ‘Now, Sigi, you must look for another wife, who will be clever at managing those wild children of yours; who will look after little Max’s chest, and reprove Felix for pertness, and, above all things, keep prudent watch on Simone with the young men, for there will be a procession of husbands for her to choose from in three or four years from now.’ And then Sigismund remembered how, when Olga had still been alive, he had gone on a business trip to Trieste and Venice, and how the glass-manufacturer, Antonio Civrian, had taken him to dine at his little palazzo just above the Rialto, and had introduced him to his five lovely daughters…. He had thought even then, with a pang of regret, how exciting it would have been to have paid court to one of these; to have gone to his wedding in a gondola; and then to have brought her proudly home, and shown her to all the Rakonitz tribe in Vienna. But Olga had to be remembered; Olga was a worthy wife – the Bettelheims were all worthy wives. Sigismund shrugged his shoulders and went home. Now, urged to re-marry, he wondered whether, by a stroke of good luck, any of the Civrian daughters were still single and in their father’s house. He was not particular which daughter; he never thought of them apart, only as five, dark and shy and lovely; living where the water rose and fell on the doorstep with every tide from the Adriatic. He went back to Venice, and found only Clementina left, who was neither the youngest nor the eldest, but perhaps the most timid. She was quite ready to fall in love with this splendid autocratic Sigismund Rakonitz. His forty-five years were nothing to her, and she was delighted when she saw the four good-looking children, Felix, Simone, Dietrich and Maximilian. But it was not long before she herself became the child of the house, petted and bashful, and very much submerged by the Rakonitz will, which was like an overbearing torrent. Her own baby son, Louis, took after Sigismund as well, though with something of his quiet little mother’s sweetness. Her stepchildren were not sullen and rebellious, as is usual in tradition, just as she was by no means the cruel stepmother who tries to exalt her own child at the expense of the others. They used to tease her, and recall lively anecdotes about her absent-mindedness; their favourite story told how she went out one Saturday evening with her husband to the Graben; he very tall and upright and protective, and she a little dark thing with hesitating step, cuddled close against his arm. She could never get quite used to traffic that rattled on firm cobbles instead of gliding soundlessly along canals. He left her outside a tobacconist’s shop while he went in to make a purchase; presently he came out again; she tucked her hand beneath his elbow and trotted happily off beside him. Presently she said, wonderingly: ‘But, Sigi, why don’t you talk to me?’ … and there the adventure might fittingly have begun, of the little Venetian lady and the quite unknown gallant, tall as Sigismund, who had happened to be the first to come out of the tobacconist’s. But when Clementina suddenly realised with a gasp that she had paid a strange man the compliment of taking a walk with him, instead of with Sigismund, she dropped his arm and fled. ‘But what did he answer, Mamma, to make you notice that he wasn’t Papa? That is what you never tell us. Is it too dreadful to tell us? Felix, look, she is blushing!’ You can imagine Simone, her vivid face one flash of mischief, pursuing poor Clementina endlessly with this question. ‘I should have waited to see if he was elegant and amusing!’ Simone would assuredly have waited. At sixteen, and seventeen, and eighteen, she was the most beautiful coquette in Vienna; so spoilt as to be heedless of blame. When she sat in a chair and imperiously commanded her little cousin, Laura Czelovar, to brush out her red-gold hair, Laura would have to step back further and further, till she stood at the very end of the room. It was the hair of a princess of fairy-tale – the great shining wave and fall of it, touching the floor when Simone stood up, though she was tall and carried her head high. Romance follows red-gold hair; and at her first Industriellenball, when the Emperor and the Royal Family walked once in solemn procession through the rooms and then retire, she achieved the triumph of dancing with the Emperor’s younger brother, who lingered behind with the populace…. If this sounds incredibly the pretty-pretty story of the merchant’s daughter who married the prince, remember that in three ways it wandered from tradition: for Simone was not modest as such heroines almost always are; how could she be modest, when the very coachmen of those smart little fiacres that drove at such a careless pace through Vienna, used to beg her to give them the honour of driving her, for nothing, wherever she wanted to go? What courtiers even the coachmen were, of this fatal foolish nation of Austrians! There was style and finish and delicate compliment in the way they handed her in: ‘Küss die Hand, gnädiges Fräulein’ – then an agile spring on to the box, a flourish of the whip, a look of merry scorn directed towards the other fiacre drivers who had been too late with their offer, and away went the two horses, with ‘the beautiful Simone Rakonitz’ sitting behind, certainly more insolent and more arrogant than either Cinderella or Beauty or the Goose-Girl, whom her career might otherwise have resembled. But again a difference; Simone danced once with the Emperor’s younger brother, but he did not send round his herald in the morning; nor did he marry her. He merely succeeded, as her father said, in stuffing her head with silly ideas, so that she refused suitor after suitor, convinced that they were not good enough. When she was twenty-one and twenty-two, they began to get fewer; and at twenty-three the crowd had thinned so visibly that her aunts began to warn her that she might leave it too late, until there was no choice at all. But still Simone laughed, and looked contemptuous, and mocked the good men who, unlike the Emperor’s brother, were eager to marry her. At twenty-four and twenty-five she began to be secretly alarmed, although her red-gold hair was as wonderful as ever; and at twenty-seven, an old maid, and on the shelf, she suddenly grew impatient of waiting for the peerless parti; and with outward thankfulness, but sick with disappointment, she accepted, as her betrothed, Karl Czelovar, of the same generation as her father, and a very worthy man, with wrinkles; and all the aunts chattered in relief: ‘God be praised, I thought she had left it too late!’ … And this is not quite the end of the story of the beautiful Simone Rakonitz, whose red-gold hair touched the ground when she stood; for six years later, she lay dying of fever in her great canopied bed; the big specialist was called in; he said that nothing could be done, listened for a moment to her imperial ravings, and then he added simply: ‘But she is quite right; with that shining mantle, she is an Empress!’ From which we can guess what had been running on and on, always, in the dreaming part of Simone’s brain. She died … and there is a moral to all this, but we can leave it to her daughter, Haidée, and her granddaughter Val, to discover; and, if they wish it, to apply. I believe Haidée, also, left it too long; and as for Val, she did not bother whether she left it or not. They were neither of them as beautiful as Simone, but Iris, who was Anastasia’s youngest grandchild, was said, by crossways inheritance, to have the same red-gold hair.
8
In the year 1868, in Paris, Babette was sitting down, fair and square, eyes bright with curiosity, to her first meal of ham.
And this, though it came near the end of a series of adventures which began with five of Napoleon’s officers to the escort of one maiden, was no less adventure to Babette Rakonitz. At seventy-eight, the relish for romance and experience still oozed from her, young and fresh as resin from the pine in Spring! Anastasia and Paul, Lena, and Lena’s two daughters, Berthe and Rosalie, stood around her in solemn expectation, for this was an occasion. Babette had been, all her life, dutiful in religious observance. She had not been able to keep her children to it, and her grandchildren still less, but she herself had punctually gone to synagogue; had kept the Jewish feast-days; above all, she had never, never eaten food that had not been kosher killed and kosher prepared. Since they had come to Paris, and after the death of old Maria, the shopping had been entrusted to Françoise, who had now been in their service for nearly fourteen years; but it happened that Babette and Anastasia wanted suddenly to countermand an order, and had followed Françoise to market; unseen, they had watched her bargaining at the stalls; listened, and realised with horror that for nearly fourteen years she must have been bringing home and cooking for them unkosher food, putting the difference in price in her own pocket.
Babette took the blow with typical fortitude; she was damned, that was certain; she had broken the Law; she did not belong any more to those chosen and set apart. ‘Well, well,’ said Babette, philosophically, ‘at least I might as well try now the taste of this ham that you have all told me so much about!’
Babette ate a large plateful of ham, and pronounced it excellent.
She lived to enjoy ham for another year. If she had lived until 1870, she would have seen the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris, and, after that, London. One feels strongly that Babette and London would have liked each other. All the Rakonitz women were happiest in Cosmopolis. Imagination cannot easily picture them in a setting of brown ploughed field on a whipped grey morning after storm. Instead, spacious drawing-rooms, with parquet floor throwing back the glitter from the Venetian crystal candelabra, brocade hangings, and a polished grand-piano – these were more natural than nature to Babette and her descendants. They scattered from Vienna, certainly, but always to other big cities, capitals of the world; Paris, Budapest, Constantinople, Venice, London – Anastasia was the first Rakonitz in London. The doctor had told Paul that the siege would mean no milk for the five children, of whom Sophie was still a baby, and three of the other four, very delicate. Very delicate; highly-strung, and weak in morals…. Sigismund, who was still in Vienna, was the only person who might have frequently said ‘I told you so’ to that self-willed daughter who had insisted on marrying her first cousin. But even then, Anastasia was incapable of admitting it, even silently. What she did was right, and what went wrong with it was accident. Moreover, she was one of those lucky beings who did not fritter energy on regret or self-reproach or any futile form of might-have-been. Those were little twigs that catch some at the skirt and hamper the feet, but she swept them on with irresistible force.
