The Man on Horseback/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
THE OLD WOMAN SPEAKS
Bertha left the room.
She had escaped without a scratch, and was off to dress for a dinner dance to be given that night by the bachelor officers of the Uhlans of the Guard, leaving her grandmother alone with Tom Graves, who had called, armed with a gigantic box of roses, violets, and orchids, to inquire after the health of the two ladies.
Old Mrs. Wedekind lay on the couch in her little boudoir furnished in a style different from the usual neo-German affair, crowded with ornaments that were no decorations, and with decorations that were no ornaments, with bulbous or angular monstrosities in wood or metal that were the fruit of some diseased artist brain from Berlin or Munich. The little octagonal, balconied room spoke of a former generation, both more gentle and more sophisticated. There was a simple rug of taupe and claret velvet, gray panelings of carved tulip wood, a lightly frivolous touch in the figures of women and tiny, paunchy cupids surrounded by love trophies which filled the angles of the cornices. There were some fine old enameled plates framed in dark green velvet, frail Tanagra statuettes and frailer tortoise-shell boxes; a mass of cushions covered with sumptuous Byzantine dalmatics, and a great Sèvres vase topped by a delicate, silvery spray of guelder roses.
Mrs. Wedekind was past eighty years of age and, besides Heinrich and Martin, she had given birth to four daughters all married to high ranking officials in the judiciary and all mothers of large families of their own. But she was still full of vitality, eagerly interested in what was going on in the world.
She smiled to herself as she lay there, studying Tom's open, boyish features with her shrewd, snapping old eyes that sparkled under bushy eyebrows, above which rose a high, wrinkled forehead negligently dusted with Rachel rice powder.
The daughter of a Westphalian nobleman, she had married Martin's father, a Bürgerlicher, a commoner, in the teeth of her family's aristocratic prejudices; and she still belonged to a former generation that had taken its cue from the best in Paris, that spoke French by preference, and German with a faintly French accent. The new Prussia rather bored her. To her it seemed too much flavored, as she expressed it, with kitchen, nursery, and sabers.
"New Prussia is frightfully bad form," she would say at times to her intimates, and even to her son Heinrich, who would invariably reply: "Yes, yes, liebe Mutter, but please keep your opinion to yourself. Don't forget …"
"I know," she would reply, with a malicious twinkle in her eyes, "you are in the army and my respected sons-in-law are Beamten, officials. And—honestly, Heinrich!—once in a while I forget that my father was a Baron von Sierstorpff, and then I feel a good deal of sympathy for the unwashed ruffians of the French revolution. Now that precious Emperor of yours …"
"Mother! Mother! You are speaking of the All-Gracious …"
"Fiddlesticks, Heinrich! The Barons of the house of Sierstorpff are a much older and a much better family than your Hohenzollern parvenus!"
In her youth she had been an enthusiastic horse-woman, riding both to stag and fox hounds, and she had told Tom how she admired his feat of that morning.
"You saved my life, young man," she said in her sharp, didactic old voice, and when Tom shook his head and mumbled something about it being not worth mentioning, she replied:
"I do not think my life is much to bother about either way. I am past the biblical limit—you see, as I am getting older, I try to believe in the Bible, so as to be on the safe side. But Bertha … There's a young life you saved …"
And then, quite suddenly, she looked straight at Tom Graves and went on:
"Young man, will you take the advice of an old woman who is not quite as blind as her children like to believe?"
"Sure." Tom was embarrassed.
"Very well, then. Leave Germany."
"Why, yes. I wasn't going to live here. I'm going back home, to Spokane."
"All right. Go. But don't dally. Leave just as soon as you can."
"But, Mrs. Wedekind!" Tom was both flustered and hurt. "I know I'm a free and easy sort of chap. I know that once in a while I say things I oughtn't, and do things that I …"
"It isn't that."
"Well—what is it?"
"Don't ask me for my reasons, young man. Do not quote me, either. I am telling you confidentially, because I like you, and because you have saved my life and Bertha's. Yet, if you should quote me, I shall simply deny that I ever said a single word to you on the subject. But take my advice!"
"But—why?"
She sat up on her couch, her fine old eyes sparkling with intelligence and with a motherly sympathy for the young horse wrangler.
"Mr. Graves," she said, "you are an honest man, a simple man, a clean man. All considered virtues in your native West, I have no doubt, and virtues once in this Germany of mine. But to-day honesty and simplicity are at a discount in Berlin. They are considered morganatic virtues, virtues on the left hand, to be sneered at, to be meanly pitied, purposely misunderstood. A simple man, a man of fine, square, old-fashioned ideals—ein echter Ehrenmann, as we say, rather, used to say in Germany—has no business here!"
And she dismissed Tom, who for the first time in his life, knowing neither why he did it nor how, bent over a woman's hand and raised it respectfully to his lips.