the herr regierungsrat was not at first sight prepossessing. he was approaching fifty, and had gone stout and rather loose, as so many men of his class and race do. then he wore one of those dreadful full-bottom coats, a kind of poor relation to our full-skirted frock-coat: it would best be described as a family coat. it flapped about him as he walked, and he looked at first glance lower middle class.
but he wasn’t. of course, being in office in the collapsed austria, he was a republican. but by nature he was a monarchist, nay, an imperialist, as every true austrian is. and he was a true austrian. and as such he was much finer and subtler than he looked. as one got used to him, his rather fat face, with its fine nose and slightly bitter, pursed mouth, came to have a resemblance to the busts of some of the late roman emperors. and as one was with him, one came gradually to realize that out of all his baggy bourgeois appearance came something of a grand geste. he could not help it. there was something sweeping and careless about his soul: big, rather assertive, and ill-bred-seeming; but, in fact, not ill-bred at all, only a little bitter and a good deal indifferent to his surroundings. he looked at first sight so common and parvenu. and then one had to realize that he was a member of a big, old empire, fallen into a sort of epicureanism, and a little bitter. there was no littleness, no meanness, and no real coarseness. but he was a great talker, and relentless towards his audience.
hannele was attracted to him by his talk. he began as soon as dinner appeared: and he went on, carrying the decanter and the wine-glass with him out on to the balcony of the villa, over the lake, on and on until midnight. the summer night was still and warm: the lake lay deep and full, and the old town twinkled away across. there was the faintest tang of snow in the air, from the great glacier-peaks that were hidden in the night opposite. sometimes a boat with a lantern twanged a guitar. the clematis flowers were quite black, like leaves, dangling from the terrace.
it was so beautiful, there in the very heart of the tyrol. the hotels glittered with lights: electric light was still cheap. there seemed a fullness and a loveliness in the night. and yet for some reason it was all terrible and devastating: the life-spirit seemed to be squirming, bleeding all the time.
and on and on talked the herr regierungsrat, with all the witty volubility of the more versatile austrian. he was really very witty, very human, and with a touch of salty cynicism that reminded one of a real old roman of the empire. that subtle stoicism, that unsentimental epicureanism, that kind of reckless hopelessness, of course, fascinated the women. and particularly hannele. he talked on and on — about his work before the war, when he held an important post and was one of the governing class — then about the war — then about the hopelessness of the present: and in it all there seemed a bigness, a carelessness based on indifference and hopelessness that laughed at its very self. the real old austria had always fascinated hannele. as represented in the witty, bitter-indifferent herr regierungsrat it carried her away.
and he, of course, turned instinctively to her, talking in his rapid, ceaseless fashion, with a laugh and a pause to drink and a new start taken. she liked the sound of his austrian speech: its racy carelessness, its salty indifference to standards of correctness. oh yes, here was the grand geste still lingering.
he turned his large breast towards her, and made a quick gesture with his fat, well-shapen hand, blurted out another subtle, rough-seeming romance, pursed his mouth, and emptied his glass once more. then he looked at his half-forgotten cigar and started again.
there was something almost boyish and impulsive about him: the way he turned to her, and the odd way he seemed to open his big breast to her. and again he seemed almost eternal, sitting there in his chair with knees planted apart. it was as if he would never rise again, but would remain sitting for ever, and talking. he seemed as if he had no legs, save to sit with. as if to stand on his feet and walk would not be natural to him.
yet he rose at last, and kissed her hand with the grand gesture that france or germany have never acquired: carelessness, profound indifference to other people’s standards, and then such a sudden stillness, as he bent and kissed her hand. of course she felt a queen in exile.
and perhaps it is more dangerous to feel yourself a queen in exile than a queen in situ. she fell in love with him, with this large, stout, loose widower of fifty, with two children. he had no money except some austrian money that was worth nothing outside austria. he could not even go to germany. there he was, fixed in this hollow in the middle of the tyrol.
but he had an ambition still, old roman of the decadence that he was. he had year by year and without making any fuss collected the material for a very minute and thorough history of his own district: the chiemgau and the pinzgau. hannele found that his fund of information on this subject was inexhaustible, and his intelligence was so delicate, so human, and his scope seemed so wide, that she felt a touch of reverence for him. he wanted to write this history. and she wanted to help him.
for, of course, as things were he would never write it. he was regierungsrat: that is, he was the petty local governor of his town and immediate district. the amthaus was a great old building, and there young ladies in high heels flirted among masses of papers with bare-kneed young gentlemen in tyrolese costume, and occasionally they parted to take a pleasant, interesting attitude and write a word or two, after which they fluttered together for a little more interesting diversion. it was extraordinary how many finely built, handsome young people of an age fitted for nothing but love-affairs ran the governmental business of this department. and the herr regierungsrat sailed in and out of the big, old room, his wide coat flying like wings and making the papers flutter, his rather wine-reddened, old-roman face smiling with its bitter look. and of course it was a witticism he uttered first, even if hungary was invading the frontier or cholera was in vienna.
when he was on his legs, he walked nimbly, briskly, and his coat-bottoms always flew. so he waved through the town, greeting somebody at every few strides and grinning, and yet with a certain haughty reserve. oh yes, there was a certain salty hauteur about him which made the people trust him. and he spoke the vernacular so racily.
hannele felt she would like to marry him. she would like to be near him. she would like him to write his history. she would like him to make her feel a queen in exile. no one had ever quite kissed her hand as he kissed it: with that sudden stillness and strange, chivalric abandon of himself. how he would abandon himself to her! — terribly — wonderfully — perhaps a little horribly. his wife, whom he had married late, had died after seven years of marriage. hannele could understand that too. one or the other must die.
she became engaged. but something made her hesitate before marriage. being in austria was like being on a wrecked ship that must sink after a certain short length of time. and marrying the herr regierungsrat was like marrying the doomed captain of the doomed ship. the sense of fatality was part of the attraction.
and yet she hesitated. the summer weeks passed. the strangers flooded in and crowded the town, and ate up the food like locusts. people no longer counted the paper money, they weighed it by the kilogram. peasants stored it in a corner of the meal-bin, and mice came and chewed holes in it. nobody knew where the next lot of food was going to come from: yet it always came. and the lake teemed with bathers. when the captain arrived he looked with amazement on the crowds of strapping, powerful fellows who bathed all day long, magnificent blond flesh of men and women. no wonder the old romans stood in astonishment before the huge blond limbs of the savage germana.
well, the life was like a madness. the hotels charged fifteen hundred kronen a day: the women, old and young, paraded in the peasant costume, in flowery cotton dresses with gaudy, expensive silk aprons: the men wore the tyrolese costume, bare knees and little short jackets. and for the men, the correct thing was to have the leathern hose and the blue linen jacket as old as possible. if you had a hole in your leathern seat, so much the better.
everything so physical. such magnificent naked limbs and naked bodies, and in the streets, in the hotels, everywhere, bare, white arms of women and bare, brown, powerful knees and thighs of men. the sense of flesh everywhere, and the endless ache of flesh. even in the peasants who rowed across the lake, standing and rowing with a slow, heavy, gondolier motion at the one curved oar, there was the same endless ache of physical yearning.
