up the stairs, deciding that we shall have to dine in our room. Knowing what a gossip Princess Poliakoff is I hope that her talk of me will create a useful smokescreen. I am somewhat surprised at how cunning I have become since I began my affair with Alexandra. I pass the two bridge-playing gentlemen as they emerge from the toilet. 'This raising of an army hasn't perturbed him much,' one says. 'But I gather he found the desertion of about half the garrison something of a shock.They say he's at his hunting lodge now, with those mechanical models of his. The business will be bloodless if it comes off at all. Holzhammer isn't a bad sort. And he'll keep taxes down.' The significance of the conversation escapes me. I reach the blue door and knock before I enter. Therese and Alexandra lie in each others' arms, smiling and giggling. Both look thoroughly dissolute, with their hair wet and scratch-marks on their bodies. 'And how have you enjoyed yourselves?' I chuckle, glad that they are happy and that Alexandra is no longer in her original mood.
Papadakis brings me a cup of tea. 'And will you eat something now?' he asks. 'Perhaps some Camembert,' I tell him. 'And something blue and soft. Something tasty. What have we?' He strokes at his beard with his finger and thumb. 'There's a little Cambozola. You used to enjoy that.' I nod at him. 'Excellent. And a glass of red wine.' He purses his lips. 'Wine? It will kill you!' I put down my pen. 'I am better now. Can't you see that? Some red wine.' He shakes his head. He is becoming surly again. 'Not according to the doctor. But I will bring it if you want it.' He leaves. Alexandra, Therese and I dine off smoked salmon and cold duck in our room. The two girls manufacture secrets and I pretend to be intrigued, to please them. Later we shall make love again, playing games with considerable zest and good humour. Then, at about three in the morning, Alexandra and I will order a cab and leave the brothel, promising to see Therese the next evening.
Papadakis takes the limousine to town. He likes, I know, to pretend that it is his because it gives him stature with the local peasants. Papadakis says he understands peasants and how they think. He hates them, he says. But his information about them is useful to me and gives me a greater knowledge of his attitudes. He is supposed to get me some patent medicine containing a stimulant but he will quite likely forget; most of the time he thinks only of himself, living in a dream of an unsatisfactory past and an unattainable future. Sometimes across his face comes the enthusiastic expression of a boy, a memory of his former charm. Pyat, the famous confidence trickster, had a similar appearance when I met him at Cassis with Stavisky in the mid-twenties. I have told him it is his duty to care for me when I am ill. He will sometimes reply it is the doctor's job. He was hired, after all, to be my secretary. The fact was I took pity on him. I offered him his last chance and he accepted it. Now he wriggles to be free, but there is nowhere for him to go. And he brings me my soup and fish and he changes my linen when the old woman is too drunk to do it. The pain has come back in my groin. Is Alexandra a mirror? Is the ugliness I believe I detect in her simply a reflection of my own? Since I was sixteen women have told me that I must change. I have always said to them that I am too old to change. If they do not like me as I am then they have the right to find someone they prefer. But I think I am changing for Alexandra and that is perhaps why I am occasionally frightened. I tell everyone that I am in love with feminine beauty in all its aspects. The fact is I become bored in the company of women who have no sexual presence, no matter how intelligent they niay be. I think I dislike such women because their condition indicates their own fear of themselves and consequently of the world around them. I have known many women who express the same impatience with non-sexual men. Sexuality is the key to personality. She undresses. She removes the rose silk frock, ie delicate chemise; she rolls down her stockings and puts them carefully on the back of the chair. She has a habit of slipping her garters over her wrist while she removes the rest of her underwear, then, holding them in her right hand, she will go into the bathroom and set them on the ledge in front of the mirror. If they are a pair she particularly cares for she will give them a little parting kiss. I say it is too late to bathe, we should go to sleep at once, but she insists. While she is in the bath I fall asleep. I awake briefly at dawn. My blood has quickened. I begin to anticipate what we shall do together later. I turn, thinking she is still bathing, but she is fast asleep with her back to me, the sheets pulled tightly about her as if she fears something. Can she fear me? Will she come to resent me? Asleep, with her face in repose, she sometimes resembles a baby. At other times, when she is snoring and her mouth is open she reminds me of a dead rodent. I wonder if that is really all she is when she is not responding to me: a tiny unimportant predator. But when she wakes her eyes destroy my prejudice. Did her eyes always possess that strange, heated glaze? I remember how she had seemed so innocent when we first met. The prospect of making love to a virgin had driven all caution away within a few minutes. Then, I think, the expression had been there, but hidden. She had only glanced at me directly once and her eyes had told me of her desire for me. Is she a natural predator? She says she loves me, but that is meaningless. She loves what she thinks I must be, what she thinks I possess, and she lusts after my cock. She is doubtless surprised, also, that she can achieve control over others through her sexuality. Unless she is an unusual female she will continue to use her sex as her only certain means to power. She will have no notion of any other way to get what she will want for herself. Even if other ways are described to her she will not quite understand what is said, for her chief experience will have been of sexual control coupled, perhaps, with certain practical services given to the one who desires her. Her will to power, which she has in common with everyone, if satisfied only through sex could ultimately leave her empty of feeling and therefore could destroy any ordinary capacity to know desire, causing her to pass from lover to lover in a perpetual cycle of lust to dissatisfaction. As I fall back to sleep I wonder if I have created a whore. More likely, I think with grim amusement, a monster which will turn on me and take my soul. I do not believe I possess the character of a natural whore-master. I am not strong enough to control her. And this is the knowledge which sometimes excites me and brings flagging senses back to peak again. These are the thoughts of my infrequent solitude. When she is awake I scarcely think at all but remain perpetually fascinated, perpetually on guard, like the tamer with his tigress. We breakfast late in the sitting room. She pours coffee for us both. The light is pale, slanting into our windows from misty skies. The air is cooler today. She sits in her maroon dressing gown, wonderfully composed, seeming thoroughly rested. She makes no reference to the previous night's adventure. Indeed, she seems healthier, younger, more cheerful, than she has seemed for some while. I compliment her on her good humour and her freshness as I light a cigarette. 'I have never felt more alive in all my days!' she says. 'My body is waking up. It never stops now. It wakes and wakes and wakes.' Her smile is spontaneous and beautiful. She says: 'Are you looking forward to this evening?' I am surprised. 'Yes.' I expected her to have doubts. She sits back in her chair in a posture of contentment. She looks towards the window. 'Isn't it wonderful outside?' I smoke my cigarette and stare carefully at her. Her courage, I believe, is the courage of ignorance. But whatever its nature it transmits itself to me. 'You enjoyed Therese?' I ask.
'Well enough,' she says. 'I have had better. Younger and without any experience. I think I should like a different girl after this evening. There are things Therese told me. Girls with special skills, apparently.' I nod: 'Oh, yes.' She takes my hand and kisses it. 'Could any woman possess a finer teacher? I want to experience everything you have experienced. I want us to be together when we discover new things.' I love the softness of her lips on my wrist, the way her slender body curves in the gown. 'There could be experiences you will not enjoy,' I tell her. 'Of course,' she says, 'but then I will know what they are.' I laugh. 'You are too fond of the novels of Huysmanns and de Goncourt. The critics are right about them. They have a pernicious influence!' I am, in my fashion, expressing my hesitation. This is the moment when I could call a halt to the adventure. But of course my curiosity overwhelms me. I acquiesce. She becomes suddenly active and begins to clothe herself. We take a drive in the afternoon, she in her cream frock trimmed with broderie anglaise and a hat with a thick veil, I in my tweeds. I shade my face with a wide-brimmed hat. After a little while I begin to notice that the tempo of Mirenburg is subtly different. There are many more soldiers in the streets today. Carriages hurry past us on their way to the station. An unusual number of people are leaving the city. I tell our driver to stop in Falfnersallee and send him to buy a paper from one of the kiosks. He says: 'It is the war, your honour. The Civil War. Hadn't you heard?' Alexandra looks with some impatience at the newspaper as if at a passing rival. Count Holzhammer has half the country on his side, including a good proportion of the Army. He has issued a proclamation demanding the abdication of Prince Badehoff-Krasny and the dissolution of Parliament. He argues that the new Armaments Bill will ruin Waldenstein. He claims the Prince has deliberately set himself against the will of the majority of the people and that he is in the power of a handful of alien industrialists. Count Holzhammer is financed with Austrian money, of course, and his ranks are swelled by Bulgarian cavalry and artillery loaned by Austria but calling themselves Volunteers. The newspaper wonders if the Germans will now send aid to the Prince. So far there has been no response from Berlin. Count Holzhammer has his headquarters in an armoured train. His forces have won a battle at Brondstein. The loyalists have regrouped near Mirenburg. Count Holzhammer awaits a response to his demands. His train is some seventy miles down the line, at Slitzcern. The paper believes the Prince will refuse the Count's demands. Mirenburg has never been taken by siege, says the editorial, in all its long history. During the Thirty Years War she successfully
