'You don't mind admitting things now and again, do you?'
'Why pretend? People always know what you're concealing.'
She looked at him.
'What do you want out of life, young man?'
He shrugged his shoulders. Here again, he had to play things by ear.
'Nothing,' he said.
'Come now, come now, am I to believe that?'
'Yes, you can believe it. I am not ambitious. Do I look ambitious?'
'No, I will admit that.'
'I ask only to be amused, to live comfortably, to eat, to drink in moderation, to have friends who amuse me.'
The old woman leant forward. Her eyes snapped open and shut three or four times. Then she spoke in a rather different voice. It was like a whistling note.
'Can you hate? Are you capable of hating?'
'To hate is a waste of time.'
'I see. I see. There are no lines of discontent in your face. That is true enough. All the same, I think you are ready to take a certain path which will lead you to a certain place, and you will go along it smiling, as though you did not care, but all the same, in the end, if you find the right advisers, the right helpers, you might attain what you want, if you are capable of wanting.'
'As to that,' said Stafford Nye, 'who isn't?' He shook his head at her very gently. 'You see too much,' he said. 'Much too much.'
Footmen threw open a door.
'Dinner is served.'
The proceedings were properly formal. They had indeed almost a royal tinge about them. The big doors at the far end of the room were flung open, showing through to a brightly lighted ceremonial dining-room, with a painted ceiling and three enormous chandeliers. Two middle-aged women approached the Grдfin, one on either side. They wore evening dress, their grey hair was carefully piled on their heads, each wore a diamond brooch. To Sir Stafford Nye, all the same, they brought a faint flavour of wardresses. They were, he thought, not so much security guards as perhaps high-class nursing attendants in charge of the health, the toilet and other intimate details of the Grдfin Charlotte's existence. After respectful bows, each one of them slipped an arm below each shoulder and elbow of the sitting woman. With the ease of long practice aided by the effort which was obviously as much as she could make, they raised her to her feet in a dignified fashion.
'We will go in to dinner now,' said Charlotte .
With her two female attendants, she led the way. On her feet she looked even more a mass of wobbling jelly, yet she was still formidable. You could not dispose of her in your mind as just a fat old woman. She was somebody, knew she was somebody, intended to be somebody. Behind the three of them he and Renata followed.
As they entered through the portals of the dining-room, he felt it was almost more a banquet hall than a dining-room. There was a bodyguard here. Tall, fair-haired, handsome young men. They wore some kind of uniform. As Charlotte entered there was a clash as one and all drew their swords. They crossed them overhead to make a passageway and Charlotte , steadying herself, passed along that passageway, released by her attendants and making her progress toward a vast carved chair with gold fittings and upholstered in golden brocade at the head of the long table. It was like a wedding procession, Stafford Nye thought. A naval or military one. In this case surely, military, strictly military but lacking a bridegroom.
They were all young men of super physique, none of them, he thought, was older than thirty. They had good looks, their health was evident. They did not smile, they were entirely serious, they were — he thought of a word for it — yes, dedicated. Perhaps not so much a military procession as a religious one. The servitors appeared, old- fashioned servitors belonging, he thought, to the Schloss's past, to a time before the 1939 war. It was like a super production of a period historic play. And queening over it, sitting in the chair or the throne or whatever you liked to call it, at the head of the table, was not a queen or an empress but an old woman noticeable mainly for her avoirdupois weight and her extraordinary and intense ugliness. Who was she? What was she doing here? Why?
Why all this masquerade, why this bodyguard, a security bodyguard perhaps? Other diners came to the table. They bowed to the monstrosity on the presiding throne and took their places. They wore ordinary evening dress. No introductions were made.
Stafford Nye, after long years of sizing up people, assessed them. Different types. A great many different types. Lawyers, he was certain. Several lawyers. Possibly accountants or financiers; one or two army officers in plain clothes. They were of the Household, he thought, but they were also in the old-fashioned feudal sense of the term those who 'sat below the salt'.
Food came. A vast boar's head pickled in aspic, venison, a cool refreshing lemon sorbet, a magnificent edifice pastry — a super millefeuille that seemed of unbelievable confectionary richness.
The vast woman ate, ate greedily, hungrily, enjoying her food. From outside came a new sound. The sound r of a powerful engine of a super sports car. It passed the hall in a white flash. There came a cry inside the room from the bodyguard. A great cry of 'Heil! Heil! Heil Franz!' The bodyguard of young men moved with the ease of military manoeuvre known by heart. Everyone had risen to their feet. Only the old woman sat without moving, her head lifted high, on her dais. And, so Stafford Nye thought, a new excitement now permeated the room.
The other guests, or the other members of the horseshoe, whatever they were, disappeared in a way that somehow reminded Stafford of lizards disappearing into the cracks of the wall. The golden-haired boys formed a new figure, their swords flew out, they saluted their patroness, she bowed her head in acknowledgment, their swords were sheathed and they turned, permission given, to march out through the door of the room. Her eyes followed them, then went first to Renata, and then to Stafford Nye.
'What do you think of them?' she said. 'My boys, my youth corps, my children. Yes, my children. Have you a word that can describe them?'
'I think so,' said Stafford Nye. 'Magnificent.' He spoke to her as to Royalty. 'Magnificent, ma'am.'
'Ah!' She bowed her head. She smiled, the wrinkles multiplying all over her face. It made her look exactly like a crocodile.
A terrible woman, he thought, a terrible woman, impossible, dramatic. Was any of this happening? He couldn't believe it was. What could this be but yet another festival in which a production was being given.
The doors clashed open again. The yellow-haired band of the young supermen marched as before through it. This time they did not wield swords, instead they sang. Sang with unusual beauty of tone and voice.
After a good many years of pop music Stafford Nye felt incredulous pleasure. Trained voices, these. Not raucous shouting. Trained by masters of the singing art. Not allowed to strain their vocal cords, to be off key. They might be the new Heroes of a New World , but what they sang was not new music. It was music he had heard before. An arrangement of the Preislied, there must be a concealed orchestra somewhere, he thought, in a gallery round the top of the room. It was an arrangement or adaptation of various Wagnerian themes. It passed from the Preislied to the distant echoes of the Rhine music.
The Elite Corps made once more a double lane where everybody was expected to make an entrance. It was not the old Empress this time. She sat on her dais awaiting whoever was coming.
And at last he came. The music changed as he came. It was a motif which by now Stafford Nye had got by heart. The melody of the Young Siegfried. Siegfried's horn in all its glory and its triumph, its mastery of a world in which the young Siegfried came through the doorway, marching up between the lines to conquer.
Out of what were clearly his followers, came one of the handsomest young men Stafford Nye had ever seen. Golden-haired, blue-eyed, perfectly proportioned, conjured up as it were by the wave of a magician's wand, he came forth out of the world of myth. Myth, heroes, resurrection, rebirth, it was all there. His beauty, his strength, his incredible assurance and arrogance.
He strode through the double lines of his bodyguard until he stood before the hideous mountain of womanhood that sat there on her throne; he knelt on one knee, pressed her hand to his lips, and then rising to his feet, he threw up one arm in salutation and uttered the cry that Stafford Nye had heard from the others. 'Heil!' His German was not very clear, but Stafford Nye thought he distinguished the syllables 'Heil to the great mother!'
Then the handsome young hero looked from one side to the other. There was some faint recognition, though
