The Goldener Hirsch, sprawled along the lake-shore on the western arm of the Y, with its shoulder turned solidly to the remnant of old splendours on the castle mound, was in a curious state of suspension between village gasthaus and tourist hotel. To the huge traditional house, with its beetling eaves, strongly battered walls, built-on cattle-byres and carved wood verandahs, had been added a new wing in brick and stone, in an austere modern style that did not offend. Two Waldmeister daughters, still unmarried, and the wives of the three Waldmeister sons, continued to run the place with a couple of poor relations and almost no outside staff; but there was a smart little reception desk in the hall, with a smart little Austrian blonde in a mini-skirt seated behind it, darting like a humming-bird between her typewriter and adding machine on one side, and the telephone switchboard on the other.
It was already September, and the high season dwindles away very rapidly when August ends. Yes, she had a room and a smile for the unexpected Englishman who had made no reservation. But the woman who showed Francis up to his room wore the full, flowered skirt, embroidered apron and laced bodice of old custom, and had her mane of black hair coiled on her head in the old heavy bun, and to judge by the waft of warm milk and cattle-flesh that drifted from her skirt as she walked ahead of him up the scrubbed wooden stairs, she had just come in from the cows.
The first-floor corridor was wide enough for a carriage and pair, the door she flung open for him broad enough to admit them two abreast. All-white, high ceiling, spacious walls, huge billow of medium-weight autumn feather-bed on the creamy-white natural wood bedstead. He was in the old part of the house; so much the better. The window looked sidelong on a large, ebullient, untidy garden, and only a sliver of the lake winked in at him. No room in the world could have been more at peace.
‘The gentleman is English?’ His German had been hesitant, and in any case the unmistakable stamp is always there, for some reason. He owned to his Englishness; he might as well.
‘The room will do?’ Her voice was low, abrupt and vibrant, curiously personal in uttering impersonal things.
‘The room will do beautifully, thank you.’ He dropped his bag on the luggage-stand, and felt for the keys of the hired car in his pocket, and the loose change under them.
‘A moment! I will open the window.’ The scent of her as she passed near to him was like the wild air from outside, part beast, part garden, part earth, part late summer foliage ripening towards its decline. She turned her head suddenly as she passed, so close that her sleeve brushed his, and he saw her face full, olive-dark and olive-smooth, and the great, bold, sullen, inviting eyes for once wide-open and glowing. But the next moment she was looking round the room with the glow veiled, and the faint, dutiful frown back on her brow.
‘No towels. I will bring.’
She was, he realized, a very striking woman, her tall figure as lithe as an Amazon, her features good, her hair splendid. Until he had looked at her so closely he had failed to notice that there was a flaw, for her articulation was so clear that there seemed to be no malformation in her palate. Only that small, vicious botch put in to spoil the pattern and embitter her life; her upper lip was split like a hare’s. The effect was not even ugly, prejudice aside; but prejudice is never very far aside from the hare-lip in an otherwise handsome woman.
She came with the towels, and he took them from her at the door. Her fingers touched his in the act. He was sure then that it had not been by accident that her breast, braced high by the black bodice, had brushed his sleeve as he had stepped past her into the room on entering.
‘If you should need anything, please call for Friedl. I shall be working below. I shall hear.’
‘Thank you, Fraulein Friedl. I’ll remember.’
Her eyelids rolled back for an instant, and again uncovered, so briefly that he could believe in it or not, as he chose, the buried volcano. Probably she had not much hope, but as a gesture of defiance against the world she persevered and deployed what little she had.
‘You are Herr Waldmeister’s daughter?’
The hare-lip quivered in what was not quite a smile. ‘His niece,’ she said, and walked away along the great, scrubbed corridor with her long stride, and left him there. But the slow, swaying walk, the erect back, the beautifully balanced head with its sheaf of black hair, all were still quiveringly aware of him until the moment when she passed from sight.
So that was one of the amenities, and one that wouldn’t be in the brochure, nor, he thought, available to everyone. Some special kind of chemistry had elected him. One cast-away hailing another, perhaps, for company in a huge and trackless sea. One insomniac welcoming another in the long, lonely, sleepless night.
He washed, and went down into the bar. There were voices in the garden and boats on the lake. Across the shining water the windows of the Alte Post blinked languidly in the sun. There were still plenty of visitors to keep the natives looking like deliberate bits of folklore—which emphatically they were not—but in a couple of months the stone-weighted roofs, the beetling eaves, the logs stacked beneath the overhang ends-outwards, all up the courtyard walls, would no longer look like window-dressing, but a very practical part of the seriousness of living. Soon the stocky, old-gold cattle with their smoky faces would come clanging down from the high pastures to their home fields for the winter.
The scrubbed boards of the floors were almost white in the guest-rooms. It was early afternoon, the quietest hour of the day in the bar, but there were a couple of obvious French guests sipping coffee and kümmel in one corner, and a bearded mountain man with a litre pot before him was conducting a conversation with the woman behind the bar, clear across the width of the room in the booming bass-baritone of the uplands. The woman was middle-aged, grey-haired and solid as a wall, and could be no one but Frau Waldmeister.
Francis ordered an enzian, and went straight to the point. She heard him broach his business, smiling at him a benevolent, gold-toothed smile, but as soon as legal matters were mentioned she did exactly what he had expected her to do, and referred him to her man. That saved him from having to go through the whole mixture of fact and fiction twice, and got him installed in a quiet corner of the empty dining-room, across a table from the master of the house. Old Waldmeister was something over six feet tall, with shoulders on him like a cattle-yoke, and a wind-roughened leather face decorated with a long, drooping, brigand’s moustache. Courteous and impassive, he listened with no sign of surprise or suspicion at being suddenly asked to think back thirteen years.
‘Herr Waldmeister, my name is Killian. I am representing a firm of solicitors in England, who are looking for a certain young man. A relative of his family resident in New Zealand has left the residue of his small property to him. The dead man had been out of touch with his cousins in England for some years, and we find now that the legatee parted company with his parents some time ago, and they have no idea where he is at the moment. We have advertised for him without result, at least so far. We therefore began to make enquiries in the hope of tracing him. The last record we have of him, strangely enough, terminates here, in your hotel, thirteen years ago.’