Flight Without End

XIV

After the war George married his cousin.

He married his cousin from lack of imagination, because it was convenient, because it was expected of him, out of good manners and friendly conciliation, and also for practical reasons — for she was the rich daughter of a rich landed proprietor. Only a man lacking in imagination could have married her, for she was one of those women who are labelled ‘good friends’, who give a man support rather than love. They can be turned to good use by anyone who happens to be a mountaineer or a cyclist or a circus acrobat or even a cripple in a wheelchair. But what a normal man is to make of them I have always failed to understand.

Klara — I find the very name revealing — was a good friend. Her hand resembled her name; it was so simple, so healthy, so trustworthy, so dependable, so honest, that it lacked only calluses; it was the hand of a gymnastics instructor. Whenever she had to greet a man, Klara feared that he might kiss her hand. So she developed the habit of giving a quite special handshake, a stout and resolute handshake which depressed a man’s entire forearm — the handshake in itself was a gymnastic exercise from which one emerged invigorated. In Germany and England, in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, in many Protestant countries, there are women who clasp a man’s hand in this fashion. It is a demonstration in favour of equal rights for the sexes and of hygiene, it is an important aspect of humanity’s battle against germs and gallantry.

Klara’s legs were matter-of-fact straight legs, legs for hiking, in no sense instruments of love — rather of sport, without calves. It seemed an indefensible luxury that they were sheathed in silk stockings. Somewhere she must have had knees — I always used to imagine that somewhere they must merge into thighs; it would hardly be possible for stockings to grow into panties just like that. But so it was, and Klara was no creature of love. True, she had something resembling a bosom, but it served only as a container for her practical goodness; whether it held a heart, who can tell?

My conscience is not very clear over this description of Klara. For it seems to me sinful to judge one of the most virtuous persons I have ever met principally on the grounds of her secondary sexual characteristics. It goes without saying that she was virtuous; what else could she be? She had a child, naturally by her own husband, the conductor — and although it is in no way a sin but, on the contrary, a virtue to have children by one’s own husband, Klara’s legitimate honourable pregnancy seemed like an escapade, and when she suckled the child it was like the eighth wonder, anomalous and sinful at the same time.

Moreover, the child — it was a girl — could ride a bicycle in her fourth year.

Klara had acquired and inherited her social sense from her father, the rich landed proprietor. Social sense is a luxury which the rich allow themselves and which has the further practical advantage of serving, to some extent, to maintain property. Her father loved to drink a little glass of wine with his head forester, to take a brandy with the forester, and to exchange a word with the assistant forester. Even social sense is able to make subtle distinctions. He would never allow any of his servants to pull on his boots, he used a bootjack out of common decency. His children had to wash in snow in the winter, travel the long road to school alone, climb up to their pitch-dark rooms at eight o’clock and make their own beds. Nowhere in the neighbourhood were domestic servants better treated. Klara had to iron her vests with her own hands. In short, the old man was a man of principle and fibre, a virtuous landowner, a living defence against socialism, respected far and wide and elected to the Reichstag, where he demonstrated as a member of a conservative party that reaction and humanity are not irreconcilable opposites.

He attended Klara’s wedding, behaved well to the conductor, and died some weeks later without ever having allowed his expression to betray that he would have preferred a landowner: humanity to the grave.