She was uneasy, perturbed to her last fibre. She wanted to remain clear, with
no touch on her. A wild instinct made her shrink away from any hands which
might be laid on her.
She was a foundling, probably of some gipsy race, brought up in a Roman
Catholic Rescue Home. A naïve, paganly religious being, she was attached to the
Baroness, with whom she had served for seven years, since she was fourteen.
She came into contact with no one, unless it were with Ida Hesse, the
governess. Ida was a calculating, good-natured, not very straightforward flirt.
She was the daughter of a poor country doctor. Having gradually come into
connection with Emilie, more an alliance than an attachment, she put no
distinction of grade between the two of them. They worked together, sang
together, walked together, and went together to the rooms of Franz Brand,
Ida’s sweetheart. There the three talked and laughed together, or the
women listened to Franz, who was a forester, playing on his violin.
In all this alliance there was no personal intimacy between the young women.
Emilie was naturally secluded in herself, of a reserved, native race. Ida used
her as a kind of weight to balance her own flighty movement. But the quick,
shifty governess, occupied always in her dealings with admirers, did all she
could to move the violent nature of Emilie towards some connection with men.
But the dark girl, primitive yet sensitive to a high degree, was fiercely
virgin. Her blood flamed with rage when the common soldiers made the long,
sucking, kissing noise behind her as she passed. She hated them for their
almost jeering offers. She was well protected by the Baroness.
And her contempt of the common men in general was ineffable. But she loved the
Baroness, and she revered the Baron, and she was at her ease when she was doing
something for the service of a gentleman. Her whole nature was at peace in the
service of real masters or mistresses. For her, a gentleman had some mystic
quality that left her free and proud in service. The common soldiers were
brutes, merely nothing. Her desire was to serve.
She held herself aloof. When, on Sunday afternoon, she had looked through the
windows of the Reichshalle in passing, and had seen the soldiers dancing with
the common girls, a cold revulsion and anger had possessed her. She could not
bear to see the soldiers taking off their belts and pulling open their tunics,
dancing with their shirts showing through the open, sagging tunic, their
movements gross, their faces transfigured and sweaty, their coarse hands
holding their coarse girls under the arm-pits, drawing the female up to their
breasts. She hated to see them clutched breast to breast, the legs of the men
moving grossly in the dance.
At evening, when she had been in the garden, and heard on the other side of the
hedge the sexual inarticulate cries of the girls in the embraces of the
soldiers, her anger had been too much for her, and she had cried, loud and
cold:
“What are you doing there, in the hedge?”
She would have had them whipped.
But Bachmann was not quite a common soldier. Fräulein Hesse had found out about
him, and had drawn him and Emilie together. For he was a handsome, blond youth,
erect and walking with a kind of pride, unconscious yet clear. Moreover, he
came of a rich farming stock, rich for many generations. His father was dead,
his mother controlled the moneys for the time being. But if Bachmann wanted a
hundred pounds at any moment, he could have them. By trade he, with one of his
brothers, was a waggon-builder. The family had the farming, smithy, and
waggon-building of their village. They worked because that was the form of life
they knew. If they had chosen, they could have lived independent upon their
means.
In this way, he was a gentleman in sensibility, though his intellect was not
developed. He could afford to pay freely for things. He had, moreover, his
native, fine breeding. Emilie wavered uncertainly before him. So he became her
sweetheart, and she hungered after him. But she was virgin, and shy, and needed
to be in subjection, because she was primitive and had no grasp on civilized
forms of living, nor on civilized purposes.
