“I suppose the focus is wherever the most important person is,” said Francis. “When the Countess is here, she is obviously the focus. Now—you ought to know these things, as an intimate of Düsterstein: I understand that for Christmas we are to entertain a Prince Max—will he be the focus? Or does the Countess always top the heap in her own castle?”
“Prince Max will be the focus,” said Miss Nibsmith, “but not just because of his rank. He is quite the bounciest man I have ever met, and his laugh and his chatter make him the centre wherever he is. The Countess adores him.”
“A relative?” said Francis.
“A cousin—not the nearest sort. A Hohenzollern, but poor. Poor, that is, for a prince. But Maxi is not one to repine and blame Fortune. No, no; he stirs his stumps and deals extensively in wine, and he gets rid of a lot of it in England and especially in the States. Maxi is what our Victorian ancestors would have called a smooth file. He will be the focus, you will see. The hot air from Prince Max will keep us all warm, and perhaps uncomfortably hot.”
What did Miss Nibsmith do with herself all day? Francis made a polite inquiry.
“I write letters for the Countess in French, English, and German. At the moment I keep an eye on the business. I type quite well. I give lessons to Amalie, chiefly in history; she reads a lot and we talk. History is my thing. My Cambridge degree is in history. I’m a Girton girl. If I have any spare time I work on my own notes, which might be a book some day.”
“A book? About what?”
“You’ll laugh. Or no, I think you have too much intelligence to laugh. Anybody who works with Tancred Saraceni must be used to odd ventures. I’m making a study of astrology in Bavaria, particularly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What do you make of that?”
“I don’t make anything of it. Tell me about it.”
“Astrology is part of the science of the past, and of course the science of the present has no place for it, because it is rooted in a discredited notion of the universe, and puts forward a lot of Neo-Platonic ideas that don’t make much sense—until you live with them for a while.”
“Does that remark mean that you believe in astrology yourself?”
“Not as hard-boiled science, certainly. But as psychology—that’s quite another thing. Astrology is based on a notion nobody wants to accept in our wonderfully reasonable Western World, which is that the position of the stars at the moment of your birth governs your life. ‘As above, so below’ is the principle in a nutshell. Utterly dotty, obviously. Lots of people must be born under the same arrangement of stars, and they don’t have similar fates. Of course, it’s necessary to take careful heed of precisely where you were born, and that varies greatly, so far as the stars are concerned. But anyhow, if the astrologer has your date, and time, and place of birth he can cast a horoscope, which can sometimes be quite useful—sometimes no good at all.”
“You sound as if you half believe it, Ruth.”
“Half yes: half not. But it’s rather like the I Ching. Your intuition has to work as well as your reason, and in astrology it’s the intuition of the astrologer that does the trick.”
“Are you strongly intuitive?”
“Well, Girton girl though I am, I have to say yes, against what my reason tells me. Anyhow, what I’m studying is how widespread and how influential astrology was in this part of the world at the time of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, when most people here were fierce Catholics and were supposed to leave all spiritual things—and that meant all psychological things as well—to the Church, which of course knew best, and would see you through if you were a good child. But lots of people didn’t want to be good children. They couldn’t fight down the pull of whatever was in the depths of their being; couldn’t fight it down and couldn’t channel it into being a contemplative, or whatever the Church approved. So they sought out astrologers, and the astrologers were usually in hot water with the Church. Very much like our modern world, where we are supposed to leave everything to science, even when science is something as spook-ridden as psychoanalysis. But people don’t. Astrology is very big business in the extraverted, science-ridden U.S.A., for instance. The Yanks are always whooping it up for Free Will, and every man’s fate being his own creation, and all that, but they’re just as superstitious as the Romans ever were.”
“Well! You’re a funny historian, Ruth.”
“Yes I am, aren’t I?”
“But as a wise man I know—or knew, for the poor fellow is dead now—used to say. Life’s a rum start.”
“The very rummest. Like this room, in a way. Here we are, cosy as can be, even if we have no focus. What makes us so snug?”
“The stove, obviously.”
“Yes, but have you never thought what makes the stove so warm?”
“I’ve wondered—yes. How is it fed?”
“That’s one of the interesting things about these old castles. Dividing all the main rooms are terribly narrow passages—not more than eighteen inches wide, some of them, and as dark as night—and through those corridors creep servants in soft slippers who poke firewood into these stoves from the back. Unseen by us, and usually unheard. We don’t give them a thought, but they are there, and they keep life in winter from being intolerable. Do they listen to us? I’ll bet they do. They keep us warm, they are necessary to us, and they probably know a lot more about us than we would consider comfortable. They are the hidden life of the house.”
“A spooky idea.”
“The whole Universe is a spooky idea. And in every life there are these unseen people and—not people exactly—who keep us warm.—Have you ever had your horoscope cast?”
“Oh, as a boy I sent away money for a horoscope from some company in the States that advertised them in a boys’ magazine. Awful rubbish, illiterate and printed on the worst kind of paper. And at Oxford a Bulgarian chap I met insisted on casting a horoscope for me, and it was blatantly obvious that what he found in the stars was pretty much what he wanted me to do, which was join some half-assed Communist spy outfit he thought he commanded. Not a very deep look into astrology, I am sure you would say.”
“No, though the Bulgarian one has a familiar ring. Lots of horoscopes used to be cast that way, and still are, obviously. But I’ll do one for you, if you like. The genuine article, no punches pulled. Interested?”
“Of course. Who can resist anything so flattering to the ego?”
“Dead right. That’s another element. A horoscope means somebody is really paying attention to you, and that is rarer than you might think. Where, and when, were you born?”
“September 12, apparently at seven o’clock in the morning, in 1909.”
“And where?”
“A place called Blairlogie, in Canada.”
“Sounds like the Jumping-Off Place. I shall have to consult the gazetteer to get the exact position. Because the stars over Blairlogie weren’t precisely like the stars over anywhere else.”
“Yes, but suppose somebody else had been born at just that moment, in Blairlogie, wouldn’t he be my twin, in all matters of Fate?”
“No. And now I shall let the cat out of the bag. This is what separates me from your boys’-paper fraud, and your Bulgarian Commie fraud. This is my great historical discovery that the real astrologers guarded with their lives, and if you breathe it to anybody before my book comes out, I shall hunt you down and kill you very imaginatively. When were you conceived?”
“God, how would I know? In Blairlogie; I’m sure of that.”