Ruth looked away stubbornly. She hadn’t come here to be lectured.
“Don’t you think that sometimes you spoil Wanda just a little too much?” Marie remarked.
“And what if I do?” Ruth shot back. “Would that be so bad?” She didn’t wait for an answer but carried on, “Look at her, the little treasure! You can’t compare Wanda to other babies. She’s something special, and she deserves the very best!”
By the time Ruth left that evening, Johanna agreed that if they could leave earlier than she’d planned they could head to Sonneberg together the next morning.
4
As Strobel’s coach drew closer to Sonneberg, his mood grew darker. For the first time, he felt not the least twinge of anticipation at the thought of returning to Sonneberg and his shop. As he gazed fixedly out the window at the pine forests rolling past, he felt stifled. A heavy stench of old sweat hung in the interior of the coach, which he had been forced to take when his train was cancelled due to work on the line.
A backwater. Nothing but a backwater.
The thought of having to spend weeks on end in this dreary wilderness before he could even think of taking another trip to B. was more than he could bear.
He shut his eyes and let his mind drift to the time he had just spent there. That was life at its fullest! He had felt every sinew in his body.
It had been a special visit, meant to celebrate the end of the renovations. The Countess P. had found just the right words for it: “Let us celebrate the resurrection of a temple of delight.” Count Z. had even compared it to a palace. Well, really . . . a slight exaggeration perhaps. But the designs had indeed lived up to all their promises. His money had been well invested. They had made something truly extraordinary.
The décor alone would have justified the expense: black and red everywhere, with great swaths of velvet, even more silk, and plain tough leather for contrast. Beyond that, there was music, champagne, and, above all, a select circle of kindred spirits. All this was reserved for a chosen few.
Strobel sat up straight. Money couldn’t buy everything, even if some people believed that it could. No, those who had a key to this temple of delight had the utmost refinement and education. Doctors, lawyers, city fathers, and heirs to great commercial fortunes—the highest of society—all with one thing in common: a strict upbringing in which rigor and discipline had been prized above all else. The capacity to abase oneself, to accept punishment—or, in turn, to show harshness and punish the submissive for their faults—this had to be learned from early childhood if it were later to be celebrated as art.
Strobel’s gaze was fixed now on the bench opposite. There was a long rip in the shabby imitation leather, and the brown stuffing that burst out smelled moldy. He traced the ragged edge of the rip with his finger. The material left a sharp, white line on his skin where it scratched him, but Strobel felt nothing.
Now the memory of these delights would have to last him for a while to come. No thrilling pleasures awaited him in Sonneberg. Consultations with clients. Keeping the accounts. Bargaining down the glassblowers and doll-makers—that would be his daily bread. There would be no more fine dinners, but instead, hasty meals, taken with no one but Johanna. Hardly an appealing prospect. To put it bluntly, what did she have to offer him? Pitiably little, even though he had spent more than a year now striving to broaden her horizons and open her eyes to life’s pleasures. Granted, she listened to what he had to say and occasionally made a mocking retort as was her habit—a habit that had once given him hope that she might develop as a more astute and assertive conversationalist—but deep down she was nothing but a country girl. Instead of keeping pace with his flights of fancy, with his sometimes startling verbal pyrotechnics, she always brought the conversation back to Lauscha. And he couldn’t care less about the blasted place, miles from anywhere in the mountains. How did the English put it? “You can take the girl out of the village, but you can’t take the village out of the girl.”
As for the other matter, here, too, his efforts turned out to have been fruitless. She had not uttered a single word about the frightfully expensive edition of the Marquis de Sade’s memoirs he had chosen as a Christmas present. Ever since then, he had made no further effort in that direction. Perhaps the old adage was true: there was no point in trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or—ha!—trying to cut a diamond from a lump of mountain stone.
On the other hand, hadn’t Count G.—or was it Baron von Z.?—claimed that in his experience it was often the simple village lads and lasses who had the greatest natural gift for submission and dominance? This certainly didn’t seem to be the case with Johanna Steinmann, for she would have given him some sign by now.