He laughs. “Not a civilized socialist, like you and Walter? I admit it freely. Though of course I understand your point of view, far better than you understand mine.”
Violet turns to him, bracing her fingers against the shelf behind her. She’s wearing her best dress, one given to her by Walter a month or two ago, fashionably narrow and high-waisted, a gossamer amethyst purple that suits her pale skin and dark auburn hair. A silver band sparkles around her ribs, just below her breasts, and her shoes are silvery, too. The effect, she suspects, is one of ethereal virginity. She looks now at Lionel Richardson, leaning his laconic body against the windowsill, cigarette dangling between his fingers, lowball glass glinting at his side, eyes regarding her thoughtfully, and wishes she had something like what the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré is wearing tonight: a red silk dress the same color as wine in candlelight, cut low across her bosom, baring her shoulders. “I don’t think that’s true at all,” she says.
“Of course you don’t.” He uncrosses his legs and tilts his head toward the window. “Do you know what they’re shouting about, out there?”
“No.”
“The Hapsburg heir was assassinated yesterday, in Serbia. Shot with his wife in their motorcar, on a state visit.”
“How dreadful.”
“You needn’t pretend with me. I’m sure you’re crowing inside. Down with the ancient empires, isn’t it? They had it coming.” He slips his hand through the opening in the window and knocks the ash from his cigarette onto the sidewalk below.
“That’s not true. I deplore any sort of violence.”
“Ah. Not a Bolshevik, then? Not quite so far as that.”
“Not at all. I believe it will all evolve naturally, the equality of man and the just distribution of property. I don’t think we need a revolution.”
“I don’t know about that,” Lionel says. His face begins to take on weight, as if the air has grown heavy upon him. “Men want to fight, don’t they? We’ve gone a hundred years without a general European war. England, Germany, France. They’re like horses at the hunt, milling about, waiting for the first hound to scent. Then bloody mayhem.”
“That’s nonsense. We’re far too rational to fall into that trap again. The workers will never agree to fight.”
“Won’t they? We’re all nationalists, deep down, Violet. Your average German hates a Slav far more than he hates his factory foreman, and vice versa. It’s human instinct.”
Violet thrusts herself away from the shelves. “Anyway, it’s all theoretical, isn’t it? There’s no reason to fight.”
“They’ll find something eventually.”
“War is never inevitable.”
“Eventually, it is. Maybe not tonight, maybe not this year. But eventually.”
“God, I thought I was a pessimist.” The champagne is hitting her brain now, making her fidgety and dreamlike all at once. She circles the room. “Why are we even discussing this? War.”
“I don’t know. Don’t mind me. Whenever this sort of thing happens, these international crises, Agadir and all that, I get in a funk. Wondering if this is it, if this is the spark that sets everything ablaze.” He stubs out his cigarette against the windowsill and lifts his glass.
Violet picks up a small Chinese vase and turns it over in her hands. Her blood is beating pleasantly, her nerves alive and tingling. She has done her best to avoid Lionel Richardson since the night in Walter’s study, to avoid this odd understanding that runs like an electromagnetic current between them whenever they collide: at dinner parties in her flat, at Herr Planck’s musical evenings, in the halls of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut. This unexpected intersection of their orbits (or perhaps it is expected, perhaps she has planned it like this) together in this room, without Walter or the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré or Henry Mortimer or anyone else, feels rare and precious, not to be handled roughly, not to be taken for granted. “I suppose it’s your job, to wonder about war,” she says. “I suppose you’d be the first in the fight.”
“Naturally. I’m a soldier, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are. You enjoy it, don’t you? Fighting and killing.”
“No, I don’t enjoy it. But I don’t mind it, if that’s what you mean. It’s elemental. It slices right through all the rubbish, it erases your thoughts, it erases everything else but the essential struggle. You’re never closer to nature than when you’re out hunting, when you’re nothing but an animal yourself. Better and purer than your civilized self.”
“You don’t have a civilized self.”