A Time of Gifts (10 page)

[10]
See epigraph.

A
PART FROM
that glimpse of tramlines and slush, the mists of the
Nibelungenlied
might have risen from the Rhine-bed and enveloped the town; and not only Mainz: the same vapours of oblivion have coiled upstream, enveloping Oppenheim, Worms and Mannheim on their way. I spent a night in each of them and only a few scattered fragments remain: a tower or two, a row of gargoyles, some bridges and pinnacles and buttresses and the perspective of an arcade dwindling into the shadows. There is a statue of Luther that can only belong to Worms; but there are cloisters as well and the blackletter pages of a Gutenberg Bible, a picture of St. Boniface and a twirl of Jesuit columns. Lamplight shines through shields of crimson glass patterned with gold crescents and outlined in lead; but the arch that framed them has gone. And there are lost faces: a chimney sweep, a walrus moustache, a girl's long fair hair under a tam o'shanter. It is like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones. The cloud lifts at last in the middle of the Ludwigshafen-Mannheim bridge.

After following the Rhine, off and on ever since I had stepped ashore, I was about to leave it for good. The valley had widened after Bingen and opened into the snowy Hessian champaign; the mountains still kept their distance as the river coiled southwards and out of sight. But the Rhine map I unfolded on the balustrade traced its course upstream hundreds of miles and far beyond my range. After Spires and Strasbourg, the Black Forest scowled across the water at the blue line of the Vosges. In hungry winters like this, I had been told, wolves came down from the conifers and trotted through the streets. Freiburg came next, then the Swiss border and
the falls of Schaffhausen where the river poured from Lake Constance. Beyond, the map finished in an ultimate and unbroken white chaos of glaciers.

* * *

On the far side of the bridge I abandoned the Rhine for its tributary and after a few miles alongside the Neckar the steep lights of Heidelberg assembled. It was dark by the time I climbed the main street and soon softly-lit panes of coloured glass, under the hanging sign of a Red Ox, were beckoning me indoors. With freezing cheeks and hair caked with snow, I clumped into an entrancing haven of oak beams and carving and alcoves and changing floor levels. A jungle of impedimenta encrusted the interior—mugs and bottles and glasses and antlers—the innocent accumulation of years, not stage props of forced conviviality—and the whole place glowed with a universal patina. It was more like a room in a castle and, except for a cat asleep in front of the stove, quite empty.

This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day's doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots. An elderly woman came downstairs and settled by the stove with her sewing. Spotting my stick and rucksack and the puddle of melting snow, she said, with a smile, “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?” My German, now fifteen days old, was just up to this: “Who rides so late through night and wind?” But I was puzzled by
reitet
. (How was I to know that it was the first line of Goethe's famous
Erlkönig
, made more famous still by the music of Schubert?)
What, a foreigner?
I knew what to say at this point, and came in on cue:... “Englischer Student...zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel”...I'd got it pat by now. “Konstantinopel?” she said. “
Oh Weh!
” O Woe! So
far! And in midwinter too. She asked where I would be the day after, on New Year's Eve. Somewhere on the road, I said, “You can't go wandering about in the snow on Sylvesterabend!” she answered. “And where are you staying tonight, pray?” I hadn't thought yet. Her husband had come in a little while before and overheard our exchange. “Stay with us,” he said. “You must be our guest.”

They were the owner and his wife and their names were Herr and Frau Spengel. Upstairs, on my hostess's orders, I fished out things to be washed—it was my first laundry since London—and handed them over to the maid: wondering, as I did so, how a German would get on in Oxford if he turned up at The Mitre on a snowy December night.

* * *

One of the stained-glass armorial shields in the windows bore the slanting zigzag of Franken. This old stronghold of the Salian Franks is a part of northern Bavaria now and the Red Ox Inn was the headquarters of the Franconia student league. All the old inns of Heidelberg had these regional associations, and the most exalted of them, the Saxoborussia, was Heidelberg's Bullingdon and the members were Prussia's and Saxony's haughtiest. They held their sessions at Seppl's next door, where the walls were crowded with faded daguerrotypes of slashed and incipiently side-whiskered scions of the
Hochjunkertum
defiant in high boots and tricoloured sashes. Their gauntlets grasped basket-hilted sabres. Askew on those faded pates little caps like collapsed képis were tilted to display the initial of the Corps embroidered on the crown—a contorted Gothic cypher and an exclamation mark, all picked out in gold wire. I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn't duelling at all of course, but tribal scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years' cult of the
humanities.
[1]
With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm. Distance was measured; the sabres crossed at the end of outstretched arms; only the wrists moved; to flinch spelt disgrace; and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime. I had noticed these academic stigmata on the spectacled faces of doctors and lawyers; brow, cheek or chin, and sometimes all three, were ripped up by this haphazard surgery in puckered or gleaming lines strangely at odds with the wrinkles that middle age had inscribed there. I think Fritz, who was humane, thoughtful and civilized and a few years older than me, looked down on this antique custom, and he answered my question with friendly pity. He knew all too well the dark glamour of the Mensur among foreigners.

The rather sad charm of a university in the vacation pervaded the beautiful town. We explored the academic buildings and the libraries and the museum and wandered round the churches. Formerly a stronghold of the Reform, the town now harbours the rival faiths in peaceful juxtaposition and if it is a Sunday, Gregorian plainsong escapes through the doors of one church and the Lutheran strains of
Ein' feste Burg
from the next.

That afternoon, with Fritz and a friend, I climbed through the woods to look at the ruins of the palace that overhangs the town: an enormous complex of dark red stone which turns pink, russet or purple with the vagaries of the light and the hour. The basic mass is mediaeval, but the Renaissance bursts out again and again in gateways and courtyards and galleries and expands in the delicate sixteenth-century carving. Troops of statues posture in their scalloped recesses. Siege and explosion had partly wrecked it when
the French ravaged the region. When? In the Thirty Years War; one might have guessed... But who had built it?
Didn't I know? Die Kurfürsten von der Pfalz!
The Electors Palatine... We were in the old capital of the Palatinate...

Distant bells, ringing from faraway English class-rooms, were trying to convey a forgotten message; but it was no good. “Guess what this gate is called!” Fritz said, slapping a red column. “The Elizabeth, or English Gate! Named after the English princess.”
Of course!
I was there at last! The Winter Queen! Elizabeth, the high-spirited daughter of James I, Electress Palatine and, for a year, Queen of Bohemia! She arrived here as a bride of seventeen and for the five years of her reign, Heidelberg, my companions said, had never seen anything like the masques and the revels and the balls. But soon, when the Palatinate and Bohemia were both lost and her brother's head was cut off and the Commonwealth had reduced her to exile and poverty, she was celebrated as the Queen of Hearts by a galaxy of champions. Her great-niece, Queen Anne, ended the reigning line of the Stuarts and Elizabeth's grandson, George I, ascended the throne where her descendant still sits. My companions knew much more about it than I did.
[2]

In spite of its beauty, it was a chill, grey prospect at this moment. Lagged in sacking for the winter, desolate rose trees pierced the snow-muffled terraces. These were bare of all footprints but our own and the tiny arrows of a robin. Below the last balustrade, the roofs of the town clustered and beyond it flowed the Neckar and then the Rhine, and the Haardt Mountains, and the Palatine Forest rippled away beyond. A sun like an enormous crimson balloon was about to sink into the pallid landscape. It recalled, as it does still, the first time I saw this wintry portent. In a sailor-suit
with
H.M.S. Indomitable
on my cap-ribbon, I was being hurried home to tea across Regent's Park while the keepers were calling closing time. We lived so close to the zoo that one could hear the lions roaring at night.

This Palatine sun was the dying wick of 1933; the last vestige of that ownerless rump of the seasons that stretches from the winter solstice to the New Year. ‘'Tis the year's midnight...the world's whole sap is sunk.' On the way back we passed a group of youths sitting on a low wall and kicking their heels as they whistled the
Horst Wessel Lied
between their teeth. Fritz said, “I
think
, perhaps, I've heard that tune before...”

That night at the inn, I noticed that a lint-haired young man at the next table was fixing me with an icy gleam. Except for pale blue eyes set flush with his head like a hare's, he might have been an albino. He suddenly rose with a stumble, came over, and said: “So? Ein Engländer?” with a sardonic smile. “
Wunderbar!
” Then his face changed to a mask of hate. Why had we stolen Germany's colonies? Why shouldn't Germany have a fleet and a proper army? Did I think Germany was going to take orders from a country that was run by the Jews? A catalogue of accusation followed, not very loud, but clearly and intensely articulated. His face, which was almost touching mine, raked me with long blasts of schnapps-breath. “Adolf Hitler will change all that,” he ended. “
Perhaps you've heard the name?
” Fritz shut his eyes with a bored groan and murmured “Um Gottes willen!” Then he took him by the elbow with the words, “Komm, Franzi!”; and, rather surprisingly, my accuser allowed himself to be led to the door. Fritz sat down again, saying: “I'm so sorry. You see what it's like.” Luckily, none of the other tables had noticed and the hateful moment was soon superseded by feasting and talk and wine and, later, by songs to usher in St. Sylvester's Vigil; and by the time the first bells of 1934 were clashing outside, everything had merged in a luminous haze of music and toasts and greetings.

* * *

Frau Spengel insisted that it was absurd to set off on New Year's Day; so I spent another twenty-four hours wandering about the town and the castle and reading and writing and talking with this kind and civilized family. (My sojourn at the Red Ox, afterwards, was one of several high points of recollection that failed to succumb to the obliterating moods of war. I often thought of it.)
[3]

“Don't forget your
treuer Wanderstab
,” Frau Spengel said, handing me my gleaming stick as I was loading up for departure on the second of January. Fritz accompanied me to the edge of the town. Ironed linen lay neatly in my rucksack; also a large parcel of Gebäck, special Sylvestrine cakes rather like shortbread, which I munched as I loped along over the snow. All prospects glowed, for the next halt—at Bruchsal, a good stretch further—was already fixed up. Before leaving London, a friend who had stayed there the summer before and canoed down the Neckar by
faltboot
with one of the sons of the house, had given me an introduction to the mayor. Fritz had telephoned; and by dusk I was sitting with Dr. Arnold and his family drinking tea laced with brandy in one of the huge baroque rooms of Schloss Bruchsal. I couldn't stop gazing at my magnificent surroundings. Bruchsal is one of the most beautiful baroque palaces in the whole of Germany. It was built in the eighteenth century by the Prince-Bishops of Spires, I can't remember when their successors stopped living in it; perhaps when their secular sovereignty was dissolved. But for many decades it had been the abode of the Burgomasters of Bruchsal. I stayed here two nights, sleeping in the bedroom of an absent son. After a long bath, I explored his collection of Tauchnitz editions and found exactly what I wanted to read in bed—
Leave it to Psmith
—and soon I wasn't really in a German schloss at all, but in the corner seat of a
first-class carriage on the 3:45 from Paddington to Market Blandings, bound for a different castle.

* * *

It was the first time I had seen such architecture. The whole of next day I loitered about the building; hesitating halfway up shallow staircases balustraded by magnificent branching designs of wrought metal; wandering through double doors that led from state room to state room; and gazing with untutored and marvelling eyes down perspectives crossed by the diminishing slants of winter sunbeams. Pastoral scenes unfolded in light-hearted colours across ceilings that were enclosed in a studiously asymetrical icing of scrolls and sheaves; shells and garlands and foliage and ribands depicted myths extravagant enough to stop an unprepared observer dead in his tracks. The sensation of wintry but glowing interior space, the airiness of the snowy convolutions, the twirl of the metal foliage and the gilt of the arabesques were all made more buoyant still by reflections from the real snow that lay untrodden outside; it came glancing up through the panes, diffusing a still and muted luminosity: a northern variant (I thought years later) of the reflected flicker that canals, during Venetian siestas, send up across the cloud-born apotheoses and rapes that cover the ceilings. Only statues and skeleton trees broke the outdoor whiteness, and a colony of rooks.