Kissing Kin (37 page)

“Not to Germans. You’d think we’d have learned that, in 1914. Besides, Hitler didn’t sign at Paris. That was Stresemann. He’s dead now. Not but what Hitler would sign something too, if he could gain time by it. Germany has discovered the world’s fatal weakness—which is that nowadays we will do anything, believe anything, promise anything, sign anything, to avoid unpleasantness. Nothing could suit Hitler better, because he can be very unpleasant indeed if he tries.”

A deliberate, insulting, well-executed snore came from the recumbent figure in red bathing-trunks on their left.

“We’re boring Bimbo,” Camilla said. “He can’t bear
politics.
Is it time for drinks? 1 suppose I shall have to smooth Victor down when he reappears.”

“It must be very inconvenient to him to have an English mother,” Johnny remarked. “I wasn’t sure he would admit to it.”

“He never has before,” said Camilla. “Though he has asked a lot of questions about England, come to think of
it—where to stay, whom to get introductions to, and so on.”

“At it again,” murmured Johnny.

“I never know what to tell him,” Camilla confessed.

“Say you don’t know any of the right people,” Johnny advised her. “Don’t inflict him on your friends there, for God’s sake!”

“Oh, come, Johnny, he’s not as bad as all that!”

“Maybe not, as you see him here. But Phoebe, for instance, wouldn’t care for him.”

“Oh, well, she’s prejudiced, she’d be on Rosalind’s side!”

“If you married a German, you’d see Rosalind’s side fast enough!”

“I have no intention of marrying a German,” Camilla said coolly, and rose, and walked away into the house, rather haughtily, as Victor had done, to see about drinks.

W
HEN
D
INAH AND
Bracken arrived in Europe in June, 1934, Jeff was with them—tall, lanky, overgrown, and twenty-one. His normal boy’s activity was still somewhat curtailed by the after-effects of that illness nearly ten years before, which was now known to have been
rheumatic
fever. He was going to be all right, they said. But he had barely escaped a lifelong invalid routine. It had left him bookish and thoughtful and gentle-voiced and oddly mature—and with enormous quiet charm. It had also checked any inclination he might have had towards an army career in Oliver’s footsteps, and settled him without any visible regrets into journalism as Bracken’s heir apparent.

By now it was impossible for anyone in Europe to forget war. A lot of people were still trying, and in Paris and Brussels and particularly in London you could still find a brief oblivion to the dreadful realities which were shaping up across the borders of Germany. But even the
Illustrated
London
News
reprinted a full page drawing from a German paper showing the presumable result of a gas attack from the air on a city—well-dressed women lying dead in the street, their skirts
artistically
disarranged, with dead children beside them, hats and
handbags strewn about, every visible human being prostrate, though the surrounding masonry was only slightly damaged. You glanced at it with horror and turned the page—then paused to contemplate it again in cold blood—and then couldn’t forget it.

Every Continental city of any size was holding realistic gas drills, with designated victims feigning casualties, ambulance routine, and other gruesome details worked out to the last degree. But not England. England was gravely giving the world her “magnificent lead” in disarmament. In Germany great parade was being made of training Reichswehr troops with the dummy arms and wooden cannon which was all the terms of the Versailles Treaty permitted them, but a reign of terror by Hitler’s private army had begun, including
mysterious
shootings and disappearances which rapidly increased after he became Chancellor early in 1933.

It seemed as though Nazi propaganda was really too
transparent
to work, but it did work, and the deadline for entering the Party in March, 1933, brought a general last-minute scramble with no conviction behind it but a dismal dodge for whatever safety there might still be in Germany. The Monarchists went on blindly believing that Hitler would restore the Hohenzollern rule, and even the Princes joined the Party as Hitler-worship spread. The aged President
Hindenberg
was seen in public with Hitler now, and it was cynically said that the Old Gentleman was being softened up.

When Winston Churchill opposed MacDonald’s plan for the equalization of the French and German armies as foolishness, Mr. Eden called him an unconstructive critic, and Mr. Lloyd George pointed out that to remove the Nazi inferiority and persecution complexes one had only to remove their cause. And then, just before this last precious grievance could be alleviated at the expense of what was left of peace of mind for France, Hitler withdrew from Geneva in one of his dynamic huffs—Wilson had never entertained the idea that any nation would ever dare to resign from the League, because, he said, it
would become an outlaw nation. But there was nothing for the Disarmament Conference to do now but collapse in more or less confessed defeat, and the shadow of despair began to lengthen in Europe. A good deal was being heard about Danzig and East Prussia and the Polish Corridor—last remnants of Versailles. There was an air-school near Berlin where the students crashed in dozens, but there were always plenty more, and Goering, who had taken over von Richthofen’s famous flying squadron in 1918, became head of the new Air Ministry. Scientific research in Germany was being prostituted to such horrors as a poison gas of which ten planes could carry enough to wipe out a million people.

Johnny Malone was Director of the European Service on Bracken’s newspaper now, and had a beat up and down the Continent which kept him nicely in touch with Camilla in Paris and Cannes. They had run into each other again last winter at St. Moritz, where Victor was teaching Camilla to ski—or trying to, for she hated it from the beginning and soon gave it up altogether, remarking philosophically that she had never been the athletic type and advising Victor to go and be hearty and Nordic all by himself from now on. Johnny, having had a very nasty fall the season before, was not ski-ing either.

Camilla was incredulous when Johnny told her that Victor was a Nazi now, whether from expediency or not, and wore the Elite black uniform in Berlin. Victor hadn’t said so, she maintained, and he was still Monarchist in his opinions. Johnny said Sure, sure, even the Crown Prince was a Nazi these days and wore the Storm Trooper uniform, as did two of his sons. Camilla looked more incredulous still.

“Come to Germany,” said Johnny abruptly. “Catch up on things. See for yourself what goes on there, you don’t have to take my word for it. Call me a liar if you can, when you’ve been there a while!”

“All right, I will!” Camilla replied aggressively. “Victor has asked me more than once to come and be presented to his
father.” And she looked at Johnny obliquely, her red mouth squared and obstinate, to see how that went down.

For a minute Johnny said nothing at all. Then he shifted in his chair with a sort of sigh.

“Lord, I can remember the good old days when we all thought Prince Conrad and his crowd were the absolute limit,” he said. “They used to talk about frightfulness, remember? No, you wouldn’t. Well, they were pikers at that kind of thing compared to the present-day experts. Conrad
is
a genuine Monarchist, if yon like. But for them the time is running out.”

“How do you mean? Victor says—”

“They’ve left it too late. There’s nothing they can do now. Hitler’s gang has got Germany by the throat and they’ll never let go. Conrad and his kind have bred a Frankenstein monster, and it will destroy them. The Nazis begin where the Prussians left off. These black shirt boys are real rough-necks, they aren’t squeamish, I can tell you—they haven’t what you could call scruples.”

“I don’t see any change whatever in Victor since I first knew him,” Camilla asserted.

“Not here, no,” said Johnny. “He’s on holiday here.”

“You mean I’d find him different in Berlin?”

Johnny gave her a long, speculative look.

“Come and see Berlin,” he said.

“You mean about the Jews and all that? Isn’t it exaggerated?”

“There are no words adequate to exaggerate it with,” said Johnny patiently. “And I don’t mean just the Jews. If any German steps out of line now he doesn’t have to be a Jew to land in a concentration camp. And a short time later his family gets him back again—in a box.”

“But aren’t the Nazis better than the Communists?” Camilla persisted.

“Why?” said Johnny.

So in June of 1934 Camilla set out for Germany with Bracken and Dinah and Jeff, leaving the Kendrick family—now five of
them—in possession of the house at Cannes. Johnny was awaiting them in Berlin.

Camilla noticed that as they neared the German border Dinah became tense and quiet, and Bracken, glancing at her anxiously more than once, said at last, “You and Jeff could still go back to Cannes.”

Dinah shook her head, her lips pressed together.

“I want him to see it,” she said.

“But
you
don’t have to,” Bracken reminded her, and Dinah said she could take it, and Bracken explained to Camilla that Nazis always affected Dinah the way cats did the people who were born with a horror of them. Dinah could
smell
a Nazi in the same room or railway carriage, he said, and it was like poison gas to her. Her hatred of the Prussians went back to the time Rosalind Norton-Leigh had married one, he said—she couldn’t abide Prince Conrad even in the old days before the war. It was psychic, or something, said Bracken, rather proud of her.

“Perhaps she would feel differently about Conrad’s son,” Camilla suggested. “If she knew him well, I mean. Victor’s harmless enough, and very attractive.”

“I must see him,” Dinah agreed grimly. “It’s partly why I’m here. I’ve got to know what Victor is like, on account of Rosalind. I promised Phoebe.”

“It’s nothing to do with her any more, is it?” Jeff asked with interest. “Rosalind isn’t likely to meet up with either of them again, I should think.”

“I hope not,” said Dinah. “But we want to
know
.”

“I wonder if anyone ever sees Conrad these days,” Bracken said. “Johnny will know. One doesn’t hear much about those fellows any more. Except von Schleicher, he still has influence.”

“
I
shall see Conrad,” Camilla told him confidently, and found Dinah’s eyes upon her. “Victor has said more than once that he wants me to know his father. He admires him very much.”

“Camilla, you aren’t—
involved
with Victor?” Dinah pleaded, as though driven to it.

“Oh, no,” Camilla answered casually. “Except that I’ve known him quite a long time, on and off, and I like him. He’s much too stiff and proper for anything else, if that’s what you mean!”

And now it was Bracken’s eyes that she felt, and she returned his look levelly, with a perverse little grin.

When they got to Berlin they found that Johnny had got into trouble with the authorities there—had in fact been asked to leave Germany because of his habit of expressing himself too freely about its Nazi masters. Johnny could never stomach the roughing up of American citizens who did not salute the Nazi flag, or did not see it, or who simply looked Jewish and caught the roving eye of a group of Hitler’s hoodlums.

Bracken’s hackles rose at once, and he went to see the American Ambassador about it. Johnny was not the first foreign correspondent to be suppressed or expelled, and Bracken wanted to make a test case of it. But the Ambassador said No. Bracken was riled, and prepared to go as high as Hitler in defence of his man, and this kept the rest of them sitting about in Berlin as June ran out. It was plain even to the most casual observer, which Bracken and Johnny were not, that an increasing tension gripped the city. The eternal strife within the Party, dog eat dog, had flared again, Johnny said, and something like civil war might come of it.

There appeared, moreover, to be something of a mystery about Prince Conrad, and even the von Schleichers, who were friends of his and with whom Johnny was on excellent terms, seemed a trifle vague as to his whereabouts. Victor himself was moving in some sort of smoke screen. He could not be found on the telephone, and there was a delay of several days before he replied to Camilla’s note sent to the usual address which she had known for some time.

He then arrived unannounced at the hotel where they were staying, wearing the spectacular black SS uniform which
added to his height and impressive carriage. He sent up his card with an invitation to Camilla to dine with him that evening. Dinah at once bristled, and said wasn’t that rather abrupt, and anyway they were all engaged at the Embassy that evening and Camilla couldn’t accept. They were just then starting out for an afternoon drive to Potsdam, but Camilla excused herself from that and after introducing Victor to the others in the lobby invited him to stop for tea with her in their private sitting-room as she could go to Potsdam some other time. He accepted with formality and apologies and apparent surprise, and the rest of the party went on while he and Camilla returned to the suite.

He paused just inside the door of the sitting-room while closing it behind him, as though noting in detail the position of the windows, entrances, and telephone in the ornate
impersonal
Adlon apartment. Camilla removed her hat, chose a chair, and said naturally, “Well, do come and sit down and tell me all your news. Is your father in Berlin now?”

Without replying, Victor walked to the sofa, picked up a large down cushion, and placed it firmly over the telephone, which stood on a console table against the wall beneath a heavy gilt mirror. Camilla watched him with a growing amazement as he drew up a chair close to hers and sat down in it, leaning towards her to say in a very low voice, “Please do not discuss my father here.”

“What on earth do you mean?” she asked blankly.

“What I say. You have a singularly clear and carrying voice. It is very charming, I’m sure—but Germany at present is no place for it.” The trace of a smile touched his shapely lips, but Camilla went on looking blank, although she had the grace to speak almost in a whisper.

“Victor, are you mixed up in all this? What
is
going on here, can you tell me that?”

“What makes you think I know?” he asked, and her eyes went significantly over the smart uniform he wore.

“I thought you were in the Foreign Office,” she said.

“I am.”

“And this as well?”

“But certainly. One does not preclude the other.” He was facing the light and new lines of strain were clearly visible on his rugged, striking face. His eyes looked heavy and sleepless, his colour was not as good as she remembered it, his body was tense and ready to spring from the delicate gilded chair he sat in. “I have a request to make which I hope you will not think unreasonable,” he was saying, in that strange inaudible voice. “My car is outside. Will you come for a short drive with me now?”

Speechlessly Camilla rose and put on her hat again, glanced once at the muffled telephone, left it for Bracken to see, and walked briskly towards the door. Victor followed. In silence they entered the lift and passed through the lower lobby to where his car stood at the curb—long, low, black, with shining metal finishings. Victor put her in beside the driver’s seat and slid under the wheel, and drove smoothly away from the Adlon, heading for the Tiergarten. Once in the park he allowed the car’s speed to slacken and glanced at her thoughtfully before he spoke.

“You are thinking it is like something out of an American cinema,” he said without smiling.

“Well, yes, rather.”