The Fox in the Attic (15 page)

Such times as Captain Goering himself was coming the whole band of brothers wore death's-heads in their caps, and carried arms.

Schloss Lorienburg was built on a precipitous tree-clad mound in a bend of the stripling Danube. Under the small window of Otto's office, in its deep embrasure, there was a nearly sheer drop of a hundred and fifty feet or so into tree-tops, so that everything nearby was hidden from where he stood. All he could ever see from here was the far distance dimmed and diminished by its remoteness—today, a horizonless pattern of small dark patches that were forest a little darker than the canopy of cloud, and small patches a little lighter and yellower than the cloud that were rolling withered winter fields under a thin scumble of rime: the high Bavarian plateau, stretching away into purple immensities under a purplish slate sky.

Otto could not see the river for it was almost directly beneath him. He could not see the village, crowded between the river and the hill's foot. He could not even see the valley, but he could hear—though faintly, through the two thicknesses of glass—the melancholy mooing of the little daily train as it wound its way down the branch line from Kammstadt; and that recalled him. The unknown English cousin was arriving on that train—cause of all his unease.

Bavarian Otto had served in Bavarian Crown-Prince Rupprecht's Sixth Army during the war, being posted to the 16th Reserve Regiment of Foot. It was at Bapaume he had lost his leg, to an English mortar-shell. Nearly all the time it had been the English he was fighting—Ypres, Neuve-Chapelle, the Somme. So what was it going to feel like, meeting an Englishman again for the first time since the Western Front?

Relatives of course are in a special category: indubitable bonds transcending frontiers connect them. Not that this was a close kinship, it was merely the kind that old ladies like to keep alive by a lifetime of letter-writing. In fact, these Penry-Herberts were really the Arcos' relatives rather than their own. It was some niece of someone in the Arco tribe who had married a Penry-Herbert, generations ago: but the Kessens and the Arcos were themselves related many times over, so it came to the same thing in the end—and even the remotest relationships ought to count.

Moreover, this was the younger brother of that little English Backfisch—he had forgotten her name, but she came to stay at Lorienburg the summer before the War, and rode in the bullock-race.

Somebody had told him, too, this boy was quite a promising young shot. His grandfather of course had been the world famous shot—even in his eighties still one of the finest in Europe: Otto's own father had felt it a great honor when invited to Newton Llantony for the snipe ... or would that have been this boy's
great
-grandfather? It was getting difficult to remember how quickly the generations pass. Indeed what Otto found hardest of all to envisage as he faced the wintry prospect beyond the window was that the little brother that girl had so prattled about in 1913 was now a grown man—the master of Newton Llantony—and yet had been too young to serve in the War.

Beneath his clipped correctness of manner Otto was a devout Catholic with tinges of mysticism.

Most Imperial German officers those days were avowed Christians. Perhaps they found in the code of their Officers' Corps the closest earthly simulacrum possible (in their eyes) to the selfless ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, and in “Germany” an identical name under which to worship God. Be that as it may, Man, among all God's vertebrate creatures is in fact the
only
species which wages war—man alone, in whom alone His image is reflected—and how could that awful monopoly mean nothing? War, surely, is a pale human emblem of that Absolute of Force; and human power, a portion of
His
attribute incarnate in us
His
earthly mirror-images: fighting,
His
refiner's furnace to brighten the gold and burn away the material dross.

Otto's present deep conviction that all this is the true teaching about war had come to him more slowly, perhaps, than to many; for he had seen the “dross” burn (some of it) with so very lurid a light. But in the end it had come even to him ineluctably, for it seemed to derive honestly from his own experience of himself and those around him in four years of war. For instance, at Bapaume when his leg was shattered three willing volunteers in turn had carried him from the front line, succeeding each other instantly as each was shot: a thing no man could easily forget, or ignore.

Because of his pride in his calling Otto was personally humble but he was not one whose convictions once formed were easily shaken or complicated. He had not argued all this out with himself step by step but had reached much the same frame of mind as if he had: he believed that for every man war is the essential means of Grace.

Whatever a cripple could do, working secretly, towards the rebuilding of the proscribed German Army, Otto was doing. But hostilities were suspended now, Germany so shattered and the civil crowd so rotten that it might be many years before war could be resumed; and suddenly he was moved by a deep pity for this young English cousin such as he felt for his own German nephew Franz. He must needs pity that whole generation everywhere whose loss it was that the last war had ended just too soon: for the next might come too late.

Presently one-legged Otto left his office and made his way with difficulty (the stone treads being sloping and uneven) down the stairs. Reaching the courtyard, he caught sight of his brother Walther who was crossing it towards the Great Gate. In spite of Walther's abnormal size and massive strength he walked lightly and springily like a cat; it was all on the ball of the foot, his was a hunter's gait rather than a soldier's ...

It was typical of Walther's courtesy (Otto thought with affection) to feel he must go to the station himself to meet even so young a guest.

Meanwhile in the crowded one-class branch-line train from Kammstadt Augustine was agog with interest. These peaceful fenceless fields! These forests, that looked cared-for as chrysanthemums—so utterly unlike wild natural English woods! These pretty pastel-colored villages with pantile roofs, onion-top churches ... all this, rolling past the half-frosted windows—all this was
Germany
! Moreover these friendly people in the compartment with him ... they looked almost ordinarily human but were they not in fact all “Germans”—even the quite small children?

The old peasant opposite Augustine had the kind of belly which made him sit with knees wide apart, and he was smoking a decorative hooked pipe which smelled like fusty hay. His face was brimming over with curiosity: earlier he had tried to talk to Augustine but Augustine's Swiss-taught school German could alas make little of this slurry dialect even with the words tapped out for him on his knee. The old man's wife, too, had a kindly wrinkled face with intensely wild humorous eyes ...

How happily Augustine could spend the rest of his days among such simple, friendly people! He had no feeling
here
of being in enemy country. But for want of a better vehicle he could only project his love on a broad and beaming smile.

The little train, raised high on trestles above a stretch of frozen flood, hooted a warning to itself as it neared a bend. With a warm forefinger Augustine melted himself a further peephole in the window-ice.

From under the voluminous black skirts of the old peasant-woman opposite there came the faint, drugged crooning of a half-suffocated hen. A moment later the woman's whole nether person began to heave with unseen poultry. She leaned forward and slapped at her skirts violently to reduce them to silence and stillness, but at that the vocal hen only woke up completely and answered the more indignantly; and then others began to join in. She glanced anxiously towards the Inspector—but luckily his back was turned ...

What
lovely
people! Augustine began to laugh out loud, whereon the old woman's eyes flashed back at him with pleasure and merriment.

Last night Augustine's express from the frontier had reached Munich after dark: that was how it happened that his first night on German soil had been spent at the old Bayrischer-Hof hotel. Since then it has been rebuilt, but Augustine had found it a majestic yet rather worn and despondent hostelry those days. As he had stood signing himself in that evening it had struck him that all the clerks and waiters there seemed
distraits
—as if they had something rather more important on their minds than running hotels. This surprised and rather charmed him: he sympathised with them, for—coming of a class which practically never used hotels—Augustine disliked and despised them
all
. No wonder the characteristic stale hotel-foyer smells here seemed to irk their clean young noses: these diluted, doctored alcohols, the coffee-sodden cigar-ends: the almost incessant rich eating which must go on somewhere just upwind of this foyer where he stood so that even its portières smelt permanently of food; and the nearer, transient smells of brand-new pigskin suitcases and dead fur, of rich Jews, of indigestion and peppermint, of perfumes unsuccessfully overlaid on careless womanhood.

Later on it had greatly surprised this novice traveller, too, to find on his machine-carved bed a huge eiderdown in a white cotton cover but
no
ordinary top-sheet or blanket to tuck round him. And it had surprised him yet further to find, half-hidden by the washstand, such mysterious scribbles on the bedroom wall ... for there, among mere lists of names, he
thought
he had made out this:

Authentic dungeon-scribbles—in a hotel bedroom?—But then Augustine had taken more particular notice of the date. “1919?”
Since
the war? “1919?”—Why, that was surely the Golden Age when the young poet Ernst Toller and his friends had ruled Munich! The thing was impossible.

The message was scrawled in a difficult Gothic hand ... he must have read it wrong—or else it was a hoax.

In the morning Augustine had perforce to pay his bill with English money. He had only tendered a ten-shilling note but the German change he was given appeared to be noughted in billions! What a joke! That pleasant-looking, dark-eyed young desk-clerk with the speed and dexterity almost of a conjurer had whipped
billions
loose out of his pocket, flipping them like postage-stamps ...“Lothar Scheidemann” the desk-card named him; and the name as well as the face somehow fixed itself in Augustine's memory.

Augustine would have liked to talk to him, for he looked certainly educated; but on a second glance decided—N-n-no: perhaps rather too formal and detached a chap for any such casual approach.

Now, in the train, Augustine took out his new German money to count those incredible noughts yet once more. It was quite true: today he was indeed a billionaire! It made his head swim a little. But then through his peephole in the frosted window he sighted a familiar flight of mallard: these at least were in normal non-astronomical numbers even in Germany, and his brow cleared. Involuntarily he crooked his trigger-finger, and smiled ...

“
Lothar Scheidemann, Lothar Scheid
...” the train wheels repeated; and Augustine's smile faded. For there had been something in the eyes of that attractive young clerk he couldn't quite get out of his mind. Then suddenly the train passed off its trestles onto solid earth again with a changed sound.

At Lorienburg station the engine of Augustine's train halted on the very brink of the swift unfrozen Danube and stood there hissing. Augustine climbed happily down and followed the other passengers across the tracks.

On the low station “platform”—so low it hardly deserved the name of one—a tall truculent young Jew was chaffing with a group of farmers, gesticulating with the duck he held by its fettered feet. These farmers, like the ones on the train, all seemed to wear a kind of civilian uniform: thick gray cloth trimmed with green, and huge fur collars. One was affectionately nursing a hairy piglet in his arms: another, a murmuring accordion.

But now a burly, almost gigantic figure was making a beeline for Augustine. His little corded and feathered “Tyrolean” hat bobbed high above the crowd. He wore the same kind of uniform the peasants wore but newer and better cut: strong as it looked—that acreage of heavy close-woven cloth—the muscles of his massive shoulders seemed almost bursting it. He walked with the gait of someone who likes to be out-of-doors walking all of every day ...

Behind him followed a small dark man with a monkey face, some sort of servant who seized Augustine's luggage. So this must be Cousin Walther—the Freiherr von Kessen come in person to meet his guest!

It must be ... and yet it surprised Augustine to find his host wearing such obviously
German
clothes. Somehow he hadn't thought of the Kessens as being Germans, the way those peasants were. Surely gentlemen were much the same everywhere: a sort of little international nation, based more or less on the English model. However, he soon found that the Baron talked excellent informal upper-class English, except that his slang was ten years out of date.

Walther shook Augustine warmly by the hand, then captured his arm and whisked him through the tidy village, inquiring the while after English relations most of whom neither of them had ever met and at the same time answering jovially the soft, respectful greetings on every hand: “
Grüss Gott, Herr Baron
...”

“
Grüss Gott, Zusammen!
”

“ 'ss Gott z'sammen!” It sounded almost like “Scotch salmon!” the abbreviated way this Bavarian baron said it, Augustine thought—and smiled. How spick-and-span everything was here, he noticed. The butcher's window did not look very well stocked by English standards, but it was orderly as a shrine: in comparison, what slatterns the English were!