The Fox in the Attic (16 page)

Augustine wished his boisterous cousin would give him time to look about him at all these wonders—he was almost having to trot. Indeed it was a mystery how the man managed to keep his own footing so securely on this icy ground, for rounding a sudden corner in the village by a chemist's Augustine himself skidded altogether and cannoned into an old Jew peddling laces, so that both of them nearly fell. Just then, too, descending the side-street and missing the pair of them by a hair's-breadth, something shot by like an arrow. This was a youth on skis. The skis—to their detriment—rattled and sparked, almost uncontrollable on the iron-hard surface (for there was no proper snow at all), and it was only by a miracle of sheer balance that the skier managed to swerve just clear of an ox-cart in the middle of the cross-roads. Then he shot away down a steep bye-road towards the frozen water-meadows.

Walther was just beginning to explain “Ahah! The eldest of my young devils, Fr ...” when something else followed, but this time something more like a low ricochetting cannon-ball than like an arrow. It was a small toboggan with two little girls on it rounded out to packages with extra clothing, the two pairs of pigtails standing straight out behind them with the acceleration of their transit. They too just managed to skid past the slowmoving ox-cart. But they failed to make the counterswerve: the toboggan hit a pile of gravel icebound into concrete and somersaulted.

The two children rose into the air and landed on their heads. The wonder was they weren't clean stunned, or even killed. But no—for they got up; though slowly, dazed. They were obviously quite a lot hurt and Augustine's tender heart went out to them. The knees of both were wavering under them. Then one began lifting her fist uncertainly towards her eyes ... but at that Walther in a brutal voice shouted something mocking, and instantly both stiffened.

They hadn't seen their father was there watching them till then; but now they didn't even stop to rub their bruises. They managed to right their toboggan—giddily, though without quite toppling over again—and dragged it away (though still moving as if half-drunk) after their brother and out of sight.

“Little milk-sops: they make me ashamed,” said Walther; but he sounded quite proud and pleased, as if expecting to be contradicted.

Augustine said nothing: he was too deeply shocked. He had omitted to take stock of his cousin's face when they first met and now needed all his eyes for the going; but from that voice, that behavior, that massive bulk, he assumed now it must be very like an ogre's, or some gigantic stony troll's.

That icy sunk lane leading up from the village, the lane the skis and the toboggans had just traversed, was very steep; but Walther took it still at the same breathless speed. Augustine began to suspect his cousin (who must have been more than twice his age) of trying to walk him off his legs; but Augustine had got his second wind now and could hold his own.

Ultimately the castle on its mound was approached from the high ground behind it along a raised causeway lined with linden-trees, ending in a wooden bridge. Just where you reached this bridge there stood on one side of the way a little closed summer beerhouse shanty—rather decrepit, and with a deserted skittle-alley full of dead leaves. But on the other side stood a life-size crucifix, skillfully carved and realistically painted; and this crucifix looked as if it was
brand new
—its newness astonished Augustine more than anything else he had seen here yet.

The heavy ironbound gates in the massive gatehouse stood open. Times were quieter now and they were only closed at sunset, Walther explained: all the same, some of the iron sheathing on them also looked brand new and this was surely almost as odd an anachronism as the new crucifix. In the porter's cubbyhole a lynx-eyed old woman sat permanently knitting. She rose and curtseyed to them, but her dropped hands did not even cease their knitting while she curtseyed.

The first court of the castle they now entered had long byres built against its high crenellated walls and from the nearest of them there came a gentle lowing, the slow clank of headchains. The cobbled yard itself was as clean as a drawing-room floor, the dung stacked tidily in masonry tanks that steamed in the frosty air: “Still, what a queer approach to one's front door!” thought Augustine. He was used of course to lawns and wide carriage-sweeps leading to gentlemen's houses: to rhododendrons and begonia-beds, with the facts of country life tucked well out of sight.

In the second court there did seem to be some attempt at a garden but now all the beds were covered with spruce-boughs against the frost ... but surely it could never get much sun in here even in summer, for nowhere was the court surrounded by less than fifty-foot lowering walls ...

“
Herunter!
” Walther suddenly bellowed against Augustine's ear: “The little imps of Satan!—Rudi! Heinz!”

Augustine looked up. High overhead against the sky, almost like tight-rope performers there on the narrow unprotected cat-walk of the battlemented wall which formed the castle enceinte, two six-year-old boys were riding little green bicycles. At their father's shout they wobbled wildly, and Augustine gasped; but somehow they dismounted safely. Walther called out again in rapid German and they scuttled into a turret doorway.

Then Walther turned to Augustine: “That is something forbidden. They shall be punished.” The bull-like voice sounded calm; but the iron hand which still gripped Augustine's upper arm was actually trembling; and the face ... surprisingly, Walther proved to have just an ordinary, anxious,
human
parent's face—not at all a stony troll's. The features were small and fine and by no means commanding. The brows beetled a bit but the brown eyes under them peeped down at Augustine almost timidly: “Don't you agree? I mean, would not even an English father also forbid?” When Augustine non-plussed said nothing he added rapidly: “Not that
I
'm a fusspot—but if their mother knew ...”

The main house itself now towered in front of them. There were four stories of stuccoed stone and then four more of steep pantiled roof with rows of dormers in it all boarded up. On the topmost roofridge was fixed a wagon-wheel, supporting a tattered old stork's nest. Augustine took this all in at a glance, for today he was still absorbing everything with the unnaturally observant eye of first arrival somewhere totally strange: not till tomorrow would he even begin to notice less.

Now Walther opened a wicket in an imposing, church-size door (remarking lugubriously: “
Twins!
It is fated that they will die together!”) and Augustine found himself ushered into a darkling, stone-vaulted space. This seemed to be a kind of above-ground cellarage or crypt, for it had no windows and immensely stout squat pillars upheld the weight of the castle overhead. Between these in the halfdark were parked a Victoria and a wagonette, together with two horse-sleighs and various other vehicles. Right at the back there was a pre-war vintage Benz—as cobwebby as a bin of port, and evidently long out of use.

Again, what a curious front-entrance for a gentleman's house! But it was indeed from here, apparently, that the main staircase led.

This narrow, twisting stairway too proved to be merely massive and defensible between its whitewashed stone walls: the stairs themselves were treaded with solid tree-trunks roughly squared with the adze.

At the first floor a heavy, wormy door opened straight off these stairs. It offered none of the flattering perspectives for entrances and exits social architects use—yet how magnificent the hall that hulking door opened into! Augustine caught his breath, for the sight was so unexpected. Not only was this hall quite vast in size: its length stretched nearly the whole width of the house: its proportions seemed to Augustine quite perfect—a most civilized room!

The floor was flagged with squares of some pale yellowish stone so shiny they reflected the chalky blues and faded crimsons of the primitive unvarnished portraits hung on the white walls—reflected even the dove-grey that the many doors opening off it were painted, and their delicate fillets picked out in gold leaf. Some of these stone floor-tiles were cracked and loose, clinking under them as they walked ...

“Adèle!” roared Walther so that the painted rafters echoed: “Here is our guest and cousin!”

Walther flung open the double doors at the far end of the hall, and stood aside in the outrush of hot air for Augustine to pass. A rather faded lady in her forties rose from an escritoire. She had very bright blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a slightly pursed mouth which only just knew how to smile; but in general her pale sandy face seemed to Augustine of a rather unmemorable kind. She thrust her hand firmly into Augustine's, English fashion; for she guessed he would be embarrassed if he thought he ought to kiss it.

Once the greetings were over, and the introductions (for there was a girl there too, and some middle-aged brother of Cousin Walther's who seemed to be lame), Augustine began looking about him again. It seemed to him sadly incongruous with the room's simple hexagonal shape and the delicate Adamsy traceries of its high coved ceiling that the place should be quite so crowded with furniture and knicknackery.

The walls were thick with pictures: amateur watercolors, mostly, and photographs. Most of these photographs were inclined to be old and faded; but there was one big enlargement in a bright gilt frame surmounted by a big gilt crown and this frame looked new, while the photograph itself looked also pretty recent—at any rate post-war. It showed an outdoor group centered on a rather dishevelled old gentleman in baggy trousers, with a grey beard and steel spectacles ...
certainly
not the Kaiser, even in retirement; and yet the frame looked unequivocally regal ... the background was some mammoth forest picnic: there were some forty or fifty children in their Sunday best—but also a bit dishevelled, the thing must have ended in a most un-regal romp!

In a firm but old man's hand it was signed: “Ludwig.” But of course—“Ludwig of Bavaria!” Thinking of “Germany” one tended to forget that Bavaria had remained a sovereign state-within-a-state, with her own king (down to the revolution five years ago), and her own government and even army. Moreover Augustine remembered hearing that this peaceable-looking old gentleman had carried to his recent grave a Prussian bullet in his body: a bullet from the war of '66, before there was any “Germany”—a war when Prussia and Bavaria had been two sovereign countries fighting on opposite sides. To an Englishman, used to long perspectives and slow changes, this was indeed History telescoped: as if King George V had been wounded at Bannockburn.

“
Germany
”: that formidable empire which had lately so shaken the whole world—its entire lifetime then had lasted less than a normal man's, a bare forty-eight years from its cradle to its present grave! Even the still adolescent U.S.A. was
three
times “Germany's” age. Everything here confused one's sense of time! There was something Victorian about Augustine's hostess, Cousin Adèle, with her lace and her chatelaine; but equally something of an earlier, sterner century too ...

There was something at least pre-war even about the young girl standing behind her. That cold and serious white face, with its very large gray thoughtful eyes. The carefully-brushed straight fair hair reaching nearly to her waist, tied back in a bunch with a big black bow behind her neck. The long straight skirt with its shiny black belt, the white blouse with its high starched collar ...

But he mustn't stare!
Augustine lowered his gaze deliberately; and behold, curled on the sofa in an attitude of sleep but with his bright eyes wide open, lay a fox.

They dined that night off wild-boar steak, grilled (it tasted more like young beef than any kind of pork), with a cream sauce and cranberry jam. There was spaghetti, and a smoky-flavored cheese. They drank a tawny Tyrolean wine that was light on the palate but powerful in action. Augustine found it all delicious: there wasn't much “starving Germany” here, he thought.

Franz (the young skier) had shot the boar, he learned, marauding in their forests—though Heaven knows where it had come from, for they were supposed to be extinct hereabouts. Baron Franz—Lothar's former schoolfellow, Mary's “ten-year-old, tow-haired little Franz”—was now a lad of twenty. He was very fair, and smaller than his father but with all his father's energy of movement. His manner towards Augustine was perhaps a little over-formal and polite as coming from one young man to another, but in repose his face wore permanently a slightly contemptuous expression. This the father's face totally lacked and it made Augustine's hackles rise a little in the face of somebody quite so young, quite so inexperienced in the world as this Franz—his own junior by three years at least.

The only other male person present was that rather dim ex-officer with a game leg, Walther's brother. He swallowed his food quickly, then shook hands all round murmuring something about “work to do” and vanished. Augustine ticketed him “Cheltenham” and thought no more about him; thus he missed the quick glance of intelligence that uncle and nephew exchanged, Franz's almost imperceptible shrug and shake of the head.

At dinner the conversation was almost entirely a monologue by Walther. The mother and that eldest daughter (the younger children were in bed, presumably) hardly spoke at all. Augustine had failed to catch the girl's name on introduction and no one had addressed her by it since, so he didn't know what name to think of her by; but he found himself peeping at her more and more. It never entered his head to think her “beautiful” but her face had a serenity which promised interesting depths. Her eyes hardly roamed at all: he never saw her glance even once
his
way; but already he surmised she might be going to prove rather more sympathique than that cocky brother, once she opened out a little.

She looked always as if she were just going to speak: her curving upper-lip was always slightly lifted and indeed once he saw her lips actually begin to move; but it proved to be only a silent conversation, with herself or perhaps some absent friend. In fact, she “wasn't there”: she seemed to have shut her ears entirely to what was going on around her. Perhaps she had heard them all before too often, these stories her father was interminably telling?