The Fox in the Attic (18 page)

Augustine was startled by a sudden silence. Walther's voice had tailed off and stopped. Walther was looking from face to face. That young Englishman with so much to learn—conceited flushed young fool! Obviously his attention had wandered. But then Walther looked at his own wife as well, his two children: their attitudes also were politely attentive and their faces blank.

Walther
so much
loved them! He had learned at his own painful costs how the world wagged—and
Gott in Himmel
wasn't it the very world they too would have to live in? Yet whenever he tried to tell them they shut themselves in their shells like this and stopped their ears. Their
own dear papa
had suffered these perils and done these deeds—not some stranger ... Ah, if only he had been born a poet with winged words hooded on his wrist ready for the slipping! But Walther had been born instead proud heir to the long line of Knights of Lorienburg—so damn all snivelling low-born poets!

Walther took a deep breath and tried again: “The Red rabble that faced von Epp that spring, four-and-a-half years ago—just imagine! It appointed for itself a self-styled
poet
in command, the Jewish scribbler Toller.”

“
Toller
...” In all Walther's rigmarole that name had come to Augustine as the first tinkle of the Germany of his supposings, the “real” Germany he had come to see: the Germany of Toller, Georg Kaiser, Thomas Mann, Werfel, Einstein, the world-famous architect Mendelssohn. Here at last, perhaps, was the moment for knowledgeable comment: “
Ernst
Toller?” said the rather fuddled Augustine helpfully: “Surely one of the greatest German dramatists of all time!—A feather,” he added acutely, “in Munich's crown.”

There was a stilly pause. Franz's gasp was audible, while Walther looked vastly startled—as if Augustine had suddenly used improper language in mixed company. “Indeed? I have not had the privilege of reading the young scoundrel's works,” he said presently with cold distaste.

Augustine had not read them either: he was only repeating Oxford tattle, where it was known that Romain Rolland had praised them, and Bjorn Bjornsen.

Augustine hadn't of course had any intention of giving offense. But now Adèle rose. The girl rose too: she passed quickly round the table, trailing her finger negligently along the edge: then she held and kissed her father's frowning forehead and vanished from the room behind her mother.

On that, Augustine found himself actually wondering for one brief moment what impression
he
might be making on
them
.—Lord, he supposed he had better watch his step ... he must make things right with Walther, straight away.

Suddenly though he realized that Walther also was bidding him good-night.

Augustine's bedroom was a large low one opening off the stairs, with white walls and dark furniture. It was heated by an iron stove standing out in the middle and the wood was crackling so merrily when he went to bed that a foot or more of the long iron flue-pipe glowed redhot. Augustine wrestled in vain with a window in the hope of letting out some of all this heat. He was not used to a heated bedroom and it made him somehow afraid to go to sleep. Thus he lay awhile in his bed awake, watching the flue-pipe glowing in the dark.

As the wine receded his mind began to race, rather like an engine with a slipping clutch; but presently its chaotic involuntary plungings began to take shape as a new poem:

He was rather pleased with that beginning, at first—its detached attitude was so adult. But then he grew disgruntled with its idiom. Why didn't his few poems, when they came, arrive spontaneously in modern idiom—the idiom of Eliot, or the Sitwells? They never did ...“Oft ...”
This
idiom was positively Victorian.
Victorian
idiom ... ? “Idiom Makyth Man,” Douglas Moss had once said; and the recollection gave him now a most uneasy feeling.

In the night-silence he could hear someone in the far distance somewhere playing a piano. It was too powerful for a girl's playing, these swelling thunderous chords were a very Niagara of
lacrimae rerum
. It must be Cousin Walther, not in bed yet—or else unable to sleep.

Augustine began to wonder about people like Walther. Were they actually the way they
talked
—unreal creatures, truly belonging to that queer fictive state of collective being they seemed to think was “Life” but which he thought of as “History”? Or were they what they looked—real people, at bottom just as human and separate as Englishmen are? Was Walther the freak he seemed? Were all the others here—indeed, all Germans—like him? Perhaps he'd be nearer the answer when he got to know the girl better ... or even Cousin Adèle. For Women (he told himself sagely and now very sleepily) are surely, surely always the same, the whole world over,

Augustine found himself climbing a long, long rope to get to his bedroom. He was at Mellton and very reasonably he had had the staircase taken out—Gilbert was on it—and put on the lawn. It was somewhere out there on the lawn now, with Gilbert still mounting it.

Presently a queer, high-pitched howling mingled itself with these dreams. It was shriller and more yappy than a dog's and almost too heartless to sound sorrowful. It came first from the big hall: then presently something passed his half-open door and the howling began again, above.

*

Squatting in her thick dressing-gown high in the middle of her hard huge bed of dark carved wood, by the shaded bedside light of a focused reading-candle, the girl (this was Mary's “wide-eyed little Mitzi,” of course, and she was now seventeen) sat writing a letter. Her face looked very different now in spectacles—much livelier than at dinner: kinder, and cleverer too; and her head was cocked on one side with one cheek almost on the page, like an infant child's ...

She wrote to Tascha every night, in her big straggly writing that she couldn't read herself. If she missed even one night Tascha thought she had stopped loving her and sent Mitzi a keepsake damp with reproachful tears (Princess Natascha was a Russian girl of her own age with a deep contralto voice and lived in Munich).

Mitzi paused and laid the letter on the quilt beside her. Then she hunched up her bare bony knees inside her nightgown against her bare soft chest and hugged them extravagantly, considering: what should she say this time?

Papa at dinner had been awful again, but that wasn't news ...

Usually the words came with a run, even when nothing had happened. Nothing much ever did happen, at Lorienburg ... but today there had surely been a real event—the arrival of this young Englishman in a house where visitors were rare.

It was difficult to guess what he was really like, inside his outside; hard to know if he would turn out to be nice
inside
or not. Hard enough to imagine what the mere feeling of being any Englishman must be like, that unknown breed, without distinguishing between them. As for his “outside”... he talked German haltingly and with a rather unpleasing accent (rather like that Swiss tutor who once looked after Franz). But when he talked his own English his voice was quite different: she hadn't thought of “English”—that dour schoolroom task—as capable of ever sounding like that! An honest, feeling voice: one you could trust not to laugh. His clothes had an extraordinary smell: a wistful smell, rather like wood-smoke—no, peat ... his shoes were curiously silent: they must have rubber soles.

The sudden howling in the hall just outside her door sent momentarily a goose-shiver down her spine. She jumped out of bed and went to investigate. As soon as she opened her door the howling stopped abruptly. She whistled, softly; but the little fox didn't come to her, instead she heard his almost soundless stealthy padding towards the stairs. For a moment she stood, listening: he went up, not down.

The night was turning colder still.

After she was back in bed and settled again wholly within the warmed spot in it she faintly heard the howling resumed; but now, high in one of the desolate uninhabited stories overhead where nobody ever went.

The obvious thing was to write to Tascha about
him
—the unknown English cousin “Augustin.” His coming was important. But it was almost a heard voice within her that kept warning her: “
No, Mitzi: better not!
”

*

When Otto left the table he went to his office and for some hours worked on the papers he had abandoned earlier. Then he looked at his watch: it was time to put through his call to Munich.

It had begun to snow. Outside the pane a succession of flakes like white moths fluttered through the beam of light.

But when he asked for his number they told him there were “no lines to Munich.” So he asked for his call to be kept in hand; but they told him no calls for Munich were being accepted tonight.—Were the lines down?—They didn't know, but they could accept no calls.—But this is to the Minister himself, Herr Doktor ... There was a pause, and then another voice answered, coldly, that regrettably that made no difference—
no
calls were being accepted.

Kahr's orders, presumably; or General Lossow's? Or perhaps actually Colonel Seisser's (he was now police chief). What were they up to, then, those Munich triumvirs? Otto hung up the receiver, and his brow was wrinkled. The snow was falling faster but clearly this wasn't a question of faulty lines: something was happening in Munich tonight!

As he creaked along the dark passages on his way to his room he wondered what it was, this time; there were so many things it might be. The situation was so tense it could only break, not bend; but there were half-a-dozen places the fracture could occur.—Still, no use worrying. He put his keys under the pillow, then oiled his revolver and put it in a drawer. Then he undressed, unstrapped his leg and laid it on a chest, and hopped to his bed.

But once in bed the pain began again: extraordinary how difficult it is to lie comfortably in bed with only one leg!

“
No calls to Munich accepted
...” On second thoughts he got out of bed again, hopped to the drawer, fetched his revolver and put it under the pillow with his keys.

When Otto heard the howling he wondered what ailed Reineke; for surely the mating season was three months off as yet?

*

Indeed there was only one person in the whole household seriously perturbed by that faint, high-pitched howling when it sounded from the desolate upper regions.

This was Franz. As soon as he was sure where the sound now came from he slipped a dark coat over his pajamas, blew out his light and quietly opened his door. The hall outside was pitch-black. He listened: no one else was stirring. As he stealthily felt his way up the stairs in the dark his bare feet were even more noiseless than reynard's own had been.

Here, in the curving walls of the stair-pit, the howling echoed eerily. On the first half-landing he passed Augustine's room—the last room inhabited. The door must be ajar; for he could hear Augustine muttering in his sleep. So, as he passed it on his way up, Franz felt for the English cousin's door and quietly closed it; for least of all did Franz want
him
rendered inquisitive about those floors above.

In Munich tension had risen all that day—to fever-level. Everyone knew that von Kahr (who had lately been appointed a dictator in the old Roman, caretaker sense) was holding a meeting that evening at which fatal decisions were expected. Kahr wanted Prince Rupprecht on the throne of his fathers: an independent Bavaria, perhaps. The meeting was private but all the bigwigs in Bavaria had been invited and several from outside.

The situation was indeed so tense it could only break, not bend: no wonder those young clerks and waiters at the Bayrischer-Hof had seemed to Augustine that morning to have something more important on their minds than running hotels! At the gymnasium too all nerves had been on edge today: even the pug-nosed instructor was so distrait he nearly broke Lothar's pliant back in a new lock he was teaching him.

Lothar himself was not consciously aware of nervousness or foreboding, but he was moved by a sudden overweening upsurge of the love he felt for all these his friends and for that incomparable brotherhood to which they all belonged. Presently a gust of it almost swept him off his feet as he stooped in the changing-room tying his shoes.

On that the lace broke, and while he knotted it his mind's eye contemplated this signal image:
Germania
, a nymph chained white and naked to the cruel Rock of Versailles. Her soft skin was ravened and slobbered by the sated yet still gluttonous Entente Powers; but it was being even more cruelly mauled and torn (he saw) by the talons of her hungry secret enemies—the Bolsheviks, the Berlin government, the Jews ... the hooded Vatican and her Bavarian separatist brood. But just then in the nick of time Lothar's boyhood hero and present commander the brave young Hermann Goering (that nonpareil among Birdmen!) swooped down in shining armor to save her—with
Lothar
at his side.

Before that picture Lothar's heart quite brimmed over with love; and while the mood was still on him he slipped his precious ten-shilling note almost surreptitiously into the Party chest.

In the throng behind Lothar as he did this his comrade the massive (though rather muscle-bound) Fritz nudged young Willi, and pointed: “Watch out!” he whispered hoarsely: “The artful little bourgeois scab—what's
he
trying to pull?”

Fritz's indignant croak was meant to be confidential, but it had come out louder than intended. At once his suspicious eyes blinked and he glanced round anxiously over his huge, humped shoulder: for Fritz was working-class (his father being a skilled burglar), and he feared that most of these bourgeois wet rags here already looked on him as no better than a Red. Who knows? That perishing little twister young Scheidemann! With his foreign Valuta he might have wormed his way in with the Top Ones here
already
... in which case poor clumsy Fritz had put his foot in it proper.—Look! Even Willi the pariah was edging away from Fritz now ... or was it Lothar Scheidemann Willi was giving the cold shoulder to?—Which?—God's Mother,
which
?