The Fox in the Attic (20 page)

So now it was only the expected which had happened. Mostly, people were jubilant. Churchbells rang and villages were beflagged. In the past people had tended to laugh a little unkindly at the late ex-king's concertina-trousers and his passionate interest in dairies; but in Bavaria fanatical republicans had always been few. Even since the republic villages still used to be beflagged and churchbells rung, children dressed in their holiday best and fire-brigades paraded, for ex-king Ludwig's “private” visits. When Ludwig died two years ago Munich gave him a state funeral. It turned into the warmest demonstration of public affection you'd have found anywhen in all that “thousand years of Wittelsbach rule.”

Thus today there were only a few who wore long faces: but those were the very few who allowed themselves to wonder
What next?
For surely this must make the present open breach with Berlin final, must make wastepaper of the Weimar constitution? An independent Bavarian kingdom, then ... but where do we go from there? Other German states had their would-be separatists too; as well as royalist Bavaria there was red Saxony; there were rebellious reds in Hamburg; and at Aachen there were those despicable paid stooges of the French who even talked of an “independent” Rhineland.

But Walther von Kessen was not among these longfaced, long-sighted ones as in bubbling spirits he saw to the hoisting of flags, ordered the firing of feux-de-joie, plotted processions and ox-roastings, planned thanksgiving Masses with the village priest, even bruited a memorial obelisk on the Schwartzberg. Moreover Augustine had caught the infection and was bubbling too: possibly the drinking of toasts (no heel-taps) in plum-brandy at breakfast contributed to his care-free attitude of “Ruritania, here we come ...” Presently he waved his glass and asked “M'Lord Baron” for a boon: surely so happy an occasion should be celebrated by granting a pardon to all poor prisoners in the castle, chained in durance vile?

For several seconds Walther gazed at him pop-eyed, as if Augustine had gone stark mad: for Walther's mind had been far away, and in any case he was somewhat unused to fooling. But at last the light dawned—and then, Walther was delighted. How very charming of Augustine! What an appropriate sentiment and how wittily expressed! Walther indeed was quite astonished: for the first time he felt for his young English cousin something that was almost affection, and clapped him on the shoulder till the dust flew. Then he commanded that the boys' dog-collars should of course be undone (“That was your meaning, wasn't it? I have divined rightly?”) and sent the two little sisters happily scurrying to see to it.

For the fact was that Walther was only too glad of this excuse for an amnesty. It was forced upon him that in this exemplary punishment he had let his sense of fitness run away with him: the boys were taking it harder than he had expected. There was nothing naturally cruel in Walther—only a belief that in punishing children one ought to be imaginative as well as stern: that the modern parent doesn't go on just unintelligently beating his children for ever.

Thereafter Walther had to go about his feudal festive occasions with Otto: so the three young people, feeling excited and pent-in, went down to the courtyard, Franz and his sister arm-in-arm, out into the keen cold air. The courtyard was deep in snow. The ramparts on its surrounding walls where yesterday the boys had bicycled were now covered in a slope of untrodden snow, the crenellated twiddles of the parapet smoothed out by snow. A snow-hush was on all the world this morning, in which the distant sounds of loyal merriment—the churchbells and the sleigh-bells and the gunshots and some far singing—floated unaccompanied: the only near sound was the tiny (indeed infinitesimal) shriek of the snow you trod.

They passed through the Great Gate. Below them, white snow blanketed the treetops and the village roofs, the church-tower rocking under its bells; and all the forests and fields beyond were also a dead white under the dun sky. In all that whiteness the tints of the painted crucifix outside the castle gate took on a special brilliance: the crimson gouts of blood that trickled from the snow-covered crown of thorns and down the tired face: the glistening pinks and ivories of the emaciated naked body with its wisp of loin-cloth: the blood and blue-white snow round the big iron spike driven through the twisted, crossed, riven feet. Under the cross but quite unconscious of it stood a group of small mites who had just toiled up there from the village with their toboggans: red caps and yellow curls, shell-pink faces intoxicated with the snow, they stood out against the background colorlessness as rich as butterflies, they and the Christ together.

Here Franz halted the trio and they stood in contemplation. “Grüss Gott,” the children whispered.

Augustine peered inquisitively down through the tree-tops towards the half-hidden village celebrating beneath. But Franz and Mitzi, their arms still linked, stood with their two smooth yellow heads close against the crucified knees. Franz's face was working with emotion. Instinctively Mitzi at his side turned towards him and with her free hand felt for and stroked his shoulder. As if that released something he began speaking: his face was averted from Augustine but his voice intended for him ... this English Augustin even though English was young and so
must
understand him!

“Papa,” said Franz (and each word was charged with its peculiar tension), “is a monarchist: we are not, of course.” He paused. “You see, Papa is a Bavarian, but I am a German.” With a careful but unconscious finger he was pushing the snow off the spike through Christ's feet. One after another the children on their toboggans and bobsleighs dived head-foremost into the trees below, leaving the three alone. “Papa lives in the Past!
We
live in the future, I and Mitzi.”

“... And Uncle Otto,” Mitzi added quietly.

“Uncle Otto too? Yes, and no ... not without reservation ...”

At that, Mitzi drew a sudden, startled breath.

As they passed in through the great gate and saw the house again Augustine glanced up at the roof, for from the tail of his eye he seemed to have caught a flicker of movement there. That
open
dormer on the fifth floor: yesterday surely it had been boarded up like all the rest?

“All the same,” Franz was saying as the trio reentered the garden court, “to me, this morning's news is good news ... so I
think
... for now things will begin to move.” Just then the twins appeared in a doorway, watching them. Augustine stooped to make a snowball, but these little fellows looked so solemn they might take it for a deadly affront. “Kahr—Rupprecht—they are themselves of no importance,” Franz was explaining. “Gustav von Kahr is merely the Finger of Fate: ‘Fate's
Little
Finger,' if I may be permitted the trope. Supposing it possible to harness too-great forces to too-small ends, today he has released in Germany disruptive powers he will not be able to control. And certainly no one in Berlin will be able to control them now Walther Rathenau is dead.—That was why the great Rathenau
had
to die,” he added in a curious husky parenthesis, his eyes suddenly large and gloating and horribly human.

“But if things do get quite out of control ... what is it you're hoping to see happen?” asked Augustine, idly amused.

“Chaos,” said Franz, simply and somberly. “Germany must be re-born and it is only from the darkness of the hot womb of chaos that such re-birth is possible ... the
blood-red
darkness of the hot womb, etc,” he corrected himself, sounding for the moment very young—a child who had only imperfectly learned his lesson.

“Golly!” murmured Augustine under his breath. This queer German cousin was proving a rather more entertaining character than he had suspected.

But just then Augustine's attention was distracted from Franz, for Mitzi stumbled over something in the snow. Franz was still holding her by the arm but had ceased to pay much heed to her, so that now she almost fell. “Whoa there, hold up!” cried Augustine blithely, and slipped from his place to take her other arm.

Usually Augustine rather avoided touching people, if he could: girls, especially. So that now he had deliberately taken a girl's arm it was somewhat a strange experience to him. True, it seemed quite devoid of any electrical discharges; but it was embarrassing all the same. Thus at first he found himself gripping the limp, sleeved thing much too hard. Then he would have liked to let go of it again but found he didn't know how, gracefully, and so had to keep hold of it willy-nilly. All the while he was acutely anxious lest Mitzi should take him for one of the pawing kind.

Whereon in a curiously emphatic—indeed almost tragic, and yet unhurried voice, Mitzi ignoring him began to talk to her brother about their uncle. Perhaps (she admitted) Franz had been right in his “reservations”; for one had to admit that Uncle Otto did
not
, in his every endeavor, show signs that he sought absolute chaos and ensued it. Indeed, the work he was doing for the Army ...

“I'm afraid that is in fact so,” said Franz, frowning. “Our uncle has not, I regret, so clearly understood the philosophical pre-necessity of chaos before creation as we have, you and I and ... and certain others.” Now that his brain was active and his emotions engaged, Franz's habitual conceited and contemptuous expression had given place to something a good deal simpler and nobler: “Hence arises our uncle's mistake—to be working too soon for the re-birth of the German
Army
, when he ought to be working first rather for the re-birth of the German
Soul
. He sets too much store by cadres and hidden arsenals and secret drilling: too little by the ghostly things. He forgets that unless a nation has a living soul to dwell in the Army as its body, even an Army is nothing! In present-day Germany an ‘Army' would be a mere soulless zombie ...”

“Hear-hear!” Augustine interrupted: “Naturally! This time the soul of the
new
Germany has to take unto itself a civilian ‘body' of course—and that can't be an easy pill for soldiers like old Otto to swallow.”

“The soul of Germany take a
civilian
body?” Franz looked startled, and there was a prolonged pause while he turned this strange idea over in his mind: “So! That is interesting ... you carry me further than I had yet traveled. You think then that our classical Reichswehr, with its encumbering moralistic traditions, will prove too strait an outlet for so mighty an upsurge of spirit? So, that the re-born Soul of Germany will need to build for itself some new ‘body' altogether—some ‘body'
wholly
German, wholly barbaric and of the people? Is that your thought?”

Now it was Augustine's turn to look startled. In some way they had got at cross-purposes but just how? And where?

But before he could gather himself to answer Franz had begun again: “The ghostly things: those must indeed not be lost sight of. Do you know what General Count Haesler said even thirty years ago?—Not? I will tell you. It was in an address to the Army: ‘
It is necessary that our German civilization shall build its temple upon a mountain of corpses, upon an ocean of tears, upon the death-cries of men without number
...'—Prophetic words, profoundly metaphysical and anti-materialist: an imperative to the whole German race! But how to be fulfilled, please, Augustin, excepting through the Army?”

So Franz continued, yet even while he was speaking his words were growing faint in Augustine's ears—fading, as at a departure, into silence. For suddenly and when least expected the magic moment had come. That soft, living arm in the thick insulating sleeve—Mitzi's arm, which his fingers had almost forgotten that they held—had warmed ... had thrilled. Now it seemed to be rapidly dissolving between his tingling fingers into a flowing essence: an essence moreover that felt to him as if it hummed (for it was indeed more a feeling than a sound, this humming) like a telegraph-wire on a still evening. Then all at once his own trembling hand which did the holding began too to dissolve away in this “Essence,” like a sandcastle in a rising tide. Now there was direct access—a direct union between the two of them through which great pulses of Mitzi's soul seemed to be pumped up his arm, thence gushing into his empty chest, his head, his singing ears.

Augustine turned himself and stared down into Mitzi's face, wild-eyed. What must she be thinking about this extraordinary thing which was happening between them? For it was surely happening to her arm and his hand alike—it was happening to them both, to the very separateness of their being. Her enormous soul was pouring every moment more deafeningly in and out through the steaming gates of his, while the whole world clanged about them. Yet Mitzi's expression was cool and calm and unfathomable as ever: her incredibly beautiful face perhaps even stiller ...

“Beautiful?”—Why, this young face out of the whole world was the sole incarnate meaning of that dumb word “beauty”! In the whole world's history, the first true license for its use! Her inscrutable face under his gaze was so still it hardly seemed to breathe. Her wide gray eyes neither met his nor avoided them—seemed to ignore them, rather.

“Her wide ...” It was then at last that the truth about those purblind eyes struck home to him! Struck him moreover with a stab of panic—for pity as well as fear can attain the mad intensity of panic.

Evidently Franz was expecting an answer. Augustine had quite ceased hearing him talking yet now heard him stop talking, sensed his expectancy. So Augustine hurriedly searched his ears for any unnoticed words which might be lingering there, like searching sea-caves for old echoes.

“Well: surely lately we've had enough of all that in all conscience!” he said at last, half at random.

“Enough of all what?” asked Franz, puzzled.

“Of ... well, corpses and tears and what's-it.”

“How ‘enough,' when Germany is not yet victorious?” Franz countered, now even more puzzled still by this queer English cousin.