The Fox in the Attic (22 page)

So now, in the gray dawn that as yet had scarcely penetrated indoors, they were searching this place for Toller the fugitive; and Franz was there to identify him, if he were found.

“Open!
Open!
” The doors seldom opened quickly enough, and again and again the sergeant had to kick down these doors. Doors entering on rooms with sagging, gravid ceilings and with lamps hastily lit. Entering on dark rooms filled to the peeling walls with beds. Collapsing rooms, filled with threadbare beds laden with whole bony families—whole families which night after night had bred on them those innumerable bone-thin children now smelling, in the darkness, of urine and of hate.

All the same, they had not found Toller; and presently for some reason Franz had been left alone like this in the darkness to guard the stairs while the rest of the patrol moved on elsewhere ...

Just at that point in his recollections Franz turned the horse's head towards the forest. All at once the sleigh plunged in among the trees down a broad ride, and Augustine in his snow-bound loving ecstasy gave loud utterance to a hunting-cry. At that happy, wholly animal sound a tremor passed across Franz's quailing, hunted face: for now in the paling darkness countless shadowy figures in their ghostlike nightclothes were hustling him and again hustling him, and the tide of them had begun to carry him away—in a twinkling that woman had snatched at his rifle and underfoot the child had writhed and bitten him and his falling gun had gone off lethally right among them, the women and the children—a deafening bang, and then the howling ...

Augustine failed to notice that tremor, for he was leaning right forward so as to be able to see past good old Franz and steal a glance at Mitzi.—Aha! At the happy, noble, British animal sound he had just emitted her parted, frost-pink lips had smiled.

Augustine leant back again in his place, content.

Mitzi had smiled ... but surely the smile lingered on her lips rather overlong? Indeed in the end it seemed frozen to a mere physical configuration, no pleasure nor humor remaining in it.

Once Mitzi's childhood cataracts had been removed the only vision she ever had when without spectacles to give things some semblance of shape (those spectacles which might never be worn in public) was a sort of marbled mingling of light and shade. But this morning she had woken plagued with dark discs floating across things—discs which even the spectacles could not dispel; and now these swimming discs, or globules, had begun to coalesce in a queerly solid black cloud, curtaining totally one part of the field. Now too that black cloud had begun to emit minute but brilliant blue flashes along its advancing edge ... for it
was
advancing, every now and then the cloud jerked forward a little further and blocked out a little more of the field (moreover, in such an absolute way!).

Six months ago without even this much warning one eye had wholly collapsed, ceased to be a sense-organ at all. “The retina had detached,” they said. But that was the eye which had always been the weaker, quite apart from those cataracts in both of them; and the doctors were so full of comforting assurances about the remaining, stronger eye! Until now she had completely believed them; but was after all the same thing now happening to her “good” eye too? In a matter of hours or minutes—hastened perhaps by the jolting of the sleigh—might she find herself for ever afterwards stone blind?

That was the sudden premonition which had made Mitzi so suddenly abandon that smile of hers and leave it lying derelict on her lips, discarded and forgotten while she prayed:

Mary, Mother ... Oh Mary, Mother ... Heart of Jesus ...

So the sleigh glided on with them, and slid—all three swaying together, these three separate identities bundled up in one bundle: a trio, pressed flank to flank in such close physical communion as almost to seem physically one person. On and on through the whiteness and the blackness of the endless snow-burdened forest.

In the ears of all three of them similarly the silvery music of their sleigh's sweet bells echoed off the endless equidistant serried boles.

It surprised Franz when at last they arrived at Röttningen to find Dr. Reinhold there. The eminent jurist was a busy man and seldom came to his brother's house; but now Franz heard his unmistakable throbbing voice as soon as they entered the hall.

It seemed to come through the open library door where Dr. Ulrich had just appeared to greet them: “
Two
shots!” the exciting voice thrilled in tones rich with pathos: “Straight through the ceiling!
Phut-phut!
Surely a remarkable way of catching the chairman's eye at a meeting ... and indeed he caught
every
eye, balancing there erect on a little beer-table—all those grandees in full fig, and him in a dirty mackintosh with his black tails showing under its skirts—like a waiter on the way home. In one hand a big turnip-watch, and a smoking pistol in the other ...”

A subdued buzz of appreciation was audible from the library. In the meanwhile Franz had been trying to murmur his parents' excuses, but Dr. Ulrich seemed in a towering hurry and wouldn't stop to listen to them—he would scarcely let the Lorienburg party get their furs off before he shepherded them in front of him into the already crowded library and pushed them into chairs. “S-s-s-sh!” he admonished them excitedly: “Reinhold was there, he saw everything! He left Munich before dawn and has just got here by way of Augsburg. They're all in it—Ludendorff, Kahr, Lossow, Seisser, Poehner ...”

“You muddle everything, Uli! It's all that Hitler!” said Reinhold plaintively, “I keep telling you!”

“... and Otto Hitler too,” Dr. Ulrich added hurriedly: “One of Ludendorff's lot,” he explained.

“
Adolf
...” his brother corrected him. “But not ‘
and
Adolf Hitler
too
'! As I'm trying to explain—only you will keep running in and out—little second-fiddle Hitler entirely stole the show! Ludendorff, today? Kahr?” he continued with ironical disdain, and snapped his fingers: “
Pfui!
—For months those two have both been stringing this Hitler along, each trying to use that empty brain and hypnotic tongue for his own ends: now Hitler has turned the tables!”

“It must all have been richly comic,” someone remarked comfortably.

“But on the contrary!” Dr. Reinhold was palpably shocked. “How can I have conveyed to you any such idea?—No, it was deeply impressive!—
Macabre
, if you like: a mis-en-scène by Hieronymus Bosch: but in no way comic!”

Once more everybody settled down to listen. “The hall was packed—by exclusive invitation only, for a pronouncement of Great Importance. Everybody who was anybody was there including our entire Bavarian cabinet—and Hitler too of course, he'd somehow been invited ...”

“
When was this, and where?
” Franz whispered to Ulrich, aside.

“
Last night. Munich
.”

“
But WHERE?
”

“
S-s-s-sh! The Bürgerbräukeller: Kahr had engaged their biggest hall
.”

“We all knew what we'd been summoned for, of course—more or less. It would be monarchy, or secession—or perhaps both ... federation with Austria, even. But Kahr seemed in no hurry to come to brass-tacks. He droned on and
on
. That tiny square head of his—for anthropometrically he's a veritable text-book Alpine, that old boy, and his little head sank lower and lower on the expanse of his chest till I truly thought it would end up in his lap! Nothing about him looked alive except those two little brown eyes of his: from time to time they'd leave his notes and take just one peep at us—like mice from the mouths of their holes!
Eight-fifteen—eight-twenty
—on and on—
eight-twenty-five
—still endlessly saying nothing—
eight-twenty-eight, twenty-nine
, and then—you should have seen Kahr's look of outrage at the interruption—that inexplicable
Phut! Phut!
”

Reinhold paused dramatically, palpably waiting till someone asked him, “What happened then?”

“Silence, at first—a moment of utter silence! But the watch in Hitler's hand was fully as significant as his pistol. On the very stroke of eight-thirty—at the very moment he first pulled the trigger—the door burst open and in tumbled young Hermann Goering with a machine-gun squad! Steel helmets seemed to appear instantly out of nowhere: at every door, every window, all over the hall itself. And then Pandemonium broke loose! Shrieks and shouts, crashing furniture and smashing beer-jugs ... punctuated by that short sharp ululation peculiar to women in expensive furs ...

“Hitler jumped off his table and began pushing to the front, revolver still in hand. Two of Goering's strong-arm boys half-lifted him onto the platform, and Kahr was shoved aside. So there he stood, facing us ... You know those piercing, psychotic, popping eyes of his? You know that long, comparatively legless body? (‘Incidentally you're
another
Alpine, dear boy,' I thought: ‘You're certainly no Nordic ...') But oh the adoring gaze those brawny pinhead gladiators of his kept turning on him from under their tin skull-cups, those ant-soldiers of his (and there seemed to be legions of them, let me tell you, there last night)!

“Now in a moment it was so quiet again you could hear Hitler panting—like a dog circling a bitch! He was profoundly excited. Indeed whenever he faces a crowd it seems to arouse him to a veritable orgasm—he doesn't woo a crowd, he rapes it. Suddenly he began to screech: ‘On to Berlin! The national revolution has begun—
I
announce it! The Hakenkreuz is marching! The Army is marching! The Police are marching!
Everybody
is marching!'” Dr. Reinhold's voice rasped harsher and harsher: “‘This hall is occupied! Munich is occupied! Germany is occupied!
Everywhere is occupied!
'” In his mimicry Dr. Reinhold glared round the room with quivering nostrils, as if daring anyone to move in his seat. Then he continued: “‘The Bavarian government is deposed! The Berlin government is deposed! God Almighty is deposed—hail to the new Holy Trinity Hitler-Ludendorff-Poehner! Hoch!'”

“
Poehner?
” said someone incredulously: “That ... long, stuttering policeman?”

“Once—Jailer of Stadelheim!—Now, Bavaria's new prime minister!” said Reinhold with ceremony: “
Hoch!
”

“And Ludendorff ... so Ludendorff
is
behind it all,” said someone else.

“Ye-es—in the sense that the tail is ‘behind' the dog,” said Reinhold: “Commander-in-chief of a thrice-glorious (non-existent) National Army—
Hoch!
It's Lossow who's to be minister of war. I tell you, when Ludendorff at last came on the scene he was in a smoking rage: it was perfectly obvious Hitler had bounced him—he'd known nothing about the coup till they got him there. He
spoke
honeyed words, but he
looked
like a prima donna who's just been tripped into the wings.”

“And Egon Hitler himself?”

“‘
Adolf
,' please ... our modest Austrian Alpine? He asks so little for himself! Only ...” Reinhold stood exaggeratedly at attention—“Only to be Supreme Dictator of the Whole German Reich—Hoch! Hoch! HOCH!”

Someone in Reinhold's audience made a more farmyard noise.

“My friend—but you ought to have been there!” said Reinhold, fixing him with his eyes: “I couldn't understand it ... frankly, I can't understand it now so perhaps you clever people will explain it to me? Hitler retires to confer in private with Kahr & Co.—at the pistol-point I've little doubt, for Kahr and Lossow were flabbergasted and palpably under arrest—while young Hermann Goering in all his tinkling medals—all gongs and glamour—is left to keep
us
amused! Back comes Hitler: he has shed his trench-coat now and there his godhead stands revealed—our Titan! Our New Prometheus!—in a slop-shop tail-coat nearly reaching to his ankles,
das arme Kellnerlein!
But then Hitler begins to
speak
again: “November criminals” and “Glorious Fatherland” and “Victory or Death” and all that gup. Then Ludendorff speaks: “On to Berlin—there's no turning back now ...” “That's spiked Kahr's separatist, royalist guns pretty thoroughly,” I thought: “and just in the nick of time! Prince Rupprecht is right out of it from now on—he's missed his cue ...” But no! For then the notoriously anti-royalist Hitler chokes out some intention-ally only half-audible laudatory reference to ‘His Majesty': whereon Kahr bursts into tears and falls into Hitler's arms, babbling about ‘Kaiser Rupprecht'! Ludendorff can't have heard what Hitler said or Kahr said either—fortunately, for he'd certainly have burst asunder ... but as it is, everyone shakes hands all round ... then State-Commissioner Baron von Kahr speaks, then Commanding-General von Lossow, then Chief-of-Police Colonel von Seisser—all licking the Austrian ex-corporal's boots! All pledging him their support! Not that I'd trust one of them a yard if I were Hitler ... any more than I'd trust Hitler's new-found reverence for royalty if I were Rupprecht.

“So much for the stage and the professionals: in the audience we're all jumping on our seats and cheering ourselves silly. ‘Reinhold Steuckel, you level-headed eminent jurist!' I kept telling myself. ‘This isn't politics, it's Opera. Everyone's playing a part—but everyone!'”

“Grand Opera—or Opera-bouffe?” asked someone behind the speaker.

Reinhold turned right round in his chair and looked at his interrogator very seriously: “Ah, that's the question! And it's early days really to know the answer,” he added slowly. “But I
think
it's what I hinted earlier: something not quite human.—Wagner you say? You're thinking of that early, immature thing of his, Rienzi? Perhaps. Yes, the score is recognizably at least
school
of Wagner ... ah, but those ant-soldiers—all those sinister, animated insects and those rabbits and weasels on their hind legs ... and above all, Hitler ... Yes, it
was
Wagner, but Wagner staged
by Hieronymus Bosch
!”