The Fox in the Attic (23 page)

He said all this with such compelling earnestness, enunciating those last words in so sibilant a whisper, that a chill hush fell on the whole room. Dr. Reinhold had not gained that courtroom reputation of his for nothing.

Dr. Ulrich kept bees, and the little honey-cakes which were being served (with liqueurs) were a speciality of the house: “Famous!” his guests exclaimed: “Wonderful—delicacies of the most surpassing excellence!” It quite shocked English Augustine to hear
men
sitting around and all talking so excitedly about food.

“Hitler would adore these cakes of yours, Uli,” said someone.

“But Herr Hitler adores
anything
sweet and sticky,” said someone else: “These little beauties would be wasted on him.” The speaker smacked his lips.

“That must be why he's got such a pasty complexion,” (it was only Dr. Ulrich himself, it seemed, who had hardly heard of Adolf).

“Does anybody know just when Hitler clipped his mustache?” Franz asked his neighbor suddenly. But nobody did ...“Because, the first time I ever saw him it was long and straggling.”

“No!”

“He was standing on the curb, haranguing. And nobody in the street was listening: not one. They walked past him as if he was empty air: I was quite embarrassed ... I was only a boy, then, really,” Franz added apologetically.

“That must indeed have been most embarrassing for you, Baron,” put in Dr. Reinhold sympathetically. “What did you do? Did you manage to walk by too? Or did you stop and listen?”

“I ... couldn't do either,” Franz confessed: “It was all
too
embarrassing. I thought he was someone mad, of course: he looked
quite
mad. In the end, rather than pass him I turned back and went by another street. He'd a torn old mackintosh which looked as if he always slept in it yet he wore a high stiff collar like a government clerk. He'd got floppy hair and staring eyes and he looked half-starved ...”

“A stiff white collar?” interposed Dr. Reinhold: “Probably he slept in that too. What the title of ‘Majesty' on the lips of his pawnbroker means to an exiled monarch at Biarritz, or the return of his sword to a vanquished general, or his dinner-jacket to an English remittance-man on the Papuan beaches—
that clerkly collar!
His inalienable birthright as a Hereditary Life-member of the Lower Middle Classes—
Hoch!
”

“It can't have been my lucky day,” Franz pursued, smiling wryly. “There was another prophet in the next street I turned along, too! And
he
was dressed only in a fishing-net: the chap thought he was St. Peter.”

Augustine liked Dr. Reinhold: intellectually he was obviously in a different class altogether from Walther and Franz (surely it was symptomatic how much Franz himself seemed to alter in Dr. Reinhold's company!). So now Augustine slipped out of the seat he had been planted in, made his way over to Dr. Reinhold and began talking to him without more ado about a boy at his prep-school who hadn't just thought he was God—he knew it. The boy (a small and rather backward and inky specimen) knew it beyond any shadow of doubt. But though he was Almighty God in person he had been curiously unwilling to admit it openly when questioned in public—even when taxed with it by someone big and important, with a right to a straight answer even from God (some prefect, say, or the captain of cricket): “Leighton Minor! For the last time—Are you God or aren't you?” He'd stand on one leg and blush uncomfortably but still not say Yes or No ...

“Was he ashamed of His Godhead? Considering the state He's let His universe get into ...”

“I don't think it was that: n-n-no, it was more that if you couldn't spot for yourself something which stood out a mile like that it was hardly for Him to make a song about it—altogether too self-advertising ...”

Dr. Reinhold was delighted: “But of course! Incarnate in an English boy how else could God behave? It's how you all do behave, in fact.” Then he inquired of Augustine in the meekest of voices: “Mr. Englishman, tell me please because I should be so interested: are you God?”

Augustine's jaw dropped.

“You see!” cried Dr. Reinhold triumphantly. But then he turned to Franz and said in tones of contrition: “Introduce us, please.” And thus—rather late in the day—Reinhold and Augustine formally “met.”

The German clicked his heels and murmured his own name, but Augustine just went straight on talking: “Sometimes we had to twist his arm like anything to make him own up to it.”

“Himmel!” Dr. Reinhold regarded his new friend with owlish anxiety: “Considering ... who He was, wasn't that just a tiny bit unsafe?” Then he clapped his hands: “Listen, everybody! I want you to meet a young Englishman whose idea of a wet-afternoon's harmless amusement for little boys is twisting the arm of ... of Almighty God!”

“He'd better meet Hitler then,” said a square woman sourly.

“It isn't as if the Kampfbund themselves took Hitler seriously,” said someone. “He's not one of their
big
men.”

“It's all Putzi's fault,” someone else was saying, “for bringing him to people's parties: it has given him ideas.”

“He ruins
any
party ...”

“Oh no! When he talks about babies he's really rather sweet ...”

“Putzi Hanfstaengl was with him last night looking like Siegfried,” Reinhold murmured: “Or rather, looking as if he felt like Siegfried,” he corrected himself.

“It isn't only under the Hanfstaengls' wing: nowadays some people actually invite him ...”

“Then they deserve what they get. I remember one dinner-party at the Bruckmanns ...”

“What—the famous occasion he tried to eat an artichoke whole?”

“Even two years ago in Berlin, at Helene Beckstein's ...”

“At Putzi's own house—his country cottage at Uffing ...”

“The formula is much the same everywhere these days,” said a rather squat actor-type, rising and moving down center: “First: a portentous message that he'll be a bit late—detained on most important business. Then, about midnight—when he's quite sure that his entrance will be the last—he marches in, bows so low to his hostess that his sock-suspenders show and presents her with a wilting bouquet of red roses. Then he refuses the proffered chair, turns his back on her and stations himself at the buffet. If anybody speaks to him he fills his mouth with cream puffs and grunts. If they dare to speak a second time he only fills his mouth with cream puffs. It isn't just that in the company of his betters he can't converse himself—he
aims
to be a kind of social upas, to kill conversation anywhere within reach of his shadow. Soon the whole room is silent. That's what he's waiting for: he stuffs the last cream puff half-eaten into his pocket and begins to orate. Usually it's against the Jews: sometimes it's the Bolshevik Menace: sometimes it's the November Criminals—no matter, it's always the same kind of speech, quiet and winning and reasonable at first but before long in a voice that makes the spoons dance on the plates. He goes on for half an hour—an hour, maybe: then he breaks off suddenly, smacks his sticky lips on his hostess's hand again, and ... and out into the night, what's left of it.”

“How intolerable!” exclaimed a youngish woman, angrily. She had an emancipated look rather beyond her years.

“At least there's this about it,” said Dr. Reinhold thoughtfully: “No one who has once met Herrn Hitler at a party is likely to forget it.”

“But they'll remember him with loathing!”

“Dear lady,” he answered sententiously, “there's one thing even more important for a rising politician than having friends; and that is—plenty of enemies!”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“It does. For a politician rises on the backs of his friends (that's probably all they're good for), but it's through his enemies he'll have to govern afterwards.”

“Poppycock!” said the sensible young woman—but too sweetly, she calculated, for it to sound rude.

Suddenly Mitzi, forgotten in a corner, gave a startled, poignant cry. But in that buzzing room almost nobody heard it—not even Augustine, for Dr. Reinhold had just offered to show him Munich and Augustine was just saying with alacrity “When shall I come?”

“Tomorrow, if you like,” Dr. Reinhold smiled. “But no—I was forgetting the revolution ... better give that a day or two ... say, early next week?”

Thus Augustine was one of the last to notice Mitzi's curious behavior. The room had dropped almost silent, for after that cry she had stepped forward a pace or two and was now standing with both groping hands held straight out in front of her. The tears of final defeat were running down her face.

“Is that child drunk?” asked the sensible young woman, loudly and inquisitively.

But in almost no time the now stone-blind Mitzi had got control of herself again. Hearing the question she turned and laughed, good humoredly.

There had surely been something a little brittle and heartless about that party at the Steuckels all through (or so it seemed to Augustine and even Franz too looking back on it afterwards): the talk was all just a trifle noisier than need be, the attitudes more striking: there was an evident bravura and a bravado about all these people. For these were in fact all people somehow, some way, riding the Great Inflation. Thus in their manner they reminded one rather of skaters caught far out too late in a thaw, who know their only but desperate hope lies in speed. The ice is steaming in the sun and there can be no turning back. They hear anguished cries behind them but they lower their heads with muffled ears, they flail with their arms and thrust ever more desperately with their legs in their efforts to skate even faster still on the slushy, cracking, sinking ice.

Anything rather than get “involved”: whereas Lothar and his lost like pursued “involvement” as if that were in itself salvation.

Franz felt he never wanted to see the Steuckels again—he was done with all that sort.

They got back to Lorienburg soon after dusk, just as the new moon was setting.

Naturally it was not till the first shock to them of Mitzi's disaster had begun to wear off and they were alone together late in the evening that Franz told his father and uncle the story of the Beer-hall Putsch.

“What stupidity!” said Walther. “It almost passes belief.”

“So our ‘White Crow' has managed to push his nose into the big stuff at last,” said Otto. “Well, well!”

“You said once he had served under you during the war,” said Franz. “What on earth was he like as a soldier?”

“As a lance-corporal?” Otto corrected him a trifle pedantically: “He was a Regimental Messenger, which rates as a one-stripe job ...” Then he considered the question conscientiously: “adequate, I suppose—by wartime standards: he hasn't the stuff in him for a peacetime Regular N.C.O. of course.” Otto set his lips grimly.

“Who are you talking about?” asked Walther absently.

“After the war,” Otto continued, “Roehm's intelligence outfit at District Command found him a job as one of their political stool-pigeons—spying on his old messmates for pay, not to put too fine a point on it. That started him: now, he seems to consider himself something of a politician in his own right—in the beer-hall and street-corner world, he and his fellow-rowdies. But it's Roehm still pulls the strings, of course.”

“Oh, that chap of Roehm's?—Yes, I've seen his name on the placards,” Walther remarked.

“But in the regiment?” Franz persisted.

“I can't really tell you much,” said Otto a little haughtily. “He did what he was told. He ... he wasn't a coward, that I'm aware of.” Otto paused, and then continued a little unwillingly: “I never cottoned to him. Damned unpopular with the men too: such a silent, killjoy sort of cove. No normal interests—he couldn't even join the others in a good grumble! That's why they all called him the ‘white crow': in anything they all took part in, Lance-corporal Hitler was always the odd man out.”

“I don't much like your Captain Roehm either, what I've heard of him,” said Walther.

“Able fellow,” said Otto: “A fine organizer! He's invaluable to the Army.—But it's that snort of his, chiefly: though he can't help it—nose smashed in the war. But it makes him seem a bit abrupt, and he's conscious of it.—Don't call him ‘my' Captain Roehm, though:
he
wasn't in the regiment.—We had his young friend ‘Gippy' Hess for a time,” Otto suddenly grimaced: “Frankly, in the List Regiment we were a pretty scratch lot, all told.”

No one commented: they both knew it had been quixotic of Otto to accept that wartime infantry posting.

In the pause which followed Otto's mind must have reverted to his “white crow”; for “... half-baked little backstreet runt!” he muttered suddenly—and with surprising feeling, for an officer, considering that Hitler had been merely an “other ranks.” Franz eyed him curiously. Clearly there'd been some clash.

Meanwhile the telephone kept ringing. Munich was still “no lines” but all that day rumor had succeeded rumor: rumors that the Revolution was marching on Berlin, rumors that the Revolution had failed, and that Ludendorff and Hitler were dead. Dr. Reinhold of course had left Munich for Röttningen before dawn that morning: he had known no more than the next man what had happened
after
that Bierkeller scene.

*

Lothar had been there, in Munich; but Lothar's excitement that momentous night had reached such a pitch that in his own memories afterwards of what had happened there were inexplicable blanks. Scene succeeded scene: but what had happened between them, just how one thing led to another, seemed subject to total non-recall.

Years later Lothar could still vividly remember the mounting elation and the rhythmic, stupefying effect of the Nazi march down the Brienner Strasse, the crowd growing like a snowball ... that absurd tumbling urchin ... the woman smelling of carbolic soap who sprang forward out of the crowd and kissed him ... that other woman who marched beside him and kept thrusting a crucifix under his nose as if he was a condemned criminal bound for the scaffold.