The Fox in the Attic (27 page)

But tonight she eluded him, for tonight he was wholly in the grip of images of a sort yet more compulsive still than hers: that cat, for instance, in the drawing-room of the little deserted manor in the Livonian woods ... a fat, white cat ... willy-nilly he began to recall it all, now, nervously smiling the while.

*

It had been one day they were looking for a missing reconnaissance-party of their own men that they came on this modest house, hidden among the birches and pines. There were fresh pink English hollyhocks round the door; but although it was nearly noon the green shutters were all closed as though the house were sleeping. Whoever had been there last had gone, and had clearly left it empty. But those shutters fitted so close that coming in from the sun you couldn't at first see: only stand there listening to the drawing-room clock that was still ticking, and wait for the dazzlement to wear off. This happened to be Wolff's sixteenth birthday, and at the sound of that clock the boy had felt desperately homesick.

Moreover, he could hear a purring ...

But soon the pupils of his eyes dilated enough to see that the room was heaped with bodies—their missing friends. The bodies were mutilated in the usual Lettish way; and these men hadn't died fighting, this had been done to them alive.

The purring cat had been sleeping luxuriously on the sofa in this very room when the searchers arrived. But now she took refuge on the top of that ornate mantelpiece clock, arched and spitting, her drawn claws slipping as she scrabbled to keep her balance on the smooth marble. Underneath her the clock whirred, then started to strike with tuneful silvery chimes.

In his rage he had torn the cat to pieces with his bare hands, then slipped in the mess on the floor and twisted his ankle. Meanwhile the others had rushed outside to search the buildings; but they found nothing living out there either except one cow. Her they killed too: they'd have killed even the tomtits if they could have caught them.

Now Wolff himself, as he remembered it all, lay there purring ...

*

Conscience had first sent Wolff east, to those freelance wars in the lost provinces where his birthplace was; and a conscience blindly indulged like his tends to acquire a stranglehold. “Conscience” had now become the one call he could no longer ever resist. The fighting had long been over; but those Baltic years of the beastliest heroism had been the years while Wolff grew his last inch of height and his spirit set in its mold; and nowadays the dictates of his conscience had become quite invarious: always the simple command to kill.

Hidden here, and now no longer able to go out and murder, Wolff was in every sense an exile from “life”: even from its warm trickles in the house he hid in. No human sound reached here: only from close overhead all night the huge clock's slow, loud, heavy ticking.

In the roof the castle clock thumped the hour and on the last stroke Mitzi woke.

It was pitchy black, and a smell of outdoor furs. There was not even a glimmer from where the window lay opposite her bed; yet Mitzi was broad awake, and agitated moreover by a sense of urgency. She reached for the box of matches by her candle and struck one ... and nothing happened. She heard the usual sputter, but it made no light.

It was only then that she remembered. But ... but however could a person have forgotten she had gone blind?

No no no! Surely this sudden blindness was only a bad dream Mitzi had just woken from—in the dark!

But that smell of furs ... suddenly yesterday's sleigh-ride came back to her. Moreover this wasn't really at all the normal blackness of night: rather it was the negation of seeing, the absence of any visual sensation whatever. It was merely Memory which had translated it into the visual terms of darkness, as being the nearest equivalent Memory knew. She tried by an effort of will to see it as “darkness” again, but almost at once a chaos of meaningless sightsensation began to wake in the deprived optic nerve—like the sensation Uncle Otto said he felt sometimes in the leg which wasn't there.

In fact, there was not any proof even that this still was night-time! It might just as well be broad day—and hence the feeling of urgency Mitzi had woken with.

Certain, now, she had overslept and was going to be late for breakfast Mitzi sprang out of bed to find her clothes. Normally she folded them on the chair by the window, where in the morning the dazzling entering daylight would direct her to them again; but in the misery of last night, had she remembered to do this? Anyway, where was that window? She had taken a few steps from her bed without thinking, and could no longer be sure which way she was facing.

Moreover those phantasms of color and shape chasing each other across her mind's-eye had now become violently vivid—like solid objects flung at her, so that involuntarily she winced to dodge them. Panicking, she began blundering about with her hands stretched out to find some bit of furniture whose touch she could recognize; and in that big room of hers she was soon completely lost. It was difficult to keep one's balance on this ancient undulating floor without eyes (even purblind ones) to help one: her toe tripped on a tilted board and she reached out to stop herself falling ... her hand touched something, and grabbed it—but only to feel an agonizing pang of pain, for it was the nearly red-hot iron flue of the stove she had seized for support.

The pain brought Mitzi back to her senses. She knew now just where she was, for she could feel the warmth coming from the stove several feet away—as she ought to have felt it before if she had kept her head instead of blundering right against it. As she stood there with her burnt fingers in her mouth it occurred to her she must henceforth learn to use such areas of local heat and cold for finding her way about: she must learn to steer by the radiant heat of the many stoves, the cold air near windows and the drafts through open doors—no longer by the direction of the light (by day from windows and by night from lamps) which formerly had fitfully pierced her private fog like lighthouse beams.

Then Mitzi remembered too the yapping of the fox the night before, and the changes in resonance when first he was in the big open hall, then on the enclosed stairs, and then in the attics above. So perhaps she could use resonance too to help tell where she was—out in the middle of a room, for example, or close to a wall?

Mitzi began moving about again, feeling for her clothes. This time she quickly found the window-chair—but they weren't on it. So as she zig-zagged to and fro across the room she began uttering little staccato fox-like cries and tried consciously to interpret their reverberation for she was desperate—she
must
find her clothes! By now, the level morning sunlight would be shining straight in—though she couldn't see it. She knew she was late, and Papa hated one being late.

A heartfelt urgency crept into her feral yapping.

*

Franz woke, that yapping tingling in his tuned ears.

For a moment he thought it really was their little fox as before; but he soon realized this was no natural fox. Indeed it was a most queer, uncanny sound: moreover it was coming from the room next his: from Mitzi's room. Something was in there with Mitzi.

A were-fox?—He shivered, and his skin prickled with goose-flesh. But an instant later he recognized the voice for Mitzi herself and fright turned to anger. The little fool! What was she up to, rousing the whole house—had she gone out of her mind? He felt so cross with her his hand trembled as he lit his candle, and he barged in on her filled with an elder brother's righteous wrath. Four in the morning! Was she out of her senses? What a time for a girl to stand in her nightgown in the pitchdark in the middle of her bedroom,
yapping!

Mitzi could hardly believe him when he told her the real time, and she burst into tears as he drove her back into bed.

But then suddenly Mitzi heard a ringing slap—and Franz's scolding voice ceased abruptly. It was replaced in her ears by another voice: a cracked old voice that was chanting a familiar little childhood jingle:

“
Dear
old Schmidtchen ...” How often, long ago, that ditty had served to lull a feverish or a fractious little Mitzi off to sleep!

Mitzi gave a deep sigh. But still the saga continued:

Candle in hand, the old nurse—her dwarfish figure swathed in three dressing-gowns, the few gray locks on her nearly bald head standing out like sea-urchin's spines—bent over her afflicted young baroness and gave her a troubled, searching look while she continued to intone:

—and so on, round and round: for the song is endless.

But already Schmidtchen's little Baroness was sound asleep; and as for the young Baron, he had long ago slunk back to his room—his tail between his legs and his boxed ear still stinging.

When that sluggard Saturday's dawn came at last it found fifteen-year-old Lies already kneeling on the cold castle stairs; for the snow off Friday's boots still lay there unmelted, each morning it had to be swept up with dustpan and brush.

Augustine was not awake yet: by the time he woke, Lies was already in his room. On his wash-stand steamed the jug of hot water for his shaving wrapped in a towel and the girl was down on her knees in front of his stove, coaxing it with fircones and the breath of her powerful young lungs. Lies wore her skirts kilted for work, and rolled her stockings; and on the backs of her broad bare white knees the rolls of puppy-fat still lingered. Augustine's sleepy eyes opened on them as she knelt there—surprised to find legs could look quite so soft (and indeed almost babyish) on any young woman quite so stalwart as Lies.

Contemplating them, suddenly the thought struck him: “Suppose you couldn't see?”—and once again a pang of pity for Mitzi racked him like an angina.

True, one could learn to thread the obstacle-race of this three-dimensional world without eyesight: that Augustine discounted. But to the
joy
of seeing Augustine was perhaps exceptionally addicted, as if his whole consciousness were concentrated close behind his eyes and almost craning out of them, like someone who can't tear himself from the window. Among the five senses sight was incomparable. Indeed, sometimes he thought he would as lief be deaf as not in this world where everyone always talked so much too much: he was not humanly musical, and the only sound he would really miss aesthetically (he thought) was bird-song.

Smells too were mostly
un
pleasant—since petrol, and since even respectable women had now taken to powder and scent. Taste ... Touch ... even Movement! He would rather break his back and live out his life in a wheeled chair than be blind, for there was an almost infinite and incessant pleasure to be got from just “looking”: even (but now he averted his eyes) at a young peasant-girl's fat knees.

How much Augustine preferred watching people to hearing them talk! When he was a boy of eleven a kindly astronomer had helped him build a telescope. It was meant for nebulae and the rings round Saturn and moon-mountains and so on; but soon he was spending hours with it by daylight too, turning it onto people. Being of the astronomical type it stood them on their heads, but one got used to that. And it was powerful: framed in a circle like specimens in a microscope slide,
his
soundless specimens could be observed unawares as closely as if they were with him in the room. How different people's faces do look when they think no one sees them and so they stop gesticulating at you with their features! It gave the boy quite a Godlike feeling, thus to “know their downsitting and their uprising, to understand their thought afar off.” For he was seeing natural human nature, which the human eye so rarely sees (even if he did see everything upside down).

For a time this human bird-watching had been almost an obsession; but at last it was brought to its own abrupt and wholly shaming end. For the view from Augustine's bedroom window at home had included another garden, and there had been three little girls who used to play there. They weren't quite gentry children, so he never came into normal naked-eye contact with them—he never even knew their names. Indeed he was then at an age to shun little girls like the plague in real life; but this was different, and soon these three were much his favorite object of nature-study. He came to know intimately almost every hair of those three heads; for the telescope brought them seemingly within touching-distance. I suppose he fell half in love with them, impartially with all three: a little private, abstract seraglio—so very close to him always, and yet ethereal visionary creatures without even voices. And so the idyll had continued, till that day when the one he happened to be watching wandered off from the others and, as he followed her with his eye curiously, suddenly bobbed down between two bushes.

When it was over the young peeper was appalled: he had seen what no boy's eye ever ought to have seen, he had broken the strongest taboo he knew. It was weeks before he used his telescope again and then it was only at night, to study the moon: the uninhabited, infertile, utterly geological safe moon.

That moon is covered with mysterious ring-mountains; some with a solitary peak rising at the very center, like a little tongue—surely utterly unlike anything to be seen anywhere on this earth? Soon he became so enthralled he planned to map the whole moon's surface, and tried to draw pictures of those rings.

As for picturing more mundane things, it was galling for someone so eye-conscious to have no aptitude for painting, however hard he tried. But Augustine's natural skill at shooting was some consolation, for here it was the exact visually-imagined pattern in space and time of the bird's flight intersecting with the brief trajectory of his pellets that was the attraction: that, and the utter loveliness of the plumage of the fallen bird.