The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (22 page)

‘The other patients were mostly Germans, with a sprinkling of Spaniards, but to my delight I found Channell. He also had been having a thin time since we parted. Nerves were his trouble – general nervous debility and perpetual insomnia, and his college had given him six months' leave of absence to try to get well. The poor chap was as lean as a sparrow, and he had the large dull eyes and the dry lips of the sleepless. He had arrived a week before me, and like me was under observation. But his vetting was different from mine, for he was a mental case, and Dr Christoph used to devote hours to trying to unriddle his nervous tangles. “He is a good man for a German,” said Channell, “but he is on the wrong tack. There's nothing wrong with my mind. I wish he'd stick to violet rays
⁴
and massage, instead of asking me silly questions about my great-grandmother.”

‘Channell and I used to go for invalidish walks in the woods, and we naturally talked about the years we had worked together. He was living mainly in the past, for the War had been the great thing in his life, and his professorial duties seemed trivial by comparison. As we tramped among the withered bracken and heather, his mind was always harking back to the dingy little room where he had smoked cheap cigarettes and worked fourteen hours out of the twenty-four. In particular, he was as eagerly curious about our old antagonist, Reinmar, as he had been in 1918. He was more positive than ever that she was a woman, and I believe that one of the reasons that had induced him to try a cure in Germany was a vague hope that he might get on her track. I had almost forgotten about the thing, and I was amused by Channell in the part of the untiring sleuth-hound.

‘“You won't find her in the
Kurhaus
,” I said. “Perhaps she is in some old
Schloss
in the neighbourhood, waiting for you like the Sleeping Beauty.”

‘“I'm serious,” he said plaintively. “It is purely a matter of intellectual curiosity, but I confess I would give a great deal to see her face to face. After I leave here, I thought of going to
Berlin to make some inquiries. But I'm handicapped, for I know nobody and I have no credentials. Why don't you, who have a large acquaintance and far more authority, take the thing up?”

‘I told him that my interest in the matter had flagged and that I wasn't keen on digging into the past, but I promised to give him a line to our Military Attaché if he thought of going to Berlin. I rather discouraged him from letting his mind dwell too much on events in the War. I said that he ought to try to bolt the door on all that had contributed to his present breakdown.

‘“That is not Dr Christoph's opinion,” he said emphatically. “He encourages me to talk about it. You see, with me it is a purely intellectual interest. I have no emotion in the matter. I feel quite friendly towards Reinmar, whoever she may be. It is, if you like, a piece of romance. I haven't had so many romantic events in my life that I want to forget this.”

‘“Have you told Dr Christoph about Reinmar?” I asked.

‘“Yes,” he said, “and he was mildly interested. You know the way he looks at you with his solemn grey eyes. I doubt if he quite understood what I meant; for a little provincial doctor, even though he is a genius in his own line, is not likely to know much about the ways of the Great General Staff… I had to tell him, for I have to tell him all my dreams, and lately I have taken to dreaming about Reinmar.”

‘“What's she like?” I asked.

‘“Oh, a most remarkable figure. Very beautiful, but uncanny. She has long fair hair down to her knees.”

‘Of course I laughed. “You're mixing her up with the Valkyries,” I said. “Lord, it would be an awkward business if you met that she-dragon in the flesh.”

‘But he was quite solemn about it, and declared that his waking picture of her was not in the least like his dreams. He rather agreed with my nonsense about the old
Schloss
. He thought that she was probably some penniless grandee, living solitary in a moated grange, with nothing now to exercise her marvellous brain on, and eating her heart out with regret and shame. He drew so attractive a character of her that I began to think that Channell was in love with a being of his own creation,
till he ended with, “But all the same she's utterly damnable. She must be, you know.”

‘After a fortnight I began to feel a different man. Dr Christoph thought that he had got on the track of the mischief, and certainly, with his deep massage and a few simple drugs, I had more internal comfort than I had known for three years. He was so pleased with my progress that he refused to treat me as an invalid. He encouraged me to take long walks into the hills, and presently he arranged for me to go out roebuck-shooting with some of the local Junkers.
⁵

‘I used to start before daybreak on the chilly November mornings and drive to the top of one of the ridges, where I would meet a collection of sportsmen and beaters, shepherded by a fellow in a green uniform. We lined out along the ridge, and the beaters, assisted by a marvellous collection of dogs, including the sporting dachshund, drove the roe towards us. It wasn't very cleverly managed, for the deer generally broke back, and it was chilly waiting in the first hours with a powdering of snow on the ground and the fir boughs heavy with frost crystals. But later, when the sun grew stronger, it was a very pleasant mode of spending a day. There was not much of a bag, but whenever a roe or a capercailzie
⁶
fell, all the guns would assemble and drink little glasses of
Kirschwasser
. I had been lent a rifle, one of those appalling contraptions which are double-barrelled shot-guns and rifles in one, and to transpose from one form to the other requires a mathematical calculation. The rifle had a hair-trigger too, and when I first used it I was nearly the death of a respectable Saxon peasant.

‘We all ate our midday meal together, and in the evening, before going home, we had coffee and cakes in one or other of the farms. The party was an odd mixture, big farmers and small squires, an hotel-keeper or two, a local doctor, and a couple of lawyers from the town. At first they were a little shy of me, but presently they thawed, and after the first day we were good friends. They spoke quite frankly about the War, in which every one of them had had a share, and with a great deal of dignity and good sense.

‘I learned to walk in Sikkim, and the little Saxon hills seemed
to me inconsiderable. But they were too much for most of the guns, and instead of going straight up or down a slope they always chose a circuit, which gave them an easy gradient. One evening, when we were separating as usual, the beaters taking a short-cut and the guns a circuit, I felt that I wanted exercise, so I raced the beaters downhill, beat them soundly, and had the better part of an hour to wait for my companions, before we adjourned to the farm for refreshment. The beaters must have talked about my pace, for as we walked away one of the guns, a lawyer called Meissen, asked me why I was visiting Rosensee at a time of year when few foreigners came. I said I was staying with Dr Christoph.

‘ ”Is he then a private friend of yours?” he asked.

‘I told him no, that I had come to his
Kurhaus
for treatment, being sick. His eyes expressed polite scepticism. He was not prepared to regard as an invalid a man who went down a hill like an avalanche.

‘But, as we walked in the frosty dusk, he was led to speak of Dr Christoph, of whom he had no personal knowledge, and I learned how little honour a prophet may have in his own country. Rosensee scarcely knew him, except as a doctor who had an inexplicable attraction for foreign patients. Meissen was curious about his methods and the exact diseases in which he specialized. “Perhaps he may yet save me a journey to Homburg!”
⁷
He laughed. “It is well to have a skilled physician at one's door-step. The doctor is something of a hermit, and, except for his patients, does not appear to welcome his kind. Yet he is a good man, beyond doubt, and there are those who say that in the War he was a hero.”

‘This surprised me, for I could not imagine Dr Christoph in any fighting capacity, apart from the fact that he must have been too old. I thought that Meissen might refer to work in the base hospitals. But he was positive; Dr Christoph had been in the trenches; the limping leg was a war wound.

‘I had had very little talk with the doctor, owing to my case being free from nervous complications. He would say a word to me morning and evening about my diet, and pass the time of day when we met, but it was not till the very eve of my
departure that we had anything like a real conversation. He sent a message that he wanted to see me for not less than one hour, and he arrived with a batch of notes from which he delivered a kind of lecture on my case. Then I realized what an immense amount of care and solid thought he had expended on me. He had decided that his diagnosis was right – my rapid improvement suggested that – but it was necessary for some time to observe a simple régime, and to keep an eye on certain symptoms. So he took a sheet of notepaper from the table, and in his small precise hand wrote down for me a few plain commandments.

‘There was something about him, the honest eyes, the mouth which looked as if it had been often compressed in suffering, the air of grave goodwill, which I found curiously attractive. I wished that I had been a mental case like Channell, and had had more of his society. I detained him in talk, and he seemed not unwilling. By and by we drifted to the War, and it turned out that Meissen was right.

‘Dr Christoph had gone as medical officer in November ' 14 to the Ypres Salient with a Saxon regiment, and had spent the winter there. In ' 15 he had been in Champagne,
⁸
and in the early months of ' 16 at Verdun, till he was invalided with rheumatic fever. That is to say, he had had about seventeen months of consecutive fighting in the worst areas with scarcely a holiday. A pretty good record for a frail little middle-aged man!

‘His family was then at Stuttgart, his wife and one little boy. He took a long time to recover from the fever, and after that was put on home duty. “Till the War was almost over,” he said, “almost over, but not quite. There was just time for me to go back to the front and get my foolish leg hurt.” I must tell you that whenever he mentioned his war experience it was with a comical deprecating smile, as if he agreed with anyone who might think that gravity like his should have remained in bed.

‘I assumed that this home duty was medical, until he said something about getting rusty in his professional work. Then it appeared that it had been some job connected with Intelligence. “I am reputed to have a little talent for mathematics,”
he said. “No. I am no mathematical scholar, but, if you understand me, I have a certain mathematical aptitude. My mind has always moved happily among numbers. Therefore I was set to construct and to interpret ciphers, a strange interlude in the noise of war. I sat in a little room and excluded the world, and for a little I was happy.'

‘He went on to speak of the enclave of peace in which he had found himself, and as I listened to his gentle monotonous voice, I had a sudden inspiration.

‘I took a sheet of note-paper from the stand, scribbled the word
Reinmar
on it, and shoved it towards him. I had a notion, you see, that I might surprise him into helping Channell's researches.

‘But it was I who got the big surprise. He stopped thunderstruck as soon as his eye caught the word, blushed scarlet over every inch of face and bald forehead, seemed to have difficulty in swallowing, and then gasped, “How did you know?”

‘I hadn't known, and now that I did, the knowledge left me speechless. This was the loathly opposite for which Channell and I had nursed our hatred. When I came out of my stupefaction I found that he had recovered his balance and was speaking slowly and distinctly, as if he were making a formal confession.

‘“You were among my opponents … that interests me deeply… I often wondered… You beat me in the end. You are aware of that?”

‘I nodded. “Only because you made a slip,” I said.

‘“Yes, I made a slip. I was to blame – very gravely to blame, for I let my private grief cloud my mind.”

‘He seemed to hesitate, as if he were loath to stir something very tragic in his memory.

‘“I think I will tell you,” he said at last. “I have often wished – it is a childish wish – to justify my failure to those who profited by it. My chiefs understood, of course, but my opponents could not. In that month when I failed I was in deep sorrow. I had a little son – his name was Reinmar – you remember that I took that name for my code signature?”

‘His eyes were looking beyond me into some vision of the past.

‘“He was, as you say, my mascot. He was all my family, and I adored him. But in those days food was not plentiful. We were no worse off than many million Germans, but the child was frail. In the last summer of the War he developed phthisis due to malnutrition, and in September he died. Then I failed my country, for with him some virtue seemed to depart from my mind. You see, my work was, so to speak, his also, as my name was his, and when he left me he took my power with him… So I stumbled. The rest is known to you.”

‘He sat staring beyond me, so small and lonely, that I could have howled. I put my hand on his shoulder and stammered some platitude about being sorry. We sat quite still for a minute or two, and then I remembered Channell. Channell must have poured his views of Reinmar into Dr Christoph's ear. I asked him if Channell knew.

‘A flicker of a smile crossed his face.

‘“Indeed no. And I will exact from you a promise never to breathe to him what I have told you. He is my patient, and I must first consider his case. At present he thinks that Reinmar is a wicked and beautiful lady whom he may some day meet. That is romance, and it is good for him to think so… If he were told the truth, he would be pitiful, and in Herr Channell's condition it is important that he should not be vexed with such emotions as pity.”'