The Trespassers (3 page)

“It will be impossible for us,” he said. “Dearest, I know how you resist the idea of going—”

“Not any more,” she answered quickly. “Oh, today was a sign. I went to the Webbers’. They were there, the S.A. men. They demanded old Mr. Webber’s passport, his bankbooks. They were taking him to the new Gestapo office. For ‘examination.’ He is so old, Franz, so fine, only a few months ago he was presented by Miklas himself with the gold medal. And today—there he stood, old and tired, with these S.A. men shouting as if he were a thief. They kept saying something about his speeches against National Socialism. He refused to give over his passport—I—I was afraid, and it was I who begged him to—”

Her voice broke. He took her into his arms, patted her head as he might Ilse’s or Paul’s. In the four weeks just past, she had skillfully sidled away from any discussion about leaving Austria. She had talked more than usual of her love for the house and Döbling, busily sewed ruffly little curtains for their summer place on the clean, clear lake near the Traunstein Mountain.

He said nothing, simply waited. So one waits for the analysis and, to go on, to dredge up the hidden feelings, the deep fears, the lost memories.

“And then I went to the Brauns’,” Christa continued, “to ask if they could help Johann Webber through that uncle of theirs who’s a judge. Some of their Jewish friends were there. Suddenly the janitor flung open the door without knocking or ringing. He’s a secret Nazi, nobody knew, nobody even suspected. He ordered their Jewish friends out, ordered the Brauns not to let Jews into the apartment any more. His voice was so—so arrogant, Oh, Franz, darling, this new sudden cruelty—the streets, the windows smashed—what is to become of us all?”

He held her closer. She was seeing the small personal tragedies—God knows they are enough; if one sees and feels them deeply enough one is seeing and feeling history.

But he knew she was not relating any of it, really, to the sweep of the future. She did not know that they had already arrested many thousands, not only Jews, but also thousands of Catholics who supported Schuschnigg, hundreds of labor leaders, scores of journalists. She did not even wonder yet about the world beyond these smashed homes, these tinkling slivers of windows on pavements. She had not thought what it meant that England and France were politically shrugging their shoulders, speaking politely about “the internal affairs of other countries” as none of their business. Probably Christa did not even know yet—

“Did you listen to the radio?” he asked.

“No. I can’t bear to turn it on any more.” She leaned away from him to search his face. Her eyes opened wider. “What, Franz, anything new? Oh, tell me, is there any hope—”

“Hitler entered Vienna late this afternoon. Entered in triumphal procession, the Conqueror.”

She gasped. Her mouth made a small oblique O like a yawning baby’s.

“He will speak tomorrow from the Hofburg. From the balcony he will shout to the people that they are now a part of his glorious Reich.”

That night they cabled Ann Willis.

As in a Bach fugue, one melodic part or “voice” makes its solo entrance, establishes its theme, and engages the attention, then is followed by a second voice, crossing and mingling with it, and then duly by a third voice and finally a fourth, so the flight of humankind from Germany, from 1933 onward, was only the first major statement of the theme of the great migrations of the 1930’s.

In the summer of 1936 the second voice issued forth from Spain, swelling to fuller volume in 1937. And now in Austria, in March, 1938, still a third was coming in to join its stately and harrowing melody to the other continuing parts.

Each part or voice was played not by a dozen human beings, but by hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, half millions. The listening ear of Europe and of the world knew by some tense and unwilling instinct that the fugue was not yet squared, that another voice was still to be heard in the tragic counterpoint. And perhaps not only one other, as in the classical fugue, but many others were yet to come, to widen the fugue form out into a world-enveloping symphony.

From the East, from Hangchow and Nanking and Shanghai, where sixteen millions were now in that other kind of flight upon their own soil, crawling through fields and along choked roads from province to province—from the East came the strident, brassy assurance that this would be so.

I
T WAS FROM A
portable radio, instrument for picnics and holiday hours, that Vera Marriner learned of
Anschluss.

For a second she scarcely took in the meaning of the news. The quiet British voice went on with the Reuter’s dispatch, and a moment later she sat up violently and searched about her on the blinding white sand for the source of the hateful words.

There it rested, just one of innumerable similar portable sets, this one under a bright beach umbrella at Montego Bay, Jamaica, in the British West Indies. The innocent, indifferent box went on tossing out into the yellow sunshine its black message of calamity.

Her heart contracted, as with a purely personal pain. She didn’t know Austria, as she had once known Germany, but she had heard so much of so many people there, from Jasper, from Ann Willis, that she could not feel impersonal now.

“So here he goes, this is it, this is the real beginning,” she thought. “All that about the Ruhr and the Rhineland was just winding up…but
this…
now he’s really begun scooping up great chunks of Europe into his Reich. Damn him, damn him—”

For a moment she wished she were at home, where she could talk this out with people who would be as angry as she. Yet she had come alone all this way south partly at least to escape the political and social nervousness of New York and the people she knew. Remembering that, she got to her feet and started up along the curve of beach, along the shining spread of blue water. Her mind worked over the vast implications of the news.

She was hailed half a dozen times, by people she had come to know in the three weeks since she had come down. Their voices, their words, showed they had not heard, or else had heard and already dismissed the news from their thoughts. That angered her, too.

She walked on more briskly. Her body was a dark, positive brown, already impervious to the stinging sun. In the flushed dark of her tanned face, the light, clear gray of her eyes was startling and compelling. Her warmly brown hair blew about, wavy and free, springing back from the ribbon tied about her head. She was small and slim; the brief white bathing suit gave her a long-legged look that made her seem taller than she was.

For all her regular features and gray eyes, she carried in her face somewhere a slightly foreign look, the look of Magyar or Slav or Central European. It was there in the deep socketing of the wide-set eyes, in the high cheekbones; it was in the rather large mouth and the quick mobility of her expression. She was no good at dissembling what she felt; she could not act a part with any skill whatever.

Now as she strode along, she was disturbed and she looked disturbed. She wondered what Jasper felt when he had heard the news from Europe. It must have held a special prod for him, and a special meaning. Everything now was translated into the vigorous language of his own purpose. That was inevitable, she knew. She could imagine the very words he was saying this moment up there in New York.

Before the quiet British voice with the Reuter’s dispatch had broken into her thoughts, she had been lying on the busy, bright beach, lazying through thoughts and memories as they came. If a vacation alone had any special merit to recommend it, it surely lay in the opportunity to think, to browse through her mind and her memories, as if she were browsing through some dim library open only to herself, where each book on every shelf was an autobiography of some phase of her own life. As she lay on the sand, thinking, this notion struck her; it pleased her and made her smile faintly.

One such volume in this secret library was titled
Jasper and I
; that was the latest, the most absorbing, though it was still unfinished and Volume II still unwritten. Another was named
My Marriage and Divorce;
that seemed to be bound in some meaningless gray, and was on the whole a dull, mediocre thing, rather than a tragic one. Another was
My Childhood
, and another,
My Success Story—Don’t Make Me Laugh.

There were many other volumes there, some short, some very long, some seemed bound in flamboyant scarlet leathers and others in the prosy cloth of schoolbooks. But one volume was missing—the restless, heated discussions of politics among her friends at home always served as a reminder of the gap. Yet this book could not be there until she herself had formulated its contents. It could never be there until she herself knew what it was she really stood for, found the continuing pattern she could live by. As yet she couldn’t even catch up this ghostly volume with any title at all, so formless was it. But someday it would be there too, and it would be a blessed book, an unquenchable book.

Until it was there, she would have a nameless unrest and searching. Neither her marriage, nor her work, nor her love affair with Jasper had quieted the one and given answer to the other.

She envied the positive ones, the devout Catholics, the ecstatic Communists, the untroubled devotees of any “cause.” They no longer were a-search. They
knew
; they had their purpose. But one could not simply decide, cool intellectual decision, “I will become passionately involved in this or that movement; I will devote myself to the juvenile delinquency problem; or I will crusade for better conditions for Negroes; or I will immerse myself heart and soul in the labor movement…”

Jasper never seemed to be troubled so. His own ambitions, his own determination to own the most famous network on the world’s air, were the inner drive that propelled him onward through every obstacle, through every emotion. It made him unswerving; his enemies called him “ruthless.” Many people whom he himself would call “friends” privately thought him so, too.

She herself did not know what he was. He did things differently from other people, that was true. He was unlike any other man she had ever known. In big ways, in little ways. Take so small an instance as his seeing her off on this very trip.

He himself had telephoned to suggest driving her to the airport.

It had never occurred to her that he would break into one of his crowded days to see her off on a short holiday.

“Oh, Jas, how dear of you, when you’re so busy.”

“Well, it’s our first separation, isn’t it?” he asked.

But the next day, when he came for her, he strode into her apartment, elated, talkative, triumphant.

“It’s a red-letter day, today is,” he greeted her.

“Because I’m going away?”

“Because it was signed and delivered this morning. The station is mine—it’s been mine legally, officially, financially mine for three hours. It doesn’t belong to Grosvenor any more.”

“Jas, that’s grand, to have it settled at last.” She was glad for him, deeply glad. No wonder he was so high-spirited.

“God, if it were only the whole network as well. I’m going mad at the lost chances because I’m not ready. Here’s all hell going to break in Austria and what do they broadcast? Hitler and Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden yesterday—and CBS sends out a program called “Old Vienna.” Christ, one broadcast this whole month from Austria, and it turns out folk songs. God knows what NBC did.”

His strong voice now had scorn and hatred in it.

“If I were only ready—I’d be sending out news from Austria every couple of hours, not songs and music, but news, excitement, crisis. Radio’s coming to that, Vee—damn them if they beat me to it.”

“They won’t. There’s no reason to think—”

“The idea’s getting around. I’m the very one who’s constantly talking it up—talking to every new prospect about my plans for regular, daily news from London, Berlin, Paris. And every damn day for a year I’ve known somebody’s going straight back to the big boys, spilling my ideas, handing them right over—”

He broke off suddenly, shrugged. The intensity went out all over him, from his voice, his eyes, his muscles.

“Oh, the hell with them,” he said coldly. “They’ll take the idea and then muff it anyway, because they’ll be scared of its heat, the sweep of it. But I’ve got to hurry. I hurry in my sleep.”

She looked at her watch then.

“We’ve got to hurry now, or I’ll miss the plane.”

He looked suddenly apologetic.

“Vee, I’m no good, talking business now. With you going—” He looked to her for reassurance, found her face smiling. “You’re a darling to let me. Come on, not another word about it.”

But in his car, through the gray, unlovely drive to Newark Airport, the talk soon went back to the network, and stayed there. At the airport, there was a last-minute rush to check her tickets, weigh in her luggage. The passengers were already boarding the plane.

He took her to the gate. Then his face changed.

“Good-by, darling, I’ll miss you,” he said. “I’ll hate your being away.”

“I’ll miss you, too, Jas. But it’s not for so long.”

“If you get a new beau down there, I’ll come and tear his ears off.”

He leaned down to her, ignoring anybody who might see. He kissed her and then held her away from him a moment, staring at her, as if he were suddenly finding it too hard to part. For one moment she wished she were not going.

“Flight Fifteen, all aboard Flight Fifteen, Charleston, Jacksonville, Miami—”

He dropped his arms; she turned quickly away from him, went through the gate.

“If you meet any big shots down there,” his voice shouted after her, teasing, gay, “anybody from BBC, fix my deal for me, will you?”

She pretended she had not heard.

That was Jasper. The scene came back to her as she lay in the sand—no wonder she herself did not know what he was. And he was as contradictory in other ways.

He described himself as “a liberal,” spoke often of “the little people” and the injustice life ladled out to them—but his voice remained tranquil, his eyes cold. She always disliked the phrase itself, with its implication that the speaker was “big people”; from Jas, with his rich, privately furnished apartment at the Sherry-Netherland, his ambitions and “big deals,” it seemed only patronizing and false.