The Young Lions

First published in 1949

THE town shone in the snowy twilight like a Christmas window, with the electric railway's lights tiny and festive at the foot of the white slope, among the muffled winter hills of the Tyrol. People smiled at each other broadly, skiers and natives alike, in their brilliant clothes, as they passed on the snow-draped streets, and there were wreaths on the windows and doors of the white and brown houses because this was the eve of the new and hopeful year of 1938.

Margaret Freemantle listened to her ski boots crunching in the packed snow as she walked up the hill. She smiled at the pure twilight and the sound of children singing somewhere in the village below. It had been raining in Vienna when she left that morning and people had been hurrying through the streets with that gloomy sense of being imposed upon that rain brings to a large city. The soaring hills and the clear sky and the good snow, the athletic, cosy gaiety of the village seemed like a personal gift to her because she was young and pretty and on vacation.

" Dort oben am Berge," the children sang, "da wettert der Wind," their voices clear and plangent in the rare air.

"Da sitzet Maria," Margaret sang softly to herself, "und wieget ihr Kind." Her German was halting and as she sang she was pleased not only with the melody and delicacy of the song, but her audacity in singing in German at all.

She was a tall, thin girl, with a slender face. She had green eyes and a spattering of what Joseph called American freckles across the bridge of her nose. Joseph was coming up on the early train the next morning, and when she thought of him she grinned.

At the door of her hotel she stopped and took one last look at the rearing, noble mountains and the winking lights. She breathed deeply of the twilight air. Then she opened the door and went in.

The main room of the small hotel was bright with holly and green leaves, and there was a sweet, rich smell of generous baking. It was a simple room, furnished in heavy oak and leather, with the spectacular, brilliant cleanliness found so often in the mountain villages, that became a definite property of the room, as real and substantial as the tables and chairs.

Mrs Langerman was walking through the room, carefully carrying a huge cut-glass punchbowl, her round, cherry face pursed with concentration. She stopped when she saw Margaret and, beaming, put the punchbowl down on a table.

"Good evening," she said in her soft German. "How was the skiing?"

"Wonderful," Margaret said.

"I hope you didn't get too tired." Mrs Langerman's eyes crinkled slyly at the corners. "A little party here tonight. Dancing. A great many young men. It wouldn't do to be tired."

Margaret laughed. "I'll be able to dance. If they teach me how."

"Oh!" Mrs Langerman put up her hands deprecatingly.

"You'll have no trouble. They dance every style. They will be delighted with you." She peered critically at Margaret. "Of course, you are rather thin, but the taste seems to be in that direction. The American movies, you know. Finally, only women with tuberculosis will be popular." She grinned and picked up the punchbowl again, her flushed face pleasant and hospitable as an open fire, and started towards the kitchen. "Beware of my son, Frederick," she said. "Great God, he is fond of the girls!" She chuckled and went into the kitchen.

Margaret sniffed luxuriously of the sudden strong odour of spice and butter that came in from the kitchen. She went up the steps to her room, humming.

The party started out very sedately. The older people sat rather stiffly in the corners, the young men congregated uneasily in impermanent groups, drinking gravely and sparely of the strong spiced punch. The girls, most of them large, strong-armed creatures, looked a little uncomfortable and out of place in their frilly party finery. There was an accordionist, but after playing two numbers to which nobody danced he moodily stationed himself at the punchbowl and gave way to the gramophone with American records.

Most of the guests were townspeople, farmers, merchants, relatives of the Langermans, all of them tanned a deep red-brown by the mountain sun, looking solid and somehow immortal, even in their clumsy clothes, as though no seed of illness or decay could exist in that firm mountain flesh, no premonition of death ever be admitted under that glowing skin. Most of the city people who were staying in the few rooms of the Langermans' inn had politely drunk one cup of punch and then had gone on to gayer parties in the larger hotels. Finally Margaret was the only non-villager left. She was not drinking much and she was resolved to go to bed early and get a good night's sleep, because Joseph's train was getting in at eight-thirty in the morning. She wanted to be fresh and rested when she met him. As the evening wore on, the party became gayer. Margaret danced with most of the young men, waltzes and American foxtrots. About eleven o'clock, when the room was hot and noisy and the third bowl of punch had been brought on, and the faces of the guests had lost the shy, outdoor look of dumb, simple health and taken on an indoor glitter, she started to teach Frederick how to rumba. The others stood around and watched and applauded when she had finished, and old man Langerman insisted that she dance with him. He was a round, squat old man with a bald pink head, and he perspired enormously as she tried to explain in her mediocre German, between bursts of laughter, the mystery of the delayed beat and the subtle Caribbean rhythm.

"Ah, God," the old man said when the song ended, "I have been wasting my life in these hills." Margaret laughed and leaned over and kissed him. The guests, assembled on the polished floor in a close circle around them, applauded loudly, and Frederick grinned and stepped forward and put his arms up.

"Teacher," he said, "me again."

They put the record on again and they made Margaret drink another cup of punch before they began. Frederick was clumsy and heavy-footed, but his arms around her felt pleasantly strong and secure in the spinning, warm dance.

The song ended and the accordionist, now freighted with a dozen glasses of punch, started up. He sang, too, as he played, and one by one the others joined him, standing around him in the firelight, their voices and the rich, swelling notes of the accordion rising in the high, beamed room. Margaret stood with Frederick's arm around her, singing softly, almost to herself, her face flushed, thinking, how kind, how warm these people are, how friendly and child-like, how good to strangers, singing the new year in, their rough outdoor voices tenderly curbed to the sweet necessities of the music.

"Roslein, Roslein, Roslein rot, Roslein auf der Heide," they sang, old man Langerman's voice rising above the chorus, bull-like and ridiculously plaintive, and Margaret sang with them. She looked across the fireplace at the dozen singing faces. Only one person in the room remained still.

Christian Diestl was a tall, slender young man, with a solemn, abstracted face and close-cut black hair, his skin burned dark by the sun, his eyes light and almost golden with the yellow flecks you find in an animal's eyes. Margaret had seen him on the slopes, gravely teaching beginners how to ski, and had momentarily envied him the rippling, long way he had moved across the snow. Now he was standing a little behind and away from the singers, an open white shirt brilliant in contrast to his dark skin, soberly holding a glass and watching the singers with considering, remote eyes.

Margaret caught his glance. She smiled at him. "Sing," she said.

He smiled gravely back and lifted his glass. She saw him obediently begin to sing, although in the general confusion of voices she could not hear what addition he made to the music.

Now, with the hour and the strong punch and the imminence of a new year, the party had become less polite. In dark corners of the room couples kissed and pawed each other, and the voices grew louder and more confident, and the songs became harder for Margaret to follow and understand, full of slang and double meanings that made the older women giggle, the men roar with laughter.

Then, just before midnight, old man Langerman stood up on a chair, called for silence, gave a signal to the accordionist, and said in an oratorical, slightly drunken tone, "As a veteran of the Western Front, wounded three times, 1915-18, I would like everyone to join me in a song." He waved to the accordionist, who went into the opening chords of "Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles". This was the first time Margaret had ever heard the song sung in Austria, but she had learned it from a German maid when she was five. She still remembered the words and she sang them, feeling drunk and intelligent and international. Frederick held her tighter and kissed her forehead, delighted that she knew the song, and old man Langerman, still on his chair, lifted his glass and offered a toast, "To America. To the young ladies of America!" Margaret drained her glass and bowed. "In the name of the young ladies of America," she said formally, "permit me to say that I am delighted."

Frederick kissed her neck, but before she could decide what to do about that, the accordionist struck up once more, ringing, primitive chords, and all the voices sang out, harshly and triumphantly, in the chorus. For a moment Margaret didn't know what the song was. It was one which she had heard only once or twice before, in surreptitious snatches in Vienna, and the male, roaring voices, obscured by drink, made the tangled German words hard to understand.

Frederick was standing stiffly next to her, clutching her, and she could feel his muscles straining with the passion of the song. She concentrated on him and, finally, she recognized the song.

"Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen fest geschlossen," he sang, the cords standing out on his throat, "S. A. marschiert in ruhig festen Schritt Kameraden die Rotfront und Reaktion erschlossen."

Margaret listened, her face stiffening. She closed her eyes and felt weak and half-strangled in the grinding music and tried to pull away from Frederick. But his arm was clamped around her and she stood there and listened. When she opened her eyes she looked across at the ski-teacher. He was not singing, but was watching her, his eyes somehow troubled and understanding.

The voices became louder and louder, full of threat and thunder, as they crashed to the end of the Horst Wessel song. The men stood up straight, eyes flashing, proud and dangerous, and the women, joining in, sank like opera nuns before an operatic god. Only Margaret and the dark young man with the yellow-flecked eyes were silent when the last "Marschieren mit uns in ihrem Geiste mit" rang through the room.

Margaret began to weep, silently, weakly, hating herself for the softness, clamped in Frederick 's embrace, as the bells of the village churches rang out in thin, joyous pealing, echoing against the hills in the winter night air.

Old man Langerman, beet-red by now, the sweat running off his round, bald dome, his eyes glistening as they might have glistened on the Western Front when first he arrived there in 1915, raised his glass. "To the Fuehrer," he said in a deep, religious voice.

"To the Fuehrer!" The glasses flashed in the firelight and the mouths were eager and holy as they drank.

"Happy New Year! Happy New Year! God bless you this year!" The high patriotic spell was broken, and the guests laughed and shook hands and clapped each other on the back, and kissed each other, cosy and intimate and unwarlike. Frederick turned Margaret around and tried to kiss her, but she ducked her head. The tears turned into sobs and she broke away. She ran up the steps to her room on the floor above.