II
So that was that, Lanny returned to West Berlin and with Monck’s advice found a car he could rent for his trip to the South. It was a little vehicle of the kind Americans call a ‘coop’; it was large enough for one man and one suitcase and a load of food, and it had quite evidently carried a great many persons to a great many places. It was one of those vehicles of which Henry Ford had said that the customers could have it of any colour they wanted provided it was black.
In order to get from Berlin to Bavaria it was necessary to pass through the Soviet zone. This was a routine matter, and Morrison had obtained the permits. Lanny had driven over this autobahn many times in the past and had clear memories of it; the last was far from pleasant, for he had been escaping from the Gestapo, which had detected his spy activities. The German underground had agreed to transport him, but he had missed connections and walked part of the way in the night. Now there was no more Gestapo, and the ride seemed luxurious in comparison; he had a tank full of petrol and a permit to buy more in the American zone.
The Soviet soldiers inspected his pass and let him into their territory; later on they let him out again, and the Americans lifted their barrier and let him in. It had been rainy and chilly in Berlin, so going south was a pleasure. The sun came out, and the landscape shone. There were few traces of war—only the towns had been bombed, and of course the factories. By the time Patton’s armies had got here the enemy had been on the run.
The route passed through Regensburg, one of the worst scenes of destruction in all tormented Germany. The great ball-bearing factory had been one of the prime targets of the American bombers, and the losses of bombing planes here had been among the heaviest in the war. Lanny hardly glanced at the wrecks; his thoughts were occupied with the memory of his own experiences, coming into Regensburg in the night, lying under a heavy tarpaulin on top of a truckload of merchandise. They had come to a roadblock, and the Nazis had stopped the truck and searched it; however, they had not bothered to untie the ropes and lift up the tarpaulin—so the son of Budd-Erling was still alive.
When the traveller came to Landshut he turned off the autobahn and headed toward the point of land that juts into Austria and contains the village of Berchtesgaden. On the heights behind it were the ruins of Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat; Lanny had already inspected them and was no longer interested. But across the valley on the Obersalzberg lived an old friend, Hilde, Fürstin Donnerstein, and he owed her the courtesy of a visit; she had helped Lanny, fleeing from the Gestapo, to make good his escape, and the risk to her had been serious.
She was the widow of a Prussian nobleman and had been a member of that ultra-smart set which flitted from Berlin to Rome to Cannes to Biarritz to Paris to London. She had been the intimate of Lanny’s first wife, Irma Barnes, now Lady Wickthorpe, and there were dozens of people she wanted to ask Lanny about—what had become of them, what they were doing, and who was in love with whom. She was a polyglot person, shifting from English to German to French and sprinkling it with the international slang of a much happier decade.
Now she wore black for her only son, who had been killed in Poland. She was living what she called the peasant life. With her were an invalid sister and a young cousin orphaned by the war; they had an elderly manservant and a peasant girl who came in by day. They were occupying three rooms of the chalet and had boarded up most of the windows in anticipation of winter—which showed signs of wishing to come that very night. In one of the empty rooms she showed Lanny piles of rutabagas and potatoes which they had grown and harvested with their own hands. ‘Look at then!’ she said, meaning the hands, and held them up; they were gnarled and brown and weather-worn. Then suddenly she jerked them down and said, ‘Don’t look at my face!’ He had already done so and knew that it was aged and careworn. He said gallantly, ‘It shines with the light of friendship’.
‘Lanny darling!’ she exclaimed. She had been a little bit in love with him in the past, but now she knew that he was an entirely married man. He had put all his friends on the mailing list of the little Peace paper, and she had been reading it. ‘Oh, Lanny, you are so tragically naïve! To imagine you can bring peace to this wretched old Continent!’
‘You think the people haven’t had enough of war?’
‘The people, mon Dieu! When did they ever want a war? It is the leaders! The Soviet madmen! They are Hottentots! Do you imagine they will ever let us have peace?’
‘We must at least try to persuade them, Hilde’.
‘You cannot even reach them. If one of them was caught with a copy of your paper they would lock him up and make him confess that fifty others were in the conspiracy—fifty who had never heard the name of the paper!’
The ‘Soviet madmen’ were very real to the conquered people of the Obersalzberg. The Americans held the federal province of Salzburg, but only a few miles away was the part of Upper Austria which the Reds held. Hilde had terrible stories to tell about them; but she had a mind that moved like a butterfly, and presently she was saying, ‘Oh, Lanny, what are you Americans going to do with us? You told me to hold on to my stocks and bonds, but what is the use if we don’t ever get dividends or interest? Are you going to let our businessmen make money again?’
‘I think that is our full intention, Hilde’, he was able to assure her.
He led her out to the car and opened up the locked trunk. The first thing she saw was a fair-sized ham. ‘Ach, du lieber Gott! Ein Schinken! How on earth did you get it?’
‘I happened to have access to the AMG store’, he explained. He produced a five-pound box of chocolates and a sack of oranges—things which couldn’t be bought anywhere else in post-Hitler Germany.
‘Lanny, vous êtes un ange!’ she cried, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. She had had so much and now had so little; her Berlin palace had been bombed and burned and her mother killed therein. She had inherited an estate in Pomerania, but now the Russians were there, and it had been what they called ‘socialized’—which meant that the peasants worked it and the Russians took as much of the produce as they saw fit.
III
They had a feast, and Hilde went on chattering. They were all lucky to be alive, she said, and out of the war. Really the peasant life wasn’t so bad; there were friends nearby, and they came to see her, so she got the gossip of the neighbourhood, and indeed of all aristocratic Germany. Her talk was full of that light kind of malice which was considered chic in the fashionable world. You were amused by the weaknesses of human nature, but you didn’t really mean any harm, and you certainly weren’t trying to change anything. You would invite your friends to share your meal of rutabagas, potatoes, bread and cheese; you would recall the good old days and repeat in elegant French the saying about the staircase of history echoing to the sound of wooden shoes going up and silken slippers coming down.
That was one of the reasons Lanny had stopped off here. Not long ago Hilde had given him valuable tips as to where the Nazis had hidden the art treasures they had stolen. Might it not be that she would know something about Himmler money? The P.A. was like a fisherman working a stream; he would cast into one pool after another, never knowing where he might get a rise. He told her, ‘I had a funny experience the other day with an English pound note; I tried to spend it and found that it was counterfeit’.
‘And what did you do with it?’
‘I tore it up’.
The old sparkle of fun came into her eyes. ‘Oh, why didn’t you bring it to me?’
‘What would you have done with it, spent it?’
‘It would have helped to pay my taxes; it might have got by. If it didn’t, of course I would have been surprised and innocent’.
‘Your morals have deteriorated’, he told her; and she said, ‘What do I care for the politicians? Les cochons!’
‘They tell me there is a lot of that false money around’—another cast with his fishing fly.
‘I have heard talk about it’, said Hilde. ‘The Nazis made it, o
f course, and I suppose they knew how. We probably spend a lot of it and don’t know the difference. I’m sure I wouldn’t’.
So, no more of that. He let her talk about the friends they had known. He mentioned Graf Stubendorf, saying that this elderly nobleman might have art works he wanted to dispose of.
‘I don’t know what he has’, said Hilde. ‘They tell me he is secretive. He’s living somewhere near the Tegernsee, with an old couple who were formerly his servants. I don’t know whether he owns the place or not’.
‘I was told that he had been cleared by AMG and could have had a worth-while post if he had wanted it’.
‘He is a primitive Junker’, replied the Fürstin. ‘He probably doesn’t relish being conquered, and especially not by a democratic country. Epatant!’
IV
In the morning Lanny set out upon a drive through delightful scenery, the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The sky was bright blue with puffy clouds drifting across it; one of them dropped a few flakes of snow upon Lanny’s pathway, as if to warn him to get his driving over with while he could. The air was laden with the scent of pine trees that covered the mountain slopes. The road wound here and there, following the course of a stream.
Hidden away in these foothills were numerous lakes, large and small. The road was well marked, and when the signpost said, ‘Tegernsee’, Lanny swung off to the left and began to climb. The stream was brawling now, and its winds and turns were sharper, and presently there spread before the traveller’s eyes a lake of deep blue bordered with a blanket of perpetual dark green.
He stopped at a little inn and asked if they could tell him where the General Graf Stubendorf resided. Ja, ja, they knew, and were proud to tell him. When he asked for lunch they were pleased to serve him, for they could see that he was a victorious American, driving an American car. To be sure, it was antique, but in those days a German was lucky if he owned a bicycle, or in the country a cart and an old horse to pull it.
There was plenty of country food here: bread which was called black but was sound whole wheat, the kind that Lanny wanted; butter and milk, country greens, and an omelet. He wanted no more. While he ate, the hostess of the inn told him about the Herrschaft who honoured their neighbourhood. Yes, he was well and was not too lonely, for he had his books, and visitors came to see him now and then. Business was good in this lake country now, for persons who had ordinarily stayed only for the summer now lived here the year round. They would rather be snow-bound in the mountains than be back in the city where they would have to hide in a cellar or in a house with half its rooms blown away by bombs. The woman told of one family whose staircase was gone and who climbed to their rooms by ladder. Ach, ja, it was wonderful to know that no more bombs were going to fall. Ach, ja, the Americans had been very polite. Here in the hill country they had removed the Nazis from the local government and left the folk to run things as usual.
V
Lanny followed the directions and turned off into a little valley. There on a slope was one of those carefully tended small farms, terraced with stones and every foot of soil preserved. There was a stone cottage, of what Lanny judged to be three or four rooms. When he knocked on the front door it was opened by a tall, erect man wearing a rough peasant jacket and trousers which had long ago forgotten what it was to be pressed. On his head was a skull cap with faded embroidery, and from under it peeped white hair; the face was long, thin, smooth shaven, deeply lined. Many years had passed since Lanny had seen it, but he knew it well. ‘Good afternoon, Graf Stubendorf’, he said. ‘I do not know if you will remember me—I am Lanny Budd’.
The old face lighted up with a smile. ‘Herr Budd! Of course I remember you. Come in’.
Lanny was pleased, because he hadn’t been sure of a welcome. His name had become known to the Germans when he had testified at the Nürnberg trial against Hermann Göring, helping to bring about the conviction of the fat Reichsmarschall as a war criminal. He said, ‘I happened to be in the neighbourhood, and I thought you might be lonely’.
‘Have a seat’, said the old man and signed to the one comfortable chair, which was in front of a cast-iron, wood-burning stove. Lanny said, ‘Oh no’, and took a smaller chair and placed it facing his host. In the course of the visit he found a chance to glance about the room and saw that one corner was curtained off, evidently for a bed. There was a small centre table, where, no doubt, the old man had his meals served.
There was a reading table with several books on it, and one of them was open. The Graf himself mentioned that it was Carlyle’s Life of Frederick the Great—Lanny had not read that huge work, but he knew about it and could imagine the old soldier reliving the days of his country’s glory. A work of five large volumes, it contains elaborate accounts of each of the battles fought by the Prussian king, with diagrams showing the position of the troops at every stage of the conflict. Military strategy is the art of so manipulating masses of men as to overcome and destroy other masses who happen to belong to some other government and are manipulated by some other general. The General Graf Stubendorf had been doing this up to fifteen months previously, and now that he could no longer do it in reality he would sit and do it in imagination, following the victorious events of the eighteenth century.
Lanny had first come to Stubendorf as a boy, thirty-three years ago. There he had met the ‘Old Graf’, the present one’s father. Lanny had met him only formally, on Christmas morning, when he had greeted all his servants and retainers and made them a speech. Der Alter had died, and his eldest son had taken his place, and Lanny had met this one in Berlin, Lanny being then the husband of Irma Barnes, daughter of the Chicago traction magnate. No doubt this Prussian aristocrat had been more impressed by the rumour of Irma’s wealth than by Lanny’s social charms. Anyhow, he had invited the young couple to be guests at the Schloss and had given them an elegant if somewhat dull time. This had marked, of course, a change in Lanny’s social position in Stubendorf, for on his previous visits he had been the guest of the Graf’s business manager, Herr Meissner.
Now it was a pleasure to recall those old happy days—the pleasure mixed with pain, for the magnificent five-storey castle had been shot to ruins by Russian artillery. Many of the children whom the old Graf had welcomed at the Christmas morning celebration were now dead and ploughed under Polish or Russian soil. The Graf said that he had no personal hard feelings; German leadership at the top had been tragically incompetent, and Germany had been defeated in a war which it had foolishly started. ‘As you know, Herr Budd, I was never a Nazi’.
It was a formula you heard all over Germany now. You heard it from the great industrialist who was trying to get back control of his plant. You heard it from the proprietor of the café and the waiter, and from the bootblack who sought your patronage outside. You might travel all over Germany and have difficulty in finding a single ex-Nazi. What few there were had gone into retirement; they met in obscure beer cellars and sang the ‘Horst Wessel’ song in whispers and plotted what they were going to do when the ‘Amis’ got out.
But so far as Lanny knew, the statement of the General Graf was the truth. He had never been a political figure. He had been an officer of the old German Armee. He had studied his profession and had risen in due course. He had been put in command of a division, and had taken that division where it was ordered and fought to the best of his ability. He had survived two serious wounds, and the rest was the fortune of war—misfortune, because his estates had been in the path of the Russian armies. Now he had retired to the American zone and was spending a peaceful old age, studying the five-volume life of Prussia’s greatest king, written in the English language by a Scot.
VI
Lanny brought up the subject of Kurt Meissner. The Graf had recognised his genius and had given him a cottage in the forest on the estate. When his family had grown, the Nazi party had supplied the funds to build him a studio nearby. Kurt had fought in the army and had lost the use of his left arm, which was sad indeed for a piano virt
uoso. His large family had fled before the Russians, and Kurt had become a prisoner of the American army.
‘After his release’, said the Graf, ‘he wrote me that he wanted to go back to Stubendorf, even though it was again a part of Poland. Permission to reside there had been granted to Gerhart Hauptmann, the poet, and Kurt was hoping for the same favour. Apparently these Reds hope to be taken as civilised; they profess to have respect for artists of all sorts’.
Lanny suggested that perhaps they had not heard about Kurt’s friendship with Hitler; or perhaps consented to overlook the ‘Führermarsch’ and remember only the symphonies and concertos. ‘Do you know how he is getting along?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t heard from him for some time’, replied the other. ‘I fear he must be having a difficult time financially. I wish I could help him, but I am no longer in a position to do so’.
‘I mean to ask him’, Lanny stated.
This son of good fortune was naturally of a genial disposition and had been trained in what was called social charm since he was a tiny child. He had been raised among older persons, mostly lovely ladies, and when he had said something bright he had observed their pleasure. So now, when he wanted to please people, he knew how to do it. Of this old man who was both a military hero and a count, he enquired concerning various guests and retainers who had been at Stubendorf in the old days, thus giving him the pleasure of talking about his past power and glory. Some of the persons had died, and others had fled and been lost track of. Lanny made mental notes of the few who might still be in the old places.