So they traversed the Königsplatz in style, with one proud little boy just in front of the marching column doing handsprings, handsprings—handsprings all the way.
It was a cold night all night in Munich—that exciting night of Thursday November the eighth—but still no snow there; and bitter and windy was the “Kahr-Freitag” morning which followed.
13
At Lorienburg, when Augustine had gone to bed last night the room had been too hot; but by morning his bedclothes had slipped off, the stove was dead and the room down to freezing-point. There was ice in the jug on his wash-stand.
Here at Lorienburg moreover there had been quite a heavy fall of snow in the night. This morning the sky was still as slaty-gray as before, but with all that whiteness outside indoors it was appreciably lighter than yesterday. As Augustine on his way to breakfast entered the hall he found the few touches of color in it picked out by the snowlight: the blue tablecloth on the little round table, a green chair, the gold scroll-work on the big black settle. The ancestral paintings looked brighter than yesterday, and the pale cafe-au-lait stone floor-tiles glistened as if they were wet.
Then came a brief flicker of shadow over everything as a cloud of snow slipped silently off the steep roof: not in one heavy lump as when it melts, but more like a slowly falling cloud of smoke. Augustine turned, and through the window saw it drifting away like smoke on the almost imperceptible breeze. Someone (he noticed) had left a bottle of beer on the sill overnight: it had frozen solid and then burst, so that the beer still stood there—an erect bottleshape of cloudy amber ice among the shattered glass!
As he turned again from the window Augustine caught sight of two little girls. They were half hidden in the embrasure of a door; but he recognized them as the tobogganers by the bumps on their foreheads, glistening like the floor-tiles. He smiled at them; but they didn’t smile back: they were too intently watching something, with shocked expressions.
It was only by following their eyes that he caught sight of the twins also, Rudi and Heinz. Those perilous trick-cyclists were crouched now under a tall Gothic bread-chest, withdrawn as far as possible from sight; but they couldn’t quite hide that they were wearing heavy brass-studded dog-collars and were chained by them to the legs of the chest with long dog-chains. Ashamed—not at all of yesterday’s crime but acutely of today’s punishment—they glared out at Augustine with unruly and unfriendly eyes.
With her back to him, and squatting on her heels so that the long fair tail of hair hanging down her back was actually touching the ground, that older sister who had so interested him last night was dipping hunks of bread in a bowl of coffee and feeding them. Intent on scowling at Augustine one of the boys got a crumb in his windpipe and choked, coffee and other liquids pouring from nose and eyes. In a paroxysm of embarrassment Augustine tiptoed past with averted head, hoping against hope the girl would not look round and see him.
At breakfast there was an atmosphere of suppressed excitement mounting. It bewildered Augustine, who knew nothing of the night’s mysteries.
At six that morning Otto had got up and again tried to telephone to Munich; but still “no lines.” He had then rung the railway-junction at Kammstadt and learned that during the night no trains had arrived from Munich and no news either. What could have happened? Services elsewhere, they told him, were normal. This narrowed the field somewhat; for if Berlin had marched on defiant Munich—or Munich on Berlin, for that matter ... or if Kahr and Lossow had loosed the Freikorps mobilized on the Thuringian border against Bavaria’s leftist neighbors ...
No: this must be something confined—for the moment—to Munich itself. And since Kahr was in control in Munich, surely something Kahr himself had started: that could only be one thing, the thing everybody expected Kahr to start.
Walther thought so too, when he heard the meager facts: it could only mean ... and now Walther was finding the suspense unbearable, waiting for the expected news in front of his untouched coffee dumb.
Franz also looked pre-occupied; but withdrawn, as if his anxiety was his own and something neither his father nor even his uncle shared (nor he theirs). Yet it was Franz alone who remembered to ask Augustine politely how he had slept (had the little fox woke him? No?), and to pay him the other small attentions of a host. Franz was heavy-eyed, as if he himself had not slept at all, his expression more contemptuous than ever.
“Heavens!” thought the simpleton Augustine, looking from face to face: “What hangovers they’ve all got!”
It was at that moment Mitzi entered the breakfast room, followed by her two little sisters. She too seemed curiously inattentive; for she would have collided with a displaced chair if Franz, polite as ever, had not whisked it out of her way.
“Dreaming again!” thought Augustine.
At breakfast Augustine found himself noticing how strangely Mitzi spread her fingers—like antennae, like feelers—when stretching out her hand for something small such as a spoon, or a roll off the dish. Sometimes it would be the little finger which touched it first, whereon the others would instantly follow. But even at twenty-three he was still at an age when, as in childhood, there are things which can be deemed too bad to be true. Thus this bad truth was bound to be slow in forcing an entry into so young and happy a head as his—the truth that already, at seventeen, those big gray eyes of Mitzi’s were almost completely blind.
“Listen!” said Otto.
Churchbells—no doubt of it! Faint but wild, the churchbells in the village below had begun ringing. Hard upon the sound came Walther’s foreman forester, his dark hair powdered with fine snow off the trees, panting and jubilant with the news he carried. It was the expected news of course (the first news always is). Solemnly Walther filled glasses and passed them round. “Gentlemen!” said Walther (everyone had already risen to his feet): “I give you—The King!”
“Rupprecht und Bayern! Hoch!” There was a tinkle of broken glass.
“What fun!” thought Augustine, and drained his glass to King Rupert with the rest and smashed it: “What nonsense—but what fun!”
Neither Augustine nor anyone else noticed that Franz smashed his glass with the drink in it untouched.
14
The first wave of rumors which spread nearly everywhere across the Bavarian countryside that Friday morning spoke, quite simply, of a Wittelsbach restoration. No one quite knew whence the news came or exactly what had happened: only that there had been “a great upheaval” last night in Munich and now Prince Rupprecht the Field-Marshal was to be king of Bavaria (his father, the ex-king Ludwig III with his Prussian bullet in him, had died two years ago).
No one was surprised. Kahr was back at the helm these days with special powers, and everyone knew Kahr was an open royalist who was maneuvering to declare the Bavarian monarchy restored the first ripe moment. Presumably his recent deliberate defiances of the federal authorities in Berlin were no more than moves in that separatist game. Lately moreover there had been no lack of know-alls to whisper, knowledgeably, that now it was only a matter of days. Last Sunday at the big Totengedenktag march-past in Munich it was Rupprecht who had taken the salute, not Kahr and not the Minister-president! Everyone had commented on that.
So now it was only the expected which had happened. Mostly, people were jubilant. Churchbells rang and villages were beflagged. In the past people had tended to laugh a little unkindly at the late ex-king’s concertina-trousers and his passionate interest in dairies; but in Bavaria fanatical republicans had always been few. Even since the republic villages still used to be beflagged and churchbells rung, children dressed in their holiday best and fire-brigades paraded, for ex-king Ludwig’s “private” visits. When Ludwig died two years ago Munich gave him a state funeral. It turned into the warmest demonstration of public affection you’d have found anywhen in all that “thousand years of Wittelsbach rule.”
Thus today there were only a few who wore long faces: but those were the very few who allowed themselves to wonder What next?
For surely this must make the present open breach with Berlin final, must make wastepaper of the Weimar constitution? An independent Bavarian kingdom, then ... but where do we go from there? Other German states had their would-be separatists too; as well as royalist Bavaria there was red Saxony; there were rebellious reds in Hamburg; and at Aachen there were those despicable paid stooges of the French who even talked of an “independent” Rhineland.
But Walther von Kessen was not among these longfaced, long-sighted ones as in bubbling spirits he saw to the hoisting of flags, ordered the firing of feux-de-joie, plotted processions and ox-roastings, planned thanksgiving Masses with the village priest, even bruited a memorial obelisk on the Schwartzberg. Moreover Augustine had caught the infection and was bubbling too: possibly the drinking of toasts (no heel-taps) in plum-brandy at breakfast contributed to his care-free attitude of “Ruritania, here we come ...” Presently he waved his glass and asked “M’Lord Baron” for a boon: surely so happy an occasion should be celebrated by granting a pardon to all poor prisoners in the castle, chained in durance vile?
For several seconds Walther gazed at him pop-eyed, as if Augustine had gone stark mad: for Walther’s mind had been far away, and in any case he was somewhat unused to fooling. But at last the light dawned—and then, Walther was delighted. How very charming of Augustine! What an appropriate sentiment and how wittily expressed! Walther indeed was quite astonished: for the first time he felt for his young English cousin something that was almost affection, and clapped him on the shoulder till the dust flew. Then he commanded that the boys’ dog-collars should of course be undone (“That was your meaning, wasn’t it? I have divined rightly?”) and sent the two little sisters happily scurrying to see to it.
For the fact was that Walther was only too glad of this excuse for an amnesty. It was forced upon him that in this exemplary punishment he had let his sense of fitness run away with him: the boys were taking it harder than he had expected. There was nothing naturally cruel in Walther—only a belief that in punishing children one ought to be imaginative as well as stern: that the modern parent doesn’t go on just unintelligently beating his children for ever.
Thereafter Walther had to go about his feudal festive occasions with Otto: so the three young people, feeling excited and pent-in, went down to the courtyard, Franz and his sister arm-in-arm, out into the keen cold air. The courtyard was deep in snow. The ramparts on its surrounding walls where yesterday the boys had bicycled were now covered in a slope of untrodden snow, the crenellated twiddles of the parapet smoothed out by snow. A snow-hush was on all the world this morning, in which the distant sounds of loyal merriment—the churchbells and the sleigh-bells and the gunshots and some far singing—floated unaccompanied: the only near sound was the tiny (indeed infinitesimal) shriek of the snow you trod.
They passed through the Great Gate. Below them, white snow blanketed the treetops and the village roofs, the church-tower rocking under its bells; and all the forests and fields beyond were also a dead white under the dun sky. In all that whiteness the tints of the painted crucifix outside the castle gate took on a special brilliance: the crimson gouts of blood that trickled from the snow-covered crown of thorns and down the tired face: the glistening pinks and ivories of the emaciated naked body with its wisp of loin-cloth: the blood and blue-white snow round the big iron spike driven through the twisted, crossed, riven feet. Under the cross but quite unconscious of it stood a group of small mites who had just toiled up there from the village with their toboggans: red caps and yellow curls, shell-pink faces intoxicated with the snow, they stood out against the background colorlessness as rich as butterflies, they and the Christ together.
Here Franz halted the trio and they stood in contemplation. “Grüss Gott,” the children whispered.
Augustine peered inquisitively down through the tree-tops towards the half-hidden village celebrating beneath. But Franz and Mitzi, their arms still linked, stood with their two smooth yellow heads close against the crucified knees. Franz’s face was working with emotion. Instinctively Mitzi at his side turned towards him and with her free hand felt for and stroked his shoulder. As if that released something he began speaking: his face was averted from Augustine but his voice intended for him ... this English Augustin even though English was young and so must understand him!
“Papa,” said Franz (and each word was charged with its peculiar tension), “is a monarchist: we are not, of course.” He paused. “You see, Papa is a Bavarian, but I am a German.” With a careful but unconscious finger he was pushing the snow off the spike through Christ’s feet. One after another the children on their toboggans and bobsleighs dived head-foremost into the trees below, leaving the three alone. “Papa lives in the Past! We live in the future, I and Mitzi.”
“... And Uncle Otto,” Mitzi added quietly.
“Uncle Otto too? Yes, and no ... not without reservation ...”
At that, Mitzi drew a sudden, startled breath.
As they passed in through the great gate and saw the house again Augustine glanced up at the roof, for from the tail of his eye he seemed to have caught a flicker of movement there. That open dormer on the fifth floor: yesterday surely it had been boarded up like all the rest?
15
“All the same,” Franz was saying as the trio reentered the garden court, “to me, this morning’s news is good news ... so I think ... for now things will begin to move.” Just then the twins appeared in a doorway, watching them. Augustine stooped to make a snowball, but these little fellows looked so solemn they might take it for a deadly affront. “Kahr—Rupprecht—they are themselves of no importance,” Franz was explaining. “Gustav von Kahr is merely the Finger of Fate: ‘Fate’s Little Finger,’ if I may be permitted the trope. Supposing it possible to harness too-great forces to too-small ends, today he has released in Germany disruptive powers he will not be able to control. And certainly no one in Berlin will be able to control them now Walther Rathenau is dead.—That was why the great Rathenau had to die,” he added in a curious husky parenthesis, his eyes suddenly large and gloating and horribly human.
“But if things do get quite out of control ... what is it you’re hoping to see happen?” asked Augustine, idly amused.
“Chaos,” said Franz, simply and somberly. “Germany must be re-born and it is only from the darkness of the hot womb of chaos that such re-birth is possible ... the blood-red darkness of the hot womb, etc,” he corrected himself, sounding for the moment very young—a child who had only imperfectly learned his lesson.
“Golly!” murmured Augustine under his breath. This queer German cousin was proving a rather more entertaining character than he had suspected.
But just then Augustine’s attention was distracted from Franz, for Mitzi stumbled over something in the snow. Franz was still holding her by the arm but had ceased to pay much heed to her, so that now she almost fell. “Whoa there, hold up!” cried Augustine blithely, and slipped from his place to take her other arm.
Usually Augustine rather avoided touching people, if he could: girls, especially. So that now he had deliberately taken a girl’s arm it was somewhat a strange experience to him. True, it seemed quite devoid of any electrical discharges; but it was embarrassing all the same. Thus at first he found himself gripping the limp, sleeved thing much too hard. Then he would have liked to let go of it again but found he didn’t know how, gracefully, and so had to keep hold of it willy-nilly. All the while he was acutely anxious lest Mitzi should take him for one of the pawing kind.
Whereon in a curiously emphatic—indeed almost tragic, and yet unhurried voice, Mitzi ignoring him began to talk to her brother about their uncle. Perhaps (she admitted) Franz had been right in his “reservations”; for one had to admit that Uncle Otto did not, in his every endeavor, show signs that he sought absolute chaos and ensued it. Indeed, the work he was doing for the Army ...
“I’m afraid that is in fact so,” said Franz, frowning. “Our uncle has not, I regret, so clearly unders
tood the philosophical pre-necessity of chaos before creation as we have, you and I and ... and certain others.” Now that his brain was active and his emotions engaged, Franz’s habitual conceited and contemptuous expression had given place to something a good deal simpler and nobler: “Hence arises our uncle’s mistake—to be working too soon for the re-birth of the German Army, when he ought to be working first rather for the re-birth of the German Soul. He sets too much store by cadres and hidden arsenals and secret drilling: too little by the ghostly things. He forgets that unless a nation has a living soul to dwell in the Army as its body, even an Army is nothing! In present-day Germany an ‘Army’ would be a mere soulless zombie ...”
“Hear-hear!” Augustine interrupted: “Naturally! This time the soul of the new Germany has to take unto itself a civilian ‘body’ of course—and that can’t be an easy pill for soldiers like old Otto to swallow.”
“The soul of Germany take a civilian body?” Franz looked startled, and there was a prolonged pause while he turned this strange idea over in his mind: “So! That is interesting ... you carry me further than I had yet traveled. You think then that our classical Reichswehr, with its encumbering moralistic traditions, will prove too strait an outlet for so mighty an upsurge of spirit? So, that the re-born Soul of Germany will need to build for itself some new ‘body’ altogether—some ‘body’ wholly German, wholly barbaric and of the people? Is that your thought?”