The Fox in the Attic

  All the same, they had not found Toller; and presently for some reason Franz had been left alone like this in the darkness to guard the stairs while the rest of the patrol moved on elsewhere ...

  Just at that point in his recollections Franz turned the horse’s head towards the forest. All at once the sleigh plunged in among the trees down a broad ride, and Augustine in his snow-bound loving ecstasy gave loud utterance to a hunting-cry. At that happy, wholly animal sound a tremor passed across Franz’s quailing, hunted face: for now in the paling darkness countless shadowy figures in their ghostlike nightclothes were hustling him and again hustling him, and the tide of them had begun to carry him away—in a twinkling that woman had snatched at his rifle and underfoot the child had writhed and bitten him and his falling gun had gone off lethally right among them, the women and the children—a deafening bang, and then the howling ...

  Augustine failed to notice that tremor, for he was leaning right forward so as to be able to see past good old Franz and steal a glance at Mitzi.—Aha! At the happy, noble, British animal sound he had just emitted her parted, frost-pink lips had smiled.

  Augustine leant back again in his place, content.

  Mitzi had smiled ... but surely the smile lingered on her lips rather overlong? Indeed in the end it seemed frozen to a mere physical configuration, no pleasure nor humor remaining in it.

  Once Mitzi’s childhood cataracts had been removed the only vision she ever had when without spectacles to give things some semblance of shape (those spectacles which might never be worn in public) was a sort of marbled mingling of light and shade. But this morning she had woken plagued with dark discs floating across things—discs which even the spectacles could not dispel; and now these swimming discs, or globules, had begun to coalesce in a queerly solid black cloud, curtaining totally one part of the field. Now too that black cloud had begun to emit minute but brilliant blue flashes along its advancing edge ... for it was advancing, every now and then the cloud jerked forward a little further and blocked out a little more of the field (moreover, in such an absolute way!).

  Six months ago without even this much warning one eye had wholly collapsed, ceased to be a sense-organ at all. “The retina had detached,” they said. But that was the eye which had always been the weaker, quite apart from those cataracts in both of them; and the doctors were so full of comforting assurances about the remaining, stronger eye! Until now she had completely believed them; but was after all the same thing now happening to her “good” eye too? In a matter of hours or minutes—hastened perhaps by the jolting of the sleigh—might she find herself for ever afterwards stone blind?

  That was the sudden premonition which had made Mitzi so suddenly abandon that smile of hers and leave it lying derelict on her lips, discarded and forgotten while she prayed:

  Mary, Mother ... Oh Mary, Mother ... Heart of Jesus ...

  So the sleigh glided on with them, and slid—all three swaying together, these three separate identities bundled up in one bundle: a trio, pressed flank to flank in such close physical communion as almost to seem physically one person. On and on through the whiteness and the blackness of the endless snow-burdened forest.

  In the ears of all three of them similarly the silvery music of their sleigh’s sweet bells echoed off the endless equidistant serried boles.

  19

  It surprised Franz when at last they arrived at Röttningen to find Dr. Reinhold there. The eminent jurist was a busy man and seldom came to his brother’s house; but now Franz heard his unmistakable throbbing voice as soon as they entered the hall.

  It seemed to come through the open library door where Dr. Ulrich had just appeared to greet them: “Two shots!” the exciting voice thrilled in tones rich with pathos: “Straight through the ceiling! Phut-phut! Surely a remarkable way of catching the chairman’s eye at a meeting ... and indeed he caught every eye, balancing there erect on a little beer-table—all those grandees in full fig, and him in a dirty mackintosh with his black tails showing under its skirts—like a waiter on the way home. In one hand a big turnip-watch, and a smoking pistol in the other ...”

  A subdued buzz of appreciation was audible from the library. In the meanwhile Franz had been trying to murmur his parents’ excuses, but Dr. Ulrich seemed in a towering hurry and wouldn’t stop to listen to them—he would scarcely let the Lorienburg party get their furs off before he shepherded them in front of him into the already crowded library and pushed them into chairs. “S-s-s-sh!” he admonished them excitedly: “Reinhold was there, he saw everything! He left Munich before dawn and has just got here by way of Augsburg. They’re all in it—Ludendorff, Kahr, Lossow, Seisser, Poehner ...”

  “You muddle everything, Uli! It’s all that Hitler!” said Reinhold plaintively, “I keep telling you!”

  “... and Otto Hitler too,” Dr. Ulrich added hurriedly: “One of Ludendorff’s lot,” he explained.

  “Adolf ...” his brother corrected him. “But not ‘and Adolf Hitler too’! As I’m trying to explain—only you will keep running in and out—little second-fiddle Hitler entirely stole the show! Ludendorff, today? Kahr?” he continued with ironical disdain, and snapped his fingers: “Pfui!—For months those two have both been stringing this Hitler along, each trying to use that empty brain and hypnotic tongue for his own ends: now Hitler has turned the tables!”

  “It must all have been richly comic,” someone remarked comfortably.

  “But on the contrary!” Dr. Reinhold was palpably shocked. “How can I have conveyed to you any such idea?—No, it was deeply impressive!—Macabre, if you like: a mis-en-scène by Hieronymus Bosch: but in no way comic!”

  Once more everybody settled down to listen. “The hall was packed—by exclusive invitation only, for a pronouncement of Great Importance. Everybody who was anybody was there including our entire Bavarian cabinet—and Hitler too of course, he’d somehow been invited ...”

  “When was this, and where?” Franz whispered to Ulrich, aside.

  “Last night. Munich.”

  “But WHERE?”

  “S-s-s-sh! The Bürgerbräukeller: Kahr had engaged their biggest hall.”

  “We all knew what we’d been summoned for, of course—more or less. It would be monarchy, or secession—or perhaps both ... federation with Austria, even. But Kahr seemed in no hurry to come to brass-tacks. He droned on and on. That tiny square head of his—for anthropometrically he’s a veritable text-book Alpine, that old boy, and his little head sank lower and lower on the expanse of his chest till I truly thought it would end up in his lap! Nothing about him looked alive except those two little brown eyes of his: from time to time they’d leave his notes and take just one peep at us—like mice from the mouths of their holes! Eight-fifteen—eight-twenty—on and on—eight-twenty-five—still endlessly saying nothing—eight-twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and then—you should have seen Kahr’s look of outrage at the interruption—that inexplicable Phut! Phut!”

  Reinhold paused dramatically, palpably waiting till someone asked him, “What happened then?”

  “Silence, at first—a moment of utter silence! But the watch in Hitler’s hand was fully as significant as his pistol. On the very stroke of eight-thirty—at the very moment he first pulled the trigger—the door burst open and in tumbled young Hermann Goering with a machine-gun squad! Steel helmets seemed to appear instantly out of nowhere: at every door, every window, all over the hall itself. And then Pandemonium broke loose! Shrieks and shouts, crashing furniture and smashing beer-jugs ... punctuated by that short sharp ululation peculiar to women in expensive furs ...

  “Hitler jumped off his table and began pushing to the front, revolver still in hand. Two of Goering’s strong-arm boys half-lifted him onto the platform, and Kahr was shoved aside. So there he stood, facing us ... You know those piercing, psychotic, popping eyes of his? You know that long, comparatively legless body? (‘Incidentally you’re another Alpine, dear boy,’ I thought: ‘You’re certainly no Nordic ...’) But oh the ad
oring gaze those brawny pinhead gladiators of his kept turning on him from under their tin skull-cups, those ant-soldiers of his (and there seemed to be legions of them, let me tell you, there last night)!

  “Now in a moment it was so quiet again you could hear Hitler panting—like a dog circling a bitch! He was profoundly excited. Indeed whenever he faces a crowd it seems to arouse him to a veritable orgasm—he doesn’t woo a crowd, he rapes it. Suddenly he began to screech: ‘On to Berlin! The national revolution has begun—I announce it! The Hakenkreuz is marching! The Army is marching! The Police are marching! Everybody is marching!’” Dr. Reinhold’s voice rasped harsher and harsher: “‘This hall is occupied! Munich is occupied! Germany is occupied! Everywhere is occupied!’” In his mimicry Dr. Reinhold glared round the room with quivering nostrils, as if daring anyone to move in his seat. Then he continued: “‘The Bavarian government is deposed! The Berlin government is deposed! God Almighty is deposed—hail to the new Holy Trinity Hitler-Ludendorff-Poehner! Hoch!’”

  “Poehner?” said someone incredulously: “That ... long, stuttering policeman?”

  “Once—Jailer of Stadelheim!—Now, Bavaria’s new prime minister!” said Reinhold with ceremony: “Hoch!”

  “And Ludendorff ... so Ludendorff is behind it all,” said someone else.

  “Ye-es—in the sense that the tail is ‘behind’ the dog,” said Reinhold: “Commander-in-chief of a thrice-glorious (non-existent) National Army—Hoch! It’s Lossow who’s to be minister of war. I tell you, when Ludendorff at last came on the scene he was in a smoking rage: it was perfectly obvious Hitler had bounced him—he’d known nothing about the coup till they got him there. He spoke honeyed words, but he looked like a prima donna who’s just been tripped into the wings.”

  “And Egon Hitler himself?”

  “‘Adolf,’ please ... our modest Austrian Alpine? He asks so little for himself! Only ...” Reinhold stood exaggeratedly at attention—“Only to be Supreme Dictator of the Whole German Reich—Hoch! Hoch! HOCH!”

  Someone in Reinhold’s audience made a more farmyard noise.

  “My friend—but you ought to have been there!” said Reinhold, fixing him with his eyes: “I couldn’t understand it ... frankly, I can’t understand it now so perhaps you clever people will explain it to me? Hitler retires to confer in private with Kahr & Co.—at the pistol-point I’ve little doubt, for Kahr and Lossow were flabbergasted and palpably under arrest—while young Hermann Goering in all his tinkling medals—all gongs and glamour—is left to keep us amused! Back comes Hitler: he has shed his trench-coat now and there his godhead stands revealed—our Titan! Our New Prometheus!—in a slop-shop tail-coat nearly reaching to his ankles, das arme Kellnerlein! But then Hitler begins to speak again: “November criminals” and “Glorious Fatherland” and “Victory or Death” and all that gup. Then Ludendorff speaks: “On to Berlin—there’s no turning back now ...” “That’s spiked Kahr’s separatist, royalist guns pretty thoroughly,” I thought: “and just in the nick of time! Prince Rupprecht is right out of it from now on—he’s missed his cue ...” But no! For then the notoriously anti-royalist Hitler chokes out some intention-ally only half-audible laudatory reference to ‘His Majesty’: whereon Kahr bursts into tears and falls into Hitler’s arms, babbling about ‘Kaiser Rupprecht’! Ludendorff can’t have heard what Hitler said or Kahr said either—fortunately, for he’d certainly have burst asunder ... but as it is, everyone shakes hands all round ... then State-Commissioner Baron von Kahr speaks, then Commanding-General von Lossow, then Chief-of-Police Colonel von Seisser—all licking the Austrian ex-corporal’s boots! All pledging him their support! Not that I’d trust one of them a yard if I were Hitler ... any more than I’d trust Hitler’s new-found reverence for royalty if I were Rupprecht.

  “So much for the stage and the professionals: in the audience we’re all jumping on our seats and cheering ourselves silly. ‘Reinhold Steuckel, you level-headed eminent jurist!’ I kept telling myself. ‘This isn’t politics, it’s Opera. Everyone’s playing a part—but everyone!’”

  “Grand Opera—or Opera-bouffe?” asked someone behind the speaker.

  Reinhold turned right round in his chair and looked at his interrogator very seriously: “Ah, that’s the question! And it’s early days really to know the answer,” he added slowly. “But I think it’s what I hinted earlier: something not quite human.—Wagner you say? You’re thinking of that early, immature thing of his, Rienzi? Perhaps. Yes, the score is recognizably at least school of Wagner ... ah, but those ant-soldiers—all those sinister, animated insects and those rabbits and weasels on their hind legs ... and above all, Hitler ... Yes, it was Wagner, but Wagner staged by Hieronymus Bosch!”

  He said all this with such compelling earnestness, enunciating those last words in so sibilant a whisper, that a chill hush fell on the whole room. Dr. Reinhold had not gained that courtroom reputation of his for nothing.

  20

  Dr. Ulrich kept bees, and the little honey-cakes which were being served (with liqueurs) were a speciality of the house: “Famous!” his guests exclaimed: “Wonderful—delicacies of the most surpassing excellence!” It quite shocked English Augustine to hear men sitting around and all talking so excitedly about food.

  “Hitler would adore these cakes of yours, Uli,” said someone.

  “But Herr Hitler adores anything sweet and sticky,” said someone else: “These little beauties would be wasted on him.” The speaker smacked his lips.

  “That must be why he’s got such a pasty complexion,” (it was only Dr. Ulrich himself, it seemed, who had hardly heard of Adolf).

  “Does anybody know just when Hitler clipped his mustache?” Franz asked his neighbor suddenly. But nobody did ...“Because, the first time I ever saw him it was long and straggling.”

  “No!”

  “He was standing on the curb, haranguing. And nobody in the street was listening: not one. They walked past him as if he was empty air: I was quite embarrassed ... I was only a boy, then, really,” Franz added apologetically.

  “That must indeed have been most embarrassing for you, Baron,” put in Dr. Reinhold sympathetically. “What did you do? Did you manage to walk by too? Or did you stop and listen?”

  “I ... couldn’t do either,” Franz confessed: “It was all too embarrassing. I thought he was someone mad, of course: he looked quite mad. In the end, rather than pass him I turned back and went by another street. He’d a torn old mackintosh which looked as if he always slept in it yet he wore a high stiff collar like a government clerk. He’d got floppy hair and staring eyes and he looked half-starved ...”

  “A stiff white collar?” interposed Dr. Reinhold: “Probably he slept in that too. What the title of ‘Majesty’ on the lips of his pawnbroker means to an exiled monarch at Biarritz, or the return of his sword to a vanquished general, or his dinner-jacket to an English remittance-man on the Papuan beaches—that clerkly collar! His inalienable birthright as a Hereditary Life-member of the Lower Middle Classes—Hoch!”

  “It can’t have been my lucky day,” Franz pursued, smiling wryly. “There was another prophet in the next street I turned along, too! And he was dressed only in a fishing-net: the chap thought he was St. Peter.”

  Augustine liked Dr. Reinhold: intellectually he was obviously in a different class altogether from Walther and Franz (surely it was symptomatic how much Franz himself seemed to alter in Dr. Reinhold’s company!). So now Augustine slipped out of the seat he had been planted in, made his way over to Dr. Reinhold and began talking to him without more ado about a boy at his prep-school who hadn’t just thought he was God—he knew it. The boy (a small and rather backward and inky specimen) knew it beyond any shadow of doubt. But though he was Almighty God in person he had been curiously unwilling to admit it openly when questioned in public—even when taxed with it by someone big and important, with a right to a straight answer even from God (some prefect, say, or the captain of cricket): “Leighton Minor! For the last time—Ar
e you God or aren’t you?” He’d stand on one leg and blush uncomfortably but still not say Yes or No ...

  “Was he ashamed of His Godhead? Considering the state He’s let His universe get into ...”

  “I don’t think it was that: n-n-no, it was more that if you couldn’t spot for yourself something which stood out a mile like that it was hardly for Him to make a song about it—altogether too self-advertising ...”

  Dr. Reinhold was delighted: “But of course! Incarnate in an English boy how else could God behave? It’s how you all do behave, in fact.” Then he inquired of Augustine in the meekest of voices: “Mr. Englishman, tell me please because I should be so interested: are you God?”

  Augustine’s jaw dropped.

  “You see!” cried Dr. Reinhold triumphantly. But then he turned to Franz and said in tones of contrition: “Introduce us, please.” And thus—rather late in the day—Reinhold and Augustine formally “met.”

  The German clicked his heels and murmured his own name, but Augustine just went straight on talking: “Sometimes we had to twist his arm like anything to make him own up to it.”

  “Himmel!” Dr. Reinhold regarded his new friend with owlish anxiety: “Considering ... who He was, wasn’t that just a tiny bit unsafe?” Then he clapped his hands: “Listen, everybody! I want you to meet a young Englishman whose idea of a wet-afternoon’s harmless amusement for little boys is twisting the arm of ... of Almighty God!”

  “He’d better meet Hitler then,” said a square woman sourly.

  “It isn’t as if the Kampfbund themselves took Hitler seriously,” said someone. “He’s not one of their big men.”

  “It’s all Putzi’s fault,” someone else was saying, “for bringing him to people’s parties: it has given him ideas.”

  “He ruins any party ...”

  “Oh no! When he talks about babies he’s really rather sweet ...”