The Fox in the Attic
No no no! Surely this sudden blindness was only a bad dream Mitzi had just woken from—in the dark!
But that smell of furs ... suddenly yesterday’s sleigh-ride came back to her. Moreover this wasn’t really at all the normal blackness of night: rather it was the negation of seeing, the absence of any visual sensation whatever. It was merely Memory which had translated it into the visual terms of darkness, as being the nearest equivalent Memory knew. She tried by an effort of will to see it as “darkness” again, but almost at once a chaos of meaningless sightsensation began to wake in the deprived optic nerve—like the sensation Uncle Otto said he felt sometimes in the leg which wasn’t there.
In fact, there was not any proof even that this still was night-time! It might just as well be broad day—and hence the feeling of urgency Mitzi had woken with.
Certain, now, she had overslept and was going to be late for breakfast Mitzi sprang out of bed to find her clothes. Normally she folded them on the chair by the window, where in the morning the dazzling entering daylight would direct her to them again; but in the misery of last night, had she remembered to do this? Anyway, where was that window? She had taken a few steps from her bed without thinking, and could no longer be sure which way she was facing.
Moreover those phantasms of color and shape chasing each other across her mind’s-eye had now become violently vivid—like solid objects flung at her, so that involuntarily she winced to dodge them. Panicking, she began blundering about with her hands stretched out to find some bit of furniture whose touch she could recognize; and in that big room of hers she was soon completely lost. It was difficult to keep one’s balance on this ancient undulating floor without eyes (even purblind ones) to help one: her toe tripped on a tilted board and she reached out to stop herself falling ... her hand touched something, and grabbed it—but only to feel an agonizing pang of pain, for it was the nearly red-hot iron flue of the stove she had seized for support.
The pain brought Mitzi back to her senses. She knew now just where she was, for she could feel the warmth coming from the stove several feet away—as she ought to have felt it before if she had kept her head instead of blundering right against it. As she stood there with her burnt fingers in her mouth it occurred to her she must henceforth learn to use such areas of local heat and cold for finding her way about: she must learn to steer by the radiant heat of the many stoves, the cold air near windows and the drafts through open doors—no longer by the direction of the light (by day from windows and by night from lamps) which formerly had fitfully pierced her private fog like lighthouse beams.
Then Mitzi remembered too the yapping of the fox the night before, and the changes in resonance when first he was in the big open hall, then on the enclosed stairs, and then in the attics above. So perhaps she could use resonance too to help tell where she was—out in the middle of a room, for example, or close to a wall?
Mitzi began moving about again, feeling for her clothes. This time she quickly found the window-chair—but they weren’t on it. So as she zig-zagged to and fro across the room she began uttering little staccato fox-like cries and tried consciously to interpret their reverberation for she was desperate—she must find her clothes! By now, the level morning sunlight would be shining straight in—though she couldn’t see it. She knew she was late, and Papa hated one being late.
A heartfelt urgency crept into her feral yapping.
*
Franz woke, that yapping tingling in his tuned ears.
For a moment he thought it really was their little fox as before; but he soon realized this was no natural fox. Indeed it was a most queer, uncanny sound: moreover it was coming from the room next his: from Mitzi’s room. Something was in there with Mitzi.
A were-fox?—He shivered, and his skin prickled with goose-flesh. But an instant later he recognized the voice for Mitzi herself and fright turned to anger. The little fool! What was she up to, rousing the whole house—had she gone out of her mind? He felt so cross with her his hand trembled as he lit his candle, and he barged in on her filled with an elder brother’s righteous wrath. Four in the morning! Was she out of her senses? What a time for a girl to stand in her nightgown in the pitchdark in the middle of her bedroom, yapping!
Mitzi could hardly believe him when he told her the real time, and she burst into tears as he drove her back into bed.
But then suddenly Mitzi heard a ringing slap—and Franz’s scolding voice ceased abruptly. It was replaced in her ears by another voice: a cracked old voice that was chanting a familiar little childhood jingle:
“Der Mops kam in die Küche
Und stahl dem Koch ein Ei:
Da nahm der Koch den Löffel
Und schlug den Mops entzwei ... ”
“Dear old Schmidtchen ...” How often, long ago, that ditty had served to lull a feverish or a fractious little Mitzi off to sleep!
Mitzi gave a deep sigh. But still the saga continued:
“Da kamen alle Möpse
Und gruben ihm ein Grab ... ”
Candle in hand, the old nurse—her dwarfish figure swathed in three dressing-gowns, the few gray locks on her nearly bald head standing out like sea-urchin’s spines—bent over her afflicted young baroness and gave her a troubled, searching look while she continued to intone:
“Und setzten ihm ein Denkmal
Darauf geschrieben stand:
‘Der Mops kam in die Küche
Und stahl ...’”
—and so on, round and round: for the song is endless.
But already Schmidtchen’s little Baroness was sound asleep; and as for the young Baron, he had long ago slunk back to his room—his tail between his legs and his boxed ear still stinging.
3
When that sluggard Saturday’s dawn came at last it found fifteen-year-old Lies already kneeling on the cold castle stairs; for the snow off Friday’s boots still lay there unmelted, each morning it had to be swept up with dustpan and brush.
Augustine was not awake yet: by the time he woke, Lies was already in his room. On his wash-stand steamed the jug of hot water for his shaving wrapped in a towel and the girl was down on her knees in front of his stove, coaxing it with fircones and the breath of her powerful young lungs. Lies wore her skirts kilted for work, and rolled her stockings; and on the backs of her broad bare white knees the rolls of puppy-fat still lingered. Augustine’s sleepy eyes opened on them as she knelt there—surprised to find legs could look quite so soft (and indeed almost babyish) on any young woman quite so stalwart as Lies.
Contemplating them, suddenly the thought struck him: “Suppose you couldn’t see?”—and once again a pang of pity for Mitzi racked him like an angina.
True, one could learn to thread the obstacle-race of this three-dimensional world without eyesight: that Augustine discounted. But to the joy of seeing Augustine was perhaps exceptionally addicted, as if his whole consciousness were concentrated close behind his eyes and almost craning out of them, like someone who can’t tear himself from the window. Among the five senses sight was incomparable. Indeed, sometimes he thought he would as lief be deaf as not in this world where everyone always talked so much too much: he was not humanly musical, and the only sound he would really miss aesthetically (he thought) was bird-song.
Smells too were mostly unpleasant—since petrol, and since even respectable women had now taken to powder and scent. Taste ... Touch ... even Movement! He would rather break his back and live out his life in a wheeled chair than be blind, for there was an almost infinite and incessant pleasure to be got from just “looking”: even (but now he averted his eyes) at a young peasant-girl’s fat knees.
How much Augustine preferred watching people to hearing them talk! When he was a boy of eleven a kindly astronomer had helped him build a telescope. It was meant for nebulae and the rings round Saturn and moon-mountains and so on; but soon he was spending hours with it by daylight too, turning it onto people. Being of the astronomical type it stood them on their heads, but one got u
sed to that. And it was powerful: framed in a circle like specimens in a microscope slide, his soundless specimens could be observed unawares as closely as if they were with him in the room. How different people’s faces do look when they think no one sees them and so they stop gesticulating at you with their features! It gave the boy quite a Godlike feeling, thus to “know their downsitting and their uprising, to understand their thought afar off.” For he was seeing natural human nature, which the human eye so rarely sees (even if he did see everything upside down).
For a time this human bird-watching had been almost an obsession; but at last it was brought to its own abrupt and wholly shaming end. For the view from Augustine’s bedroom window at home had included another garden, and there had been three little girls who used to play there. They weren’t quite gentry children, so he never came into normal naked-eye contact with them—he never even knew their names. Indeed he was then at an age to shun little girls like the plague in real life; but this was different, and soon these three were much his favorite object of nature-study. He came to know intimately almost every hair of those three heads; for the telescope brought them seemingly within touching-distance. I suppose he fell half in love with them, impartially with all three: a little private, abstract seraglio—so very close to him always, and yet ethereal visionary creatures without even voices. And so the idyll had continued, till that day when the one he happened to be watching wandered off from the others and, as he followed her with his eye curiously, suddenly bobbed down between two bushes.
When it was over the young peeper was appalled: he had seen what no boy’s eye ever ought to have seen, he had broken the strongest taboo he knew. It was weeks before he used his telescope again and then it was only at night, to study the moon: the uninhabited, infertile, utterly geological safe moon.
That moon is covered with mysterious ring-mountains; some with a solitary peak rising at the very center, like a little tongue—surely utterly unlike anything to be seen anywhere on this earth? Soon he became so enthralled he planned to map the whole moon’s surface, and tried to draw pictures of those rings.
As for picturing more mundane things, it was galling for someone so eye-conscious to have no aptitude for painting, however hard he tried. But Augustine’s natural skill at shooting was some consolation, for here it was the exact visually-imagined pattern in space and time of the bird’s flight intersecting with the brief trajectory of his pellets that was the attraction: that, and the utter loveliness of the plumage of the fallen bird.
Only one thing equaled this last—the utter loveliness of Mitzi’s hair; and at the thought of that, this morning, in his warm body under the warm bedclothes his heart glowed warmer still.
Yet Augustine this morning—though he would not admit it—was really in two minds about Mitzi. His heart might be warmed by the generous fires of love but the pit of his stomach had its sinking moments, its moments of chill. He loved Mitzi and Mitzi only and would love Mitzi for ever—and even more so for her blindness! Yet, to be coupled till death did them part with a blind girl was a bit like ... like entering a three-legged race with a partner who has only one leg.
As a budding lover Augustine had developed some at least of the instincts of a grown man but he was still an egoist also, with still the instincts of any normally self-centered child: too much of an egoist, perhaps, to tolerate yet the full “we-ness” of true marriage. So he clutched unconsciously perhaps at Mitzi’s blindness as something by which his separateness seemed permanently guaranteed. But the human personality like the plant has its “growing-point” with a foresight and wisdom all its own: a foresight insistent (in this case) that so infantile an egoism could not last for ever, that to seek to perpetuate it by a lame marriage must prove a disastrous thing. Hence, then, perhaps, these queer flutters of panic. He never for a moment consciously contemplated not marrying Mitzi yet something within him prompted a curious lack of impatience about going to her and actually Saying the Word—although he longed to say it.
With luck there would be an empty place next to Mitzi at breakfast. Thereafter (Augustine told himself) he would refuse to be parted from Mitzi all day: he would devote himself openly and unequivocally to her, claim the privilege of guiding her from room to room, of fetching and carrying for her ...
But when Augustine got to the breakfast-table he found no Mitzi. Cousin Adèle was preparing a tray: Mitzi would be breakfasting in her own room, and so after all the moment of final commitment was postponed! Augustine was desolated; and full of jokes.
4
Permission to breakfast in one’s own bedroom was rare in the annals of Lorienburg: one always had to appear even if one ate nothing. So Mitzi was indeed grateful not to have to appear today, when such waves of black despair were rolling over her it would be impossible to keep her feelings from appearing in her face.
For blindness was not an affliction which would pass—like a pain, or like an illness which either gets better or kills you. She was blind now she was young: she would be blind middle-aged: she would still be blind when she was old—she would die blind. She was going to be blind all her earthly life: only beyond the grave would she again have eyes to see.
The length of life—oh, its interminable length! Almost she formulated the wish to be struck dead that minute; but something smote her inward lips as with an actual blow of the hand, preventing them from quite uttering any wish so wicked.
Why had God done this to her? What had she done to deserve it? When she felt it coming on, had she not prayed with every breath of the lungs of her soul? Why hadn’t God answered her prayer, then? If He’d let her off this she’d have adored Him all her days and laid her whole life as a thank-offering on His altar, gone out to nurse lepers ...
Why had God done this to her? Because she had sinned? But everyone sins. Granted she was more sinful than average, one of the most repellent of all His creatures; but on the other hand no sin can’t be forgiven and she’d gone to confession regularly, received absolution. Had the priest’s absolution then been somehow always unavailing? It must have been! For a just God would have had to count up against her unforgiven every sin mortal and venial she had sinned since babyhood to judge her worthy of this.
“Most merciful Father ...” But the gates of His mercy were shut against Mitzi, it seemed. “Holy Mary, never was anyone who sought thy intercession left unaided ...” But Our Blessed Lady had withheld her intercession from Mitzi.
From Mitzi—the pariah of Heaven.
The meaningless chaos of sensation in the optic nerve still revolved without intermission.
Would she have never been born! Would that the day she was to be born could have been left out of the calendar, the darkness of the night preceding it joined mercifully without any intervening day to the darkness of the night that followed, rather than that Mitzi had ever come into being as the living human soul in whom this unending frenzied darkness should come into being! Why had life been given her, to be so miserable in, so bitter?
What had God put her into the world for at all, if having put her there He couldn’t forgive her?
But forgiveness, she knew, is only for the truly penitent: without the sinner’s contrition absolution is a mere form of words snatched from the priest’s lips by the Powers of the Air, blown back like smoke.
Had Mitzi never truly repented, then, in her heart, of the sins her lips had confessed? Since He had not forgiven her, Reason answered “that must be so.”—Then again and again she had taken the Holy Sacrament impenitent, thus eating her own damnation!
At this sudden thought of damnation Mitzi sweated with the absolute of terror; for in that case this blindness was a mere earthly foretaste of the horror to come. In that case even the grave could be no “bed of hope” for a Mitzi; for its bottom would open under the weight of her sins to discharge her incontinently into the bottomless everlasting fires of Hell ...
Oh how short is that brief postponement of punishment we call earthly life, and how awful the everla
sting wrath of God!
Mitzi’s mind was young and single, her faith unquestioning and her imaginative powers vivid. Her agony of mind was now passing beyond what tender human nerves can bear: like the point at which some poor soul trapped in the top of a blazing building at last makes the necessary leap from the sixth-floor window into the smoke.
5
When breakfast in the dining-room was over Augustine found himself at a loose end, for Walther shepherded Adèle and Otto and Franz into the drawing-room and shut the door. Evidently some sort of family council was going into session (under the fatherly eye of Good King Ludwig III). Nervous, and with time to kill till Mitzi appeared, Augustine’s first thought was to spend it making friends with the younger children at last. But that might not be easy: to begin with there was the difficulty of his “good” German, and moreover morning and evening they were all made to file round the table ceremoniously to kiss his hand which put one on altogether the wrong footing. Better wait till later, perhaps (he had never before funked children, but he’d never before struck quite such a formidable quartette). Moreover he had just remembered that this was Saturday: Augustine had spent three whole nights in Germany without sending Mary so much as a picture-postcard yet.
Augustine had already had one letter from Mary, here. “Polly has a cough ...” (Mary had said nothing about Nellie and the dead child’s father coming to the lonely neo-Gothic “Hermitage” to live: she thought that wound better given a little time to heal.)
But when Augustine went to his room and began writing he found it difficult to keep bent on his travelogue a mind that kept turning to Mitzi. However, he didn’t want to tell Mary about Mitzi quite yet: not till he had spoken to the waiting Mitzi and even her father and it was all settled. It never occurred to him Mary could think thirty-six hours from first meeting rather soon to have made up their minds: he was sincerely afraid if he couldn’t tell her something definite she would think them hopeless ditherers to have havered so long.