The Fox in the Attic

  So today Mitzi was indeed alone in her darkness, and indeed in despair.

  Mitzi had taken for granted that first day’s first ecstasy was going to be her condition from now on for ever. It had never occurred to her once God had found and possessed her she could ever lose Him again. Had her eyes of the spirit also been smitten with blindness? Was that possible? For God must be there!

  Mitzi thought of that game where the seeker is blindfold but the onlookers help him by saying “You’re cold!” or, “You’re hotter now ...” Surely she was not truly alone, with the glorious saints (she was told) all around her? Crowds of them, clouds of them—onlookers, all of them seeing where God was? Would none of them say “hot” or “cold” to her? For God MUST be there!

  Or had Mitzi but eyes, to read with! The Learned Fathers (she knew) had all been here before her, in this “dark night of the spirit”: at least they’d be company for her—give her hope.

  St. Teresa of Ávila ... Teresa had written of “seasons of dryness,” times when even that greatest of the mystics found prayer was impossible; but surely Teresa had something too, somewhere, about the “three waters” which solace that dryness? Mitzi alas had paid little attention in school when the nun read that bit aloud to them: now she hadn’t the haziest notion what those “three waters” were (and for that very reason felt certain that here lay the key to her problem). The “first water” was ... what was it? Oh had she but eyes, to read that book over once more!

  But again, why had God done this? Why (and now her soul trembled in mutiny), why show her the depths of His love if He meant to withdraw it? Oh cruel the love that so used her! Truly Mitzi had welcomed her blindness, if nothing but blindness could open her heart to His sweetness: but would she had never known bliss rather than know it and lose it—on top of her blindness.

  Yet Teresa ... Oh could she but READ ... and that was the state of her mind when she heard a knock at the door, and her uncle walked in.

  *

  It had struck the uneasy Otto that morning how lonely the girl must be feeling: so far as he knew, no one much visited her except old Schmidtchen—and it couldn’t be good for her, moping alone in her room all day with nothing to do. Leg or no leg he must get her to come for a walk with him. Of course, he himself couldn’t walk far; so perhaps it would be better after all if Franz took her? Or what about that young Englishman: surely he’d spare an hour to give the poor girl an outing?

  He must find out if she’d like that; and so he had come to her room. But one glance was enough: Mitzi was huddled in a chair beside her untasted breakfast, and her face wore a look of such strain she was certainly fit for no stranger’s company. She answered incoherently, too: she seemed unfit to converse, even with him.

  But Otto was determined not to leave her like this, now he had come. Perhaps she would like him to read to her? At that suggestion she trembled, but nodded. “Well: what shall I read, then?”

  But alas, to listen to “Teresa” with him watching! It must strip Mitzi’s soul bare, and today her horrible soul wasn’t fit to be seen—not by anyone’s eyes. Just because she so longed for Teresa, then, Mitzi chose at a venture Thomas à Kempis. Thomas seemed safer—more congruous too (she told herself) with her uncle’s disciplined mind. And who knows? He might even prove helpful.

  But Otto’s calm unspeculative voice made Thomas’s dry mediaeval apothegms sound even drier still: Otto gave the words a sharp intonation like musketry instructions and Mitzi’s attention soon wandered. She had been green, and now she was cut down—dried and withered like grass ...

  “Shut your door, and call to you Jesus your beloved: Stay with Him in your cell ...”

  —came Otto’s confident voice.—Yes, all very well! But suppose you call and He won’t come?

  Mitzi was getting sulky with Thomas. God had taken her up like a toy ...

  The thing finally and supremely necessary for the Christian (read Otto presently) was

  “That, having forsaken everything else, he leave also himself: go wholly out of himself, and retain nothing of self-love ...”

  Then for a moment the reader glanced over his shoulder; for silently Franz had looked in, made a face, and withdrawn. Perhaps it was that momentary tiny change in Otto’s voice; or perhaps it was only the image of her own unique ill-treated “self” so vivid that very moment in her mind that made the bald words hit Mitzi like a thunderclap. She shuddered violently: for what did that mean? Was Thomas saying that if she was to return to God, then even to herself her “self” must become indistinguishable—no singer may single the sound of her own hosanna in the chorus of the heavenly host?

  Must she forego even her own “I am”—the one thing she had thought nothing could take from her—not Death, even? But how could she, by sheer act of the will, do just that? How could she forget she was “she”? The task was both unexpected and plainly impossible: if God existed, so must she.

  For Science can prove most things—or disprove them, sooner or later; but there is one thing Science can’t prove or disprove and nobody asks it to because everyone knows it already: each knows his own “I-ness.” Other people’s unproven “I-nesses” he is willing to surmise, by analogy; but he can’t be directly conscious of them from within as he is of his own. Indeed there seems to be no other concept in quite that same category—I mean, something without intervention of the senses or logic a direct object of consciousness—except for people like Mitzi conscious of God: that is, of the “I”-ness of God. For it would be an understatement to say that Mitzi “believed” in God; she was conscious of His great “I AM” in the same way—in the very same breath of partaking—as she was of her own little “I am” that reflected the image of His. Say, rather, that she “believed” the existence of the people around her—her Mother, Franz, Otto, Natascha! But God’s existing Mitzi “knew”—from within it, just like her own.

  In the squeeze of the dilemma Thomas had posed her, for the first time it occurred to Mitzi that being “with God” is never a static condition: it is rather a journey—and endless.

  The discovery was visual. Far below her—like the lights of an inn left behind in the valley when a sudden turn in the mounting road shows them again but now directly beneath you—she saw, in the likeness of a pinpoint of light far down underneath her, that first day’s simple, sweet happiness: and now knew she could never go back to it. Nor did she want to, she found! For she who seeks God must press forward (thought Mitzi): lost sight of, God lies always in front.

  Something of that moment of vision must have shone in her face; for, watching and part-comprehending his niece’s emotion, Otto felt—yet hardly dared feel—a sudden elation. Could it be after all ... against all odds ... that their decision was the utterly right one?

  If so, then some Saint had taken a hand since everyone’s motives in reaching it had been so utterly wrong.

  19

  Franz had looked in on his sister because he too was growing uneasy about that decision as time wore on. Franz too couldn’t get Mitzi out of his mind.

  Yet surely Franz at least knew his motives had been of the noblest? For his iron duty it was to keep his hands free, his back unburdened for whatever burden Germany might lay on it (so Wolff had taught him). Each son and daughter of Germany these desperate days must be devoted wholly to Germany; and what could a blind girl hope to do for a Germany in travail except one thing—avoid hampering the activists, take herself out of their way? Like Agamemnon at Aulis, Franz had been called to bind his nearest and dearest on his country’s altar ... and very noble he was to do it, no doubt.

  Yes ... but would Mitzi herself see it that way unless he explained to her? Franz must at least have a talk with his sister and so he had gone to her room—but found his uncle in there before him.

  Uncle Otto was reading to Mitzi, and reading moreover some of that anemic soul-rotting drivel no good German might believe any more ... Ah, but Mitzi of course from now on ... it cut Franz to the quick, how far apart already he and
his dearest sister had drifted.

  Disgruntled, Franz crept away without interrupting them—up to the attics. For the root of Franz’s new feelings of guilt about Mitzi was undoubtedly this: she was to be sacrificed to the “Cause,” but that Cause (if he would but admit it) was in fact in a state of utter stagnation. Ever since Rathenau (more than a year ago) nothing had been done. Their mystic goal of Chaos seemed now remoter than ever: even Friday’s enigmatic upheaval in Munich had only left Weimar stronger. Meanwhile, the legions of the Activists were ... were inactive. Kern their old leader was dead, and Fischer: even the noble young Salomon was in prison: weaklings had joined the Nazis: that really only left Wolff to lead them, and Wolff all these long months ...

  “Wolff!” Franz halted, trying to adjust his eyes to the dusk. “Wolff, where are you? I want to talk.”

  Huddled in his furs, the recluse was crouched in the open dormer staring out at the bright interminable sky. Wolff was the same age as Franz but appeared even younger, for the idealist’s generic tendency to moral insanity had left the generic innocent charm quite unaffected—or had even enhanced that youthful magnetism of altruism and singleness of purpose.

  At long last Wolff’s climbing rope was uncoiled again: he was running it like a rosary through his fingers. From far below in the courtyard the Englishman’s voice floated up to him (in his British impudence hectoring German children! But his time would be short ... ).

  Reluctantly, and with a rapt visionary look in his blue wide-set eyes, Wolff turned away from the light. For the last hour or so Wolff had been absorbed in his dreams of killing Mitzi and naturally was loth to return to earth. But he must: for ... heavens, what was this good fellow saying? (It was indeed something new to be criticized by worthy little Franz.)

  “Wolff, I do wish you’d listen! What I mean is, oughtn’t you to ... well, in fact isn’t it high time now we ... look, why don’t you come out of here and put yourself at our head?” Wolff stared at him in silence. “Then at least we could all die gloriously like Kern and Fischer,” Franz added a little lamely. “But ever since Rathenau ...”

  The great Rathenau—the king-pin (they had thought) without which the whole hated edifice must collapse—Weimar’s only genius! Walther Rathenau was a Jew, and had just signed a treaty with the Bolsheviks; but that wasn’t the reason they had killed him: that had meant nothing to Kern and Wolff and all their likeminded fellow killers, for these were no bourgeois predictable Nazis. No: with the complete open-mindedness only true fanatics can afford they had read all his books with deepening admiration, hung on his lips till they reached at last the mystic conviction that here at last was the one wholly worthy sacrifice for Germany’s redemption which Fate must accept. It was not till they at last knew they almost loved Rathenau that they had heard that final categorical imperative to kill him.

  With an effort Wolff forced himself to answer: “Franz! Don’t you trust me any more?”

  “Yes of course, Wolff, but ...”

  “Do you suggest I am shirking my duty?”

  “No of course not! But ...”

  “Then can’t you trust me to judge when the time is ripe?”

  Yet Wolff’s words rang hollow even in his own ears; for what nonsense they both were talking! He would never come out, he knew that. Wolff couldn’t say so to his only disciple, but there was nothing left now to put himself at the head of! All that was kaput—since Rathenau. Now that Kern and Fischer (the protagonists in that sacrificial killing) had died fighting in a deserted tower of Saaleck Castle the whole Noble Army of Martyrs was on the run. “The king-pin, without which the whole hated edifice must collapse?” But it had not collapsed: instead, the nationwide horror and revulsion of feeling had infected even their own ranks and now Wolff had no friend or follower left in all Germany but silly Franz.

  “Wolff, you must break out—not stick here rotting! A hundred heroes call you!”

  But Wolff only smiled a rather superior smile. He had nobler things to think about now, did Franz but know it. Anyway, how could he wish to leave here even if he was able? In a whole year spent here he had grown into a unity with the very timbers of these attics (to express that unity he now knotted his rope to one). Look! Like the bones in Ezekiel already these beams were covering themselves with flesh, with skin—and it was his flesh and skin they were growing (delicately Wolff stroked the wood with one affectionate finger, tracing beetle-paths in the thick dust). He would breathe into these dry beams soon, and then these attics would live ...

  Though perhaps the whole range of them was too large to vivify: enough his one particular corner, his own bundle of furs ... Indeed, better still when he had something quite closed-in—say a box—to lie in. He must ask Franz for one ...

  “Wolff!!!—For the LAST TIME!”

  Franz looked so funny in his ignorant, puny vexation that Wolff started to laugh. Little this booby knew what final exploit for Germany Wolff was planning: that made it funnier still! So funny, Wolff laughed and laughed ... he’d a good mind to tell Franz all about it just to see how he took it.

  *

  Franz left finally almost in tears. But even before he was gone Wolff had forgotten him, back in his dreams of destroying those two.

  After all, he would not do it while they slept: no, he’d kill them together—and so that they knew. One day they’d go for a walk in the forest; and he would follow them. He would stalk them, flitting from tree-bole to tree-bole. By the end, deep in the forest and far from all help, they’d suspect something was there and yet never see him. He would circle them round—like this noose he was knotting. Fear would seize them: they’d cling to each other, and—hidden—he’d mock them. Then at last he’d come out to them, slowly, and kill them, and bury them deep in the snow where no one would find them till spring.

  *

  Mitzi’s hair ... blood, running in its fine gold, running down till it crimsoned the snow.

  Mitzi’s blood, spouting—floods of it—lakes of it, warm and exquisite!—Seas of it ...

  Look! The sun himself dangled a rope of glutinous blood from his globe—emulous, wanting to join those seas like a waterspout.

  On a fountain of blood like a bobbing ball on a water-jet Wolff’s soaring soul was mounting to heaven—high, high into the interminable blue ... but then something bit it! Bat-winged and black, something sunk teeth in it, tore it.

  The abominable attack was so sudden—no time to recall Wolff’s soul to his body, it was caught out there bare: spirit to spirit in hideous unholy communion. Despair! Down he was rocketing falling twisting ... oh agony agony! Blackness, everywhere black: noise ... pain, everywhere pain—unbelievable pain!

  “I ABHOR THINGS STRANGLED ...”

  From his temples the sweat spurted, and his teeth met through his tongue.

  20

  Below in the sunny courtyard the children were wildly laughing.

  Augustine had driven them hard: he had kept them working on that colossal snowman a whole hour without respite. But when it was done he had remodeled its nose with his fingers a minute or two, added his own hat and pipe and scarf—and lo, it was him! Then Augustine had been the first to knock the hat off with a snowball, and now they were all pelting it madly (not entirely without rancor, however, and the laughter was rather high-pitched).

  Otto was in his hot little office again, where almost nothing was audible from outside; where the only sound was the slow, stuttering thump of his typewriter as he sat at it, sweating.

  Under Otto’s window Franz was alone—skiing, hurtling down the almost precipitous castle mound between the close-planted trees and missing them by hairs’-breadths. It was madly dangerous, but his spirit with its newly-broken navel-string was now in that kind of turmoil only deliberate danger can ease. Walther had been away since early, in a distant part of the forest where there was work to be planned. Adèle was down in the village.

  Thus the whole inhabited house was empty except for Mitzi, still in her room.

  Th
ere, everything was quiet. Even the voices of the children she couldn’t hear; for Mitzi’s window was on the far side of the house, over the river. But then, in the stillness, her acute ears caught an extraordinary sound: a human and yet inhuman sound, a sound she could only describe to herself as worse than groaning and it came from overhead—no doubt of that, it came from somewhere in those empty floors above her. There was someone up there: someone who needed help.

  Mitzi went to her door and called Franz: no one answered of course. Then she called to her father; but the house was utterly still and now she had that certainty one feels sometimes in an empty house that it is empty. There was nothing else for it: she would have to go up there herself.

  Crossing the hall at a venture she luckily struck the door to the stairs first shot, and with her hand on the wall to guide her began to feel her way up them. Slowly passing Augustine’s door (which stood open as usual) she spoke his name into it, quietly—though certain he wouldn’t be there. Then she went on as fast as she dared, to the heavy door at the top.

  Hinges and latch had been recently oiled: the door swung open without the creak she expected. This second floor, she remembered, consisted of “rooms,” like the first floor: finished, and even furnished—only not used since the war so that everything here was lifeless, and shrouded moreover in dirt and dust: her sensitive fingers abhorred it.

  She stood still here a moment, and listened; but there wasn’t a sound. The groaning had ceased. Something told her, though, it had come from much higher than this—that terrible groaning.

  As best she could Mitzi felt her way to the next flight of stairs (which she dimly remembered were brick ones) and started to mount them. These stairs were uneven and narrow: she hadn’t been up here for years and no longer could picture properly what lay in front of her.