Above Suspicion (12 page)

Richard knew Frances was right in her self-analysis— she was like that—but his job right now was to see that her nerve didn’t crack before she had reached the cool, calm and collected stage. That would probably come before the end of this journey; at least, he hoped so. Her handicap was imagination. It was more difficult to face unpleasantness when you had imagination. But, as she had said, coming here helped
to reconcile the adjustment. It also hastened it, thank heaven.

“I know,” he said, and began some amusing suggestions about what they could possibly be drinking.

“It’s really only habit which makes me order coffee. A few more days and I’ll probably lose it,” Frances said.

“It’s extraordinary what people can swallow for the sake of their beliefs. I heard of a practising surrealist who spent many months eating his wardrobe.”

“That sounds a good story,” said a man’s voice. Both Richard and Frances looked up in surprise.

“Hello, van Cortlandt. Glad to see you.”

“May I come over here for a while? I wanted to tell your wife…”

“I know,” said Frances quickly. “I’m sorry I got so hot and bothered yesterday in that discussion. You know, it isn’t easy for us to look at these things disinterestedly.”

“And I came over here because I began to feel I might have seemed too darned callous. You see, I’m trying to look at things disinterestedly, and I’m finding that isn’t easy, either.”

“Well,” said Richard, “now that we have all kissed and made friends, what will you have?” They all laughed, and van Cortlandt said he would have beer. Frances had a feeling that he disapproved of them somehow because they were English, and yet was surprised into liking them when they caught him off his guard.

“As a matter of fact,” he was explaining, “I watched you being the only real human beings in a roomful of stuffed dummies, and I thought we were fools if we didn’t get together. We may be a lot different, but we aren’t just like—” He nodded over his shoulder in the direction of those concentrating on the
mastication of specially chosen vitamins to build a specially chosen race.

“Zombies is, I believe, the technical term,” suggested Richard. “Now would you really like to hear the story about the wardrobe?”

They talked for an hour and then decided to have a moonlight walk. The bodyguard joined them outside the hotel, Richard noted. As Frances explained that they were probably leaving tomorrow for the mountains, he wondered just who had been watching them inside the hotel dining-room. Not that it mattered, not now.

They didn’t choose any particular way, but just followed any twisting street which would lead them to the banks of the Pegnitz. Away from the bigger thoroughfares, the lights were economically dim, but it seemed safe enough—even with the two men marching behind them at a discreet distance. In the narrower streets where there were so few people, the men were ludicrously obvious. Richard wondered if they never felt the ridiculousness of the whole thing. The American, after his first glance back at them, had ignored the two pairs of feet keeping time with such perfect precision. Later, Richard wondered why he never then questioned the American’s lack of interest. Perhaps he was relieved that van Cortlandt appeared to think that this was only normal; it would have been difficult to pretend that they hadn’t noticed a thing. At the time he only felt grateful for van Cortlandt’s tact. It was a little surprising in such a forthright, I’m-just-a-plain-man type of individual. Perhaps the American found that frankness could be a very useful front, just as many a Britisher found under-statement a safe enough refuge.

Both Van Cortlandt and Richard were in good form. They talked with a good deal of the fervour and conversational abandon which have an unexplained way of suddenly appearing between two strangers, as much to their own surprise and enjoyment as to that of their audience. Frances was very well content to be the audience. They had just cruelly dissected Gothic art, and were proceeding to rhapsodise over Baroque, when Frances clutched their arms, and they moved closer to her. From the quiet blackness of the little alley to the left of them came a bitter cry, the high, self-strangling cry of fear or pain, or both. They looked at one another.

“And just what is that?” asked Richard quietly. He made as if to move into the alley. There was another cry. It made Frances feel sick. Van Cortlandt and Richard looked grimly at each other.

“You stay here with your wife, I’ll investigate.” The American had taken a step along with Richard into the alley.”

“Halt!” The abrupt command came from behind them. The two men had increased their pace to a run, as they had seen the foreigners become curious.

“Halt!” Van Cortlandt and Richard stopped; they looked belligerently at the men. Frances came to the rescue.

“Something’s wrong—a murder or something—down there.”

The brown-shirted men exchanged looks.

“We advise you to take a walk,” the older one said.

“But something is wrong,” the American protested.

The trooper who was doing the speaking said, “We advise you to take a walk. It is only a Jews’ Alley.”

So that was it. Frances thought for one moment that van Cortlandt was going to jab his large, clenched fist right in the middle of that mock-pleasant smile. There was a minute’s silence, only broken by a faint moaning. Frances turned abruptly and walked quickly away. The others followed, and they heard the Germans laugh at something one of them said. They were silent until they were almost at the hotel, and then van Cortlandt spoke.

“That’s it,” he said savagely. “Just as you are enjoying yourself and are thinking that life isn’t so bad after all, you meet that. Blast them to hell!”

“It’s our last night here, thank heavens,” Frances said.

“I’ve got to stay for two or three days more, and then I’ll get the hell out of here. Austria’s next. I’m working towards Vienna. I have enough material as it is, already, but I can’t print half of it. The nice kind people in the other world would think I was a liar or another sensationalist; and my boss would say I was sent out to report and not to do propaganda which would harm his organisation.”

“Is that considered at this date?” asked Frances.

“From the strictly business point of view, yes.” Frances began to understand why newspapermen were cynics.

They were silent again. All the charm of the night had been broken. Hans Sachs had given way to the Iron Maiden. As they said goodbye in the hotel lounge, van Cortlandt gave them his card, and wrote his New York business address on the back of it.

“That will always be able to tell you where I am supposed to be, anyway,” he added, with the attractive smile which had quite won Frances yesterday. Yesterday, or was it weeks ago? They gave him their address in Oxford, and watched him write
it down in his diary. Oxford, thought Frances, where the only scream in the dark came from the little Athenian screech owls. Firm handclasps
—they
were something friendly and honest.

“Tomorrow,” Richard said firmly, as they went upstairs to their room, “tomorrow we leave.”

Early next morning they left for Munich. It was a town they had both known well in the old days. Richard expected that they might be still under some kind of supervision, although their uniformed bodyguard had been left behind the walls of Nürnberg. So he chose the simplest things to do. In the afternoon they walked through the central streets, and for once he had no objections to window-shopping. In the evening they visited the Hofbräuhaus.

Frances was pathetically eager to watch the people, the same people she had seen each day when she had been an art student here in 1932. She seemed as if she were trying to read a riddle. Eventually, she gave it up.

She shook her head sadly. “I don’t understand it, quite truthfully. There is something in the German soul or mind which baffles other races; there must be. On the surface, all they have got out of it is a new grandiose building here or there
where they can listen to more speeches, and I can’t think of anything more boring. And they have also got a lot of uniforms, and high signs, and a firm military tread. But to all appearances the shops aren’t any better, the restaurants aren’t any better, the food is worse, so are the theatres and the books. The clothes of the people do not look any more prosperous; and the trains always ran on time here, anyway.”

“They have also got Austria and Czechoslovakia and lots of promises,” suggested Richard.

“And concentration camps, and universities which are travesties, not to mention the hatred of three-quarters of the world at least.”

Richard began to wish it had not been necessary to enter Germany. He thought of the pleasant holiday they might have been having in Switzerland or in the French Alps, or in Ragusa. Somewhere where the things you saw didn’t immediately start grim speculations…anywhere except this doomed country. That was what had depressed Frances so much, this feeling of doom which was apparent to the outside observer when he saw how blindly these people accepted their grand illusion. Richard felt as if he were watching passengers in a train whose engine crew were increasing speed, disregarding brakes, while the tracks in front were steep and twisting. Either the train would make the journey in record time, or they would end in horrible disaster. The strange thing, the terrifying thing, was to see the passengers accept the ominous swaying of the train along with the conductor’s glib assurances; to watch them disregard the fate of the passengers who did raise some objections, even although they had once praised the intelligence of those they now abandoned so heartlessly—and the strangest thing about
it all was the fact that all of these passengers—except the children, who were encouraged to stand at the window and cheer violently—all of them had been in a previous train wreck. No wonder Frances was depressed. She had always believed that men were intelligent animals.

If only the methods of hate and force had been resisted at the very beginning: not by other countries for
that
would have been called the unwarranted interference of those who wanted to keep Germany weak), but by the people of Germany themselves! But, of course, it had been more comfortable to concentrate on their own private lives instead of dying on barricades, if in the last extreme they had had to pit force against force. It was easier to turn a deaf ear to the cries from the concentration camps, to harden their hearts to the despair of the exiles, to soothe their conscience with praise of the Fatherland. And now it had come to, the stage where other peoples would have to do the dying, on barricades of shattered cities, to stop what should have been stopped seven years ago.

Frances spoke again. “I wonder where it will all end…”

“In the hall of the Gibichungs,” Richard said bitterly, and with that he discarded the problem of the German mind.

On Sunday, the ninth of July, they arrived in Mittenwald. If Richard had been alone, he would have risked going straight on to Innsbruck, but with Frances beside him it was quite another matter. It was probably just as well that there was Frances, to keep him from taking chances which might lead to disaster. Some days in Mittenwald would help to smooth out any complications which might have begun in
Nürnberg—and Frances needed the mountains. That was important to remember, with Innsbruck and whatever else lay ahead of them.

At first Richard would take her only for a short ten-mile walk. “Your legs are out of training, and your feet need hardening,” he insisted. The following day they did fifteen miles. On the next they included some climbing. By Thursday Frances could manage the Karwendel Peak without any trouble. It was on that day that Richard had begun to feel at ease again. The sense of being shadowed had gone, and Frances seemed as if she had successfully reached her past-worrying stage.

They had climbed steadily since eight o’clock, resting almost on top of the mountain to eat the sandwiches the hotel had provided that morning. They sat on the path, their legs hanging down over its edge as it dropped steeply away. Richard watched Frances open the thick hunks of bread, and extract the little grains of caraway from the slabs of soaplike cheese. She dropped them gravely one by one over the cliff, on whose edge she swung her tanned bare legs. They looked like a schoolgirl’s, thought Richard, above the heavy-wool socks and the flat-heeled shoes, with that attractive mixture of slenderness and strength. The light breeze ruffled her hair, which had curled round her brow with perspiration, and flapped her loose silk shirt. She had tied her cardigan round her neck by its sleeves. Her excavations for caraway over, she slapped the sandwich together, and took a lusty bite. Richard found himself smiling. There was something touchingly intent in her face as she looked at the Isar rolling rapidly far below them.

“It is lovely,” she said quietly, “quite lovely. Look!” She pointed a leg up the valley with its green fields and winding, ice-blue river. “‘God made the country, man made the town.’

Pity man couldn’t learn better.”

“He is a messy imitator. He thinks complexity is a proof of progress.”

They were silent, each with their own reactions to the simplicity of the scene.

At last when they had finished their lunch, Richard rose.

“Time to move,” he said, and helped Frances to stand up on the narrow path. “Fifteen minutes to the top and then we shall see Austria.”

“We have plenty of time,” Frances said, looking at the sun. “It won’t take long to come down.”

Richard shook his head reproachfully. That was one thing he couldn’t teach Frances; she couldn’t resist coming down a mountain quickly. She would never make a real mountain climber. She was plucky enough, though. She was following him up the last difficult stretch to the top with no outward trouble, although inwardly she was probably cursing in despair. She hated going up a mountain just as much as she loved coming down.

As they regained their breath on the top of the peak, they faced the Austrian Alps, rising in rugged waves of grey stone, snow-streaked.

Richard pointed. “Over there lies Innsbruck. We’ll go there tomorrow. We have been recommended by one of your school friends—Mary What-d’you-call-her to stay at the Gasthof Bozen in Herzog-Friedrich-Strasse.”