Dark Tunnel (8 page)

“Call it inner light if you wish, or conscience or the superego. Whatever you call it, it knows that some things are wrong.”

“You are an unconscious anarchist, Dr. Branch. You would set up the feeling or impulses of the individual against the laws, against the good of the state.”

“If the laws are evil, they are not for the good of the state. Denying the validity of the individual conscience leaves no check on the state. Whatever it does is right.”

“If it is successful, yes,” Peter Schneider said, as if that clinched the argument. “If unsuccessful, no.”

“Successful in doing what?”

“In furthering the interests of its people, or as many of them as possible.”

“You’re arguing in a circle,” I said, “but let that pass. Can the good of the majority of the people sanction, or perhaps even include, the persecution or misery of a minority?”

“Obviously,” Peter said, and leaned forward across the table. “I cite the Negroes in the United States.”

“And the Jews in Germany?”

“You’re trying to drive me into an anti-Semitic position, Dr. Branch.”

“Not at all. I’m trying to drive you out of an anti-Semitic position.”

“Nonsense. I merely said that the individual could not be sure of being right when he takes the law into his own hands. Especially a woman, a young girl.”

“You seem to share Hitler’s prejudice against women,” I said, “as well as his prejudice against Jews.”

“I have no concern with Hitler,” Peter said.

Dr. Schneider spoke for the first time in minutes, “It is not entirely courteous to argue so strenuously with a guest. You must accept our apologies, Dr. Branch.” His voice was a light monotone which contrasted with his usual rich blatancy. It sounded as if he was afraid to speak but couldn’t help himself.

I said, “The conversation is both interesting and instructive. I believe that Mr. Schneider was about to expound an old Turkish doctrine regarding the inferiority of women.”

“Ach, women,” Peter said. “You Americans are hag-ridden by your women. They ride on your shoulders and strangle you with their legs. Their legs are pretty, of course. But why should they be treated as equals? Would you give equal civil rights to a race-horse?”

“If it had equal intelligence and other human qualities.”

“Are women equal in intelligence to men?”

“Not if they’re not educated. The Middle Ages proved that.”

“Why attempt to educate them? Women can perform their natural functions without education. Most of them are hardly more complicated than a child’s puzzle. Press three buttons in the proper sequence and the gates open. The gates of Aulis and the gates of hell. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Suddenly I could contain my anger no longer and it boiled over. “I abandon the argument. Your political and social ideas have the fascination of the horrible as far as I’m concerned. And the horrible loses its fascination very quickly.”

What Peter said had convinced me that if he wasn’t a Nazi intellectual he had missed his calling. I stood up with a vague notion of walking out of the house, but the thought of Ruth held me. She was coming there to-night and evidently didn’t know what kind of family she was walking into.

Peter stood up and said, “Come now, Dr. Branch, you must learn to be a better loser. We must have no hard feelings over a small argument of purely academic interest.”

I bit back my anger and said, “I suppose I did fly off the handle. I must be getting the professorial habit of resenting contradiction.”

Dr. Schneider produced an artificial laugh which bounced twice against the roof of his mouth and fell flat.

“Not contradiction, sir. Merely disagreement,” Peter said. “We are probably using different words to mean the same thing.”

I let even that pass.

Dr. Schneider got out of his chair and said, “It’s some time before we’re due at the station, Dr. Branch. Would you care to look over my house?”

I said I would and Peter excused himself. A moment later I heard his light feet go up the stairs two or three at a time. His father showed me the library with its shelf of first editions, the copper-screened back porch overlooking the lights of Arbana, the small, warm conservatory opening off the porch, and even the utility room where the furnace sat drinking oil and glowing contentedly. Dr. Schneider became quite amiable again after Peter left us, and he waxed lyrical over his radiant heating system which kept the floors warm enough to sleep on all winter. He seemed to love his house better than he loved his son.

I listened enough to answer when I had to, but material possessions bore me, especially when they belong to other people. I pricked up my ears, though, when he offered to show me the
salle d’armes.
A special room for fencing seemed incongruous in the house of a man of Dr. Schneider’s age and weight.

“I’m rather interested in fencing,” I said. “Do you fence?”

“When I was a student, I indulged in some sabre-play.” He touched his left cheek, which was seamed with scars. “But I have not fenced for thirty years. Peter is a considerable fencer, I believe.”

“Really? I did some intercollegiate fencing when I went to college, but I’ve never competed with the sabre. We used foils and epee, with masks, of course. I’ve got no scars to show for it.”

“Our sabre-fencing at Heidelberg was a crude and bloody business,” Dr. Schneider said with an emotion that surprised me. We moved out of the utility room under the staircase into the central hall, and I noticed Peter coming down the stairs. “Since my Heidelberg experiences I must confess I have detested fencing, and especially the sabre. It is a butcher’s implement.”

Peter was at the foot of the stairs now, and he stood there listening.

“If that’s the way you feel,” I said, “it’s surprising that you have a fencing
salle
in your house.”

“It was part of the house when I bought it, and I left it as it was. Peter sometimes uses it when he is here, and, of course, it lends a certain touch to the house.”

“The manorial touch,” I said. “Your establishment is on a feudal scale, Dr. Schneider. I’d like to see your fencing room.”

As we went down the hall, Peter joined us and said, “My father has been maligning the sabre, Dr. Branch. It is the most beautiful of weapons, and the most difficult.”

“The Italian sabre has its points, certainly. I’ve played around with it but I never really learned it.”

We went on discussing the sabre as we entered the
salle d’armes,
but after Dr. Schneider switched on the light my mind wasn’t on what I was saying. It was wondering where Peter Schneider had picked up the smudge of lipstick on his cheek. I hadn’t seen it there before he went upstairs, and Frau Shantz, the middle-aged housekeeper, didn’t look as if she used lipstick or as if Peter Schneider could conceivably kiss her.

Dr. Schneider pointed at a row of long, narrow cases on a table at the end of the room and said, “There are the foils, Dr. Branch, if you are interested.”

When I went to look at them, Dr. Schneider spoke in an angry whisper which I couldn’t catch. When I turned around, the lipstick had disappeared from Peter’s cheek and he was casually tucking a handkerchief into his breast pocket.

“I’m afraid it’s the least interesting room in the house,” Dr. Schneider said.

“On the contrary. It brings back very pleasant memories, probably because I won a round-robin once and this recalls the scene of my former triumph. It was the only thing I ever got a letter for in school.”

To anyone but a fencer the room would have been less interesting than an average hotel room with nobody living in it. It was a large, square, empty room on a rear corner of the house, with tall windows on two sides. There were crossed sabres over the door, and a few wire masks and pads hung on the white plaster walls. A corrugated rubber mat ran across the exact center of the room.

But the black rubber mat and the faint memory of old sweat along the walls excited me for a minute. I took a foil out of its case and moved it in the air.

Peter stood beside his father watching me. I looked at him and his mouth moved into a smile like soft rubber, but under the rosy flesh the strong and passionate bones of his skull were fixed in a durable, clenched grin. His blonde hair looked senescent in the white light.

“Would you care to play with the foils a little, Dr. Branch, since you do not affect the sabre?”

“I’d like to,” I said, “if you’ll be forebearing. I’m years out of practice.”

Peter clicked his heels and bowed and started to take off his coat. I started to take off mine.

“I’m sorry to interfere with your sport,” Dr. Schneider said, “but there’s hardly time, I’m afraid.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s not eight-thirty,” I said.

Peter spoke to his father in low, intense German. He must have thought that I didn’t know enough colloquial German to understand him, because what he said was, “Hold thy noise, thou doddering fool.”

Dr. Schneider said nothing, but he turned green like old bronze. He turned and walked stiffly out of the room.

“We’d better skip it,” I said. “Your father seems to object.”

“Of course not. There is plenty of time. My father is a wet blanket. Do you care to select a foil and a mask?”

“If you wish.”

We put on masks, faced each other on the rubber mat, and saluted with our foils. The blunt, harmless blades crossed and disengaged. He lunged and I parried and lunged. He moved away very quickly and parried and lunged.

If you have once learned to swim, your muscles never forget what to do in the water. Though I had not fenced for years, my muscles remembered the parries and
ripostes
that had been trained into them. My footwork was slow but the foil lightly held in my fingers followed their direction like an extension of my hand. I touched Peter three times while he touched me twice.

He laid down his foil and took off his mask and I took off mine.

“You are quite an expert fencer, Dr. Branch.” He spoke with what used to be called old-world courtesy before the old world lost its manners. But his fair skin was strained tight over the bones of his face.

“Hardly,” I said. “I’ve probably spent more time with the foils than you have.”

“No doubt you have. The sabre is my weapon. The foil is a pretty toy but the sabre is an instrument of war.”

He moved quickly to the doorway and took down the two sabres from over the door. He thrust the hilt of one towards me and said, “Just feel it, Dr. Branch, the weight and balance and versatility.”

While he stood opposite me on the mat and made his sabre whistle in the air, I looked at the one he had given me. It was not an Italian fencing-sabre with truncated point and blunted cutting-edge. It was a cavalry sabre, heavy and long, pointed like a pen and sharp enough to cut bread or throats. It was an instrument of war, all right.

Peter said, “On guard,” and I looked up to see him giving me the fencer’s salute with the other sabre. His blade whirled in the air and leveled out towards my bare head. Fear came down on me like a cold shower but there was exhilaration in it, too. My blade sprang up almost without my willing it to keep my skull from being split, and I parried the cut.

The sabres crossed and arced in the air. He struck at my head again and I riposted and tried to kill him by sinking my blade in his neck. He parried very easily and smiled at me. He struck at my head and I parried. A drop of sweat ran down my forehead and tickled the end of my nose. I was sweating with exertion and with the terror of death. The movements of my raised arm began to feel laborious and remote.

Two well-matched men can carry on unbroken play with sabres for minutes at a time, but we were not well matched. After the first few strokes, I could hardly meet his descending sword. My weapon became a burden too heavy to hold and the flashing metal dazzled my eyes.

He forced me back steadily towards the wall, his sabre falling like steady hammer-blows. The sweat ran into my eyes and clouded my glasses. Through them I saw the skull-grin shining in his face like a sign of death. My left heel struck hard against the wainscoting and ended my retreat. He struck at my head and I parried and he changed his tactics and thrust at my throat.

My nerve broke down and I forgot about everything but saving my neck. I dropped my sabre and moved sideways along the wall and his point crunched into the plaster. I started running across the bare room and his sabre came between my legs and tripped me. I went down hard on the concrete floor and my glasses fell off and smashed in front of my face. The back of my neck tingled for the final blow.

No blow came, and Peter’s footsteps went past me towards the doorway in the second that I lay breathless. I raised my head and looked towards the door. My eyes were dimmed and stinging with salt sweat, but between his moving legs I thought I saw a woman in the dark hall outside the open door. She was shaking her head from side to side, so violently that her loose hair fell across her face.

Before Peter closed the door behind him, I saw enough to make me think that Ruth Esch was standing there waiting for him. Then I thought that there were shadows in the hall, that Ruth had been in my mind for hours, that my imagination was wild with fear and anger, and I half-doubted what I had seen.

I was suddenly conscious of my position, crouched on my hands and knees like a beaten dog, and I stood up. I picked up the broken pieces of my glasses and wrapped them in a handkerchief and put them in my pocket. The knob of the door turned quietly and I picked up the sabre I had dropped and stood facing the door as it opened.

Dr. Schneider was standing in the doorway wearing a topcoat and holding his Homburg in his hand. He showed his false teeth in a smile under his moustache and said, “I hope you enjoyed your exercise, Dr. Branch. I can see that you are a true swordsman. You hate to relinquish a sabre even for a lady’s sake. But I’m afraid we must go now if we are to meet the train with any time to spare.”

“Isn’t Ruth here now?” I blurted.

“Why, no, it’s only twenty to nine. I thought you understood that we were to go together and meet her.”