The Clowns of God (26 page)

But for the rest I always do better if there’s no one holding my hand.”

“But Franz wants to marry you,” Lotte objected.

“He told me he’s asked you several times.”

“I know he does; but he wants a kaus frau someone to make him feel safe and well nourished and reassure him that he’s a genius. I don’t want that role and I don’t want him to get stuck in his dependence either. He has to learn that we’re partners as well as lovers.”

“And what will happen,” asked Johann with a grin, “if he doesn’t learn as fast as you’d like, little sister?”

“Then, big brother, I find someone else!”

Lotte and Mendelius exchanged the rueful looks of parents who find themselves left far behind in argument. Mendelius asked:

“And you, Johann? Have you given any thought to my proposal?”

“A lot of thought, father and I’m afraid the idea doesn’t work for me.”

“For any special reason?”

“One and one only. You’re offering to buy me out of a situation I have to handle for myself. I hate the idea of war. I see it as a vast, horrible futility. I don’t want to be conscripted for gun-fodder but I’ve never felt special enough to … well, to be exempted from the destiny of my own peer group.

I’ve got to stay with it, at least long enough to decide whether I belong there or in opposition. I’m not explaining this very well. I appreciate your care for me; but in this case, it goes further than I want or need.”

“I’m glad you can be honest with us, son.” Mendelius was hard put to conceal his emotion.

“We don’t want to run your life. The best gift we can give you is liberty and the conscience to use it. So let me ask all my family a question. Does anybody object if I buy the valley?”

“What would you use it for?” Johann stared at him in surprise.

“Your father has a dream of his own.” Lotte reached out to touch Mendelius’ hand.

“When he retires he’d like to found an academy for postgraduate studies a place where senior scholars can meet and share the learning of a lifetime. If he wants to try it then I support him.”

“I think it’s a wonderful idea.” Katrin was full of enthusiasm.

“I keep saying to Franz that everybody has to keep reaching out all the time. If you get too secure you go stale and fusty.”

“You’ve got my vote, father.” Johann looked at Mendelius with a new respect.

“If I can help to get the place started, count on me. And if things get too rough at the University, you can always opt for early retirement.”

“I’ll call the lawyers first thing in the morning. They should start negotiating with the Grafin: Next week I’ll go down and look at the property. I’d like you to come with me, Johann.”

“Of course.”

“What about you, Lotte? Would you like to come?”

“Later, Carl. This time you and Johann should go together. Katrin and I have our own things to do.”

“I’m really excited.” Mendelius expounded his plan.

“I’d like to talk to a good architect a special kind of man with an interest in the ambience of living.”

“We’re all being very calm and logical,” said Lotte abruptly.

“But I’ve got the terrible feeling life won’t turn out quite the way you expect.”

“Probably it won’t, darling; but we have to hope and act as if it will. In spite of Jean Marie’s prophecies I still believe we can influence the course of human events.”

“Enough and in time to prevent a war?”

There was a hint of hidden desperation in Lotte’s question. It was almost as if she expected her children to be snatched suddenly from the dinner table. Mendelius gave her a swift worried look and said, with more confidence than he felt:

“Enough and in time, yes. I’m even hopeful that the publication of our piece on Sunday will focus world attention on the urgency of new initiatives for peace.”

“But,” Johann objected, “half the world will never see what you’ve written, father.”

“All the leaders will,” Mendelius persisted, if only to shake Lotte out of her black mood.

“All the intelligence services will read and evaluate the material. Never underrate the diffusion of even the simplest news item. Now, why don’t we clear the table and get the washing-up done. They’re doing The Magic Flute on television. Your mother and I would like to watch it.”

Halfway through the performance the telephone rang.

Georg Rainer was on the line from Berlin.

“Carl? I think I’ve made sense of our amateur spies. It’s clear now that Monsignor Logue passed the word that I would be working on this story. I think the surveillance was organised just to establish that fact. Now the Vatican has decided to issue its own account of the abdication. There will be a formal statement running to about three thousand words in next Tuesday’s edition of Osservatore Romano. That means we’ll be out first, and there’ll be some red faces over the mistake in timing! I understand the text of the Vatican release will be made available in the secular press on Monday afternoon. I’ll call you if there’s anything in it that affects our position.”

“How do your editors feel about our piece, Georg?”

“Everyone’s excited about it. Interesting, though, there’s a lively betting market on the kind of reaction we’ll get from the public.”

“How are they phrasing the bet?”

“Who will come out best in the popularity stakes the Vatican or the one-time Pope? Listening to the office talk, I’m not sure any more. I’ll be back in Rome on Monday morning. I’ll call you from there. Love to Lotte.”

“And to Pia.”

“Oh, I almost forgot. We’ve decided to become engaged.

Or at least Pia did and I gave my reluctant consent.”

” Congratulations!”

“I’d rather be poor and free!”

“The hell you would! Thanks for calling, Georg.”

“Do you want me to place a bet for you in the papal sweepstake?”

“Ten marks on Gregory XVII. We have to support our own candidate!”

* A week later the verdict was in. The Rainer/Mendelius account of the abdication was received with lively interest by the public, and by the pundits with qualified respect. There was a reluctant agreement that it ‘clarified many issues left diplomatically vague in the Vatican account’. There was question whether the authors ‘may not have inflated a crisis in the religious bureaucracy to the dimension of a global tragedy’.

The London Times provided the most judicious summing up in a leader written by its Roman Catholic editor. . The authors, each within his own competence, have written an honest brief. Their history is carefully documented; their speculations are based on sound logic.

They have illuminated some of the dark byways of Vatican politics. If they have tended to exaggerate the importance of a papal abdication in twentieth-century history, it must be said in their defence that the ruined majesty of Rome can play tricks with the soberest imagination.

What they do not exaggerate, however, is the perennial power of a religious idea to rouse men’s passions and incite them to the most revolutionary action. It says much for the collective wisdom of the hinge-men of the Roman Catholic Church that they were prepared to act promptly and in unity against what they saw as a revival of the ancient Gnostic heresy. It says even more for the deep spirituality of Pope Gregory XVII that he chose to retire from office rather than divide the assembly of believers.

Professor Carl Mendelius is a sober scholar of world repute. His tribute to his patron and long-time friend reveals him as an ardent and loyal man with more than a touch of the poet. He is wise enough to admit that human polity cannot be directed by the visions of the mystics. He is humble enough to know that the visions may contain truths which we ignore at our peril.

It was the misfortune of Gregory XVII that he seemed to be writing prematurely the epitaph of mankind. It is his fortune that the memorial of his reign has been written with eloquence and with love.

Mendelius was too intelligent a man not to see the irony of the situation. With Georg Rainer’s help he had raised a monument to an old friend; but the monument was a gravestone, beneath which lay buried for ever the last vestiges of influence and power which Jean Marie might have exercised. No man could have served the new Pontiff and his policies better than Carl Mendelius. It was fitting that his labours should have made him a millionaire and given him a reputation far beyond the merits of his scholarship. But the most bitter irony of all was a note of thanks from Jean Marie in Monte Cassino.

I thank you both from the bottom of my heart for what you tried to do. No man could have had better advocates or more gallant friends. The truth has been told with understanding and compassion. Now the chapter can be closed and the work of the Church can proceed.

So, you must not talk as though all is lost. The yeast is working in the dough; the seed, scattered on the wind, will germinate in its own time. As for the money, I grudge you not a centime of it. I trust you will spend some of it happily on Lotte and the children.

Be calm, dear friend, and wait for the word and the sign.

Yours always in Christ Jesus, Jean Marie Lotte, reading the letter over his shoulder, rumpled his hair and said quietly:

“Leave it now, my love! You did your best and Jean knows it. The people in this house need you, too.”

“I need you also, dear.” He took her hands and drew her round to face him.

“I’ve meddled long enough in the big world. I’m a scholar not a gad-fly journalist. I’m glad we start lectures again tomorrow.”

“Have you got all your stuff together?”

“Most of it.” He held up a wad of typescript and laughed.

“That’s the-first subject for this term. Look at the title: “The Nature of Prophecy’.”

“Talking of prophecy,” said Lotte.

“I’ll give you one.

We’re going to have a great season of gossip in town when Katrin goes off to Paris with her Franz. How are we going to deal with it?”

“Tell the old girls to jump in the Neckar!” said Mendelius with a grin.

“Most of them gave up their own virginity in a punt under the willows!”

Every day during term time Carl Mendelius left his house at eight-thirty in the morning, walked down the Kirchgasse to the market, where he bought himself a boutonniere from the oldest character in the square: a raw-tongued grandmother from Bebenhausen. From there it was a short two blocks to the Illustrious College, which he entered always by the south-east gate under the Arms of Duke Christoph and his motto: “Nach Gottes Willen’ According to God’s Will.

Once inside he went straight to his study and spent half an hour checking over his notes, and the daily stack of memoranda from the administration office of the University.

At nine-thirty precisely he was on the rostrum in the aula with his notes stacked neatly on the lectern.

Before he left the house on this first Monday of term, Lotte reminded him of the police warning to vary his route and his procedures. Mendelius shrugged impatiently. He had three streets to choose from; and lectures always began at nine thirty There weren’t too many permutations to be made.

Anyway, at least on his first morning, he wanted to sport a flower in his buttonhole. Lotte kissed him and shoved him out of the house.

The ritual of arrival was accomplished without incident.

He spent ten minutes chatting in the quadrangle with the Rector of the College, then went up to his study, which, thanks to the ministrations of the housekeeper, was immaculately tidy and smelt of beeswax and furniture polish. His gown hung behind the door. His mail was stacked on the desk. The term schedules were penned on his message rack.

He felt a sudden sense of relief, almost of liberation. This was home country. He could walk it blindfold.

He unpacked his brief-case, checked the texts of his day’s lectures, then addressed himself to the mail. Most of it was routine material; but there was one rather bulky envelope with the President’s seal on it. The superscription was faintly ominous: “Private and Confidential Urgent Deliver by Messenger’.

Since the faculty meeting the President had been studiously silent on all matters of contention, and it was not at all impossible that he wanted to stage a set-piece battle with every order in writing. Mendelius hesitated to open the missive. The last thing he wanted was to be distracted before the first lecture of term. Finally, ashamed of his timidity, he slipped a paper-knife under the flap of the envelope.

When his students came running after the explosion, they found him lying on the floor with his hand blown off and his face a bloody mess.

The voice of one crying in the wilderness:

“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”

Isaiah Ch. XL, verse 3 His Holiness Pope Leo XIV settled his bulky body deeper in the chair, propped his gouty foot on the stool under his desk and surveyed his visitor like an old and ill-tempered eagle. He announced in his harsh Aemilian accent:

“Frankly, my friend, you are a great nuisance to me.”

Jean Marie Barette permitted himself a wintry smile and agreed.

“Unfortunately, Holiness, it is easier to be rid of redundant kings than supernumerary Popes.”

“I don’t like the idea of your visit to Tubingen. I like even less the idea of your cantering around the world like some fashionable Jesuit intellectual. We made a bargain over your abdication.”

“Correction,” said Jean Marie curtly.

“There was no bargain. I signed the instrument under duress. I put myself voluntarily under obedience to Abbot Andrew and he has told me I must in charity visit Carl Mendelius and his family. Mendelius is critically ill. He could die at any moment.”

“Yes, well!” His Holiness was too seasoned a bureaucrat to court a confrontation.

“I will not interfere with your Abbot’s decision; but I remind you that you have no canonical mission. You are expressly debarred from public preaching or teaching. Your faculties to ordain clergy are suspended but you are not of course prohibited from the celebration of Mass or the sacraments.”

“Why are you so afraid of me, Holiness?”

“Afraid? Nonsense!”

“Then why have you never offered to restore to me the functions of my bishopric and my priesthood?”