The Fox in the Attic (21 page)

Already by mid-morning more detailed rumors about what had happened last night in Munich were reaching Lorienburg. But once these stories began to contain even a scrap of truth they began to sound quite incredible. For now the name of General Ludendorff came into them—and what part had he in Rupprecht?

The legendary Ludendorff! For the last half of the late war he had been supreme arbiter of a German realm that stretched from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf. On the collapse in 1918 prudently he had withdrawn to Sweden for a while (leaving it to Hindenburg to get the defeated armies home unaided): but he had reappeared lately, and had immured himself in a villa near Munich at Ludwigshöhe, where he practiced ancient pagan rites (it used to be rumored) and kept pretty queer company: succoring conspirators, baiting the Jesuits from time to time, and abusing the Bavaria he lived in. Yet now Rumor was saying that today the great
Feldherr
had come out of his retirement like an Achilles from his tent: that he had thrown in his lot with Rupprecht: that the Bavarian restoration had grown to a “National” revolution.

Rupprecht (said Rumor) was to be not only Bavarian king but German Kaiser, and Ludendorff and Rupprecht were to march on Berlin shoulder to shoulder! Otto and Walther looked at each other completely disbelieving, for how could two such sworn enemies ever join forces? Was it conceivable for His Most Catholic Majesty to begin his reign by countenancing in any way the discredited Ludendorff—a professed anti-Christian, an unblushing Prussian, a parvenu moreover whose forbears were hardly any of them even noble? It was inconceivable that Rupprecht would accept an Imperial crown at Ludendorff's hands. Yet Ludendorff's name persisted, even when the stories grew more circumstantial. Other lesser names too began to be added: Colonel Kriebel (Ludendorff's Kampfbund leader) and Major Roehm of von Epp's staff, and even some egregious pocket-demagogue of Roehm's who (it appeared) also tagged in somehow with the Kampfbund: all these were in some way involved. There seemed no doubt that Ludendorff was indeed playing a big part: rather, it was the part played in all this by Rupprecht which seemed as time went on to grow more and yet more nebulous. Indeed, was Rupprecht even in Munich? And where was the Cardinal?

At last someone declared that since last Sunday's “Unknown Soldier” parade Prince Rupprecht had positively never left his castle in Berchtesgaden. Had he been made even King of Bavaria at all, then? Once that was doubted, someone else was positive that the restoration wasn't even scheduled to be triggered for three whole days yet.

These counter-rumors too flew fast. Down in the village, whoever it was had been pealing the bells got tired of it and stopped. Up in the castle, Walther put what was left of his plum-brandy back in the cupboard and locked it. There seemed to be reasonable doubt whether anything had happened, or even was going to happen. At least, anything fit to celebrate: Walther had no desire at all to celebrate
Ludendorff
's pranks. He'd save his liquor for Monday ... if Rupprecht really was to be made king on Monday (the “emperor” idea he had dismissed wholly from the start).

All this passed quite unheeded by Augustine: his mind was too full of Mitzi. For Augustine had fallen in love, of course. As a well-made kid glove will be so exactly filled with hand that one can't even insert a bus-ticket between them, so the membrane of Augustine's mind was now exactly shaped and stretched to hold Mitzi's peerless image and nothing more: it felt stretched to bursting by it and couldn't conceivably find a hair's-breadth room for anything else.

Augustine navigated now whenever he crossed a room. I mean, like the yachtsman working along the coast who takes some point on his beam to steer by instead of looking straight ahead—some bold headland, or rock-girt lighthouse—and fills his mind with that cynosure: keeps taking new bearings on it, and reckoning his changing distance from it. This was very much the way Augustine now shaped his course across any room that had Mitzi in it. Even when his back was turned to her the very skin under his clothes seemed aware of the direction Mitzi lay: just as the body through its clothes can feel the direction of the sun's rays falling on it.

Augustine was now twenty-three: but had he ever been in love like this before? Certainly not ... at least, not since his kindergarten days.

Presumably the whole party had luncheon presently, but Augustine was too deeply besotted to be conscious of such things any more. Afterwards however came something that he had to take cognizance of: Mitzi vanished, and reappeared dressed all in furs. Franz too appeared, looking handsome and mediaeval in a long sleeveless belted sheepskin jerkin (he liked his arms free for driving, he said). Then Walther insisted on lending Augustine his own fur coat, a magnificent sable of dashing but antique cut—and much too large for Augustine, which caused great hilarity. Finally Adèle produced a sealskin cap for him, and as she fitted it to his head with her own hands her face suddenly went young again: fleetingly it was almost as if Mitzi herself peeped out of it.

Apparently it had been arranged a long time ahead that this afternoon Augustine was to be shown to some neighbors. These were the Steuckels, who lived very comfortably in a large villa at Röttningen ten miles away. Originally it had been planned for the whole Lorienburg family to descend on Röttningen in force, but in view of the dubious political situation surely Dr. Steuckel would understand ...

—Anyway, now it was to be just the three young people alone.

The Steuckels (Augustine was informed) were not nobility; but they were distinguished intellectuals (a class, Walther explained carefully, which
he
considered deserving of every respect). Dr. Steuckel owned an old-established Munich publishing firm of high repute, which—like the even more famous Hanfstaengl outfit—specialised in Fine Art; and he controlled an exhibition-gallery and picture-business as well (pounds and dollars!) in a very good position on the Promenadestrasse. That was
Ulrich
Steuckel of Röttningen, of course—“Dr. Ulrich”: his brother Dr. Reinhold (the eminent Munich jurist) had once been like Walther himself a Centrist member of the Landtag but now (also like Walther) by his own wish kept out of party politics. He still knew everybody, though.

Dr. Reinhold was particularly able ... here Walther digressed to describe one of the previous season's meetings of “Gäa” (a serious and distinguished circle whose proceedings began with an authoritative lecture on some worth-while subject and continued with brilliant informal discussions over veal sausage and free beer). Walther himself had been present on that occasion but had hardly dared to speak, whereas Reinhold Steuckel had covered himself with glory by totally confounding the lecturer over some technicality of monetary theory—the lecturer being no less a person than Dr. Schacht himself, the great Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. “People are saying,” Walther now digressed, “that Schacht will shortly be called on to direct the financial affairs of the nation ...”

But at that point Mitzi started off down the stairs, whereon Augustine (to whom in any case the name of Schacht meant nothing) instantly closed his ears against Walther and followed her hot-foot.

When they reached the courtyard Augustine realized the reason for all these furs and this wrapping-up. They were to travel perched high on a light one-horse sleigh, sitting abreast there the three of them as open to the weather as three birds on a branch.

Augustine's heart leapt; but Franz chose to sit in the middle between them, alas, since he was driving.

As soon as the little monkey-faced man let go of the horse's head and the sleigh moved off—even while still at a walk—Augustine was assailed by a curious giddy, swimming feeling; for the sleigh began slipping about, like a car in an uncontrolled skid. Instinctively Augustine's motoring foot felt gingerly for a brake, his motoring hands clutched for a steering wheel. The sleigh was yawing about behind the horse like a raft on tow. But horse-sleighs, Augustine soon found, don't mind yawing and skidding: they are not intended to behave like staid vehicles on wheels: they don't even need to stick to the road. As soon as they were free of the perils of the causeway Franz left the road altogether. He turned aside into the fields at a canter, his sleigh sliding and pitching on its squeaking runners in the rushing clear cold air, taking his own beeline across this open unfenced country like a hunt.

Once Augustine was able to persuade his muscles to relax, and to acquiesce in this helpless-feeling motion as a baby's would do, he found his mind also relaxing (in sympathy) into a state that was almost infantile. He felt an overwhelming desire to sing: not any proper song with a regular tune, but just to warble aloud in Mitzi's honor much as a bird sings when it is in love—much as Polly had “sung” that day they had driven down to Mellton. Moreover, when he had slammed his ears tight shut in Walther's face just now Walther's last meaningless syllables had got caught inside: “
Schacht! Schacht! Doktor ... Hjalmar ... Schacht
,” Augustine began to carol. Then he stopped, to comment in his ordinary speaking voice: “‘Hjalmar'! What an in
eff
ably ridiculous name! I bet he parts his hair in the middle—eh, Franz?”

But Franz paid no attention: his mind was all elsewhere, was in the past ... von Epp's crusade of four years ago to turn the Reds out of Munich ...

Papa last night had wanted to make a great fuss over coupling Franz's name with it all as if it wasn't a matter of course that Franz had volunteered! Hadn't he been already a trained cadet by then, and turned sixteen?—No younger than his friend Wolff; and by then the dedicated Wolff had already been away fighting in the Latvian marshes for the past six months. There had been plenty of others from Franz's cadet-school too with von Epp. Even Wolff's little brother Lothar—ex-Governor Scheidemann's other boy—had wanted to join, and they'd have taken the lad if Lothar hadn't looked so obviously only a child ... Lothar's voice hadn't broken even.

Why then had Franz minded it so last night when Papa blurted ... after all, it was not true any more to say that ... that whatever-it-was had happened to “him”: it had happened to a boy: the very sixteen-year-old boy as it chanced that
he
used to be—but he wasn't that boy now.

Toller ... last night those two had both spoken Toller's name (the Reds' young commander); and that had touched something on the quick.

There had been that day when the Reds counter-attacked unexpectedly and for a few hours Franz had found himself Toller's prisoner ... The loathsome taste of imminent death bitter on his lips whenever he licked them (and he had kept on licking them as he stood there with tied hands expecting it): was that the sensitive spot?

If not,
what else?

After their Spring campaign—the gun-booms and the bomb-bangs, the excitement and the fright—May Day 1919 had been the final day of triumph for the White forces, the day of victory and glory. There had been a cock-a-hoop triumphal march into Munich under arms, down the broad but battered and littered Ludwigstrasse, across the Odeonsplatz—goose-stepping between the Residenz and the stately Feldherrnhalle and down the narrow canyon of the Residenzstrasse, past the Max-Josefs Platz to the gothickated Marienplatz beyond. There had been a Te Deum and an open-air Mass: the Red Flag has been hauled down and the “dear white-and-blue flag” of old Bavaria had been hoisted over the city again.

That surely was the end: after May Day, volunteers such as the schoolboy Franz had hoped to go straight home. But there had been work still to do, it seemed: Munich had not only to be freed it had to be cleansed ...

That “cleansing”... suddenly Franz's hands on the reins trembled and the galloping horse threw up its head and snorted: for suddenly twenty-year-old Franz was sixteen and living that boyhood
whatever-it-was
over again.

The triumphal May Day was over: Munich entirely in “white hands” but seething still ...

Mechanically Franz's hands still guided the sleigh with his sister and Augustine in it, but he was scarcely conscious of it for in his reverie he was transported backward in time to an enormous hostile Munich tenement-building on the far side of the river Isar right beyond the Bürgerbräukeller: it was the gray small hours of the morning, and Franz was quite alone there, and lost.

This young cadet had never been in such a place as this before: he had scarcely in his life before even seen the urban poor. But now he was left alone here, alone in this dark would-be-clean but old and rotting and hence stinking wet warren of endless decaying dark corridors and broken stairs and stuffed-up windows: surrounded in the darkness by innumerable woken waspish voices repeating “
Toller!
” in different tones—and rude things about him (little Franz) and fierce blood-curdling threats.

Franz had been sent here with a patrol which was searching for Toller; for this was the sort of place Toller might be expected to take refuge in. Most of the other Red leaders had been caught and shot by now or clubbed to death; but Toller had hidden himself, the dirty Jew! The patrol had brought Franz along because he alone had ever seen Toller face-to-face.

That of course was the day Franz had been Toller's prisoner: the day the Reds had surprise-attacked in front and then armed women from the local munitions-works had suddenly taken the Whites in the rear as well, and while most of the Whites had managed to escape to Pfaffenhofen Franz had stuck loyally close to his commandant, until ...
Hey, presto!
The canny White commandant himself had escaped from the little town solo on a railway-engine and Franz and the few who had remained with him were taken.

At last they had been brought before the bloodthirsty Toller: a slim, small-bodied young student-ogre with big brown dramatic eyes and wavy black hair. They thought that now they would surely be shot. But instead Toller had said something sentimental and a huge navvy had untied the blond, childlike Franz and given him his own hunk of sausage: whereon Franz had burst into tears under Toller's very eyes and Toller had turned all his prisoners scot-free loose—the dirty Jew!