The Fox in the Attic (29 page)

For the little family chapel at Lorienburg was a baroque confection of exceptional splendor. Augustine had been reared in an Anglo-Gothic reverential gloom; but this was all light and color and swelling curves. There was extravagantly molded plaster and painted trompe-l'œil, peeping angels, babies submerged in silver soap-suds and gilded glittering rays ... Augustine had
heard
of Baroque—as the very last word in decadence and bad taste; but anything so outrageous as this was incredible in a secular ... and this was a
sacred
place! Even the professing atheist could not but be shocked.

Yet Augustine soon realized he ought rather to be reassured. Hitherto he had shirked wondering whether Mitzi was really a believing Christian; but even if she thought she was, a religion which expressed itself in a place like this couldn't possibly be more than skin-deep—something easily sloughed, under his teaching. Yet could any teaching of his be needed? Surely the utter callousness of what had just happened to Mitzi must already have taught her more forcibly than any words could that the Universe has
no
heart. Mitzi
must
know now there was no one else in heaven or earth to love her—only him.

But in that case why had she come here? And where was Mitzi? For he hadn't found her, still.

Seeking her, Augustine peeped gingerly into the dark confessional; then he tiptoed to the sanctuary rails. But his eyes soon began to wander, for though the general effect of this awful place was so utterly wrong all the same there were details which plucked at his eyes so that he could not help but look. Even the billowing chaos of color and glitter above the altar once he examined it began to assume shape and meaning: patently it was intended for an enormous storm-cloud with the rays of God on top—and then suddenly Augustine noticed that from every cranny and interstice of that vasty tornado towering under the God-light from above there were miniature heads of child-angels peeping! In their rather sweet way these were quite lovely—and palpably all portraits: every child in the village that long-ago year must have been singly portrayed here: this was a whole child-generation of Dorf Lorienburg. One Sunday centuries ago all these fresh young faces up there must have been mirrored by the First-Communion young faces bowed over the altar-rail below, each carved face with its own living counterpart. But whereas in time those faces at the rail had grown old and disillusioned and coarse—and had all died, generations ago—these through the centuries had remained forever singing: immortal, and forever child.

All portraits, and all singing: as the eye traveled up the cloud from parted lips to parted lips it seemed inconceivable one couldn't
hear
that singing: the eye filled the laggard ear with visionary sweet sound ...

—in thin, angelic treble unison the ancient and holy chant was floating on the air; and with a sudden shiver up the spine Augustine realized he
could
hear the singing.

Augustine's scalp pricked; but a moment later he realized this must be only Mitzi—just Mitzi somewhere, and the echoes that she woke. Momentarily he felt furious with her, as Franz too had been furious when her yapping duped him in the night. What did the little fool think she was up to,
singing
—here, alone in this empty frightful chocolate God-box?

Where had she got to? He turned where he stood, and glared all down the nave.

Augustine found Mitzi in the end crouched before something in a far corner: something of which he had been half-conscious all the time, for though it was part-hidden by a gorgeous catafalque it still showed up incongruously in all this welter of color, being carved in dark unpainted wood: an object palpably much older than anything else here, as well as nobly different in style. It was a great 13th-century Deposition, more than lifesize; and half-hidden at its foot knelt Mitzi.

The thin but almost faultless voice had finished the ecstatic Latin chant, and fallen silent. Mitzi was silently praying. She was still, and hardly seemed to breathe; and the big black bow was coming off her fair plait of hair.

He longed to retie it for her ... oh how he loved her—and what poles apart they were!

Mitzi was praying for a miracle, no doubt—to that bit of wood! Or, was she merely the hurt child who clings leechlike but hopeless to her teddy bear? Was it, then ... was it possibly
better
at least for the time being to leave her with her religious illusions, if these were a comfort to her?

Perish the thought! It can never be better to believe a lie; and surely “God” was the biggest lie ever uttered by the human race!

How thankful Augustine now was he had yielded to his returning instinct for watching unseen—with the sense it conferred of almost supernatural guardianship over the loved one, on this mysterious solitary sortie of hers!

But Mitzi's hair
... Augustine's fingers of themselves were craving for the touch of it just as the parched tongue itself craves for water; and at once he could think of nothing else. Dropping on hands and knees he inched forward across the floor-matting without sound—himself now scarcely daring to breathe. Delicately he lifted his hand and at last as lightly as touching a butterfly's wing just touched the tip of her hair.

But instantly he withdrew his fingers for even that contact had so quickened his breathing that now she surely could not help but hear!

Indeed Augustine's heart was beating so wildly that only her rapt religious state could possibly have kept him undiscovered long. For although he realized it would be fatal to be discovered now he had presently begun acting as uninhibitedly as if he wore a cap of darkness indeed—fluttering noiselessly about Mitzi, as she moved from one devotional spot to another, in a kind of one-man unwitnessed ballet. And when at last Mitzi left the chapel, as she locked the vestry door Augustine glided to her side “as if” to take her arm and guide her—so close their two bodies were almost touching. They moved off like that, too—he hovering over her mothlike. His right arm even started its own passionate makebelieve, raised “as if” round her.

Augustine was trying to
will
Mitzi into the right path through the snow; and they must have looked unequivocally a pair of lovers as the two of them plunged together into snowdrifts and out again as if neither of them had eyes at all for the outside world; for what else could prompt so wildly erratic a course but the mutual blindness of love? But so intoxicated was Augustine now with his role of Zvengali-cum-Invisible-Man, he had quite forgotten that the only eyes to which he was really invisible were Mitzi's. Thus it was now Augustine's turn to be watched unwitting—from the dormer so mysteriously unboarded—by the truly Invisible Man (that existence in the attics nobody knew about except Franz).

Nor was that watching eye benevolent—or harmless.

Augustine had meant to speak to Mitzi as soon as they reached the hall—as if meeting her there. But when they got there the two little girls were framed in the dining-room doorway; so he hesitated, and Mitzi made a bee-line for her room.

He'd lost her! But no doubt she'd be out again soon, so he'd wait; and in the meanwhile Augustine was in such a gay, exalted and rather fantastical mood, so bubbling over with makebelieve, that children to work it off on seemed a godsend—if only he could get these ones to accept him at last!

Augustine advanced on the children all smiles, and mooing like a cow (so tiresome, this language difficulty!): then, changing his note, stood still and bleated like a lamb. The effect was not quite any one might have expected. There was the first shock of bewilderment of course (and embarrassment, for at eight and nearly ten the two little girls were surely too old for quite such nursery tactics); but what was odd was that then they ran towards him apparently in an access of extreme friendliness. They began chattering away to him nineteen-to-the-dozen; and so far as he could make out, they were saying there was something lovely they wanted to show him—to show
him
especially, their dear Uncle: something quite wonderful ... downstairs.

Taken aback, Augustine studied their faces: for this just wasn't true! They were laying on all the charm of two elderly experts; but behind all the smiles and cajoling there was fright in those four eyes like little gray stones.

Through the dining-room door, too, came the unmistakable clink of metal on metal. Augustine had to use sheer muscular strength to shake off their pulling and plucking, but then he peeped through. The air in the dining-room was thick with feathers. There was white down everywhere, swirling in the currents of hot air the stove set up. Feathers covered the floor; and in the midst of it all, of course, were the Twins. Heavily armored (indeed they could hardly move) in real shirts of chainmail reaching their ankles and even trailing along the floor, and with real swords, they were acting out some legend of their race. It was evidently a fight in a snowstorm; for they had slashed open a big down cushion and had hung it from the great central chandelier—and here an occasional whack from a sword sent still more down and feathers eddying on the air. Already their well-greased armor was sicklied o'er with feathers.

But at that very moment Augustine heard the distant drawing-room door open and voices down the hall. The Council was at last adjourning: from the far end of the hall Walther was advancing, and behind him Adèle, Franz and Otto.

With an urgent whispered “Achtung!” Augustine turned to face them. What was to be done? The two failed sentinels still stood at their post but their crestfallen faces had gone as expressionless as Christmas annuals: they were beyond even trying any more. So it was Augustine himself who babbling of forestry or something somehow contrived to head Walther and the rest of them off, and lead them harmlessly elsewhere.

Thereafter Augustine returned to his own waiting-post in the hall: he lingered there till it was time to eat, but even then Mitzi still didn't reappear.

Luncheon was always rather a movable feast at Lorienburg, but that Saturday it was quite exceptionally late. In the meantime some skilled sympathizer (Augustine suspected Lies) had been in the dining-room and made a wonderful attempt at clearing up the mess there; but when the meal was at last served there were still feathers here and there, as Walther—evidently wholly bewildered how they had got there—rather pettishly kept pointing out.

The children ate their food without seeming to hear him, but Adèle was profuse in her apologies to her guest: “It's that little fox,” she explained—“he must have got in here and disembowelled a cushion and played at chicken-coops with it ...

“But alas!” said Adèle. “As Walther says, you can't punish
foxes
—they don't understand!”

With her serious watery-blue eyes she fixed Augustine's—and winked.

So Lorienburg went about its normal business that Saturday. Mitzi kept to her room while Augustine roamed restlessly looking for her the whole afternoon: no one mentioned yesterday's revolution and Hitler seemed already quite forgotten.

But in the meanwhile the discomforted Hitler—a proved failure now, a fugitive hurt and hopeless and with the Green Police on his trail—had finally gone to earth in Uffing. Uffing is a village on the edge of the Staffelsee, that lake of many islands at the foot of the towering Bavarian Alps where the broad Ammer valley leads up towards Garmisch. Hitler went there not because he saw there any hope of safety but because the hopeless hunted animal tends always to bury its head in some
familiar
hole to await the coup de grace. Some years past Putzi's American mother had acquired a farm near Uffing, and last summer Putzi and Helene themselves had bought a little house there too: Putzi and Helene, that young couple who alone perhaps in all Germany seemed to Hitler to be fond of him for his own sweet self.

“Putzi”—or Dr. Ernst Hanfstaengl, to give him his proper title—as a half-American had taken no part in the war. Before it broke out he had been a student at Harvard and later he had married a German-American girl in New York. Here in peacetime Germany, naturally this gifted and musical German-American German couple moved in circles more intelligent and civilized than any their park-bench protégé had previously known: yet they didn't seem to see Hitler at all like the nasty caricature Dr. Reinhold and his cronies elected to see. True, when they tried to introduce into those circles of the wealthier Munich intelligentzia this tiresome but vital, this incredibly naïf yet incredibly gifted and indeed sometimes entrancing performing pet of theirs, then things tended to happen which embarrassed and galled Hitler, so that Hitler was never really at ease there and retaliated with an assumed contempt. But on musical weekends here at Uffing with Putzi and Helene themselves (alone or with only the clammy gloomy young Rosenberg for a foil) he could always entirely uncurl. He could be then all soul and wit: and how they responded! Baby Egon in particular adored his “Funny Uncle Dolf”: for Hitler could always be marvelous with children (which seems to be a common corollary of an addiction to chastity, even so secret and compulsive and perverse a chastity as his).

The mother's pretty farm was ten minutes out in the country, beyond the sawmill and the river. But the young couple's was a neat and homely little house close to the maypole and the church: it was plumb in the middle of the village, though backing onto fields: squarish, and unlike its neighbors built of stone. Moreover with some vague premonition of trouble Putzi had surrounded his pocket-size property with a five-foot stone wall as if to turn it into a dwarves' castle; and Hitler had only the happiest memories of this friendly little fort.

Helene had been alone at this “villa” except for her two-year-old child and the maids when Hitler had himself secretly dumped there, arriving on foot, through the fields, after dark, late that Black Friday evening, muddy and hatless and his shoulder queerly drooping and with a man each side of him holding him on his feet. “Also, doch!” she greeted him: for Helene herself had been in Munich that very morning yet had heard nothing there of that disastrous march, and only after her return had heard (and till now, disbelieved) the village rumors.