The Trespassers (44 page)

“Fix it with the Treasurer’s office,” he ordered, “to send these out direct, from now on.”

“Yes, Mr. Crown.”

He lit a cigarette and saw that his hand was shaking. Hate could do that to him. The way fear did to some men.

The moment she was awake, Vee knew the date of this dark February morning. Tuesday, the twenty-first. Six months from today.

When she got home from the store that night, the phrase changed. “Six months from tonight.” The little phrase droned and hummed through her mind.|

She was leaving the store on Friday. That would be good. She could not imagine yet how she would get through the long daylight hours without the specific tasks to which she could nail her thoughts. But she would learn to manage that, too. This overwork could not go on; it could not be good for her physically.

For the last few days, she had been rushing the final preparations for the spring “line” in every department; designing, conferring with the staff of buyers, talking with a dozen major manufacturers in each accessory division. She worked after hours every day with her assistant, shoveling a thousand directions and pointers into her mind, to make the transfer of duties go as smoothly as possible after she left.

Each evening when she at last took a taxi at the side door of Ralsey’s, she sank back against the seat and closed her eyes, too limp to light a cigarette. At home, she would lie down and tell herself that this time she would be able to take a nap. But sleep was-as impossible under the incessant drubbing of her thoughts as it was later at night.

This evening was the same. The best she could do was to rest. She would be alone until eleven, when Ann was coming up from a dinner she had to go to, Ann who managed to come over every other night, for all her busy life.

Dora tiptoed in with a tray.

“Just some good soup and some sliced chicken?” Dora coaxed. “Please try if you don’t feel hungry tonight.”

“Yes, Dora, I am hungry. It looks fine.”

“You say that, then you hardly touch—” She broke off, then she gathered her courage together. “Ever since you had that influenza, I been so worried. If you broke off with—you know, I can’t help knowing he don’t—”

Vee made a small gesture. Dora cut the sentence and left the room.

“You’re sweet to think about me, Dora,” Vee called after her. She ate as well as she could. She gave her attention to it, consciously trying to eat the little that was on the tray. It was simply out of the question to eat more than a few mouthfuls. A glass of milk, coffee, two or three bites of a sandwich at luncheon, some soup and crackers—beyond that, she simply could not manage food. She drank a second cup of coffee, and. then she went and put on her coat and hat.

She would take a longer walk tonight even though she was so tired. She might sleep better if she got more exercise. For three nights now she had refused to take the blue capsules, and she was glad to be done with them. There was humiliation in needing their help. She would get over this horror of sleeplessness soon.

She did not know how long she walked, or how far. It was a windless, starry night, almost mild, with that first easy feel of spring which sometimes comes to enchant the world in late February. The soft air on her face was reassuring.

Time was passing, and time healed, and someday the terrible knowledge that the Jas she had loved so passionately…

She kept on walking. Fatigue lay along her muscles and in her bones, but she kept on as long as she could.

She let herself into the apartment at about ten. The newspaper lay folded on the coffee table in the living room, and Dora had left a glass of milk and some cookies for her. She sank down into the sofa and drank the milk gratefully. Her eyes went to the headlines, shocked again at the hopeless news from Spain. Madrid would fall in a few days and the war would be over. The last-ditch fighting was useless, there was no hope.

The paper slid from her hands. She never had been so exhausted. Maybe she was coming down with grippe or flu—there was that all-over ache in her bones. She ought to go in and lie down until Ann came. To lie absolutely still and rest her legs and back would be comforting. But she did not move.

Her eyes fell on the coffee table. She could see it as it was on another evening, with a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket, a red rose wired to one handle, a gay red satin bow to the other. That was the evening he decided he would go to Dr. Gontlen. She had urged him to go, she had wanted him to go—to end his torment, to make him happy, to be happy herself.

“But I trusted you then, I trusted you—”

She clipped her mind off. She stood up and went into her bedroom. The brown-tweed portable caught her eye. It was absurd to go on cutting herself off from radio news any longer. There might be some late news about the war. Anything, rather than the thinking, the remembering. She turned suddenly to the radio, and clicked it on blindly.

A deep, resonant voice came out to her.

“…tonight in the streets of Madrid. It is a lost cause, it is a hopeless cause…”

The voice, this voice, this familiar sound in her ears. What was this? How—? Her hands flew up to her head—something was spinning—Jasper’s voice was filling her ears.

“…but every man of honor, every man of integrity, will understand
their
honor,
their
integrity…”

She heard her own voice yelling. There was the spinning somewhere, but her voice was yelling, “Honor—integrity—God, oh, God—honor and integrity.”

She was near it. She was near that voice. She was near his voice. She heard herself screaming and she felt herself stooping. She had the thing in her hands; it was heavy, but she raised it over her head. High, higher, with that voice she knew still coming out, into her house, into her bedroom, to talk of honor and integrity.

For a moment she held it high, then with one heaving, lurching effort of both her arms, she threw the monstrous thing across the room. She heard the smash, the tinkling of glass—the spinning was mixed up with it all and the falling, the sliding. And somewhere in the very pit of life the tearing, pushing pain.

Honor. Integrity. Say the words in Spanish to the 300,000 starving Spanish refugees massed now at the French border, to the 200,000 behind them who will press forward into France when the horror is complete and Madrid surrendered to the Fascists. Say it to the disarmed Spanish soldiers under guard at Argelès and Saint-Cyprien in democratic France, say it to the women and children in the concentration camps at Perpignan, in the camps at Clairville, Auch, Port-Vendres, and Marseille. They are treated like enemy prisoners by France; they have no regular shelter, no sanitary equipment, little medical help, and starvation rations.

Say it to them all—the newest half million to push wildly across the borders to a foreign land where no welcome waits. They are the Loyalists—they fought for freedom, they fought the Fascists for freedom.

Once they were Spain’s teachers—2063 men and women now in concentration camps were teachers. And they were Spain’s builders and masons—17,000 men now in concentration camps were builders and masons. And 10,272 of Spain’s mechanics are there now, and 45,918 peasants who worked Spain’s soil, and 2440 of Spain’s printers who made the newspapers and the brave placards and posters to arouse Spaniards to fight the Fascists.

And there are also Spain’s architects and engineers in the concentration camps of France, and her dentists, pharmacists, nurses, opticians. Her tailors and musicians are there, her bullfighters and surgeons and aviation mechanics are there, and her blacksmiths and millers and vintners…

Say the words to them. Honor. Integrity. They will know what you mean.
Their
honor,
their
integrity. They will not think of the parliamentarians who prattled of embargoes and neutrality acts while the deadly supplies came in from Hitler and Mussolini; they will not think of the “nonintervention” principles of Chamberlain and Bonnet and the isolationist blocs in the American Congress. They will think instead of their own brothers and fathers and sons who gave their lives on the rich Spanish earth to show other men everywhere how much one must finally give for freedom.

Speak to them in Spanish. In soft and liquid syllables try to explain the immigration laws which they soon may be meeting face to face, as so many others from other lands have already done before them.

Not all of them, of course, but those at least who know that prison or the death sentence waits them if they try to go “home. To those, explain the laws of the earth’s countries, to the officers and the political leaders, the most active speakers and fighters of Loyalist Spain, who know that many years must pass and much blood spill on other rich earth before the battle is won and the homeward march begun.

To France, staggering under the impact of this new half million, came quick help from mighty governments and their peoples and the committees of all civilized nations. Money was sent, and wheat and flour, medical supplies and clothing. Over a million dollars came forth in a few weeks from twenty-four countries on the old continents and the new.

But the open door? The gate swung wide?

Through all that spring, with all the efforts of individuals and committees, with a thousand wires pulled and a hundred thousand voices pleading “emergency,” the immigration laws grinned in the anxious face, laughed at the pleading tongue.

Great Britain opened her mighty doors to 310 of this newest half million. North Africa received 500. The U.S.S.R. about 450. Chile was more lenient—1000 found safety in her long, narrow miles. And Mexico was most generous of all—2125 Spaniards in the first half of 1939 found haven in Mexico.

The United States welcomed some of these brave fighters. The quota for Spain is 252 in any year. And in this year of grace, the United States of America permitted 250 of Spain’s men and women to set foot on her sympathetic soil.

Money, yes, dollars, pounds, gulden, francs—yes. Wheat and drugs and bandages—yes. But the simple gesture of welcome, the quickly opened port of entry? Impossible,
amigos,
it is the law.

The news from Spain, the Nazi march into Prague, the imperturbable mien of Zurich, and the silence from America, all fused a metallic core in Franz Vederle’s heart.

His interlude of self-imposed calm had vanished. Once again his nerves jumped with tension. Once again he wanted only to go to Zurich and shout out strident anger at their inaction and silence.

Europe was collapsing into the flaming crater of war. The occupying of Bohemia and Moravia last week screamed it to all the world; the imminent surrender of Madrid should echo and re-echo that dying scream of warning.

In these last days of March, he felt, no man still caught in the tumult of migration could fail to live in a specialized fear that war must surely come before he once again had a foothold on a permanent shore.

He tried every trick he knew to keep the children from guessing his desperate anxiety. But they sensed it as children always do. They talked again of Döbling, remembering small things that he had not heard them mention for months. Paul was moody, and when he spoke of his coming birthday, he said almost sullenly, “Boys of twelve have a kind of junior army in Italy and Germany, haven’t they?” Ilse was unexpectedly quarrelsome and fretful. One night, she made up a story about a little chicken lost in the woods, hungry and starving and unable to find her mother, and after that her childish tales and fantasies were often on the same theme. Their simple symbolism was clear even to Christa.

And Christa herself had entered a new phase, which on the surface seemed natural enough, innocent enough, but which dismayed him more than he would admit to her.

Christa liked Ascona, it was as simple as that. She said so with increasing frequency and pointedness. Casually at first, then more urgently, she conveyed her reluctance to leave. Spring was deepening the little town’s physical beauties, enriching the color of Lago Maggiore, the slopes above, with their fig trees, olives, pomegranates, and myrtle. All these enchanted her. And she had grown attached to the life they led, their friends, the walks for tea to the Hotel Monte Verita or the delightful Café Verbano—these gave her an inner contentment she had not known since they had left Austria a year before.

He could not begrudge her this momentary peace of heart, nor would he, if he were not so certain of the potential of new misery that lay within it.

One evening when rain-heavy clouds and winds swept in from the south, she looked at him and laughed.

“
Vento Mussolini
,” she said. It was the regional joke for bad weather. “I feel so much better than I thought possible when we left Döbling, Franz. It is not so bad to be an
émigrée,
after all.”

She never used the word “refugee.” Yet, though theirs had been technically a voluntary emigration, that was balanced by the fact that a voluntary return was impossible now—except to Dachau or Sachsenhausen or that death penalty so widely advertised by the Nazis for only part of the sins they had committed.

“It is lucky that we came here from Zurich,” he said warily. “You might have had more of those chest colds if we had stayed north all winter.”

“I don’t mean just physically better,” she said. “Here, it’s easy to imagine settling down…”

She fell into a reverie, and when she spoke again, she told him once more how much she enjoyed the people they knew, the musical evenings, the sense of being respected and liked again. Gently, he tried to make her understand how she was screening herself from reality.

And a few days later it would come up once more. It added to his fears about what still lay before them all.

Of that future he could now think only with a resentful stubbornness of hope. In spite of the cable from New York—that thrilling cable which had released him at last from his long secretiveness with Christa, and in spite of the brief letter from the Consulate, saying the same thing and bearing the cautious phrase, “if your cases are approved”—in spite of this definite advance, they still seemed a millennium away from the actual visas.