The Fox in the Attic (19 page)

(Willi was edging away from both, probably; for with a “Roman” nose like Willi's for sole birth-certificate it was surely only prudent for a young Trooper to tread a bit delicately.)

But this evening there was to be not much time for prudent little maneuvers like these. For while Lothar was still dreaming about Germania and Willi was still debating in his mind who to stand next to at roll-call it was announced that the troop had special orders tonight. They were to cross the western sector of the city in twos and threes by different routes and to rendezvous at the Drei Katzen—an obscure but spacious beerhouse just off the Nymphenburger Strasse past the Löwenbräu. There the “Hundred” they were enrolled in would mobilize, with certain other “Hundreds,” and be told what to do.

Nothing more was said to them now than just that: no word about Kahr's meeting at the Bürgerbräu beyond the river, on which all day all surmise had centered: yet there was something electric in the air, and everyone knew that at last this was no routine assignment. At once all prudent little maneuvers were forgotten quite, for at once all the jealousies and suspicions which inspired them had vanished like smoke. You could almost hear the click as those “hoops of steel” settled into place, binding all these ardent young men together into one body like well-coopered barrel-staves.

As dark fell they had set out: in twos and threes, as ordered. Larger numbers might attract attention: to go alone would be imprudent, for it was at any time none too safe after dark in certain streets near here for these known Galahads alone—even partly armed, as they were tonight. The Reds had been driven underground—the treacherous beasts ...

Thus the uncouth but sterling Fritz lingered in the doorway for his friend Lothar (who had a quick hand and a cool head in a scrimmage, as Fritz well remembered), and the two linked arms; whereon they both of them felt almost frightened at the intensity of the comradeship each other's touch engendered.

Arm-in-arm like that they had moved off, keeping well to the middle of the roadway, well clear of doors and alleyways. Each had one hand on the bludgeon in his pocket, each with his weather eye searched the shadows his side. They were confident even without having to look round that the trusty Willi was following a pace or two behind and guarding their rear.

But there were no Reds on the streets this bitter evening: only other young men like themselves moving purposefully in twos and threes; and heavy covered lorries, which roared along the streets in increasing numbers and skidded round the icy corners with crashing gears.

Crossing the Stiglmaierplatz, however, our Lothar and Fritz and Willi had several reminders that (Reds apart) theirs was by no means the only “patriotic” private army in Munich those days. There were other—and potentially hostile—loving “German Brotherhoods.” The Löwenbräukeller they saw was full to the gills with men of the Reichskriegsflagge, with steins in their hands and their danders up, roaring their heads off ... well, these (as Willi, who had an insatiable curiosity about such things, pointed out to them) were Captain Roehm's own men now, since the show-down—and Roehm seemed to be a grand chap, it was he indeed who had put our own leaders on the map! So, on Willi's instructions the three young musketeers hailed Roehm's men in passing. But in that uneasy alliance under old Ludendorff's titular presidency called the “Kampfbund” these two were almost the only component parts which could fully trust each other. Those “Oberland” men outside the Arzbergerkeller—Weber's crowd ... ? Well (said Willi) these ... and perhaps Rossbach's henchmen too ... these might be trustworthy up to a point, but there were others—the “Vikings” for example—who were an altogether different kettle-of-fish. The “Vikings” resembled Captain Goering's gymnasium brotherhood only in their love for their country and hatred of its government and of public order: they were too Catholic and monarchist by half to stomach the blasphemies of a Ludendorff or a Rosenberg. These would be Kahr's men and Prince Rupprecht's if brass-rags were ever irrevocably parted with those two.

These “Vikings” were Commander Ehrhardt's chickens. Ehrhardt, of course, was already famous: a veteran of the guerrilla fighting that raged for two whole years after the 1918 “armistice” in the lost Baltic provinces, it had been he too who had led the Naval Division in the Kapp Putsch on Berlin. And Rossbach as well was famous: he also was one of those young veteran outlaws of the Baltic shambles who had gone to ground in Bavaria when cowardly Berlin disowned their private wars. Lone warrior-patriots of the lost lands in the East, such as prove lodestones to angry young men any time, anywhere! What a godsend, then, it had been to an unknown unglamorous little H.Q. bellhop with his own splinter-party to build when at last he had been able to counter the attractions of such heroes as these with the prestige of
his
young Captain Goering! For Hermann (the old African governor's handsome son) had been the ace of Richthofen's famous wartime “Flying Circus,” and now had all the panache on him of his
Pour le Merite
(Germany's V.C.).

By the time they had reached the Drei Katzen and reported, that too was filling up: older men, mostly—ex-soldiers; but all their
own
men however, except for a small and rather secluded, unwanted knot of “Vikings” (who seemed all eyes and ears).

Two hours later they were still at the Drei Katzen, waiting—with steins in
their
hands now and their danders up, roaring their heads off—when a car drew up outside with a squeal of brakes. Hermann Esser was in it (Esser the young journalist and scandal-buster). He looked wildeyed and feverish tonight. They crowded round him: Esser had come straight from the Bürgerbräu and he gave them the news: thirty-five minutes ago precisely the balloon had gone up! They cheered till the building shook. Then Esser gave them their orders: to march in parade order right through the heart of the city to the Bürgerbräu. It was “action” at last!

As Lothar's company with banners flying and drums beating swung down the Brienner Strasse by lamplight—with
guns
in their hands now and their danders up, roaring their heads off—people poured everywhere out of the sidestreets: men women and children marched with them and behind them and in front of them and all round them, cheering wildly for the “Revolution”—though just whose revolution most of them scarcely knew. Was this the Catholics' monarchist and separatist one, or ... whatever the Kampfbund themselves were after?—Cross or Hakenkreuz?—Either meant mud-in-the-eye for Berlin: thus both were almost equally attractive to Bavarians after fifty years of Prussia calling the tune.

So they traversed the Königsplatz in style, with one proud little boy just in front of the marching column doing handsprings, handsprings—handsprings all the way.

It was a cold night all night in Munich—that exciting night of Thursday November the eighth—but still no snow there; and bitter and windy was the “Kahr-Freitag” morning which followed.

At Lorienburg, when Augustine had gone to bed last night the room had been too hot; but by morning his bedclothes had slipped off, the stove was dead and the room down to freezing-point. There was ice in the jug on his wash-stand.

Here at Lorienburg moreover there had been quite a heavy fall of snow in the night. This morning the sky was still as slaty-gray as before, but with all that whiteness outside indoors it was appreciably lighter than yesterday. As Augustine on his way to breakfast entered the hall he found the few touches of color in it picked out by the snowlight: the blue tablecloth on the little round table, a green chair, the gold scroll-work on the big black settle. The ancestral paintings looked brighter than yesterday, and the pale cafe-au-lait stone floor-tiles glistened as if they were wet.

Then came a brief flicker of shadow over everything as a cloud of snow slipped silently off the steep roof: not in one heavy lump as when it melts, but more like a slowly falling cloud of smoke. Augustine turned, and through the window saw it drifting away like smoke on the almost imperceptible breeze. Someone (he noticed) had left a bottle of beer on the sill overnight: it had frozen solid and then burst, so that the beer still stood there—an erect bottleshape of cloudy amber ice among the shattered glass!

As he turned again from the window Augustine caught sight of two little girls. They were half hidden in the embrasure of a door; but he recognized them as the tobogganers by the bumps on their foreheads, glistening like the floor-tiles. He smiled at them; but they didn't smile back: they were too intently watching something, with shocked expressions.

It was only by following their eyes that he caught sight of the twins also, Rudi and Heinz. Those perilous trick-cyclists were crouched now under a tall Gothic bread-chest, withdrawn as far as possible from sight; but they couldn't quite hide that they were wearing heavy brass-studded dog-collars and were chained by them to the legs of the chest with long dog-chains. Ashamed—not at all of yesterday's crime but acutely of today's punishment—they glared out at Augustine with unruly and unfriendly eyes.

With her back to him, and squatting on her heels so that the long fair tail of hair hanging down her back was actually touching the ground, that older sister who had so interested him last night was dipping hunks of bread in a bowl of coffee and feeding them. Intent on scowling at Augustine one of the boys got a crumb in his windpipe and choked, coffee and other liquids pouring from nose and eyes. In a paroxysm of embarrassment Augustine tiptoed past with averted head, hoping against hope the girl would not look round and see him.

At breakfast there was an atmosphere of suppressed excitement mounting. It bewildered Augustine, who knew nothing of the night's mysteries.

At six that morning Otto had got up and again tried to telephone to Munich; but still “no lines.” He had then rung the railway-junction at Kammstadt and learned that during the night no trains had arrived from Munich and no news either. What could have happened? Services elsewhere, they told him, were normal. This narrowed the field somewhat; for if Berlin had marched on defiant Munich—or Munich on Berlin, for that matter ... or if Kahr and Lossow had loosed the
Freikorps
mobilized on the Thuringian border against Bavaria's leftist neighbors ...

No: this must be something confined—for the moment—to Munich itself. And since Kahr was in control in Munich, surely something Kahr himself had started: that could only be one thing, the thing everybody expected Kahr to start.

Walther thought so too, when he heard the meager facts: it
could
only mean ... and now Walther was finding the suspense unbearable, waiting for the expected news in front of his untouched coffee dumb.

Franz also looked pre-occupied; but withdrawn, as if his anxiety was his own and something neither his father nor even his uncle shared (nor he theirs). Yet it was Franz alone who remembered to ask Augustine politely how he had slept (had the little fox woke him? No?), and to pay him the other small attentions of a host. Franz was heavy-eyed, as if he himself had not slept at all, his expression more contemptuous than ever.

“Heavens!” thought the simpleton Augustine, looking from face to face: “What hangovers they've all got!”

It was at that moment Mitzi entered the breakfast room, followed by her two little sisters. She too seemed curiously inattentive; for she would have collided with a displaced chair if Franz, polite as ever, had not whisked it out of her way.

“Dreaming again!” thought Augustine.

At breakfast Augustine found himself noticing how strangely Mitzi spread her fingers—like antennae, like feelers—when stretching out her hand for something small such as a spoon, or a roll off the dish. Sometimes it would be the little finger which touched it first, whereon the others would instantly follow. But even at twenty-three he was still at an age when, as in childhood, there are things which can be deemed too
bad
to be true. Thus this bad truth was bound to be slow in forcing an entry into so young and happy a head as his—the truth that already, at seventeen, those big gray eyes of Mitzi's were almost completely blind.

“Listen!” said Otto.

Churchbells
—no doubt of it! Faint but wild, the churchbells in the village below had begun ringing. Hard upon the sound came Walther's foreman forester, his dark hair powdered with fine snow off the trees, panting and jubilant with the news he carried. It was the expected news of course (the first news always is). Solemnly Walther filled glasses and passed them round. “Gentlemen!” said Walther (everyone had already risen to his feet): “I give you—The King!”

“
Rupprecht und Bayern! Hoch!
” There was a tinkle of broken glass.

“What fun!” thought Augustine, and drained his glass to King Rupert with the rest and smashed it: “What nonsense—but what
fun
!”

Neither Augustine nor anyone else noticed that Franz smashed his glass with the drink in it untouched.

The first wave of rumors which spread nearly everywhere across the Bavarian countryside that Friday morning spoke, quite simply, of a Wittelsbach restoration. No one quite knew whence the news came or exactly what had happened: only that there had been “a great upheaval” last night in Munich and now Prince Rupprecht the Field-Marshal was to be king of Bavaria (his father, the ex-king Ludwig III with his Prussian bullet in him, had died two years ago).

No one was surprised. Kahr was back at the helm these days with special powers, and everyone knew Kahr was an open royalist who was maneuvering to declare the Bavarian monarchy restored the first ripe moment. Presumably his recent deliberate defiances of the federal authorities in Berlin were no more than moves in that separatist game. Lately moreover there had been no lack of know-alls to whisper, knowledgeably, that now it was only a matter of days. Last Sunday at the big Totengedenktag march-past in Munich it was Rupprecht who had taken the salute, not Kahr and not the Minister-president! Everyone had commented on that.