The Fox in the Attic (28 page)

Only one thing equaled this last—the utter loveliness of Mitzi's hair; and at the thought of that, this morning, in his warm body under the warm bedclothes his heart glowed warmer still.

Yet Augustine this morning—though he would not admit it—was really in two minds about Mitzi. His heart might be warmed by the generous fires of love but the pit of his stomach had its sinking moments, its moments of chill. He loved Mitzi and Mitzi only and would love Mitzi for ever—and even more so for her blindness! Yet, to be coupled till death did them part with a blind girl was a bit like ... like entering a three-legged race with a partner who has only one leg.

As a budding lover Augustine had developed some at least of the instincts of a grown man but he was still an egoist also, with still the instincts of any normally self-centered child: too much of an egoist, perhaps, to tolerate yet the full “we-ness” of true marriage. So he clutched unconsciously perhaps at Mitzi's blindness as something by which his separateness seemed permanently guaranteed. But the human personality like the plant has its “growing-point” with a foresight and wisdom all its own: a foresight insistent (in this case) that so infantile an egoism could not last for ever, that to seek to perpetuate it by a lame marriage must prove a disastrous thing. Hence, then, perhaps, these queer flutters of panic. He never for a moment consciously contemplated
not
marrying Mitzi yet something within him prompted a curious lack of impatience about going to her and actually Saying the Word—although he longed to say it.

With luck there would be an empty place next to Mitzi at breakfast. Thereafter (Augustine told himself) he would refuse to be parted from Mitzi all day: he would devote himself openly and unequivocally to her, claim the privilege of guiding her from room to room, of fetching and carrying for her ...

But when Augustine got to the breakfast-table he found no Mitzi. Cousin Adèle was preparing a tray: Mitzi would be breakfasting in her own room, and so after all the moment of final commitment was postponed! Augustine was desolated; and full of jokes.

Permission to breakfast in one's own bedroom was rare in the annals of Lorienburg: one always had to appear even if one ate nothing. So Mitzi was indeed grateful not to have to appear today, when such waves of black despair were rolling over her it would be impossible to keep her feelings from appearing in her face.

For blindness was not an affliction which would pass—like a pain, or like an illness which either gets better or kills you. She was blind now she was young: she would be blind middle-aged: she would still be blind when she was old—she would die blind. She was going to be blind all her earthly life: only beyond the grave would she again have eyes to see.

The length of life—oh, its interminable length! Almost she formulated the wish to be struck dead that minute; but something smote her inward lips as with an actual blow of the hand, preventing them from quite uttering any wish so wicked.

Why had God done this to her? What had she done to deserve it? When she felt it coming on, had she not prayed with every breath of the lungs of her soul? Why hadn't God answered her prayer, then? If He'd let her off this she'd have adored Him all her days and laid her whole life as a thank-offering on His altar, gone out to nurse lepers ...

Why
had God done this to her? Because she had sinned? But everyone sins. Granted she was more sinful than average, one of the most repellent of all His creatures; but on the other hand no sin can't be forgiven and she'd gone to confession regularly, received absolution. Had the priest's absolution then been somehow always unavailing? It must have been! For a just God would have had to count up against her
un
forgiven every sin mortal and venial she had sinned since babyhood to judge her worthy of
this
.

“
Most merciful Father
...” But the gates of His mercy were shut against Mitzi, it seemed. “Holy Mary, never was anyone who sought thy intercession left unaided ...” But Our Blessed Lady had withheld her intercession from Mitzi.

From Mitzi—the pariah of Heaven.

The meaningless chaos of sensation in the optic nerve still revolved without intermission.

Would she have never been born! Would that the day she was to be born could have been left out of the calendar, the darkness of the night preceding it joined mercifully without any intervening day to the darkness of the night that followed, rather than that Mitzi had ever come into being as the living human soul in whom
this
unending frenzied darkness should come into being! Why had life been given her, to be so miserable in, so bitter?

What had God put her into the world for at all, if having put her there He
couldn't
forgive her?

But forgiveness, she knew, is only for the truly penitent: without the sinner's contrition absolution is a mere form of words snatched from the priest's lips by the Powers of the Air, blown back like smoke.

Had Mitzi never truly repented, then, in her heart, of the sins her lips had confessed? Since He had not forgiven her, Reason answered “that must be so.”—Then again and again she had taken the Holy Sacrament impenitent, thus eating her own damnation!

At this sudden thought of damnation Mitzi sweated with the absolute of terror; for in that case this blindness was a mere earthly foretaste of the horror to come. In that case even the grave could be no “bed of hope” for a Mitzi; for its bottom would open under the weight of her sins to discharge her incontinently into the bottomless everlasting fires of Hell ...

Oh how
short
is that brief postponement of punishment we call earthly life, and how awful the everlasting wrath of God!

Mitzi's mind was young and single, her faith unquestioning and her imaginative powers vivid. Her agony of mind was now passing beyond what tender human nerves can bear: like the point at which some poor soul trapped in the top of a blazing building at last makes the necessary leap from the sixth-floor window into the smoke.

When breakfast in the dining-room was over Augustine found himself at a loose end, for Walther shepherded Adèle and Otto and Franz into the drawing-room and shut the door. Evidently some sort of family council was going into session (under the fatherly eye of Good King Ludwig III). Nervous, and with time to kill till Mitzi appeared, Augustine's first thought was to spend it making friends with the younger children at last. But that might not be easy: to begin with there was the difficulty of his “good” German, and moreover morning and evening they were all made to file round the table ceremoniously to kiss his hand which put one on altogether the wrong footing. Better wait till later, perhaps (he had never before funked children, but he'd never before struck quite such a formidable quartette). Moreover he had just remembered that this was Saturday: Augustine had spent three whole nights in Germany without sending Mary so much as a picture-postcard yet.

Augustine had already had one letter from Mary, here. “Polly has a cough ...” (Mary had said nothing about Nellie and the dead child's father coming to the lonely neo-Gothic “Hermitage” to live: she thought that wound better given a little time to heal.)

But when Augustine went to his room and began writing he found it difficult to keep bent on his travelogue a mind that kept turning to Mitzi. However, he didn't want to tell Mary about Mitzi quite yet: not till he had spoken to the waiting Mitzi and even her father and it was all settled. It never occurred to him Mary could think thirty-six hours from first meeting rather
soon
to have made up their minds: he was sincerely afraid if he couldn't tell her something definite she would think them hopeless ditherers to have havered so long.

Thus Augustine's letter-writing limped, and presently he laid down his pen and mooned round the room examining the pictures all over again. There was a distant group of figures in one of them, on the banks of a river, which had intrigued him before; for they were so minute he couldn't make out what they were at. Were they bathing—or ducking a witch?

If only he'd been standing on yon tufted abbey tower with that telescope he'd had as a boy turned on them! Vividly Augustine recalled the pleasure he used to get from studying just such distant groups, himself unseen. But then a new thought struck him: now—and without any telescope at all—he could study a blind Mitzi just like that! He could gaze right in her face at six inches range without giving her offense, just as long ago he used to study those ... those distant little girls in the garden! At the queer thought of it his heart jumped like a fish in his breast.

The recollection of his telescope made him turn automatically to the window, and look down from it into the great courtyard underneath. And there, to his astonishment, went Mitzi herself—quite alone, and blundering through the snow.

Mitzi (he saw) was purposefully feeling her way along the façade of the house: she had followed it right into the corner of the court where the snow had drifted: she was floundering almost waist-deep in snow. But then she turned at right-angles along the side-wall (evidently she hadn't dared risk a bee-line in the open): found the door she wanted: unlocked it, and vanished inside.

For at the moment when Mitzi had felt herself to be at the implacable very bottom of despair, beating her head against the bars of her imperfectly-remembered religious instruction like a bird in a trap, a voice as real as the hand which had smitten her inward lips had said: “Think, Mitzi—THINK!” and suddenly the answer had come to her. There was indeed one damnable sin she had never repented nor even confessed for she had never noticed till now she was sinning it: all her life she had allowed herself to feel afflicted because she could not see as other children saw: she had never once
thanked
God for what little sight she had.

Now she had lost it she realized what a treasure even that purblind sight had been. Finding her way about used to seem difficult—yet how easy it had then been in comparison with now! Moreover, how singular had been the beauty of that peculiar world once hers! Those soft-edged, looming shapes things had: the irised patterns of color changing from moment to moment as when a kaleidoscope is shaken, the flickering fringes of bright violet round where windows were and the gorgeous coronas that meant lighted lamps: the veined and marbled skies, the moving dappled pillars that were her friends and the standing ones that were the trees ...

She
, who had always hovered halfway to blindness—surely this should have been a perpetual reminder to her that sight is not intrinsic to humanity: that sight is a gift—which God gives, or God withholds. Yet all this she had enjoyed and never once thanked God for it.

It was at this instant of perfect contrition for her ingratitude to God, this realization of the worthlessness of all her petty repentances of sins that were so minuscule in comparison with this one, that her intolerable nervous tension snapped and Mitzi at last made her necessary “leap” into the stretched blanket.

Thereafter all fear of Hell—all
thought
of punishment even—was suddenly gone as completely as a finished thunder-storm is gone. What remained was a feeling of floating: of floating on God's love. It soaked her through like sunshine. She felt God incomparably nearer than ever before: God held her whole being nestling in the hollow of His infinite hand ... or no, God wasn't even that much outside her—He was running in her veins.
He
was the tongue speaking in her mind's ear and He was the mental ear which listened, He was the very mind in her which did her thinking. There was now no obstacle at all between herself and God: her will and His were one. Once, Mitzi had made her sight into a barrier between herself and God: so God had touched her eyes with His healing finger and now that barrier was gone ... and how she loved and adored Him for it!

Mitzi believed herself already quite lost in God. But was she, wholly? Surely there was still one tiny part of this neophyte which even now watched the transaction as it were from outside; and, curiously, that outsider was the “I” at the transaction's very heart. That “I” in her which couldn't help feeling just a little bit cocky that
she
had been chosen for an act of such exceptional grace; for after all, it isn't everybody God thinks worth striking blind to bring her to Him.

But it is difficult to express this cavil at all without exaggerating it. For the moment at least the voice of this outside watcher inside Mitzi was in comparison as faint as the piping of a gnat dancing in the spray of a roaring waterfall: the Mitzi-of-the-Adoration was scarcely aware of it, and let it pass; and presently her desire for prayer and praise—to thank God for her new blindness as the source of this ecstasy she now enjoyed, of this foretaste within Time of the Eternal Life—had become so insistent her ordinary weekday room could no longer contain it, and she felt her way to the door.

No one saw Mitzi cross the hall; for that family council (which had met to decide what was to be done with Mitzi) was still in session: a conference at which the chairman—the late King Ludwig—watched, but said never a word. Thus no one saw, no one heard Mitzi creeping down the stairs. Even Mitzi herself never noticed when she tripped and nearly went headlong, so intent was her whole thought on reaching her goal.

It was not till she was right out in the courtyard, fumbling her way through the snow to find the door which led through the vestry into the castle chapel, that Augustine alone at last caught sight of Mitzi from his window—and darted down after her with thumping heart.

Augustine was an adept wildfowler and his shoes had thick crêpe-rubber soles. The door Mitzi had entered still stood open and he slipped inside, careful to make no sound.

He found himself in a room lined from floor to ceiling with noble old cupboards and presses in painted pine—like the changing-room of an 18th-century football club, he thought (if the 18th Century had had football clubs), but this changing-room had a faint ecclesiastical smell and he observed a holy oleograph of exceptional crudity (a rather disgusting surgical item, a bleeding heart) on the only bare patch of wall. However there was no Mitzi here; so he continued equally stealthily through a further open door and found himself in what he at once knew must be the chapel: and there he stood aghast.