The Fox in the Attic (39 page)

“The eye is the light of the body ...” How Augustine longed now to look fresh with his under-used eyes at familiar pictures—yes, and also to turn this new “light of the body” onto the new art Jacinto had talked of so reverently—Matisse, Cézanne and the rest! If only the next stop was Paris ...

But it wasn't, of course: the next stop was Kammstadt, and by the time Augustine had changed trains and was chug-chugging up the valley again from village to village more and more was it Mitzi who filled all his thoughts, filled his very fingers and toes: less and less (for the moment) Significant Form. For he meant to go straight to Mitzi the moment he got back. He began rehearsing what he would say to her—even filling in her answers. His life's supreme moment was come. When they were married he must teach Mitzi about ... but ... but how on earth do you teach a blind person about Significant Form? Yet he felt even that wasn't impossible to the strength of his love.

When the train at last reached Lorienburg and Augustine jumped down on the line he found that the children had all come whooping to meet him. All four of them fought for his bag (too heavy for even all four of them), then dropped it and fought for his arms and his hands. They all talked at once and no one listened to the answers he gave without listening either. When they got to the village however they stopped for Augustine to buy them sweets and the atmosphere grew calmer: calm enough, at least, for him at last to ask after Mitzi.

“You'll just be in time to say goodbye to her: she's off to a convent.”

“For long? Are they teaching her Braille there or something?”

“What do you mean, ‘long'?”

“Mitzi's going to be a Religious.”

“She's taking her vows.”

“A Carmelite Sister: she's wanted to, ages.”

“They've accepted her now; and Papa says she can.”

* * * *

“Don't you understand? Mitzi's going to be a nun ...”

* * * *

“Is something the matter?”

“Come on, Stupid, what are you waiting for? You've got your change now so
come on
...”

How the rest of that day passed Augustine never knew: he was a walking zombie, with no mind for things to make any impression on.

When he woke next morning and remembered, his heart went at once so leaden in his breast that it pressed on his stomach and made him feel quite sick. When he opened his sticky eyes it was almost as if he had gone blind himself; the color had gone out of the world, and all solidity. His surroundings were so wraithlike they were more like memories of things seen long ago than fresh sense-impressions. Even solid Lies kneeling at his stove was faded and immaterial as a ghost.

Augustine's legs carried him to breakfast: he drank some coffee, but ate nothing.

Today Walther and Adèle (contrite perhaps at their own inhospitable feelings of a week or so ago) were full of plans for his amusement. The sleigh “smashed to match-wood” had nevertheless been repaired, and was at his disposal: “Would you like to see some churches?” asked Adèle, explaining that one of the finest baroque masterpieces of the Asam Brothers was only five miles away: or, in the opposite direction there was that little shrine with its quaint votive pictures of every kind of rustic disaster and disease ...

“Nonsense!” said Walther. “He'll have seen enough churches in Munich—haven't you, my boy?” It transpired that what Walther wanted was to send him off with the foreman to a distant part of the forest, there to decide whether the frost was yet hard enough for a bottomless bog to bear heavy cart-loads from the castle cesspool to where their nutrients were needed most. “It takes longer for that bog to freeze properly than the Danube itself!” Walther explained: warmth, engendered by the decaying vegetation in it no doubt: Augustine would find it all most interesting, and (he added as a tactful afterthought) he would value Augustine's advice. Franz too was agog to teach him skiing: it was a lovely day, and the snow was just right at last. As for the children—their parents' presence constrained them to silence, but they were miming to him imploringly through the open door.

Of the whole sort of them, only Adèle noticed at all Augustine's curious condition. She wondered what on earth could have happened to the young man in Munich: bad news, perhaps, from home? But Adèle had an unshakable belief in the powers of sightworthy objects to distract the mind and assuage the troubled heart, and only pressed her sight-seeing proposals all the more.

What Augustine wanted, of course, was simply to be alone; so he let the torrent of conflicting plans roll over him, made the best excuses he could to the adults, dodged the children and set off by himself for a long tramp in the snow.

The meaningless sky was without a cloud, and set in it was a sun that gave him neither light nor warmth.

At first his legs felt nerveless. He had hardly got outside when they wanted him to stop, and for a while he leaned over the broken palings of the old skittle-alley opposite the great Crucifix, contemplating with downcast eyes three dots sunk blackly just below the surface of the snow under the overhanging linden. Three tiny shrunken bats they were, that had frozen to death hanging in the twigs above and dropped there.

... That ever Mitzi should shrivel to a nun! In a mind's-eye flash he saw Mitzi lying white in the unending darkness of her night with tell-tale toothmarks on her throat ... Augustine wouldn't look up at it but turning with eyes still lowered shuddered at the very shadow on the snow of that (to him) grisly vampire-figure clamped too insecurely to its rood above him; and hurried off long-legged like someone at nightfall with twenty miles to go.

Augustine was already crossing the wide field beyond the road with the same idiot haste and now knee-deep in snow when the children from the castle spotted him far-off and making for the forest without them. How had he forgotten them? They ran out after him; but the snow was soon too deep for them, and to their astonishment he paid no attention when they yelled to him to wait. Yet they wouldn't give up till a waist-deep drift in the middle of the field almost engulfed them. Here even Trudi was forced to a halt, and the twins showed little but their heads above the snow.

He
must
have heard them, on so still a morning! Yet with lowered eyes Augustine hurried on, never even looking behind him when they called. At this incredible betrayal the twins did what they never did—burst into a wail, puncturing the surrounding snow with tear-holes while Augustine vanished out of sight.

There had been no new fall lately, and in the thinner snow on the fringes of the forest the surface had recorded for Augustine's earthbound eyes all the criss-cross passages of animals and birds for the past few nights and days. Idly he scanned them: the neat-punched slots two-and-two of roedeer: the marks of a fox's pads, set after each other in one straight line like the track a cog-wheel would make: the arrowed tracks of all kinds and sizes of birds, with the delicate imprints of their trailing tails and wings like fossil ferns. It was as if all these creatures had been here at the same time together, summoned to a compulsory dance of all creation without pattern or purpose.

The only living creature in sight now was a single black-bird about to alight. The dazzling snow made her misjudge her height as she came down, so that she tail-slipped the last two feet to a false landing with claws outspread in front of her and tail-feathers sticking into the snow. As Augustine turned into the forest the bird called after him: “You're well out of it—you don't know when you're lucky!”

Augustine turned round in surprise; but he was wrong, it was only a bird.

In the airless gloom of the forest Augustine threaded his way between the tree-trunks—smooth tubular boles showing a cold blue-gray against the dull green foliage lining the heavy, high-overhead canopy of snow. These endless rows of immensely tall evergreens without branch or twig for fifty or sixty feet were all exactly alike and closely and evenly spaced. There was no undergrowth. Because of their precise spacing and the lack of any lower branches or foliage their echoing was voluminous and sinister whenever the silence was broken. One yapping farm-dog in the far distance sounded like a whole pack of hounds in full tongue—or like a distant riot.

But presently Augustine debouched from the thick trees quite by chance onto a broad drive, and for a time followed along it. This was the selfsame drive that had taken them a month ago on their way to Röttningen; but that at first he failed to notice. Then something familiar must have struck him; for suddenly he remembered the sound of their sleigh-bells, and that frost-pink face peeping from her furs ... how happy he had been even next-but-one to Mitzi on the box-seat, that day a month ago!

At first Augustine had been wholly numbed by despair; but now that he had begun seeing his surroundings again a little he also began again, just a little, to think. Was it after all even now too late? It was not as if Mitzi had gone to the convent already and the gates had shut on her: then, doubtless, they'd never let her go. But as long as she was at home they surely couldn't compel her. Had he perhaps given in too easily—stunned by the first obstacle just
because
he had taken for granted the prize was there for the plucking whenever he chose? If he went back now and declared himself, surely this whole crazy nunnery-project must vanish like smoke! Surely (and at this idea his heart kicked like a back-firing engine) Mitzi was only doing this because she despaired of him: for how could any healthy, normal girl like Mitzi want to become a nun?

“Fool!” he replied to himself: “You don't understand her. You haven't a hope.”

For that was the point: if in a human way Mitzi had turned him down for another chap ... but there wasn't one! Only that ever-living ever-dying figure on the Cross which Augustine used to think nothing of, but now made him shudder so.

What sort of a mediaeval, then, must Mitzi be—inside of her—that she could even consider going into a convent? It beggared comprehension! How could such a person nowadays even exist? And how could her parents allow it instead of sending for a psychiatrist? He couldn't understand them either, not at all. But then, did he understand
anyone
here? Perhaps not even dear Reinhold. They were all ... cock-eyed, somehow, when you got under the surface (why, look at Franz!). You thought you could see how the wheels went round but really you couldn't at all. They weren't the same kind of beings that you were, these Germans.

These Germans
... all this passion for politics, as if any human “collective” was something that really existed!

These trees
... all these millions of sinister similar man-grown evergreen trees ...

“
Christ I want to get out!
” he shouted out loud; and quick as a bullet's ricochet the tree-boles snapped back at him “
Get out!
”

After trudging aimlessly in the forest for several hours Augustine suddenly found himself coming out in the open. Here the country before him was strange to him. Under the trees he had lost sight of the sun, and had no idea even of the general direction he had taken: he might have walked in a circle so that “home” was just round the corner, or it might be ten miles away. There was nothing in sight he could recognize.

Augustine felt dog-tired. Normally he could walk thirty miles without tiring at all, but today the state of his nerves had set up in his muscles numberless minute internal tensions and now these had fought each other to a standstill: he ached.

Augustine had come out of comparative darkness to the edge of this dazzling snow-field, so he had to shade his eyes with his hand from below as he scanned the landscape for someone to tell him the way. As luck would have it, there was a farm not very far off, and briskly walking towards it a middle-aged man—thick-set, and dressed as a well-to-do peasant. Augustine forced himself to a jogtrot to intercept him; and when the man saw him, he waited.

When the farmer saw this obvious foreigner and obvious gentleman, who was also so obviously lost, trotting towards him over the snow, three emotions combined to make him ask in the stranger: curiosity, compassion, and pride in his home. Augustine was too nerveless to resist, and anyway, longed for a chair to sit down on. He followed his host in without looking round him—for once, he was himself in no mood to be curious. All that really interested him was something to sit on awhile.

He was taken into a parlor where the walls were covered with horns, and regaled there on layer-cake sodden in rum; but in his present state the cake seemed to him tasteless and he could hardly swallow it down. But then they gave him a generous tot of home-distilled plum brandy and that made him feel better at once.

Augustine began to look round him at last. Those hundreds of antlers and horns ... were they trophies of the chase, decoration, or simply to hang your hat on (or rather, your hundreds of hats)? Instead of a dog on the hearth-rug—incidentally, there wasn't a hearth for it either—the fur rug had itself once been a dog! What a compendious arrangement ... he bent down and tickled its ear (they offered to fill up his glass, but he firmly refused—Gosh their plum stuff was strong!).

Almost wherever the horns left room on the walls there was a carved crucifix or a carved cuckoo-clock—one or the other: there were also two terrible portraits in oils, and it gave one a jolt to see how like was his mother's picture as a bride to this elderly farmer himself, in spite of his whiskers. Augustine turned, and smiled at his host benignly—the nice old three-hundred weight!

Again they tried to fill up his glass, and again he refused.

Meanwhile the questioning went on. It was all so courteous and terribly tactful that everything had to be carefully answered. They seemed thrilled to learn he was English, and wanted to know all he could tell them about King George.

Before Augustine quite knew what was happening they were showing him round. Never had he seen anywhere quite so crammed with possessions. Bedroom after bedroom had three or four beds in it: each bed had three or four mattresses and then was piled high with all kinds of other things so that no one could possibly sleep on it. Every wardrobe was bursting with clothes and had cardboard boxes on top of it: everything had to be taken down, unfolded and shown. All these things had accumulated in dowry after dowry over three generations, he gathered. None of them seemed to be used—they were wealth, like the gold in a bank. Yet the tiptoe possessors seemed radiant ...
these
were people who knew beyond doubt what they wanted—and had it! Sorrow suddenly rose in his throat, but he swallowed it down.