The Fox in the Attic (40 page)

They told Augustine he was not far from the Danube and also the railway, but further on down the line than Lorienburg was. The station was two miles off, and it was getting time for the train but still they insisted he just saw the cows—nothing else—before he departed.

A door opposite the parlor-door opened off the front hall straight into the stable (so he had just to look at the horses). Beyond lay the piggery (he also looked at the pigs), and furthest of all were the cows—rows and rows of them, all red-and-white (“What kind of cows has King George got at Sandringham?” How on earth should he know!). But the Sandringham cows couldn't be finer than these were: indeed at the sight of all his own wonderful cows the farmer seemed ready to float; and in spite of himself Augustine was intrigued by them. A boy had just brought in the calves to be suckled: Augustine couldn't help watching how the milky little nit-wits tried all the other mothers as well as their own, and how mildly those other ones kicked them aside.

Just as they were leaving the cows, one of them lifted her nose from her calf and called after Augustine: “You just don't know when you're lucky!”

Augustine looked round in surprise; but he was wrong, it was only a cow.

The visit had done Augustine good, but as he hurried off along the lane once more his melancholy kept hitting him in waves as sea-sickness does. When that happened the color in everything faded, and the legs under him almost refused.

Even at the best of times Augustine's surroundings in Germany never seemed to him quite “real”: they had a picture-book foreignness, down to the smallest detail. The very snow he was walking in differed from English snow. Those distant forests were colored a “Victorian” green—the color of art-serge curtains rather than trees: the edges of the forest were all sharp-etched (outside of them no loose trees stood around on their own) and yet these plantations were formless, for their arbitrary boundaries seemed to bear no relation to Nature or the lie of the land. Thus the landscape (in his eyes) had none of the beauty almost any English landscape (in his eyes) had got.

Augustine kept passing wayside shrines, and even the farms had each its own little doll's-chapel outside with a miniature belfry and an apse as big as a cupboard. Taken all together and on top of the churches they added up to a pretty frightening picture ... Often these chapels were almost the only outbuildings the farms had got, apart from a crow's-nest up an apple-tree for potting at foxes.

Indeed these hardly looked like “farms” (which are, surely, essentially a huddle of big byres and barns with a tiny house tucked away in the middle?). These (because the animals lived indoors on the ground-floor) looked all “house.”

Since landscape changes like this from country to country it must owe very little to Nature: Nature is no more than the canvas, and landscape the self-portrait the people who live there paint on it. But no, hold hard! Surely, rather the people who
have
lived there; for landscape is always at least one generation behind in its portrayal (like those other portraits that hung on the parlor wall). This was Augustine's “new” Germany, but the landscape here was unchanged since Kaiserdom or even before: whereas the people ...

But at that point Augustine stopped dead in his tracks, for something had struck him—something so obvious why on earth hadn't it struck him before?
The people were also pre-war
. History has to use second-hand timber when she builds a new edifice—like those awkward post-war chicken-houses people build out of bits of army huts and old ammo-boxes, with “W.D.” stamped all over them and costly enigmatical fittings too much trouble to unscrew. Likewise the people the new Germany was built of were the self-same people the old had consisted of before the structure was smashed and they were ripped out of their places in the ruins and ... but could you call the new Germany “built”? No! Just at present these were more like rooks sent wheeling about in the sky when their rookery-tree is felled. One day they would settle ...

When Augustine at last reached the plain of the riverbed, he was surprised to find there no snow at all. There was ice there instead: on the road it had been swept into untidy heaps like a dump for shattered window-panes: on the fields it just lay around on the ground like more window-panes shattered. Round each of the trunks of the roadside trees three feet from the ground there was a kind of ring-table of ice you could picnic on ...

They explained it all to Augustine when he called at the village Gasthof for a drink (after all, he had made good time). A week ago (they told him) the Danube had frozen. Dammed with the barrier its own ice-floes had piled up, the river had flooded out over the plain and begun to freeze again, like a lake. But then with the weight of the water behind it the dam had broken and the floods had subsided—deserting their new ice, which was left in the air unsupported, and broke. Now, in sheets and fragments and splinters for miles it lay in the sun and glittered: only those “tables” of ice round the trees remained as witness to the depth of the floods.

In the middle of the village, the market-place had a kind of Xanadu-wonder because of the trees. For their branches and twigs were feathered with white ice that glittered in the sun: they were like cherry-trees every inch in bloom, and whenever the faint breeze breathed on them they tinkled like tiny bells.

The road to the station took Augustine close to the river itself. Even now the river was not everywhere frozen: here and there where the current was strongest there were still patches of dark gray water that steamed in the sun, so that the solitary swan indefatigably swimming there was half-hidden in vapor. But elsewhere the Danube seemed to be frozen solid in heaps. It was wild, yet utterly still. Huge blocks of ice had jostled each other and climbed on top of each other like elephants rutting and then got frozen in towering lumps: or had swirled over and over before coagulating till they were curled like a Chinese sea. None of them had remained in the place where first it had frozen: each block was complete in itself but now out of place—like a jig-saw puzzle glued in a heap helter-skelter so that now it could never be solved.

It was all such a muddle! Although it was utterly still it expressed such terrific force it was frightening: the force that had made it—thrusting floes weighing hundreds of tons high into the air, and the force it would release when it thawed. When that ice melted at last it would go thundering down the river grinding to bits everything in its path. No bridge could possibly stand up to it. The longer you looked at its stillness, the greater your feeling of panic ... Augustine
hated
Germany: all he wanted now was to get away as quick as he could.

The moment he got back he would go straight to Walther, tell him in ten words that he
had
to marry Mitzi; and then go straight to Mitzi and ... and not take “no” for an answer. For he couldn't possibly leave Mitzi behind in all this: no longer just for his own sake but for
hers
he must rescue her—take her to England (and make a reasonable Englishwoman out of her like everyone else).

*

Augustine jumped from the train the moment it stopped. He galloped up the hill. Still out of breath he asked for Walther at once. But the Baron (they told him) was out. Augustine stamped his foot in fury: every minute's delay was intolerable! When would he be back?—The Baron and Baronin wouldn't be back till tomorrow ... surely the Gentleman knew that
today
they were taking the Young Baroness to her convent? They had started at noon.—No,
she
wasn't coming back with them of course: the Baron and Baronin would return alone in the morning. But the Young Baron would be here for dinner tonight, and the Colonel-Baron: three gentlemen dining alone, Good Appetite to them!

So this was the end! From his protestant upbringing Augustine knew that what once a convent has swallowed it never gives up ...

Flinging his things into the old Gladstone bag that had once been his father's he could hardly see what he was doing: he was more like a boxer practicing on a punch-bag than a young man packing his clothes.

Where was he going to next? Anywhere anywhere anywhere! Over the frontier to whatever other country was nearest! But then, as he turned again to the wardrobe his bag called after him: “You don't know when you're lucky!”

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

The knowledgeable reader will have recognized for himself how deeply this volume is indebted to Bullock, Wheeler-Bennett, Hanfstaengl, Kubizek, Salomon and other published authorities, as well as to private sources.

A long list of these latter would defeat by tedium the purposes of gratitude but I cannot leave unnamed Baroness Pia von Aretin: she gave me access to her father's memoirs and in every way she and her family have helped me immeasurably. I must also thank particularly the only living person in a position to describe to me at first-hand the whole forty-eight hour period when Hitler was in hiding at Uffing. (Neither of these, however, is blameworthy for my opinions.)

At certain points my narrative of the “Putsch” differs materially from others previously compiled. But I have imported almost nothing fictitious except the little dog in the plaid waistcoat, and the historian may be interested to know that much of this narrative—including the whole episode in the crypt, the crucial briefing in the fencing-school with all that implied, and the correct route of the march—is based on a vivid contemporary account by an actual Nazi participant, a Major Goetz. this account was contained in a letter to a friend dated 26th November, 1923, which some weeks later found its way into the German press. Its very mistakes authenticate it, but it does not seem to be well known.

*

I am also more deeply indebted than I can express to the skillful and patient private critics of my manuscript.

—R.H.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

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www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1961 by the Executors of the Estate of Richard Hughes

Introduction copyright © 2000 by Hilary Mantel

All rights reserved.

Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Richard Hughes

Cover design: Katy Homans

Cover photograph: Francesca Woodman, detail from
Providence, 1975–76
; courtesy of Betty and George Woodman

First Published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1961

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Hughes, Richard Arthur Warren, 1900–1976.

  The fox in the attic / by Richard Hughes.

        p.   cm.

   Originally published: London : Chatto & Windus, 1961, as v. 1 of an unfinished trilogy entitled: The human predicament.

  ISBN 0-940322-29-3 (alk. paper)

  I. Title.

PR6015.U35F69   2000

823'.912—dc 21                                                      99-34917

 

eISBN 978-1-59017-531-6
v1.0

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