The Wooden Shepherdess (21 page)

“Eleven-five-
six
” was the date of the Founding of Kammstadt, that most important of all historical dates! Lehrer Faber had boxed his ears, and tried to rub in the digits with One, One, Five and
six
“head-nuts.” For Kammstadt was two years older than upstart Munich, founded Eleven-five-
eight
—a fact no Kammstadter ever ought to forget. More-over the founder of both, the great Duke Henry the Lion (“No NOT his father Duke Henry the Proud, you blockhead!”) had honored our founding by combing a beard which had never been combed for years (“So you see how we came by our name of Kammstadt”): and two of the broken teeth of that overtaxed comb were the proudest relics the town possessed.

Still, nobody really minded head-nuts; and after all, with fifty boys in the class what else could the boys expect?

Learning here was all of it learning by rote, and lost was the child who altered a single word (as you tended to do, if weakly you let yourself think of the sense). But even paraphrase was a peccadillo compared with writing left-handed. Each time that Ernst did this the crime was promoted: from head-nuts, through ruler-cuts on chilblainy knuckles, to laying him bare-bum over the table and switching with hazel-rods. When even that failed (little Ernst's young friends having nicked the rods with their knives in advance so they broke), the Teacher even tried Reason: for surely it stands to Reason that nobody writes with his left?

Lehrer Faber, with bristling red mustache and a look of thwarted ambition in piercingly bright blue eyes: this was the Fountain of Knowledge.... When lessons were done and the school exploded there always remained a quorum of small boys jostling round him, bombarding him with their questions six-at-a-time. There was nothing the Lehrer didn't know, from astronomy down to sexing lady and gentleman worms and how and airplane flies.

Little Ernst was often one of the jostlers—not that he always had something to ask, but because he liked to be part of a lump (any lump, whatever its object). One day he found he had somehow jostled himself right up in front, but a question luckily came: “Herr Lehrer, I know you can't fly just by hanging on to the string of a big enormous kite; but suppose you tied your kite to an eagle, couldn't you?”

When he got home, his mother was anxious to know what Ernst had learned that day in school. For answer, he silently took his old toy rabbit and made it zoom through the air with its long flannel ears outstretched, pretending he'd got an eagle....

But what was the use of even a real eagle to someone who hadn't a kite to tie to it?

Meanwhile, for Hitler in Landsberg August passed and September too without his expected release; and as Reinhold hinted he might, he gave the whole discredit for this to Röhm. He suspected Röhm and his growing “militant arm” of malice prepense, of intending to keep the Munich authorities too much alarmed to want Hitler at large while behaving just well enough not to get banned themselves. In October his six months were up: yet October passed, and November ... and Hitler chalked up a very bad mark against Röhm.

The December Elections however at last did the trick. For now the tide had apparently turned, and even that right-wing electoral coalition the Nazi remnant had joined lost more than half of their seats: so the “Nazi Menace”—if ever there really was one—no longer existed....

The Munich authorities heaved a sigh of relief and turned him loose just before Christmas.

Counting back to the day of Hitler's arrest, he had been “out of action” for thirteen months. No one was wearing his shoes, he had seen to that—though Röhm had apparently cobbled-up some sort of pair of his own. Now he must make a fresh start; but not entirely from scratch, for this time (thanks to the Trial) everyone knew his name—and nobody knew his plans.

In an elegant house in an elegant quarter of Munich, at half-past six, an impatiently-waiting child hears a visitor kicking the snow off his boots in the hall: then a hop-skip-and-jump, and he's riding high in the visitor's arms while he breathes “Dass D'nur wieder da bist, Onkel Dolf!” down the mothbally neck of the visitor's blue party-suit. And how that fine little four-year old hero had grown since the day when they shared those cakes in the Blutenbergstrasse cell! “But where have you hidden your new baby sister, you rascal?”

However, before the four-year-old hero could answer his long-lost Uncle was pleading with Father to play him the “Liebestod.” ...

Hanfstängl glanced at his guest in surprise. Why, he looked so well; and they'd hardly yet said How-d'you-do! Could a fit of the old nervous tension be on him again so soon? Well, Wagner's music was always the cure—like Saul. So he sat himself down then and there and thundered the “Liebestod” out on his big concert grand, while the bust of Benjamin Franklin danced all over the lid.

The listener seemed to have grown quite plump: as he stood with his feet apart and his head on one side, his serge suit strained at its buttons so much that the little boy eyed it in wonder. But just as the last of those healing Lisztian fireworks died on the air, in came Mother with little Herta—and Uncle was kissing her hand and gone into ecstasies over our baby, and saying again and again how sorry he was for all the trouble he'd caused her at Uffing....

What “trouble” at Uffing? The boy could remember nothing, apart from some baying of dogs in the dark; and surely those hadn't been Uncle's dogs which had made all that noise?

As a matter of fact he found there was little he could remember at all about Uncle Dolf—apart from the all-important fact that he loved him, and always had.

Then the sliding doors slid, and they moved in to dinner. This Coming-out Dinner was served in style, by candlelight. Turkey and small-talk.... Hitler professed himself greatly impressed by this highly artistic use of candles instead of electric lamps: it showed superior taste. He seemed altogether impressed by this cultured, upper-class home which his hosts had acquired; and the “feine Gegend,” the upper-class neighborhood. “Hanfstängl,” Hitler declared: “You are quite the most upper-class person I know!”

Suspecting no irony Putzi was pleased, and preened. For his friend was clearly doing his best (minding his
P
s and
Q
s and careful to use the right knives and forks), but could do with a lot more taming and teaching yet; and Putzi fancied himself in the role of instructor to genius.

Pastries and small-talk.... The child was abysmally bored. Uncle Dolf was the only person at dinner who spoke to him even once; and that was merely recalling some infantile joke he insisted they used to share, though the boy had forgotten it. Spanking, forsooth, those “naughty” carved wooden lions on Father's chair.... Couldn't Uncle see how this three-year-old's babyish stuff embarrassed a four-year-old hero? So then he turned his thoughts to the tree, and the presents to come. He had asked for a sabre, first; and he hoped there'd be no hanky-panky, the Christkind would bring him a proper cavalry one. But next on his list of requests was that cooking-stove everyone teased him about.... Would the Christkind think him a sissy like everyone else did—a boy who wanted to cook? Would Uncle Dolf think him sissy? That terrible thought made him blush to the roots of his hair, and he couldn't swallow his tart.

Wine, and a deal more small-talk.... Herr Hitler drank almost nothing, yet seemed to be warming up. He told one cruel satirical prison anecdote after another, making them laugh as he brought Count Toni to mimic life—and then his warders, even producing their tread in the passage outside, and the turn of a key in the lock, all done with that magical voice.

In his pictures of prison life he was palpably playing for sympathy. Putzi however decided that prison had done him the world of good, for a rest and a regular life had been just what he needed. No doubt he was now a saner and wiser man; and perhaps the future was not so black after all.... He thought of Frederick the Great, and reminded Hitler that after the Battle of Hochkirch even “der alte Fritz” sat biting his nails on a drum and had thought he was done for.

But Hitler brushed aside all serious talk of the future: tonight was a festive night. Instead he started in bubbling spirits to tell them stories of life on the Western Front. Mostly these were good-humored enough—though he seemed to have got it in for some Colonel von Kessen, a stuck-up Bavarian Baron whom Hitler mimicked while everyone laughed till the tears ran down their faces (even the little boy managed a loud guffaw, though he'd no idea what his parents were laughing about). Hitler contrasted this toff with his earthier Sergeant-Major Amman, of whom he spoke warmly; and also the sterling Lieutenant Hess....

Next he started a parody howling and whistling through his teeth till there wasn't the battle-sound of a German or French or an English gun that his mimicry didn't include; and they gasped with surprise at his skill when he even attempted the composite roar of a Western Front artillery barrage, complete with Howitzers, Seventy-fives and machine-guns. The windows rattled, the furniture shook; and a rueful Putzi thought of his upper-class neighbors startled pop-eyed out of their Christmas peace. Whizz-bangs, and rumbling tanks: the screams of the wounded.... They laughed more uncertainly now, no longer sure it was quite so funny—this mimicking voice of the plump little man in a blue serge suit who never forgot a sound: the retching cough of the gassed, the glug of somebody shot through the lungs.

“Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” on the concert grand.... It was time for the longed-for Bescherung, the Tree and the presents at last; and they all put on holy faces. But “Stille Nacht” was for only so long as they stood in a pious line and sang: once Uncle had started showing the little soldier the way to hold the saber which Baby-Jesus had brought him the music changed to a stirring Nazi March. Moreover this was the “Schlageter March” which Father himself had composed in the martyr's honor (shot by the French, in the Ruhr). In its sad-somber parts the bass notes imitate drums, and then comes the wild ferocious “Pfui!” refrain:

“
Pfui!
” Stirred to ancestral depths, you crammed all your hate and contempt for the dastardly French in that single yell
Pfui
.... Catching the mood from elders themselves too moved to notice, the little boy waved his wooden saber and slashed at the heavy furniture (“Pfui! Pfui!”), trying to make it bleed. But now a sudden torrent of words from Hitler howled down the grand piano and even the “Pfui” refrain itself: how the War must be fought all over again in France, but now against France alone so that France could be brought to her knees and Paris shattered to rubble, the French crushed under its ruins like cesspool rats....

The pianist snatched his hands from the keys as from red-hot coals, aghast at the screaming devil his music had raised in his guest. Was this any “saner and wiser man,” who still could suppose we would ever be left alone in the ring with France? But penned for a year with only ignorant blockheads like Rudolf Hess with his Clausewitz-Haushofer-Rosenberg nonsense.... Indeed, half in love—so far as he
could
fall in love—with “mein Rudi, mein Hesserl.” ...

Meanwhile the little boy dived head-first in a sofa and lay there blindly slashing—berserk, completely cuckoo. From the tree a tilting candle dripped hot wax on the face of the china doll in the crib.

*

When at last he was sent up to bed the boy was bursting with sleep like a bud but still beside himself with excitement. He dreamed of the Christus Kind and his Uncle Dolf in identical old blue bath-robes riding away on a truck together in triumph, while Benjamin Franklin waved a saber and danced on the top of that tiny stove you could really-and-truly cook on (the stove which he prudently hadn't unwrapped till he got it upstairs).

But then, in his dream, that cooking-stove grew and grew till its chimneys hid the whole horizon in smoke; and Benjamin Franklin vanished like everything else.

That same Christmas Eve Mellton Chase held another impatiently-waiting child: for Augustine had lingered in Canada right through the fall into winter, and only today was the truant expected home at last.

The delay had begun with some Oxford friends Augustine had found at Government House: they had shown him a deal of kindness in Ottawa, pressing Augustine to wait for at least a few days before booking his passage home—and to tell the truth, he hadn't felt wholly averse to enjoying their flesh-pots awhile after living so rough. Then at one of their parties he met a wandering South Carolinian called Anthony Fairfax. This was a young man of just his own age, but with manners so old-world and courtly they made him feel in comparison ill-bred and boorish—and yet this hidalgo had built his own automobile himself at home by hand.... Moreover by now the fall had begun, the crimson Canadian fall when the maples light up like lamps and the pumpkins flame on the porches: when peaks are revealed overnight crystal-sharp through the suddenly clarified air—the tops of far-off mountains hull-down behind the horizon, of ranges you couldn't have guessed all summer were even there.

At this wonderful time of year, and attracted as well as intrigued by each other, it didn't take much to send the two of them off together in Anthony's home-made car exploring.

They started towards the North. Soon they found themselves driving on trails intended for horsemen at most, through virgin forest by compass: up ridges and down ravines, with an ax kept ready for chopping down trees and a pick for dislodging rocks and a hand on the door-handle always ready to jump.

By day they were far too busy to talk; but rolled in their rugs at night they talked till they fell asleep. Apparently Anthony's old-world charm included a firm belief that dueling, courts-of-honor, and being a three-bottle-man were still today the
sine qua nons
of
noblesse oblige
; and that Negroes ranked at most as one of the higher primates.... Augustine assumed that any Don Quixote with such a sensible feat to his credit as building his own mechanical Rosinante was bound to be joking; but Anthony also assumed that Augustine was joking—no gentleman really could doubt such obvious truths as these; and this mutual notion that neither meant what he said had enabled the pair to argue with endless good humor.