The Wooden Shepherdess (37 page)

The Florida boom had been based on selling the Garden of Eden strip by strip to the exiled Children of Adam; but even the previous year it had passed the stage where people bought Florida land at all. Now they only bought options to buy it they never meant to take up—only to sell on and on at a profit. So when a hurricane finally jogged the Boomster's elbow by laying the paradise-city of Coral Gables flat, the whole pack of cards collapsed; and many Exclusive Residential Lots (which might in actual fact be pestilent sections of mangrove swamp and fit habitation only for crocodiles) found themselves back in their old original owners' rueful hands.

But these Florida speculators hadn't by any means only been proper professional Real Estate men: they included every get-rich-quick Tom, Dick and Harry, throughout the land. By now these were hopelessly hooked on making more and easier money than what they could earn as drugstore clerks and garage mechanics, and so when Florida failed them they turned their fledgling attention to Wall Street. There they quickly developed the same sort of fatal dealing in options and buying on minimal margins, till prices of Stocks soon soared far beyond any possible values in terms of a Corporation's profits or earnings—just like Florida land, but soon on a far vaster scale as professionals also began to climb on the golden band-wagon.

During this Stockmarket Boom you made money so fast just “playing the market” that loans to Germany lost their former allure. Thus Germany's former imports of easy money suddenly dried at the source, which spelled an untimely end to Germany's brief prosperity. Grandiose schemes (such as Kammstadt's new municipal race-track and playing-fields) were perforce abandoned half finished, and workers again laid off. Thus while the rest of the world still enjoyed the Great American Stockmarket Boom—so that even Britain would prosper so much at the height of the Boom as to see her workless drop to the one-million mark—depression and mass unemployment hit Germany once again; and that spoonful of honey they'd lately enjoyed only made it taste even more bitter.

This played straight into Hitler's hands. But it might play even more into Strasser's: so Hitler that autumn appointed Göbbels as Gauleiter in Berlin: chiefly to keep an eye on those former Messiahs of his, the radical Strasser brothers. In short, he had to be ready at all times to contradict the official “Voice in the North of the One Indivisible Nazi Party.”

Lothar was lucky: he somehow contrived to hold on to his City Hall job, and meanwhile was secretly working heart-and-soul for the Cause.

When he moved to Kammstadt that summer he'd happened to find himself a room in the house where little Ernst Krebelmann's school-teacher, Lehrer Faber, already lodged on the floor above. At first they had known each other only as fellow-lodgers, bowing stiffly without a word whenever they met on the stairs. But one day Lothar had happened to open his door just as the Lehrer passed on the tiny landing outside, those two square yards of shining parquet floor with their rubber-plant and their smell of furniture-polish; and Lothar would never forget that momentous sight, for the day had been hot enough for the Lehrer to carry his jacket over his arm which allowed a glimpse of the swastika badge that was normally hidden behind his lapel.

This had given the young man courage to speak. As yet he himself had never officially joined the Party: indeed the only signed-up Party Member in Kammstadt then at all was the lonely Lehrer, who had to keep mighty quiet about it if only because of his job; but the latter had welcomed Lothar with open arms as a veteran of the Putsch. He took him up to his attic room with its piles of books and aroma of stale cigars (the underpaid Lehrer smoked one each Sunday, and had to live on its smell for the rest of the week).

After some brotherly talk the Lehrer had looked for something to lend him to read. Luckner's
See-Teufel
, or Junger's
In Stahlgewittern
perhaps? But Lothar had read them both. Or something by Heer, or Naso, or Brehm, or Geissler? Finally Lothar had carried away both volumes of Houston Chamberlain's
Grundlagen
, once he had learned that before he died last winter the septuagenarian sage had said of Hitler that “here was a man to be followed blindfold.”

Lehrer Faber and Lothar were pioneers: there was still a long row to hoe, but during the next three years the Nazis began to gain a tiny footing even in ultra-conservative Kammstadt. There the only “Marxists” one had to fear were the highly respectable Social-Democrat councilors ruling the City Hall (for Kammstadt's working class was a trifle larger than Ludo supposed), the only Jews were Ludo's friends whose father was tied by the leg to the private bank he owned. Most of their first recruits had joined them simply because they liked and respected the Lehrer—anything
he
could belong to must be all right. These formed the as-it-were intellectual wing of the local Nazi cell, still meeting in secret and mostly discussing philosophy half through the night. But Lothar himself deserved the credit for bringing in a much more forceful recruit: one Ludwig Kettner, a bankrupt builders' merchant nagged by a tireless energy.

No one could ever call Kettner an intellectual! During the War he had won an Iron Cross for valor, losing an eye at Verdun. After the War was over, starting from scratch as a scrap-merchant mainly dealing in surplus government stores, he had seized the chance of the building boom to launch out on building materials proper. Kettner had seemed to be one of Kammstadt's coming men when suddenly everyone ceased to build. Lothar had dealt with the man at the City Hall during his prosperous days: he had liked him then, and now he was on the rocks Lothar had been one of the few to befriend him still.

By temperament more of the condottiere type, Kettner soon tired of endless midnight discussions. He wanted action.... It shows how behind the times little Kammstadt was, that is wasn't till 1928 that Kettner had even begun recruiting an embryo S.A. squad among Kammstadt's “veteran” organizations.

“America's final bell....”

That tocsin tolled on October the 29th, 1929: the climactic day of the Great American Stockmarket Crash was the day little Gillie Wadamy reached the momentous age of three (though he wasn't allowed any cake because of a stomach-upset).

Wall Street prices had started to fall a fortnight before, shaking out early the smallest fry—such as Anne-Marie Woodcock's numerous Beaux (for Ree was now seventeen, and a budding beauty “with plenty of Beaux to her string and Boy does she string 'em!” was how Russell put it). But now “all her Beaux come undone,” all their chickenfeed winnings were gone; and by close of play on Tuesday the 29th, her father was broke as well.

Bramber had thrown up his job to give his whole time to the Market, and only a fortnight before had been worth (on paper) a cool quarter-million dollars. Misled by occasional ups in the midst of the downs even after the selling began he had gone on buying, hoping to make this a half. So now he was back behind even his starting-point; for now their precious New Blandford farm would have to be sold and the proceeds go to his brokers. All-Hallow-e'en was a properly haunted affair for the Woodcocks this year, with hardly a cent in the house or a steak in the ice-box.

Bramber could hardly expect his job back—not in a city chockfull of these Bramber Woodcocks. Earl (you remember the ocarina-player?) and Baba and even Junior were still in school: the only possible bread-winner seemed to be Ree, who could surely get some sort of personality-job even in times like these.... But the prospect held little attraction for Anne-Marie: instead she wrote to the grandmother down in Lafayette (La.) whose name she bore, sold her furs for the fare and left for the Deepest South by rail alone in a day-car.

She promised—and meant it—to send them what help she could, if and when she could. But Grandmother Voisin had never approved of the Woodcock match, and her generosity seemed to depend on the prior claims of sundry young painters and sculptors from New Orleans. All the same, Ree expressed no intention of coming home: the young painters and sculptors were plenty fun, the countryside pleasant down there round Acadian Lafayette on Vermilion Bayou, the weather quite warm enough without any furs....

So that was that: Junior and Earl would have to do newspaper rounds before school, and their mother must take in piece-work for garment makers.

The height of the Crash saw perfectly sound securities finding no bidder at any price; but roughly-speaking overall prices dwindled no more than an average third from their previous peaks, and merely fell back to a rational level. This was cold comfort however to dealers in “margins”; and victims like Bramber regarded this third not as fairy gold (which had never existed except in accountants' brains) but as genuine wealth being swallowed down by an opening earth like it swallowed those men in the Bible.

He perked up a little when President Hoover pronounced the economy rock-bottom sound even so, and immune to whatever “healthy” and “realistic” adjustments took place in Stock Exchange ratings. But Russell was less optimistic. He stressed the economy's new and now almost total dependence on Hire Purchase systems in retail trade: for that too (said Russ) was dependence on fairy gold. Germany's fighting the War on the never-never had landed her later in terrible woes, so how (asked Russ) could America hope to escape them when doing the same thing in times of peace? Countless insolvent investors must fail to meet their installments on goods they had “bought,” so that half-used automobiles and washing-machines would be dumped back on dealers who thought they'd got rid of them. New production would have to slow down—and men be laid off; and with highly-paid wage-earners losing their jobs a second wave of installments must fail to be met, more goods be returned, more men be laid off....

Bramber was quick to point out it was pretty good nerve for a sassy young Jeremiah to contradict the accredited seers. But the factory chimneys did cease to smoke; and (as Russell was brash enough to remark) things had advanced quite a bit in the business world since the bad old days when the overriding charge on a bankrupt plantation was feeding its slaves till sold. Slaves couldn't simply be fired and left to fend for themselves, as nowadays free labor could be—and was.

*

If Peace is indivisible, so is Prosperity: slow economic paralysis gripped not only the U.S.A. in 1929 but the whole of the trading world. Germany's industries lost with their export markets the foreign exchange they needed to service their foreign loans, plunging the country's unstable finances even more deeply into the soup.

Hitherto, merely a million Germans had been without jobs; but Hitler was able to rub his hands as the figures mounted by leaps and bounds. By the autumn of 1930, in less than a year they had topped the three-million mark—three million hungry and desperate men, on a wholly inadequate dole for the first few months and afterwards Parish Relief.... He had merely to bide his time. By giving Strasser his head with the poor and the workless, while still refusing to rubber-stamp Strasser's Bolshy ideas himself, he ensured the panicky middle-classes would vote for
his
protection against those selfsame menacing hordes who voted for Strasser—securing the Party a double harvest of votes. And indeed when polling-day came the Nazis netted more than a hundred seats in place of their previous measly gadfly dozen: the Nazis were right on the map at last—and Lepowski was eating his hat....

“He has only to bide his time,” said Reinhold the Hitler-watcher. “A couple of years may well see unemployment double again—and likewise those hundred-odd Nazi seats. There are times when sudden and violent action is needed to change the course of events, times to simply sit still and be carried along by the tide—and Hitler always knows which. Those constant complaints of his “indecision” are simply a failure to grasp that
what
you do often matters so very much less than
when
.”

Homeless unemployed men were housed in makeshift barracks: mostly in Great War left-overs, derelict army camps like the one still only half-dismantled when Kammstadt's Playing-Fields Scheme was shelved. Its menacing presence, a bare half-mile from the city walls and crammed with soup-kitchen scarecrows from miles around (for it served three neighboring counties), scared the pants off Kammstadt's respectable burghers.

And yet the Depression had scarcely touched Kammstadt itself at all. The City had less than two hundred unemployed of its own on the books at a City Hall with Flemish gables and outdoor frescoes of lords and ladies; and most of these paupers were well out of sight in a suburb down by the railway-tracks where nobody went on his Sunday walk. Merchants might do a shade less business, banks be chary of overdrafts, shoemakers find themselves using more sole-leather now for repairs than uppers-leather for new, cabinet-makers have time for occasional glasses of beer: that sort of thing—but that sort of thing was all. And yet there was fear in the air: fear of the outside world, fear of what “they” were doing “out there.” They discussed it whenever Kammstadters met in their clubs—in their Shooting Clubs, their Veterans' Clubs, their Singing or Gardeners' Clubs, their Patriotic Clubs (there were almost more clubs in Kammstadt than Kammstadters). What “they” were up to “out there” was the topic at every Stammtisch; and nobody knew the answer, that was the trouble.

Meanwhile the Nazi Cell in Kammstadt was growing: they hadn't yet reached double figures, but made up in energy what they still lacked in numbers. The principal hurdle they had to face was the common talk of Storm Troop excesses elsewhere: for they themselves behaved well enough, apart from occasional quarrels with “Marxist” Reichsbanner men only used hitherto to getting their eyes blacked by Communists. Mean-while they laid on “mammoth” public meetings in halls small enough to make them look crowded—meetings which everyone heard of, even if very few went. They staged patriotic plays, and concerts: they sang patriotic songs, and on Public Holidays Kettner paraded and marched (rather stage-army marches perhaps, importing the same Storm Troopers to march who had yesterday marched in one neighboring town and were due to march in another tomorrow). Kettner was now the Deputy Storm Troop Leader for Kammstadt County; and likely to rise even higher the more the County Leader himself succumbed to the bottle.