The Wooden Shepherdess (45 page)

Adèle turned her back on the hubbub to gaze out into the azure sky, then down at the sunlit patchwork plain below where oblongs of yellow and green cultivation filled every space between the dark blue patches of forest. The nearer distance was dotted with rows of tiny new pinhead haycocks, and lines of round green beads that were fruit-trees planted in rows; and moving specks of brilliant color like miniature ladybirds—groups of women crossing the fields on their way from Church. Where the landscape began to merge into haze, on a distant broken chalk-line of road a creeping cloud of dust like a silkworm's cocoon was too far off to reveal the truck which it must contain....

Then Walther called her name; and she turned to face the invasion, smiling politely.

Walther himself seemed in wonderful form, alternately wolfing slices of sausage himself and throwing bits to a pair of adoring dogs, while discussing the breathtaking news from Munich with Franz: for the Kessens were nothing if not well informed. So Röhm had committed suicide! Frankly, a jolly good riddance.... There wasn't much to be said for the upstart Hitler, but even less for the blackguardly Röhm! He had tried to stage a revolt with his rag-tag-and-bobtail “army” (as everyone always knew he would); and then when it failed he had taken the easy way out.... Those Storm Troops of Röhm's were almost as bad as Eisner's “Guards” in the old Red Terror days: “D'you remember—but no, of course you wouldn't you're much too young—the day when a posse of Eisner's rapscallions attempted to seize the Castle?”

“I wasn't a child at the time,” said Franz in a patient voice, “but a boy of sixteen, and away at cadet-school. You're mixing me up with the twins, who were babies then.”

“Quite ...” Walther turned to the Twins: “The rascals had somehow got through the gates, but a cowman soon chased them out with a pitchfork.”

The twins looked suitably blank: they had heard the story so often before, and anyhow hated to be reminded how young they were.

“The fact is,” said Franz, laying down his fork, “that this latest master-stroke is additional proof that you all underrated the Führer right from the start. ‘Crude,' you called him. His burning love for his country you couldn't deny; but what you failed to observe was the streak of political genius governing every move from his earliest days. I remember having to point out, years ago, to my learned friend Dr. Reinhold Steuckel, how cleverly Hitler employed the ancient maxim Divide and Rule to retain the Nazi leadership even in prison: ‘burning his empty shoes himself rather than letting anyone step in them,' that was the phrase I used.”

Walther was nettled. “Thank God the fellow has done what any self-respecting Chancellor had to do, and brought the S.A. to heel! I admit that it took some guts, but I fail to see anything ‘clever' about it: these men were his rivals within the Party, but vis-à-vis everyone else they were Hitler's staunchest supporters. Destroying their power has weakened no one so much as Hitler himself....” There came a small interruption as Franz was called away to the phone, but Walther went on to the world at large: “In short, he has bound himself hand-and-foot and delivered himself to the Army: we've got the little man just where we want him, now!”

He looked round the family circle in triumph; but no one gainsaid him—if anyone heard him indeed, for the twins were thinking of horses, Janos was tickling Trudl's ear with a flower.... And women, of course, hold no political views. “Darlings, put Fritzl down!” said Adèle, as Leo and Ännchen each attempted to lift one end of connecting dachshund: “Come back and finish your milk.”

“But Granny, he
wants
to look over the wall!” said Leo.

“Who was the call from?” asked Irma when Franz returned.

“Nothing.... No one I knew: only some old Army friend of Uncle Otto's who hasn't seen him for years and wanted to know where he was.”

“You told him?” asked Father Petrus quickly.

“Of course. But I said he'd be back to lunch.”

“My coffee is cold!” complained Walther. So Irma set the urn on the flame to re-heat, and without remonstrance emptied her father's still-steaming coffee-cup over the wall.

“Do fishes like coffee?” asked Leo; but nobody seemed to know.

“I was just explaining,” said Walther to Franz, “that we've now got Chancellor Hitler properly under our thumb. You mark my words: henceforth he'll be merely a figurehead, serving those Great Conservative National Forces on which he now completely depends.”

“Frankly, Papa,” Franz answered coldly, “you seem to forget that the man is a patriot through-and-through. He and the Army are natural allies because their aims are the same—the resurrection of Germany: therefore the question of ‘figureheads' doesn't arise. After all, Hitler has done already something that mountebank Papen alone could never have done: he has scourged the moneychangers and time-serving politicians out of our Augean Stables. And now that he's ridded himself as well of all Leftist and otherwise unreliable elements inside his Movement, then everything wholesome and sound in the land will be proud to rally behind your derided ‘figurehead'!”

Walther was losing his temper: “You really expect any man of breeding....”

But now Father Petrus had got to go: he had Parish duties....

*

So Father Petrus tucked up his cassock and chugged away on his little two-stroke.

He had to visit the Forester's house (where the Forester's aged mother was said to be
in extremis
), so left by the dusty Kammstadt road and presently entered the forest. The sun was already high in the sky, the smell of pines and the forest shade a refreshing change; and so was the forest silence, for Father Petrus had had about all he could take of von Kessen politics.

So far, he seemed to have managed to hold his tongue. But the Church had her own (and a pretty efficient) grapevine: the Priester knew a lot more than anyone up at the Schloss about what had been going on. As yet the Nazis had only admitted a few dozen deaths, but he knew it must run into hundreds; and not by any means all of them S.A. thugs, nor even Men of the Left. There was Erich Klausener killed, the leader of Catholic Action; and Adalbert Probst, the Leader of Catholic Youth; and also that other prominent Catholic Herbert von Bose, who some said had written von Papen's Marburg speech. Adding these three gratuitous deaths to von Papen's abject humiliation, things hardly boded well for the Church.

Others said Protestant Edgar Jung had written the speech and they'd killed Jung too! And von Kahr, that harmless old has-been: someone had telephoned only this morning to say he'd been dragged from his bed in his nightshirt and taken to Dachau, where no one knew what had become of him. Poor harmless Willi Schmidt had been playing his cello last night to keep the children quiet till supper was ready, when he too was dragged away—Heaven alone knows why.... And all on the Führer's orders! So this was the kind of Patriot “everything wholesome and sound in the land” should be proud to rally behind!

And yet (Father Petrus thought, as he turned down the ride which led to the Forester's house) these Kessens were fundamentally decent people; and somehow, that made it worse.... Not that he or anyone else could suppose this a massacre only of innocents: prayers for those on whom lay the heaviest guilt must expressly include the dead. Heines and Ernst and their kind were bloodstained rascals.... That made him think of Chicago, where once he had worked in a German Catholic Mission: a city where rival gangsters murdered each other with nobody minding much unless there were innocent bystanders shot by accident. Civilized Germany wasn't Chicago, however; and ours no common outlaws—no mere O'Bannions, Torrios, Gennas or Druccis! Killers and killed alike had been men deemed worthy of holding the highest offices in the State; and
this
Al Capone was Germany's Federal Chancellor, sitting in Bismarck's seat!

Order, disorder.... Here in the twilit forest all was meticulous order: pine-needles clean as a drawing-room carpet, straight lines of tree trunks at regular intervals stretching for miles.... He hardly dared glance to the side as he rode, or he might fall off: for the twinkling changes of geometrical vista exerted mesmeric effects on the passing eye.

Then he reached the deer-fence surrounding the forest nursery, looming ramparts of metal and wire like that awful Dachau camp. Inside it, delicate tree-children stood to attention in rows as stiff as their forest elders: no one a hand's-breadth taller than anyone else in his row, and no one a hair's-breadth out of line. There were tree-babies too, in long rectangular seed-beds capped with gleaming aseptic pebbles: seedling conifers only an inch or two high, and not ready yet for their first transplanting.... But now the Forester's distant watchdog had heard the sound of his sputtering engine's approach and had started to wake the echoes, till every tree trunk around him barked like a separate dog with the same identical voice.

The Forester's little daughter was freckled, and loved Father Petrus dearly. Almost before he had stopped his engine the child had climbed on his handlebars, tenderly wiping the sweat from his face with her tiny wisp of a handkerchief, trying to rub off his worried frown: for Father Petrus need worry no longer, she told him, since Granny was better.

Indeed when he climbed to the frowsty room where she should have been dying he found the old lady throned fully-dressed in a high-back chair, with a glass of schnapps in her hand.

*

After this wholly abortive Appointment with Death, Father Petrus set off for home. The schnapps he'd been plied with sang in his head, and his tiny two-stroke kept up a merry
chug-chug
: his stomach began to think about lunch. So he rode along slowly, keeping a careful look-out for Pinewood Boletus— a summer fungus to which he was equally partial roasted with onions, or flavored with fragments of ham and broiled in olive-oil seasoned with herbs, or frittered—or even with sugar and lemon-juice, ending the meal....

But then he was brought up short by the sight of an an-cient Adler, parked off the high road right at the forest's edge. He knew it at once for Colonel von Kessen's car; and why was it standing there empty? The Colonel might have gone mushrooming too: yet he couldn't be far off—not with that leg! Then he saw new wheel-marks churned in the dust which that Adler had never made—marks which looked more like a truck; and at once he forgot about lunch.

With a sinking heart he caught sight of a boot sticking out of a straggly bush too small to conceal a body. He left his machine and touched it; and found himself holding a loose artificial leg. There was blood, and the straps had been cut. On that he began to search in earnest; and found the body at last in a clump of bilberries, battered and half-undressed—stained with bilberry juice and sprinkled with pine-needles.

That's why he'd heard no shot: Otto's own leg had been used to beat him to death.

A day or two later von Kahr's body was found in a swamp near the Dachau Camp, apparently pick-axed to death. Father Stempfle was found in a wood, with a broken neck as well as shot through the heart. On the other hand, Frau Willi Schmidt—the widow of Munich's most eminent music critic— was sent not only her husband's coffin but with it a handsome apology for the mistake, and even a modest present of money. She wanted to send back the money; but Himmler himself came on the phone and “advised” her to take it with no more fuss.

In short, Father Petrus had much on his mind the day when he came to Carmel to break the news of Colonel von Kessen's death to Colonel von Kessen's niece.

The Prioress sent for Sister Mary of Bartimaeus, then had the Father sit at the Parlor grille and unburden himself of all he knew from beginning to end. Mitzi was deeply moved, and the tears trickled down her face. The Prioress watched her in silence, then took her hand and promised a Mass for the rest of her uncle's soul. But the blind nun shook her head: “You mustn't misunderstand me, Mother: I'm only crying because of my ignorance. No one had told me such wickedness could exist.”

“Man cannot live without God....” The Prioress hesitated a moment, and then went on: “But even the heathen know that. Surely the Good News Jesus of Nazareth brought was rather that God cannot do without Man, not even the men who would drive the nails. Himmler and Himmler's men are also His children.” She paused again; and then added, the ghost of a smile in her voice: “Though as to His purposes for them—as for ourselves, we can know no more about that than a tea-cup knows about tea.”

*

But once Great Silence began not even Mitzi's long detachment from home could save her from feeling bereaved. She seemed to be living in two different places at once, two different times. So many years had passed since she'd heard it, and yet Uncle Otto's voice sounded just as fresh in her ears tonight as that desolate morning his leg creaked into her room and he'd sat with her reading from Thomas à Kempis aloud:

“Yes,” she had grumbled inside herself at the time: “But suppose you call Him and Jesus won't come?” For this had been over ten years ago: she'd been little more than a child—and a juggins at that, in her fond belief she already knew God like the back of her hand.

Midnight.

Alone again in her cell, and this time in bed, she heard the distant hoot of an owl. The midsummer midnight air came through her open window and brought with it many a peaceable midnight sound, cooling her cell with all those particular garden scents one only can smell at night. Breathing this heavenly air from outside it was hard to believe there could be such evil abroad in the land. She thought of St. Peter's words: