CHAPTER LIII

 

February 23^rd 1934

 

Helen came into the sitting-room, holding a frying-pan in which the bacon was still sputtering from the fire.

      'Breakfast!' she called.

      'Komme gleich' came back from the bedroom, and a moment later Ekki showed himself at the open door in shirtsleeves, razor in hand, his fair ruddy face covered with soapsuds.

      'Almost finished,' he said in English, and disappeared again.

      Helen smiled to herself as she sat down.  Loving him as she did, she found an extraordinary pleasure in this close and incessant physical intimacy with him – the intimacy that their poverty had perforce imposed on them.  Why do people want large houses, separate rooms, all the private hiding-places that the rich find indispensable?  She couldn't imagine, now.  Humming to herself, out of tune, Helen poured out the tea, helped herself to bacon, then began to sort the morning's letters.  Helen Amberley.  No Mrs.  Communist frankness and informality.  She opened the envelope.  The letter was from Newcastle.  Would it be possible for her or Giesebrecht to speak to a group of young comrades on conditions in Germany some time in March?  Well, one would have to see.  Mr E. Giesebrecht.  From Switzerland; and surely that thin spiky writing was Holtzmann's.  Ekki would be pleased.

      'Something from Holtzmann,' she said as he came in.  'I wonder what news he'll have this time?'

      Ekki took the letter, and, with that methodical deliberation that characterized all his actions, opened it; then laid it down beside his plate and cut off a piece of bacon.  He poked the bacon into his mouth, picked up the letter again, and, slowly chewing, began to read.  An expression of intent and focused gravity came into his face; he could never do anything except thoroughly and wholeheartedly.  When he had finished, he turned back to the first page and started reading all over again.

      Helen's impatience got the better of her at last.  'Anything interesting?' she asked.  Holtzmann was the best informed of the exiled journalists; he always had something to communicate.  'Tell me what he says.'

      Ekki did not answer at once, but read on in silence for a few seconds, then folded up the letter and put it away in his pocket.  'Mach is in Basel,' he answered at last, looking up at her.

      'Mach?' she repeated.  'Do you mean Ludwig Mach?'

      In the course of these last months, the name of this most resourceful and courageous of all the German comrades engaged in the dissemination of communist propaganda and censored news had become, for Helen, at once familiar and fabulous, like the name of a personage in literature or mythology.  That Ludwig Mach should be at Basel seemed almost as improbable as that Odysseus should be there, or Odin, or the Scarlet Pimpernel.  'Ludwig Mach from Stuttgart?' she insisted incredulously.

      Ekki nodded.  'I shall have to go and see him.  Tomorrow.'

      Spoken in that slow, emphatic, foreign way of his, the words had a strange quality of absolute irrevocableness.  Even his most casual statements always sounded, when uttered in English, as though he had made them on oath.

      'I shall have to go,' he repeated.

      Carefully, conscientiously pronounced, each syllable had the same value.  Two heavy spondees and the first half of a third.  Whereas an Englishman, however irrevocably he had made up his mind, would have spoken the phrase as a kind of gobbled anapaest – I-shall-have-to-go.  In another man, this way of speaking – so ponderous, so Jehovah-like, as she herself had teasingly called it – would have seemed to Helen intolerably grotesque.  But, in Ekki, it was an added attraction.  It seemed somehow right and fitting that this man, whom (quite apart from loving) she admired and respected beyond anyone she had ever known, should be thus touchingly absurd.

      'If I couldn't laugh at him sometimes,' she explained to herself, 'it might all go putrid.  A pool of stagnant adoration.  Like religion.  Like one of Landseer's dogs.  The laughter keeps it aired and moving.'

      Listening, looking into his face (at once so absurdly ingenuous in its fresh and candid gravity and so heroically determined) Helen felt, as she had so often felt before, that she would like to burst out laughing and then go down on her knees and kiss his hands.

      'I shall have to go too,' she said aloud, parodying his way of speaking.  He thought at first that she was joking; then, when he realized that she was in earnest, grew serious and began to raise objections.  The fatigue – for they would be travelling third-class.  The expense.  But Helen was suddenly like her mother – a spoilt woman whose caprices had to be satisfied.

      'It'll be such fun,' she cried excitedly.  'Such an adventure!'  And when he persisted in being negatively reasonable, she grew angry.  'But I will come with you,' she repeated obstinately.  'I will.'

      Holtzmann met them at the station, and, instead of being the tall, stiff, distinguished personage of Helen's anticipatory fancy, turned out to be short and squat, with a roll of fat at the back of his neck, and, between little pig's eyes, a soft shapeless nose like a potato.  His hand, when she shook it, was so coldly sweaty that she felt her own defiled; surreptitiously, when he wasn't looking, she wiped it on her skirt.  But worse than even his appearance and his sweaty hands was the man's behaviour.  Her presence, she could see, had taken him aback.

      'I had not expected …' he stammered, when Ekki presented her; and his face, for a moment, seemed to disintegrate in agitation.  Then, recovering himself, he became effusively polite and cordial.  It was gnädige Frau, lieber Ekki, unbeschreiblich froh all the way down the platform.  As though he were meeting them on the stage, Helen thought.  And acting badly, what was more, like someone in a third-rate touring company.  And how detestable that nervousness was!  A man had no business to giggle like that and gesticulate and make grimaces.  Mopping and mowing, she said under her breath.  Walking beside him, she felt herself surrounded by a bristling aura of dislike.  This horrible creature had suddenly spoilt all the fun of the journey.  She found herself almost wishing that she hadn't come.

      'What a loathsome man!' she managed to whisper to Ekki, while Holtzmann was engaged in extravagantly overacting the part of one who tells the porter to be careful with the typewriter.

      'You find him so?' Ekki asked with genuine surprise.  'I had not thought …' He left the sentence unfinished and shook his head.  A little frown of perplexity wrinkled his smooth forehead.  But a moment later, interrupting Holtzmann's renewed protestations of affection and delight, he was asking what Mach thought of the present situation in Germany; and when Holtzmann replied, he listened, absorbed.

      Half angry with him for his insensitive obtuseness, half admiring him for his power to ignore everything that, to him, was irrelevant, Helen walked in silence at his side.

      'Men are extraordinary,' she was thinking.  'All the same, I ought to be like that.'

      Instead of which she allowed herself to be distracted by faces, by gigglings and gestures; she wasted her feelings on pigs' eyes and rolls of fat.  And all the time millions of men and women and children were going cold and hungry, were being exploited, were being overworked, were being treated as though they were less than human, mere beasts of burden, mere cogs and levers; millions were being forced to live in chronic fear and misery and despair, were being dragooned and beaten, were being maddened with lies and cowed with threats and blows, were being herded this way and that like senseless animals on the road to market, to an ultimate slaughter-house.  And here was she, detesting Holtzmann, because he had sweaty hands – instead of respecting him, as she should have done, for what he had dared, what he had suffered for the sake of those unhappy millions.  His hands might be sweaty; but he lived precariously in exile, had been persecuted for his principles, was a champion of justice and truth.  She felt ashamed of herself, but at the same time couldn't help thinking that life, if you were like Ekki, must be strangely narrow and limited, unimaginably without colour.  A life in black and white, she reflected, hard and clear and definite, like a Dürer engraving.  Whereas hers – hers was a vague bright Turner, a Monet, a savage Gauguin.  But 'you look like a Gauguin,' Anthony had said, that morning on the blazing roof, and here in the chilly twilight of Basel station she suddenly winced, as though with physical pain.

      'Oh, how awful,' she said to herself, 'how awful!'

      'And the labour camps,' Ekki was asking, intently, 'what does Mach say about the feeling in the labour camps?'

      Outside the station they halted.

      'Shall we begin by taking our things to a hotel?' Ekki suggested.

      But Holtzmann would not hear of it.  'No, no, you must come at once,' he insisted with a breathless emphasis.  'To my house at once.  Mach is waiting there.  Mach wouldn't understand it if there was any delay.'  But when Ekki agreed, he still stood irresolute and nervous at the pavement's edge, like a swimmer afraid to plunge.

      'What's the matter with the man?' Helen wondered impatiently; then aloud, 'Well, why don't we take a taxi?' she asked, forgetting for the moment that the time of taxis had long since come to an end.  One took trams now, one took buses.  But Gauguin had precipitated her into the past; it seemed natural to think of taxis.

      Holtzmann did not answer her; but suddenly, with the quick, agitated movements of one who has been forced by circumstances to take a disagreeable decision, caught Ekki by the arm, and, drawing him aside, began to speak to him in a hurried whisper.  Helen saw a look of surprise and annoyance come over Ekki's face as he listened.  His lips moved, he was evidently making an objection.  The other replied in smiling deprecation and began to stroke his sleeve, as though in the hope of caressing him into acquiescence.

      In the end Ekki nodded, and, turning back to Helen, 'Holtzmann wants you to join us only at lunch,' he said in his abrupt, heavy way.  'He says that Mach wouldn't like it if there is anyone besides me.'

      'Does he think I'll give him away to the Nazis?' Helen asked indignantly.

      'It isn't you,' Ekki explained.  'He doesn't know you.  If he did, it would be different.  But he is afraid.  Afraid of everyone he does not know.  And he is quite right to be afraid,' he added, in that tone of dogmatic finality which meant that the argument was closed.

      Making a great effort to swallow her annoyance and chagrin, Helen nodded her head.  'All right then,' I'll meet you at lunchtime.  Though what the point was of my coming here at all,' she couldn't help adding, 'I really can't imagine.'

      'Dear Miss Amberley, chère consoeur, gnäddige Frau, comrade …' Holtzmann overflowed with bourgeois and communist courtesies in all the languages at his disposal.  'Es tut mir leid.  So very sorry.'  But here was the address of his house.  At half-past twelve.  And if he might advise her on the best way of spending a morning in Basel …

      She slipped the card into her bag, and without waiting to listen to his suggestions, turned her back on the two men and walked quickly away.

      'Helen!' Ekki called after her.  But she paid no attention.  He did not call again.

      It was cold; but the sky was a clear pale blue, the sun was shining.  And suddenly, emerging from behind high houses, she found herself beside the Rhine.  Leaning over the parapet, she watched the green water hurrying past, silent, but swift and purposive, like a living thing, like life itself, like the power behind the world, eternally, irresistibly flowing; watched it, until at last it was as though she herself were flowing along with the great river, were one with it, a partaker of its power.  'And shall Trelawney die?  There's twenty thousand Cornish men shall know the rea-ea-easosn why.'  And suddenly it seemed certain that they would win, that the revolution was only just round the corner – there, after that first bend in the river.  Irresistibly the flood drove on towards it.  And meanwhile what a fool she had been to be cross with Ekki, what an absolute beast!  Remorse gave place, after a little, to the ecstatically tender anticipation of their reconcilement.  'Darling,' she would say to him, 'darling, you must forgive me.  I was really too stupid and odious.'  And he would put one arm round her, and with the other hand would push back the hair from her forehead and then bend down and kiss her …

      When she walked on, the Rhine was still rushing within her, and, unburdened of her offence towards Ekki, she felt immaterially light, felt almost as though she were floating – floating in a thin intoxicating air of happiness.  The starving millions receded once more into remote abstraction.  How good everything was, how beautiful, how exactly as it ought to be!  Even the fat old women were perfect, even the nineteenth-century Gothic houses.  And that cup of hot chocolate in the café – how indescribably delicious!  And the old waiter, so friendly and paternal.  Friendly and paternal, what was more, in an astonishing Swiss-German that made one want to roar with laughter, as though everything he said – from his commentaries on the weather to his complaints about the times – were one huge, continuous joke.  Such gutturals, such neighings!  Like the language of the Houyhnhnms, she thought, and led him on, with an unwearying delight in the performance, to hoick and whinny yet again.

      From the café she went on at last to the picture gallery; and the picture gallery turned out to be as exquisitely comic in its own way as the waiter's German.  Those Boecklins!  All the extraordinary pictures one had only seen on postcards or hanging, in coloured reproduction, on the walls of pensions in Dresden.  Mermaids and tritons caught as though by a camera; centaurs in the stiff ungainly positions of racehorses in a pressman's photograph.  Painted with a good faith and a laborious lack of talent that were positively touching.  And here – unspeakable joy! - was the Toteninsel.  The funereal cypresses, the white tomb-like temples, the long-robbed figures, the solitary boat on its way across the wine-dark sea … The joke was perfect.  Helen laughed aloud.  In spite of everything, she was still her mother's daughter.

      In the room of the primitives she paused for a moment, on her way out, before a picture of the martyrdom of St Erasmus.  An executioner in fifteenth-century costume, with a pale shell-pink codpiece, was methodically turning the handle of a winch – like Mr Mantalini at the mangle – winding the saint's intestines, yard after yard, out of a gash in the emaciated belly, while the victim lay back, as if on a sofa, making himself thoroughly comfortable and looking up at the sky with an expression of unruffled equanimity.  The joke here was less subtle than in the Toteninsel, more frankly a knockabout; but excellent, nonetheless, in its own simple way.  She was still smiling as she walked out into the street.

      Holtzmann, it turned out, lived only a few hundred yards from the gallery, in a pretty little early nineteenth-century house (much too good for a man with sweaty hands) set back from the road behind a little square of gravel.  A large car was standing at the door.  Holtzmann's? she wondered.  He must be rich, the old pig!  It had taken her so little time to come from the gallery that it was hardly a quarter-past twelve as she mounted the steps.  'Never mind,' she said to herself.  'They'll have to put up with me.  I refuse to wait one second longer.'  The thought that, in a moment, she would see Ekki again made her heart beat quickly.  'What a fool I am!  What an absolute fool.'  But how marvellous to be able to be a fool!  She rang the bell.

      It was Holtzmann himself who opened – dressed in an overcoat, she was surprised to see, as though he were just going out.  The expression with which he had greeted her at the station reappeared on his face as he saw her.

      'You are so soon,' he said, trying to smile; but his nervousness and embarrassment amounted almost to terror.  'We had not awaited you until half-one.'

      Helen laughed.  'I hadn't awaited myself,' she explained.  'But I got her quicker than I thought.'

      She made a movement to step across the threshold; but Holtzmann held out his arm.  'We are not yet ready,' he said.  His face was flushed and sweating with embarrassment.  'If you will return in a quarter hour,' he almost implored.  'Only a quarter hour.'

      'Nur ein Viertel Stündchen.'  Helen laughed, thinking of those embroidered cushions on the sofas where the Geheimrats slept off the effects of noonday eating.  'But why shouldn't I wait indoors?'  She pushed past him into a dark little hall that smelt of cooking and stale air.  'Where's Ekki?' she asked, suddenly overcome by the desire to see him, to see him at once, without another second's delay, so that she could tell him what a beast she had been, but how loving all the same, how adoring in spite of the beastliness, and how happy, how eager to share her happiness with him! At the other end of the vestibule a door stood ajar.  Calling his name, Helen ran towards it.

      'Stop!' Holtzmann shouted behind her.

      But she was already across the threshold.

      The room in which she found herself was a bedroom.  On the narrow iron bed Ekki was lying with all his clothes on, his head on one side, his mouth open.  His breath came slowly in long snores; he was asleep – but asleep as she had never seen him sleeping.

      'Ekki!' she had time to cry, while a door slammed, another voice joined itself to Holtzmann's, and the vestibule was loud with violent movement.  'My darling …'

      Then suddenly a hand closed on her shoulder from behind.  She turned, saw the face of a strange man within a few inches of her own, heard somewhere from the background Holtzmann's 'Schnell, Willy, schnell!' and the stranger almost whispering, between clenched teeth, 'Schmutziges Frauenzimmer'; then, as she opened her mouth to scream, received a terrible blow on the chin that brought the teeth violently together again, and felt herself dropping into blackness.

      When she came to herself, she was in bed in a hospital ward.  Some peasants had found her lying unconscious in a little wood five or six miles from the town.  An ambulance had brought her back to Basel.  It was only on the following morning that the effects of the barbitone wore off and she remembered what had happened.  But by that time Ekeki had been over the frontier, in Germany, for nearly twenty hours.