A legacy; a novel Read online

  Julius's mother died when he was a small boy. His father did not remarry, no female relative was called in and the house went on being run by an elderly majordomo. They were all taught early, Julius said, to order their own dinner. The boys, in fact, took their place at table at twelve, not as children but as sons of the house, drinking their wine and doing their share as hosts. They entertained their neighbours as little as possible. Baden, the old Baron said, had turned dowdy in the Sixties—the men dressed badly and the women were interested in nothing. Yet the house was always full; with scientists and travellers and collectors from all over Europe, with gentlemen of decided hobbies, with old beaux, with cousins and gourmets and the sons of the relics of the French Revolution, and there was always a warm welcome at Landen for quacks. In this household my father remained until he was seventeen years old.

  Then he was asked to accompany a Prince of Baden of the same age on an educational tour. The rest of the suite consisted of the Prince's tutor Herr von L., one equerry, a courier and a valet, and they stayed away some years. They went to France, where they were inscribed at the Beaux-Arts and Julius took lessons in furniture designing and began his lifelong siege of the Hotel des Ventes, and met the women who pleased him among the grandes cocottes of the Second Empire. They went to Spain, to Portugal, and thence by sea to Italy. On Julius's insistence they went to Spanish Morocco, and on Herr von L.'s to Greece. They returned by way of Vienna, stayed at the Hofburg and the young men had their glimpse of the Empress Elizabeth. They did the usual things and saw the expected people. They sketched; looked at sights; went to dances. They hunted in the Guadarrama, were at Seville for Holy Week one year and at Venice for the Carnival the next; they called at the proper courts, had their fortunes told by a gypsy under the walls of the Alhambra and paid their respects at Rome; yet Julius's pursuits and will must have dominated the party, for they spent the best of their time looking at houses and browsing in antique shops. Julius always loved France, but he was swept off his feet by Spain. In Italy he knew already what he was looking for and found less of it; in Greece their travelling became more strenuous—he was enchanted by the ritual of Mediterranean living he found among goatherds and fishermen, and hardly touched by anything else. He returned to Landen as a young man, with a lemur, some crates full of bric-a-brac, and a clear idea of how he wished to spend his life.

  It was after 1870; the Franco-Prussian War had been fought while Julius was in Spain, Baden was now a part of Germany, and he found everything quite changed.

  The Feldens, like many people in those parts, would have preferred to stay on as they were. They had not liked the idea of even a Southern-German Federation, and had it not meant giving up the monarchy they would not have minded being joined to France. The accomplished fact of a wholly German Union with and—worse—headed by Prussia in the wake of a French defeat in a gratuitous war, gave them a most unpleasant shock. No good would come of it, the old Baron said, and his tenants said the same; politics were an activity of plotters, of whom Bismarck was a fair example. They decided to wash their hands of the new Empire—it could not make any difference to themselves. And then all at once the most unlikely people were in uniform. Land values were going down and everything else became expensive. Anyone wanting the quietest post was asked for qualifications. Baron Felden believed himself on the brink of ruin; neighbours came and badgered him about providing careers for his four sons. He was seventy himself and, without realizing it, had always done as he pleased; now they told him one must swim with the

  times. There had never been any talk of this kind at Lan-den; before his tour Julius had wanted to be an amateur cabinetmaker and his brother Johannes an animal trainer. The old man got rattled and Johannes, at fifteen, was carted off to a cadet corps to be made into an officer; Julius, who was too old for this fate, was boarded with a crammer at Bonn to be got through the new examinations for the Diplomatic Service. The lemur died.

  The old Baron's choice had not been wise. At any event it was made too late. Johannes, rather unbelievably, became a captain; my father never got beyond third secretary, and at his chance resigned. But Johannes also became simple and in due course the pivot of a cause celebre; Julius in most respects managed to fare better, but the changes sprung on him gave him a distrust of life and he adjusted himself with a twist that left him, too, at odd angles with reality. He saw forces everywhere he wished only to dodge, not understand, and existence governed by a sequence of fortuitous blows. He had a long run of successful elusion of what he feared, but he believed it to be always at his heels, and his own great talent for the grace of living was mined by that streak of pessimism, gloom and caution which must have made life seem to him such a precarious course, and life with him so peculiar. One could never tell, he used to say, what one might find upon returning from a journey. It was most catching. And by his side, up on the box, about to turn into our drive, my heart too contracted and my hand stole to my forehead for a protective sign as we sat, my father and I, joggled, silent, trying each for himself to lay the vision of the house burnt to the ground.

  The rigours of the Prussian cadet institutions were notorious and intentional. They were places where boys— the sons usually of military gentlemen, and sometimes from as young as nine—were left to spend seven or eight

  years in a formative atmosphere of organized hunger, brutality and spiritual deprivation. There they were drilled into rigidity on frosty mornings with smallarms, von Moltke, the Army Manual, Julius Caesar and the campaigns of Frederic the Great. Many died. Of dysentery or pneumonia in the infirmaries—no boy was sent, or after one experience would go, to these for less—of injuries, never reported, never mentioned, suffered in the dormitories after dark. The survivors were released at eighteen as career officers and defective human beings. Corps Benz-heim on the Rhine, a recent foundation, was only newly Prussian but a good self-conscious copy of the originals. Johannes went out of his mind.

  He could not have been less prepared. He, who in his ample home had always had a sunny bedroom to himself and his three large dogs, who had eaten fresh food brought in from their own farms, who had always been spoken to and been taught to speak with gentle courtesy to everyone, who had spent his days in the fields and his evenings round a polished table, Johannes, who had not even been a schoolboy, but was shaped into an unconscious blend of fine animal, young gentleman and happy child, was locked to sleep in a dormitory with forty breathing humans, shouted at by corporals and prefects, marched along corridors and dished out slops in an enamel mug. On his first night, at supper, he cried. As the clatter of the refectory, the commands, the gaslight, the fumes of thin soup and undrained greens broke in on him, he burst into open tears. A Rousseau flavour still lingered about Landen, and the old gentlemen his father's guests wept freely. Johannes did not know the century had changed. He did not know, he could not know, what tears meant at Benzheim. For an instant he was looked upon with awe—this display of what no one ever might uncover could only be an enormous, an unimaginable act of daring. Then they loathed him. The captain with the game leg who was on surveillance limped by, eyes averted. The word later went almost audibly through everybody's mind. The head boy of his table, a cadet of seventeen, leant forward and stared at Johannes cold and hard. The others followed. The faces of two or three of the smaller boys began to work, one yelped out a snicker. They subsided at once. Johannes, locked in his homesickness, lifted his childish streaming face, unseeing. Then there came a diversion: it was Thursday night, and on Thursday night they were given meatballs for their supper. There were other meat days—Irish stew on Wednesday at midday, beef-and-gravy for Sunday dinner, all wolfed— but the Thursday meatballs were the big treat, the one good thing in all the week.

  The story of Johannes's first evening at Benzheim was a part of the experience of my childhood. I knew it at a time when the turn of his affairs had made my father my only companion and me the only company of his later years. I was seven, then eight, then nine. By day I playe
d alone; at night in a high-ceilinged room my father told a lighter version of his life, and I concealed my knowledge. Thus the memory of the boy who was a man and died before I was as much as born, and of the school I never saw, were part of the secret reality of my own past.

  They called the meatballs klops. An orderly went round and ladled out two grey pellets on each thick white plate. The cadets did not take up their forks. They tried not to look at the food, they tried not to look at each other; they did not know where to look. They did not know what to do with their hands. Then the prefect, Stubendltester was the unprepossessing term, went off like a firecracker. The sound was something like Klawp/sah RHOWFF! and it was an order. Twenty-three white china disks flew up, changed hands, whirled through the air, tilted on the same angle at the head, flew on—it was a dazzling manoeuvre, executed like a variety turn. Johannes sat up, friendly and captivated.

  The prefect rapped RrrrhALT! and the plates grounded smoothly. There was a plate once more in front of every boy and about ten of them were empty; and there was now before the prefect's place a neat mound of meatballs. He shovelled, fast as fast, a klops at a time. The boys kept their poses. Then he put down the fork and cracked his sound. The plates circled; six more were cleared. They landed with Johannes's full one conspicuous in their middle.

  "You there, pass up your plate," said the prefect. "And mind you know how to next week. Tonight you may take it up to me yourself."

  Johannes did not budge.

  "Did you hear me?" said the prefect. He did not speak, he shouted.

  "Yes," said Johannes.

  "Bring up your platel"

  "No," said Johannes.

  The walls did not come down.

  "Oh it isn't that I want to eat it," said Johannes. Then, fearing he'd been rude about the food in someone's house, he said, "You see, I'm not hungry," and began to weep again. Johannes's German was deplorable, full of wrong inflections and French words, and he spoke it with the buzzing slur of the Baden peasants.

  The cadets acted sniggers.

  Johannes turned to a boy of twelve. "Have mine," he said, "won't you?"

  The boy recoiled but knew it was too late. He had looked at the new monster's plate; he was included in his doom.

  "I am waiting," said the prefect.

  "You had enough," said Johannes. "It is disgusting to eat up other people's dinners. They look as if they wanted them themselves."

  There was a swell of embarrassment.

  "Stand up when you speak to me," said the prefect.

  "Pourquoi done?" said Johannes.

  "STAND UP."

  "This is very silly," said Johannes.

  There was a stiffening—the captain on the round stood by Johannes's chair. "Get up," he said.

  Johannes got up.

  "Name?"

  "We already met, Monsieur VOfficier, you very kindly showed me upstairs this afternoon."

  The captain was the physics master. The masters at Benzheim were Army officers, and a tricky lot; men whose physique was too poor for soldiering and whose talents or connections had failed to get them a staff appointment. "Name?" the captain said.

  "Johannes von Felden."

  "Cadet von Felden," said the captain, leaning on his stick, "I must remind you, One: your Stubenaltester is your immediate superior; Two: your display of civilian humour is out of place at Benzheim, and will not be tolerated."

  "Do I have to do everything he tells me, sir?" said Johannes.

  "You heard me. In future you will address me as Herr Hauptmann."

  "Yes, Herr Hauptmann."

  "We have had enough of your Yes's and No's, Cadet von Felden. The correct form is 'At your orders, Herr Hauptmann.' That is all. Cadets, you may finish your supper."

  Johannes picked up his plate and took it to the head of the table. He put it before the prefect with a slight bow. "Monsieur, vous me degoutez" he said, and returned to his chair.

  The prefect resumed command; the plates circulated— four untouched lots remained. As he chewed he pulled out his watch, laid it on the table, then went, Faaahll/ T TSOOH! and the four boys before whom full plates

  happened to have come down, ate. It was forty seconds to go till grace, they had long finished their bread and mug of cocoa, and the wretched minced meat was stone cold.

  That night in the dormitory they fell on him. They did not have an easy time of it, for Johannes was very strong. In fact anywhere else, his strength, his innocence and his beauty— "ah, il etait beau" my father had once said— would have saved him. He fought like a beast at bay—he sprang, he charged, he bit; he clawed, he bucked; but no one accused him of fighting like a girl, and what unnerved them most was the noise he made. He growled, he covered them with injurious French, "Qa, alors ca — ca c'est trop fort!" He howled in the dark from the top of his lungs, great loud forest howls of rage and pain, and they knew that silence during these affairs was of the essence. But at the end they were too many for him. He mauled them, but they mauled him badly; and when rather sooner though than they had meant they let him go, Johannes was in a pitiable state. He leapt on his bunk with a cry of, "Vous n'etes qu'une bande de mal-elevesV* trembling with fury. And so outraged was he, so aching and incredulous that, overcome, he fell asleep at once, and for the first time perhaps at Benzheim a new boy went to bed on his first night without a thought of home.

  Next morning he walked out.

  He was waked by an enormous bell. He was so beaten up that he could hardly move and it was very cold. He followed the others—washed before a line of tin basins, got dressed as he was expected, joined the stampede downstairs for early rollcall. He stood in the yard with them, at attention in the March wind. When they re-formed for tramping in to prep he walked off. He just walked off. A couple of officers looked up, Johannes walked on. A sentry called a question, Johannes walked by—across the square,

  past the guardhouse, through the gate, down the hill, into the town—

  He did not last long. He was picked up a few hours later at an inn as he was trying to get them to let him have a meal and advance the money for a telegram home, and was rather impressively arrested. The town of course was out of bounds, though permission was usually given to spend an hour with a visiting relative. It was one of those quaint German market towns, all scrape-and-bow and nook-and-beam, and the inhabitants were making quite a good thing out of the hungry cadets, yet their hearts were with the authorities and the band, and the streets were full of cakeshops, sausage butchers and spies. Johannes's full intentions were not grasped. The charge was absence without leave, and as he was new, and probably a halfwit, they let it go at that. He was arraigned at rollcall, caned and locked up for forty-eight hours in a cell. When they let him out he sprang at the lieutenant and bit him through the uniform. He was handcuffed, tried, sentenced and locked up again. After that he became more tractable. As he could not spell and could hardly write, they put him in the lowest form and he held himself very quiet. The small boys never managed to keep all the rules, they were always having something buttoned the wrong way or staying in bed ten seconds after bell or dropping the soap because their hands were cold, and they were always being punished, and among them Johannes was rather less conspicuous. Even so discretion was not his strong suit: he yet had much to learn. He betrayed himself into an argument—disinterested, as he was not slow— against the Benzheim custom of penalizing every day and on all occasions the boy who happened to be last in any move. Johannes though under-educated was rational and he was struck by the point that someone or other had to be last through any door, and he pressed it. And when at the fortnightly half-hour he was told to write his letter home, he covered a copybook page with his laborious scrawl in utter confidence. One can imagine what followed. Later the letter was put into a dossier and the poor scrap survived.

  Ce Dimanche 28 Mars i8y . . . Cher Papa, Je suis fort malheureux. Tous le monde ici est fou. Mes earnerades sont des me chant. Quand je suis parti ils mon prit et fat fait de la prison.
IL FAUT EN-VOYER ME CHERCHER TOUS DE SUITE je vous embrasse Embrassez pour moi Jules, Ursus et Ulysse, Zoro et le Petit Gabriel votre bien malheureux

  Fils Jean

  All in all he was much in trouble. His reputation had become bad and he was watched. And so it took him several weeks before he got away again.

  Julius meanwhile did not fare too badly at his crammer's. The work surprised and bored him—"at my age!"— and there was rather an amount of it. Unlike his brother's, his hand was formed and ornamental; but like Johannes's it was illegible, and like Johannes he had never learnt to spell. He was also vexed by the necessity impressed upon him to become correct in German, pointing out that as he was supposed to be sent en poste elsewhere it would surely be more sensible to learn languages. There were compensations. Bonn was not at the end of the world, and there was an excellent train service. Every week he spent a day or two in Holland or in Belgium, looking at Bruges and Ghent, eating oysters at Amsterdam, gutting antique shops, walking evening streets in Brussels and waterfronts at Antwerp and Delft. He looked: he picked up things: he learnt. It was still a time of finds, and he developed an eye and a shrewd manner with the dealers. At

  Liege he stalked a table for three weeks. "Quel dommage" cried the shopman, "qu'un homme si elegant puisse etre aussi radin."