The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  Allowing for rhetorical exaggeration, there was very little in Irma’s speech with which Toby did not agree. Her sins of omission were glaring. Not a word of the courageous Stresemann, nor of the violence that deprived and continued to deprive the individual of his most ordinary rights, nor of the plain fact that if there were one country in Europe absolutely safe from aggression, it was Germany. But so far as she went, it was a fine, worldly creed.

  “A true, pure German woman!” declared Toby’s neighbour enthusiastically. “A true, pure German woman!”

  Toby cordially agreed, with amused mental reservation that she was Austrian on her passport, pure in no ordinarily accepted sense, and had the blood of every conquering tribe that had ever passed over Europe. He longed to meet Irma and to find out what had happened to her. His instinct told him that it was quite natural for her to have become a Nazi, but the logical steps by which she had arrived were for the moment beyond him.

  She was followed by two male speakers who dealt with the problem of foreign trade and Mexican trade in particular. Sacrifice for the strength of the fatherland was the keynote of their speeches. They were received with startling enthusiasm. It saddened Toby. The readiness of men to make sacrifices for an ideal was so beautiful, and, to his mind, it was being prostituted.

  When speeches were over, Irma was surrounded by a group of minor diplomats and prominent businessmen; to join them might merely embarrass her, and nothing whatever could be said. He therefore bade a formal and flowery farewell to the secretary of the Sportverein and explained that the Countess von Reichensund was an old friend of his, that he did not wish to disturb her at the moment and that he would leave his card in case she wished to telephone him at his hotel.

  A little after midnight when he was undressing for bed Irma called him up. She seemed enthusiastic, frankly delighted to hear of him. Toby was amused by his own feeling of surprise—he had felt it a dozen times before, but never quite got over it—that Nazis and Communists, Seventh-Day Adventists and any other followers of fanatical religions, were ordinary human beings with ordinary friendly emotions in their daily lives.

  “Where are you staying?” he asked.

  “Here! Under the same roof, Toby!”

  “Good God! Would it be proper to call on you?”

  “Why not?” she laughed. “I’d love to see you. No. 562. The floor below you. Turn left—no, right—when you come down the stairs!”

  “Shall I bring a drink?”

  “Do! A little wine-cup was all I got at the Sportverein. They were all so shy of me.”

  Toby had a bottle of champagne and two glasses sent up to his room, and then carried the tray down to hers. Irma was far more recognisable in the intimacy of a room. She had changed into a suit of black velvet pyjamas, luxurious but neutral as a dinner jacket. He shook her hand, the firm grip prohibiting his original intention of kissing it.

  “But you’ve grown a man, Toby!” she exclaimed in surprise, as if she had been a friend of his mother who had last seen him in sailor suits.

  “Time passes,” he replied, “except for you.”

  “I? God knows what I must look like. I’m as old as the hills.”

  “You were thirty on the twenty-ninth of September.”

  Irma smiled at him, touched by his memory.

  “Tell me, what are you doing in Mexico?” she asked. “Do you live here?”

  “No, I’m just finishing a business trip through Spanish America.”

  “I too. A lecture trip, at least.”

  “I thought the Nazis didn’t employ women.”

  “We do not. And that is right, Toby,” she answered, a little challengingly. “But there are a few of us who have the privilege of working for the Führer. I asked to be allowed to talk to German women abroad, and they let me. I take no salary and I serve as best I can.”

  “And that’s uncommonly well!” he said. “You Germans seem to have a genius for propaganda. I wish I did!”

  “What are you selling, Toby? Aeroplanes?”

  “Nothing so aristocratic. Toys!”

  “Heavens! And I thought you’d be an international celebrity by now!”

  They compared notes for quarter of an hour with growing confidence. Her tour had been the shorter, but it seemed probable that they had twice been in the same town at the same time. Their reactions to that outer skin of life which could be seen with the eyes and felt through casual contacts with other human beings were enjoyably the same.

  “Congratulations on your speech!” said Toby, refilling the glasses.

  “Thank you. But they are undeserved. I’ve spoken something like it so many times. You’re a fascist, I suppose?”

  “God forbid!”

  “Of course!” she laughed. “You wouldn’t be. You were always so English. A good old-fashioned liberal. What’s good for England is good for the rest of the world—is that it, Toby?”

  “Well, in these days, not altogether!” he answered. “But I won’t talk politics. I want to hear about you. Are you married?”

  “I was. My husband died six years ago.”

  “I’m awfully sorry.”

  “It’s just as well, perhaps. He could never have adjusted himself to the Third Reich.”

  Toby was startled by this hardness.

  “You’re shocked,” said Irma, seeing the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes die away, and well remembering the sign. “I was very fond of him. But it’s all over long ago. And it’s true that he would have been very unhappy.”

  “Hm’m,” he remarked, sipping his champagne. “I can’t imagine what took you into this game, Irma.”

  “Game! Do you call the life and death of a nation a game?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “Oh, Toby! You are so absurd!” Irma exclaimed, with a half-angry laugh. “It really is time that you began to take life seriously.”

  “I suppose it is,” he replied. “But tell me more about yourself. No children, I suppose?”

  “No,” answered Irma suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Your body. It’s as beautiful as ever.”

  “That isn’t what you meant.”

  “It’s what I said.”

  She took refuge in her sex.

  “Haven’t I changed a great deal?”

  “More character in the face. But just as lovely.”

  Irma touched his hand with a gesture of gratitude. Toby kissed the slender arm, and she drew it away sharply.

  “Comrades, Toby!”

  “As you wish.”

  “I should like to keep you in my life if you don’t make it impossible. Please forget all about Vienna.”

  “I shall never forget Vienna,” Toby answered. “But I wasn’t thinking of it at all just then. Only of you—as you are.”

  “I wish you didn’t always say the right thing, my old Toby,” Irma snapped. “It’s not sincere.”

  “Must I always be sincere?”

  “With me—yes!”

  “Start, then. I know you want to.”

  “Very well! Understand that I have too much to do. I don’t want you or any other man. If I did, I should get into that bed with you and forget you the next day. There!”

  “I’m glad you said any other man,” he replied. “It eases the sting. But it’s nice to hear you want to keep me in your life. Shall we have a meal together to-morrow?”

  “I can’t manage it any day, Toby,” she answered regretfully. “I’m booked up. You see, I’m a sort of roving diplomat. They think I’m important.”

  “I’m sure they do. I do. As a matter of fact, I expected to find you dressed up in boots and breeches and a damned great gun. But I gathered you didn’t want me to be too shy.”

  “Wretch!” exclaimed Irma, laughing. “But be at home between five and six to-morrow. I might co
me.”

  The following day was pleasant, with nothing to be done but tidy up some loose ends of Hanson & Crane’s business in Herr Xabec’s office and bask in his gratitude. The old gentleman wanted to hear all about the meeting of the previous night; not that he cared what had been said, but he was anxious that Monsieur Manning should have been treated with fitting hospitality and given plenty of beer to wash down the distasteful politics.

  “A woman!” he exclaimed on hearing of the Countess von Reichensund. “And the only sense in the Nazi programme was that women were to return to the home! There they had an idea. When I was young there were no women in offices and no unemployment. Des farceurs! Des exaltés! She was pretty?”

  “Well, no,” answered Toby doubtfully. “An aristocratic type. An Austrian. Delightful to look at, but not pretty.”

  “Ah! She was plump!”

  “No. Very slim.”

  “Impossible, cher collègue! You say she was aristocratic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then she was plump,” said José Xabec with great satisfaction.

  He smacked his lips, wagging his perky little imperial, and winked at Toby.

  “I am young again, Monsieur Manning! Ah, the little Austrians! So well-born! So plump as partridges! I am young again, Monsieur Manning, and it is thanks to you. I shall do big business for you—big business.”

  Toby led him out to a heavy farewell lunch, and then suggested that they should spend the afternoon with the horse-dealers; not that he intended to buy in Mexico City, but he needed to know the main points of pack horses and pack saddles and what he ought to pay for them. He reckoned that no member of that generation which considered the aristocratic type to be plump could be entirely ignorant of horses. José Xabec turned out to be an expert, for he had traded all over the country before the completion of the railways. He haggled with the dealers, lectured Toby, checked and corrected Manuel’s lists, and swore that he had not so enjoyed himself for forty years. Hearing that the mysterious goods would be heavy and of little bulk—and suspecting them to be cartridges—he purchased two saddles with deep and narrow panniers of the type used by the army for the transport of pom-pom shells and boxes of ammunition.

  Toby sent these forward to Durango, escorted Herr Xabec to his office and returned to his hotel. While waiting for Irma in his room he opened a bottle of wine and smoked a pipe over maps of the states of Durango and Zacatecas. He discovered his plans to be deplorably vague. It was all very well for Manuel to say that the venture would be easy for a respectable commercial traveller with letters from his consul and a face that moved policemen to courtesy; there would be too many days when he would need Manuel’s genius for swift action in emergencies. The real trouble was how and when to transfer the contents of the pack saddles to a trunk or suitcases—how, in fact, to get the gold out of the primitive world of the sierra into the civilised and impressionable world of railways and customs officials. At some point human beings must know that he had arrived from nowhere, alone and therefore at once arousing curiosity, and that he was proposing to depart by train with the valuables that his string of horses had carried packed away in heavy baggage.

  Logically and inevitably the change-over must take place in a hotel or railway station, and suspicion must be aroused—to be passed on in due season to train conductors and customs officials. The transfer from pack saddle to suitcase could not be made in open country; it would mean that he must first deposit the empty baggage in some hiding-place, then fill it, and then, since the horses could not carry the extra weight, hire a car or wagon to take the bags to a railway station—a proceeding which would make him a suspected character for miles around. A car of his own would solve the problem, but it was out of the question. He had not the money to buy one—indeed the purchase of horses and the financing of the adventure would mean using all his own funds and temporarily lending himself some of Hanson & Crane’s as well—and to hire one was impossible, since he would have to leave it at a station or the frontier.

  The best route seemed to be on a through train to New York. Everyone was agreed that neither the United States nor the Mexican customs examined baggage so long as the passenger looked respectable and had a transit visa and his steamship ticket. The alternative was to sail from Vera Cruz. There the Mexicans did not as a rule compel a traveller to open his baggage, but they were unaccountable. They might choose that very day to look for an escaping archbishop hidden in somebody’s socks.

  There was a cheerful rat-tat on his door.

  “Can I come in?” Irma asked.

  Toby opened the door and she strode into the room, a semi-military overcoat swirling above her ankles and a dashing felt hat of copper brown on her fair hair. She was magnificent, her cheeks glowing from the sharp spring wind that reminded Mexico City of its seven thousand feet above the sea.

  “Heil! ” said Toby, flinging up his right hand. “How’s Colonel Storm-Leader von Reichensund?”

  “Schön! Toby, what a glorious country! Why didn’t we conquer it instead of the Spaniards?”

  “Who’s we?”

  “The Nordic peoples.”

  “Still too backward in those days, Herr Oberleutnant. We couldn’t be expected to compete with civilised men. But don’t be depressed! The Nordics and the negroes will both revert to a cultured Mediterranean type in time.”

  “Toby! Have you been drinking?”

  “If you mean—have I been quenching a normal thirst and do I dislike water, the answer is yes.”

  “I thought so. It isn’t the real you to talk like a Jew in a café.”

  “That depends on the Jew and the café,” said Toby, laughing. “Sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing in the great outdoors.”

  Irma flung off her warlike coat, looked into Toby’s amused and gentle eyes and flung off her warlike mood as well.

  “Paying official calls,” she answered, dropping into a deep chair and stretching herself. “Lunch at the Legation. A talk to the German women this afternoon. Interview with two Aryan cinema proprietors at four. And I’m dining at the Consulate to-night.”

  “Good God! Don’t you ever rest?”

  “Betweenwhiles. And I’m resting now.”

  “Thank you!”

  “I thought so much about you after you left last night. You’re so intelligent, Toby. You always were.”

  “Like a Jew in a café?”

  “No, fool! That’s intellectualism, not intelligence. I hate intellectuals. But that doesn’t mean that I love stupidity. I can relax with you. That’s why I don’t want to lose you altogether again.”

  “Well, don’t vanish as you did last time. What happened to you?”

  “Nothing! I led a silly useless sort of life in Prague, while my aunt trotted out a mixed bag of hochwohlgeboren bachelors for me. Dear God, I was bored! But it was better than making you miserable or living on nothing but cabbage soup. I lived and ate and was polite—and three-quarters of me were dead. And finally I married the man who seemed the least dull. It was all right, my marriage”—she shrugged her square, nervous shoulders with a gesture that dismissed as a futility the past tenderness. “—And after he died, I took a flat in Berlin and amused myself. It was disgusting, Toby. I went to pieces. And then I was saved. I found the Leader. I have been a Nazi since 1930.”

  Toby said nothing. His imagination took him through every move and emotion in that short history. It was the tragedy of the generation, the tragedy that Mark Ottery had so well defined. Only in his country they believed in nothing and in Germany they were ready to believe in anything.

  “When do you go home?” he asked, finding that she had said all she was going to.

  “On Saturday. I’m going by New York.”

  “Damn!”

  “Why damn?”

  “We might have travelled together. But I have to stay here another week or two.”<
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  “I’d like to stay too,” said Irma. “I’ve nothing to do now and I love Mexico. But I’m stale, Toby. I want to go home. I’m sick of all these self-satisfied Auslandsdeutsche. They think of nothing but foreign trade. They must learn to make sacrifices. We make enough in Germany.”

  Toby suddenly saw his plan of campaign. He knew her to be the soul of honour within her own lights, and if she had been an active Nazi since 1930 she must have had some experience of illegalities. Cruel she might be. A fanatic she certainly was. But he could choose no more trustworthy companion than a fanatic whose interests were not concerned with money, whose creed in fact recommended a stern and Spartan simplicity.

  “Why don’t you drive to the frontier?” he suggested. “You could get away from ungrateful businessmen and see something of the country at the same time.”