The Black Laurel

by Storm Jameson

  She was uninterested in his release, because she had not noticed that he was away. Trembling from head to foot, she walked about the room, moving things with her narrow slightly deformed hands, her hair loose, one arm thickened by yards of valuable old lace.

  “Why don’t you go and live with Sophy?” he asked her. “She could give you eight or nine rooms without noticing that you were there.”

  “Unfortunately I should notice her,” his sister said calmly, “and the abominable American habits she caught from her mother of washing and greasing herself. Thank you, we’ll stay here — at least until the Bolshies come. Then away, away.”

  She waved her hand holding a Meissen bust of their greatgrandfather and set it down without noticing that she had knocked off one of the ears. Her brother’s habit of deferring to her was too strong for him to think of protest. He left the house.

  It was a warm day, one of those days, rare in Berlin, when a light the colour of honey softens its depraved clarity. Where he was walking, there was little for it to soften except ruins; doing its best with these, it created something gravely nostalgic, like the memory of a child’s pleasure in coloured postcards of foreign cities. Rechberg limped through the streets with the certainty of a sleepwalker; he neither saw the rubble lying everywhere nor stumbled over it. He was even happy. Blessedly floating round him were images of Gerdnau, as it had been during his childhood. For a few minutes the Lithuanian groom who taught him to ride and shoot was walking beside him; he had been called “the Russian” or “Russky” by the other servants; he was good-humoured, placid; his body hid a dangerous liveliness in its stolid limbs: the boy loved him. Now, feeling Russky near him, and catching glimpses of the birches, a corner of the stables, the lake, he felt a delusive joy. He knew, alas, that it was an illusion; he could not go on living in it without an effort he was too sane to make. Already a wall in front of him was showing monstrous premonitory symptoms. He dragged himself past it, thinking feverishly: Why didn’t the general ask me about Kalb? Was it a trap? Could it be anything but a trap?

  Under whatever else, even more important, might be occupying his mind, he thought about the looted paintings and speculated on his chances of being caught and disgraced. One part of him did not admit that it was disgraceful to fill Gerdnau with jewels their original owners were unworthy to keep. The proper place for them was in Germany, and in the sweet kernel of Germany — that is, Gerdnau. He knew this. With passion, as he knew that his mother had been a saint, he knew it. Yet it was not only the fear of being found out that poisoned him now. There was the germ of a different knowledge. Had he sinned? Is it barely conceivable that the act of rescuing a masterpiece from barbarian Potockis, Zamoyskis, and what not, is something a thought less delicate? And he was being forced to tell about it lies on lies, each lie a new degree of corruption, becoming incurable. . .

  Sin or not, if he were exposed and disgraced, he would feel as a Frenchman is said to have felt after the battle of Montcontour; that it had pleased God to abandon his own. . .

  He stumbled. The core of pain in his eyes, since the hours — weeks — in front of the scorching lamp used by the Russian officials, was still there, liable to stab him at any moment. If he could sleep it away — but he was afraid of sleep. I must see a doctor, he thought. Or Father Husen.

  He had reached Leist’s room. Knocking, he went straight in, as simply as he would have walked into Leist’s grandfather’s cottage in Gerdnau. Leist was bent over a suitcase he was packing. He swung round. Seeing who it was, he showed his horse’s teeth in a benevolent smile.

  “Come in, come in. I’ve been anxious about you. Where have you been hiding since Saturday? The princess told me you were out, but that was perhaps what you had ordered her to say?”

  Drily — he was offended by Leist’s new habit of speaking to him as though they were on some footing of equality:

  “In fact I was arrested by the English authorities. I’ve only just been released.”

  “Ah. Because they knew where you’d been? Or because of Kalb? How lucky, by the way, that Kalb was removed while still only on the track of things. If he is beheaded —”

  Rechberg interrupted — in spite of himself.

  “If —?”

  “The English,” said Leist, with a smile, “are notoriously silly about justice. . . I was forgetting — you’d gone when he was arrested, you don’t know the details. It couldn’t have been more providential — I’d made a very simple arrangement, to have him picked up by the Russians and sent away. . . who would have bothered about him? The clumsy fellow wandered into a genuine looting affair; he was handed over to the English — and so on and so forth. You know the rest.”

  “I thought...” began Rechberg.

  He was silent. With an atrocious pang, he realised that Kalb was innocent Until this moment he had taken it as past doubt that a Jew accused of an unpleasant crime is guilty; his trouble had been to convince himself that when Kalb disappeared he would be safe. Without understanding what he was thinking, he thought: I shall be punished for this. . . Leist’s face had begun to swell at one side and a roguishly merry eye was opening in the rosy cheek. Trembling, he looked away from it.

  The door opened again and young Gerlach came in. He looked ill. His face twitched; he made no pretence at politeness. Sauntering across the room to the bed, he sat there sullenly, head hanging down, without a word.

  Rechberg had an impulse to turn him out of the room; he had no patience with the young man’s nerves and believed that he showed off. He controlled himself; the ill-mannered puppy was Lucius’s affair. His eyelids quivered and fell; he dropped giddily into a pit of blackness: round him, in menacing disorder, floated objects from his sister’s room, with parts of Mechtilde herself; one of her eyes, enormous, spiteful, gazed at him from the rim of a cup, a bunch of deformed fingers hung down, and her profile, stammering, gave birth to two others.

  As though he were coming out of an anæsthetic, he heard fragments of conversation. The young man had begun to talk in a rapid undertone. With a confused horror he thought they were discussing his cousin Gerlach’s death. When had he died?. . . “You’ve forgotten, my boy,” said Leist calmly, “that if he were fished out it would only be one of hundreds of drowned unrecognisable bodies. . . ” Opening his eyes, Rechberg asked,

  “What bodies are you talking about? What’s this about Lucius?”

  The young man glanced at him; he had been crying. Rechberg saw Leist stoop over him with a cruelly sharp smile. . . “You even talk like a schoolboy,” he said coldly: “do you think you will be able to control your romantic emotions, or shall I help you?”

  Vexed, young Gerlach got up from the bed. Without glancing at Leist, he said,

  “When I need your help I’ll ask for it.” He turned to Rechberg and said coolly and haughtily, “You might as well know; it’s not your business, but you are at least a decent chap, one can talk to you —”

  Placing his hand on the young man’s shoulder, Leist said drily,

  “Leave the baron alone. You’re hysterical. Go home and get Maria to put you to bed.”

  Had the young man become limp and tearful again? Was his scar really moving and wriggling through the drawn skin of his temple at that side?

  “She bolted on Sunday.”

  “Well, bless me, go home and put yourself to bed,” Leist said: he was speaking with a genial brutality. “I’ll find something for you to do. Off you go.”

  He pushed the young man out of the room. Smiling,

  “I had no idea your young cousin — he is your cousin, I think? — was a neurotic. I’m afraid he’s useless.”

  To sleep, Rechberg thought. Only to sleep. There must be a region, below or beyond nightmare, where he could pick up again the decent sanity of his life. God hasn’t abandoned me, he thought. He made an effort to control his thoughts.

  “Why was Rudolf Gerlach crying like an idiot?”

  “How do you expect him to cry?. . . I don’t like admitti
ng it, but as a people we are hysterical — in the same way as the French are greedy and the English slow-witted. One of our illnesses is the effect on immature minds of defeat, and at least part of the remedy lies in purging anyone who thinks he must preach guilt and atonement. Your nervous young cousin has only too much guilt!”

  None of it is true, Rechberg thought: I dreamed it. In the same moment he knew that he would have to question young Gerlach. Forcing himself to sit upright, he looked closely at his hands; they had not yet betrayed him by learning to see or laugh.

  “Well?” Leist said. “Are you satisfied that the persons you’ve been talking to are serious?”

  He shuddered. Fear, resentment, a sense of error, struggled in him with an obscure fascination. He said slowly,

  “What impressed me was the energy I felt in them. It comes from a continent of peasants and barbarians. What couldn’t such ruthlessness and vitality achieve in civilised hands?”

  Leist looked at him with a gentle irony.

  “In your hands, you mean. Listen — I know that the reason you agreed to talk to them had nothing to do with your intentions. All you meant was to allow your English colleagues to suspect you of intriguing with the naughty Russians. Isn’t that so? But, suppose, just suppose, that they and not the bankrupt English or the fat leeches in America are the victors? What then, my friend?”

  Rechberg groaned, scarcely knowing it.

  “I’m told they’re destroying the library at Gerdnau.”

  “The truth is, you’ve compromised yourself with the authorities — you can be sure they don’t believe you were kidnapped. . .”

  The weight behind Rechberg’s eyes became unbearable; he let his head fall forward: inside his skull, the pain and confusion of his thoughts was a physical torment. By my own cleverness, he thought, I dug this pit. Yet I’m justified; I want to do what is right, what will save us ... He realised that Leist was still talking. He was reciting lists of figures: “. . . of the 170 millions of Russians, 87% are under fifty years old. More than a third of them are under fifteen. No mortal force can turn back such a torrent of youth.”

  Rechberg stood up. He swayed. Below him in the stable yard, arms out, a smile stretching his wide mouth so that it joined his ears, the Lithuanian groom waited for him to jump from the mare’s back. Now I can, he thought: now.

  “I must sleep.”

  “You can stay here,” Leist said.

  He caught Rechberg as he fell forward. Rechberg murmured something unintelligible. “Thanks — Russky — dear Russky.” Ah, Leist thought, he’s seen what’s coming and he doesn’t like it. He laid Rechberg on the bed, and returned to the suitcase he was packing for a journey by plane. A small case, it held everything he possessed.

  Finished, and preparing to leave, he stood for a minute looking down at the sleeping man with a mingling of contempt and pity. For a moment he did not recognise as pity this emotion diluting the scorn and the impulse to humiliate that moved him in his communion with other human beings. It sprang from the same source, so rare, so curiously fresh, as his memory of Gerdnau and his grandfather’s field in spring: no clear image, but a poignant feeling of wet orchises and sun. Rechberg’s full short mouth was pursed, and the thin skin of his eyelids seemed bruised. Forcing himself to smile, Leist thought: He belongs, the fool, to a class which has outstayed its welcome, yet dreams of making the new serve its intrigues. . . His feelings became colder and more bitter when he reflected that, unless he walked delicately, he might himself become a victim of another sort: the revolutionary is always murdered by the State he has brought into being. Quite rightly — since what place is there in the new regime for men apt to violence, plots, lies? Nor was this all. He, a German, would always be sacrificed by his foreign masters to a change in policy he had not foreseen. Mind, he had every intention of keeping his eyes skinned and his nose to the wind to avoid running into the death reserved for too ardent believers. And in his calm moments he felt safe because he did not believe — except in himself, his intelligence, his force, his will. The fear of wasting these by throwing them in on the wrong side slept and ate with him. It was only when he had the ill-luck to wake up between two and three in the morning that another fear slid, a thin icy snake, between him and the blanket. Did they, did Kalitin, know that they had to do with an ambitious atheist? Was he watched?

  During the past week he had been offered, by a friendly American called Scorel, the post of adviser at a clearing station for looted paintings, in Munich — and promised a post afterwards in America.

  He had refused. Of course, with qualms. But — when he thought of leaving Germany for good, a nausea such as he had not felt since he was a starving scrofulous adolescent gripped him. His refusal was firm. . .

  Lifting the sleeping man’s head gently, he placed a pillow under it, and drew the blanket up over him to the soft chin.

  He remembered that he had two or three tins of butter in the cupboard. He hesitated for a moment — they might send him back from Moscow in a week — then made a bundle of them, and carrying them and his suitcase, crept out of the room, shutting the door as softly as a mother leaving her sleeping child. He went down to the malodorous basement, and gave the tins to the pale woman starving there so decently and quietly; she was twenty-three and looked fifty. Coming back, he stopped to speak to a child playing listlessly on the top stair with a kitten: boy, kitten, and mother, had all been defeated. Leist stroked the boy’s head and gave him a coin.

  He had a moment of joy — as though he had brushed past something in his memory, a young light, clear, pure, the sun and cool air of his childhood. It was nonsense; his childhood had been hard and meagre. And yet — there was a light round it.

  He stepped out into the warmth and the ruins.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Just when Arnold was leaving the house for the airfield, the telephone rang in the hall: he took it up, and heard Edward ask for him. An impulse he did not try to understand gripped him; he laid the receiver down sharply without speaking, and went out of the house.

  In London that evening he was told that the papers he had to take back to Gary were not ready and would not be ready for another five or six days. Perhaps on Monday. Through the official he telegraphed to Gary for instructions, and went back to his room in the club Edward disapproved of. His mother had opened up the house in Highgate, and was living there; he did not want to see her; she would question him on his work and Gary, and he would either lie or tell her about Gary’s offer. He was determined not to tell her and have the decision made for him with cries of joy and emotion. And lying would be a bore. . . Yet why not, since he had decided, tell her and let her rejoice freely? Not in my hearing, he thought drily. . . He was ashamed of his unkindness to her. He threw her out of his mind.

  In the morning his instructions came through the Foreign Office. He was to wait. This vexed him, since it worsened his chances of getting back before his mother must hear from someone that he was in London. She would be unspeakably hurt. He thought it over moodily for several minutes, and decided: No, I must risk it.

  When, that evening, the telephone rang in his bedroom he thought at once: She’s found out. He felt angry, ashamed, afraid. Stiffening himself, he took the receiver up and heard Edward’s voice again.

  In his relief he was the boy escaping from the overcharged air (overcharged with anxiety, affection, his mother’s possessive tenderness, her ambitions, the absurd scenes she played through with his father) of his home, into the friendly shabby house of Edward’s parents and the blessed freedom these gave their son and his friend to be anything they pleased. Holding the receiver, he smiled like an idiot.

  “Oh, it’s you. Well, thank God for that. Where are you?”

  “In London,” Edward answered, “ in my club. I rang you up yesterday morning before seven to tell you I was going on leave today. I’d no sooner got through than I was cut off: you’d left when I got on again.”

  “Something wrong with the telepho
ne,” he said. “ Shall I come round?”

  “Of course.”

  He had time, on the way to Brook Street, to remember that Edward would certainly go to see Mrs Brett and Lise. His dislike of Edward’s indifferent kindness to the girl, almost contempt, was no less than it had been. Since their argument he had taken care not to talk to him about the Bretts, but now, something would be said, and he would be forced to answer. Far better, he decided, vexed, if I jump in. Confusedly, too, he wanted to have it out with Edward. Not so much because of the girl herself, he thought coolly, as because it was a bore to have lying about in his mind things he must avoid with Edward. . .

  “There you are, mv dear. Sit down somewhere, chuck my shoes off that chair. What a stroke of luck. How long have you got?”

  “Until Monday.”

  The familiar happiness seized him. Sprawling in his chair, he watched his friend putting away shirts and vests a shade too elegant: abruptly, he remembered Edward’s mother; until she died she always washed his shirts, with a skill no laundry would spend on them — and Edward hated it to be known. How badly both of us treat our parents, he thought; and in the same breath thought that if his mother had been as undemanding, shy, gentle, as Mrs West, he would not have neglected her. Is that true? he wondered. Smiling,

  “Do you know what I heard a man say about your club the other day? — oh, the Savile? That club full of nice men who make their own trousers. I may say that when I came in just now an old gentleman was asking the porter for a needle of white cotton.”

  “That would be for a nightshirt,” Edward said seriously.

  “I’d wear one myself if I knew where to buy them. At least I shouldn’t be annoyed by losing the trousers and not the jacket, I’d lose the whole shoot.”

  “I don’t lose things. Neither do you — you’re too lazy to pick them up. . . Do you know a fellow called Scorel, an American?”