The English Air

by D. E. Stevenson

  “Why do they call Mr. Dickens the bearded pard?” inquired Franz gravely.

  “Oh, that’s a joke,” replied Sophie, delighted to find that she could answer the question so easily, “because Mr. Dickens hasn’t a beard you see—and of course he’s the padre—so they call him the bearded pard.”

  “It is a joke,” said Franz, considering it gravely.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “just a joke, that’s all.” She hesitated doubtfully. Now that she had explained it to Franz the joke seemed distinctly poor. She continued, “You see, Franz, when people are very young and happy everything seems a joke. I mean even silly jokes seem funny. It’s because they’re all so young … well, of course, you’re young, too, but perhaps you aren’t quite so happy.”

  “I am not unhappy,” Franz said thoughtfully. He was not unhappy. Indeed he was much happier in this alien land than he had expected to be. “I am not at all unhappy,” he repeated, “and I am not homesick as I had expected. Everyone is very kind and friendly. It is just that I cannot understand when it is a joke and when it is not—that is my chief difficulty. We have jokes, too, but they are quite different from your jokes. Even with you, Cousin Sophie, I am not always sure whether it is a joke or not.”

  “But I don’t know, myself!” she declared. “I talk a lot and I usually mean to be quite, quite serious … and then, sometimes, I find I’ve made a joke, so how could you possibly know? I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”

  “No, it is no use worrying.”

  “Talking helps,” she continued in a thoughtful voice, “talking helps a lot if you don’t quite know what you mean. It helps me to understand what I mean myself if I talk about it.”

  “But how—” asked Franz in bewilderment, “but Cousin Sophie, how can you talk at all unless you know what you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, “I just know that I talk and then the thing comes clear … and, even if I don’t understand it myself, Dane always understands. That’s funny isn’t it?”

  He agreed that it was.

  This conversation, though extremely muddling, helped Franz a good deal and he began to see a glimmer of light where before there had been fog and darkness. He saw that there was a great deal to understand so he was a step further on his way to understanding. He began to look at these people with new eyes and to listen even more attentively to all they said. There was Major Worthington, for instance. Major Worthington was apparently strong and well but he did no work and Franz had put him down as a flaneur and had despised him only a shade less than Migs Corbett, but now Franz saw that, as he had been so completely mistaken in the one case, he might be mistaken in the other. For all he knew to the contrary Major Worthington might be another hero in disguise. Franz began to ask discreet questions about Major Worthington and to study him with a good deal of care.

  Chapter Eight

  When Roy returned to Fernacres for a spell of leave he seemed to be filled with positively dynamic energy. They played tennis all the afternoon, they danced until midnight, and the next morning at breakfast Roy was still full of vim.

  “We’ll bathe this morning, shall we?” he inquired, as he dug his spoon into his porridge and cream. “It’s a lovely day and we must make the most of our time. Harry and I have got to be back at ten. We could bathe this morning and play tennis in the afternoon and then go on to the pictures. Who’s for bathing?”

  “It’s a splendid idea,” declared Wynne, who would have assented with equal fervour to any suggestion of Roy’s.

  “I think so too,” agreed Franz.

  “Absolutely O.K.,” said Harry, “what time do we start? Where do we go? Is Agatha invited to join the party? She hasn’t a bathing suit of course but I bet she can swim.”

  “Agatha would go to the bottom like a stone,” said Roy quite seriously.

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “She would.”

  “I bet you,” began Harry, and then he stopped, “oh well,” he said, “oh well, it’s no use betting because we couldn’t try it out. I mean Jim would simply kill me if I ran Agatha into the sea. All the same I’m pretty certain she’d float, Roy.”

  “I’m pretty certain she wouldn’t.”

  This was the sort of conversation that left Franz miles behind. He sat and gaped. They could not be serious in their desire to run the car into the sea and yet they seemed perfectly serious. Harry had now produced a piece of paper and a pencil and he was making careful calculations while Roy looked over his shoulder and objected or agreed. Even Major Worthington seemed interested in the problem of whether or not Agatha would be seaworthy.

  “Her body is wood,” Harry was saying, “and her wheels too … and she’s the right shape you see.”

  “You’d have to know her weight to get at her displacement, wouldn’t you?” Dane inquired.

  “It’s her engine,” Roy pointed out, putting a finger on the neat diagram which Harry had been making. “She’d go down by the bow, Harry.”

  Harry pushed the drawing away. His eyes were dreamy; “I’ve always wanted to make an amphibious car,” he said, “what d’you think about it, Major Worthington?”

  “There might be something in it,” agreed Dane thoughtfully, “for military purposes, or for the colonies—and I believe Russia has been experimenting with an amphibious tank—”

  “For us,” Harry cried. “Don’t you see, sir, it would be simply marvellous for us. If Agatha were amphibious. I could drive down to Kingsport and straight out to the Terrible. There would be no need to hang about on the quay waiting for the picket boat.”

  “What would you do with her when you got there?” Dane asked with a humorous lift of his brows.

  “Garages on board,” suggested Roy, who had begun to visualise the possibilities. “Garages, my boy, and a sort of shutter with a hinge to let down into the sea so that you could drive in.”

  “Or you could swing them up with derricks,” Harry said.

  “My idea’s better,” declared Roy. “Less trouble and more fun. Fancy driving your car straight out of the sea into the Terrible—gorgeous!”

  Dane smiled. “There might be some difficulty about garage space,” he pointed out, “if every N.O. had a car—”

  “I knew there’d be a snag somewhere,” said Roy, frowning, “there always is. The amphibious car is not for us—Oh, hell, you’d have to wait until you were a post captain at least before you could garage in the ship … That reminds me,” he added in a different tone of voice, “by Jove I nearly forgot to tell you. The Majestic is coming to Kingsport.”

  This piece of news brought exclamations of delight from Sophie and Wynne; and Wynne, who was always thoughtful and kind, explained to Franz that Sophie’s brother was the Admiral and that he would be sure to ask them to lunch on board.

  There was a sudden silence after that and Roy, glancing at the clock, declared that it was high time they were under way. So the four young people rushed off and found their bathing suits and were issued with coloured bath towels and soon they were packed into the old battered car and were on their way to bathe.

  They went through the village and along the cliff and then, turning off the main road into a narrow stony lane, they bumped along to a gate. Here they left Agatha and proceeded on foot down a steep path to the shore, and they found themselves in a sheltered cove where a barrier of high rocks stretched out into the sea.

  “It’s the best place, isn’t it, Wynne?” said Roy. “We’ll undress and sit in the sun until the spirit moves us to bathe. You can have the cave to undress in,” he added generously.

  They undressed and sat in the sun. It was sheltered and warm. The rocks were warm to lie on and there were tufts of sea pinks—cushiony tufts of grey, green grass with the flowers standing up on their thin, wiry stems. The sea was blue and purple and green in patches and there was a little fishing boat with a white sail tacking manfully against the breeze.

  “She’s nice, isn’t she?” Roy said, breaking a little silen
ce. “By Jove everything’s nice. I am happy.”

  “Summer is the best time,” Wynne murmured dreamily. “If it was always summer, and you always had the people you liked best near you, it would be Heaven, wouldn’t it?”

  Franz looked at her as she sat there, perched a little above him on a flat-topped rock, with her hand clasped round one knee and her profile outlined against the blue sky. He saw her long slender limbs, the bright gold of her fine silky hair, and the faded blue bathing suit which moulded her slight figure like a glove and he thought that she was the embodiment of summer and all that summer meant. Franz felt sure that she was unique, there was nobody so full of the joy of living, there was nobody so vital. She gave the whole of herself to whatever she was doing or saying and she had always more to give … she was joy, thought Franz, joy and youth personified. He felt old compared with her, for he had seen so much sorrow and suffering; he had seen fear, too, and fear was ugly. Wynne did not know what sorrow was, Wynne was fearless and beautiful.

  Franz felt sorry for himself in a vague sort of way because he realised that he had never been really young—in the way that Wynne was young. He had never been absolutely happy and carefree. Looking at her he caught glimpses of things that were lovely and desirable, things that he thought existed only in songs and fairy tales …

  “You’re dreaming, Franz,” said Roy’s voice close to his ear. “What are you dreaming about?”

  “He’s dreaming about the girl he left behind him,” declared Harry.

  “No,” said Franz, smiling, “no, there is no girl that I left behind, I have not got a girl of my own yet.”

  “Tell us about Germany,” said Roy, “tell us what you do—how you amuse yourselves and all that.”

  “It would not interest you.”

  “Of course it would interest us,” said Roy eagerly. “It’s frightfully interesting to hear about other countries. When I look at you and think of all the things you’ve seen—things that I’ve never seen and probably never will—it makes my brain reel.”

  “You have seen things that I have never seen,” Franz pointed out.

  “Go on,” said Harry, “tell us about it. Tell us all about Germany.”

  It was a large order and Franz found it difficult to begin, but after a few minutes he warmed up to his task. His audience helped him a good deal for it was so appreciative and so interested and alert. It hung upon his words, it asked intelligent questions and it goaded him on when his tale began to flag. Franz, sitting on the warm rock, told these new friends of his all that he thought might interest them about his own country. He told them first about the German summer—the air was so much warmer, and the sun more deeply golden—he told them about the flowers, about the lilacs with their honey-sweet warm smell, and how every cottage garden was full of flowers and almost every house in every town had, at the very least, a window-box of gaily coloured blossoms. In the streets there were fruit trees growing, and in all the squares, so that wherever one went, there were flowers and the scent of flowers and the whole land seemed to grow drunk with their sweetness.

  They clamoured for information about what he did, and Franz told them about the house in which he had been born and brought up. It was an apartment or—as his hearers realised—a sort of flat in one of the best districts of Freigarten. The rooms were large and somewhat bare in comparison with Fernacres, but they were cool in summer and were heated in winter by big porcelain stoves. “Tant’ Anna” was the doyenne of the house, she had taken the place of a mother to Franz, and had devoted her life to him.

  “She is old-fashioned a little,” Franz declared, “she does not move with the times, and although she does not say so I believe she often thinks that the old times were better.”

  “Perhaps they were,” suggested Roy.

  “No,” said Franz firmly, “no, we are much more happy now. Everything is better. You must not think that Tant’ Anna complains or that she is not loyal to our Leader—we are all loyal and united—but sometimes when nobody is there I hear her singing the old songs, and afterwards she is sad.”

  He went on to tell them about the neighbours who lived in the adjoining apartments—there were the Schneiders who lived below and the Von Oetzens who lived above. The Von Oetzens had no children of their own and they had always been very kind to Franz. They had taken a tremendous interest in all he did. Herr Von Oetzen’s pockets were always full of sweets and he had never met Franz on the stairs without sharing them with the boy.

  “I am afraid I was very greedy,” declared Franz with a faraway smile. “I used to wait until I heard him coming down so that I should be sure to meet him—but it was not only for the sweets that I liked to meet him. He was always so kind to me, so gemütlich. It will be pleasant to see him again when I go home and to tell him all that I have seen.”

  “What about your own friends—I mean friends of your own age?” Roy inquired.

  This started Franz off again—as had been intended—and he told them about the Wandervögel, the Youth Group to which he belonged. They were young men and girls (said Franz) who formed a sort of club and went for outings together, walking through the woods with their knapsacks on their backs or rowing upon the waters of the lazy German streams. The croaking of the frogs in the grass, the buzzing of the gnats as they drifted along in the flat-bottomed boats—all these things became clear to Franz as he spoke. He told of the camps on the banks of the rivers, of the tents with their swastika flags, and how they built fires and cooked and feasted and bathed together and danced in the moonlight; and he told of the new Youth Songs which their leaders had taught them and which they sang as they marched, or as they sat round the camp-fire in the evening, taking different parts, and filling the woods with harmony.

  It all sounded very idyllic, and Franz was vaguely aware that he was making it sound a great deal more idyllic than it was. He was giving a slightly distorted impression of the Wandervögel Outings, an impression seen through rose-coloured spectacles. He had said nothing of the sordid side, of the intrigues, and jealousies and promiscuous love affairs which flourished like weeds in the hotbed of Nazi Youth. Franz had enjoyed the Outings until he began to discover what lay beneath the surface, but before he left home he had grown tired of them and faintly disgusted, and on several occasions he had made excuses to remain behind. He had grown a little tired of the Youth Songs, too, and had sometimes wished that they could sing some of the songs which had been loved and prized long before the Youth Songs were invented—the songs that Tant’ Anna sang when she thought that nobody was listening—songs by Schubert and Brahms and Strauss, lovely melodies and words which touched the heart—but Franz had never dared to put this wish into words for his contemporaries would have laughed him to scorn.

  These feelings of doubt and vague discontent were far below the surface, and indeed, if the truth were told, Franz had never before acknowledged them to himself. It was only now, when he looked back and saw it all in perspective, that he knew his own mind. He realised, as he spoke, and described the Wandervögel Outings in glowing terms, that Roy and Harry were made of different stuff—he had been faintly disgusted, but they would be horrified; he had been a trifle bored, but they would be bored to death.

  “Gosh!” exclaimed Roy, “what tremendous fun! Gosh, why don’t we have Outings like that? I’ll tell you what, Franz, I’ll come over to Germany my next long leave and you can take me on one of those Outings.”

  Franz looked at him in alarm. “But you would not like it, Roy.”

  “I wouldn’t like it? You bet I would. Why, it must be simply grand.”

  “You would not like it,” repeated Franz. “I know you would not like it … there are many reasons why you would not like it at all.”

  “What reasons?”

  “Many,” repeated Franz, searching wildly to find at least one fairly presentable reason … “For one thing you would not like the discipline. You like doing what you like when you like it.”

  “He’s right,” pu
t in Harry. “I thought it sounded absolutely grand, too, but I see what Franz means. These Outings are organised. They all bathe by numbers—one, two, three—”

  “No,” said Franz, “not quite like that, but we are not so free as you.”

  “I like to be free,” Harry said thoughtfully; “I do what I’m told when I’m on duty but my off-duty time is my own, and I’ll take good care that nobody interferes with it.”

  “It is better to be organised—” began Franz.

  “No,” interrupted Harry firmly, “no, it isn’t … nobody can organise me in my off-duty time—not even the First Lord himself. If he were to come down that path,” said Harry more firmly than ever, “if he were to come walking down that path and tried to start organising me, I’d show him where he got off.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” said Roy.

  “I’m not an ass,” retorted Harry. “You always say I’m an ass if you can’t understand what I mean. There’s a very deep meaning here … listen Roy.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Well, look here, I’m going to bathe in a minute—I shall climb out along those rocks and take a header into that lovely green water. I’m looking forward to it with every bit of me. I’m just waiting for the exact moment when I shan’t be able to resist it any longer, but—mark this, Roy, because this is really the important part—if the First Lord came down that path and began organising me and telling me I was to bathe immediately, I should simply go and dress, I should do it, not because I’m a contrary sort of person, but because there would be no pleasure in bathing under orders—that’s all.”

  “And quite enough, too,” declared Roy.

  “That is not our way,” said Franz, looking at the rebel with disapproval. “We like to obey our Leader. We are agreed that our Leader knows best what is good for us. He tells us how to exercise our bodies and be fit, he orders all our days.”