The Black Laurel Read online

  How to handle a man of whom you know only that he does not look like his acts?

  He pushed towards Rechberg one of his own decanters. Vexed, since he had taken pains to order that nothing with the crest be used at this meal, he said absently,

  “It was a mistake to destroy so much of Europe. I doubt whether it’s going to be possible to put it in order. At least yet.”

  “If you neglect an estate,” Rechberg said in a calm voice, “it loses value. But the ground remains and at a cost can be cleared and replanted. In this case a part of the estate has vanished.”

  His voice became drily passionate, exhausted:

  “If you had had the sense to make terms. If you, my dear sir, had been able to cure your political and military idiots of their neurosis — I mean the folly of unconditional surrender — before the bolsheviks seized half the estate. . . I don’t ask you to care about the fate of Germany — we have lost cities where the daily life of our people flows through the Renaissance (no doubt you tell yourself we had none — a lie) to the twelfth century, and below that into a darkness alive with German voices, places like Gerdnau, so deeply ours that a child falling asleep there became for a few hours the memory of his race —”

  He is talking about himself. . .

  “— no doubt we ought to be punished for our mistakes. I say: our mistakes. The Nazis were bunglers. But the job they bungled — the modernising of the European estate — was godly. Are you, you, your friends — so-called — any less clumsy when you ignore even the existence of Germans like myself? Men who have been defeated — but are not less honourable for that. The existence, I say, of civilised men — allies of yours against the barbarians. Asiatic tribes, primitives.”

  He stopped suddenly, hostile.

  The paradox is that he is sincere, Gary thought. . . Yet he helped the bunglers. He used in helping them the (does he call them?) godly powers that were his as one of a very small family of financiers of all countries (except Russia).

  How far can I trust him?

  “Yes, barbarians,” he said lightly, “but also — which bolshevik khan was it said: The Russian is revolutionary until he is thirty and afterwards canaille?”

  The irony in Rechberg’s glance altered his face. It had the air now of a foolish disguise.

  “They are not the only canaille in Europe. Let me tell you, the French. . . one year before the war, Schneider approached me, with offers. And I was paying others of the haut patronat, through a Swedish bank, in 1922. The upper layers of the country are through and through rotten. But do you believe it stops there?”

  Gary stifled an irrational anger. As so many Englishmen do, he cherished a France which is immortal because it is a spirit: it is the sun cutting in half an old house, it is bread and oil, it is the harsh wine of a village café, it is a family reunion of uncles called Ronsard, Vigny, Pascal, Giraudoux, it is the women washing clothes in the fountain of a dilapidated square, it is the faith of its sceptics and the serene irony of its saints. He said drily,

  “I don’t deny that France is a fifth-rate power. But without it —” (he had been on the verge of saying: without the light of France. . .), “Europe will be distorted by our self-satisfaction and your greedy wish to embrace the world — you’ve infected America with it, by the way; one of your major crimes.”

  The movement of Rechberg’s shoulders was nearly imperceptible. He said coolly,

  “If you like. But I ask you what loyalty there can be in a horde of parishes ruined by miserly peasants?”

  With a sly smile he added,

  “At the time of Munich I, I alone, spent 25 million francs to seduce the French press. Who is seducing it now? The Soviet minister in Paris?”

  His slyness amused Gary. In less than two hours he had discovered in this man he wanted to use a liveliness which explained, partly, why he was liked: he had the energy without the brutality of his father — Gary recalled a dinner in Berlin when the elder Rechberg insulted grossly all the foreign guests, including the French minister. And he was adroit. What else?

  They went on to the terrace. The lake trembled a little in the heat; the leaves of the birches were so saturated with sun that they were visible only as transparent fins moving at the edge of the sky.

  “The birches at Gerdnau were famous. I’m told they’ve been cut down.”

  Not the deepest thing in him, his bitterness, but the one I can use. . . Gary said gently,

  “At all costs, we must have peace.”

  “Impossible,” Rechberg said drily. “Think. Where in the world do men even breathe peacefully? Your own country, too weak now to use its tongue. A rich selfish undisciplined America, jealous of you, weakly afraid of Russia. The guilty fears of the Russians —”

  He glanced at Gary with the same rather disquieting slyness.

  “Some of us are expecting your country to make a new Munich — with Stalin this time!”

  Gary resented this so sharply that he was astonished.

  “Not a chance of it.”

  The immense effort he made to calm himself released suddenly a jet of his passion.

  “But,” he said slowly, “there is every chance, unless we outbid revolution among our own peoples, of disorder, social cancer, strain — war. . . Communism — the oldest myth of humble people, the deepest and least rational. . . In point of fact, less rational at this moment than ever. It is science, not you or I, my dear Rechberg, which has reduced the multitude of human beings to the role of slaves. A handful of men control powers you could really call godly — able to save and destroy. We can save — and without giving the sheep of our hand the illusion that they can be free.”

  He stopped.

  It was too soon to talk about his plan. And, there was only one man he could talk freely to. . . Talking about it to Lucius Gerlach’s cousin, he must offer the plan as an aristocracy of brains and finance, served by favoured cadres of technicians and scientists. And in a sense this was what it was — except that the passive millions must be used with the greatest kindness; pensioned, and made sterile, when they were superfluous. For the rest, cherished. And there must be no fear of invention: old skills must be mercilessly replaced — whatever it cost. With a lacerating contempt he thought: Sterilised human beings can be happy; sterility in invention is death.

  The mysterious patience of humble people, like the patience in its growth of one of these birches. . . if you are going to call anything the human condition, this is it. And it lay open to him. His certainty of being able to make use of it moved in him like the agony of possession. He stepped forward, so that the sun struck him.

  He had forgotten Rechberg. With a look of mischief playing foolishly on his face, Rechberg said,

  “Yes, yes. Authority, my dear sir, is for the few — but perhaps God allots it. Can he have allotted it to Stalin? I simply say: Can he? Since the brute, after all, has it!”

  “I have no enmity against Russia,” Gary said drily, “only against the Soviet cancer.”

  “So you suggest a counter-irritant!”

  “What?”

  Rechberg smiled.

  “An image,” he said gaily.

  Gary repressed a feeling of dislike. After all, he thought sharply, a Boche. He did not speak. The warmth, a light warm wind, soothed him, it fell round him in smooth folds, a hand pressing his shoulders. At a great height, an aeroplane flew east.

  Towards Gerdnau, he thought.

  Rechberg had turned on his heel and was limping towards the house. He asked curtly if he might take one of his books from the library. Gary felt a spring of remorse and liking. He answered with simple warmth.

  “Let me know which books you want and I’ll send them to you. As many of them as you can house. All, if you like. You were generous enough just now to call me your tenant. Allow me the rights of a tenant — to oblige his landlord in any possible way.”

  Rechberg showed that he was charmed — but shook his head.

  “They are safer with you, my dear Gar
y.”

  He chose three books. Kassner’s Elements of Human Greatness, a devotional work, and a volume of poems.

  Gary watched him going slowly down the staircase to the hall. Looked at from the back, his head with its immense wavering ears against the dazzling whiteness of the wall, he seemed more than ever anxious, sly, good.

  He went back to the library and sent a servant for Arnold. The effort he had been making with Rechberg, and the moment of exultance, had tired him. He wanted suddenly to lie down. Horrified. . . Am I beginning to age?. . .he jerked himself upright. Why give myself so much trouble? he thought drily: I have no son. He heard Arnold come into the room, and swung round. The thought struck across his cbsession: Why not make him my son? It was less thought than the movement, at a great depth, of the fear of extinction.

  In a light voice, he asked,

  “Are you bored here?”

  “No, sir, not at all. Not now.”

  “You were bored.”

  Looking at him with an easy amusement, Arnold said,

  “It’s not the sanest place in the world, is it? Wouldn’t it have been better to leave them to pull themselves together? Give them the rules — no dangerous toys, no aeroplanes, no guns — then abandon them, with the R. A. F. as male nurses, keeping an eye on them. The pilots wouldn’t complain, they’d be sleeping at home, and the rest of us could become civilians and clear up England. What d’you think?”

  “Too simple, my child. Germany is only one card in the pack.”

  “A pity”.

  His only reason for summoning his pilot had been to get the taste of Rechberg out of his mouth. But it was not Rechberg, it was his own impatience to finish here, to make absolutely certain of the two men he needed — for different reasons and on different terms, but he needed both with the same urgency — freeing him for a further stage of the plan. He had discovered his impatience only in the last few days; it was like the threat of an illness, and he was exasperated by it to a rage he hid and tried to ignore.

  He had dismissed at once the thought of Arnold as a son, a successor. But a profound relief flowed from it, along a level of his mind below impatience, below even his liking for the young man.

  “I don’t need you this afternoon. You’re free for the rest of the day.”

  The pilot looked at him with his warm brilliant smile.

  “Thank you very much, sir. If you’re sure it’s all right, I’ll sit in on the English concert this evening. Are you sure you won’t want me?”

  “Amuse yourself,” he said gently.

  He had been crushing something in his pocket — the piece of thyme: its scent, and a few dry brittle leaves, clung to his fingers. For less than a second he had a confused image of the past: a past so distant that it might be time itself, a depth in which all thoughts and all anguish disappeared. Again he felt the relief.

  Chapter Twelve

  The concert was Mrs Brett’s — she carried it; the rest was the rag-tag and bob-tail of Ensa. Catching sight of Arnold from the platform, she scrawled a few words on a programme, inviting him to come to the hotel after the concert, and had it taken to him. He was pleased he had been noticed, and a little unwilling. As always, he had the fear of being inadequate to a social occasion. But he went. Lise was here with her mother, and a little to his surprise, he wanted to see her.

  It vexed him to find more than a dozen people chattering and drinking in Mrs Brett’s room. They included Cecil Cowley, in the shape of a culture-bearing insect; he was assumed to be finding and fertilising such blooms as still exist in Germany. The young man’s dislike of him was so irrational — in the end, what he disliked was any form of enthusiasm— that he was slightly ashamed of it: he hoped Cowley would not see him in the crowded room.

  He hesitated in the doorway. Mrs Brett came to him, radiant, excited as though her voice were still vibrating at the ends of her nerves. She is beautiful, he thought, without interest.

  “I’m happy you’ve come. Did you enjoy it? But where is Edward, I didn’t see him in the theatre?”

  “He meant to come.”

  “Lise,” Mrs Brett called.

  The girl came across the room; she moved lightly and awkwardly, like a young child.

  “My secretary,” Mrs Brett said, laughing. “I had to find an excuse to bring her. Lise, you know Flight-Lieutenant Coster. Talk to him.”

  She turned away. Arnold looked at the girl, who was staring past him, her eyes widely open. Suddenly he recognised her. . . Years ago, six years, some week or two before the war, when he was living in his mother’s house in London, he used to hear a child crying in the next house, at the other side of the wall of his bedroom. Twice at night he jumped from his balcony to hers — they were on the third floor: her mother was often out, and on these nights the servants left her alone in the house. She was a very little creature, he had taken her for a child of six (she must, he realised, have been nearly twice that); wild, docile when he talked to her in the darkness, with a strange movement of fury when he wanted to turn a light on her. For less than a moment he felt the room, its darkness merging into the night covering the rumour of the city under the threat of war, the deserted house, the child’s voice floating to the surface of darkness, and the fever that summer of his own body and mind. . .

  In his excitement he spoke with a quick warmth, unlike himself.

  “I remember you, you cried in the next house — I came in twice. In fact, I came a third time, but you’d gone. You’ve probably forgotten, but you wrote something on the wall, a message — what was it? No, I’ve forgotten. You were a very queer child.”

  She was staring at him now with a look of hostility and anger.

  “Since you didn’t remember me, it’s not likely you’d remember any silly words I wrote.”

  She blushed, realising that she had given herself away.

  “It’s a long time,” Arnold said.

  “I’d forgotten you myself — no, that’s nonsense, I knew you at once, but you’ve grown stupid, you’re not in the least interesting now, you look like any young man who only knows how to fly.”

  Taken aback, he said,

  “But what did you expect?”

  “Nothing.”

  Even in his annoyance, he noticed that she was not trying to seem interesting; she had the savage malice of a child, without any vanity. She was charming, too; he imagined that she was ignorant and intelligent, just as she was awkward, composed, graceful. But he was vexed because she had snubbed him: with a bored air, he said,

  “It’s impossible to remember everyone, and after all you were a child — and I’ve been doing other things for six years.”

  “Of course,” she said, mocking him, “do forgive me. You will — heroes are always generous and modest.”

  She walked away from him, and before he could escape, Cowley was standing in front of him: he held his glass up and said,

  “There must be enough apricot brandy in Berlin to drown the rats. I can’t say I like it, but it has the knock-out effect I seem to need here. Ruins depress me, even though one of the kindest things you could do for Germany was to give them the chance to build a respectable capital, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Arnold said curtly.

  He saw the cloud of chagrin darkening Cowley’s face, and remembered that Edward had said he was mortally hurt when younger men did not like him. I can’t help it, he thought coldly; the fellow is a bore, a cultured ass. Cowley was silent, then drifted away. To his relief, Arnold saw Colonel Brett come into the room. He stood, looking round him. His eyes intimidated by something reckless and impatient in their wide stare; in this room his large body seemed larger, massive; energy and good-tempered malice broke from it. He saw Arnold and walked smiling towards him.

  “Well, my boy, I haven’t see you since Scotland. How are you getting on? Enjoying yourself, eh? How d’you like this place from the ground? A fine mess you’ve made of it. Mind you, I’m not complaining. They asked for it, poor sil
ly devils, and by God they’ve got it.”

  Mrs Brett’s voice in his ear startled the young man. What she said would have embarrassed him if her husband had given any sign that he cared what she said. He only smiled.

  “So long as they leave Humphrey here, playing at soldiers, he won’t complain. Look at him, he’s the happiest man in the world.”

  “You can see I’m not the most miserable,” her husband said, still smiling.

  Arnold was watching Mrs Brett with the curiosity which was his only feeling for most human beings; he employed it deliberately, it helped him in seeming unmoved. His happiness irritates her, she despises him for it, he thought: but why? Because she believes he’s simple? She’s wrong. For a dedicated soldier — why can’t she see it? — he’s been too wide-awake all his life: he has a good-humoured insolence — and he didn’t learn it in a day. . . This insolence he imagined in Brett, and his honesty, drew Arnold strongly. But he had no sentence ready to use.

  He saw the change in Mrs Brett’s face, to a joy instantly smoothed away into the false bright intimacy of her manner with friends.

  “Edward, my dear, how are you? I needed you at the concert, terribly. I insist on your being there tomorrow. Will you?”

  Edward made a pretence of apologising: he had a frank smile, which came and went quickly on his fine lips.

  “My dear Mary, I’m frightfully sorry. I couldn’t let you know. At the last minute the old man decided to move today instead of Monday.” He turned to Arnold. “We’re moving quite near you — I may say, to a finer house. I’ve scored — and I don’t think you can beat it.”

  “I shan’t try,” Arnold retorted: “what’s your bid?”

  “A yacht of our own. I found the house, and I got us in just ahead of a brute of a lawyer masquerading as a general.” He glanced with smiling deference at Colonel Brett. “You’ll bear me out, sir, that it was my trick.”