A Legacy (27 page)

"I see the Grand Duke's myrmidons haven't turned out to protect you."

"Est-ce la Revolution?" said Jules. "Cela tombe bien."

"Your friend, His Royal Highness the Grand Duke of Baden; this is Karlsruhe, in case you haven't noticed."

"You come from His Highness?" said Jules.

Just then there was a commotion in the corridor. Two more men appeared in the doorway. The wagon-lits conductor was nowhere to be seen, but Marie was trying to ward them off.

"Shame on you," she said.

"Perhaps she also has a commission in the Body Dragoons?"

"We represent the German people," the man with the cigar said to Jules.

There Caroline turned on them. "Gentlemen—" she said and let fly in English. It might have been impressive had they not begun talking all at once to Jules. Jules fainted. So it was only later on from Marie that she heard what he heard then, that Captain Johannes von Felden had been shot by a soldier of his regiment.

It is not my aim at this time to recount the Felden Scandal. Even if I wished to do so I should hardly be com
petent. One phase of it was over before I was born; the next, I lived through without knowing it. My knowledge of the institutions, government and temper of the Kaiser's Germany is sketchy, conventional and instinctive, full, no doubt, of inaccuracies and gaps; it is also retrospective and so indelible as to be almost impervious to subsequent correction. It is lurid knowledge, of the kind one might acquire of a house through which one has made one's way with a candle in one's hand. The Bernin Papers have never been published; and are now believed to have been destroyed. Newspaper files of the period are probably still extant. I have not looked them up. I doubt I ever shall. What I learnt came to me, like everything else in this story, at second and at third hand, in chunks and puzzles, degrees and flashes, by hearsay and talebearing and being told, by one or two descriptions that meant everything to those who gave them. Also, by putting two and two together. I have never been to Spain; I only know the Paris of before the first Great War in which my mother as a young woman crossed the Seine to talk to Sarah and walked with Julius in the Tuileries from words and pictures; I never went back to Germany. With one exception, the people of that time had passed out of my life before I was out of childhood: I did not see them again. They are all dead now. Their houses are no more. Their few descendants must be dispersed over three continents. Had I a mind to, I should be hard put to find them. It is a finished story—immobile in the unalterable past; untouchable, complete, as if sunk inside a sealed glass tank. For me, it was never a new story. Every second hand had touched a first; to every fragment there had floated up another—this phrase had been the key to a remembered look, this fib belied an earlier one, this hint illumined words once overheard, this tale resurrected the mood of a whole winter. Which memories are theirs? Which are mine? I do not know a time when I was not imprinted with the experiences of others. In a sense this is my story.

The Felden Scandal was remarkable for the extraordinary ill-nature of the emotions it aroused. Public scandals, scandals during periods of relative stability, that is, when many may wish to have a whack at, but few are ready to pull down, the existing structure of society, follow a certain pattern. Something, an abuse, a crime, an instance of gross injustice, becomes known by leakage or design and is taken up. The regime, that is supposed to have tolerated, committed or otherwise abetted the abuse, tries to deny or explain away the facts exposed. If these facts happen to be very much at odds with what the general citizen has come to expect from his established rulers, if they are irregular, or disreputable, or sensational enough, or presented to appear so, or if the citizen is simply very poor or very thwarted or very dull, the public scandal will indeed be public and it will be on. Motive will be everything, but motive as usual will be scrambled. Some of the accusers will be prompted by faction, and some by principle, others will think of morality or self-advancement or their friends and enemies, and most of them will think a little of these all; and nearly everybody will believe he is thinking of that so complexly constituted entity, a man's conception of his public duty. The men in office, too, will be animated by loyalty to faction or each other and a sense of the usefulness of their careers to their country and themselves. There will be a measure of honesty and a measure of truth, and often more than a measure of good will, but there will also be very large measures of the opposite things. And when the hue and muddle are all over, when heads have rolled, and ink and printer's ink have flowed, and voices have been raised in anger and pretended anger, when many people have been made to feel self-righteous and a few have been made to feel afraid, when the test case has been decided and the commission sent in their report, when every side has gone as far as they would go and time has been worn out, there will very likely be some justice done and a little guilt brought home: this innocent man will have been re-
instated in his place and his detractors been deprived of theirs; that practice discredited, and that borough the last to put through their contracts in that way; but the borough council know, and others know, that they were not the first; the innocent man in being vindicated has been through the gutter, and there are those who think that his innocence was a great nuisance and those who have not been convinced of it at all, and those who speak in private for the men who are out, knowing that the day must come when it hardly will be necessary to do so in public; and of those who were so loud and happy against the doers, how many are there who did mind the deed? A score has been chalked up; it will bear interest; and all in all the world in that country has become a little muddier than it was before.

For all that, there is usually a generous element in such upheavals. A murmur of tolerance, some staunchness among friends, desire to obtain better things for others; clamour for a hero as well as devils and the scapegoats. In the Felden Scandal everybody seems to have turned, almost indiscriminately, against everybody else. Of course it must have been true that nobody had much of a leg to stand on, but there was also this: the events that caused this outcry against the existing order—sequels to an irregularity in a backwater enacted over thirty years—were not representative of it. They may have shed a queer light on the Wilhel-minian era, certainly not a characteristic one, and indeed people must have asked themselves how it could have happened here. And yet the howls went up, and no one ever, anywhere, seems to have been heard to laugh.

The Colonel of Johannes's regiment had retired. (He was not the kind that is made general.) The next man was a new broom from the North. He looked at his lists and found that he had a captain in charge of a stud farm by the forest who had not yet turned up to report. He asked, and was told that the captain never did. He asked more, but there seem to have been no answers. "It had

always been like that." "They had never seen the captain." "The major would know." The major unfortunately was absent on long leave; his health had been running down and he was wintering on Madeira with a wife. The Colonel, much displeased about a great many things, declared in mess that he would send for the captain.

"Oh I shouldn't do that, sir."

"Pray, why?"

"He wouldn't come."

"Captain von Felden?"

"Well if you really want to know, sir, he's supposed not to be quite all there."

"The Captain?"

"That's what they say."

"Unheard of."

"It may be just because he's getting on, sir. He's been out there since before anybody's time. He must be frightfully old."

"A captain? No, no, there must be some mistake. Can't get round the retiring age, you know."

"The Grand Duke's supposed to take an interest in him. His mother used to."

"The Grand Duke?"

"Our Grand Duke, sir."

"Ah, to be sure."

A young subaltern piped up, "Perhaps he's the Man in the Iron Mask?"

"I shall send for him at once," said the Colonel.

"I should write to the Major, sir, I should."

"Write abroad? About something going on twelve miles from here?"

So the Colonel sent for the Captain; and when Johannes did not come, he sent again, a second lieutenant from his own province this time, and a corporal. Their names were von Putnitz and Schaale. Johannes's own orderly had been rattled by the Colonel's first inquiry, and he tried to dress him in a uniform. Johannes appeared frightened and re-

sisted. He flung himself on the floor and tried to roll the tunic off his back. The orderly at once helped him out of it and managed to calm him down. He then left him in order to ask the Colonel's messengers not to see the Captain today as the Captain was not well. The lieutenant looked at the orderly, who was dressed in breeches and a striped jacket, and told him that his orders were to see the Captain. The lieutenant and the corporal then entered Johannes's room. The lieutenant brought his heels together before a superior officer and announced himself in accents Johannes might have been supposed to have forgotten. Johannes, teeth bared, sprang at his throat. What happened then has never been quite ascertained. The attack must have been savage as well as sudden, and von Putnitz cried out. The corporal always maintained that the cry had been explicitly for help; Putnitz testified that this was not so, but once admitted he could not be sure. The corporal drew a revolver and fired two shots, and by the time the orderly got into the room Johannes was dying. The lieutenant, wounded and bleeding, was jabbering with shock; the corporal stood staring at the weapon in his hand.

It was a difficult position for the Colonel. He did not see it so at first. He had Lieutenant von Putnitz put under arrest and the corporal in irons, and arranged for a court martial. He might have had at least one of them shot out of hand next day, had not Johannes's orderly, Faithful George as he came to be dubbed, lost his head and bolted. Two hours after the deed he appeared on his bicycle in his own village, beside himself with grief and terror, and tumbled into his parents' kitchen with the cry, "They've murdered my Captain!" He then went on to Sigmunds-hofen, the address of the lady whom he knew, who had come to see them and who had always written to the Captain like a sister. The house was closed, but as it happened Clara was there, having come down for her annual eight days' spring airing. Clara had turned sixty, and her health was not good; she had always been merciless with
herself, and her frame could not produce the strength she constantly expended. What she had to hear was terrible to her. "It must have been God's Will," she said. Then, "A judgement." "Did he have a priest?" she asked. "Taken like a child . . . Ah yes. . . ." The orderly, who was weeping, saw the confusion of that scene, and wept more loudly. Clara failed to recognize his need. She asked for an hour in which to recollect herself; the orderly found his way to the village tavern with his tale.

Meanwhile the Colonel had a warrant out against him for desertion. And when he with Clara and a young priest from Sigmundshofen-Dorf, whom Clara had commandeered, stepped off the local train at the garrison he was arrested on the platform. Clara tried to interfere; then went off to add the orderly's arrest to the long messages she was sending to her husband, to her brother and to Jules over the public telegraph. Jules's got lost in Spain. Desertion carried a death sentence, which, in peacetime, might or might not be commuted. The Colonel later explained that his warrant had been a matter of routine.

When the Colonel was informed that a female relative had arrived at the dead Captain's house, he did not like it at all.

"She's the sister of the Secretary of State," his second told him.

"Is she? I daresay. Another irregularity no doubt." Then he bethought himself that what with three culprits now at heel, Felden must be regarded as a deceased brother officer and the victim, and he decided to express his condolence to the lady. Before he could do so, Clara was announced.

She cut him short. "There has been grave negligence," she said. "How could you have allowed him to see soldiers?"

"Madam—" the Colonel said.

"We, also, are to blame. It was a mistake to leave him here. We ought not to have trusted you."

What he learnt from Clara was devastating to the Colonel. Could this be the same service he had dovetailed with so happily at Stettin and at Schwerin and at Liineburg? It addled him, and he did not want to hear, but he could not stop her. When at last she left him he was so upset that he broke his rule about regimental concerns and then and there wrote out a report—a string of pained questions—-to his brigade. (He had cause to be grateful; this report, as it turned out, did not save his career but it did prevent his being cashiered on the spot.) Later the same evening he was told of the presence of reporters from the town. He gave instructions to send them packing. The reporters got hold of a conveyance and took themselves off to the forest and the Captain's house. And so, between them, Faithful George, Clara and the Colonel got the story into the morning papers.

At first it appeared a desultory sensation at the breakfast tables. It was called the Dragoon Officer Murder for a day or two; of course that label had to be abandoned, yet it somehow set the tenor of the public mind, and none of the alternatives ever became really established.

Then, before the week was out, the story was given direction by the appearance of the first of a series of leaders in the new Socialist daily Fortschritt, above the signature of one of the most ruthless and accomplished publicists of the day who wrote under the pseudonym of Quintus Nar-den. Narden was not a young man, and he had been for years the spokesman of the Anti-Militarists, the Army was almost his monopoly—that overgrown body of sabre-rattling drones, that state within the state, that romping-ground of insolent and idle aristocracy, that waxing incubus. . . . The article was called A Family. He would attempt, Narden wrote, to give an outline of the careers of three brothers. Three Barons. Pleasure-loving men brought up in the lap of luxury, though men of but small fortune. How, then, did they provide for themselves? Were they given professions? did they condescend to learn a trade? did they en-