A Legacy (5 page)

Johannes's escape from Benzheim must have been a feat. He broke out of the dormitory after lights out, avoided patrols, climbed a wall. When he was free, he began to run and he ran all night. At morning he lay low. He did not know much geography, but he was sure that he knew his way home, and he also knew that he must not take it. He suddenly knew a good deal. He knew that they would be after him, and he knew where they would look. He was dead certain determined that he must not be taken, and on this he concentrated with ferocity. He hid in a wood for the whole of the first day; after dark he started out towards the north. It was as much in the opposite
direction of Landen as he knew to make it, and he stuck to it for seven nights. He had no money. He got a tramp to let him have his clothes; then dug a hole for the uniform with his hands, his knife and stones. After this he avoided roads and humans; he never let himself be seen. At night he streaked through fields and vineyards; in daytime he crawled from cover to cover where he could, but mostly he lay still. It was an animated region and people were about their work all day. Johannes knew that he must sleep lightly or not at all, and at once he learnt to sleep like a hare. Dogs and cows came to snuff him in his hedge, but with these he knew how to deal and they always walked off quietly. He did everything with a purpose, and everything he did was right. He had taken his watch and his knife with him, and the daguerreotype of his black dog Zoro—he left nothing he loved at Benzheim—but he buried them with his uniform. Johannes had been a very open boy, now he lived like an animal that is used to covering its tracks. Once he had a shock: at morning he saw a river and a gabled town, and he believed it was the Rhine. It was the fifth day, and of course he had read his Leather-stocking, and he knew all about walking in circles. It may or it may not have been Benzheim; he never found out. But he was crazed with panic and had to fight it—alone, without a hold, lying still in grass; and that day exhausted his heart.

It was mid-April when Johannes had left Benzheim; the days were often grey and wet, and the nights were still quite cold. There was always ground frost. The tramp's boots would not have done, and Johannes's own, unnecessarily perhaps, were buried; so first he walked on socks and then he walked barefoot. He kept alive on water. Sometimes he stole a little food. Eggs from farmhouse hens, beets and mangel from a barn, milk straight from a goat. He tried to munch oats. There was nothing edible yet in fields and orchards, and he never broke into a larder. He had read in the Encyclopaedia at Landen that man could

live without food for twenty-seven days provided he took plenty of water, and he had discussed this riveting fact with his brothers. The Encyclopaedia said that the subject would feel no actual hunger, and Johannes, who didn't either, marvelled at such prescience and it gave him confidence. All the same he was growing weaker. He did not realize that the Encyclopaedia had not assumed the subject to walk five-and-twenty miles a night over rough roads.

He had been right. They were after him and with all the apparatus of authority. How near he came to being taken perhaps only his instinct knew. The Cologne Constabulary drew a cordon round a twenty-mile radius from Benzheim; the Country Police of Rhine-Hesse, Wurttemberg and Baden were alerted; his description circulated; gendarmes patrolled the roads. They were many; they used the means at their disposal; and they could count on eager locals to help them in a manhunt. Against this mechanism Johannes set his solitary discipline. Two points were in his favour. The Cadet Corps were not popular; atrocity stories were going round. A cadet had been killed that winter by falling from an upper-storey window at Lichterfelde where his comrades had made him stand at attention on the ledge during a freezing night. The Socialists, the Liberals, the yet not very well-affected South were likely to pounce questions at an opportunity. It was expedient, then, to keep an escape quiet, above all not to let it leak into the papers; and so, the eager locals' support could only be enlisted in a round about way.

The Benzheim authorities also took one risk: confident that the boy would never reach them, they did not inform his relatives.

The second point was the tendency of the Army mind to follow past experience—they were still out-manoeuvring his last walkout. Reports of what J. v. Felden was likely to do were sent out to police captains. Instructions were to look for an impudent and forward boy who would

throw his weight about at hotels, ask for what he wanted, and speak in a thick Baden border accent mixed with French. All the same, this was not a wholly convincing character to the policing yokelry, and many a zealous Wachtmeister went about the countryside with his own ideas, asking farmwives to keep an eye open for anything suspicious; and so indeed if Johannes had tried to help himself from somewhere to a sausage all might well have been up with him.

The tramp was never found; or did not talk.

On the eighth night Johannes changed his course to east. (He kept count of time, and he did this by biting notches in a stick.) It was dairy country now, cattle were already out at night, and he was able to get more milk. After four more days he turned at last southwest and risked a beeline home.

He reached Landen on a Sunday afternoon in May. The old Baron, Julius, who was spending the week, and Gusta-vus were out driving. They saw a filthy matted figure rise before them from the ground. They did not recognize him, nor did the spaniel who was with them.

And then that ragged skeleton threw himself into the tilbury with a howl.

"Prenez garde au vernis" cried the old Baron. And then they knew it was Johannes.

But they could not believe it.

Johannes embraced them, and they were stunned.

"Mon Dieu, mon fils" said the old Baron, "qu'est-ce que cela pent bien dire?"

They really did have Tokay Essence at Landen, and they brought it up for Johannes. The cork bore the stamp of a year in the Eighteenth Century, and a spoonful of it appears to have had all the effect attributed to that fabled elixir. And when Johannes had had a bath and been put into clean linen, eaten a hot-house peach and drunk another nip of the reviving wine, the old Baron became in
dignant and affectionate. He clucked and tutted at Johannes's tale— Pas possible . . . Est-ce concevablef Pensez-donc! Quel endroit sauvage —and Johannes told it freely. He still spoke then. Except for his appalling physical condition, he did not seem changed; he was himself. He babbled, he complained, he talked of Benzheim with simple indignation. Yet certain scenes he re-enacted for Julius every day. Julius and Johannes had been most close for years, as Gustavus was a stick and Gabriel a baby. Perhaps none of them was able to follow all; much of it must have been outside the grasp of Johannes's father who was getting old, and the range of Gustavus's sympathy who was growing up a pedant. The old Baron was put out by Johannes having what he called thrown away his watch; burial he rejected as dramatic.

"Such a good watch," he said every time he was reminded. "Your own grandfather made it, so exaggerated."

But Gabriel, who was twelve then, had nightmares about Benzheim; and on Julius, threatened as he felt himself, something of what Johannes had met with impressed itself for life. There was enough to upset them all. The old Baron got very angry with Benzheim—he said it was a great shame, a great pity, Johannes must have beef tea every day, and the episode was closed. Julius stayed on at Landen for the time being and Johannes made a quick recovery.

T
hen several kinds of forces began to move all at once. They were not directly interested in Johannes; he was discounted and at the same time a factor in their calculations, and they crushed him. Gustavus had been trying to get engaged all that spring, and a week after Johannes's return he succeeded.

"Whatever next?" said the old Baron. "Quelle folie encore?"

Gustavus said he had the privilege of being accepted.

"By that young woman?"

"Indeed, Papa."

"You asked her?"

"Well yes, Papa. When I had her father's permission."

"How very rash. Well, you shall not have mine. At your age. You are much too young. How old are you?"

"Twenty-three in August."

"There you are! Who ever heard of a man marrying at twenty-three. Best years of his life. I did not. Your grandfather did not. Your Uncle Xavier did not. Jules a sa maitresse pres de Namur. Une femme tres bien. Why, I was fifty before I set eyes on your mother."

"You were married at forty-eight, Papa."

"Quite. Nearly fifty. You see?"

It was true. The Feldens were susceptible, but prudent. They liked to live single and they liked to leave children, and few of them lived very old. So they married late and died soon. There were barely two generations of them to a century, and no Felden child had ever known its grandfather. Gustavus might have pointed out the questionable wisdom of directing sons from the brink of dotage; what
he said was, "Things were different then, Papa, and I love Clara."

"Bien sur. Tout le monde connait ce sentiment. Pourtant ce n'est point une femme aimable. Et lorsqu'elle aura trente ans elle sera fort laide. Et puis c'est une devote . . ."

"She's a saint!"

"Eh bien! cela te fera une jolie epouse. If you want someone to drag you to mass seven days a week, engage a chaplain. I see no reason for you to leave your home now that I am old and have my experiments and my correspondence and cannot be expected to think about the harvest and those rascals my tenants and count every cart of hay. None of you seem to know when you are well off. Look at Jean."

"But Papa, I'm not thinking of leaving home. We will all live here. Clara thinks she would like to start a school—"

"Ah pas de bonnes ceuvres — surtout pas de bonnes ceuvresl"

"Clara says, the village needs—"

"Bring her here?" The old Baron pulled himself together. "Quite impossible. The house is too small. And what would she do with herself? She cannot sit with us at night. I daresay she would want your mother's drawing room opened, and she would be very dull. No, no, no, all quite impracticable . . . And believe me, no good will come of marrying people like that. Mais oui, c'est un beau nom. Mais le tien Vest aussi. Et si aujourd'hui il a un peu moins d'eclat, c'est que depuis des siecles nous avons bien mange et vecu heureux! Le vieux Bernin a toujours eu quelque chat a fouetter. Pire qu'un cardinal. C'est pres-qu'un ambitieux."

"But Clara is an angel."

"No doubt."

The old Baron spluttered on for days. He complained to Julius, nattered to the major-domo, poured out letters. Gustavus sulked. He was disappointed by his father's reception of his news, but what he really minded was the
attitude of the Bernins themselves, which was reserved. There was little they could decently take exception to in the engagement, and there was nothing to please them. It upset long laid lines and in return offered a young man with no prepared career or overt worth, and a connection with one of the least forward-looking elements in the Grand Duchy. The fiancee's father, Count Bernin Sigmundshofen, was an extremely able, extremely active man, the leader of a powerful Catholic clique, the head of one of the great South German families, and a public figure. He was President of the Landtag and for many years had been the envoy of the Grand Duke Friedrich to the Holy See, yet the range of his activities lay well beyond the narrow scope of Baden. He was one of those men who are supposed to have a friend in every chancellery, and he certainly had a relative in many; not only Baron Felden accused him of ambition. He now seems to have been something else: a disinterested man with a cause. He was also a meddler by conviction, had immense experience of motives and affairs, and, alas for Johannes, considerable charm.

Count Bernin's ends were dedicated to the Church, or rather to the unity and eminence of Catholic Europe for which aim he saw her as the instrument. The Reformation stood for him as the root of present evil and he no more accepted the split of Christendom than my grandfather accepted the German Empire. Yet while my grandfather went about complaining loudly morning, day and night, the Count was a man who prided himself on his long-term view; and if he was, as he may well have been, a fanatic, he also had the gift of urbanity, and he was a practical politician. He, too, deplored the new Germany, but he had seen it coming, and as the next step proposed to fight it from within. It could not have been a happy moment for dreaming of a Pax Catholica. For one thing there was no Catholic power. France was anti-clerical and defeated, Spain neutral, Italy not united, Austria embroiled with Slavs and Sultans and about to fall apart. Moreover, the alliances of these decades—with Russia, with England, with
Turkey, with Japan—were sought not on lines of denominational concordance but for purposes of colonial expansion, territorial adjustments and condoned aggression: to allay and inspire fears. Count Bernin, well aware, contended that given these facts, and given also the ineptitude of the Wittelsbachs, the dotage of the Hapsburgs and the push of Prussia, the lines for the politically amorphous German South and its slumbering nobility were laid; it must revitalize, take up its part, shoulder the Catholic burden and become dominant in Germany, the bridge to France, a link with Rome and one day perhaps the cornerstone of the Apostolic Hegemony of Europe. So Count Bernin went from country house to committee room, hinting, consulting, expounding, talking of profits and preferments and the dangers of being left behind, prodding lazy prelates, flattering supine civil servants and lethargic landowners into visions of their own importance, urging friends and colleagues to take office, bid for office, groom their sons for office. First one must beat the Prussians at their own game, he argued. They were making up at present to the South—very well then, one must take their plums. Let us become efficient; let us use that Prussian foible for the military: Bavaria, Wurttemberg and Baden had some excellent regiments full of uniforms and traditions—let us send our sons to sparkle in the Guards.