Читать книгу A Toast to Tomorrow - Cyril Henry Coles - Страница 6

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Fräulein Rademeyer came back one day to the two bleak rooms they tried to call home, and Klaus lifted his head in surprise at her air of unmistakable triumph. She shut the door carefully behind her, put her bag down and took out of it half a cabbage, perfectly fresh, a wedge of cheese, a small piece of steak, a loaf, a twist of paper containing alleged coffee, and another containing several spoonfuls of brown sugar.

“Wait,” she said. “That is not all.”

She brought out of the pocket of her cloak a small parcel wrapped in greaseproof paper.

“Butter,” she said in awed tones, “real butter.”

“Have you been going in for highway robbery,” said Klaus, “or merely petty larceny? Not that the result is petty——”

“There is a man outside the door,” she interrupted, “with a bundle. Would you bring it in, my dear?”

Klaus returned with a small sack containing firewood on the top and coal underneath—not much, but some.

“For heaven’s sake, explain,” said Klaus. “Have you met Santa Claus, or what is it?”

“I met a schoolfriend of mine, that is all, though it is true her name is Christine. Let me come to the fire, dear, I want to make it up. She and her husband have just come to live here. Give me three sticks—no, four. He was one of the architects or master contractors or something who have just built the new Deutches Museum at Munich. Now the coal. They came to live here because her mother’s house—would you like to come and blow this while I prepare the stew?—because her mother’s house was empty and her husband has retired, and they thought they might as well live here as anywhere else. Oh, dear, how I do run on, I haven’t been so excited since—I think I will sit down a moment, I don’t feel well.”

Klaus abandoned the crackling fire and sprang to help her to the battered old sofa on which he slept at night.

“For pity’s sake lie down and keep quiet a minute,” he said. “I’ll put the kettle on, we’ll have coffee and bread-and-butter while the stew cooks. I shall buy a collar and chain for you, you run about too much.”

“No. The coffee is for later on. We shall overeat ourselves if we are not careful. I will lie still while you peel the potatoes. Peel four.”

They feasted at last and were warm at the same time, an almost forgotten luxury, since as a rule one could either buy food or fuel, but not both. Ludmilla went on with her story.

“I told Christine all about you and what a burden I am to you——”

“Then you told her a pack of lies, and the wolf will get you.”

“No, for if it were not for me you could go wandering off and find work somewhere.”

This was perfectly true, but Klaus had hoped it had not occurred to her.

“Rubbish,” he said stoutly. “If it were not for you I should have turned into a filthy tramp, all holes, whiskers and spots.”

“Spots?”

“Where I had entertained visitors,” he explained kindly. “Go on about Christine.”

“She has a son-in-law. Do you know anything about”—she pulled a leaflet from another of her numerous pockets and read from it—“transport by land, road and railway, construction of tunnels and bridges, ships, aeronautics, or meteorology?”

“No, but I jolly soon will if it means work. Why?”

“Because her son-in-law is in charge of the section of the Deutches Museum which deals with all those things, and he wants steady, reliable men to look after them.”

“I think I could manage that. You only have to walk about and tell people not to touch.”

“You have to explain things to children when they ask you questions.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Klaus happily. “You just tell ’em they’ll understand all these things better when they are a little older.”

“That wouldn’t have satisfied me when I was young,” said Ludmilla. “Perhaps the young folk of the present day are less tiresome than I was.”

“Even now you haven’t told me where all the food came from.”

“Out of her larder. We went into her house to talk, and then we went into her larder while she put all these things in my bag. Then I said I must go, so she sent their servant to carry it, and the coal. Also, we are going to dinner there to-morrow.”

“Can you cut hair,” asked Klaus anxiously, “if I sharpen our nail-scissors?”

They went to Munich in the spring of 1923, a year almost to the day since the auction at Haspe, and found two tiny bedrooms and a sitting-room in the upper half of a workman’s house in Quellen Strasse, close to the Mariahilfe Church in the old part of the city. From here it was only a short walk for Klaus through the Kegelhof and by Schwartz Strasse and the outer Erhardt Bridge, to the Isar island which is nearly covered by the immense buildings of the Deutches Museum. The pay was desperately little in those days, but permanent, and as Lehmann came to know the Museum personnel, some of the unmarried members of the staff were glad to have Ludmilla to darn socks and vests for them. Gradually they got a home together, with chairs replacing packing-cases, and blankets on the beds instead of coats and sacks and strips of carpet. They were always hungry and usually cold, but they had occupation.

Klaus was fortunate in the man who worked in the same part of a section as he did. Herr Kurt Stiebel was an elderly man who had been a partner in a firm of solicitors of some repute in Munich; in common with the rest of the professional classes in Germany he had been brought to absolute penury in the slump, and thought himself fortunate to have obtained a post which would provide him with a fireless attic in a narrow turning off the Höhe Strasse, and almost enough food to keep him from starving. Klaus brought him home to Quellen Strasse one evening after the Museum closed, to drink watery but hot cups of “Blumen” coffee and eat a few leathery little cakes Ludmilla had saved up to buy for the party.

“You are our first guest, Herr Stiebel,” said Fräulein Rademeyer, “you are very welcome indeed.”

“I am honoured,” said the old gentleman, and kissed her hand. “It is long since I had the pleasure of being entertained.”

“Take this chair,” said Klaus. “That one has a loose leg, I have learned the art of sitting on it.”

“It is as well,” said Ludmilla. “It will cure you of your regrettable tendency to lounging. Have you had a good day, Herr Stiebel?”

“I was not asked more than twenty questions of which I did not know the answers. There was a small boy who asked who invented the arch, and when I said the Romans did—I believe that is right—he asked who the Romans were. I directed him to the Ethnological Section.”

“He didn’t go,” said Klaus. “He came and asked me why bricks are usually red and what makes the veins in marble. Even that wasn’t so bad as the young man who asked me to explain in simple language the Precession of the Equinoxes. I swivelled him off to what’s-his-name in Astronomy.”

“We are learning,” said Stiebel dryly, “to cope with these emergencies. When I was a solicitor and found myself confronted with a poser I used to say I would consult the authorities. Now my clients do it instead.”

“My father used to say,” said Ludmilla, “that you can’t teach an old hand new tricks, but I have learned many things this last year or so.”

“We all have, my dear lady, even to seeing a saddler of Heidelberg Chancellor of a German Republic, and a house-painter from Vienna leading a march on Berlin.”

“Where is he now, what is his name—the house-painter?”

“Hitler. Serving a sentence of five years’ detention in a fortress.”

“Did you ever see him?” asked Klaus. “I have heard much about him. General Ludendorff was behind that, I understand.”

“Certainly he was, there is no secret about that; Ludendorff, in my opinion, wanted to turn out Ebert and did not care what tools he used for the work, but as you know, the scheme failed ignominiously. Yes, I have seen Hitler several times and have been to one or two of his meetings. You know,” said Stiebel, as one apologizing for a lapse, “one goes anywhere when one has no occupation, it serves to pass the time. To my mind, he is just a stump-orator, I doubt if we hear any more of him.”

“He obtained a considerable following, did he not?”

“Among the more excitable and despairing elements, undoubtedly, Fräulein. Unhappy young men, seeing no future, neurasthenic ex-servicemen, Army officers with no pay and no prospects, older men with their life’s work ruined, such as these are tinder to his spark. But when prosperity returns to our Germany, as return it must, there will be no place for such firebrands as Hitler.”

“Apart from Ludendorff,” said Klaus, “did any of the more conspicuous war figures support him?”

“Only Goering, so far as I can remember. He was very severely wounded in the shooting, and smuggled out of the country, I hear. He may have died, I do not know.”

“Goering? The air ace? I met him at Darmstadt,” said Klaus.

All through the year 1923 the mark, already so low in value that fifty would not buy a box of matches, dropped and dropped until ordinary figures lost their meaning, and English soldiers in the Occupied Area bought good cars for the equivalent of a few shillings, and a factory in full production for a few pounds. Men and women, and especially young people, sold all they had or could give for the price of a meal or a taste of ordinary civilized comfort, and every street, almost every house, had its tragedy when vice, as always, walked hand in hand with despair, saying, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry—or pretend to be—for to-morrow we die.” It was so horrible as to be incredible, had it not been so oppressively real, this condition of a nation where nobody at all had any money which was worth anything at all, it was like the awful catastrophic ravings of some inspired prophet of evil.

“Surely,” said Klaus to Stiebel, “things must take a turn for the better soon, this cannot go on. Something must happen or we shall all die.”

“Do you recall,” said Stiebel in his precise way, “what someone said during the war about the gold-red-black of our Flag? Gold, they said, for the past; red for the present; and black for the future. Well, this is the future, and I see no end to it.”

He put his glasses on his nose and they immediately fell off again, he caught them with a bitter little laugh. “I could wish our agonies were not so frequently absurd also. My nose is so thin my glasses will not stay in place.”

“Give them to me,” said Klaus, and spent ten minutes cutting thicker cork pads and fitting them in the slides. “Perhaps that will be better.”

“It is admirable,” said the old gentleman, trying them on.

“I wish I could fill all our voids with a little cork and a sharp knife.”

“Then there would be a shortage of cork,” said Stiebel acidly. “It is evident to me that Heaven is tired of Germany.”

In the early autumn someone asked Klaus whether he was going to hear Hitler speak.

“I thought he was in prison,” said Lehmann casually.

“Where can you live not to have heard the news? He has been released and is speaking at a meeting on Saturday.”

Klaus went, since the hall would be warmed and the entertainment free, besides, he had by this time heard Hitler described alternatively as a gas-bag, a great leader, a firebrand, a stump-orator, a Messiah, a poisonous little reptile, the Hope of Germany and the Curse of Munich, and Lehmann was mildly curious. He hardly knew what he expected—some loud-voiced professional ranter, full of stock phrases and fly-blown arguments. He saw instead a pale young man with a nervous manner and very little self-control. Hitler spoke of Germany as she was and as she might be. He laid the blame for the present appalling condition of affairs on the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Government, the Jews, the profiteers, and the foreigner, and worked himself up into a state of hysterical excitement, screaming and weeping and losing the thread of his arguments in a manner which rather repelled Klaus, though there was no doubt that the man was sincere and he carried the meeting with him. Klaus returned home in a thoughtful mood, and Fräulein Rademeyer asked what he thought of the little Austrian.

“I don’t know. I can’t admire a man with so little self-control—when he gets excited he yells like a madman. But there is no doubt he can sway the crowd, and it is possible that if he were well advised he might yet do something for Germany.”

“My dear, have another potato, you have eaten nothing. He is quite a common little man, is he not?”

“He might be a clerk or a shop-assistant, yes. He is neurotic and unbalanced, yes. He shouts and weeps and contradicts himself, but he can make people listen to him.”

“So you said, Klaus, but does he say anything worth listening to? What does he want to do?”

“He wants to turn out all the old men who have brought us into this mess, he says that in future Youth shall lead Germany. He blames the Jews and the profiteers for the fall of the mark.”

“Very possibly he is right, but what exactly does he propose doing in the matter? Is he a financier?”

“I don’t know,” confessed Klaus. “I suppose he will have to have financial advisers. As to what he proposes to do, he wants to run candidates from his party at the Reichstag elections, and when they have a majority they will reform the country.”

“Ever since I was old enough to read the papers,” said the old lady, “leaders of political parties have been saying that. I expect they said it in Ur of the Chaldees.”

“Yes, I know,” said Klaus, thumping the table, “but this time somebody has got to do it, or we shall all die. I am not overmuch impressed by this fellow Hitler, but at least he is someone fresh. He has ideas——”

“God forbid that I should throw cold water on the smallest spark of hope, but we have been disappointed so often. Neurotic, unstable, incoherent, it does not sound promising.”

“I admit it doesn’t, but at least here is someone prepared to try and save us.”

“And you think he has a chance?”

“I don’t know, but I shall make a point of seeing him again. I have come to that state where I would support a convicted murderer or an illiterate village wench if I thought either could help Germany. Hitler, after all, is more probable than Jeanne d’Arc, and look what she did! She raised France from the gutter——”

“Have another potato, dear,” said the sardonic old lady.

A week or two later Klaus strolled into a café one evening to drink a glass of cheap beer and exchange views with his fellows, a mild extravagance he sometimes permitted himself when the monotony of his life became more than he could bear. On this occasion there was a group of men gathered closely about one table listening to two of their number who were arguing hotly.

“But you must base the mark upon some definite asset, and we have no gold. Gold is the basis of all reputable currencies.”

“That is the way the capitalists talk, and the Jews, who have ruined our country between them. The real wealth is in the land, in fields and mines and forests, and in the good work of our people in factories, not in the pockets of the rich.”

“I have heard that voice before,” said Klaus to himself, for he could not see the speaker over the shoulders of the men surrounding him. Klaus said “Gu’n’abend” to one or two who were known to him, and they made room for him in the circle; he was right, the speaker was Hitler.

Lehmann sat sipping his beer and listening to the discussion, which became increasingly one-sided as Hitler worked himself up and harangued his hearers without staying to hear what was said in reply, and it seemed to Klaus that Hitler had all the drive, fire and enthusiasm, and personal magnetism too, while greater intelligence and reasoning power remained with the two or three who opposed him. Why must they be opposed, Klaus wondered, if knowledge and skill could be harnessed to the service of this little human dynamo? Something might yet be done, even now.

He was introduced to Hitler that evening and made a point of seeing a good deal of him in the weeks that followed. He remained unimpressed by the little man’s mental capacity, but there was no doubt of his sincerity nor of his uncanny power of gaining adherents, in ever increasing numbers, to his party. Undoubtedly the man could be useful, and Klaus joined the National Socialists to be welcomed for his sturdy common sense and resourcefulness. Their leader came to rely upon him as a man whose advice was worth attention and whose reliability was beyond question.

One night in winter Klaus invited his new leader to coffee at the house in Quellen Strasse, and Hitler came. Fräulein Rademeyer welcomed him with the old-fashioned courtesy natural to her.

“It is my greatest pleasure,” she said, “to welcome my nephew’s friends to our house. Will you sit here by the fire, Herr Hitler?”

He made her a stiff bow, but hardly glanced at her, and immediately addressed Klaus. “Are you coming to the meeting to-morrow night, Lehmann? Good. I shall speak on the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. These clauses have already been broken by every signatory to the Treaty except, possibly, England, and even that may not be true. I expect they have something up their sleeves.”

“Will you take sugar in your coffee, Herr Hitler?”

“Thank you. I shall show that a treaty already broken can no longer be binding upon Germany, and I shall announce that an immediate programme of rearmament will be the first care of the Party when it comes to power. It will solve the unemployment problem——”

“Where is the money to come from for all this?” asked Ludmilla innocently.

“The Party will attend to that, you would not understand if I told you, Fräulein. While we are rearming——”

“The first step of all,” said Klaus to Ludmilla, “is to stabilize the currency. Herr Hitler is dealing now with what happens in later stages. You were saying——”

It took some time for Hitler to get into his stride again, but presently, in a pause of his flood of talk, Fräulein Rademeyer asked whether there were any women in his Party and, if so, what they did to help him.

“There is no place for women in the Party, Fräulein, their place is in the home. The three C’s,” he added in a lighter tone. “Cookery, church and children.”

“Usefulness and piety.”

“Precisely, Fräulein. Now, with regard to the Ruhr——”

When he had gone, Klaus and Ludmilla looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“I am sorry——” he began.

“Please don’t, dear, I haven’t been so entertained for a long while. Your saviour of Germany is the funniest little man I have ever met.”

“I have never seen him in a lady’s company before, though it did not occur to me till now. There are stories going round of his rudeness to women, but——”

“Not so much rudeness as—I don’t think there’s a word for it. Like the way you treat a tiresome fly, shoo! Be off!”

“I will not bring him here again.”

“Probably it is the fault of his upbringing. His mother should have slapped him oftener, and a great deal harder. My dear, what a lot he talks.”

“That won’t matter if he can induce people to act. But—it is a great pity that it’s bad manners to slap one’s guest. There is a lot to be said for one’s nursery days when one would have simply hit him on the head with a tin engine!”