In the room of the primitives she paused for a moment, on her way out, before a picture of the martyrdom of St Erasmus. An executioner in fifteenth-century costume, with a pale shell-pink cod-piece, was methodically turning the handle of a winch – like Mr Mantalini at the mangle – winding the saint’s intestines, yard after yard, out of a gash in the emaciated belly, while the victim lay back, as if on a sofa, making himself thoroughly comfortable and looking up into the sky with an expression of unruffled equanimity. The joke here was less subtle than in Toteninsel, more frankly a knockabout; but excellent, none the less, in its own simple way. She was still smiling as she walked out into the street.
Holtzmann, it turned out, lived only a few hundred yards from the gallery, in a pretty little early nineteenth-century house (much too good for a man with sweaty hands!) set back from the road behind a little square of gravel. A large car was standing at the door. Holtzmann’s? she wondered. He must be rich, the old pig! It had taken her so little time to come from the gallery that it was hardly a quarter-past twelve as she mounted the steps. ‘Never mind,’ she said to herself.
‘They’ll have to put up with me. I refuse to wait one second longer.’ The thought that, in a moment, she would see Ekki again made her heart beat quickly. ‘What a fool I am! What an absolute fool.’ But how marvellous to be able to be a fool! She rang the bell.
It was Holtzmann himself who opened – dressed in an overcoat, she was surprised to see, as though he were just going out. The expression with which he had greeted her at the station reappeared on his face as he saw her.
‘You are so soon,’ he said, trying to smile; but his nervousness and embarrassment amounted almost to terror. ‘We had not awaited you until half-one.’
Helen laughed. ‘I hadn’t awaited myself,’ she explained. ‘But I got here quicker than I thought.’
She made a movement to step across the threshold; but Holtzmann held out his arm. ‘We are not yet ready,’ he said. His face was flushed and sweating with embarrassment. ‘If you will return in a quarter hour,’ he almost implored. ‘Only a quarter hour.’
‘Nur ein Viertel Stündchen.’ Helen laughed, thinking of those embroidered cushions on the sofas where the Geheimrats slept off the effects of noonday eating. ‘But why shouldn’t I wait indoors?’ She pushed past him into a dark little hall that smelt of cooking and stale air. ‘Where’s Ekki?’ she asked, suddenly overcome by the desire to see him, to see him at once, without another second’s delay, so that she could tell him what a beast she had been, but how loving all the same, how adoring in spite of the beastliness, and how happy, how eager to share her happiness with him! At the other end of the vestibule a door stood ajar. Calling his name, Helen ran towards it.
‘Stop!’ Holtzmann shouted behind her.
But she was already across the threshold.
The room in which she found herself was a bedroom. On the narrow iron bed Ekki was lying with all his clothes on, his head on one side, his mouth open. His breath came slowly in long snores; he was asleep – but asleep as she had never seen him sleeping.
‘Ekki!’ she had time to cry, while a door slammed, another voice joined itself to Holtzmann’s, and the vestibule was loud with violent movement. ‘My darling . . .’
Then suddenly a hand closed on her shoulder from behind. She turned, saw the face of a strange man within a few inches of her own, heard somewhere from the background Holtzmann’s ‘Schnell, Willi, schnell!’ and the stranger almost whispering, between clenched teeth, Schmutziges Frauenzimmer’; then, as she opened her mouth to scream, received a terrible blow on the chin that brought the teeth violently together again, and felt herself dropping into blackness.
When she came to herself, she was in bed in a hospital ward. Some peasants had found her lying unconscious in a little wood five or six miles from the town. An ambulance had brought her back to Basel. It was only on the following morning that the effects of the barbitone wore off and she remembered what had happened. But by that time Ekki had been over the frontier, in Germany, for nearly twenty hours.
CHAPTER LIV
February 23rd 1935
ANTHONY HAD SPENT the morning at the offices of the organization, dictating letters. For the most part, it was a matter of dealing with the intellectual difficulties of would-be pacifists. ‘What would you do if you saw a foreign soldier attacking your sister?’ Well, whatever else one did, one certainly wouldn’t send one’s son to murder his second cousin. Wearisome work! But it had to be done. He dictated twenty-seven letters; then it was time to go to lunch with Helen.
‘There’s practically nothing to eat,’ she said, when he came in. ‘I simply couldn’t be bothered to cook anything. The unspeakable boredom of making meals!’ Her voice took on a note of almost malevolent resentment.
They addressed themselves to tinned salmon and lettuce. Anthony tried to talk; but his words seemed to bounce off the impenetrable surface of her sullen and melancholy silence. In the end, he too sat speechless.
‘It’s just a year ago today,’ she brought out at last.
‘What is?’
‘Just a year since those devils at Basel . . .’ She shook her head and was silent again.
Anthony said nothing. Anything he could say would be an irrelevance, he felt, almost an insult.
‘I often wish they’d killed me too,’ she went on slowly. ‘Instead of leaving me here, rotting away, like a piece of dirt on a rubbish heap. Like a dead kitten,’ she added, as an afterthought. ‘So much carrion.’ The words were spoken with a vehement disgust.
‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.
‘Because it’s true. I am carrion.’
‘There’s no need for you to be.’
‘I can’t help it. I’m carrion by nature.’
‘No, you’re not,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve said it yourself. When Ekki was there . . .’
‘No, I wasn’t carrion then.’
‘What you’ve been once, you can be again.’
‘Not without him.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, if you want to be, you can. It’s a matter of choosing. Choosing and then setting to work in the right way.’
Helen shook her head. ‘They ought to have killed me. If you only knew how I disgust myself!’ She screwed up her face into a grimace. ‘I’m no good. Worse than no good. Just a lump of dirt.’ After a pause, ‘I’m not even interested in Ekki’s work,’ she went on. ‘I don’t like his friends. Communists. But they’re just beastly little people, like anyone else. Stupid, vulgar, envious, pushing. One might as well have the fun of wearing a chinchilla coat and lunching at Claridge’s. I shall probably end by selling myself to a rich man. That is, if I can find one.’ She laughed again. Then, in a tone of more bitter self-contempt, ‘Only a year today,’ she resumed, ‘and already I’m sick of it all. Utterly sick of it and pining to get out of it. I’m disgusting.’
‘But are you entirely to blame?’
‘Of course I am.’
Anthony shook his head. ‘Perhaps it’s also the fault of the work.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Organized hatred – it’s not exactly attractive. Not what most people feel they really want to live for.’
‘Ekki lived for it. Lots of people live for it.’
‘But what sort of people?’ he asked. ‘They’re of three kinds. Idealists with an exceptional gift for self-deception. Either they don’t know that it’s organized hatred, or else they genuinely believe that the end justifies the means, genuinely imagine that the means don’t condition the end.
Ekki was one of those. They form the majority. And then there are two minorities. A minority of people who know that the thing’s organized hatred and rejoice in the fact. And a minority that’s ambitious, that merely uses the movement as a convenient machine for realizing its ambition. You, Helen – you’re neither ambitious nor self-deceiving. And, in spite of what happened this day last year, don’t really want to liquidate people – not even Nazis. And that’s why the chinchillas and the orchids seem so attractive. Not because you actively long for them. Only because this particular alternative is so unsatisfactory.’
There was a silence. Helen got up, changed the plates and set a bowl of fruit on the table. ‘What is the satisfactory alternative?’ she asked, as she helped herself to an apple.
‘It begins,’ he answered, ‘with trying to cultivate the difficult art of loving people.’
‘But most people are detestable.’
‘They’re detestable, because we detest them. If we liked them, they’d be likeable.’
‘Do you think that’s true?’
‘I’m sure it’s true.’
‘And what do you do after that?’
‘There’s no “after,”’ he replied. ‘Because, of course, it’s a lifetime’s job. Any process of change is a lifetime’s job. Every time you get to the top of a peak, you see another peak in front of you – a peak that you
