Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (604 page)

The Frau Rechtsanwalt came close to George.

“We Germans are not such barbarians to our prisoners?
Wie
?” she asked, with her admonitory air. “Those are officers’ servants.” With her plumpness, fairness, and youth she had always the air of an instructress — as if she were admonishing a younger brother.

George said:

“Officers! Not
our
officers!”

She answered:

“Yes! Hundreds of English officers are prisoners in our town here. They will not give paroles; that is why you see none in the streets. It is said to be forbidden by your Government for the officer class to give paroles. But, say: we Germans are not such barbarians!” George exclaimed:

“I, too, have given no parole!”

“But you!” she exclaimed. “You are so gentle — so good — so untroublesome! If only all the English were like you!”

He thought for two days, and then demanded to see the official who had him in charge. It was the Assessor with the always unbuttoned clothes. He was cutting his nails. George said:

“You do not take it that I have given any parole. If that was understood, I withdraw it.”

The Assessor had a very short neck; he had to slew half his shoulders round to look at George, he having one blue leg over the wooden arm of his chair.

“London,” he said, “cannot be so pleasant a place as Zell. Its Tower is burned. That great fortress!”

“I consider, now,” George said, “that I have given no parole. I prefer imprisonment.”

The Assessor went on cutting his nails.

“Decidedly,” he said, “Zell is a better place. I cannot have you imprisoned. I have no orders. You are ‘ protected.’”

Ten days later the same official said to him, with a jeering expression in his blue eyes, his fat face being completely immobile:

“Our German trains are still well steam-heated. Unlike you English, we have no general strike — no rioting — no coal famine! So I do not understand why you choose to go on your feet in a snowstorm!”

They had captured George on a lonely heath, sixteen miles or so from Zell, as the Assessor had said, in a snowstorm. As a matter of fact they had sent after him an immense, old-fashioned landau, drawn by two very fat horses, a single, unarmed fellow whom George took to be a non-commissioned officer, but who was really a footman, and of course a coachman. The footman marched straight up to the snow-filled, heathery hollow, perhaps a hundred yards from the high road. In it George was crouched, intending to spend there the short hours of daylight. He had left the Rechtsanwalt’s flat at two in the morning, and had walked through the night, making for the Dutch frontier.

The Governor’s footman — that was what he was — saluted with an immense stamp on the soft ground and presented a letter. It ran something like this:

“Be so good, Excellency, as to return and present yourself before me at my office. A promenade in this weather, even though no one hinders it, is no doubt heroic
à L’Anglais.
But it will cause inconvenience to a good friend of yours if you are not returned here by eleven, The carriage of the Town Governor is at your disposal.” It was signed: “Assessor Something,” the name being illegible.

George asked the man in uniform:

“If I refuse to return?”

The man made again his immense salute. He exclaimed, with no expression at all on his face, in a voice of great volume and harshness:

“Excellency! No instructions!”

George said, in talking of this point, that, now, his nerves completely gave way — and his legs. He was convinced that he could not have walked the hundred yards or so to the carriage but for the half of a large flask of cognac that he poured down his throat. That was a deliberate breakdown of the will — an act of voluntary self-demoralisation. It was, too, a flight from the mystery that seemed to hang over him.

I suppose that, had that Assessor not been a fantastic idiot, there need have been no mystery; apparently George was perfectly free by “Higher orders” to go where he liked, a policeman following him. But he was never told that, because apparently the Assessor had not been ordered to tell him. I suppose he would have been stopped if he had approached fortifications or that sort of thing. But the mystery had been too much for George. Once his father had said to him, heavily, and with a note of special warning:

“My boy, never drink when you are very perturbed, or during periods of prolonged strain. Against alcohol itself I have nothing to say. Drink as gentlemen do in the society you frequent. But to use it as a refuge, even temporary, from worries is fatal to your family.”

That boy had been so completely unimpassioned during all the time he had been talking that, at that point, I had to say to him:

“I suppose your position had been pretty beastly till then?”

He uttered deeply:

“Believe me, it was hell!” — and the resonant word seemed to echo away down into caverns.

“Ah but, believe me, too,” he continued, “it was not just merely my own position.”

He remained brooding for a moment or two:

“I was alone also with the consideration of my father’s death. I could have saved him if I had gone a day earlier!

“Besides,” he continued, after another pause, “ you have no idea of the impression of overwhelming power that those people produced. I swear to you that, when at last I got back to London and saw the motor ‘buses run about, it was a week before I could believe that they existed, or the streets or the Government buildings.... And then — over there — when I stood by the open door of that landau; when I stood there on the road and saw, just moving away from talking to the coachman, the three or four gendarmes in fur pelisses, that must have tracked me through the night.... I tell you, I just gave way. There seemed to be no escape. Ever! The bitter wind blew across the flat heath; the policemen walked off towards a wood of silver birches. It seemed to be Power, so immense, so unconcerned, and so contemptuous. I determined, then and there, to give in; to go back to the Rechtsanwalt’s; to succumb to drink; and women; and....”

I said:

“What?”

He just answered:

“Oh, well!”

He went on:

“I assure you that was the first drop of alcohol I had touched for many weeks. I knew I had to be wary. It was no sort of plain sailing.”

Anyhow he said that the effect of that half flask of German brandy was to render him not amorous, but mad to do murder. Through the long, bitter drive in the winter daylight he cherished the warming idea that he was going to strangle the blue-eyed Assessor. His hands worked in anticipation till he hurt his palms with his nails.

He stood in front of the Assessor’s desk, his hands still crawling of themselves under the stress of that emotion. He was listening to what he considered to be the imbecile jocularities of that complacent idiot. With his intellect he was trying to keep himself back, as, six months before, he had tried to restrain himself from catching the throat of Mr. Podd. He felt that if he gave way to that impulse he would have gone mad; it would mean such a want of self-control as to amount to mania. It was, perhaps, what they wanted.

He had been made ridiculous. They had obviously watched him during every step of the escape he imagined he was going to make; from the door of the Rechtsanwalt’s flat at two in the morning until, just when he was worn and untidy enough to look like a fool, they had pulled him back. His reason told him that to honour their buffoonery by attempting to murder that Assessor would be to show them that he felt himself fooled; just as it had been over-honouring Mr. Podd even to dispute with him. He desperately did not want to assault that grinning fool in the unbuttoned blue tunic. Yet his legs bent themselves, trembling to make the spring necessary to carry him round the table. He said that that was the most ghastly feeling he had ever had in his life: the dread that he might act in spite of his will; or even unconsciously. As if he might suddenly come to himself and find that fellow choked at his feet!

He said it seemed to last for seven hours!

The Assessor threw a long envelope on to the table and jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of a shabby, varnished door.

“Take these,” he said. “ Give them to the Herr Offizier that you will find in the next room. He is a friend of yours. I wish him joy of such friends. For me it would be too like treason. But I am not prince-befriended!”

George said that just moving across that office floor gave him a feeling of mental relief like the falling away of a great physical oppression from his chest; and he added that Dr. Robins, his prospective father-in-law, had told him that that mental state had a definite scientific name amongst mad doctors. The name George had forgotten, but he said that it meant that he was pretty near either suicidal or murderous mania.

The next room turned out to be a living apartment of a rather sordid appearance. It contained a dingy, plush-covered couch, a dining table in dull mahogany showing the circular stains from glass bottoms, and a hanging lamp with an exceedingly fly-blown silk shade. The light was pallid and obscured by the figure of a very tall man, who was looking out of the window. He wore a very long cape of light grey with a dark blue high collar and a great gilt-spiked helmet. It gave George a disagreeable feeling. He was used to officials who were also of course military officers; but these were usually in
déshabille,
obese, spectacled, and engrossed in papers. This was the murderous Prussian in the nail-new, parade spick and spanness of butchery.

The grey pillar turned and regarded him with dark, lowering eyes beneath prominent bony brows. A deep, resentful voice that grated from the chest, said:

“Sie!” — which is the less intimate form of the German for “You!”

George felt his own voice assume the same resonance as if of parade. His lips said:

“Curtius!” And they stood stiffly, crossing hostile glances.

The poet began to express in long, formal sentences, his regret that he should for so long have seemed to neglect one for whose confinement he acknowledged himself to be directly and by invitation responsible. He called George “Your Excellency, Lord Marsden!” and addressed him, George said, as if he had been delivering a proclamation at the gates of a fortress. He ended up:

“Believe me, I have not neglected your Excellency’s affair. For such an affair these times are not easy.” George answered:

“Upper-Lieutenant Professor Doctor Geheimrath should have done nothing. The circumstances warranted that.” The poet’s eyes, he said, blazed redly with an intense fury.

“The circumstances,” he exclaimed, “made necessary your being restored to liberty. For the honour of Germany. For my honour too!”

He put out from under his cloak a roll of papers printed in columns.

“Be so good,” he said, imperatively, “as to take a place at the table — and to read these.”

He leaned down to smooth out the rolled cuttings from newspapers, the skirts of his cape brushing George’s seated figure. George read, in besmudged Gothic capitals, the heading of a newspaper cutting:

“
Der Fall Marsden,”
as who should say: “The Marsden Case!”

It came to him dimly, in one of the immense sentences with which German writers for the press open their more impassioned communications, that in that article someone had been pleading for his own release. The writer said:

“That the German-culture-spreading George, Earl Marsden, by law enemy of the Empire, but actually imprisoned by chance at the invitation — nay, by the very persuasion of a poet who is a true son of our Fatherland, should languish in gaol, we, in the interests of the credit of our people itself, hold to be a calamity for German honour.” George looked down at the signature. The writer had been the poet himself, under the date of the first of September, 1914. George began: