Chapter 1 Emmy
April1946
Frankfurt,Germany
E
mmy Clarke was a librarian not a soldier.
She met her eyes in the cracked mirror hanging in the Frankfurt train station WC and told herself that again. She was a librarian.
The United States Army uniform Emmy wore mocked that assertion.
It was a costume, though. A powerful one that offered Emmy protection as she traveled through postwar Germany, but a costume nonetheless.
Mr. Luther Harris Evans, the director of the Library of Congress, had told her that all the trappings—including an army title she certainly hadn’t earned—were a precaution. She wouldn’t be in a single moment of danger if she accepted the two-month assignment abroad.
Had Director Evans known her well, he would have realized she didn’t care about the potential danger.
She just didn’t want to see herself in the uniform that her husband had died in.
Emmy touched the tie at her neck, and remembered how she’d tightened Joseph’s four-in-hand knot the morning he’d shipped out,
like she had a thousand times since they’d been married.
The pain of the loss had dulled, as everyone had said it would, but being in Germany was bringing it all back. And this was only the first day of her new assignment.
“A faint heart never filled a spade flush,” Emmy whispered to herself, a saying her mother had picked up in the Montana logging towns they traveled through, poker a religion more than a pastime out there. The phrase was a bit of card sharp nonsense, but it always reminded her of what she had already been through in her life and survived.
She could do this, too.
Emmy gave her reflection a firm nod, and then bent to retrieve her bag.
Stragglers were still disembarking from the train when she stepped back out onto the platform, but the crowd was thinning. She was thankful for that. There were too many people in U.S. Army uniforms and she needed to find a specific one.
Major Wesley Arnold.
The major was a member of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives unit, the group that had been irreverently dubbed Monuments Men. Emmy had always loved the idea of them— scuttling about Europe, protecting artistic and architectural masterpieces from bombs, Allies and Axis alike. Safeguarding humanity’s cultural inheritance.
No one on the platform looked like an academic who also punched Nazis in the name of defending art, so she kept walking, hoping he would find her first.
When she got to the lobby, Emmy was immediately surrounded by a group of young children, their thin little bodies pressing into her legs, their hands reaching up, palms and fingernails crusted with dirt. She wasn’t fluent in German but knew enough to realize they were begging for food.
After several days of traveling by train through the country, she had been prepared for this onslaught. Starving children gathered at spots along the railroad all the way from the port to Frankfurt,
calling out to passengers for cigarettes and candy and sandwiches. Never for money, that wouldn’t do them any good.
“Bitte, bitte, bitte,” they cried in unison. Please. Please. Please.
Emmy resented them. She hated them, even.
Because they made her care, and Emmy didn’t want to feel any kind of complex emotion for Germans—children or not. Her chest went tight as she pictured that moment of fixing Joseph’s tie once more. His smile, the dark curl that fell over his forehead.
Don’tyouforgetme,he’d said. A tease, a joke. But there had been a serious thread that ran through those words. They both knew his likely fate.
“Bitte, bitte, bitte.”
A sharp whistle cut through the pleas, and Emmy looked up into the eyes of a man holding a placard with her name scrawled across it.
The begging children didn’t scatter, just shifted their attention, and the man held out a package to the youngest one in the bunch with a single command: “Share.”
They seemed to collectively decide they had gotten all that they would and scampered off after the rest of the passengers. The man watched them go and Emmy watched the man.
He was of medium height and medium build with a mediumbrown hair color that matched medium-brown eyes. Silver threaded through the strands at his temples, suggesting he was at least in his midthirties. A constellation of freckles sat at the corner of his mouth, which was the only objectively interesting thing about his face.
But there was a magnetism about him that was hard to look away from.
Maybe it was her travel-induced delirium, but she had to admit that he did, in fact, look exactly like an academic who also punched Nazis in the name of defending art. That impression might have to do with the spiderweb of freshly scarred skin that peeked out from his collar. Or the way he leaned much of his weight on his cane. He had seen action.
When Emmy met his eyes, they were hard, but there was a slant to his lips as if he found her scrutiny amusing.
She flushed and looked down, caught out. What assumptions was he now making about her? Emmy had never given much thought to her looks. She was unremarkable but not unattractive, with a face that most people forgot a few minutes after meeting her. Throughout her life, she’d received the advice to skip dessert plenty of times. The one feature that garnered any attention—her thick, glossy black hair—was currently dull from travel, tucked back in a low chignon.
For a silly moment, she wished she’d applied lipstick in the WC.
“I’m Mrs. Clarke,” she said after realizing they had been standing in a strange, weighted silence for too long.
His half smile became a full one that still didn’t meet his eyes. Her own flicked down to his scars again, and she wondered if the flint in his personality was innate or forged through war.
“Major Wesley Arnold,” he said, his voice a lovely rumble, his accent American but hard to place beyond that. “At your service.”
He reached out a hand for her bag and she fought the urge to refuse his help because of his cane. If he’d offered, he could handle it.
“I hope your trip was uneventful,” he said, stilted in that way of people who weren’t natural conversationalists. She followed him into the street where an open-air jeep was waiting under guard by a young private.
“Quite.” Emmy eyed the step up into the vehicle. There was no way she was going to climb in there in a graceful manner with this impractical skirt tight around her knees. How the army thought this was a suitable uniform, she would never know. Women working for the war efforts should have been supplied with trousers.
Before she could even make an attempt, Major Wesley Arnold’s hands cupped her waist. He boosted her into the passenger seat with an ease that suggested a hidden strength not obvious to the casual eye.
Emmy blinked, thrown once again. He’d handled the whole affair with an efficiency she found intensely refreshing. She had needed to
get into the jeep, and so he had made it happen.
Major Arnold slid behind the wheel and stowed his cane, all with well-practiced movements. Maybe the injury wasn’t quite as new as she’d thought.
“Thank you,” she murmured. He paused with the key in the ignition as if her response surprised him. Perhaps he’d been expecting a reprimand for how his thumbs had pressed into the soft flesh of her hips.
They drove for a while in silence, and maybe in some other circumstance it would have been uncomfortable. But mostly, she was too exhausted to feel anything but gratitude that someone had taken over the logistics of getting her to where she needed to go.
Emmy wasn’t sure she could have made idle chitchat, anyway. They were driving through destruction that was so complete and devastating she couldn’t look away from it—the buildings that were no longer buildings; the skinny dogs that, judging from the state of the few people she saw out, would likely become food themselves; the air that was thick with dust and the stench of human suffering. Sour rot, copper blood, disease.
Why was she here again?
She hated that she was here.
Joseph hadn’t died in this country, but he had died becauseof this country.
Emmy had been more than happy toiling away in the acquisitions department of the Library of Congress. It was a prestigious position for someone as young as she, and it let her get lost in books. Grief, she’d found, had a way of receding when she was reading. Her work in acquisitions often had more to do with examining the book itself than consuming the story, but she’d never been good at ignoring the words that beckoned her into another world, into another time period, into a place where her husband hadn’t died along with millions of other young men.
Then Director Evans had called her into his office. The Library of Congress needed a volunteer to head to Offenbach am Main where the government had set up an archival depot that held the millions of books the Nazis had plundered from occupied nations. They were
to sort through all that loot for anything that could be deemed “enemy literature” in an effort to learn more about why and how all this had happened.
One of the original members of the mission had become ill and had to bow out, and Emmy would serve as a placeholder until they could get someone in longer term.
Everything in her had balked at the request. How could she go to Germany and be anything but the cruelest version of herself?
But she’d never been able to say no to books.
So instead of walking to work on a crisp spring morning back in Washington, she was being driven through a bombed-out Frankfurt by a man with scars and darkness in his expression in the very country she’d sworn never to step foot in for her entire life.
More children ran behind their jeep, their bones pressing too tight against their skin, their lips dry and cracked, their feet bare. Emmy wanted Major Arnold to drive faster, but even when they left the children behind there was little relief to be found. On the sidewalk, a pair of shoes stuck out from a dirty blanket, the lump underneath too still to be anything but a corpse.
“Should we stop?” Emmy dared ask, even though she wanted nothing more than to pretend she hadn’t seen it.
But Major Arnold shook his head. “I’ll send someone out. It’s . . . not uncommon.”
Three weeks ago, before Director Evans had given her this assignment, Emmy would have said she would be perfectly happy to consign each and every single German to hell. Yet here they were in hell, and Emmy couldn’t find any satisfaction in the suffering that she saw.
As they crossed the bridge toward Offenbach am Main, a town that sat over the river from Frankfurt, she felt Major Arnold’s eyes on her. When she looked, though, he was back to watching the road. The potholes that came not only from bombs but from neglect and budgetary prioritization required careful navigation.
“Your first time in Germany?” he asked, his voice neutral.
“First time out of America,” she admitted. And then, her defenses lowered, “I don’t know what I expected.”
“Some people think the Germans deserve all this,” Major Arnold said.
She thought about all she’d seen since arriving in Germany. Her train had passed through whole towns that had been leveled to the ground. That rubble represented more than stone and mortar.
She thought about Joseph’s last letter, which she carried around in the breast pocket of her army-issued jacket. The paper was yellow at the edges, tearstained now. He’d written the message the night before the Normandy invasion, the night before he’d died alone on a beach, if he’d even made it that far.
“I’m not an expert,” Emmy said slowly. “But I don’t think this is what justice looks like.”
That earned her an approving glance from the major. They fell silent once more and Emmy was glad for it. She had no desire to bare her soul to this stranger. Instead, she twisted the wedding ring she still wore and tried not to think about anything at all.
Major Arnold finally pulled to a stop in front of an ugly, giant warehouse. During the war it had been used to make chemicals and pharmaceuticals for purposes she had been afraid to ask about.
Now it was the army’s Offenbach Archival Depot. Emmy had been half hoping that the major would drop her off at her cottage for today, but now that they were at the collection point she couldn’t ignore the thrill of excitement that coursed through her.
She trailed behind Major Arnold, studiously not looking at the fit of his uniform. When he opened the door to the depot, the intoxicating, earthy scent of books crashed into her, not a ripple but a tidal wave. Glue and paper, bindings and ink. Time.
Inside, there were millions of books that had been stolen by the Nazis. They came from all over Europe—from research libraries and private collections and universities and government agencies. There would be ones that were encrusted with jewels whose pages were adorned with gold; there would be slim, cheap throwaway paperbacks that came from someone’s bedside table; there would be priceless documents that held information on civilizations that would be forgotten had the volumes not been salvaged.
They had been found by men like Major Arnold in castles and wine cellars, in homes and apartment buildings, in schools and hidden behind wallpaper. They had been found in that horrific institute across the river that had been set up by the high-ranking Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, with the sole purpose of studying the Jewish culture.
Since she had been tasked with this assignment, Emmy had been focused on how hard it would be to go to Germany. How much it would be a constant reminder of everything she’d lost.
She should have known better, though.
What better way to soothe the broken parts of her than to be part of the effort that was helping all of these books find their way home?
Chapter 2 Annelise
Summer1937
Bonn,Germany
Annelise Fischer pulled her modest dress over her head the minute she passed the tree line. She dropped it on the ground and spread her arms to the sky above, clad only in her underthings.
Despite the woods’ thick canopy, the sun cut patterns through the leaves, kissing her cheeks, her chest, her arms. She lived for this moment, for this freedom.
The air was cooler in here, the sounds of nature waking back up as they always did once the creatures of the forest became accustomed to her presence. She wanted to take her leather sandals off as well and press the souls of her feet into the soil, to feel the earth beneath her.
A low whistle brought her back to herself.
“Better be careful,” Marta Schmidt said, tapping Annelise on the rump in greeting. “There be wolves in these woods.”
Annelise flashed a smile that she knew bent toward predatory. “Wolves should be scared of me.”
“You are positively terrifying,” Marta teased, as Annelise rummaged through her rucksack. She shimmied into a pleated skirt
that hit just below her knees, and then pulled on the bright turquoise blouse she’d bought at the market the past weekend.
Annelise tied a daffodil-colored scarf around her neck and then yanked her socks up to her knees. Marta watched it all with the patient eye of someone who’d just finished her own adjustments.
Some of the Edelweiss Pirates wore their flashier outfits out around town. But, so far, Annelise’s parents hadn’t made a fuss about where she was spending her time after school and on weekends. She wanted to keep it that way, so she played the part of a good German girl when there was a chance her neighbors would see and report back on her outfits.
As her final touch, Annelise secured the edelweiss pin to the corner of her scarf. The flower was the symbol that bound them all together. Once upon a time, it had represented groups of young people who had devoted themselves to outdoor pursuits—to hiking, to camping, to skiing, to frolicking in the woods. Those had been simpler days.
Now the symbol had weight. They were the Edelweiss Pirates, the youth who wouldn’t conform, who wouldn’t join the Hitlerjugend, who would wear what they wanted, say what they wanted, act how they wanted. And in doing so, the Pirates had become more than a flower—they had become a thorn in the side of the Nazis at a time when it seemed most of their fellow countrymen were begging to lick the boots of the Führer.
“Are you finally sleeping in Stefan’s tent tonight?” Annelise asked Marta, as they started deeper into the woods. The hiking trails that wound up the Seven Mountains outside Bonn were plentiful and well-marked, though they were used with less frequency than they had been in Annelise’s parents’ generation. Now the adults were too busy working in the factories and the young people were too busy with the Hitlerjugend.
That did mean more often than not the Pirates had the woods to themselves. Most of the boys in the group had dropped out of school a few years back, so they came here ahead of the girls who still went to classes and set up camp at the top of Lohrberg Mountain. They always brought extra tents. Annelise and Marta often shared
one, but Stefan had been chasing after her friend for a few weeks now, and Annelise had a feeling Marta was ready to be caught.
“That depends on what present he brought me today,” Marta said, nose in the air as if they didn’t both know it was a foregone conclusion.
“He’ll have written you a song.”
Stefan was one of the more proficient guitar players in their little group, though a lack of skill rarely stopped any of their boys from strumming along or showing off.
“Then maybe I’ll leave you in the tent by yourself.” She shot Annelise a sly smile. “But only if the song is good.”
An acrid jealousy crept in behind Annelise’s amusement. It wasn’t that she wanted either Stefan or Marta, nor did she worry she would lose Marta’s friendship and attention.
No, Annelise was jealous because she desperately wanted that feeling. She wanted to wantsomeone.
Marta made the flirtations look fun. She’d sharedhertentwith a few of the boys, broken a few other hearts, and laughed her way through it all with such charm that no one resented her after all the dust settled.
Annelise wished she could love so easily.
The boys in their group had never appealed to her beyond friendship. She adored them, but they were silly and sweet and she’d seen their pale rear ends on the days they swam in the cool mountain lakes. She hadn’t been impressed.
Beyond the Pirates, though, there were only the boys who had gleefully donned the Hitlerjugend uniform, and she didn’t think she’d ever be able to flirt with, let alone kiss, someone who supported that lunatic.
While she didn’t naturally draw attention like Marta, who was all plush curves and big grins and luscious red curls, Annelise could admit to her own subtle kind of beauty. Her wheaten hair was thick and long, her legs trim from weekly hikes, her face pretty enough. Had a boy struck her fancy, she didn’t think she’d have trouble getting him to share her tent.
That hadn’t happened yet. Maybe it never would.
Marta’s fingers wrapped around Annelise’s wrist, drawing her to a stop. They were only about halfway to the summit and Annelise tensed when she noticed Marta’s expression.
“You have a little shadow,” Marta whispered, her lips brushing Annelise’s ear.
As casually as she could, Annelise glanced over her shoulder and caught the flutter of the Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform. Everything in her relaxed and she rolled her eyes.
“Christina, out,” Annelise demanded. “Now.”
For a moment nothing happened, then her sister slunk from behind a tree, her shoulders rounded, her mouth set in a petulant pout.
“You’re not supposed to be out here,” Christina said, ever the prim and proper BDM girl. At fifteen, Christina was a little more than a year younger than Annelise, but sometimes Annelise wondered if one of them was a changeling. They were so different. Not in looks —they could be twins and had been told so many times—but in temperament.
Her little rule-follower of a sister knew nothing of freedom, of wanting. Christina liked being told what to do, liked wearing that ridiculous uniform and spending all her free time learning how to be a good German wife and mother for the Fatherland. She’d been a tattler and an apple-polisher as a child and it seemed she’d never grown out of the impulse.
“Yet here youare,” Annelise countered, irritated. Christina was always following her, trying to catch her in some kind of trouble.
“Trying to save you,” Christina said, cheeks flushed in what Annelise knew was righteous indignation. “From ruining our family.”
Annelise considered arguing, but they’d had this discussion so many times over the past year, she could practically run the lines playing both of their parts. It would end with bitterness from Christina—who did genuinely believe she was doing what was best for Annelise—and exasperated annoyance from Annelise. None of it was worth the wasted breath.
“Come on,” Annelise said, and then started up the trail once more.
“You’re sure this is wise?” Marta asked beneath her breath.
Christina hadn’t fallen in behind them yet, but Annelise knew it wouldn’t be long before her little shadow caught up.
“No,” Annelise said, with a grin. “But when does anything we do count as wise?”
They both ignored Christina as she finally joined them, and continued to gossip their way to the top of the mountain.
For all that Christina liked to prattle on about how important sports and athletics were to the BDM, she was huffing far more than either Annelise or Marta by the end.
Annelise handed over her flask of water. Just because she was frustrated with Christina didn’t mean she wanted her to suffer.
Christina took it without thanks. But that was her sister—so used to Annelise’s care that she would only notice it if it was gone.
Marta and Annelise soaked in the view as Christina tried to subtly catch her breath. The thick Rhine wound its way through the farmlands that surrounded Bonn, the hills in the distance matching their own high point, the bluebird sky dotted with puffy clouds. They could have been standing in a painting for how perfect the day was.
Being up here, so far away from the struggle of her daily life, made Annelise almost forget everything that was going on down below. The politics, the hardship, her parents’ dead-eyed stares.
The way that all of the Pirates faced backlash for refusing to fall in line with Hitler.
Annelise had to watch as her friends were denied good positions at warehouses, had to put up with being shunned by all their neighbors and given poor marks by teachers. But worse, in the past few months, the bullies in the Hitlerjugend—or the HJ as everyone called them—had begun violently targeting the Pirates. There had been several all-out brawls in the street that had resulted in more than a few broken bones and black eyes for the Pirates. And it was only going to continue to escalate.
But if resistance had been easy, it wouldn’t have been resistance.
Annelise had always believed that the traits that had caused the Pirates to seek belonging in outdoors groups were the same that led them to identify the brutality in the Nazis’ worldview while everyone
else bought into the propaganda. The Edelweiss Pirates, by nature, sought peace, sought equanimity, sought love and freedom and selfexpression. They had never been the type to conform to what was expected—rather they ran through the trees, they climbed impossible mountains, they breathed in air that hadn’t been tainted by warehouse smoke or by hatred.
They were pirates, which meant they could never be serfs.
Marta whooped and Annelise turned to see the smoke rising just off the summit.
Annelise looped an arm around Christina’s neck as they followed a skipping Marta at a slightly slower pace.
“Aren’t you missing your precious BDM practice right now?”
Annelise asked, hating the part of herself that made her poke and prod. “Or is this a spy-in-training assignment?”
Christina wasn’t cruel like some of the Hitlerjugend, but she loved handbooks and guidelines and being told what to do. If one of the women who ran the BDM asked her to find out what the Pirates got up to in these mountains, Annelise wasn’t sure Christina wouldn’t give a detailed list of how to identify everyone involved. She was a teacher’s pet in a new world where they reigned supreme.
“I said I have the same illness as you’ve mysteriously had for the past six months.”
Annelise had been putting off the quite persistent local BDM office with the excuse that she didn’t want to infect the rest of the girls.
“You lied?” Annelise asked, eyes comically wide in shock that was only half exaggerated. Christina was typically so earnest, Annelise had a hard time picturing her sister delivering even the smallest fib.
Christina took a fortifying breath. “It was for the greater good.”
Of course, that’s all Christina cared about. She had bought into all that Nazi propaganda that made all the girls like Christina think themselves more important than they would ever be. “I am terrified to ask what you believe is the ‘greater good’ here.”
“Making sure our family is in good standing with the NSDAP,” Christina said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Perhaps it was petty of Annelise, but she couldn’t help but add, “You mean the Nazis.”
That earned her a glare and a hard pinch to the soft side of her arm. “You think you’re so clever, but it’s comments such as that that will doom us.”
Hitler wasn’t particularly fond of Nazi, which had roots in a name synonymous with backward peasants. It was a sore point for the party that it had taken off so.
Annelise smirked and pinched her sister back.
Up ahead, the Edelweiss Pirates’ camp came into view. Marta launched herself into the arms of the tall boy with bronzed curls and a guitar strung around his back. Christina made some offended sound—boys and girls were kept strictly separate in the HJ and the BDM.
“You won’t tell anyone about this?” Annelise checked one more time, dropping the pretense of teasing. She had no desire to endanger her friends simply because she’d naively trusted her sister. As much as Christina toed the line, Annelise didn’t think she would do anything that would actually endanger Annelise.
Christina sniffed as if she found the question preposterous. “I don’t want myself associated with these hooligans.”
“Well, when you put it that way, I’m convinced,” Annelise said, dry but honest. If she could count on anything it was that Christina wouldn’t want to get in trouble herself.
The fire was already going, logs set up around it to create a gathering space. The tents had also been constructed, a mishmash of painted canvas and sticks.
Annelise always took the one with the three pines on the flap. She threw her rucksack inside without even checking to see if it was taken, and then found Walter Schubert in the small crowd. She kissed his cheek in thanks because he’d set up the tent without any expectation of sharing it with her.
That’s how the Pirates were. They looked after each other.
“Who brought the Nazi?” one of the boys called, clearly having come back from relieving himself.
“Shove off, Hans,” Annelise snapped, wrapping a protective arm around Christina’s waist. Only she could be mean to Christina, that’s how sibling relations worked. “She’s my sister.”
Muffled grumbling followed the introduction, but no one really put up a fight. Annelise was far from the leader of the group, but she was well-liked and had been around long enough to have earned some goodwill. If she vouched for someone, most of the Pirates would go along with it.
Meanwhile, Christina looked like she wanted to take a running leap off the nearby cliffs to escape the scrutiny, so Annelise squeezed her hip in a comforting gesture while wishing she’d brought an extra set of clothes for her to change into.
There was nothing to be done about Christina, though. Annelise’s school clothes were sweat-damp and unpleasant, and even if she had brought something that would help her sister fit in with the group, Christina would have refused. She wore her BDM skirt and jacket with pride. Annelise directed Christina onto one of the logs beside Walter, who would treat her the gentlest, and then grabbed a package of warmed nuts that had been resting against the fire. She poured most of them out into Christina’s waiting palm.
Marta sat herself in Stefan’s lap, which prompted Hans to grab for the guitar. The strap was completely decorated in pins, but at the top was the edelweiss flower. Annelise fiddled with her own as Hans strummed the opening bars of one of their favorite songs.
The three hitchhikers met, who’dtraveledaroundthe world. Let’s allhitchhike together.
An ache filled the hollow spaces in her body—that wantingof something she couldn’t quite name. To be somewhere else, to be someone else, she didn’t really know. But life had to be more than working in factories and producing infants for the Fatherland and passing simple day after simple day in this tiny town.
The Pirates sang, handed the guitars around, doled out the liquor one of the boys had smuggled from his house in a flask. Some kissed, some danced, they all laughed and talked and felt at home for once.
The closest they came to discussing the HJ or the Nazis was when they were performing skits for each other.
In one of them Stefan and Marta pretended to be two members of the HJ. The Pirates around the campfire booed and hollered when they announced who they were and then dissolved into a fit of giggles when the two buffooned their way into setting up a one-man tent. They argued who would take it and settled on Marta inside, with Stefan sleeping outside. A “family of bears” wandered by and began “attacking” Stefan. They ran away when Marta stuck her head out of the tent. Stefan begged to switch places, but Marta refused. When they went back to sleep, the bears returned and batted Stefan around again.
A couple Pirates called encouragement to the bears as they once again ran off when Marta “woke up.” Stefan pleaded to be given the tent, and Marta reluctantly agreed.
When the bears came back the third time, the head one said, “We’ve given this Nazi a hard enough time, let’s go for the one in the tent.”
Even Christina couldn’t hide her laughter at the punch line, despite the angry flush Annelise had spotted riding along her cheekbones. Apart from the silly skit, though, the Pirates stayed away from controversial topics. It was rare they delved into politics anyway. Some of them really had simply joined because it was an outdoors group, some because they didn’t like being told what to wear and how to act. Many of them simply didn’t like the HJ. Despite the fact the very existence of the group had become an annoyance to the Nazis in town, the boys didn’t often get philosophical about the NSDAP’s policies. Regardless, with Christina there, that kind of discussion was off-limits.
When Annelise and Christina crawled into their tent long after the sun had set, smelling of smoke and gin and laughter, Annelise gathered her sister in her arms and placed a sloppy kiss on her forehead.
She and her sister used to be so close as children. Their brother, Anders, was older and commanded all their parents’ limited attention, so it had been up to the girls to entertain themselves. Ever since Christina joined the BDM two years ago, though, most of their conversations had devolved into petty fights.
Annelise could admit more often than not she dismissed Christina as silly, not worthy of a debate. But how could she spend the night with the Pirates and not see what Annelise loved about them? They didn’t judge anyone—more than a few harmless chirps—nor did they hate or belittle those with less power or social status. They were creating a community so much stronger than the BDM because they actually cared for each other and loved the things the group valued.
“You could be a Pirate, Christina,” Annelise whispered, almost nervous.
“Never. They’re nothing but riffraff who will get you killed one day,” Christina said.
A door shut in her face. Annelise wasn’t quite sure why she kept trying, except that hope was a stubborn weed, hard to kill.
Christina could be extraordinarily kind and clever and caring. She always tucked an extra apple into their father’s lunch box on market days, filled hot water bottles for their mother’s aching back. She stood up for the odd children who were targeted by older classmates, and nursed sick birds back to health. Christina wasn’t a saint, but at heart, she was a loving, fair person.
Everyone had flaws and weaknesses, but Christina’s seemed amplified beneath their current troubles. Perhaps everyone’s did.
Annelise finally put into words the one thing she wanted most from Christina and the one thing she was losing hope of seeing from her sister.
“Oh darling,” she whispered. “My greatest wish is for you to realize that sometimes choosing the right thing is more important than whether or not you’ll get hurt doing it.”
Chapter 3 Christina
February27,1943
Berlin
The massive roundup of the last Jews in Berlin—meant as an early birthday present to the Führer—started before dawn on the secondto-last day of February.
The city would be Judenfrei by the end of April.
Christina Fischer had been waiting for the Gestapo to act ever since Joseph Goebbels’s speech a little more than a week ago. No one talked about how he’d slipped in the beginning, how he’d almost said exterminatedwhen talking about his plans of total war.
She had heard it, though.
A sharp left took her through a shortcut that had been made possible by RAF bombings. What had once been a boutique featuring the latest styles from Paris was now nothing but a new path to work. It made Christina’s trek easier, so she couldn’t say she minded.
Coldhearted. She’d heard the pejorative many times in her life, from men at school, from girls who’d wanted to be friends. Her current colleagues at the Abwehr were too professional to say it to her face, but she had no doubt it was muttered behind her back.
It wasn’t that her heart was cold, though. Instead, it was shattered, never to be repaired.
Christina pulled her coat tighter and burrowed deeper into her scarf—the weather was cruel today. Her cheeks were already chafed from the wind, her ears frozen to the touch. A storm was coming. Four covered trucks roared by, their wheels kicking up icy slush in their wake. Globs of dirt and snow and something she didn’t want to think about landed on her boots, on the hem of her coat. She lifted her eyes from the sidewalk to glare, but then tripped to a stop when she got a glimpse into the backs of the trucks.
People. A mass of bodies, shoulder to shoulder, bellies and thighs pressed together as if they didn’t deserve the dignity of personal space.
Christina shook her head and began walking once more. There was nothing she could do for them.
She quickened her pace, cutting through the Tiergarten. When she’d first come to Berlin, the park had reminded her so much of the Seven Mountains and of Annelise that she’d nearly wept at the sight of it.
Now it had been completely stripped bare of its trees—the wood too valuable over the long, starvation winter to be left standing. Once gorgeous and thriving and now empty and desolate, barely a ghost.
Christina no longer lingered in the park.
The concrete building that housed the Abwehr took up the entire corner of Bendlerstrasse. Christina didn’t bother to take her coat off as she entered. They hadn’t been able to properly heat the place in months despite the fact it was the home of the intelligencegathering arm of the Wehrmacht. Christina wasn’t sure how anyone believed the Nazi propaganda that they were winning the war.
Would the recent, horrific defeat in Stalingrad change any minds? Would everyday, average Germans even be given enough information to realize how crippling the loss was?
She doubted it. But she was a cynic.
By the time she reached her desk, she was dreaming of the one cup of coffee she was allowed. It tasted of disappointment and a
tiny bit of sewage, but it did wonders to warm a body up. Then she caught sight of the metal inbox on her desk. It was only seven fortyfive on a Saturday morning and already it was full.
Christina sunk into her chair. Officially, she was a low-level secretary for the postal bureau of the Abwehr’s counterespionage unit. She was responsible for handling any letters or intercepted communiqués that were deemed suspicious. Of course, she wasn’t in charge of reading them herself, but she was supposed to sort them and get them to the right code breaker or scientist.
The work wasn’t taxing, and had it been her only job Christina might have been driven mad by the mind-numbing simplicity. But she kept herself engaged in other ways.
The quick click of heels against hardwood had her glancing up.
“Good morning, bunny,” Johanna Ritter said, perching on the corner of Christina’s desk. She was too bright and bubbly, always, but especially on this cold February morning when Jewish men, women, and children across the city were being shoved into the backs of trucks and carted off to God knew where.
Usually when dealing with Johanna it helped to remember that she was likely one of the many Abwehr employees loyal to Admiral Wihelm Canaris, the head of the agency, rather than to the Führer. The Abwehr was riddled with Canaris supporters who—like the man they followed—blamed Hitler for ruining Germany. They wanted to take down the Third Reich almost as much as the Allies did.
She wasn’t sure how many double agents Admiral Canaris had on his side within the agency, but it was not insignificant. On the other hand, there were just enough fanatically loyal Nazis here to keep it afloat for now.
Canaris’s strategy of threading the needle between keeping the Nazis happy and undermining them enough to hurt their war efforts was a high-stakes game, and, if she was being honest, it didn’t make life easy for her. Working as a double agent in an agency whose rivals rightly suspected it was full of double agents was precarious at best. If she made it through this war, it would be a miracle.
Sometimes she couldn’t believe everyone who worked for the organization hadn’t all been summarily taken out and shot just to clean up the reputation of the agency, but they were more often than not labeled as simply incompetent instead of traitorous.
It helped that Canaris’s British contacts had assassinated Reinhard Heydrich—Canaris’s rival in the SD and one of the Abwehr’s fiercest critics—when he’d started investigating the agency too closely.
At least those were the whispers in Christina’s circle of acquaintances.
Christina wasn’t a Canaris loyalist—she was loyal only to herself— but she considered them allies.
“Can I help you?” Christina’s voice came out terse, but Johanna had dealt with far worse from her fair share of angry Wehrmacht officers.
“I had the most interesting night,” Johanna said, inspecting her nails. “Dinner at Horcher.”
Christina tensed at the mention of Hermann Göring’s favorite restaurant. It was where Nazis took women they wanted to impress and when they wanted to impress women, young Nazis tended to brag about privileged information they had.
For ladies in the business of double-crossing the Nazis, accepting dinner invitations to places like Horcher was one of the best ways to get secrets, if pillow talk itself wasn’t an option.
“Such an eager young buck, I won’t be seeing him again,” Johanna continued casually. “He did say the most curious thing, though.”
Christina bit the inside of her lip, wishing they didn’t have to go through this pony show. But she understood the necessity of it. Anyone watching them would think they were nothing but two gossiping secretaries, maybe wasting time but not worth much notice otherwise. “Did he?”
“Mm-hmm.” Johanna finally dropped her hand, and met Christina’s eyes. “He passed on dessert because he had an early morning assignment.”
“Yes, I noticed the trucks while coming in to work,” Christina said, on the edge of annoyed now. Most people in the Abwehr, if not most
people in Berlin, knew that a roundup had started that morning.
By the end of the day, more than twelve thousand Jewish Berliners would likely be detained by the Reich Security Main Office. The Gestapo had been tight-lipped about the assignment—they never liked sharing anything with the Abwehr.
But a few days ago, the Gestapo had started informing factory employers that their Jewish workers would be gone. Word got out.
“Right, this young buck had a particular assignment, though,”
Johanna continued, her voice prodding, like she wanted Christina to understand without having to say it explicitly.
Why would she assume Christina would be able to follow her?
Christina wasn’t working on anything to do with the roundup—either for her legitimate position or the one that could get her killed.
No, it would have to be something personal. But she didn’t have a personal life. Except, of course, for . . .
She stilled, her breath catching in her throat.
Eitan.
But that didn’t make any sense. She hadn’t thought he would be in danger, because he wasn’t supposed to be in danger.
Christina didn’t want to ask. She forced the question out through numb lips anyway.
“Not intermarried Jews?” Christina said. “Surely.”
They were supposed to be a protected category. At some point, someone high up in the government had decided that to keep the peace with the families of tens of thousands of intermarried couples in the country, intermarried Jewish citizens would be safe from deportation. The Reich needed laborers, after all. They could work in factories to aid the war effort.
They were supposed to be exempt.
Johanna didn’t answer, simply leaned over and scooped the pile of messages out of Christina’s inbox. “I’ll take care of these; it seems like you may have a few telephone calls to make.”
Then she was gone.
Christina ignored another colleague’s greeting as she headed for the exit, past the guard, onto the street. She ducked down an alleyway three blocks over, and entered the back of a bakery without
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her whole soul and body and sex had to rouse up and pass into these stories of his. This thrilled her and absorbed her.
Of physical life they lived very little. She had to superintend the house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey for many years, and the dried-up, elderly, superlatively correct female ... you could hardly call her a parlourmaid, or even a woman ... who waited at table, had been in the house for forty years. Even the very housemaids were no longer young. It was awful! What could you do with such a place, but leave it alone! All these endless rooms that nobody used, all the Midlands routine, the mechanical cleanliness and the mechanical order! Clifford had insisted on a new cook, an experienced woman who had served him in his rooms in London. For the rest the place seemed run by mechanical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty good order, strict cleanliness, and strict punctuality; even pretty strict honesty. And yet, to Connie, it was a methodical anarchy. No warmth of feeling united it organically. The house seemed as dreary as a disused street.
What could she do but leave it alone...? So she left it alone. Miss Chatterley came sometimes, with her aristocratic thin face, and triumphed, finding nothing altered. She would never forgive Connie for ousting her from her union in consciousness with her brother. It was she, Emma, who should be bringing forth the stories, these books, with him; the Chatterley stories, something new in the world, that they, the Chatterleys, had put there. There was no other standard. There was no organic connection with the thought and expression that had gone before. Only something new in the world: the Chatterley books, entirely personal.
Connie's father, when he paid a flying visit to Wragby, said in private to his daughter: As for Clifford's writing, it's smart, but there's nothing in it. It won't last!... Connie looked at the burly Scottish knight who had done himself well all his life, and her eyes, her big, stillwondering blue eyes became vague. Nothing in it! What did he mean by nothing in it? If the critics praised it, and Clifford's name was almost famous, and it even brought in money ... what did her father mean by saying there was nothing in Clifford's writing? What else could there be?
For Connie had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.
It was in her second winter at Wragby her father said to her: "I hope, Connie, you won't let circumstances force you into being a demivierge."
"A demi-vierge!" replied Connie vaguely. "Why? Why not?"
"Unless you like it, of course!" said her father hastily. To Clifford he said the same, when the two men were alone: "I'm afraid it doesn't quite suit Connie to be a demi-vierge."
"A half-virgin!" replied Clifford, translating the phrase to be sure of it. He thought for a moment, then flushed very red. He was angry and offended.
"In what way doesn't it suit her?" he asked stiffly.
"She's getting thin ... angular. It's not her style. She's not the pilchard sort of little slip of a girl, she's a bonny Scotch trout."
"Without the spots, of course!" said Clifford.
He wanted to say something later to Connie about the demi-vierge business ... the half-virgin state of her affairs. But he could not bring himself to do it. He was at once too intimate with her and not intimate enough. He was so very much at one with her, in his mind and hers, but bodily they were non-existent to one another, and neither could bear to drag in the corpus delicti. They were so intimate, and utterly out of touch.
Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that something was in Clifford's mind. She knew that he didn't mind whether she were demi-vierge or demi-monde, so long as he didn't absolutely know, and wasn't made to see. What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist.
Connie and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby, living their vague life of absorption in Clifford and his work. Their interests had never ceased to flow together over his work. They talked and
wrestled in the throes of composition, and felt as if something were happening, really happening, really in the void.
And thus far it was a life: in the void. For the rest it was nonexistence. Wragby was there, the servants ... but spectral, not really existing. Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn, and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything ... no touch, no contact! Only this life with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in, and they wouldn't last. Why should there be anything in them, why should they last? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of reality.
Clifford had quite a number of friends, acquaintances really, and he invited them to Wragby He invited all sorts of people, critics and writers, people who would help to praise his books. And they were flattered at being asked to Wragby, and they praised. Connie understood it all perfectly. But why not? This was one of the fleeting patterns in the mirror. What was wrong with it?
She was hostess to these people ... mostly men. She was hostess also to Clifford's occasional aristocratic relations. Being a soft, ruddy, country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue eyes, and curling, brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather strong, female loins she was considered a little old-fashioned and "womanly." She was not a "little pilchard sort of fish," like a boy, with a boy's flat breast and little buttocks. She was too feminine to be quite smart.
So the men, especially those no longer young, were very nice to her indeed. But, knowing what torture poor Clifford would feel at the slightest sign of flirting on her part, she gave them no encouragement at all. She was quiet and vague, she had no contact
with them and intended to have none. Clifford was extraordinarily proud of himself.
His relatives treated her quite kindly She knew that the kindliness indicated a lack of fear, and that these people had no respect for you unless you could frighten them a little. But again she had no contact. She let them be kindly and disdainful, she let them feel they had no need to draw their steel in readiness. She had no real connection with them.
Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their ideas and his books. She entertained ... there were always people in the house. Time went on as the clock does, half-past eight instead of half-past seven.
CHAPTER III
Connie was aware, however, of a growing restlessness. Out of her disconnection, a restlessness was taking possession of her like madness. It twitched her limbs when she didn't want to twitch them. It jerked her spine when she didn't want to jerk upright but preferred to rest comfortably. It thrilled inside her body, in her womb, somewhere, till she felt she must jump into water and swim to get away from it; a mad restlessness. It made her heart beat violently for no reason. And she was getting thinner
It was just restlessness. She would rush off across the park, and abandon Clifford, and lie prone in the bracken. To get away from the house ... she must get away from the house and everybody. The wood was her one refuge, her sanctuary. But it was not really a refuge, a sanctuary, because she had no connection with it. It was only a place where she could get away from the rest. She never really touched the spirit of the wood itself ... if it had any such nonsensical thing.
Vaguely she knew herself that she was going to pieces in some way Vaguely she knew she was out of connection: she had lost touch with the substantial and vital world. Only Clifford and his books, which did not exist ... which had nothing in them! Void to void. Vaguely she knew. But it was like beating her head against a stone. Her father warned her again: "Why don't you get yourself a beau, Connie? Do you all the good in the world."
That winter Michaelis came for a few days. He was a young Irishman who had already made a large fortune by his plays in America. He had been taken up quite enthusiastically for a time by smart society in London, for he wrote smart society plays. Then gradually smart society realised that it had been made ridiculous at the hands of a down-at-heel Dublin street-rat, and revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word in what was caddish and bounderish. He was discovered to be anti-English, and to the class that made this discovery this was worse than the dirtiest crime. He was cut dead, and his corpse thrown into the refuse-can.
Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment in Mayfair, and walked down Bond Street the image of a gentleman, for you cannot get even the best tailors to cut their low-down customers, when the customers pay
Clifford was inviting the young man of thirty at an inauspicious moment in that young man's career Yet Clifford did not hesitate. Michaelis had the ear of a few million people, probably; and, being a hopeless outsider, he would no doubt be grateful to be asked down to Wragby at this juncture, when the rest of the smart world was cutting him. Being grateful, he would no doubt do Clifford "good" over there in America. Kudos! A man gets a lot of kudos, whatever that may be, by being talked about in the right way, especially "over there." Clifford was a coming man; and it was remarkable what a sound publicity instinct he had. In the end Michaelis did him most nobly in a play, and Clifford was a sort of popular hero. Till the reaction, when he found he had been made ridiculous.
Connie wondered a little over Clifford's blind, imperious instinct to become known: known, that is, to the vast amorphous world he did
not himself know, and of which he was uneasily afraid; known as a writer, as a first-class modern writer. Connie was aware from successful, old, hearty, bluffing Sir Malcolm, that artists did advertise themselves, and exert themselves to put their goods over. But her father used channels ready-made, used by all the other R.A.'s who sold their pictures. Whereas Clifford discovered new channels of publicity, all kinds. He had all kinds of people at Wragby, without exactly lowering himself. But, determined to build himself a monument of reputation quickly, he used any handy rubble in the making.
Michaelis arrived duly, in a very neat car, with a chauffeur and a manservant. He was absolutely Bond Street! But at sight of him something in Clifford's country soul recoiled. He wasn't exactly ... not exactly ... in fact, he wasn't at all, well, what his appearance intended to imply. To Clifford this was final and enough. Yet he was very polite to the man; to the amazing success in him. The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis' heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitch-goddess Success also, if only she would have him.
Michaelis obviously wasn't an Englishman, in spite of all the tailors, hatters, barbers, booters of the very best quarter of London. No, no, he obviously wasn't an Englishman: the wrong sort of flattish, pale face and bearing; and the wrong sort of grievance. He had a grudge and a grievance: that was obvious to any true-born English gentleman, who would scorn to let such a thing appear blatant in his own demeanour. Poor Michaelis had been much kicked, so that he had a slightly tail-between-the-legs look even now He had pushed his way by sheer instinct and sheerer effrontery on to the stage and to the front of it with his plays. He had caught the public. And he had thought the kicking days were over. Alas, they weren't.... They never would be. For he, in a sense, asked to be kicked. He pined to be where he didn't belong ... among the English upper classes. And how they enjoyed the various kicks they got at him! And how he hated them!
Nevertheless he travelled with his manservant and his very neat car, this Dublin mongrel.
There was something about him that Connie liked. He didn't put on airs to himself; he had no illusions about himself. He talked to Clifford sensibly, briefly, practically about all the things Clifford wanted to know. He didn't expand or let himself go. He knew he had been asked down to Wragby to be made use of, and like an old, shrewd, almost indifferent business man, or big-business man, he let himself be asked questions, and he answered with as little waste of feeling as possible.
"Money!" he said. "Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose."
"But you've got to begin," said Clifford.
"Oh quite! You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't help it."
"But could you have made money except by plays?" asked Clifford. "Oh probably not! I may be a good writer or I may be a bad one, but a writer and a writer of plays is what I am, and I've got to be. There's no question of that."
"And you think it's a writer of popular plays that you've got to be?" asked Connie.
"There, exactly!" he said, turning to her in a sudden flash. "There's nothing in it! There's nothing in popularity. There's nothing in the public, if it comes to that. There's nothing really in my plays to make them popular. It's not that. They just are, like the weather ... the sort that will have to be ... for the time being."
He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so old ... endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him generation after generation, like geological strata; and
at the same time he was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.
"At least it's wonderful what you've done at your time of life," said Clifford contemplatively.
"I'm thirty ... yes, I'm thirty!" said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly, with a curious laugh; hollow, triumphant, and bitter.
"And are you alone?" asked Connie.
"How do you mean? Do I live alone? I've got my servant. He's a Greek, so he says, and quite incompetent. But I keep him. And I'm going to marry. Oh, yes, I must marry."
"It sounds like going to have your tonsils cut," laughed Connie. "Will it be an effort?"
He looked at her admiringly. "Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will! I find ... excuse me ... I find I can't marry an Englishwoman, not even an Irishwoman...."
"Try an American," said Clifford.
"Oh, American!" he laughed a hollow laugh. "No, I've asked my man if he will find me a Turk or something ... something nearer to the Oriental."
Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen of extraordinary success; it was said he had an income of fifty thousand dollars from America alone. Sometimes he was handsome: sometimes as he looked sideways, downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent, enduring beauty of a carved ivory Negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and the strong queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth; that momentary but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the Buddha aims at, and which Negroes express sometimes without ever aiming at it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And then a swimming through, like rats in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion, amounting almost to love.
The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a bounder! How much more bounderish and assertive Clifford looked! How much stupider!
Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her. He turned his full, hazel, slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of pure detachment. He was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made. With the English nothing could save him from being the eternal outsider, not even love. Yet women sometimes fell for him ... Englishwomen too.
He knew just where he was with Clifford. They were two alien dogs which would have liked to snarl at one another, but which smiled instead, perforce. But with the woman he was not quite so sure.
Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee Michaelis, restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a fine November day ... fine for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park. My God! What a place!
He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady Chatterley: he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer came, would he care to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room.
Connie had a sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the central portion of the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground floor, of course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley's own parlour. He followed blindly after the servant ... he never noticed things, or had contact with his surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cézanne.
"It's very pleasant up here," he said, with his queer smile, as if it hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. "You are wise to get to the top."
"Yes, I think so," she said.
Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up.
Now she and Michaelis sat on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers ... other people were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in his success.
"But why are you such a lonely bird?" Connie asked him; and again he looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.
"Some birds are that way," he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar irony; "but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being a lonely bird yourself?" Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: "Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!"
"Am I altogether a lonely bird?" he asked, with his queer grin of a smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned, or afraid.
"Why?" she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. "You are, aren't you?"
She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost lose her balance.
"Oh, you're quite right!" he said, turning his head away, and looking sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her power to see him detached from herself.
He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything, registered everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the night was crying out of his breast to her in a way that affected her very womb.
"It's awfully nice of you to think of me," he said laconically. "Why shouldn't I think of you?" she exclaimed with hardly breath to utter it.
He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.
"Oh, in that way!... May I hold your hand for a minute?" he asked suddenly, fixing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and sending out an appeal that affected her direct in the womb.
She stared at him, dazed and transfixed, and he went over and kneeled beside her, and took her two feet close in his two hands, and buried his face in her lap, remaining motionless. She was perfectly dim and dazed, looking down in a sort of amazement at the rather tender nape of his neck, feeling his face pressing her thighs. In all her burning dismay, she could not help putting her hand, with tenderness and compassion, on the defenceless nape of his neck, and he trembled with a deep shudder.
Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his full, glowing eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything.
He was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman, trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, aware of every sound outside.
To her it meant nothing except that she gave herself to him. And at length he ceased to quiver any more, and lay quite still, quite still. Then, with dim, compassionate fingers, she stroked his head, that lay on her breast.
When he rose, he kissed both her hands, then both her feet, in their suède slippers and in silence went away to the end of the room, where he stood with his back to her. There was silence for some minutes. Then he turned and came to her again as she sat in her old place by the fire.
"And now, I suppose you'll hate me!" he said in a quiet, inevitable way. She looked up at him quickly.
"Why should I?" she asked. "They mostly do," he said; then he caught himself up. "I mean ... a woman is supposed to."
"This is the last moment when I ought to hate you," she said resentfully.
"I know! I know! It should be so! You're frightfully good to me...." he cried miserably.
She wondered why he should be miserable. "Won't you sit down again?" she said. He glanced at the door.
"Sir Clifford!" he said. "Won't he won't he be...?" She paused a moment to consider. "Perhaps!" she said. And she looked up at him. "I don't want Clifford to know ... not even to suspect. It would hurt him so much. But I don't think it's wrong, do you?"
"Wrong! Good God, no! You're only too infinitely good to me ... I can hardly bear it."
He turned aside, and she saw that in another moment he would be sobbing.
"But we needn't let Clifford know, need we?" she pleaded. "It would hurt him so. And if he never knows, never suspects, it hurts nobody."
"Me!" he said, almost fiercely; "he'll know nothing from me! You see if he does. Me give myself away! Ha! Ha!" He laughed hollowly, cynically at such an idea. She watched him in wonder. He said to her: "May I kiss your hand and go? I'll run into Sheffield I think, and lunch there if I may, and be back to tea. May I do anything for you? May I be sure you don't hate me?—and that you won't?"—he ended with a desperate note of cynicism.
"No, I don't hate you," she said. "I think you're nice."
"Ah!" he said to her fiercely, "I'd rather you said that to me than said you love me! It means such a lot more.... Till afternoon then. I've plenty to think about till then." He kissed her hands humbly and was gone.
"I don't think I can stand that young man," said Clifford at lunch. "Why?" asked Connie.
"He's such a bounder underneath his veneer ... just waiting to bounce us."
"I think people have been so unkind to him," said Connie.
"Do you wonder? And do you think he employs his shining hours doing deeds of kindness?"
"I think he has a certain sort of generosity."
"Towards whom?"
"I don't quite know."
"Naturally you don't. I'm afraid you mistake unscrupulousness for generosity."
Connie paused. Did she? It was just possible. Yet the unscrupulousness of Michaelis had a certain fascination for her. He went whole lengths where Clifford only crept a few timid paces. In his way he had conquered the world, which was what Clifford wanted to do. Ways and means...? Were those of Michaelis more despicable than those of Clifford? Was the way the poor outsider had shoved and bounced himself forward in person, and by the back doors, any worse than Clifford's way of advertising himself into prominence? The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of gasping dogs with lolling tongues. The one that got her first was the real dog among dogs, if you go by success! So Michaelis could keep his tail up.
The queer thing was, he didn't. He came back towards teatime with a large handful of violets and lilies, and the same hang-dog expression. Connie wondered sometimes if it were a sort of mask to disarm opposition, because it was almost too fixed. Was he really such a sad dog?
His sad-dog sort of extinguished self persisted all the evening, though through it Clifford felt the inner effrontery. Connie didn't feel it, perhaps because it was not directed against women; only against men, and their presumptions and assumptions. That indestructible, inward effrontery in the meagre fellow was what made men so down on Michaelis. His very presence was an affront to a man of society, cloak it as he might in an assumed good manner.
Connie was in love with him, but she managed to sit with her embroidery and let the men talk, and not give herself away. As for Michaelis, he was perfect; exactly the same melancholic, attentive, aloof young fellow of the previous evening, millions of degrees remote from his hosts, but laconically playing up to them to the required amount, and never coming forth to them for a moment. Connie felt he must have forgotten the morning. He had not forgotten. But he knew where he was ... in the same old place outside, where the born outsiders are. He didn't take the love-making altogether personally He knew it would not change him from an ownerless dog, whom everybody begrudges its golden collar, into a comfortable society dog.
The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity.
But occasional love, as a comfort and soothing, was also a good thing, and he was not ungrateful. On the contrary, he was burningly, poignantly grateful for a piece of natural, spontaneous kindness; almost to tears. Beneath his pale, immobile, disillusioned face, his child's soul was sobbing with gratitude to the woman, and burning to come to her again; just as his outcast soul was knowing he would keep really clear of her.
He found an opportunity to say to her, as they were lighting the candles in the hall:
"May I come?"
"I'll come to you," she said.
"Oh good!"
He waited for her a long time ... but she came.
He was the trembling excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came, and was finished. There was something curiously childlike and defenceless about his naked body: as children are naked. His defences were all in his wits and cunning, his very instincts of
cunning, and when these were in abeyance he seemed doubly naked and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and somehow struggling helplessly.
He roused in the woman a wild sort of compassion and yearning, and a wild, craving physical desire. The physical desire he did not satisfy in her; he was always come and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her breast, and recovering somewhat his effrontery while she lay dazed, disappointed, lost.
But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when his crisis was over And there he was generous and curiously potent; he stayed firm inside her, given to her, while she was active
... wildly, passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity, he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction.
"Ah, how good!" she whispered tremulously, and she became quite still, clinging to him. And he lay there in his own isolation, but somehow proud.
He stayed that time only the three days, and to Clifford was exactly the same as on the first evening; to Connie also. There was no breaking down his external man.
He wrote to Connie with the same plaintive melancholy note as ever, sometimes witty, and touched with a queer, sexless affection. A kind of hopeless affection he seemed to feel for her, and the essential remoteness remained the same. He was hopeless at the very core of him, and he wanted to be hopeless. He rather hated hope. "Une immense espérance a traversé la terre" he read somewhere, and his comment was: "—and it's darned-well drowned everything worth having."
Connie never really understood him, but, in her way, she loved him. And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hopelessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever quite love at all.
So they went on for quite a time, writing, and meeting occasionally in London. She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get with him by her own activity, his little orgasm being over. And he still wanted to give it her. Which was enough to keep them connected. And enough to give her a subtle sort of self-assurance, something blind and a little arrogant. It was an almost mechanical confidence in her own powers, and went with a great cheerfulness.
She was terrifically cheerful at Wragby. And she used all her aroused cheerfulness and satisfaction to stimulate Clifford, so that he wrote his best at this time, and was almost happy in his strange blind way He really reaped the fruits of the sensual satisfaction she got out of Michaelis' male passivity erect inside her. But of course he never knew it, and if he had, he wouldn't have said thank you!
Yet when those days of her grand joyful cheerfulness and stimulus were gone, quite gone, and she was depressed and irritable, how Clifford longed for them again! Perhaps if he'd known he might have wished to get her and Michaelis together again.
CHAPTER IV
Connie always had a foreboding of the hopelessness of her affair with Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean nothing to her. She was attached to Clifford. He wanted a good deal of her life and she gave it to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a man, and this Clifford did not give her; could not. There were occasional spasms of Michaelis. But, as she knew by foreboding, that would come to an end, Mick couldn't keep anything up. It was part of his very being that he must break off any connection, and be loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me down!
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good
fish in the sea maybe but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came to see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby. But if they weren't mackerel they were herring, with an occasional cat-fish, or conger-eel.
There were a few regular men, constants; men who had been at Cambridge with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had remained in the army, and was a Brigadier-General. "The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from having to face the battle of life," he said.
There was Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about stars. There was Hammond, another writer. All were about the same age as Clifford; the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in the life of the mind. What you did apart from that was your private affair, and didn't much matter. No one thinks of enquiring of another person at what hour he retires to the privy. It isn't interesting to anyone but the person concerned.
And so with most of the matters of ordinary life ... how you make your money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have "affairs." All these matters concern only the person concerned, and, like going to the privy, have no interest for anyone else.
"The whole point about the sexual problem," said Hammond, who was a tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more closely connected with a typewriter, "is that there is no point to it. Strictly there is no problem. We don't want to follow a man into the W. C., so why should we want to follow him into bed with a woman? And therein lies the problem. If we took no more notice of the one thing than the other, there'd be no problem. It's all utterly senseless and pointless; a matter of misplaced curiosity."
"Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling point."... Julia was Hammond's wife.
"Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my drawing-room. There's a place for all these things."
"You mean you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet alcove?"
Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.
"Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia; and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in."
"As a matter of fact," said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: "As a matter of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a strong will to self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been in the army definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now I see how inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success is in men. It is enormously over-developed. All our individuality has run that way. And of course men like you think you'll get through better with a woman's backing. That's why you're so jealous. That's what sex is to you ... a vital little dynamo between you and Julia, to bring success. If you began to be unsuccessful you'd begin to flirt, like Charlie, who isn't successful. Married people like you and Julia have labels on you, like travellers' trunks. Julia is labelled Mrs. Arnold. B. Hammond ... just like a trunk on the railway that belongs to somebody And you are labelled Arnold. B. Hammond, C/o Mrs. Arnold. B. Hammond. Oh, you're quite right, you're quite right! The life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You're quite right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for success. That is the pivot on which all things turn."
Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity of his mind, and of his not being a timeserver. None the less, he did want success.
"It's quite true, you can't live without cash," said May. "You've got to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along ... even to be free to think you must have a certain amount of money, or your
stomach stops you. But it seems to me you might leave the labels off sex. We're free to talk to anybody; so why shouldn't we be free to make love to any woman who inclines us that way?"
"There speaks the lascivious Celt," said Clifford.
"Lascivious! well, why not? I can't see I do a woman any more harm by sleeping with her than by dancing with her ... or even talking to her about the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead of ideas, so why not?"
"Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!" said Hammond.
"Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?"
"But we're not rabbits, even so," said Hammond.
"Precisely! I have my mind: I have certain calculations to make in certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life or death. Sometimes indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would interfere with me disastrously. In the same way starved sex interferes with me. What then?"
"I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit would have interfered with you more seriously," said Hammond satirically.
"Not it! I don't over-eat myself, and I don't over-fuck myself. One has a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve me."
"Not at all! You can marry."
"How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my mind. Marriage might ... and would ... stultify my mental processes. I'm not properly pivoted that way ... and so must I be chained in a kennel like a monk? All rot and funk, my boy. I must live and do my calculations. I need women sometimes. I refuse to make a mountain of it, and I refuse anybody's moral condemnation or prohibition. I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking round with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk."
These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.
"It's an amusing idea, Charlie," said Dukes, "that sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose it's quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and emotions with women as we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex might be a sort of normal, physical conversation between a man and a woman. You don't talk to a woman unless you have ideas in common: that is you don't talk with any interest. And in the same way, unless you had some emotion or sympathy in common with a woman you wouldn't sleep with her. But if you had...."
"If you have the proper sort of emotion or sympathy with a woman, you ought to sleep with her," said May. "It's the only decent thing, to go to bed with her. Just as, when you are interested talking to someone, the only decent thing is to have the talk out. You don't prudishly put your tongue between your teeth and bite it. You just say out your say. And the same the other way."
"No," said Hammond. "It's wrong. You, for example, May, you squander half your force with women. You'll never really do what you should do, with a fine mind such as yours. Too much of you goes the other way."
"Maybe it does and too little of you goes that way, Hammond, my boy, married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your mind, but it's going damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as fiddlesticks, from what I see of it. You're simply talking it down."
Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.
"Go it you two minds!" he said. "Look at me.... I don't do any high and pure mental work, nothing but jot down a few ideas. And yet I neither marry, or run after women. I think Charlie's quite right; if he wants to run after the women, he's quite free not to run too often. But I wouldn't prohibit him from running. As for Hammond, he's got a property instinct, so naturally the straight road and the narrow gate are right for him. You'll see he'll be an English Man of Letters before he's done, A. B. C. from top to toe. Then there's me. I'm nothing. Just a squib. And what about you, Clifford? Do you think sex is a dynamo to help a man on to success in the world?"
