Lucifer Before Sunrise (26 page)

“Lucy, please listen to this. It's from a book published by the Oxford University Press,
The
Speeches
of
Adolf
Hitler
,
April
1922–
August
1939
,
with a foreword by Lord Astor, Chairman of the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, who writes, guardedly, ‘
the
strength
of
the
National
Socialist
system
lies
in
the
fact
that
it
has
turned
to
base
uses
ideas
and
ideals
which
do
but
await
inter
pretation
to
serve
as
building
stones
in
the
reconstruction
for
which
we
hope
.'
I suppose he's got to say that. Well, here's a translated passage of a speech by Hitler made in April, 1922.

“‘I would like here to appeal to a greater than I, Count Lerchenfeld. He said in the last session of the Landtag that his feeling ‘as a man and a Christian' prevented him from being an anti-Semite. I say: my feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognised these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who, God's truth! was the greatest not as sufferer but as fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers … How terrific was his fight for the world against the Jewish poison, today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognise more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross … And as a man I have the duty to see to it that human society does not surfer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilisation of the ancient world some two thousand years ago—a civilisation that was driven to its ruin through this same Jewish people'.”

“Did the Roman Empire fall because of Jews?” asked Lucy. “I'm only asking a question. I'd like to know.”

“I can't really say.”

“Sir!” said David. “I think I know! Teacher told us it was because the Romans put pleasure before duty.” He added with a toothy smile, “You know, Dad, like you don't do.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I don't bestways know, y'know. Do I, Chooky?” to Jonathan.

“Shut up,” replied Jonathan. “Dad told me it was because they had hot baths, not cold ones like Dad has, didn't they, Dad?”

Lucy said, when the children were in bed, “Don't mind my
saying
it, but while
I
know why you feel about things as you do,
sometimes
your attitude, to those who do not quite understand you, does tend to bring about confusion. If only you could see what people are, their good points, I mean, and not their defects, I think you would be happier, and so would they.”

She looked at him with a slightly uncertain gaze that seemed to quail a little, and yet was not abashed. “Sometimes I think that it is a pity you do not appear to have any regard for my few solid virtues, but see only my shortcomings.”

“Well, I don't really, you know, Lulu. It's only in weak
moments that my true nature is driven out—if you see what I mean —and what I can only describe as the luciferic impulse takes possession. I didn't get it by copying Hitler, you know. Cousin Willie was more like Hitler than I. I know it's wrong to shout like that. I'm sorry, I'll try not to think anymore about the war.”

“Well, Phillip, I understand you. But it's the children I worry about, to be frank. They are too young to be emotionally disturbed.”

“I know, I know. Family history seems to repeat itself. As soon as the farm is in proper order, I'll go back to the Gartenfeste, and be calm and uninvolved, and write.”

Lucy was thinking, How can I—what
can
I do, so that he is freed from his burden? Surely someone would be glad of having a farm, especially now that food is so short? Shall I write to Tim about it? He's much more practical than he was, and perhaps he knows somebody who might buy it.

That night she wrote to her brother.

*

Early in the morning of the last day of the Old Year Phillip started out for the railway station in the darkness with Boy Billy. It was difficult to start the engine of the Silver Eagle, which had been rebuilt of old parts from a scrap yard. The works in Coventry had been blitzed; none were obtainable in Norwich. All garages were on war-work now, as most shops were nearly empty, except of utility ration-coupon goods. However, he managed to get the car out of the yard, Billy and Lucy pushing it down the road until the engine fired.

The serpentining road was frosty, tyres of the Silver Eagle worn smooth. They glided somehow to the station, and slewed to a stop. He leapt out of the motorcar, ran for a ticket, while Boy Billy rushed down the platform, sprang into a carriage; bag and ticket followed through the open window in the last coach leaving the platform; and Phillip was left watching the end of the train curving out of the station, and yet hopeful that the brief respite on a tractor course at the Ford experimental station in Essex would give Boy Billy an outlook different from that which he was acquiring from village youths with their talk of big money.

He had been up two hours before, to feed and groom the three horses in the stable, and was tired already; but returning to the farm, there was nothing for it but to take the horses and tumbrils up the gulley as the red sun was rising, and cart the last of the
sugar-beet
crop. Yet it was a satisfying day, for his second boy Peter was
with him to help. He found the work pleasant with Peter by his side, he wearing the overalls his elder brother had out-grown, a garment patched and repatched, worn thin and all the colour washed out.

Jack the Jackdaw, Powerful Dick and Steve were still lifting beet. They wanted to knock off at half-past two, and as Peter had worked hard, Phillip took the horses to the stable, and watered and fed them. He must plough; he dreaded to be caught with the work undone by the time the frost really set hard in the land; so he put on a sheepskin coat used by an A.S.G. driver in the 1914–18 war and took the tractor to the Scalt. The field had been well mucked and the scald or stoney match had had more mud spread on it. He ploughed a deep furrow while the half-moon rose up above the mist of the marshes and a small red sun went down through the trees of the Lower Wood: pale moth-wing on his left as he moved up the field; burst, blood-clown insect on his right as he ploughed down again. Mechanically his body went up and down the field, while the sunset died out and the last partridge ceased to call over the field. The dusky earth was viewed sadly by vacant moon. He had had enough. Taking the tractor along the Lower Wood drive to the premises—mallard, teal, and wigeon flying up from the dyke on his right-hand—he let the water out of the radiator, covered it up, and went home, wanting the warmth and light of the parlour, and the faces of Lucy and the children.

*

He found Peter, David and Jonathan playing games at the table. He missed his alert and sympathetic daughter. Rosamund had gone to visit cousins in Dorset.

Since Christmas Jonathan had owned his own pack of cards. He was five, and played his hand well; but he did not like losing game after game. He was a neat and tidy child with large dark eyes and a direct, single mind—when it was not overset by emotional
disturbance.
He was most sensitive. A couple of months previously he had taken up his garden produce (his garden being one yard square) and stored it in a cupboard, laid out neatly: potatoes, lettuces, beans, cabbages, carrots, together with a heap of earth containing seeds that had not come up. A month afterwards Phillip found the store by chance, most of it rotten. When he showed Lucy with what care he, Jonny, had arranged the vegetables, the child had looked mortified; the dark, blank look of mental pain came in his eyes, and without a word he had gone away. Phillip had been smiling with pleasure; but Jonny had
thought he was laughing at him, and his heart or resistance was momentarily broken—hence the tears. He was too mother-tender; he needed more father-friendship. No more fanatics, eccentric with will-power coiled by the frustrations inherent in the age, shall be made in the family, if I can help it, thought Phillip.

There was a similar scene that evening. Jonny, so keen to hold his own, lost again and again, until he could not bear it; and with red cheeks and blank eyes, he left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him. A little later it was opened slightly, and a dark eye regarded Phillip in the narrow space.

“We aren't laughing at you, Jonny,” he called out, to be
answered
by a tearful, muttered, “Shut up.” The door was again closed. What should one do? For Phillip understood the child so well; he was himself over again. He wanted to reassure him; but it was useless to reason with emotion.

David was practical. “It's best to leave him alone when he gets his moods, Dad,” he announced brightly, smiling his big-toothed smile. With his blue eyes and yellow hair David was Ariel. The two brothers were great friends, and worked happily together: eight-year-old David whose mind worked so fast that he could not yet read, who lived in an enchanted world of the imagination: five-year-old Jonny who in a slower voice repeated David's remarks, shared or rather adopted his moods, but who worked steadily and surely. They were members of a Gang, with
headquarters
in an old chicken house on the Home Hills, fitted with rusty spring bed, water-colours (Jonny's) in rows, a sack of small potatoes, camouflage netting left behind by the troops, a table (sack-form from the barn) and bits of wood representing
tommy-guns
. Jonny was the leader: he had the ideas.

Seeing Phillip still hesitating, Lucy said, “He's so sensitive about making a mistake, and so keen always to do things peoperly.”

“Let's have a wrestling match. Me versus the world. I'll hold you two down, then call for help! I'll also be referee.”

All rolled upon the mat. “Help!” screeched David. “Jonny! Help!”

Soon all three brothers were mobbing the referee, who was soon laid out, so that prizes could be disposed of—an apple, a rare piece of chocolate, an uncommon biscuit, a lollipop from the village shop. Afterwards they had a dance, which ended in another wrestling match between Peter and his smaller brother. It became a wild party; cocoa was suggested, with a little rum in it, for everyone.

“Yippee!” cried David. The tame bat hibernating on the beam, given a couple of drops of rum, went sailing blackly about the room, finally coming to rest again upside down on the beam. They turned radio knobs to get the loudest music. German music was preferred—drums, brass, and some drive in it, as opposed to the nostalgia of most of the British dance-bands.

When the New Year's party had ended, children with mother gone to bed, Phillip sat on before the fire, to see the Old Year out, and the New Year in.

*

Goodbye to 1941; now it was almost 1942, and midnight news from the B.B.C. imminent. He pulled himself out of the armchair, and turned down the radio. The news was bad. It looked as though Manilla was gone. Would the Japanese walk into Singapore, by isolating it and smashing it from the air—a giant caught by Lilliputians, a decaying giant, whose Midas-touch could not save it, all the gold of the opium-wars and the sweat-shops of the East?

Hungry of his self-imposed duty, details of present history, he switched on the other wave-length and listened to Goebbels'
Apologia
for his Führer. He felt that Goebbels was the soul of loyalty, as he spoke of his friend in a clear and resonant voice. Stalin, cried Goebbels, was the real enemy of Europe and Hitler was Europe's hero, as history would declare.