"We’ll all be in it, if they’re going to live at Bienvenu."
"In the first place, Rahel may have to take him to a hospital. And anyhow, we aren’t going back until fall. Hansi and Bess are making money, and so is Johannes, I have no doubt, and they’ll want to have a place of their own. All that’s in the future, and a lot of it depends on Freddi’s condition. I suggest leaving you at Emily’s until I come back. I’m having Jerry bring Rahel in a car, so he can take her wherever she wants to go, and then you and I will be free. There’s a maison de sante here in Paris, and a surgeon who took care of Marcel when he was crippled and burned; they’re still in business, and I phoned that I might be sending them a patient."
"Oh, Lanny!" she exclaimed. "How I would enjoy it if we could give just a little time to our own affairs!"
"Yes, darling," he said. "It’s a grand idea, and England will seem delightful after I get this job off my hands. I’m eager to see what Rick has done with his last act, and maybe I can give him some hints."
It wasn’t until he saw Irma’s moue that he realized what a slip he had made. Poor Lanny, he would have a hard time learning to think about himself!
X
Irma was duly deposited at the Chateau les Forêts, an agreeable place of sojourn in mid-July. In fifteen years the noble beech forests had done their own work of repair, and the summer breezes carried no report of the thousands of buried French and German soldiers. Since Emily had been a sort of foster-mother to Irma’s husband, and had had a lot to do with making the match, they had an inexhaustible subject of conversation, and the older woman tried tactfully to persuade a darling of fortune that every man has what the French call les défauts de ses qualités, and that there might be worse faults in a husband than excess of solicitude and generosity. She managed to make Irma a bit ashamed of her lack of appreciation of a sweet and gentle Jewish clarinetist.
Meanwhile Lanny was speeding over a fine highway, due eastward toward the river Rhein. It was in part the route over which the fleeing king and queen had driven in their heavy "berlin"; not far to the south lay Varennes, where they had been captured and driven back to Paris to have their heads cut off. Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure—such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.
The traveler had supper on the way, and reached his destination after midnight. There was no use looking at an empty bridge, and he wasn’t in the mood for cathedrals, even one of the oldest. He went to bed and slept; in the morning he had a breakfast with fruit, and a telegram from Jerry saying that they were at Besancon and coming straight on. No use going to the place of appointment ahead of time, so Lanny read the morning papers in this town which had changed hands many times, but for the present was French. He read that Adolf Hitler had called an assembly of his tame Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House, and had made them a speech of an hour and a half, telling how he had suffered in soul over having to kill so many of his old friends and supporters. When he was through, he sat with head bowed, completely overcome, while Göring told the world how Hitler was the ordained Führer who was incapable of making a mistake; to all of which they voted their unanimous assent.
With thoughts induced by this reading Lanny drove three or four miles to the Pont de Kehl, parked his car, and walked halfway across. He was ahead of time, and standing by the railings he gazed up and down that grand old river. No use getting himself into a state of excitement over his own mission; if it was going to succeed it would succeed, and if it didn’t, he would go to the nearest telephone and get hold of the Oberleutnant and ask why. No use tormenting himself with fears about what he was going to see; whatever Freddi was would still be Freddi, and they would patch it up and make the best of it.
Meantime, look down into the depths of that fast-sliding water and remember, here was where the Rheinmaidens had swum and teased the dwarf Alberich. Perhaps they were still swimming; the motif of the Rheingold rang clear as a trumpet call in Lanny’s ears. Somewhere on the heights along this stream the Lorelei had sat and combed her golden hair with a golden comb, and sung a song that had a wonderfully powerful melody, so that the boatman in the little boat had been seized with a wild woe, and didn’t see the rocky reef, but kept gazing up to the heights, and so in the end the waves had swallowed boatman and boat; and that with her singing the Lorelei had done. Another of those tragic events which the alchemy of the spirit had turned into pleasure!
Every minute or two Lanny would look at his watch. They might be early; but no, that would be as bad as being late. "Punktlich!" was the German word, and it was their pride. Just as the minute hand of Lanny’s watch was in the act of passing the topmost mark of the dial, a large official car would approach the center line of the bridge, where a bar was stretched across, the east side of the bar being German and the west side French. If it didn’t happen exactly so, it would be the watch that was wrong, and not deutsche Zucht und Ordnung. As a boy Lanny had heard a story from old Mr. Hackabury, the soapman, about a farmer who had ordered a new watch by mail-order catalogue, and had gone out in his field with watch and almanac, announcing: "If that sun don’t get up over that hill in three minutes, she’s late!"
XI
Sure enough, here came the car! A Mercedes-Benz, with a little swastika flag over the radiator-cap, and a chauffeur in S.S. uniform, including steel helmet. They came right up to the barrier and stopped, while Lanny stood on the last foot of France, with his heart in his mouth. Two S.S. men in the back seat got out and began helping a passenger, and Lanny got one glimpse after another; the glimpses added up to a gray-haired, elderly man, feeble and bowed, with hands that were deformed into claws, and that trembled and shook as if each of them separately had gone mad. Apparently he couldn’t walk, for they were half-carrying him, and it wasn’t certain that he could hold his head up—at any rate, it was hanging.
"Heil Hitler!" said one of the men, saluting. "Herr Budd?"
"Ja," said Lanny, in a voice that wasn’t quite steady.
"Wohin mit ihm?" It was a problem, for you couldn’t take such a package and just walk off with it. Lanny had to ask the indulgence of the French police and customs men, who let the unfortunate victim be carried into their office and laid on a seat. He couldn’t sit up, and winced when he was touched. "They have kicked my kidneys loose," he murmured, without opening his eyes. Lanny ran and got his car, and the Frenchmen held up the traffic while he turned it around on the bridge. They helped to carry the sufferer and lay him on the back seat. Then, slowly, Lanny drove to the Hotel de la Ville-de-Paris, where they brought a stretcher and carried Freddi Robin to a room and laid him on a bed.
Apparently he hadn’t wanted to be freed; or perhaps he didn’t realize that he was free; perhaps he didn’t recognize his old friend.