Tossing the newspaper into Crowley’s lap, he said, “I’ll thank you to stay out of it from now on. You and the whole OTO, for that matter.”
What, Rebecca wondered, is that?
“I’m afraid you have no sway over me, or, for that matter, the Ordo Templi Orientis.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Machen retorted. “Go ahead and do what thou wilt. No one’s stopping you. Just leave this bowmen business to me.”
“You’re not forgetting the rites, are you?”
“Not at all. I shall, as always, be there.”
“And do your part?”
“And do my part.” Then, turning to Rebecca, he said, “Will you allow me the honor of escorting you out?”
“Who said she was leaving?” Crowley demanded.
“I do, Aleister,” he replied, in a freighted tone that Rebecca could not have missed.
“I don’t see why.”
“You don’t?” Machen replied. “Surely you don’t want me to elucidate.”
The atmosphere had grown charged, and Rebecca, taking the hint, placed the goblet on the table and rose from her seat. The heat in the room was so great she felt a tiny bit unsteady on her feet at first, and Machen came quickly to take her elbow. Without a glance back, he all but hauled her toward the door, and as they made their way down the long corridor, Rebecca heard wicked laughter from one of the rooms, followed by the crack of a whip, the rattle of a chain. A woman groaned.
“Shouldn’t we help?” she said, just as the door was flung open and she saw, standing bare-chested with a whip in one hand and his suspenders hanging low, the same blond brute who’d been minding the cashbox at the lecture.
“Heinrich,” Machen said, acknowledging him, before quickly correcting it to “Henry,” all the while tightening his grip on Rebecca’s arm and drawing her on. Machen’s clothing, she noted, was matted with cat hair.
“Who is he?” she said, dragging her feet and still wanting to intervene.
“Heinrich Schell—Graf’s cudgel. He’s no one you would ever want to tangle with.”
“But the woman in there—”
“She is no doubt there of her own accord, hard as that might be to believe.”
Glancing back, she saw the suspendered man still watching, with a flat malevolent gaze.
“However strange they might seem,” Machen cautioned, as he hustled her down the stairs, where Circe awaited them with Rebecca’s coat already draped across her arm, “in this house it is wise to leave things be.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“No, I do this,” Kurt said, sitting up in the bed, his leg still propped on a pillow. He put the bowl of pea soup, generously laden with ham, in his lap, and took the spoon and napkin Jane held out. He looked so proud of himself.
Perched on the chair by his bedside, she went back to studying the tattered English–German dictionary that Dr. Grover had given to her. Trained in medical schools both in England and on the Continent, he said that he’d never attended a lecture without it, “though, even then, it was notably faulty about any word or invention from the previous thirty years.” Its publication date was 1864.
But it helped. For the past few days, as she and Kurt had passed it back and forth, pointing to words and expressions to make themselves understood, they had come to know and, though she recognized what a leap this was, trust each other. Simple things were easy (food, water, an extra blanket, an opened window) to communicate about, but the more important questions—what was to happen next? where was Kurt to go? how long could he remain a fugitive in this cramped attic?—were considerably harder to address or explain, especially as Jane could never come up with what she thought was quite the right answer. She had debated the issue not with Kurt, but with Dr. Grover, all the while aware of the fact that she had only so much time to come to a conclusion; by the time Wells came back from the Front, it would all need to have been sorted out.
Since his departure, she had had only one field card from him—a rudimentary missive printed by the military that was routinely read and redacted for any mention of an exact place, or army unit, or plan. She knew he would have his hands full, taking copious notes for his newspaper dispatches, but she waited for the postal delivery every day in the hopes of receiving something more substantial.
“This . . . it was . . . gut,” Kurt said, placing the empty bowl and spoon on the bedside table. His color was restored, Jane thought, and unless she was mistaken, he had already put on a pound or two. Dr. Grover had been by to check on the ankle cast—he’d whipped up the plaster in the kitchen—and seemed satisfied with the boy’s progress. The worst part of it for Kurt, she now surmised, was the confinement; he was young—seventeen, he told her, though he had lied about his age to be accepted into the air corps—and he was eager to get outside and into the winter sunshine. But she was still afraid to let him out into the yard or the barn, even when she had given Mrs. Willoughby the day off. In fact, she had told her to come much less frequently, on the excuse that with Wells gone, the house did not need so much attention. Mrs. Willoughby was not happy about her reduced hours.
Waving one hand to indicate the whole house, Kurt said, “Empty?”
Jane nodded. Here it was again.
“Out?” he said, gesturing at the window.
“Nein,” she said. “Too . . .” Quickly, she looked up the word for danger. “Gefahr. You never know when someone might come around.”
Often they both slipped into full sentences in their own languages, confident that context and tone would carry the day—which it generally did.
But he cast his blue eyes despondently toward the window again—a bank of fluffy white clouds was off in the distance—and she felt the way she had when her sons Gip or Frank had begged to have a pony ride, or to skip their lessons for just one afternoon.
“At Germany,” he said, “I was out. Worked in . . .”
“Fields?”
“Ja. Farm. Kühe und Hühner.”
Cows and chickens.
“With your brothers? Brüder? You’ve said that you had several brothers.”
“Ja. I was the—” He pinched his fingers together to indicate that he was the smallest or youngest.
“Are they still at home,” she asked, “or in the war, too? Fighting?” Though so far voluntary, the mobilization in Britain had been so extensive, she imagined that it must be the same in Germany. Every man—or boy, who could pass for one—wanted to be a part of the action, wanted to suit up in a uniform and strut around the town square to be given admiring smiles from the girls. The worst fate that could befall you was to have one of those pretty young damsels present you with the white feather of cowardice. Again, she thanked God that her two boys were young enough to be spared.
“Ja, all in war. Albert,” he said, shaking his head. He made the motion of a plane flying, then crashing.
“I’m sorry.” But what was she saying? That she regretted the loss of a pilot whose job it was to kill her own people?
“Caspar,” he added, shaking his head again. This time, he made the gesture of a gun being pointed, a trigger being pulled. A tear glimmered in his eye.
So that was two—and by now, his family would have been informed that they had lost a third child to the war—their youngest. She could not imagine what it would be like if she ever lost one, not to say both, of her own sons.
In their halting way, they talked for another hour until it was time for one more of Kurt’s analgesic tablets, which always made him drowsy. Before she left the room, he pointed out the window at the waning sun and said, “Nacht?”
“Soon, yes.”
“No,” he said, drowsily. “Out. Nacht.”
He was asking if he could go out after dark. “Let me think about it,” she said, tapping her temple to indicate that she was mulling it over.
“Danke,” he said.
“Schlaf gut,” she replied, before descending the narrow staircase and then locking the door at the bottom, not to keep him in, b
ut, despite the fact that they were alone in the house at present, to guard against any unwarranted intrusion from an unanticipated visitor.
At her desk, she sat down to write another letter to H. G. Unlike mail to most personnel at the Front, hers had to be rerouted through Colonel Bryce’s office at the Ministry of Military Information. No one was to know that Wells had been posted to the battlefield. But all the while she wrote, telling him about being appointed the deputy watch commander, or the arrival of the Norwegian editions, she felt like a fraud. She was deceiving him. She wasn’t telling him her deepest, darkest secret, the one that was sleeping upstairs under the rafters, the one that posed a genuine dilemma. Her pen often paused, but if she had even considered divulging what she had done, the thought of her letter being opened for censorship purposes made it quite impossible. No, this would be a question that only she and Dr. Grover could solve.
Accustomed as she was to H. G.’s absences—on lecture tours, to conventions and meetings on the Continent, to his extended stays in the London flat—this one was sui generis. This one, unlike all the others, involved the real threat of death. Oh, she knew that the army would take every precaution to protect him and get him back safe and sound, but at the battlefront there was only so much that could be done. The enemy was not about to observe any special rules of conduct because the other side had sent an eminent figure into the fray.
After another hour or two of typing up handwritten pages for H. G.’s next book—she never failed to marvel at the variety and volume of his output, from love stories to scientific treatises—she prepared a light supper for herself, and brought up a tray to Kurt. He was still groggy when she came in, but quickly roused himself—his appetite had returned in no time—propping himself up against the headboard and accepting the plate of mutton and mint jelly with relish. His nap had apparently refreshed him—his eyes were bright and clear—and he had no sooner finished than he glanced again at the window. The moon was full, and he looked at it as longingly as a wolf who wanted to sit back on his haunches and howl.
“Out? Ja?” he said. “Nacht!”
Jane scrunched up her face, to indicate that she still thought it was a bad idea, but he put his hands together, as if in prayer, and looked at her so imploringly she could hardly stand it.
“Ich will den Himmel sehen.”
Taking the dictionary, he pointed out the German word for “sky”—Himmel—as if it were the name of his beloved, and for a farm boy raised in the countryside, and then made an engineer on a zeppelin, it made sense that the sky, and the open air, would be so important to him.
She glanced at the clock on the table. It was after eight. What were the chances that anyone would be out and about the rectory at this hour? Next to none. What harm could it really do?
Plainly, he could see her wavering, and a big toothy grin broke out on his face. His teeth, she noted, were solid and white, much better than most British boys’ of his age. It must be the result of all the fresh milk and eggs and cheese he ate, growing up on a farm.
“We go?” he said, drawing the blanket off his legs. “Out?”
“Ja,” she conceded. “Yes.” She held up one hand. “But wait.” She went to the old dresser and removed the pants and tunic she’d found him in; she had laundered them, but they were mostly rags. Still, she knew that if Kurt was ever found out, or turned over to the authorities, it would be essential that he be wearing a uniform and not civilian clothes. Civilian clothes spelled spy, and certain execution.
Teetering in his underwear by the side of the bed, one ankle still in the cast, he let her help him into the clothes, and then, leaning on one of H. G.’s old walking sticks, hobbled to the door. Getting down the stairs was a perilous journey, made no easier by his eager haste, and then down the main flight again, and through the downstairs rooms. Kurt looked around in wonder. He had registered so little of this on his previous trips, sedated or barely conscious at all. Now he had plainly become aware of the rich Oriental carpets, the mahogany bookshelves gleaming with leather-bound sets, the fine furniture, and the oil paintings, in gilded frames, hanging on the walls. Jane guessed that he had seldom, if ever, been in such a fine house.
At the back door, she gave him one of H. G.’s old overcoats to put on—no point in saving him from amputation only to have him succumb to pneumonia—and after donning her own, stepped out first for a reconnoiter. A pair of rabbits froze on the lawn, then hopped away into the brush. An owl hooted in a tree overhead. But as was to be expected, there was no sign of a human being anywhere.
Kurt was still just inside, but champing at the bit to get out. She waved him on, and putting the cane out in front of him, he left the cover of the house, his head already tilted up toward the sky. It was a clear and cold night, and the stars were twinkling. He came only a few yards, before stopping beside a tree, and using its trunk to keep balanced, looking all around—at the vegetable bins, the empty tennis court, the barn where he had hidden himself after the crash. Jane wondered what he was thinking. This alien place, this house in the middle of nowhere, had become his refuge, his sanctuary, his only real experience of England—home of his sworn enemies. And apart from Dr. Grover, she was his only human connection, not to mention his savior. How did it feel, she wondered, to be so marooned, in such an unlikely and dangerous place?
But looking at him now, she knew he was thinking of none of that. He was entirely in the moment.
“Schön,” he said—beautiful—closing his eyes for a moment and taking a deep breath of the night air. He inhaled it as if it were the finest perfume. Then he opened his eyes again and walked a few steps from the tree, into the open yard, and gazed straight up, studying the stars. Pointing at a particularly bright asterism of seven stars, he said, “GroBer Bär.” It was, she knew, the Great Bear constellation; H. G. had often taken the boys out in the yard at night to point out to them the various heavenly bodies and configurations, but left it to her to tell them the myths behind each one. This one she remembered well.
Jupiter, king of the gods, had lusted after a young woman, a nymph of Diana, named Callisto, and Juno, the god’s wife, in a fit of jealousy turned her into a bear. But not before a boy, Arcas, was born. Years later, on a hunting expedition, Arcas was about to kill the bear—his own mother—when Jupiter intervened to stop such a terrible crime from occurring; he transformed the son into a bear, too, and put them both into the sky, the boy as Ursa Minor. If only she, Jane, had those same powers—if she did, then that young Rebecca West would not be any worry now. She would already be a handful of stars in the night sky.
As for relating the tale to Kurt, it would be far too much to narrate in her faulty German. Besides, he might have heard the story in his own tongue, perhaps from his parents, standing by their own barn in the German countryside.
In the baggy overcoat, he had ambled over toward the vegetable plots and was poking about in the barren earth with the end of the walking stick, perhaps recalling the nights he had dug around for any petrified root to gnaw on, when something put Jane on alert. It was the sound of an automobile engine, coming up the country lane. She turned quickly, just in time to see its headlamps searching for the end of the rectory drive.
“Kurt! Hide!”
He turned around, and seeing the car’s lights already sweeping toward the house, lurched off toward the darkness of the barn.
Who could this be? Jane shielded her eyes from the glare of the headlamps, and it was only when they dimmed, and a car door opened, that she could make out Mr. Slattery, stepping out, with something in his hand. As he came closer, she could see that it was an envelope, the kind telegrams arrived in.
For a terrible moment, she was paralyzed with fear. H. G.
“Evening, Mrs. Wells.”
“Good evening, Mr. Slattery. You’re working late.”
“This came in late,” he said, “straight, I’m told, from the War Office. The orders were to get it to you quick as it could be done.”
She took
the envelope, but hesitated to open it.
“You want me to wait, in case there’s a reply?”
She was about to say no, then thought better of it. Whatever news the envelope contained, it was better to open it straightaway and deal with it. “Let me get some light,” she said, walking closer to the open back door.
“That your nephew?” Slattery said, following a few feet behind.
“What? Who?”
“Maude Grover said your nephew was staying with you. Had some kind of accident.”
“What about it?” she said, slipping a fingernail under the flap to unseal the envelope.
“Thought I saw someone out here in the yard with you.”
“No, there was no one.” Why oh why had she given in to Kurt’s pleas?
“You sure? Not over by the barn?”
“Quite sure,” she said, at last able to focus on the unfolded telegram. Its opening words were enough to quell her fears and slow her heartbeat.
ALL WELL DEAR BUT NO THANKS TO JERRY STOP MUCH TO TELL YOU STOP RETURN TO LONDON ON WEDNESDAY FOR DEBRIEFINGS STOP THEN HOME BY WEEKEND STOP LOVE TO YOU H. G.
My God, she thought, dropping the hand holding the telegram; it was still shaking. A telegram, delivered at night, with orders from the War Office, was a terrifying thing. Thousands of other families, with loved ones at the Front, would attest to that same fact. But where was Slattery? She lifted her gaze only to see him ambling toward the barn.
“Mr. Slattery?” she called out, suppressing any note of alarm. “Where are you going?”
“Could have sworn I saw somebody,” he said, his eyes scanning the hard earth for footprints.
“There was no one, I assure you.”
“Well, with Mr. Wells away, and your boys off at school, I wouldn’t want any trouble to happen out here at the rectory.”
“That’s very kind of you. But why don’t you come inside for a minute? You can have a glass of brandy while I compose a reply to this telegram.”
The brandy, as she thought, proved a sufficient lure to turn him around, and once he was inside, she glanced back at the barn—the door was ajar, but otherwise nothing looked amiss—and led Mr. Slattery to the front parlor, chattering all the while about the news of the day. While he enjoyed a generous shot of H. G.’s best brandy, she composed a warm but innocuous message to her husband, and then escorted her guest out the front door, waiting, waving gratefully, until he had backed all the way down the drive and turned the livery car toward town. Only when his taillights had faded into the night, did she take a full breath and then, go back out to the yard to find Kurt and give him the all-clear.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 15