Dark Tunnel

by Ross Macdonald

  “How on earth did she get out of Germany?”

  “She escaped. She has said that she would tell me more when she arrived, but she would not trust the details to the mails. All I know is that she escaped into Vichy France, and from there to Algeria. The Vichy-controlled administration in French North Africa put her in prison in Algiers. This summer I heard of her through the War Department, and was able to procure her release. She was taken to England and from there secured passage to Canada. And now she is to teach here at Midwestern. With her thorough knowledge of the German language and society, she will be a most valuable instructor in the AST Program.”

  “There’s no doubt of that,” I said. “But it seems to me that she owes you a very great deal.”

  “Do you think so?” he said. There was a deep and tragic irony in his smile. He got up and turned his back on me to look out into the twilight that was rising from the ground like thin smoke into the pale sky. I stood up and looked out of the bay window over his shoulder. A few ragged clouds were scudding north and out of sight above the house. The curved window in which we stood was like the glassed-in prow of a boat, headed nowhere across a darkening sea.

  Something moved in the garden and broke the illusion. I looked down towards the far end and saw a man get up out of a deck-chair on the last terrace by the cliff-edge. He stood for a moment with his back to the house, looking up into the moving sky. His body was slim and straight against the horizon and he stood with his legs apart like a young man, but in the evening greyness his hair looked snow white.

  Dr. Schneider rapped on the window and the man in the garden turned around and saw us and started up the flagstone path to the house. He moved quickly and easily like a cat, his Angora hair blowing in the wind. When he came closer, I could see that he was a young man, hardly older than some of my students. His face and hair were very blonde, almost albino, and his eyes were as pale and empty as the sky.

  Schneider turned to me and said, “My son Peter. I don’t believe you know him.”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “I seldom see him myself. He’s a consulting engineer, you know, and his job takes him all over the country. He just got back from Canada and is taking a short holiday.”

  “Really? Did he meet Ruth Esch?”

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “Of course not,” Peter Schneider said from the doorway. I turned and looked at him. If his pale eyes had not been incapable of expression, he would have been glaring at his father. “Canada is a large country, you know.”

  His accent was surprisingly good, less evident than the old man’s, although Peter had only been in the country two years.

  Dr. Schneider moved around me and said, “Of course, you were in Toronto, weren’t you? Peter, I’d like you to meet Dr. Branch. Dr. Branch, my son Peter.” There was no warmth and no fatherly condescension in his voice. The two spoke to each other as equals and their relation puzzled me.

  “How-do-you-do,” Peter said and put out his hand. I answered him and stepped forward to shake it. It was soft and strong like his face, which was as rosy and smooth as a baby’s.

  The strength of his face was in the bones. Under the light drift of hair the brow was wide, with bulbous ridges above the eyes. The nose was blunt and straight and the sharp, triangular chin looked determined, but the lower lip was thick and soft, like a woman’s or a sulky boy’s. His face, strong and petulant at once, was handsome enough, but two things made it strange. His eyelashes and eyebrows were so light that he seemed to have none, and his steady eyes were almost colorless and held no meaning. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, Peter Schneider’s soul had long ago pulled down the blinds and gone into another room.

  “I know Toronto a bit,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I turned to Dr. Schneider. “Where was Ruth in Canada?”

  He looked at his son and said nothing. Finally he spoke: “I don’t know.”

  An elderly woman with drooping eyes and mouth and breasts came into the room and stood twisting her apron until Schneider said, “Ja?”

  “Dinner is ready,” she said in German and stumped away on flat slippered feet.

  I looked at Schneider and he said, “My housekeeper. I brought her with me from Germany and she has refused to learn English. Mrs. Shantz is an ignorant peasant, but she is a good cook.”

  When the dinner had reached the coffee and cigarettes stage, I was ready to agree with him. Frau Shantz spoke only German but her cooking had a pleasant French accent. Good food and two Martinis had made me very comfortable from the neck down, and even Peter, though his invisible eyebrows kept their complacent scowl, had broken down and begun to talk.

  Partly in the hope of finding out more than they had told me and partly for the sake of talking about her, I told them some of the things I knew about Ruth. I watched their faces when I described her attempt to protect the old Jewish doctor.

  Dr. Schneider surprised me by looking entirely sympathetic and saying, “She was very brave, very brave. If more Germans had such moral courage, certain—ah—conditions would be impossible.”

  “She’s a virtuous woman,” I said, “with the courage to follow it through.”

  “Courageous, certainly,” Peter Schneider said. “Nobody can deny it. But why do you call her virtuous, Dr. Branch? Is virtue merely physical courage, the early Roman virtus?”

  “Moral courage as well,” I said, looking into his eyes to see what he was getting at. His eyes said nothing: it was like looking into the depths of a wash-basin. I went on: “Her feelings were decent and right and she acted in accord with them.”

  “Naturally, we sympathize with her feelings because they agree with our prejudices, against anti-Semitism for example. But is virtue merely a matter of the feelings of the individual? What if the feelings are wrong? Say I have an uncontrollable urge to maim small children, is such an act sanctioned and made virtuous by my mere possession of such an impulse? I distrust the feelings of men in general. I subscribe to the doctrine of original sin.”

  “I hadn’t thought of you as a religious man, Mr. Schneider,” I said in the hope of insulting him. “You’d base your ethics in dogma or revelation then, would you?”

  “Of course not, I was speaking figuratively. I base morality in the common good. If you act for the common good, you are doing the right thing.”

  “Whose common good?”

  “The good of the community. The political group or state, whatever the group happens to be.”

  “Is there no morality above the state?”

  “Obviously not. Morality varies from place to place. In Russia it is not considered moral to deprive colored people of civil rights. In America and India it is considered moral.”

  “That merely proves that the state or community can be wrong.”

  “Who is to decide that the state is wrong? The individual following some inner light?” There was a sneer in his tone but his face was blank of anything but the permanent scowl which grew more complacent by the minute. I looked towards Dr. Schneider at the head of the table. His eyes were hooded and his face was shut up.

  “Call it inner light if you wish, or conscience or the superego. Whatever you call it, it knows that some things are wrong.”

  “You are an unconscious anarchist, Dr. Branch. You would set up the feeling or impulses of the individual against the laws, against the good of the state.”

  “If the laws are evil, they are not for the good of the state. Denying the validity of the individual conscience leaves no check on the state. Whatever it does is right.”

  “If it is successful, yes,” Peter Schneider said, as if that clinched the argument. “If unsuccessful, no.”

  “Successful in doing what?”

  “In furthering the interests of its people, or as many of them as possible.”

  “You’re arguing in a circle,” I said, “but let that pass. Can the good of the majority of the people sanction, or perhaps even i
nclude, the persecution or misery of a minority?”

  “Obviously,” Peter said, and leaned forward across the table. “I cite the Negroes in the United States.”

  “And the Jews in Germany?”

  “You’re trying to drive me into an anti-Semitic position, Dr. Branch.”

  “Not at all. I’m trying to drive you out of an anti-Semitic position.”

  “Nonsense. I merely said that the individual could not be sure of being right when he takes the law into his own hands. Especially a woman, a young girl.”

  “You seem to share Hitler’s prejudice against women,” I said, “as well as his prejudice against Jews.”

  “I have no concern with Hitler,” Peter said.

  Dr. Schneider spoke for the first time in minutes, “It is not entirely courteous to argue so strenuously with a guest. You must accept our apologies, Dr. Branch.” His voice was a light monotone which contrasted with his usual rich blatancy. It sounded as if he was afraid to speak but couldn’t help himself.

  I said, “The conversation is both interesting and instructive. I believe that Mr. Schneider was about to expound an old Turkish doctrine regarding the inferiority of women.”

  “Ach, women,” Peter said. “You Americans are hag-ridden by your women. They ride on your shoulders and strangle you with their legs. Their legs are pretty, of course. But why should they be treated as equals? Would you give equal civil rights to a race-horse?”

  “If it had equal intelligence and other human qualities.”

  “Are women equal in intelligence to men?”

  “Not if they’re not educated. The Middle Ages proved that.”

  “Why attempt to educate them? Women can perform their natural functions without education. Most of them are hardly more complicated than a child’s puzzle. Press three buttons in the proper sequence and the gates open. The gates of Aulis and the gates of hell. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

  Suddenly I could contain my anger no longer and it boiled over. “I abandon the argument. Your political and social ideas have the fascination of the horrible as far as I’m concerned. And the horrible loses its fascination very quickly.”

  What Peter said had convinced me that if he wasn’t a Nazi intellectual he had missed his calling. I stood up with a vague notion of walking out of the house, but the thought of Ruth held me. She was coming there to-night and evidently didn’t know what kind of family she was walking into.

  Peter stood up and said, “Come now, Dr. Branch, you must learn to be a better loser. We must have no hard feelings over a small argument of purely academic interest.”

  I bit back my anger and said, “I suppose I did fly off the handle. I must be getting the professorial habit of resenting contradiction.”

  Dr. Schneider produced an artificial laugh which bounced twice against the roof of his mouth and fell flat.

  “Not contradiction, sir. Merely disagreement,” Peter said. “We are probably using different words to mean the same thing.”

  I let even that pass.

  Dr. Schneider got out of his chair and said, “It’s some time before we’re due at the station, Dr. Branch. Would you care to look over my house?”

  I said I would and Peter excused himself. A moment later I heard his light feet go up the stairs two or three at a time. His father showed me the library with its shelf of first editions, the copper-screened back porch overlooking the lights of Arbana, the small, warm conservatory opening off the porch, and even the utility room where the furnace sat drinking oil and glowing contentedly. Dr. Schneider became quite amiable again after Peter left us, and he waxed lyrical over his radiant heating system which kept the floors warm enough to sleep on all winter. He seemed to love his house better than he loved his son.

  I listened enough to answer when I had to, but material possessions bore me, especially when they belong to other people. I pricked up my ears, though, when he offered to show me the salle d’armes. A special room for fencing seemed incongruous in the house of a man of Dr. Schneider’s age and weight.

  “I’m rather interested in fencing,” I said. “Do you fence?”

  “When I was a student, I indulged in some sabre-play.” He touched his left cheek, which was seamed with scars. “But I have not fenced for thirty years. Peter is a considerable fencer, I believe.”

  “Really? I did some intercollegiate fencing when I went to college, but I’ve never competed with the sabre. We used foils and epee, with masks, of course. I’ve got no scars to show for it.”

  “Our sabre-fencing at Heidelberg was a crude and bloody business,” Dr. Schneider said with an emotion that surprised me. We moved out of the utility room under the staircase into the central hall, and I noticed Peter coming down the stairs. “Since my Heidelberg experiences I must confess I have detested fencing, and especially the sabre. It is a butcher’s implement.”

  Peter was at the foot of the stairs now, and he stood there listening.

  “If that’s the way you feel,” I said, “it’s surprising that you have a fencing salle in your house.”

  “It was part of the house when I bought it, and I left it as it was. Peter sometimes uses it when he is here, and, of course, it lends a certain touch to the house.”

  “The manorial touch,” I said. “Your establishment is on a feudal scale, Dr. Schneider. I’d like to see your fencing room.”

  As we went down the hall, Peter joined us and said, “My father has been maligning the sabre, Dr. Branch. It is the most beautiful of weapons, and the most difficult.”

  “The Italian sabre has its points, certainly. I’ve played around with it but I never really learned it.”

  We went on discussing the sabre as we entered the salle d’armes, but after Dr. Schneider switched on the light my mind wasn’t on what I was saying. It was wondering where Peter Schneider had picked up the smudge of lipstick on his cheek. I hadn’t seen it there before he went upstairs, and Frau Shantz, the middle-aged housekeeper, didn’t look as if she used lipstick or as if Peter Schneider could conceivably kiss her.

  Dr. Schneider pointed at a row of long, narrow cases on a table at the end of the room and said, “There are the foils, Dr. Branch, if you are interested.”

  When I went to look at them, Dr. Schneider spoke in an angry whisper which I couldn’t catch. When I turned around, the lipstick had disappeared from Peter’s cheek and he was casually tucking a handkerchief into his breast pocket.

  “I’m afraid it’s the least interesting room in the house,” Dr. Schneider said.

  “On the contrary. It brings back very pleasant memories, probably because I won a round-robin once and this recalls the scene of my former triumph. It was the only thing I ever got a letter for in school.”

  To anyone but a fencer the room would have been less interesting than an average hotel room with nobody living in it. It was a large, square, empty room on a rear corner of the house, with tall windows on two sides. There were crossed sabres over the door, and a few wire masks and pads hung on the white plaster walls. A corrugated rubber mat ran across the exact center of the room.

  But the black rubber mat and the faint memory of old sweat along the walls excited me for a minute. I took a foil out of its case and moved it in the air.

  Peter stood beside his father watching me. I looked at him and his mouth moved into a smile like soft rubber, but under the rosy flesh the strong and passionate bones of his skull were fixed in a durable, clenched grin. His blonde hair looked senescent in the white light.

  “Would you care to play with the foils a little, Dr. Branch, since you do not affect the sabre?”

  “I’d like to,” I said, “if you’ll be forebearing. I’m years out of practice.”

  Peter clicked his heels and bowed and started to take off his coat. I started to take off mine.

  “I’m sorry to interfere with your sport,” Dr. Schneider said, “but there’s hardly time, I’m afraid.”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s not eight-thirty,”
I said.

  Peter spoke to his father in low, intense German. He must have thought that I didn’t know enough colloquial German to understand him, because what he said was, “Hold thy noise, thou doddering fool.”

  Dr. Schneider said nothing, but he turned green like old bronze. He turned and walked stiffly out of the room.

  “We’d better skip it,” I said. “Your father seems to object.”

  “Of course not. There is plenty of time. My father is a wet blanket. Do you care to select a foil and a mask?”

  “If you wish.”

  We put on masks, faced each other on the rubber mat, and saluted with our foils. The blunt, harmless blades crossed and disengaged. He lunged and I parried and lunged. He moved away very quickly and parried and lunged.

  If you have once learned to swim, your muscles never forget what to do in the water. Though I had not fenced for years, my muscles remembered the parries and ripostes that had been trained into them. My footwork was slow but the foil lightly held in my fingers followed their direction like an extension of my hand. I touched Peter three times while he touched me twice.

  He laid down his foil and took off his mask and I took off mine.

  “You are quite an expert fencer, Dr. Branch.” He spoke with what used to be called old-world courtesy before the old world lost its manners. But his fair skin was strained tight over the bones of his face.

  “Hardly,” I said. “I’ve probably spent more time with the foils than you have.”

  “No doubt you have. The sabre is my weapon. The foil is a pretty toy but the sabre is an instrument of war.”

  He moved quickly to the doorway and took down the two sabres from over the door. He thrust the hilt of one towards me and said, “Just feel it, Dr. Branch, the weight and balance and versatility.”

  While he stood opposite me on the mat and made his sabre whistle in the air, I looked at the one he had given me. It was not an Italian fencing-sabre with truncated point and blunted cutting-edge. It was a cavalry sabre, heavy and long, pointed like a pen and sharp enough to cut bread or throats. It was an instrument of war, all right.