by James Hilton
“He didn’t think your work was much good until he found it worth appropriating.”
“In a sort of way, that’s exactly true, and from him it was the perfect tribute…. He’d used other people’s work before—I found that out…. On the other hand, I can see now there was a special reason why he didn’t think I was much good when I first started with him in Vienna.”
“Why?”
“Because … well, it concerns your father.”
“How?”
“I don’t know whether you knew it, but he paid Framm to take me as his assistant.”
“He paid Framm?”
“I didn’t find out till I was in Berlin, and then, of course, I understood why Framm hadn’t taken me very seriously at first. He just thought I was a rich man’s protégé, so he set me to work on what he thought wouldn’t come to anything and left me to it. He had a few rich students he treated the same way. He’d take anybody’s money, but you couldn’t exactly buy him with it—he’d let you think you could and then secretly go back on the bargain.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “My poor father! If he knew that he’d have to add Framm to the list of all the other people who disappointed him…. Just for curiosity, have you any idea what my father did pay?”
“My whole salary.”
“Good God! So all the time—”
“Yes, all the time I was in Vienna I was costing Framm nothing.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. But I was thinking also that if the arrangement was for my father to pay your salary, then my father was a bit responsible for you being underpaid.”
“Or else generous for offering to pay for me at all.”
“Perhaps…. It’s odd, though, how much easier it is to forgive Framm for exploiting you totally than to excuse my father for not putting up a few extra dollars. Particularly as….”
I stopped in time. It had been on my tongue to say: “Particularly as he had a reason to get you out of the way.”
“Go on,” Brad said.
“Particularly as he’s so rich,” I answered. But perhaps it sounded as improvised as it was.
“Shall we start going down?” he asked, and we tramped a mile or more before he spoke again.
We had cached a thermos of coffee at the old picnic place and it made a pleasant excuse for another halt. But we were tired now, exhausted in nerves and bones; the feeling came on suddenly while we were lying on the grass. We smoked cigarette after cigarette and, as the afternoon progressed, rolled over in deep lassitude to stay in the sun.
“What exactly did you do in Berlin?” I asked, lazily. “Routine work for Framm, you said. But wasn’t there anything you did on your own?”
“Not so much. Now he knew I was good and he was paying me himself he kept me busy most of the time. But of course his work and mine weren’t so far apart. Electromagnetism links up with the entire field of quantum mathematics.”
“But didn’t you have any personal life? Any fun? Didn’t you go anywhere?”
“Berlin wasn’t a gay city in those days.”
“But there must have been a few places—theaters, movies….”
“Yes, I went to a few.”
“Didn’t you visit anybody’s home? Of course I remember what you were like in London….”
“That was different. I was shy then. I wasn’t shy in Berlin. But I didn’t go anywhere—except once to a party Framm gave.”
“Oh? At his house?”
“Yes. I wanted to see what it was like. He had a big villa in Charlottenburg. His wife was all right—quite pleasant—the gracious hostess— probably what we should call in America a socialite. But domestic also. The place was swarming with little Framms. Kids of all ages from two to twelve. It was a big party—professors and professors’ wives, and the kind of half- professors they call Privatdozenten. All very Nazi, of course. And nobody packed the kids off to bed, as they should have, and the more they romped and misbehaved the more Framm seemed to enjoy it.”
“Just one happy family.”
“Maybe … if you can work that in with the fact that Framm was notorious for his affairs with other women. I’d known that in Vienna, but I didn’t meet his family there, so it hadn’t looked like such a paradox. To see him playing silly games with those kids, who obviously adored him, when all the time one knew what a swine he was….”
“Did you ever visit his house again?”
“No, I’d had enough. Perhaps he’d had enough too—I wasn’t asked. But he’d introduced me very charmingly to everybody. Of course they knew what had happened in Vienna—who I was, and about Pauli. I was his American specialty— the young mathematician for whom the privilege of working with Hugo Framm outweighed all personal and private complications…. Or no—perhaps that’s going too far. I don’t know what was in his mind about me. He had an air of showing me off as a novelty, but then I was a novelty. Not many Americans studied in Germany after the Nazis came to power.”
“Of course they must have thought you were sympathetic.”
“Sure. I wanted them to think so. It was part of my plan…. You’d better let me tell you the whole story consecutively….”
* * * * *
The Technische Institut was outside Berlin, a functional edifice, deliberately unacademic in style; different branches of science were housed floor above floor, and as in London, Physics was at the top, not from any symbolic recognition of its importance but for the opposite reason that more favored sciences chose the more accessible space. Brad, however, did not mind that. To ascend by the slow elevator through the sounds and smells of so much practical experimentation in other fields, most of it geared for war, and to reach finally the quietude of his own room under the roof gave him a feeling that he was in, but not of, the hive.
He soon realized that it was a political as well as a scientific hive. Within the aggressively Nazi framework of staff and student bodies there were continual interdepartmental struggles—for government appropriations, extra personnel, and that continuance of political favor on which very existence depended. Framm spent at least half his time and energies on these exhausting battles, and usually he won them. He was utterly unscrupulous, a wily tactician, a dangerous enemy and a false friend; but Brad had to admit that, so far as dealing with the higher authorities was concerned, these attributes were necessities of survival. It was when they showed in his treatment of subordinates that Brad hated him with a pure intensity that nourished his own personal decision.
He had wondered at first how his co-workers would accept him into their midst, but he found he had so little contact with them, professional or personal, that problems of behavior rarely arose on either side. He had been at the Technische Institut for weeks before he exchanged more than a good-morning with anyone except Framm and Framm’s secretary.
Then for some reason this girl gave up her job and another arrived one morning in her place. She was friendly, and since Framm happened to be away most of her first day, she used her conversation on Brad, who would not have encouraged her but for a curious circumstance which he soon discovered—that the girl knew what had happened in Vienna, but did not yet connect Brad with it. And she was most anxious to chat about her new employer, for whom she had already conceived the ardent admiration that women so readily felt for Framm. Wasn’t he wonderful? Such a brilliant mind … and his eyes—they seemed to bore through you. And so pale—perhaps he didn’t have good health. She had heard he nearly died after that madwoman attacked him in Vienna.
Brad thought this as good a method of exploration as he was likely to find. He said “yes” in answer, and added a few details to whet her eagerness both to give and to take. Presently she said: “Of course you know what was really behind it all?”
So the accusations Pauli had made against Framm were common gossip, Brad reflected; he wondered how that would help or hinder the accomplishment of his purpose. He said: “No? What was it?”
Then she said something that so utterly shocked an
d amazed him that even the girl, who had expected to create a small sensation, was surprised at the larger size of it.
What she said was this: that Pauli had been Framm’s mistress and that when the Nazi movement in Austria began to flourish, Framm got rid of her because she was a quarter Jew.
Brad had known this latter fact, which had meant nothing to him, but the suggestion of her relationship with Framm was shattering, even though he was aware that the girl might only be repeating untrue gossip. Nor did he know quite what it shattered. Not his faith in Pauli; nor his hatred of Framm, which in many ways it accentuated. Eventually he decided it must be something inside himself that had nothing to do with either.
Later in the same day the girl came to him, full of apologies and embarrassments; doubtless during the interval somebody had told her who Framm’s assistant was. He patted her arm and said it didn’t matter, it hadn’t been her fault; but they talked no more on any subsequent occasion, and soon Framm’s temper and temperament made her quit as had her predecessor.
Brad found that coming to terms with the new idea, true or not, put Framm in perspective, made the focus of his own observation almost fascinatingly sharper, so that he accumulated data with less impatience. When he saw Framm’s ruthlessness in trampling opposition he felt more certain than ever that the man had been responsible for Pauli’s death, yet he was also willing to wait longer till he discovered some final clinching evidence. For this reason he welcomed and even relished every fresh display of Framm’s malice; each instance added a fragment to the mosaic of indictment. There was a clever young biologist who had criticized some administrative scheme that Framm was trying to put over—sound criticism, since afterwards Framm changed his scheme accordingly. But he could not forgive the instigator, and had him hounded from a minor university post on a racial count. Not that he believed in the prevalent nonsense about Aryanism, but he found the nonsense useful. If one of his subordinates were part Jewish, a good scientist, and also subservient to him personally, he would protect him, but if he weren’t good or showed any sign of independence, then the racial angle provided a weapon. The way he used it against the biologist was typically improvised; he spread the story that the man was a Jew when actually he wasn’t. In all such maneuvers Framm had no conscience, no hesitation, and no pity. He despised the mob and the Nazi mob as much as any other, but he was willing to pay it all the necessary kinds of lip service.
Sometimes, overhearing in Framm’s office half of a telephone talk that revealed either the lip service or the ruthlessness, Brad would be unable to keep back a look that told plainly enough what he thought; and Framm would catch the look, interpret it correctly, yet seem by no means displeased. Gradually Brad came to realize that these interpretations did not put to hazard a relationship which, on the surface, he still wished others to take for one of close friendship; on the contrary, Framm at times seemed to derive perverse enjoyment from the situation. And perhaps because of this, and also because Brad was an American, Framm was less guarded in what he said in front of him. He agreed that the division of science into good Germanic and bad Jewish was sheerly idiotic; he had admitted this, freely and cynically, when Brad had argued the cause of the biologist. And when he saw the look in Brad’s eyes, he said: “You’ll probably kill me one of these days, Bradley, but I know you won’t peach on me.”
In this fantastic way he trusted Brad, and no less when Brad’s hostility became outspoken. He too became then more outspoken; he began to make Brad an audience whenever he had trouble with the authorities or with his rival department heads. He would rehearse an argument, or conduct a post-mortem on one; he would unleash his wits in dangerous territory after carefully making sure that the doors were closed and that his secretary was at lunch. He was capable of referring to Hitler as “that inspired Quatschkopf into whose hands God has entrusted the destiny of the world.” He confided in Brad all the details of his continuous and frustrating feuds with the Nazi higher-ups, he would read over his briefs in defense of theoretical work; and then, less tactfully, he would let loose a devastating blast against the intelligence of certain persons in authority. Nor could anyone be much more devastating than Framm when he was in vitriolic form. His voice and gestures were of such excellent acting quality that Brad once asked why he wasted them on a single hearer. Framm replied: “They are not wasted—they are indulged in.”
As for the work, that too progressed so well that it reached many an abstract discussion point. Framm would enter Brad’s laboratory after some tigerish outside struggle in which he had bested an opponent, placated a superior, or sacrificed an underling; and for very relief he would launch into an expounding of his own scientific philosophy—a synthesis of the practical and theoretical in which, at the higher levels, there was no necessary basis of deduction from observed facts, but the mere waving of theory, like antennae, to set a course for later experimentation and possible discovery. The mathematician, he was fond of saying, could construct a field theory for the unknowable as well as the unknown; and he was also fond of a quotation from (of all persons) G.K. Chesterton to the effect that “the difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.” Good, Framm commented, except that there was no fundamental difference between the two behaviors, and he would scribble some half-impish equation on the blackboard to illustrate.
Brad’s habit was to do his own experimental work mostly in the mornings; but later in the day, when he had his graphs and computations to assemble, he would move into a world of pure symbol-expression; and sometimes then a curious trancelike ecstasy would take possession of him, an ecstasy that Framm’s hand on his shoulder did not disturb.
What was disturbing, whenever he was outside his own workroom, was the whole bludgeoning atmosphere of Nazi domination during that last year before the outbreak of war. He was in Berlin during the period after Munich, and on a March day in 1939 he heard Chamberlain’s Birmingham speech over Framm’s special radio. When the storm troopers marched into Prague and Memel, Framm’s exultation had been unbounded. Brad realized that beneath the skin of derision which was no more than a privately intellectual arrogance, Framm was a perfect Nazi. That Quatschkopf, as he put it, had been inspired again. Presently there would be moves on Danzig, then Poland. The European democracies would not fight, because they had no fight left in them. And as for America, Framm added contemptuously….
It was years since Brad had been in his own country, yet Framm’s scorn took him back in mind immediately. While he saw the towers of Manhattan and the wheatfields of the Dakotas, he looked at Framm with the cold answering thought: I must do what I have to do and then get going….
* * * * *
I said I was glad he had felt like that about America. “I’d been afraid you were getting to be the kind of American that Julian once said was like some kinds of wine—they don’t travel well….”
He answered moodily: “I don’t know whether I travel well or not, but I sometimes wish I hadn’t traveled at all. It would have been better fun to stay where I was born.”
“And know no more mathematics than I do?”
“Sure. Plus no more politics and history than I do. Then we might both have been happy.”
“Together?”
He laughed. “There comes the flaw. I wouldn’t even have met you if I hadn’t traveled.”
“You’d have met somebody else and I’d have met somebody else.”
“But that’s exactly what we did. I met Pauli and you met—oh, everybody.”
“Not quite that. But even if I had, I don’t know what we can do about it now. We’re so old.”
“Now you’re kidding….”
“Yes, but you’re not. You really feel we’re aged in the wood and the wood’s a bit rotten. I don’t blame you. I just managed to miss one world war— you’ve had two. But I had a head start on you by being a precocious brat even when I was eighteen.”
“You certainly were. And I was a bit of a prig until….”
He hesitated and I said laughing: “This sort of confession ought to be good for the soul, if a scientist believes in one.”
“And even if he doesn’t.”
“I wish I was sure about souls. I wish I knew as little as my mother did and understood as much.”
“What made you think of her?” he asked sharply.
“I often think of her. I miss her more than I ever thought I would. She was a darling. You knew her—you remember what a darling she was.”
“Yes, I remember.” He looked uneasy.
“But get on with your story. Tell me about Framm—if you still want to.”
I lay back and waited. When he resumed, it was abruptly and faster, as if he had got to a part that had to be carried in stride. “Framm often worked at night and so did I. We’d have the whole floor practically to ourselves when the others had gone home. That of course would provide the opportunity. And yet, you know, I wasn’t eager in any sense of time—I mean, it didn’t have to be today or tomorrow or the next day, provided I knew it was going to happen someday. And meanwhile inside our own private world I was able to admire and envy his sheer brain stuff more than that of anyone else I have ever known, before or since. That’s a plain fact and I’ll never deny it. It hadn’t anything to do with liking the man. But at odd moments, when a certain quality in his mind revealed itself, I had a feeling that I can only call a religious one … of worship, if you like … not worship of him, for Christ’s sake, but of something quite distant, impersonal … the soul, if you like the word, that a scientist believes in. You were talking about that just now.”
There was no comment I ventured to make. At length he said roughly: “Do you get me?”
“Partly.”
“Wouldn’t be surprising if you didn’t. Perhaps you think they were right to put me in a psychiatric ward. They had their reasons, maybe. If only they hadn’t kept on watching me all the time, as if I carried the secret of the universe in my pocket. Perhaps somebody thought I did and gave them orders— Follow that man, he knows too much, he worked with Framm…. He has the magic formula, economy size, made like a doctor’s prescription, not one ingredient, but several….”