People of the Book

by David Stacton

  Hannale seemed not at her ease. He supposed it was this place and did not blame her. But it made it no easier for him to say what he had come to say.

  Actually she had a dark spot on her conscience and, woman fashion, could not remember what was in it. She did not feel guilty exactly—no woman ever feels guilty about anything, even as a child—but should what she had done be discovered, she would have to deny it, and though she would be believed, she was not sure she would be forgiven. So while she did not think about it, she was uneasy.

  She was beginning to grow into a rangy beauty, long-legged, firm jawed, with that look of a well-bred hunter German women sometimes have, a cool, endearing stranger. When she was happy, those gray and green-flecked eyes, that had in them somewhere a little amber, were joyous and reserved. Like certain animals, she had the haughtiest, best-tempered physical good manners, always. It was not a matter of upbringing; it was a matter of breeding. He was proud of her. She would be a high-stepping lady. She was already mettlesome.

  None of which made what he had to say any the easier. They sat down and played with daisies. She strung them and he plucked them and handed them to her, gravely, and then with a smile.

  A barge went downriver.

  “Hannale,” he said, stripping carefully a grass blade down to its rib, without realizing what he was doing. “Could you be happy here?”

  “I liked it better there. I don’t like being shut up. We weren’t shut up there.”

  He knew where there was. His fingers paused. The Magician walked down a corridor. “We can’t go back there.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, busying her fingers with their daisies. “I know.”

  “You know a lot of things, don’t you?”

  “Some.”

  “Frau Stolz likes you. She says she’ll look after you.”

  “You’re going away.”

  He threw the grass rib away and started to peel another. Then he nodded jerkily.

  “And I can’t come?”

  “I’ll send for you as soon as I can.”

  “To Wollin?”

  “Yes.”

  She was terrified. But he was her brother, and she owed him much. Why had the Magician and Selina gone away?—not the imaginary Selina, she was beyond imaginary playmates now, but the other one.

  “I’ll stay if you want me to,” he said. He looked at her and then at the slow-moving barge. “But it’s the only way we’ll ever get out of here.”

  She never felt at ease unless he was around the corner. She hated it here. It was dark and mean and cramped.

  “No, you have to go.” She glanced at him sideways. “Lars, you must.”

  A little sigh escaped out of him. It was only a ripple across his shirt, as the laces stirred.

  “When?” she asked.

  “Not just yet. Soon.”

  They went back to making daisy chains. These ultimate permissions are granted quietly. As the sun began to sink, he stood up and held out his hand.

  “Let’s run.”

  They ran all the way back to town, so as not to have to hear the gates close behind them. They went to the riverbank every day that week, the weather holding, and below them the still river flowed on, northward, toward the Danube, and Ingolstadt, and Regensburg, and Linz, and Vienna, and Budapesth, and Mohács, and Belgrade, to the St. Georghe Mouth and the Black Sea, of which they had never heard.

  He was very pleased with her. He had brought her up. She was his sister. He could now do what he should always have done, go back to Wollin. This made him sad, but as crazy happy as a dog going home. It also made him solemn. It made them both solemn.

  *

  Stöss was consulting his God. In other words, as usual, he could not make up his mind.

  People sometimes have in them something stronger and finer than they are, which they are too weak to save. Knowing and despising themselves for their own weakness, they attack that small nodule in themselves with fury, squeeze it out, press it, and call it a cancer, remembering that old school rhyme in the Hexameron, that Canker is a disease of Plants, Cancer one of Animals.

  They expect goodness to eat them alive. They hate it. They destroy it. But they never quite get all the roots, and it spreads again. Do what we will, we can never quite destroy what is good in us. So it gnaws away, and will kill us if we are not careful. It requires constant trimming.

  Stöss was trying to remember his past, and found he couldn’t. He had never been one to splash ashore and take his strandhugg by force. Instead, he beat himself in the dark and winced at human cruelty. Though cruel himself, that was only because he was frightened. The good terrified him. For cruelty you can be punished, but the good has no reward. It is also an effort. To be good you must stand on your own, convinced of what you stand for. And he couldn’t. He had snatched at life sideways, in flight, with averted eyes. He could not remember what it looked like, for he had not dared to stare it down. He remembered not the pleasures of life, but the discomforts and hazards of snatching at them. His character had forced him to live like a thief.

  Those puddings Frau Stolz served him were precious to him because they were permitted. Nothing had been permitted him before. He cherished the novelty.

  That we are permitted to have only what we make and take had not occurred to him. He was an unhealthy animal: he loathed himself. It is a thing no animal short of a mongrel does but man. There is no animal but man so sick as to do that. The others lick their wounds and heal or else they die. Death is something that happens, like anything else. But to men it is something that has not happened yet, and so they fear it.

  Stöss would have liked to have a son without the bother. But he could not nerve himself to admit the connection, which would mean responsibilities, explanations, awkwardness, disorder. So better to say nothing. Besides, his ladies thought the boy a young tough. There was that vigor….

  Having consulted his God and gotten no answer, he decided to temporize. To temporize cost him such enormous effort, he had no energy left for a decision. It is a terrible responsibility to keep from one’s flock that God says neither yes nor no, that God sees everything but waits. So, so shall I. It is the endless dilemma of two bears in one den.

  The trouble was, he didn’t like Lars. And how could he be sure? Women are apt to anything, and Lars had tow hair. There was no tow hair in his family. It was im-pos-si-ble. Perhaps if he waited it would solve itself. It is remarkable in this world how many things do, if first you pull the eiderdown up around your ears.

  If only it had been some other boy, more admiring and less rough.

  Stöss’s Christian doubts were not of the usual sort. He had no doubts; he was certain God has nothing to do with us. This was his alternative to turning Manichee, and no reason to admire Him the less. But it deprives Him of ears, and most people are limited to what they can ask for.

  Ask for nothing: it is futile. Give thanks: it is a pleasure. He is above all this: good. At least something has been saved out. God’s not a man or a being, but everything that is. He is is. And naturally, those who cannot accept the universe can scarcely be expected to accept Him. They want a little God, one they can suck like a doll, something more helpful and personal, a placebo.

  So to call on God, and the word God itself, seemed to Stöss always a cheat. There is no such person, it is all vanity. What there is, is not available with advice. Therefore it behooves us to be sturdy. But Stöss was not sturdy and could not bear to be alone. It is difficult to forgive Him for not caring, when there is nobody else who does. So though Stöss had within him perception of a great and noble truth, this only made him the more ashamed of his own weakness. Therefore he truly hated God, as others must always hate anyone who does not adore them and cosset them with soft sirups. He would gladly have brought mariolatry back into the church, both as the ultimate insult to Him, and out of scorn for those who still believed in Him.

  How else could he feel? Our autobiography is the sum of other people’s lives, and he had neve
r known any. He had not been interested. He had had neither the ease nor the time to return the pressure of any human hand.

  But time passes. We grow older. Behind us stand our previous selves, all empty, all waiting. We cannot remember them. If we have had nothing worth remembering so far, how should we remember them? He was so many different lost people, and he had been afraid truly to be any of them. He had shed them all, as quickly as he could, from childhood on. They fluttered on twigs behind him, transparent as snake skins. Outside his study the wind blew the last dead leaves across the square. Somehow dead leaves came even into this city, though there were few trees, and those now green in other people’s gardens. It was a haunted sound, the sound of the past being rustled away. He was alone on top of a rocky hill. It had been a long climb. He was at last secure, but there was no one to share the joke with.

  There could have been Lars.

  Not only does he not like me, but I do not like him, thought Stöss angrily, and broke the quill he had just, with his frugal neatness, sharpened. He had never in his life thrown an inkwell at a wall. It would have been better had he done so, but that would have made a splotch, a sign of his passing, and he shrank from that.

  Looking around his pawky, comfortable, lurking room, Pastor Stöss felt desperate. A man on a log over a crevasse, and the wood rotten, could have felt no worse. What did not occur to him was that:

  II.xxi.14: Wherefore as that same divine law forbids parents to be put to death for the offenses of children, so it exempts children from the same punishment for the actions of their fathers: a lenity which is greatly commended by Josephus and Philo.

  Life was difficult for Stöss. It was a problem for him, so huge it blocked his view, and left him alone behind it, quietly sobbing. For total moral paralysis is not only an uncomfortable disease, it evokes no sympathy, since the patient takes care of himself: he needs no nurse.

  55

  Richelieu once said, “Those who work for the State should imitate the stars. The dogs bark, but they shine nonetheless and revolve in their courses.” He also said, in a memorandum to Father Joseph, that if two unequal parties enter into the same treaty, it is the greater power which is at the disadvantage, for though lesser powers may be excused from wriggling out from under, a great power may not do so, since it dare not risk its probity to its prestige. This had not prevented him from wriggling out from under a good many.

  On April 30th, Oxenstierna entered Paris, in the manner of that cat to whom all places are the same. We are told it is the capital of the civilized world, but are under no obligation to believe what we are told. Though the House of Vasa was in its fourth generation and sixth ruler, the House of Bourbon in its second and second, though he had been minister for over twenty years, Richelieu for merely eight, he was prepared for any ostentation, since to France the whole exterior world is parvenu. He did not propose to be annoyed. He did recommend to Grotius, who had come out to meet him, a rereading of the Master’s work, Book Three, Chapter Twenty, subsection twenty-five:

  What some allege in excuse for a short delay in the execution of a treaty is not to be admitted as true, except some unforeseen necessity has occasioned the impediment. For though some of the canon-laws may favour such a plea, that is not surprising, considering they are framed solely with the view of promoting charity among Christians. But in this question relating to the interpretation of treaties, it is not so much our business to lay down what is best and properest for everyone to do, nor even to state what religion and piety require, as to consider what everyone may be compelled by legal authority to do.

  In short, astutely press and wisely dally. Such are the rights of peace and war.

  The princelings in the Germanies spoke much of the rights of the Holy State. Oxenstierna was not unacquainted with the notion. He even believed in it. But such was his upbringing, he saw the Heilige Staat to be Sweden, not the Germanies. As representative both of the real one, and of the others as well, he thought he had much to bargain with, the one in the names of the other. His position was unassailable; it was not his own power that was to be bargained with, but France’s lack of any. He had still seven armies in the field, defeated or not, and France as usual had not one, only a few irregulars, mounted nobles good for nothing, and a few impotent princelings ill suborned.

  So this is France, he said, and enjoyed himself. We must make them pay. And though not swallowing megalogothicism whole, he looked around him with the rueful amusement of Alaric (one of the epithets applied to Great Gustavus) in Rome. The buildings were fine, but where were the people?

  To Richelieu’s annoyance, he spoke Latin only, though his French was fluent. Richelieu’s Latin was not. La manière de negociation françoise, wrote Oxenstierna, est tellement estrange, and depends trop de la finesse. Richelieu, in his turn, complained of Oxen-stierna’s manière Nordique, un peu gothique et beaucoup finnoise. So negotiations went smoothly.

  Oxenstierna, whose only aim was to have the matter done, the troops paid, and a slice of Pomerania, allowed himself to express an interest in Alsace-Lorraine. Intrigue may be stretched many ways. A large man in a good mood can be disconcerting. “He is an inexhaustible source of wise counsels,” said Richelieu bitterly. And so he was. The Swedish armies were in revolt, the war had shattered into shards, discipline could no longer be maintained, the Imperialists were winning victory after victory. But there were insurrections in France, and no one but Sweden had troops.

  Meeting Richelieu, Oxenstierna had come away impressed. Though too silky and sinuous for his taste, Richelieu’s ability could not be doubted. Under such circumstances the Cardinal had his sympathy. He did not have his compliance. Both men enjoyed the duel. It is so seldom we meet somebody worth the trouble and the skill.

  The result was the Treaty of Compiègne, whereby, in return for the left bank of the Rhine, France recognized Sweden as an equal ally, gave her control of Worms, Mainz, and some other places, agreed not to make a separate peace, paid subsidies to the Swedish armies, and consented to declare war against Spain (whose troops were in the Rhinelands). It was satisfactory. And besides, it gave him once more the opportunity to hear Grotius lecture upon the Highest Good, the improvement of Morals, and the Condition of Man. He never mentioned any particular man by name. He had a skill at wiping out faces. He wished to better the lot of the crowd. Whereas Oxenstierna, who found most people irrelevant, knew five hundred fools by their particularity to Grotius’ one, and was always searching for a face in the crowd worth yanking out. Nothing else is worth the saving. You hook him out, ask him his name, and if, as it looked, he has qualities, you set him on his way. Like that boy.

  Whereas to Grotius men were incurably plural. No wonder the man lacked tact.

  Also he had noticed the mobs here. In Sweden we have conspiracies, revolts, rebellions, and crowds. But we have no mobs. Perhaps it is because, if we treated them this way, our peasants would rise and strike us dead. It is also, however, because we manage our own farms, and so make certain how much Dick can pay before we ask for more. No Swedish monarch has ever had to fear the people.

  As for the treaty, Oxenstierna contented himself with the remark that “dried Baltic Salmon, recommended by a well-tasted poivrade, greatly excelled the superb bisques at the Cardinal’s table.” As so it had, but then in those days the French had nothing to thicken their sauces with but bread crumbs.

  It did not occur to either of these gentlemen that in the course of a long and complex war, people die. Of course people die. That’s what they’re there for. It cannot be helped. It is the only way to cut them back. How else could we sign a treaty or take a town? Nonetheless, it was now a French war. Oxenstierna wanted no more of it than to take his subsidies and go.

  On the 21st of May, 1635, it was proclaimed on the Town Place at Brussels, that His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XIII, declared war upon His Most Catholic Majesty, Philip IV; and all over South Germany and the Rhinelands Imperial and Spanish forces began to move up.

 
; 56

  In Blicksberg it was raining. It had been raining now for a five-day storm. Blicksberg stands on the Bavarian plateau, fifty miles southeast of the Swabian Jura. It was hard, cold mountain rain which came down in torrential spurts. The gutters and drains were unable to choke it down fast enough. There were here no silver fish to flip-flop back toward their own element. One could only gasp for life.

  Stöss kept to his study, stared at nothing, avoided the children, and sharpened quills. The weather had made him querulous. He did not eat. Hannale was practicing solitude in her room. Lars spent his time in the kitchen with Frau Stolz. The kitchen was a warm island in a lowering house.

  “You’ve made up your mind to go,” said Frau Stolz, tight-lipped and approving.

  He nodded.

  “Good. And don’t you worry too much. She’ll be all right, probably better.”

  Lars crinkled his forehead and sat astraddle his chair, with his arms clutching the back of it. It was a roughhewn chair with pegged legs. The top of its back came to his chin.

  There is such a thing as being inhabited. Otherwise he could not have forced himself to leave. We become those people we admire. In fact, what Stöss objected to in Lars was not Lars entirely, but something new to him since Mysendonck’s death, the turns of voice, the way the body moves, the presence of a stranger, a decision and vigor which had not been there before. He had become hard enough again not to ask for help, but to go away in order to be able to give it. We are the sum total of those we are fond of. They are the sum total of us. We get our strength from that. This happens often with the young, less often when we are older; for like the thymus gland, the bump of admiration is absorbed and passes away in all but the exceptional of God’s creatures, whom the ability to love, therefore to emulate, has kept alive. So with Frau Stolz and her brothers. She had that vivacity to be seen in the periwinkle eyes of very old ladies, a look that says we are mortal but we are not trapped, and looks out at the world with the wonderful amusement of those to whom tulips are not tulips, but life back again this year, dewy and coppery in the bud. It is the look of a gardener.