The Carp Castle Read online

  Moira and Aunt Madge Foxthorn exchanged a glance. They seemed to be privately amused about something, with a trace of complicity. After a moment Moira said, “Hugo Eckener” (how strange this sounded, as though it were some schoolboy she was talking about) “tells me that you served in the War.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you suffer?”

  “I?” He wasn’t sure what she meant. “Not personally.”

  “You see, Georg von Plautus”—and now she seemed to speak to him directly, not to Eckener, not to anyone else in the world; it was as though the others were not there—“you see, I have a special gift of Vision that allows me to see into the heart of the world, and this has revealed to me that the German race has played a tragic part in the drama of history, in my Astral journeys, I have seen the nobility of its men and the sacrifice of its women. I know that because of the suffering the Germans have undergone, and because of the sufferings they have inflicted on other people, they should be regarded with a special understanding and compassion. We should all work with particular diligence to free the Germans from their Karma, so that their spirits can rejoin the universal Atman of brotherhood.”

  Georg remained silent at this. It seemed to him absolute nonsense. She seemed to be saying that, because he had dropped bombs on London, he was an unfortunate person who should be treated with special consideration. He murmured a phrase he would never have pronounced under any other conditions. “There is enough suffering to go around for everybody.”

  He was aware of the other woman’s forehead-bulb pointed in his direction. It was slightly unsettling. The two women seemed to have nothing more to say. Moira didn’t shake hands, nor did she offer tea or a glass of sherry. She held her green smile while Eckener and Georg left the room (Georg felt vaguely that they ought to back away, as from the presence of Royalty). The car whisked them back to the plant, and in his office Eckener told him for the first time what the terms of the position were. The monthly salary was more than he had earned in the year previously, and it was paid in dollars. He was to have absolute command of the maneuvering and navigation of the League of Nations, and Moira was to tell him where it was to go.

  “You’re a lucky fellow,” Eckener told him. “It’s settled then. Here’s your copy of the contract.”

  They shook hands on it themselves, since it wasn’t evidently the custom of the two American ladies to shake hands, and Eckener produced his bottle of brandy. At this point, only two hours from the moment he had first heard of Moira, Georg had no idea who she was or what her plans were. It didn’t matter. The words She has a dirigible still glowed in his thought-vault, along with the memory of her penetrating green eyes and the gown with M’s all over it.

  A strange business. Georg clutched its strangeness, which was also the strangeness of his own special destiny. He went on in this way, exalted and blissful, concealing his inner state and showing the world only his steely exactness and military probity, during the months in which the airship was finished to the highest standards of the Zeppelin Company, in which he conducted its trials and trained its crew, to the day when it rose from the concrete apron at Friedrichshafen and turned its nose to the north. And to think that during the War he had not believed in Fate! Who then had dropped that newspaper into his frame of vision as he sat in the café in Berlin? Who had caused this green-eyed demoness to swim into his ken, like an unknown planet into the telescope of an astronomer? Fate! Fate!

  *

  “Ten degrees right rudder,” he orders.

  “Ten degrees right, Herr Kapitän.”

  The Captain is starting his broad turn south of Mainz in order to make his approach to Frankfurt, fifteen miles to the east. The compass turns, clicking for each degree. “Steady on zero eight zero.” Frankfurt is visible ahead now; he can see the soot-stained jumble of the city and, a little to the right, the hangar at Zeppelinheim in the southern suburbs. Although there are only a few fluffy clouds overhead, there are dark nimbus to the east, over the Vogelsberg. He doesn’t think the rain will arrive in time to interfere with his landing, but he keeps a wary eye on it. He looks around for something that will give him a clue to the wind, a flag or a smoking chimney. Frankfurt radio reports good weather; they don’t seem to have turned around to look at the mountains behind them.

  He catches sight of a farm chimney with its smoke drifting weakly to the west. The wind is only about ten knots; it will be a couple of hours before the rain arrives. But now his attention has been caught by something else he sees through the windscreen. He gets the binoculars from the rack. In a clearing in the woods, two froglike creatures are weaving and circling. Naked human beings. He adjusts the glasses and peers more carefully. He can tell that one is female and one male, not from any external signs, which are indistinguishable from this altitude, but from their motions, the one running with flailing arms, the other with legs pumping and elbows tucked in like an athlete. A clearly understandable little drama, banal, but enough to hold the Captain’s attention for a few seconds. He wonders how long it will be before they notice the airship. It is only about a quarter of a mile from them now; its darkening shadow races toward them through the woods.

  But now something new and inexplicable is happening. The male has approached the female closely and is circling around her, but she, instead of repulsing his advances, or surrendering to them, is batting at the air around her as though beset by invisible ghosts, pirouetting, bending, straightening up, swinging her arms as though exercising with Indian clubs; and look, he is doing the same! twirling, slapping his thighs, then his head with one hand and his stomach with the other, as if attempting that difficult trick where you pat the one and roll your palm on the other, sitting down, standing up, running a few yards, making a spasmodic jerk, then coming back to the female and uniting with her so suddenly that the two figures fall to the ground, roll over, and scrunch convulsively together like two dying slugs.

  A clear enough end to the dance; the rest of it is perhaps some ritual common to these two individuals. The white blob passes away under the bulk of the dirigible and becomes invisible; the Captain puts away the binoculars. The incident reminds him that the universe doesn’t consist solely of his humming airship and its efficient, well-trained, responsive crew; down below is the old world with its strife and cruelty, its urban soot, the stench of politics, its suffering without remedy, the muddled and tormenting, inefficient spasms of sex. Erwin, although he is looking out through the windscreen, has apparently not noticed this vignette below.

  “What are you heading?”

  “Zero eight zero, Herr Kapitän.”

  Right on course. He has been watching the compass closely and is too well disciplined to lower his eyes to anything else.

  “Elevators steady; there’ll be an updraft here as we cross the Rhine.”

  “Steady, sir,” replies the young Englishman.

  The grimy sky of Frankfurt is more clearly outlined now, rising up from the horizon. It is a town that the Captain knows well, although he has no particular affection for it.

  “Erwin. D’you remember the Bierstube that we airshipmen used to frequent when we were in Frankfurt, eh? The Heldenkeller.”

  “Ja, Herr Kapitän.”

  “We might drop around there tonight, d’you know, just for old time’s sake. We Germans that is. The old gang.”

  “Ja, Herr Kapitän.”

  The Captain thinks that in the future airships may be steered by an automatic helmsman—a shiny silver box where the rudder-wheel now is, plus a little parrot that sits by the windscreen and says “Ja, Herr Kapitän” from time to time. As the dirigible passes over the Rhine the elevator man corrects for the expected updraft; first its nose wants to go up, then its tail, and he spins his wheel one way and the other to keep it level.

  “Steady at eight hundred, sir.”

  The Captain nods without speaking, checks the altimeter himself, then sights out through the windscreen at the still tiny shape of the hangar south of t
he city.

  “Five degrees down elevator.”

  “Five degrees down, sir.”

  The Captain rubs his front teeth together, a beaver-like tic he has when he is alert. He is enjoying himself now; he is doing what he’s good at and his mind works with the precision of a Swiss watch. “Fifteen minutes!” he shouts into the speaking tube.

  A bell trills, calling the crew to their landing stations. A quartermaster appears and takes up his position at the engine telegraphs, and another crewman stands ready at the ballast toggles.

  “All ahead slow.”

  The four telegraphs clang, then twitter again as the answers come back from the engines. The horizon has risen up now until it is fixed in the sky a little higher than usual. The inclinometer reads down ten. The sound of the engines changes; the cello-note dies away to a whisper in which the grumble of the individual cylinders can be heard. A sound the Captain loves; he can feel it vibrating like a caress in his bones. The landscape below rises slowly toward the dirigible.

  The next thing that happens is that he becomes aware with the eye in the back of his head that Mrs. Pockock has come down the aluminum ladder and is standing at the rear of the car with Aunt Madge Foxthorn. He swivels his head briefly to look. The two of them are clad as they were when he first caught sight of them in the hotel in Konstanz, except that Mrs. Pockock is now wearing a round linen hat with a floppy brim to match her gown. Civilians (as the Captain thinks of everybody in the world except airship crews) are not allowed in the control car, but in this case it’s her dirigible, so she can do as she pleases. The phrase She has a dirigible still hangs in his mind like a dim votive lamp in a church, illumination him with a strange kind of emotion for her, a dark, sexless, visceral, half-resentful love such as one might have for a God one dislikes. Zu Befehl, meine Dame! I shall take you to the ends of the earth, yet my soul shall not bend before you.

  The League of Nations (he is reminded of its ludicrous name now that she is standing behind him in the car) sinks slowly in the fading light of the afternoon. He can see the hangar more clearly now, and even the stub-mast on wheels and the broad stretch of grass before it where he is to land. This is the field that the old Count Zeppelin planned as a base for his international airship service to America, to South America, and even to Africa, to wipe out the war-shame, to lift the spirit of Germany and restore its place in the proud family of nations, and now it has come to pass! The field is ready, waiting only for the new airships to emerge from the factory, and fitly named for the Count himself—Zeppelinheim, a locution that, in the copulative way of German diction, combines the two most beautiful words in the language, and gives the Captain a swell of pride, of love, of nostalgia just to think about it. He is ready to let the others moon over Mutter, Vaterland, and Liebe.

  “Three and four stop!”

  The two telegraphs clang again. Closer to the earth the breeze is not so strong; the power of the two engines propels the dirigible slowly against the wind. Altitude four fifty. In the late afternoon light, with the sky still blue to the west, the League of Nations becomes a giant submarine moving forward in an indistinct medium, sinking gradually deeper. A submarine is very much like a dirigible, he thinks. Both are long cigar-shaped machines made of metal, with propellers sticking out on the sides, and the same vanes for turning right and left, up and down, intersecting the fluid in which they move. They even have the same controls, a steering wheel, an elevator wheel, and an engine telegraph. Yet the Captain never doubts the superiority of his own machine. An airship is to a submarine what a God is to a man. If submarines could think, they would imagine gods in the form of dirigibles, similar to themselves but composed of finer matter, and moving in an ethereal medium. You can see something out of a dirigible, even though only in one direction, down, but you can see nothing out of a submarine. Another difference is that U-boats are far more dangerous than Zeppelins, just as life is more dangerous for men than it is for God. Several of the Captain’s friends at Naval School went into U-boats and they are all dead now. Hofstadter, Von Klamm, he remembers, Kopnick, Franckenstein who cheated at math, Vogel whom the others twitted on account of his high voice and his fondness for Cologne water. Strange thing, life. A banal thought, but the very banality of the phrase is part of its strangeness. Do all men feel this? Surely not. In any case, not Erwin. “Never mind the compass. D’you see the hangar ahead now, Erwin? Just steer for the thing.”

  “Ja, Herr Kapitän.”

  The shadow of the dirigible extends ahead of it, across the farmland and then the bleak suburbs of the city with its factories and crisscrossing roads. Altitude two hundred. The airship is barely making headway now against the light breeze; at this speed it is at the mercy of every current of air and must depend for its trim on ballast and gas-venting. The Captain orders a little gas released from Number 2 cell, forward in the hull just over his head. The ship noses down until it is drifting directly toward the mast. A swarm of ants rushes toward him from the hangar. The three handling-lines drop from the bow; the Captain sees them tumbling down in coils in front of them, then straightening as they trail across the grass. The ground crew snatches the center handling-line, and the big ship is slowly winched forward to the top of the mast. The control car stops only eight feet from the ground. A half-dozen of the ground crew come up trundling a gangway on wheels. Behind him he hears Mrs. Pockock’s silvery voice: “I must be the first to descend.” He notices for the first time that among the people swarming around the control car are a number of photographers, bearing their cameras with trays on the top of them for the flash-powder, and other men in soft black hats who must be journalists. The door of the car opens and the gangway clangs a little against the aluminum until it is adjusted.

  Nobody pays any attention to the Captain. Musing with irony over the way she has taken over the scene with the sheer force of her personality, he clicks his heels. “Good evening, Mrs. Pockock.”

  “Moira,” corrects Aunt Madge Foxthorn.

  Moira descends the metal stairway, and the cameras flash out blindingly like shells over London.

  THREE

  At nine o’clock on a rainy night in Mainz, Eliza and Romer are leaving the hotel, sharing a single umbrella. Moira’s séance is just beginning in a hall on the Bischofsplatz, but Eliza and Romer are not attending it; undoubtedly their absence will be noticed. They feel guilty about this, and also because they were not with the other members of the Guild to meet Moira when she arrived in the dirigible in Frankfurt. But if anyone asks, Eliza can plead the exact truth, that she went on a picnic in the afternoon and was stung by wasps. She has four stings: two on the back of her neck, one on her ankle, and one on her left breast, where she occasionally lays the palm of her hand to see if the tenderness is still there, giving the impression to an observer (but there is no observer) of an old-fashioned actor indicating sincerity, compassion, or fervor. Romer has one on his right hand and one in the crease of his groin, which makes him walk in a slightly bent-over posture.

  In the hotel, which is called the Goldene Kalb (the Golden Calf was the ancient symbol of Mammon, as Romer explains to Eliza), they can’t be together because Eliza shares a room with Joan Esterel and Romer with a member of the Frieze named John Basil Prell, one of the two who studied at the Gurdjieff Institute in Fontainebleau while Romer was studying metaphysics in Heidelberg. John Basil Prell is a serious young man with round steel spectacles, and there is no question of doing anything dubious or unseemly in his presence, or asking him to leave the room for a couple of hours so that they could do it in his absence. Of course, both Joan Esterel and John Basil Prell are gone to the séance now and the two rooms are empty. Should they turn and go back? They exchange a wordless glance. Then they go out the door of the hotel into the rain.

  Eliza has a suspicion that her time of the month is coming on, although she hasn’t told Romer. They wend their way down a double avenue of plane trees with a church at the end, the rain rustling on the umbrella and silvering the
pavement in front of them. It is quite dark. Every hundred yards or so there is a street lamp, but in between them the lovers are on their own, guiding themselves by the glimmers from the next lamp, pressing their shoulders together under the umbrella to dodge as much rain as possible, and holding hands in the narrow space between their hips where no one can see them. Apart from the fact that they are sharing an umbrella, their love remains hidden, as it has up to now. Nobody knows about it except Joan Esterel, a nosy person who finds out about everything, and possibly Moira, who is very likely, Eliza thinks, its instigator, and is even at this moment aware of where they are and what they are up to. She doesn’t know why she thinks this or what evidence she has for it. She knows only that Moira knows, sees, and is the cause of most of the events around her. She caused me to be stung by wasps, Eliza tells herself with a religious conviction. She knows that she is superstitious, she believes fervently in superstitions; they are the occult signals to what is really going on in the world, unknown to scientists and therefore all the more valuable to those like herself for whom science can do little and has no value. A warm glow suffuses her at the memory of Moira’s face, at the thought of her name; it was Moira who freed her from her multitude of afflictions before which science was helpless, who changed her life and caused her to be walking in the rain tonight with Romer when she might have been alone in some dismal English or Belgian lodging-house. She has her wasp-stings, of course, which science could very likely alleviate in some way, but she can’t he bothered. And other little afflictions common to all women; you can hardly complain about that.

  Coming out of the tunnel of her thoughts, she sees that they have walked in silence down this long avenue almost to the church at the end. He peers anxiously at her dim face in the shadow of the umbrella. “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s nothing. I’ve got a slight headache, that’s all.”

  “It’s very likely the venom from those pesky wasps. It may have long-term effects. Do the stings still hurt?”