However, after dinner Willy made some pointed hints that I should leave him and Roy alone. I did not budge. Willy pouted. He might be acquiring great gentility, I thought, but he still had some way to go. His patience was not lasting — all of a sudden he began commiserating with Roy on the dangers of life in England. “You too will be destroyed. It is stupid to stay in England. Why do you not come to Germany? It can be arranged. We will have everything nice for you.”
So that was it. I glanced at Roy. It was certain now that he would get more from Willy if I went away. He nodded. I made an excuse. “Don’t be too late,” said Roy. “He won’t have gone when you come back.” Willy regarded me with an absence of warmth.
I sat at a café in the Petergraben, not far away. The night was warm enough for all the windows to be open; lusty young men and girls went by on the narrow pavement. It was all cosy, cheerful, jolly with bodily life. It was different from anything we should know for long enough.
I bought a paper, ordered a large glass of beer, and thought about this affair of Willy Romantowski. It was grotesque. I was not worrying; I had faith that Roy would behave like the rest of us. Yet it was grotesque. Who had suggested it? What lay behind it? Maybe the motives were quite commonplace. In the middle of bizarre events, it was hard to remember that they might be simply explained. Yet I doubted whether we should ever know the complete truth behind Willy’s invitation.
I was sure of one minor point — that Willy himself was a singularly unheroic character. He was terrified of the war and determined to avoid it. It seemed to me distinctly possible that he had volunteered to fetch Roy in order to establish a claim on a good safe job back in Berlin. I remembered Roy’s judgment on how gallant these epicene young men would be: this was a joke against him.
I returned to the Spalenbrunnen. From outside, I could see Roy and Willy still sitting at the dinner-table. When I joined them, I noticed with a shock that Willy was in tears.
“Nearly finished, Lewis,” said Roy to me. “I’ve been telling Willy that I can’t go back with him. I’ve asked him to tell my friends that I love them. And that I love Germany.”
“I only came for your good,” said Willy, full of resentment, plaintiveness and guilt.
“You must not pretend, Willy,” said Roy gently. “It is not so.”
Willy gulped with distress — perhaps through disappointment at not bringing off his coup, perhaps through a stab of feeling. He shook hands with Roy: then, though he hated me to perdition, he remembered his manners and shook hands with me. Without another word, he went out of the room.
“Very remarkable,” said Roy. He looked tired and pale.
I took him out of the smoky room, and we sauntered along the street. Roy had packed a black hat for the journey, and he pulled it down low over his forehead. The lights were uneven in the gothic lanes, and his face was shadowed, a little sinister. I laughed at him. “Special hat,” he said. Whatever else left him, the mockery stayed. “Suitable for spying. I chose it on purpose.”
He was now certain that the first move had come from Schäder, though Willy did not have much idea. Someone from the “government” (no doubt an official in Schäder’s ministry) had gone to the Knesebeckstrasse to discover whether anyone knew Roy. Willy had been there, and had been only too anxious to please.
That was intelligible. But why had he been despatched to Basel, long before they had the slightest indication that Roy would come? That was one of the puzzling features of the whole story. Roy brought out the theory that Willy was given other work to do in Switzerland. This was only one of his jobs. He was the kind of low-grade agent that the Germans used for their petty enquiries, and no doubt other governments as well. He had a nose for private facts, particularly when they were unpleasant. Probably he mixed pleasure with business, and put in a little blackmail on the side.
But Roy had not been able to make him confess. It was no more than a guess. About the connection with Schäder, however (whom Willy had hardly heard of, any more than a bright cockney of the same class would have heard of a junior cabinet minister), Roy was able to convince me. For Willy had produced, parrot-like, several messages which he could not possibly have invented. The most entertaining ran thus: a few days before the war began, the university had resolved that Roy’s work during his stay in Berlin “had been of such eminence as to justify the title of visiting professor, and this title could properly be bestowed upon him, if he did similar work at a later period.” That is, the opposition had stone-walled until they got a compromise which must have irritated everybody. It was a piece of stately academic mummery, and we stood by the gold-painted fountain at the corner roaring with laughter.
Why had Schäder taken this trouble to lure Roy? It was true that Roy knew things that would be of use — but how had they discovered that? was it in any case sufficient reason? I suggested that it might be, in part, friendly concern.
“They must be absolutely confident that they’ve got it won,” I said. “It must be easy to sit back and do a good turn for a friend.”
“I wonder if they are so confident,” said Roy. “I bet they still think sometimes of defeat and death.”
He knew them so much better than I did. He went on: “Reinhold Schäder is a bit like you, old boy. But he’s very different when it comes to the point. He’s a public man. He never forgets it. He might think of doing something disinterested. Such as fetching me out for the good of my health. But he wouldn’t do it. Unless he could see a move ahead. No, they must think I could be some use. It’s very nice of them, isn’t it?”
Then there was the final puzzle. Schäder, or his subordinates, must have thought it out. Roy said that there were complete arrangements for passing him into Germany. How likely had they reckoned the chance of getting him? Did Schäder really think that Roy would go over?
Roy shook his head.
“Too difficult,” he said.
Then he said simply: “Did you think I should go?”
I replied, just as directly: “Not this time.”
“You came to watch over me, of course,” said Roy, not as a question, but as a matter of fact.
“Yes.”
“You needn’t have done,” said Roy. His tone was casual, even, sad, as though he were speaking with great certainty from the depth of self-knowledge. It was a tone that I was used to hearing, more and more. Suddenly it was broken humour. “If I’d wanted to go, what would you have done, old boy? What could you have done? I wish you’d tell me. It interests me, you know.”
I would not play that game. We walked silently out by the old town gate, and Roy said, again in that even tone which seemed to hold all he had learned of life: “It wouldn’t be easy to be a traitor.”
He added: “One would need to believe in a cause — right to the end. If our country went to war with Russia — would our communist friends find it easy to be traitors?”
I considered for a second.
“Some of them,” I said, “would be terribly torn.”
“Just so,” said Roy. He went on: “I may be old-fashioned. But I couldn’t manage it.”
So we walked through the old streets of Basel, talking about political motives, the way our friends would act, the future so far as we could see it. Roy said that he had never quite been able to accept the Reich. It was a feeble simulacrum of his search for God. Yet he knew what it was like to believe in such a cause. “If they had been just a little different, they would have been the last hope.” I said that was unrealistic: by the nature of things, they could not have been different. But he turned on me: “It’s as realistic as what you hope for. Even if they lose, the future isn’t going the way you think. Lewis, this is where your imagination doesn’t seem to work. But you’ll live to see it. It will be dreadful.”