Next day when he woke he found a green leather hunting costume laid out for him, complete with feathered hat, belt, and dagger. The men were a varied crowd: Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht officers, other bankers, the president of an electrical works, a prominent actor. Pug was the only foreigner. The jolly group took him warmly into their horseplay and joking, and then into the serious business of the hunt. Pug liked duck-hunting, but killing deer had never appealed to him. General Armin von Roon was in the party, and Pug lagged behind with the hook-nosed general, who remarked that to see a deer shot made him feel ill. In this meeting Roon was more loquacious than before. The forest was dank and cold, and like the others he had been drinking schnapps. They talked first about the United States, where as it turned out, Roon had attended the Army War College. Then the General discussed the Polish campaign, and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which he surprisingly called a disaster, because of all the ground Stalin had gained without firing a shot. His grasp of the field operations was masterly. His estimate of Hitler, Victor Henry thought, was cold-blooded and honest. Roon scarcely veiled his contempt for the master race theories of the Nazis, or for the Party itself, but he was making out a strong case for Hitler as a German leader, when shots rang out and a nearby hullabaloo drew them to join the party, ringed around a small deer lying dead !n blood-spattered snow. A ceremony ensued of horn-blowing and pushing a sprig of fir into the dead mouth over the bloody lolling tongue. Henry became separated from the general. That evening he looked for him before dinner, and was sorry to learn that Roon had been summoned back to Berlin.
After dinner, a string quartet played Beethoven in a cream-and-gold French music room, and a fat-bosomed famous soprano sang Schubert songs. The guests listened with more attention than Pug could muster; some, during the lieder, had tears in their eyes. Rhoda felt in her element, for in Washington she was a patroness of music. She sat beaming, whispering expert comments between numbers. Dancing followed, and one German after another danced with her. From the floor, she kept darting sparkling looks of gratitude at her husband, until Stoller took him in tow to a library, where the actor and Dr. Knopfmann, the head of the electrical works, sat over brandy.
As yet, on the weekend, Pug had not heard a word about the war. Conversation had stayed on personal chatter, business, or the arts.
“Ah, here is Captain Henry,” said the actor in a rich ringing voice. “What better authority do you want? Let’s put it to him.” A gray-moustached man with thick hair, he played emperors, generals, and older men in love with young women. Pug had seen his famous King Lear at the Schauspielhaus. His face just now was purple-red over his stiff collar and buckling starched shirt.
“It might embarrass him,” Dr. Knopfmann said.
“No war talk now. That’s out.” said Stoller. “This weekend is for pleasure.”
“I don’t mind,” Pug said, accepting brandy and settling in a leather chair. “What’s the question?”
“I create illusions for a living,” rumbled the actor, “and I believe illusions should be confined to the stage. And I say it is an illusion to hope that the United States will ever allow England to go down.”
“Oh, to hell with all that,” said the banker.
Dr. Knopfmann, a twinkling-eyed, round-faced man like the captain of the
“What do you say, Captain Henry?” the actor asked.
“The problem may never come up. You still have to lick England.”
None of the three men looked very pleased. The actor said, “Oh, I think we can assume that’s in the cards — providing the Americans don’t step in. That’s the whole argument.”
Stoller said, “Your President doesn’t try to hide his British sympathies, Victor, does he? Quite natural, in view of his Anglo-Dutch ancestry. But wouldn’t you say the people are against him, or at least sharply split?”
“Yes, but America is a strange country, Dr. Stoller. Public opinion can shift fast. Nobody should forget that, in dealing with us.”
The eyes of the Germans flickered at each other. Dr. Knopfmann said, “A shift in public opinion doesn’t just happen. It’s manufactured.”
“There’s the live nerve,” Stoller said. “And that’s what I’ve found difficult to convey even to the air marshal, who’s usually so hardheaded. Germans who haven’t been across the water are impossibly provincial about America. I’m sorry to say this goes for the Fuhrer himself. I don’t believe he yet truly grasps the vast power of the American Jews. It’s a vital factor in the war picture.”
“Don’t exaggerate that factor,” Henry said. “You fellows tend to, and it’s a form of kidding yourselves.”
“My dear Victor, I’ve been in the United States nine times and I lived for a year in San Francisco: Who’s your Minister of the Treasury? The Jew Morgenthau. Who sits on your highest court, wielding the most influence? The Jew Frankfurter.”
He proceeded to reel off a list of Jewish officials in Washington, stale and boring to Pug from endless repetition in Nazi propaganda; and he made the usual assertion that the Jews had American finance, communications, justice, and even the Presidency in their pockets. Stoller delivered all this calmly and pleasantly. He kept repeating “
“To begin with,” Pug replied, a bit wearily, “the Treasury post in our country has little power. It’s a minor political reward. Christians hold all the other cabinet posts. Financial power lies with the banks, the insurance companies, the oil, rail, lumber shipping, steel, and auto industries, and such. They’re wholly in Christian hands. Always have been.”
“Lehman is a banker,” said Dr. Knopfmann.
“Yes, he is. The famous exception.” Pug went on with his stock answers to stock anti-Semitism: the all but solid Christian ownership of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, the Christian composition of Congress, the cabinet, and the executive branch, the eight Christian judges out of nine on the Supreme Court, the paramount White House influence of a Christian, Harry Hopkins, and the rest. On the faces of his hearers appeared the curious smirk of Germans when discussing Jews: condescending, facetious, and cold, with superior awareness of a very private inside joke.
Stoller said in a kindly tone, “That’s always the Jewish line, you know, how unimportant they are.”
“Would you recommend that we take away what businesses they do have? Make
Stoller looked surprised and laughed, not in the least offended. “You’re better informed than many Americans, Victor. It would be an excellent idea for the health of your economy. You’ll come to it sooner or later.”
“Is it your position,” the actor said earnestly, “that the Jewish question really has no bearing on America’s entry into the war?”
“I didn’t say that. Americans do react sharply to injustice and suffering.”
The smirk reappeared on the three faces, and Knopfmann said, “And your Negroes in the South?”
Pug paused” “It’s bad but it’s improving, and we don’t put them behind barbed wire.”
The actor said in a lowered voice, “That’s a political penalty. A Jew who behaves himself doesn’t go to a camp.”
Lighting a large cigar, his eyes on the match, Stoller said, “Victor speaks very diplomatically. But his connections are okay. One man who’s really in the picture is Congressman Ike Lacouture of Florida. He fought a great battle against revising the Neutrality Act.” With a sly glance at Pug, he added, “Practically in the family, isn’t he?”
This caught Pug off guild, but he said calmly, “You’re pretty well informed. That’s not exactly public knowledge.”
Stoller laughed. “The air minister knew about it. He told me. He admires Lacouture. What happened to the dance music? Ach, look at the time. How did it get to be half past one? There’s a little supper on, gentlemen, nothing elaborate—” He rose, puffing on the cigar. “The American Jews will make the greatest possible mistake, Victor, to drag in the United States. Lacouture is their friend if they’ll only listen to him. You know what the Fuhrer said in his January speech — if they start another world war, that will be the end of them. He was in deadly earnest, I assure you.”
