Stained Glass Read Free Page A

her only child, and heir to the huge landed estate of his father. At first he obligingly escorted the ladies proffered by his mother for his attention: the neighboring blue bloods. Then others came from remoter parts of Germany. When he traveled with his mother to England in 1946, he saw for the first time, since graduating from Greyburn in 1938 after six years of English public-school life, his second cousin Caroline, herself first cousin to the reigning monarch, whom she succeeded as queen a few years later after the fatal accident. Caroline was imperious by nature and undertook to find the perfect girl for her glamorous, studious, wealthy, driven German cousin. Axel obligingly affected to be quite taken by the three girls (beautiful, literate, witty, in differing mixes) he escorted during the summer, all of whom were deeply attracted to him (Lady Leinsford in particular, though it had not amused Axel when she said to him, sighing in his arms, “For you, Axel, I’d even become a Nazi”). Axel’s treatment was perfunctorily ardent. He would systematically contrive to seduce them (four days, three days, eleven days respectively), and then with much tenderness announce that he had to get back to his work, the nature of which he never specified.
    â€œHas it ever occurred to you, Axel,” Princess Caroline once said, “that it isn’t absolutely clear whether you are a nice man? I mean, I love you very much—you know that, Axel—but you are very distracted. And your interest in people seems, somehow … abstract.” She searched his eyes. “But I am certain you are going to do great things in European politics. If you don’t mind, Axel, when you take over Europe could you please leave this little island to its own idolatrous pleasures? Don’t forget now, Axel. That can be your bread-and-butter present to me on leaving Stamford House.” Axel smiled—and then actually appeared to … think about it. (“I do believe,” Queen Caroline said, recalling the incident in 1952 when Axel Wintergrin announced the foundation of his political party, “I do believe,” she repeated, “that when I made that flippant—that ludicrous—‘request’ of Axel, back when he was a mere child [Axel had been a mere child of twenty-six], he hesitated precisely because he was trying to decide whether to grant it!”) Back home, after two months’ summer indolence in England, Axel drove himself in his studies, adjourning altogether that part of his romantic activity that could be said to be oriented toward a possible marriage. “All in due course, Mother,” he comforted the countess.
    After submitting his thesis and taking his degree, he spent his time traveling throughout Germany. He would know, on arriving in a city or town he had never been to, just where to go: always he would find the man, or woman, who shared his obsession. And—always—in a matter of days he had made fast friends, who as often as not became disciples. As his movement grew it became easier for him because he would come to town, check in at a hotel, and there he would be reached by those who had word of his coming. They would seek him out, sometimes a single man or woman, more often two, three, or a half-dozen people, and talk with him. He would be asked to speak to a gathering, but always he stipulated that not more than a roomful should be there. He was not ready to address large audiences.
    He spoke quietly about the genuine idealism of the German people who had become united less than a hundred years earlier, and now were sundered by a consortium of powers, one partner in which had designs on human liberty everywhere, while the other partner, fatigued by a war that had roused its people from a hemispheric torpor which they once thought of as a part of the American patrimony—an American right, so to speak—was confused now and disillusioned by the