Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [37]
‘Yes, you’re expressing things very well, James.’
‘It’s a pattern, a pattern that arises and seems inevitable. You can recognize it where you find it. There was a period when a yearning towards crusades swept countries. All over Europe people embarked in ships, they went off to deliver the Holy Land. All quite clear, a perfectly good pattern of determined behaviour. But why did they go? That’s the interest of history, you know. Seeing why these desires and patterns arise. It’s not always a materialistic answer either. All sorts of things can cause rebellion, a desire for freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religious worship, again a series of closely related patterns. It led people to embrace emigration to other countries, to formation of new religions very often as full of tyranny as the forms of religion they had left behind. But in all this, if you look hard enough, if you make enough investigations, you can see what started the onset of these and many other–I’ll use the same word–patterns. In some ways it’s like a virus disease. The virus can be carried–round the world, across seas, up mountains. It can go and infect. It goes apparently without being set in motion. But one can’t be sure, even now, that that was always really true. There could have been causes. Causes that made things happen. One can go a few steps further. There are people. One person–ten persons–a few hundred persons who are capable of being and setting in motion a cause. So it is not the end process that one has to look at. It is the first people who set the cause in motion. You have your crusaders, you have your religious enthusiasts, you have your desires for liberty, you have all the other patterns but you’ve got to go further back still. Further back to a hinterland. Visions, dreams. The prophet Joel knew it when he wrote “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” And of those two, which are the more powerful? Dreams are not destructive. But visions can open new worlds to you–and visions can also destroy the worlds that already exist…’
James Kleek turned suddenly towards Lord Altamount. ‘I don’t know if it connects up, sir,’ he said, ‘but you told me a story once of somebody in the Embassy at Berlin. A woman.’
‘Oh that? Yes, I found it interesting at the time. Yes, it has a bearing on what we are talking about now. One of the Embassy wives, clever, intelligent woman, well educated. She was very anxious to go personally and hear the Führer speak. I am talking, of course, of a time immediately preceding the 1939 war. She was curious to know what oratory could do. Why was everyone so impressed? And so she went. She came back and said, “It’s extraordinary. I wouldn’t have believed it. Of course I don’t understand German very well but I was carried away, too. And I see now why everyone is. I mean, his ideas were wonderful…They inflamed you. The things he said. I mean, you just felt there was no other way of thinking, that a whole new world would happen if only one followed him. Oh, I can’t explain properly. I’m going to write down as much as I can remember, and then if I bring it to you to see, you’ll see better than my just trying to tell you the effect it had.”
‘I told her that was a very good idea. She came to me the next day and she said, “I don’t know if you’ll believe this. I started to write down the things I’d heard, the things Hitler had said. What they’d meant–but–it was frightening–there wasn’t anything to write down at all, I didn’t seem able to remember a single stimulating or exciting sentence. I have some of the words, but it doesn’t seem to mean the same things as when I wrote them down. They are just–oh, they are just meaningless. I don’t understand.’
‘That shows you one of the great dangers one doesn’t always remember, but it exists. There are people capable of communicating to others a wild enthusiasm, a kind of vision of life and of happening. They can do that though it is