Free The Story of Henri Tod by William F. Buckley

Henri said solemnly, trying to remind himself how one was supposed to look when one looked solemn, “first, you must promise me that you will never tell anyone what I am about to tell you.” Espy promised, solemnly, that as long as he lived, Tod’s secret would be safe. Well, said Henri, he had suffered. He was a Jew. His parents had been taken away and killed in a concentration camp. He had a sister, her name was Clementa. She hid out in a town called Tolk, with a family called Wurmbrand. They pretended that Clementa and Henri were their niece and nephew. They had looked after them since he was thirteen, and they were in touch with the Resistance. And the Resistance had brought him safely to England. Was this not evidence that there were indeed good Germans?
    Espy Major whistled, and whispered that he’d had no idea that Tod had gone through so much, and that he wished immediately to modify any suggestion that Tod had not known danger. Whereupon they shook hands, rose, and Henri was very sick. Espy led him to his bed.
    Three weeks later, Henri was surprised to be called out of his Greek class. Mr. Wallenberg had secured permission of the headmaster to interrupt him, and was waiting for him in the reception room.
    He was pale, and told Henri that he needed to talk with him privately. And so they drove to The Boltons, at Number 7 of which Wallenberg lived. Inside, he told Henri to sit down.
    â€œHave you spoken to anyone about the Wurmbrands and your sister?”
    Henri’s lips quivered, and for a moment he did not reply.
    Wallenberg repeated the question.
    â€œI told one boy.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œThe night I was made captain. Three weeks ago.”
    Wallenberg turned his face to one side. “The day before yesterday, the Gestapo went to the farmhouse. They took the Wurmbrands out and shot them. They took your sister away in their car. She was driven to Hamburg and put on a train with all Jewish people rounded up in a general sweep. The train left Hamburg, and headed toward Poland.”
    Henri Tod left St. Paul’s the next day and took a job in Leeds as a coal miner. His curiosity about Espy was limited, because he knew that Espy himself would not wish harm to come to Henri’s sister. He did inquire about the profession of Espy’s father, who was a journalist, wholly engaged in covering the war. It crossed his mind only fleetingly to ask Espy Major whether he had told his father (or anyone else) the story of the new school captain’s secret family in Tolk, but decided against doing so. Of what use that line of questioning? On whom could the blame be put, other than himself? And so all he did was to collect, wordlessly, his personal materials, and leave a note in the headmaster’s office. He did not leave a forwarding address with Mr. Wallenberg, whom he never saw again.
    In the spring of 1950, he knocked on the door of the dean of admissions at Trinity College in Cambridge and said he would like to enroll to do advanced studies in philosophy. The dean looked at the young man, deferential but proud, mature beyond what the dean had experienced in young men of twenty-three or four. He was clean-shaven, strong, even-featured, brown-eyed, with perfectly shaped white teeth, slender nose and lips. The dean told him, somewhat more courteously than he’d have addressed a young man less striking in appearance and behavior, that there were conventional ways of applying for admission to graduate schools—where had he attended college?
    He was surprised to be told that the applicant had not even completed his public schoolwork at St. Paul’s, five years earlier. However, the applicant said, he had done concentrated reading while working in the coal mines, and was prepared to submit to examination. Rather intrigued by all this, the dean excused himself, left the room, and telephoned to the taskmasterish Russell Professor of Philosophy, James Jamison, and told him he