by Ellis Peters
He was no comfort. He said the same things to Gerd, and in much the same words. She heard him attentively, fixing her great, black, young, sad eyes on him trustfully, for he was friend as well as shepherd. When he had done, she said: “You may be right. Yet if it could be only one accidentally decent boy, he would do. If I could like one of them, and be able to bear it that I came from the same race, it would be enough. And there must be some who are good—you know it is impossible there should be none at all.”
“Some there may be,” he said, “but don’t look for them here. The best go back, they want to do something for their own country. What do you expect to find here? There’s so little in any of them except what someone with more will has planted—they’ve got no bones of their own to stand up by.”
“I cannot go on all my life hating,” said Gerd. “I wasn’t made for it.”
Jim turned his dark, massive face toward her and said: “While there’s hateful things going on every day side by side with us, what’s wrong with hating?”
“It’s painful. It deforms one. Perhaps it even kills.”
“Not a chance!” he said with a fiery smile, sultry and sudden like the red of a bonfire breaking through the damp smoldering blanket of sods. “It keeps alive, sometimes. With no other solitary thing to live for, hate can keep you alive.”
“It is not a way in which I can maintain life,” she said, looking at him plaintively; but she was never angry, never condemned his angers, never said things heatedly without considering first if she truly meant them. And therefore, for one who loved her, it was necessary always to listen to her earnestly, and try to make the adjustments which alone could help you to understand her.
“No,” he said, staring at her steadily, “no, I don’t suppose you could.” She did not know, because she thought so little of herself she did not guess, even when he looked at her like that, that he adored her. Why should she suspect it? She was a few years older than he, and looked older still; she was graying, her figure was growing soft and shapeless and middle-aged, and her face had never been striking, even in first youth. “Try, then!” he said, and abruptly turned away. “Have it your own way! If it doesn’t come off—if he’s all I think he might be—there’s always me around to deal with him. But if he turns out to be the usual kind,” said Jim Tugg, “I’ll kill him.”
She did not think anything of that, not because he was given to saying such things, but because everyone says them sooner or later. Her mind had gone too far with the idea to turn back; if she had retreated from her purpose now it would only have been one more ghost close on her heels, like the spectral bastard of the older memories.
So Helmut came. He came lumpishly, defensively, with closed face and warding-off eyes, as if he feared everyone he met might hit him. They received him without fuss or too much favor, like any other hand, lodging him in the attic room over the house end of the stables, and feeding him at their own table. But getting his head out from between his shoulders was a labor for Hercules during the first few days, and tools were needed to prise out a few whispered words. He worked willingly, even anxiously, and looked years younger than his age because he seemed so lost and timorous; but it was true that the actual lines of his face, in their solidity and stillness, did not quite bear out the unformed, grieved questing of his eyes. He seemed so young that Gerd was moved, and the warmth of it came into her heart gratefully, and she believed she had succeeded.
She was not even very unwise. She called him Helmut, because Jim was always Jim, but used it very seldom because it came stiffly to her tongue. Only if she had to use a name for him, that was the name. And on his part there were few words except: “Yes, Mrs. Hollins!” and “No, Mrs. Hollins!” like a dutiful boy new from school. Jim behaved to him with careful but competent coolness, as to an awkward gate-post freshly painted. And in a few days Helmut began to expand to his full size, instead of going about shrunk defensively into himself; and in a few days more, when he had his true height, only an inch below Jim’s, and his great, loose young breadth of shoulder spread for all to see, his gait and all his movements, down to the extending of a hand to accept a plate, acquired a glossy, exultant smoothness, his step an effortless spring, his voice a resonance hitherto unsuspected.
“He comes to himself,” said Gerd, and was pleased, as if the triumph had been hers.
He did come to himself, and with a vengeance. He was late in to his dinner one day, having stayed to finish a repair job on one of the distant fences; and by the time he arrived Hollins was away again, and Jim just leaving. She served Helmut alone. He watched her as she came and went, and his light blue eyes had quite stopped being young and pathetic, and were bright, opaque and interested. They traveled all over her, and enjoyed their sapience. Suddenly in the very same tone in which he had just thanked her for his pudding he said in German: “You like it better here than at home, do you? The English are more long-suffering?”
Her step faltered for only the fraction of a second. She put a cup of coffee at his elbow, and said quite calmly and levelly : “Do not speak German to me. I prefer not to use it.”
“You want to forget it?” he suggested sympathetically, and flashing up at her a quick, cold grimace which was not quite a smile.
“I prefer not to use it. If you speak in it I shall not answer you.”
“In English then,” he said, and laughed so briefly that the sound was gone almost as soon as recognized. He stretched himself, leaning back in his chair to have her the more securely in view. “Do you think even the English do not tire at last? There are some who are tired already of harboring you. They make little noise yet, but the time will come when you will hear it, even in this very nice comfortable place.”
No protests came to her lips, because there was no use in them. She turned her back and went away from him, carrying dirty dishes into the scullery, as if he did not exist, or only as precisely the same rather lumpish and harmless young man he had been five minutes before. Behind her he said, a little more sharply for her apparent calm, but still with a shy, subtle quietness: “You hear already, but a Jew crawls away only when he must. Even when you kick him out at the door he creeps in by the window again.”
She closed the door between them, and began to fill the sink, as if nothing in the world had happened; her heart in her breast was like a white-hot stone, heavy, dragging her body down into a dark place she did not know, but she began to whisk soap powder into the water, to slide the knives into it, and clatter them out again on to the draining-board.
Presently he brought his dishes in to her there, the door opening almost apologetically as on his first day, and his big, fair body coming in sidelong. She felt him there, though she did not turn her head, and all she saw was his hands as he put down the plate and cup on the table at her right hand. Then, as he was going, he touched her; his fingertips, first so softly that the contact was hardly perceptible, then with a sly, savoring firmness, in the soft flesh of her back, drawing lines, drawing a subtle shape there on her body.
“Even in this nice country,” he whispered, with a stupid little giggling breath of excitement and pleasure in her ear, “you will wear here, some day, a yellow star.”
He was gone, even a little hastily in the end, shutting the door loudly over her motionless silence. She stood there at the sink staring at her raised hands with a slight, concentrating frown, while the lather dried on them in little iridescent bubbles with the smallest of moist, bright sounds. She seemed to be contemplating some domestic complication such as the next week’s grocery order. What she was actually seeing was a long, dark earth corridor, and six people walking down it, father, mother, Walter, Hans, Frieda, Josef; and at the end of it a crematorium trolley, into which, one by one, they quietly climbed and vanished.
II—The Place
One
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The farms at Comerford, cheek by jowl with the collieries, lay round the rim of a misshapen bowl which circled a bend of the River Comer. Over a
ll the high ground sheep-pasture jostled with the waste tips and shafts of the mines, and the relics of old forest filled every cranny of the hills still left to them. But the greatest acreage on these levels belonged to new and fantastic forest, which had eaten at the pastures until almost sixty percent was absorbed. The pits had begun to dump here a hundred and fifty years ago from great numbers of sudden, shallow shafts; and having created about itself queer mud-pie shapes of clay, each shaft finally failed and was abandoned, the area being thereupon left for the wind to plant again, and the seasons to reclaim. On the better places a wild, deep, elastic grass grew, then heather, then the unconquerable silver birches which came from nowhere, by fragile-seeming colonies, to seed and flourish upon starvation. The casing of the shafts fell in, their perfunctory wooden surrounds disintegrated or were impounded in bad winters for firewood, and there remained, quite simply, a series of highly dangerous holes in the ground, which were nobody’s business. Presently about these death-traps the high woodlands thickened with bramble and heather and bilberries, and made soil enough for other trees to feed there; and a few more enterprising landowners, like Selwyn Blunden of the Harrow, covered the barren places with young plantations, and turned parts of them into preserves, since they would raise no other crop. So from forest Comerford circled round again to forest, but these woods had the bizarre outlines of the high places of Assyria, instead of the suave folded lines of the primeval England.
Slithering inward from the cooler winds, the village coiled itself inside the bowl, three convoluted streets, so involved that one could nowhere see more than fifty yards ahead, and a maze of footpaths kept clear by the obstinacy of the inhabitants, who used them on principle even when they proved to be the longest way home. And downward still from the village went the rich, sheltered fields of the lower farms, greening, greening into the black prolific water-meadows, and the serpentine curves and bright calm pool of the Comer.
The main road, winding up the valley, made the passage of the village perforce, for as yet there was no bypass to spare motorists the convolutions of the Comerford street. The railway was just over the coal-rim and out of sight, with the local station nestling a lane’s length from the last wood of the Harrow preserves.
On the rim the opencast unit camped like a giant circus, leisurely stripping up the more naked of the clay hills, under which the coal seams ran obliquely toward the Harrow; and on this sacred land, too, the Coal Board had designs, so that the contractor and his men sat and looked with shining eyes at the fat wooded lands, and the heathery open levels extending from the edge of their present site round to the skyline above the river. Old Blunden had shrugged his shoulders over the hectic changes in the landscape, in the social pattern of England and Comerford, even in the day-to-day business of farming, and had seemed to accept the necessity of adjusting himself to all these things; but he was human, and when the encroaching finger of change tried to creep over his own boundaries he stopped being quite so philosophical about it.
The odds were that if the fight went against him he would pay up and look big, for he had always been a sporting old chap; but he would see to it that there was a fight first. His appeal was a massive responsibility, for he was one of the powers in the district still, for all his virtual retirement. The farm might be nominally his son’s responsibility now, even his son’s property, but their voices in this matter were one voice, and that was the old man’s.
Meantime, the large, leather-coated, weather-beaten Gypsies and their monstrous machines went on methodically building new mountains and gouging out new valleys, and the dark topsoil, neatly isolated, began to grow a fresh young grass even in the autumn, in the first decline of the beautiful year. And for the time being this edge of Comerford looked like a stretch of the baked clay deserts of Sinkiang. People who had never turned a hair about the open shafts in the woods were never tired of lamenting this temporary devastation. Even the more thoughtful residents looked forward to the day when the lie of coal would be exhausted, and the site would be folded level and bare again to heal slowly in the soothing flow of seasons. Only the little boys, exulting in strange friendly men and the pleasures of change, collected new grotesque tractors and grabs and loaders as they had formerly collected cigarette packets and stamps, and gravitated to the site on their way home from school as dogs to a bone. Just as the twentieth-century nomads, the new navigators, gravitated inevitably to the pubs of Comerford in the darkening evenings, and boiled among the regulars like an incompatible ingredient in some chemical mixture, with larger bodies, louder voices and different accents, a race of good-humored giants left over from the primitive world.
The Shock of Hay was the largest pub in the village, snug under the shadow of the church tower, with the trim oval green drawn around it like a nicely arranged skirt about a demure woman posing for her portrait. It had a creaking picture-sign so faded that it might have been anything, and a large stable-yard from the heyday of horses, and an erroneous reputation of being a coaching inn, though the truth was that no coach in the history of transport ever ran so crazy a route as to pass through Comerford. The house was warm and red and squat, with ceilings rather low for Georgian, but rooms of the commendable spaciousness which gives a large man license to stretch his legs as he sits, without tangling them in the iron stand of the next table, or tripping up his neighbor in the gangway. The sunshine miners liked it because they could sprawl; but they liked it also, as everybody did, because it possessed the inestimable asset of the person of Io Hart.
Joe Hart owned and ran it. He had been born there, and his father before him, and though he had had a few vicissitudes in his young days, sown a few unexpected crops here and there, been a boxer and a fireman and a lumberjack for brief periods, it had always been taken for granted that when the old man died he should come here and take over the business. And so he had, as to the manner born.
Mrs. Hart had been dead for four years now, but Io, the elder daughter, who was twenty-two, had everything at her finger-ends, could manage the whole diverse flow of customers year in and year out without disarranging a curl of her warm brown hair, and make her father, into the bargain, do whatever she wanted. When she knew what she wanted, which wasn’t always. Folks were beginning to say that she didn’t know which of two young men she wanted, and that was shaping into quite a serious matter, especially when they would come and do their quarreling in the snug, and over any mortal thing under the sun except Io. Luckily, the only other girl was thirteen, a safe age yet. Her name was Catherine, but it had been shortened to Cat early in her schooldays, and from that had swiveled round into Pussy, by which unexpected and in many ways unsuitable name everyone in Comerford knew her. She was an extremely self-possessed young woman, shaped like a boy rather than a girl, though not so lumpy at the joints; she could outrun most boys of her age, skim stones over the Comer with a flick of the wrist like a whiplash while the shots of her rivals sank despondently in mid-stream, climb like any monkey, throw from the shoulder, keep up her end one-handed in school or out of it, and had generally, as her father proudly said (though not in her hearing), all her buttons on. She would never be the beauty Io was, but in another way she might be pretty disturbing in a few years, with her direct green eyes and her snub nose, and all that light-brown hair now impatiently confined in two long plaits, one over either shoulder. But the only kind of cat she recalled was some rangy tigerish tom, treading sleekly across the gardens in long strides with his soft, disdainful feet; not the kind of cat one would call Pussy. Because of its inappropriateness the name stuck; people are like that.
Io was darker of eyes and hair, though fairer of face. She had a pink-and-white skin which glowed softly, and when she smiled, which was often, the glow seemed to brighten and deepen, warming her whole face. She was one of those fortunate people who are dainty by nature, invariably dainty without any effort on their part, whose clothes always fit, whose hair always curls, and to whom dust never adheres, while mud-splashes in the street deflec
t themselves from touching even their shoes. Her very gestures had a finished delicacy, and no spot ever spilled overboard from a glass while she carried it. She was plump, frankly plump, with some shape about it, the new feminine turn of fashion might have been designed expressly for her soft, firm figure. Her arms even had dimples in them near the elbows, dairy-maid fashion, and even those village connoisseurs who theoretically were devotees of the attenuated celluloid lovelies of Hollywood found this generosity of Io’s person singularly agreeable to behold. In fact, the chief drawback of the Shock of Hay was that sometimes even its ample spaces became uncomfortably full.
The two who were seriously upsetting the peace of the place on Io’s account were Charles Blunden and Chad Wedderburn. Not that they ever came into the open about it; they just sat there in their particular corner of the snug, perhaps one or two nights a week for an hour or less, and bristled at each other like fighting terriers. But it was quite obvious what goaded them, by the jealous way they sharpened their words and threw them like darts whenever she came near them. They were always arguing about something, and the something was never Io; it might be politics, it might be books, or music, or even football; but most often it was something abstruse and high-flown, amply provided with long words and formidable terms, so that their neighbors admired the more as they understood the less. They had always been friends, and for that matter had always argued, in a casual way, so that the effect was not of a change, but only of a sudden and devastating acceleration in the inflammable progress of their relationship. But it left people with an uneasy feeling that some day it might get really out of hand, and refuse to stop.
Now wouldn’t you think, said Comerford to itself, that two young men who had been half across the world during the war, and lived through two or three lifetimes of adventure and discomfort and danger, could be trusted to behave with some restraint and calm over the simple matter of a girl they both admired? Yet that was the one thing that set them both off like the fuse to explosives; after all they’d been through! True, there were lulls of common sense between, chiefly when Io, who had a temper of her own if it came to that, had visibly been pushed to consider knocking their heads together. Then the odds were that one or other of them would laugh, though rather discomfortedly, and they would come to their senses and go off together apparently friends, and both out of spirits.