She was seduced when she was seventeen by a medical student who was a lodger in her father’s house, and has had a number of affairs since; she is by no means the prude that her thin-lipped, hard little face led me to believe. In fact, the glimpse that I caught of this other side to her when I asked her to fish the fly out of my eye was truly revealing. I did not go into the details of the matter, but I am sure that Helmuth met with little trouble in making her his mistress.
However, for the past few weeks the affaire had not been going at all well. Helmuth has been neglecting her, and it is for that reason she has been encouraging Owen Gruffydd, the village schoolmaster. It struck me as pathetic that she should attempt to make Helmuth jealous, and particularly of anyone like that.
Helmuth’s sex-life is in the true Weylands tradition, and if she told him outright that she was thinking of going to bed with Gruffydd he would probably say: ‘Why not? I hope you enjoy yourself.’ As it is I doubt if her poor little ruse has even registered with him. If it has I can imagine him chuckling to himself at the thought of anyone attempting to set up a small-time teacher as his rival. Helmuth evidently felt like a little amusement, but is now tired of her, and nothing she can do will get him back—unless he feels the urge again, and then he is capable of taking her off a better man than Gruffydd, whether she likes it or not.
Gruffydd seems to be a respectable type, and he wants her to marry him. I can understand that, as although Deb might look pretty small game in Bond Street she must appear quite a glamour-girl to anyone who lives down here in the back of beyond. She does not love him, but they have tastes in common and the marriage would give her security; so she is toying with the idea. The trouble is that she is still in love with Helmuth and determined to get him back if she can—although she knows that the odds are all against it leading to anything permanent—but, meanwhile, Gruffydd is pressing her for an answer; and, as his ‘old Mum’ is fighting tooth and nail against his marrying a Jewess, Deb may lose him altogether unless she grabs him while he is all steamed up about her. So she is in a bit of a jam at the moment.
I learned quite a lot about her early life and it turns out that she is really a Russian, although she was born in Germany. Her family were Russian Jews living in Kiev until 1905. That was the year of the abortive revolution, and as many of the nihilists who staged it were Jews it was followed by an exceptionally fierce pogrom.
In those days it was quite an ordinary occurrence for a sotnia of Cossacks to gallop their ponies into a ghetto, apply their knouts lustily to the backs of anyone who came in their way, and loot a few of the richer houses. It was done by order and just the simple Czarist way of keeping the Children of Israel from getting above themselves. But this time the authorities had got really angry and were marching hundreds of these wretched people off to Siberia; so Deb’s family decided to get out while the going was good, and the whole issue migrated to Leipzic. She was born seven years later.
In the first great war most of her uncles and cousins fought for Germany; but when the real Russian revolution came in 1917 they all deserted, or got themselves out of the army, as soon as they could, and went back to Russia to join the Bolsheviks. Deb’s father seems to have been both cleverer and better educated than the rest of his clan. In the dozen years he had lived in Germany he had taken several degrees, and by the outbreak of the 1914 war he was already a junior professor at Leipzic University. So he and his wife decided to remain and bring up their children as good Germans.
Despite Germany’s defeat, and the chaos and hunger that succeeded it, between 1918 and 1933 the Kain family prospered. When Hitler came to power the old boy was a leading light on his subject and much revered by his colleagues; his eldest son was a doctor, his second son reading for the law, two daughters were married, while Deb, who was then twenty-one, was getting on well with her training as a professional nurse, and engaged to a bright young journalist.
From 1930 on, while the Nazi boys were getting control of first one thing, then another, the Kains suffered a certain amount of unpleasantness, although nothing compared with what the old folks had known during their youth in Russia. But after Hitler became Chancellor things began to happen.
It was the usual sordid and horrifying story, beginning with ostracisation and ending with violence. The old professor died of a heart attack, after having had his trousers pulled off and being chased ignominiously down the street by a pack of young hooligans. A Nazi truncheon smashed the nose and pince-nez of the doctor brother, blinding him in one eye; but all the same he was frog-marched along the gutters for a quarter of a mile before they flung him into a prison van, and he finally disappeared, presumably to a concentration camp.
Within a few months the whole family were dead, in prison or in hiding. Deb appears to have been the only lucky one, if you can call it lucky to survive seeing your fiancé caught in a bierhalle, hustled into a corner and used as a target for several hundred bottles, while your own arms are held behind you and you are forced to look on. Anyway, she got away to England.
I asked her how she managed it and she replied: ‘The Party got me out.’
At that I was a little mystified, as we had been talking of the Germany of 1933, and in that connection, to me, ‘The Party’ signified the Nazis. But a brief question to her soon cleared the mystery up. Her two brothers and her fiancé were all members of the ‘Communist’ Party, and it was the Moscow-run Communist Underground that got her by devious means across the German frontier.
She had been provided with a letter to a Miss Smith, who runs a private nursing-home, and a nursing service for out-patients, at Hampstead. On reaching London she presented her letter and was taken on. For the first two years she worked in the home, until she had completed her training; then she was put on the regular roster for small outside jobs alternating with periods of duty in the home. Now she is one of the senior Sisters and either has charge of a floor in the home when in London or goes out to jobs such as this, where the pay and responsibility are high.
I remarked that while the pay might be good here my case was a routine one involving no danger to life, so there was little responsibility attached to it; and added that, since she had such cause to hate the Nazis, I found it surprising that she had not seized the opportunity to help in the fight against them, by volunteering for active service with one of the military organisations on the outbreak of war.
Her reply came as tonelessly as everything else she had said, but it positively made me blink. She said: ‘I could not do that because if I had I should have been making a contribution to the British war effort.’
I pondered that one for a moment, then I recalled the fact that, although she was a Jewess and an anti-Nazi, she had been brought up as a German, so I hazarded: ‘I suppose you still have pleasant memories of your childhood in Germany, and so have a sentimental reluctance to see the Germans defeated?’
‘No,’ came the answer. ‘I have long outgrown all such stupid sentimentality, and I am an Internationalist. I feel no obligation to either country.’
I said to Deb: ‘If you had remained in Germany I suppose it is a hundred to one that you would have died like your sisters from ill-treatment and starvation in a Nazi concentration camp. As it was you succeeded in getting to England, where for the best part of ten years you have had the full protection of British justice, and been free to live where you chose and earn your living in any way you like, with absolute security from any form of discrimination, oppression or persecution. Don’t you really feel that you owe this country something for that; and that instead of taking cushy jobs like this you ought to have offered your services when the first call went out for nurses for the forces?’
‘I could not,’ she said. ‘I was under orders not to do so.’
‘Whose orders?’
‘The orders of the Party. The Soviet Union had entered into an alliance with Germany. It was not for me to question the wisdom of Comrade Stalin and the Politbureau. The order came to us all that we must
do nothing to aid Britain in her war against Germany.’
I stared at the expressionless face in front of me. I suppose I should have realised a few minutes earlier that, if Deb’s brothers and fiancé had been active Communists and ‘the Party’ had smuggled her out of Germany, the odds were that she was a member of it, too. But I hadn’t; and, as far as I knew, I had never met a real dyed-in-the-wool Red who owned a Party ticket before.
‘I see,’ I said slowly. ‘But how about your own feelings? I can understand your having felt a certain loyalty to the Comrades who saved you from the Nazis, but doesn’t the ten years of security that we gave you mean anything to you at all?’
‘I had to live somewhere,’ she replied. ‘I would have gone to Russia if I had been allowed to, but I was ordered to come here. The British Government is Capitalist and Imperialist; it is the keystone of resistance to world-rule by the Proletariat, and more Comrades were needed to work for its overthrow.’
At that, I began to wonder if I ought not to do something about Comrade Deborah Kain, and try to find a way to tip off our security people that she is one of the secret enemies in our midst. But on second thoughts I realised that it would be futile. The British Union, as the Fascist Party calls itself, has been banned, and its leaders live on such fat as is left in the land on the Isle of Man; but not the Communists. They are our gallant allies and are still permitted to share our dangers and ferment strikes, when and where they like. This is a free country—even if the Home Office is run by a collection of lunatics who are incapable of understanding that Fascism and Communism differ only in being two sides of the same penny—and Deb is legally just as much entitled to her opinion as I am, even if she would like to kill the King and have Churchill thrown into a concentration camp.
Still, on the offchance that some day somebody at the top may see the red light, and the information then prove useful, I asked her: ‘From whom do you receive your orders?’
‘From Miss Smith,’ came her reply.
‘Who gives her hers?’
‘I don’t know.’
As I expected, they are still working on the old cell system. But what a clever racket. An expensive nursing organisation must get lots of calls from important people who have had operations or gone sick. Bright girls like Deb can be sent out to look after them. No one suspects a trained nurse; papers are left about and telephone calls made in their presence. The Reds must pick up quite a lot of useful information on the way the war is going, and the industrial situation, like that.
‘Are all the nurses in your organisation Party Comrades?’ I enquired.
‘Oh, no; at least I don’t think so. Owing to the war there is a great shortage of private nurses, so in these days Miss Smith takes on anyone she can get.’
From that it appears that I have been honoured. No doubt Miss ‘Smith’ decided that as I am potentially a great industrial magnate it would be worth sending one of her ewe-lambs to look after me; but if she hopes to pick up anything worth while about the Jugg aircraft plants I fear she is going to be disappointed.
However, as a matter of interest I asked Deb if she had learned anything worth reporting since she had been in Wales.
‘Only about Owen Gruffydd,’ she said. ‘He is Labour and wants to stand for Parliament after the war. He is very Left and has the right ideas already. If I marry him I am sure that I could make something of him. The fact that he had joined the Party would be kept secret; and it is part of the plan that we should get as many Comrades as possible elected under the Labour ticket. Besides, if he got in I should meet a lot of his fellow members. I took out naturalisation papers in 1938, so I am already a British subject, and I could work on them to get me nominated by the Labour Central Office as their candidate for another constituency. I am quite as intelligent as most of the men I have met, and I am sure I could get myself elected, if only I were given a chance as the official Labour candidate in a good industrial area.’
That was the end of our conversation. I had always thought Deb to be a hard, capable, superficially intelligent little go-getter, but I was far from realising the height of her ambitions or the depths of her perfidy. This last revelation took me so aback that I could think of nothing else to ask her, so after a few moments I told her to forget all she had said, and woke her from her trance.
Then I closed my own eyes, in order to avoid looking at her, and said I felt like a nap. But I didn’t go to sleep. I sat there feeling shattered and sick—just as though I had found a toad in my bed.
Tuesday, 26th May
I had a fright last night—a very nasty fright. For the past few days the weather has been patchy, with mostly bright, sunny mornings, then getting overcast in the afternoons; and on both Sunday and Monday evenings we had showers of rain. In consequence, although there was a new moon on Saturday, cloudy skies saved me from seeing its light—until last night.
I would not have seen it then but for the fact that I had lobster for dinner. I was not, thank God, woken by my sub-conscious shrilling a warning to me that the Horror was approaching, but by an attack of indigestion, which aroused me into sudden wakefulness about one o’clock.
In the old days I used to be able to eat anything with impunity, but since my crash ruled out all exercise—except the little I get from swinging a pair of Indian clubs for a quarter-of-an-hour every morning—my digestion is not what it was. I suppose I ought to be more careful what I eat, but I never seem to think about it till the damage is done. Anyhow, the lobster woke me and there was that damnable band of moonlight on the floor.
It is three weeks now since I have seen it, and it gave me a frightful shock. It has been said truly enough that ‘time is the great healer’, and this long immunity from attack had certainly healed, or at least dulled, the awful impression that the visitations of the Thing made on my mind. Seeing that broad strip of moonlight again, with the two sinister black bars across it made by the shadow of the pieces between the windows, had the same effect upon me as if someone had suddenly ripped the bandages from a hideous wound I had received some time ago, exposing it again all raw and bleeding.
But I am glad now that lobster chanced to be the main dish last night and that I ate too much of it. In spite of my having told myself repeatedly that time was slipping away, and that I must not let myself be lulled into a false sense of security during the dark period of the moon, that is just what I have done. Not altogether, perhaps, as the fate that menaces me has never been far from my thoughts, but I feel now that I ought to have made more strenuous efforts either to secure help or to escape from Llanferdrack. What other line I could have tried that I have not yet attempted I still cannot think; but there it is. I cannot help cursing myself now for the time I have given to fruitless speculations on this and that, instead of concentrating entirely on the all-important problem of saving myself.
Last night was a blessed warning, arousing me anew to my danger as sharply as the sounding of an air-raid siren, and I am wondering now if the lobster for dinner with my resulting indigestion was, after all, pure chance. Providence is said to work in strange ways, and, although I haven’t mentioned it in this journal, since early this month I have been praying for protection.
Until then I hadn’t said a prayer since old Nanny Trotter left, when I went to Weylands. She taught me my prayers and always made me say them, however tired I was; but I don’t think that any child prays from choice, and I was as pleased to stop praying as I was to cease from washing my neck, when other boys at Weylands told me that the first was ‘not done’ and the second optional.
Even when I was a fighter-pilot I never called on God to help me. In those days I was fully convinced that it was a calm head, a clear eye and a steady hand that did the trick. It was you or the Jerry and the best man won, with no darn’ nonsense about Divine intervention. At least, that was how I saw it then.
But, once I had argued it out with myself to the conclusion that the Thing in the courtyard is, and can only be, a creature of the Devil, it
seemed logical to fall back on God. In view of my past neglect of Him I didn’t feel that I was entitled to hope for very much, but the Christian teaching is that His mercy is infinite; so night and morning, and sometimes at odd periods of the day, I began to pray.
At first I felt very self-conscious and awkward about it; particularly as I could not go down on my knees, and to pray sitting in my chair or lying on my back in bed seemed disrespectful; but after a bit I decided that if God was taking any notice of me at all He wouldn’t let that make any difference, seeing how things are with me. So, although it may sound a bit far-fetched, it isn’t really at all improbable that Cook may have been guided to her choice of giving us lobster for dinner last night in response to my prayers for guidance and protection.
I don’t quite know why, but I am inclined to believe that God may grant us guidance and warnings but expects us to fight our own battles and protect ourselves; except, perhaps, in dire extremity when the dice are weighted too heavily against us. Anyhow, having seen the red light, whether it was a Heaven-sent one or not, I made up my mind early this morning that I must take immediate action.
My letter to Uncle Paul was posted only yesterday. It should be in London this morning, but there is no afternoon delivery at Queensclere, so even if it is now on its way down into Kent he won’t get it till tomorrow. When he does get it I think he will come here as soon as he can, but Thursday is the earliest that I can reasonably expect him; and if he has engagements that he feels he cannot break he may not arrive till the weekend. Looking at the matter from his point of view, he would be quite justified in feeling that I could hardly be in such an almighty hurry to get the new financial schemes I mentioned off to the lawyers without giving him a few days’ grace.
The Haunting of Toby Jugg Page 17