Fallen Into the Pit

Four

« ^ »

The Lodge had cost the Coal Board more than it was worth, and more than they need have paid for it if they had had the courage of their convictions; but it was house-room for thirty men. The warden was a decent, orthodox, middle-aged man who expected his troublous family of Welshmen, local boys, Poles, Germans and Czechs to behave in as orderly a manner as children in a preparatory school, and was out of his depth when they did not. The whole setup was too new for him; he preferred an arrangement tried and hardened by use, where the right procedure for every eventuality was already safely laid down in black and white for a simple man to follow. Improvisation was not in his nature. He opened the studded imitation Tudor door to George, and perceptibly heaved all his responsibilities into those welcome navy-blue arms at sight. His wife would be less than useless; she had political convictions but no human ones. If the boy was really hurt they’d better get him out of there, thought George, before she gave him a chill.

“Doctor here?” he asked, halfway up the stairs with the warden babbling in his ear.

“Just ten minutes ahead of you, Sergeant. He’s with the lad now.” There is a certain type of man who persists in using the word lad though it does not come naturally to him; the thing has a semi-clerical ring about it, a certain condescension. You get the feeling that a young male creature of one’s own class would have been a boy, while this person is subtly different.

“Good! No verdict from him yet?”

“There’s scarcely been time, Sergeant. This has been a terrible business, it might so easily have ended in a tragedy. This collier’s lad—” A shade more of definition, and one step down; we’re getting on, thought George.

“Which? You didn’t say who the victim was. Local boy?”

“Young Fleetwood. He’s been here only a month, and really—”

“I know him,” said George. “What about the other party?”

“A young man named Schauffler, Helmut Schauffler. I must say he’s never given me any trouble before. A good type, I would have said. And, to be quite fair, I can’t say he has been altogether to blame—certainly not the only one to blame—”

“Where is he now?”

“Down in my office. My assistant is there with him.”

“You weren’t there when the thing happened?—wherever it did happen? Was anyone?”

“It was in the day-room. Three other men were present. They were playing darts. I don’t know if you—”

“That’s all right,” said George, marching across the landing, which betrayed its period by being lit with a large stained-glass window in improbable armorial bearings, notably of a violent blue. “Let’s see what the damage is, first. Which room?” But the murmur of voices had drawn him before the warden could reply, and he walked in upon the end of the doctor’s ministrations without waiting to be led. There were more people round the bed. The warden’s wife, holding with an expression of reserve and distaste an enamel bowl of water stained darkly red. A scared-looking eighteen-year-old backed up against his bed in the far corner; the rest of him trying to be invisible, but his ears sticking out on stalks. And somebody long and lean, or appearing long by reason of his leanness, standing with his back to the door and talking down to the boy on the bed across the doctor’s bowed shoulder. A quiet, reasonable voice cheerfully advising the kid not to be an ass, because everything would be taken care of, including letting his mother know. The speaker looked round at the small sound the door made in opening, and showed the unexpected face of Chad Wedderburn, the slanting light magnifying his scar. Tonight he had another mark, too, a small punctured bruise upon the same cheek, of which at the moment he seemed completely unaware.

The doctor was a little, grimly gay, middle-aged man with brilliant eyes, and false teeth which slipped at the most awkward moments, and which he plugged testily back into position with a sudden thumb whenever they tripped him. He looked over his shoulder at George, and with a welcoming grin, as who should say: “Ah, trouble!” pulled him directly into consultation. Trouble was the breath of life to him, not because he enjoyed seeing people tormented, but because his energy was tumultuous, and demanded an exhausting variety of interests to employ it through the day.

“There you are, Sergeant!” he said, as if George had been there from the beginning. “What did I tell you? Only a perfectly clean wound, touched a rib, no damage, not the ghost of a complication of any kind. Thinks he’s going to die because he bleeds freely. Thinks I’m going to forbid you to badger him, I dare say. Your mistake, my boy! Put you through it as much as he likes, I’ve no objection. Eat you if he likes! He’d find you tough enough if he tried it!” He was all this time busily finishing a bandage, and buttoning a stained shirt over it again with fingers which flew as fast as his tongue, but more steadily. The boy on the bed looked a little bewildered at the spate of words, but a little reassured, too, and stirred docilely from side to side as the hands directed him. “Good boy! You’re all right, I promise you. Nothing in the world to worry about, so take that scared look off your face, and relax. All you’ve got to do is exactly as you’re told for a few days. Something new for you, eh? Eh?”

Apprehensive but faintly soothed gray eyes flickered from the doctor’s face to George’s, and back again. Young Fleetwood was seventeen, sturdy but small for his age; on his own here now, George remembered, the family had moved south. Clever, idealistic kid, out to save the country and the world, so he bypassed the chance of teaching, and set out to cure what was wrong with the mines. Probably end up as a mining engineer, and maybe that would reconcile his old man, who had been a collier himself and learned to look upon it as something not good enough for his sons. All the more important because there was only this one son now; the elder was dead in the last push into Germany, in 1945.

“I’m taking him into hospital for a few days,” said the doctor briskly. “No great need, but I’d like him under my eye.”

“Best thing for him, I’d say. How bad was it?”

“Quite a gash—sliced wound, but the rib stopped the knife, or it might have been a bad job. The ambulance will be here for him in about ten minutes, but if you need longer—? Let him down easy, he’s had a fright.”

“That’s all right, he wouldn’t know how to start being scared of me,” said George cheerfully. “Known me all his life.” He sat on the edge of the bed, and smiled at the boy until he got a wan smile in return. “Can we have the room to ourselves until the ambulance comes? Let me know when you’re ready for him, doctor.”

Jim Fleetwood let the room empty of everyone else, but turned his head unhappily after Chad Wedderburn, and reached a hand to keep him, but drew it back with a slight flush, ashamed of hanging on to comfort. Chad said quietly: “It’s all right, Jim, I’ll come back.”

“Stay, by all means,” said George, “if he wants you. That’s all right with me. I know the feeling.” The door closed after the others, and it was quiet in the room. “That’s better! How did you get here? Just visiting?”

“Jim asked for me, and his roommate called me on the phone. I was ahead of the doctor. His family are a long way off, you see; I suppose I seemed about as solid a prop as he could think of offhand.” He looked, at that, as if he might be. The broken bruise on his cheek burned darkly; he saw George’s eyes linger on it, and said evenly: “Yes, I walked into it, too. This was a present from the same bloke. The row was barely over when I got here, everybody was arguing, down in the day-room, what happened and what didn’t happen. Schauffler happens to be a kind I know already. He didn’t much like being known. But he’d given up the knife by then, luckily for me. I was turning away from him at the time,” he explained gently, but with a certain tension in his voice which hinted at stresses underneath. “I had Jim in my arms. The Schauffler kind chooses its time.”

“I wish you’d lit into him then,” said Jim, feebly blazing. “I wish you’d killed him.”

“You’re a fine pal, to want me hanged for a Helmut Schauffler!”

The boy paled at the thought, and lost his voice for fear of saying something of equally awful implications with the next breath.

“There isn’t going to be any trouble, is there? I don’t want my people to get it wrong.” He began to flush and shake a little, and George put a hand on his shoulder to quiet him.

“The only trouble you’ve got is a few days in hospital, and the job of getting on your feet again. Just tell us all about it, and then quit worrying about anything except getting well. We’ll see that your parents don’t get it wrong. You can trust us. If I don’t make a good job of it, Wedderburn will. Now, how did this business start?”

“It’s been going on a week or more, ever since I was coming from the showers one day, and saw him just leaving some more German chaps outside. They saluted each other the Nazi way, and said: ‘Heil, Hitler!’—just as if there hadn’t been any war, and our Ted and all the other chaps gone west for nothing. I dare say I oughtn’t to have cut loose, but what can you expect a chap to do? I couldn’t stand it. I suppose I raved a bit—honestly, I can’t remember a damned word I said, but I suppose it was all wrong and idiotic. I should have hit him, only Tom Stephens and some more fellows came, and lugged me away. I didn’t put any complaint in—I couldn’t, because I was ashamed I’d made such a muck of it, and anyhow he hadn’t done anything to me, only stand there and grin. But ever since then he’s picking on me here—nothing you could get hold of, because there never was anyone else around to see and hear—but he’d slip remarks in my ear as he went by—he got to find out about Ted, somehow, I think he’s been prying here in my room. But I can’t prove any of it. I’m telling you, but it’s only my word for it. Only, honestly, I haven’t made it up, and I’m not imagining it, either.”

“I wish you’d had the sense to come to me days ago,” said Chad Wedderburn.

“Well, but I didn’t want to make trouble for you, and it was all so slippery. You can see it’s no good now. I only made you take the same sort of nastiness I’ve had.”

“What about tonight?” prompted George.

“He was down in the day-room, playing darts with three of the fellows. They didn’t often invite him in, but I suppose he was there, and they took him on. I didn’t even know. I went down there to borrow a fine screwdriver, because I’d broken the strut of Ted’s photo, and I was putting a new one on it. When I went in he was sitting by the table, and he had a clasp-knife, and was trimming the end of a dart that wouldn’t fly true. I never took any notice of him. I just put the photo on the table—as far from him as it would go, but it’s only a small table—and asked Tom Stephens for his pocket gadget, and he gave it to me, and went on with the game. And I went back to pick up my picture.” He stirred painfully on his pillow, and shut his teeth together hard to stop a rising gulp. “It’s Ted in his uniform—I went and left it down there—”

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that. Go on!”

“He sat there whittling away with the knife, and he looked at me over it, and then he spat—making believe he was spitting on the blade, and then stooping down to sharpen it on the sole of his shoe—but he knew what he was about, all right! He spat on Ted’s photo—spattered it all over the face— He spat on my brother, and grinned at me! A dirty little Nazi like that!”

“So you went for him,” said George equably.

“Of course I did! What would you expect me to do? I dropped the screwdriver—anyhow it was a little pocket thing, all closed up, like a lipstick—and went for him, and hit him in the face, and he started to get up and lunge at me, all in one movement. The knife went into me, and I fell on top of him, and then the other three came and pulled us apart, and I was bleeding like a pig—and—and I was scared like a kid, and started to yell for Mr. Wedderburn, and Tom went and got him—and that’s all.”

Not all, perhaps, that could be told, but all that Jim was capable of telling just then, and it was as full of holes as any sieve. He looked speculatively at Chad’s darkening cheek, and asked: “What about your little incident? If you had the kid in your arms at the time, you can hardly have started the rough stuff.”

Chad smiled sourly. “I didn’t even call him rude names. It was all strictly schoolmaster stuff. He was sitting like a damp sack until I turned to go out of the day-room, and then he shot up like a rocket and took a hack at me. I—hadn’t been complimentary, of course. His poor English might have led him to find words there which I never used.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” said George hastily.

“Just the words you’ll probably find in his. He has them all, there’s been time to find the right ones. But it would hold up an assault charge,” he said simply, “if you’re hard up. Every little helps!”

George thought it might, but discreetly said nothing. He patted Jim with an absent-minded cheerfulness, as he might have done a Dominic smitten with stomachache, bade him do as he was told, like a good chap, and not worry about anything; and with the exchange of a glance committed him again to the surprising care of Chad Wedderburn, who was inexpertly putting together the small necessities of a stay in hospital from the chest-of-drawers. “See him off, and keep him happy. Come along to the station on your way back, will you? I’ll take care of brother Ted, you can be easy, you shall have him back safely.”

He went down, not very well satisfied, to collect three vague and confused statements from the dart-players. An incident only three seconds long is not seen clearly by men whose minds are concentrated on a dart-board placed on the other side of the room. Tom Stephens, who was the most anxious to back up his roommate, said he had seen the blow struck, and didn’t think it was any accident. He had also seen the insult to Ted’s photograph, which still lay on the table with half-dried stains of spittle undoubtedly marking the glass, and his firm impression was that that had been no error of judgment, either, but a deliberate provocation. But the other two were less ready to swear to it. The German had started up to defend himself, and the open knife was already in his hand; what could you expect in the circumstances? Jim had hit him first, and quite possibly on mistaken grounds. They wouldn’t like to say he had meant any harm.

As for the warden, he wanted everything smoothed down into a chapter of accidents, the eruption of contrary temperaments intent on thinking the worst of each other. Schauffler had always been a good, quiet fellow, a little sullen and defensive in this place where he felt himself unwanted, but anxious to avoid trouble rather than to court it. The position of an anti-Nazi German soldier allowed into industry here was certainly a difficult one, and it was the warden’s opinion that hot-headed young people like Jim Fleetwood did nothing to make it easier. All this he poured into George’s ear as they went along the corridor to his office to have a look at this vexed case in the flesh.

The warden’s assistant was sitting at a desk near the top-heavy Victorian fireplace, and opposite him in a straight-backed chair, perfectly still and inert, sat Helmut Schauffler.

He was perhaps twenty-three or -four, blond as a chorus girl, with a smooth face weathered to dark ivory, and light-blue eyes a little moist and swollen, as if he had been crying, and could cry again at will. But the rest of his face, smooth across broad, hard bones, was too motionless to suggest that any sort of grief was involved in the phenomenon. He should, thought George, be a pretty impressive specimen when on his feet, broad-shouldered and narrow-flanked, with large, easy movements; but just now he didn’t look capable of movement at all, he sat, as Chad had said, like a damp sack, helpless and hopeless, with his flaccid hands dangling between his knees. They didn’t look as if they had bones enough in them to hold a knife, much less steer it into another man’s ribs. When George entered, the blue eyes lifted to his face apprehensively, like the eyes of an animal in a trap, but the rest of his face never moved a muscle.

His voice was deep but vague in pitch, fitting the sullen indefiniteness of his person; his English was interestingly broken. He burst easily into a long and pathetic explanation of the whole incident, the burden of his song being that here he was an outcast, misinterpreted, misunderstood, that his most harmless gestures were held to be threats, and the most innocent lapses of his tongue, astray among the complexities of the English language, taken as deliberate affronts. Once animated by his own woes, his body exhibited some of the tensions which had been missing, drew itself into the compact and muscular mass it was meant to be, with double the adolescent strength of Jim Fleetwood in it. It appeared, in fact, to enjoy its own animal competence. The hands, flattened along his thighs, no longer looked incapable of killing.

“I never wish to hurt this boy, I never wish to insult his brother, never. That one was a soldier, I too, I respect him. It is by a bad chance it happens like that. But the young brother is so hot, all at once he runs at me, strikes me in the face—I do not even know what it is he thinks I have done! When I am struck so, I jump up to fend him off—who not? The knife I forget, all is so suddenly happening, I am so confused. It is only he, running at me, he runs on the knife in my hand— What am I to say? If I am not German, this does not happen. If I am not German, he does not so quickly think the worst in all I do. What is it, to be here in this country a German?”

George reminded him delicately of the Nazi salute which had not passed unnoticed at the colliery. He admitted it, tears of despair starting in his blue eyes.

“Thus we are taught so long, thus it must be done years of our lives, can we so soon lose it? It comes to my hand, so, my will does not know what I do. Never have I been a Nazi, only one must conform, or for parents, family, all, is very bad life. I am young, I do as I am taught. And now it makes me to seem an enemy here, where I would be only a quiet citizen.”

His depression deepened when the unwarrantable blow at Chad Wedderburn was recalled to his memory. Five people had seen that, and to deny it was purposeless; even excuses might carry less weight here, but he could try. He enjoyed trying, George could see that. As the tragedy and doom of his eyes deepened, the exultation and sleekness of his body became more clear and insolent, like the arrogant stretchings of a cat before a fire.

“That was a bad thing, I own it, I regret it. But even that I do not mean. I am confused, angry, I am in trouble and afraid, no one helps me, no one explains or wishes to make things easier. This man, it is well understood he is very angry for the boy Jim. But he rages at me—half he says I do not understand, and so perhaps I think it worse than it is. I lose my head, and strike him because I am in despair. But when I have done it I am sorry, I no longer wish to hurt him. I am very sorry and ashamed.”

He wept a subtle tear or two; George was impressed in spite of himself. He went away to phone Weaver, and get a car from Comerbourne. This hostel was no place for Helmut Schauffler now, from any point of view; even the warden would be glad to get rid of him, though one felt that he would be equally glad to get rid of Jim. And in view of the fact that somebody, somewhere, was due to have considerable trouble with Helmut in the future, maybe a few days in custody wouldn’t do any harm; especially as the tears and broken words were due to flow for the magistrates’ benefit even more readily than they had done for George’s, and he doubted if a charge of unlawful wounding or causing bodily harm was going to stand up successfully under their weight.

He didn’t forget to collect Ted’s photograph, clean it gravely of the traces of Helmut’s attentions, and commit it to the care of Tom Stephens until Jim came home. It was the usual conventional photograph of a simple young man in uniform: candid-eyed, vulnerable, not too intelligent, very much Jim’s brother; easy meat, the pair of them, for a Helmut Schauffler. George felt depressed, and not altogether because of the immediate upsets of Comerford. Something was going wrong here which had also larger implications; it wasn’t in a few months’ time that the world was due to hear about it, but in twenty years or so, after a few people had shouted their hearts out about it and been shrugged aside as mental for their pains.

George went home at last, late and slowly, and found Chad Wedderburn talking to Bunty in the kitchen. The cut on his cheek was discoloring badly, and by tomorrow would be a focus of extreme interest for the Fourth. George said, remembering the beginning of his evening as if it drifted back to him from a thousand miles away: “I hope Dom hasn’t seen that. If he has, you’re liable to be sued for breach of contract, or obtaining money on false pretenses, or something.”

When Chad laughed, the stiffening cut quivered and laughed with him. “I’m afraid he has. He was a little late getting home, and we met on the doorstep. His eyes popped out of his head, almost. He’s probably hanging over the banisters now, all ears.”

“I hope,” said Bunty, “he’s asleep by this time, or there’ll be no getting him up in the morning. What would you like him to be told, if he assumes I’ve got the whole story out of you?” And though she said “if,” it was immediately clear to George that indeed she had. She wore a satisfied look, as if she had not been altogether left out of events.

“I leave it to your husband,” said Chad, grinning at George. “Or haven’t you got a clue, either?”

“I could tell him the truth, I suppose, but he’d be pretty disgusted with you.”

“Oh, I don’t know!” said Chad, smiling down a little somberly at the curling smoke of his cigarette. “He’d see the arguments for nonviolence—in the circumstances. Still, I do admit—”

“You’d have liked to pulverize him, wouldn’t you?”

“It would have been a pleasure,” said Chad, in voice and word still understating.

“Why didn’t you? Oh, I know, you were thinking about Jim, you wanted him safe out of the rotten business without any more harm—and all that. Still—why didn’t you?”

The hard, lean fingers closed gently together on the end of the cigarette and crushed it out. “I was afraid,” said Chad, very simply, “that if I started I should probably kill him.”