Fallen Into the Pit

Five

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Helmut Schauffler was discharged on the bodily harm charge, though with a warning that it was dismissed only by reason of an element of doubt as to his motives, and the extent to which sheer accidental circumstances had framed him. On the assault charge he was fined £2, which within the allotted time he contrived to pay. The magistrates gave full weight to his passionate plea that everybody was against him, and the worst construction automatically put on everything he did; so anxious were they to be excluded from the everybody thus censured that they leaned over backwards to be generous to him, and expressed the hope that he would yet find his niche in England, and settle down happily among his neighbors. The local colliery administration had already decided by then that they would be courting trouble by taking him back, and in their turn hoped that something else might be found for him, something more retired from the frictions of hostel life. Say some job on a farm. He was able-bodied, and a hard worker by inclination; if he had to deal only with à very small group of individuals who were prepared to take a little trouble with him, the results might still be admirable. The magistrates called this case to the attention of any local farmers who might be in need of a hand, and hoped one of them would feel able to make the experiment.

Gerd Hollins read the local weekly religiously from front page to back every Saturday evening. She put it down and looked at her husband over the carefully folded sheets at last, and was quiet for a long time. Whenever she fixed her eyes on him thus, Chris Hollins felt their plucking as the strings of a harp feel the fingers that wrest music out of them, and had to look up and meet her dark glance before he could have any rest.

They had been married now for ten years; she had been in England for twelve, and her speech was flawlessly English, perfected even with the leisurely country softness of Comerford, where she had learned most of it. But she kept still some little opulent gestures and elaborations of manner which set her apart as clearly as an accent would have done. She had been assimilated without being changed; sometimes it was merely plain that she was not English, sometimes one could safely judge her country to be Germany. Always, though her quietness withdrew it into the background of her personality, the discerning eye could be sure that she was a Jewess. Her father had been a teacher in Dessau; there had been three brothers, and one more sister. Now there was only Gerd. She had escaped in the autumn of 1937, and by interminable ways round Europe arrived in England, where she had found domestic work, and begun to scrape together all the money she could, in readiness for the day when some other member of the family should follow her. But nobody ever came. It was only by the most elaborately capricious of chances that she herself had ever arrived. Long after she had married Christopher Hollins she had gone on hoping and believing that the others would turn up, after the war; and after the war she had traced at least her youngest brother, but to a cardboard box of ashes on a shelf in a room of the crematorium of Osviecim. And that was all.

Gerd was in the middle thirties, and already less handsome than she had been; but Chris was fifty, and found her very beautiful. Even if her figure had rounded and spread far more disastrously, and the understandable gray in her smooth, rather coarse black hair been more obtrusive, he would still have thought her a beauty, for he was still in love with her, and probably always would be. He had lived all his life in the constant round of his little lands, a hill-farm just above the village, mostly sheep-pasture; but she had brought here in her person all the romance and all the tragedy of Europe, and in spirit he understood it better, and burned with it more deeply, than many who had wandered through it in uniform and seen it for themselves, but without an interpreter. Most people found him narrow and dull and virtuously uninteresting, but inside the placid shell she had found house-room for all the havoc of humanity’s hopes; and living alone with him was not boring to her.

She folded the paper more firmly, the dry half-column of “Magistrates’ Courts” framed between her hands. “Chris, have you seen this?” She gave it to him. He read it silently, and looked at her again, and gravely.

“Perhaps you’ll think it a counsel of desperation,” she said, “but I want you to take in this man.”

“But all these years,” he said, astonished, “you’ve avoided having any contact with Germans. Why should you suddenly want to have one here? I’m dead sure it would be a mistake. Better not to think of them, even, not to remember they exist.”

“I know! I’ve been wrong to avoid the issue. If by trying one could really forget they exist, that might be well. But I have tried—as you say, I’ve tried for years—and without success. How long can one go on running away from a fact, I wonder? Chris, I haven’t done you or myself any good. You can’t pretend things haven’t happened. I’m tired of trying. If I could make this effort, it would be better for us both.”

“It’s too big a risk,” he said. “We should be fools to go looking for trouble. He’ll only remind you all over again, every time you look at him. That’s no way to get rid of memories.”

“I’ve tried smothering them,” she said, “for years. It’s no good that way, Chris. I can’t forget things that way. There’s only one thing for it, and that’s to admit everything and accept everything, and find some way of living that doesn’t mean always sitting on top of a chest of grudges, trying to keep the lid from opening. If I could get used to the idea that Germans are much the same as other flesh and blood—if there could be some ordinary boy, stupid perhaps, difficult perhaps, I don’t care—only someone who could have something in him worth forgiving—”

“You seem to have picked a difficult case if you want this one,” he said bitterly.

“There are no easy ones. Anyhow, what would be the good of an easy one? It would mean nothing. But he’s young— and if it succeeded, I should be a lot happier. Chris, I want to try. Let me try!”

“I don’t know!” he said. “I’ll have to think about it. Give me a little time to consider. I’m involved in this, too.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “because you, too, would be happier if we could get rid of this past that follows us about.”

It is not easy to shake off memory by any method; and gentle and still as she was, and spotlessly innocent of any act which should haunt her afterwards, and unfair though it is that the acts of other persons should haunt us, Hollins had felt her always being followed by the hate and horror which even she could not escape. He did not reflect that her nature was soft, and should have been unretentive. He was not given to thinking except by such processes as lift the shoot to the light. But he could perceive, and he perceived that she made the best of things, and even enjoyed some happiness, always with the footsteps treading on her heels. Ten years had not achieved a cure by leaving well alone; it might be worth even the risk of meddling.

So he thought about it, and sought another opinion because thought was such unfamiliar country to him. He talked it over with Jim Tugg, in the late afternoon when he came back tired from the last of the dipping. Jim listened, and his black brows drew together over the gaunt deeps of his eyes.

“Your wife’s a saint,” he said, wasting no words, “but she’s a fool, too. If you do a daft thing like that, you’ll be buying trouble for everybody.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” admitted Hollins, “but she’s set her mind on it.”

“More fool her, to think it could do any good. And more fool you, if you let her have her way. Forgive! You might as well forgive an adder for being an adder, and pick it up in your hand, and expect it not to bite you.”

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.