Fallen Into the Pit

One

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Gerd Hollins went down to the end of the garden in the late September evening, past the small green door in the high wall, which Jim Tugg had painted afresh that afternoon. The screen of the orchard trees separated her from the house and from her husband’s uneasy, questioning eyes, and now there was no living creature within sight or sound of her but the silly, self-important hens, scratching and pecking desultorily in their long runs. They came screeching to meet her when she went in and filled their troughs. She filled her basket with eggs, going from shed to shed, stooping her head under every lintel with the same patient, humble movement, rearing it again as she emerged with the same self-contained and self-dependent pride. But as she was dropping the peg into the last latch, her back turned to the narrow path by which she had come, she stiffened and stood quite still, her fingers frozen in the act, her breath halting for a moment. She heard and knew the step, though he walked on the grass verge to soften it. She had asked Jim to lock the door in the wall when he finished the job, but he must have forgotten. She could scarcely blame him, when the door had never been locked before in his experience.

“You didn’t expect me?” said Helmut, in the soft, pleased voice every inflection of which she knew and hated. “You are not glad to see me? It is ungrateful, when I go to so much trouble to pay you these visits. How would you remember your own language, if it were not for me?”

Gerd let the peg fall into place, and picked up the basket. When she turned to face him, she saw him astride the path, where it closed in hedge to hedge, so that she could not pass him unless he chose to let her. Everything about him was now hideously familiar to her: the heavy spread of his shoulders, the forward jut of his head upon the thick young neck, the blond, waving hair, and the coarser, duller fairness of the face, now fallen a little slack with enjoyment. He had scarcely to speak at all, only to appear, and drink and eat the quiet despair and loathing of her looks; he did not need to have any power to touch or harm her, because he was a reminder of all the harm she had already suffered, all the rough hands which had ever been laid on her.

“I like to spend a few minutes with you,” he said softly. “It is like home again for you, isn’t it? Like home, to see someone look at you again not like these stupid sentimental people—someone who doesn’t weep silly tears over you as a refugee, but sees only a greasy, fat, aging Jewess, a creature to spit on—” He spat at her feet, leisurely, and smiled at her with his blue, pleased eyes. “You Jews, you like to have a grievance, it is bad for you when you cannot whine how you are persecuted. I am something you need—why are you not grateful to me?”

“Why do you come here?” she said, in a very calm and level and unreal voice. “You have been beaten already, more than once. Do you want to be killed for this amusement? Is it worth that much?”

She had never spoken to him like that before; in the whole incredible relationship she had spoken as little as she could, in his enforced presence remaining still and withdrawn, shutting him out from her spirit as well as she might. Now she came suddenly out of her closed space to meet him, and he was stimulated by the new note in her voice, and came closer to her, giggling softly to himself with pleasure. He put out his big right hand, and felt at her arm, digging his fingers into it curiously, probingly, as into a beast.

“You Jews, you think to grow soft and fat on this country now as you did on us. You are like slugs, without bones. You will not take much crushing, when the English learn sense.”

“You had better go,” she said, “if you wish to be safe. You’ve had your fun; be warned, it can’t last forever.”

“Safe? Oh, I know already where your men are, both of them. 1 am quite safe. Presently I will go—when it pleases me—when the smell of Jew is too strong for me.”

“Why do you come here?” she said. “What do you hope to gain? You can’t harm me. We are in England now, not Germany. I am protected from you here.”

“You are not protected,” he said triumphantly, “because you will not claim protection. Why don’t you tell your fool of a husband how I come to torment you? Because you want a quiet life, and still you hope to find one. You don’t want to tell him, or the other one, either, because they will want to kill me if they know, and it will be nothing but trouble for you all, whether they succeed to kill me or fail, only trouble. And then to help them you would have to stand up in court and tell all this for the papers to take down, and they would make a good story with all your sad past in Germany, for people to buy for a penny and read, people who don’t know you, don’t care more for you than I do. You will die before you do that—you have only one kind of courage. So you hope if you keep very quiet and pretend not to hear, not to see me, this bad time will pass, and no trouble for these men of yours, and even for you only a short trouble. No, you don’t go to the law! Not to the law, nor to your husband! It is just a nice secret between you and me, this meeting. I am quite safe from everyone but you. And you are too soft to do anything—too soft even to be angry.”

She looked at him without any expression, and said in the same level tone: “It might be a mistake to rely too much on that.”

Helmut laughed, but looked over his shoulder all the same, and took his hand from her arm, which had all this time refrained from noticing his touch sufficiently to wish to shake it off. He was, for him, very careful now; he appeared only when he was sure of finding her alone. There was no hurry; if he went softly he had a whole lifetime in which to drive her mad.

“Bah, you would even lie to him, to keep him from knowing. I have the best ally in you. But it is an offensive smell, the smell of Jew, and even for the fun of seeing you hate me I cannot bear it long. So I am going, don’t be afraid. It isn’t time for you to be afraid yet—not quite time. You have not to go back to the ghetto and the camp—yet!” He laughed again, and touched her cheek with his hard fingertips, and shook and wiped them as if her pale, chill flesh had soiled them. Then he turned carelessly on his heel, and went away from her in a quick, light walk, and slid through the green door in the wall, closing it gently after him.

Gerd stood for a long time staring about her, while the empty twilight deepened perceptibly about her and grew green with the green of the trees. She ought to have become used to it by now, and yet the shock never grew less, was always like the opening of a black pit under her feet. She had almost forgotten, until he came, that it was possible to hate anyone like that. He was all the shadowy horror of her life rolled into one person, and he came and went protected and secure and insolent about her, reminding her softly that he had been the means of destroying her family, and would yet be the means of destroying her; for in spite of the war and the peace and all the good resolutions, it appeared that governments were still on his side, not on hers.

She went on into the house, bracing herself to meet her husband’s eyes and tell him nothing. She had brought him sorrow and trouble enough. But Hollins was not in the house. She supposed that he had merely gone out into the yard upon some late job or other, or up the fields on his usual evening round; but she sat with her sewing for a long time, and he did not come in.

She sat and thought of Helmut. And continually out of nowhere the thought of Christopher’s old service revolver came to her mind. She looked at it calmly, and did not either embrace or put away the suggestion, but only let it lie there in her mind, like a seed patiently waiting to grow.

Helmut went up through the woods toward the rim of the bowl, his hands deep in his pockets, his feet muttering in the scuffle of pine needles and drifted twigs under the trees, and silent in the deep grass of the open places. He whistled as he went, for he was very pleased with events. He liked his job, he liked being in a private lodging, he liked the money he jingled in his fingers as he walked, he liked the evening, and his errand, and the feeling of well-being which his methodical visits to Gerd gave him. He liked his own cleverness and everyone else’s stupidity, which fed it without effort on his part. He liked the large black eyes of the Jewish woman, defying him but believing him when he told her that he was only the vanguard, that racial hate was not far from her heels, even here, and would bring her down at last.

Behind him in the shadow of the trees, out of hearing and screened from sight, someone walked with him, step for step.