The Dark Tunnel

CHAPTER III

WHEN I FINISHED HUNTER said, “And that’s the end of the story, eh?”

“I hope not,” I said. “It’s beginning to look as if it isn’t. But I haven’t heard anything of Ruth for six years.”

“I suppose you tried to get in touch with her–”

“I did what I could. They wouldn’t let me back into Germany but I wrote letters to everyone I could think of. The Repertory Theatre, Frau Wanger, the manager of her apartment building. I even called her father in Köln by long distance but I couldn’t get in touch with him. All I ever found out was that she wasn’t in her apartment any more, and she wasn’t at the Repertory Theatre.”

“Maybe they concentrated her,” Hunter said.

“That’s what I was afraid of. I even thought they might have killed her. It was the uncertainty that got me more than anything. It still gives me nightmares. You’re walking across a bridge with a girl and she falls through a trap-door into dark water and disappears. You’re dancing with a girl in a bright ballroom and the lights go out and when they come on she’s dead in your arms with her scalp peeled off and hanging into your face.”

“Christ you’ve got a grisly imagination. Skip the horrible details, eh?”

“That night in Munich wasn’t imagination,” I said. “Nor the six years of wondering what happened to her.”

“But it’s over now. What did Schneider say?”

“I didn’t have much of a chance to talk to him. I’m going out to Schneider’s for dinner to-night and then we’re going to meet her at the station. She’s coming on the nine o’clock train from Detroit.”

“So it’s a romance with a happy ending.”

“I hope so. Six years is a long time but I know how I feel about her.”

“Good luck to you. We need an Héloise and Abelard love-story around here. The faculty gets more and more bourgeois every year, more and more like a flock of insurance company employees. You’ll be Prometheus the Firebringer if you can show us a little grande passion. Why, this town hasn’t had a spot of the pure flame since the Assistant Dean of Women went to Australia and had a baby on sabbatical leave.”

“I can’t promise anything like that. My intentions are strictly honorable. In fact, I can’t promise anything and I prefer not to talk about it.”

“No doubt that’s why you’ve been talking about it for an hour,” Hunter said with a lopsided smile. He looked at his watch and got up to go. “It’s nearly six. I’ll be looking forward to meeting Ruth Esch.”

“You’ll meet her,” I said. “Thanks for lending an appreciative ear. And don’t use it against me if she’s already married.”

Hunter flicked his hand at me and left the shop. I finished drinking my final cup of coffee and got up to follow him out. When I was paying my check, an elegant grey suit mounted on whalebone and plush came through the door on elegant painted legs. Helen Madden’s figure was the kind that makes other women look vulpine when they pass it in the street. Her face was not so stunning but it was pleasant enough: a wide, amiable mouth, a straight nose, intelligent brown eyes, and hair that must have cost her seven percent of her salary.

“Hello, Bob,” she said. “I’m glad you happened to be here. There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

“I’m sorry I can’t stay. I’ve got a dinner engagement. But let me be the first to congratulate you.”

She blushed and looked happy. “Did Alec tell you?”

“Yes. It’s the second-best news I’ve heard this year.”

“What’s the best?”

“I’ll tell you to-morrow when I’m sure. There’s many a slip between cup and lip, especially when the cup runneth over.”

“Don’t be so mysterious. You’re just like Alec.”

“Has he, too, been whispering cryptic nothings into your ear?”

“It’s past a joke.” Her voice had a faint hysteric screech which I had never heard in it before. “Come and sit down for a minute.”

She sat down in a booth and I sat opposite her.

“What’s bothering you, Helen?” This was the first time I had ever spoken to her like an uncle, but our relations were always shifting. Friendship between the sexes is invariably complicated, even when it is not impossible. Helen and I had gone around together a bit but it came to nothing by mutual agreement. We hated each other a very little, because we couldn’t forget that we might have loved each other.

“I suppose it’s nothing really,” she said. “But Alec has seemed strange lately. He hardly noticed me when he came into the office this afternoon.”

“I can’t understand why.”

“Bob, is something on his mind? I know he’s anxious to get into the Navy, but that hardly accounts for the way he’s been looking. He’s been terribly grim the last few days. And he never used to be that way at all.”

“He’s over-working,” I said. “There’s a lot of business to clean up before he leaves. And he’s got his ups and downs like anybody else.”

“Not Alec. I’ve been working with him every day for nearly two years. Alec is the original vitamin-fed personality, and when he acts grim he has a reason.”

I couldn’t tell her what I knew just then so I introduced a diversion. “There’s been no trouble between you, has there?”

“None at all. And there won’t be.” Her voice was warm and firm again, the voice of a woman sure of her man.

“Why should you worry, then? He has a tough job. Forget you’re engaged to him in the office. Outside of the office, forget that you’re his secretary.”

“And end up with schizophrenia,” she said with a smile. “You don’t know of any special trouble he’s having then?”

“Of course not,” I lied. “And if I did know of anything I wouldn’t tell you. Alec can handle any trouble he’ll ever get into. Watch him when he gets into the Navy. He’ll be the terror of the seas.”

“Run along to your dinner engagement, Bob. You’ve made me feel better. Alec’s secretive about his feelings, you know, and I guess it’s been getting me down. Heavens, I’ve been acting like a calf.”

“Not a bit. I’m sorry I can’t stay.”

“I told you to run along. Good-bye.”

I looked at my watch on the way out, and made a bee-line for my apartment. It was nearly six-fifteen and my engagement with Schneider was for seven. But if I was going to meet Ruth at the station, I had to shave and change my clothes.

My livingroom-bedroom-kitchenette was ten minutes from McKinley Hall, but I made it in less. By the time the tower clock rang the half-hour, I had finished shaving. Two minutes later I was tying my tie when the phone rang.

I picked it up and said, “Branch speaking.”

“Hello, Dr. Branch, this is Dr. Schneider. I tried to get you before but you were out.”

“I just got in a few minutes ago.”

“I merely wished to suggest that I pick you up in my car. Save gas, you know. I have to run into town anyway.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but it’s a fine fall evening and I think I’ll walk. I’ll see you shortly.”

“Oh, of course, if you’re going to walk – We can drive down to the station together. Good-bye.” He hung up.

I looked at the clock on the mantel. I had twenty-five minutes to walk out to Schneider’s place, a distance of about a mile and a half, and I put on my coat and started immediately. Germans like trains and guests to run on time.

He had bought the house on Bingham Heights when he first came to Midwestern. I had never seen it from the inside, because Schneider was not usually hospitable to his academic inferiors, but I had seen it from the road. What made it interesting was the university grapevine report that it had cost Schneider most of the small fortune he had brought with him out of Germany.

He couldn’t have bought real estate in a better place. Bingham Heights is an escarpment overlooking Arbana from the north. Cut off from the city proper by a hundred-foot cliff with a stream running along its base like a moat, it constitutes a sort of upper town for the aristocracy, the deans and department heads and retired automobile millionaires. But any ordinary man can reach this plutocratic eyrie by a scenic road which winds up to the heights.

It was just on seven when I reached the top of the cliff, but I stood for a minute to catch my breath. The road ran near the cliff at the top of the rise, and beyond the wire cable and white posts of the guard-fence, fifty feet of scraggly bushes sloped down to the bare lip of the edge. From the road I could look down over the city.

The still trees and the quiet buildings seemed to lie under amber in the evening light. Fifty miles away Detroit vibrated steadily like an engine that could not stop, and planes and tanks in an endless stream roared and rattled away to war. But in the fall of 1943, Arbana seemed as peaceful as ever. I could have stood and watched it for an hour, but Schneider was waiting and like a little man I went to meet my dinner.

The road curved away from the cliff and ran along the top of the escarpment two or three hundred yards from the edge. There were houses standing in spacious grounds on both sides of the road, but the houses to my left, between the road and the cliff, were bigger and looked as if they cost more. The third house on the left, a long, low white brick building with modernistic shoebox lines, was Schneider’s. It stood in several acres of landscaped grounds, terraced down to the cliff edge and surrounded by trees which had been left standing when the house was built. A concrete runaround driveway masked by elms led in from the road. The porch was at the back for the sake of the view, and the front door opened directly onto the driveway.

When I came down the driveway, Schneider was standing in the doorway waiting for me.

“Dr. Branch,” he said, “I was beginning to despair of you.”

“I’m sorry if I’m late. I didn’t hurry particularly because you said you were going to drive into town and I thought you might pass me on the road.”

“Oh, I decided not to go. I can do my errand to-night quite as well. Shall we go in?”

He spoke very amiably but there was awkwardness and strain in his gesture when he moved aside to make way for me. I noticed his eyes when I passed him and they were dull and opaque like brown wood.

He followed me in and took me down the central hall to the living room at the back. The floors were blue varnished concrete, slippery and smooth like semi-precious stones. There was a big Persian rug in the living room with the same deep blue in it, relieved by old, decadent rose. The lights were fluorescent and invisible and came on like dawn when Jupiter pressed the switch. The fireplace was big enough to roast a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound pig.

I wondered where Schneider’s money came from. The Nazi chiefs had always objected to money going out of Germany, except for what they invested abroad themselves. Was Schneider a Nazi investment as Alec thought? It was strange that he had left his son in Germany for seven years after he left himself. But perhaps he couldn’t help himself. I thought of Ruth.

“Won’t you sit down,” Schneider said, nodding towards a chair by the window. “Martini?”

“Thanks, I will.”

He poured and handed me my cocktail and sat down with his own on the curved leather seat in the bay window which overlooked the garden.

I sipped my drink and said, “May I ask how you happened to get in touch with Ruth Esch?”

“Of course, my dear boy.” I have several grey hairs among my raven locks and I dislike being anybody’s dear boy. “It’s really very simple, though it seems strange now that I tell of it.”

“It’s a strange world,” I said. “Melodrama is the norm in 1943.”

“Exactly. Ruth’s story in a case in point. She has had six grim and terrible years, experiences which must have been most arduous to a woman of her culture and sensibility. She was imprisoned by the Nazis for alleged treason activity.”

“When?”

“In 1937, I believe.”

“So that’s what happened. You’ve been in touch with her, then?”

“Yes, of course, during the last few weeks. Ruth has been in Canada for several weeks. There has been some difficulty about her entering this country, but it’s cleared up now. I have been able to prevail upon the Department of Justice to relax, in her case, their somewhat stringent attitude towards so-called enemy aliens.”

He stroked his beard as if it were a trophy he had won, but I didn’t resent his vanity. If he really had helped Ruth to get into the country I’d get up early every morning and currycomb his beard with loving care.

“How on earth did she get out of Germany?”

“She escaped. She has said that she would tell me more when she arrived, but she would not trust the details to the mails. All I know is that she escaped into Vichy France, and from there to Algeria. The Vichy-controlled administration in French North Africa put her in prison in Algiers. This summer I heard of her through the War Department, and was able to procure her release. She was taken to England and from there secured passage to Canada. And now she is to teach here at Midwestern. With her thorough knowledge of the German language and society, she will be a most valuable instructor in the AST Program.”

“There’s no doubt of that,” I said. “But it seems to me that she owes you a very great deal.”

“Do you think so?” he said. There was a deep and tragic irony in his smile. He got up and turned his back on me to look out into the twilight that was rising from the ground like thin smoke into the pale sky. I stood up and looked out of the bay window over his shoulder. A few ragged clouds were scudding north and out of sight above the house. The curved window in which we stood was like the glassed-in prow of a boat, headed nowhere across a darkening sea.

Something moved in the garden and broke the illusion. I looked down towards the far end and saw a man get up out of a deck-chair on the last terrace by the cliff-edge. He stood for a moment with his back to the house, looking up into the moving sky. His body was slim and straight against the horizon and he stood with his legs apart like a young man, but in the evening greyness his hair looked snow white.

Dr. Schneider rapped on the window and the man in the garden turned around and saw us and started up the flagstone path to the house. He moved quickly and easily like a cat, his Angora hair blowing in the wind. When he came closer, I could see that he was a young man, hardly older than some of my students. His face and hair were very blonde, almost albino, and his eyes were as pale and empty as the sky.

Schneider turned to me and said, “My son Peter. I don’t believe you know him.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“I seldom see him myself. He’s a consulting engineer, you know, and his job takes him all over the country. He just got back from Canada and is taking a short holiday.”

“Really? Did he meet Ruth Esch?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Of course not,” Peter Schneider said from the doorway. I turned and looked at him. If his pale eyes had not been incapable of expression, he would have been glaring at his father. “Canada is a large country, you know.”

His accent was surprisingly good, less evident than the old man’s, although Peter had only been in the country two years.

Dr. Schneider moved around me and said, “Of course, you were in Toronto, weren’t you? Peter, I’d like you to meet Dr. Branch. Dr. Branch, my son Peter.” There was no warmth and no fatherly condescension in his voice. The two spoke to each other as equals and their relation puzzled me.

“How-do-you-do,” Peter said and put out his hand. I answered him and stepped forward to shake it. It was soft and strong like his face, which was as rosy and smooth as a baby’s.

The strength of his face was in the bones. Under the light drift of hair the brow was wide, with bulbous ridges above the eyes. The nose was blunt and straight and the sharp, triangular chin looked determined, but the lower lip was thick and soft, like a woman’s or a sulky boy’s. His face, strong and petulant at once, was handsome enough, but two things made it strange. His eyelashes and eyebrows were so light that he seemed to have none, and his steady eyes were almost colorless and held no meaning. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, Peter Schneider’s soul had long ago pulled down the blinds and gone into another room.

“I know Toronto a bit,” I said.

“Really?”

I turned to Dr. Schneider. “Where was Ruth in Canada?”

He looked at his son and said nothing. Finally he spoke: “I don’t know.”

An elderly woman with drooping eyes and mouth and breasts came into the room and stood twisting her apron until Schneider said, “Ja?”

“Dinner is ready,” she said in German and stumped away on flat slippered feet.

I looked at Schneider and he said, “My housekeeper. I brought her with me from Germany and she has refused to learn English. Mrs. Shantz is an ignorant peasant, but she is a good cook.”

When the dinner had reached the coffee and cigarettes stage, I was ready to agree with him. Frau Shantz spoke only German but her cooking had a pleasant French accent. Good food and two Martinis had made me very comfortable from the neck down, and even Peter, though his invisible eyebrows kept their complacent scowl, had broken down and begun to talk.

Partly in the hope of finding out more than they had told me and partly for the sake of talking about her, I told them some of the things I knew about Ruth. I watched their faces when I described her attempt to protect the old Jewish doctor.

Dr. Schneider surprised me by looking entirely sympathetic and saying, “She was very brave, very brave. If more Germans had such moral courage, certain – ah – conditions would be impossible.”

“She’s a virtuous woman,” I said, “with the courage to follow it through.”

“Courageous, certainly,” Peter Schneider said. “Nobody can deny it. But why do you call her virtuous, Dr. Branch? Is virtue merely physical courage, the early Roman virtus?”

“Moral courage as well,” I said, looking into his eyes to see what he was getting at. His eyes said nothing: it was like looking into the depths of a wash-basin. I went on: “Her feelings were decent and right and she acted in accord with them.”

“Naturally, we sympathize with her feelings because they agree with our prejudices, against anti-Semitism for example. But is virtue merely a matter of the feelings of the individual? What if the feelings are wrong? Say I have an uncontrollable urge to maim small children, is such an act sanctioned and made virtuous by my mere possession of such an impulse? I distrust the feelings of men in general. I subscribe to the doctrine of original sin.”

“I hadn’t thought of you as a religious man, Mr. Schneider,” I said in the hope of insulting him. “You’d base your ethics in dogma or revelation then, would you?”

“Of course not, I was speaking figuratively. I base morality in the common good. If you act for the common good, you are doing the right thing.”

“Whose common good?”

“The good of the community. The political group or state, whatever the group happens to be.”

“Is there no morality above the state?”

“Obviously not. Morality varies from place to place. In Russia it is not considered moral to deprive colored people of civil rights. In America and India it is considered moral.”

“That merely proves that the state or community can be wrong.”

“Who is to decide that the state is wrong? The individual following some inner light?” There was a sneer in his tone but his face was blank of anything but the permanent scowl which grew more complacent by the minute. I looked towards Dr. Schneider at the head of the table. His eyes were hooded and his face was shut up.

“Call it inner light if you wish, or conscience or the superego. Whatever you call it, it knows that some things are wrong.”

“You are an unconscious anarchist, Dr. Branch. You would set up the feeling or impulses of the individual against the laws, against the good of the state.”

“If the laws are evil, they are not for the good of the state. Denying the validity of the individual conscience leaves no check on the state. Whatever it does is right.”

“If it is successful, yes,” Peter Schneider said, as if that clinched the argument. “If unsuccessful, no.”

“Successful in doing what?”

“In furthering the interests of its people, or as many of them as possible.”

“You’re arguing in a circle,” I said, “but let that pass. Can the good of the majority of the people sanction, or perhaps even include, the persecution or misery of a minority?”

“Obviously,” Peter said, and leaned forward across the table. “I cite the Negroes in the United States.”

“And the Jews in Germany?”

“You’re trying to drive me into an anti-Semitic position, Dr. Branch.”

“Not at all. I’m trying to drive you out of an anti-Semitic position.”

“Nonsense. I merely said that the individual could not be sure of being right when he takes the law into his own hands. Especially a woman, a young girl.”

“You seem to share Hitler’s prejudice against women,” I said, “as well as his prejudice against Jews.”

“I have no concern with Hitler,” Peter said.

Dr. Schneider spoke for the first time in minutes, “It is not entirely courteous to argue so strenuously with a guest. You must accept our apologies, Dr. Branch.” His voice was a light monotone which contrasted with his usual rich blatancy. It sounded as if he was afraid to speak but couldn’t help himself.

I said, “The conversation is both interesting and instructive. I believe that Mr. Schneider was about to expound an old Turkish doctrine regarding the inferiority of women.”

“Ach, women,” Peter said. “You Americans are hag-ridden by your women. They ride on your shoulders and strangle you with their legs. Their legs are pretty, of course. But why should they be treated as equals? Would you give equal civil rights to a race-horse?”

“If it had equal intelligence and other human qualities.”

“Are women equal in intelligence to men?”

“Not if they’re not educated. The Middle Ages proved that.”

“Why attempt to educate them? Women can perform their natural functions without education. Most of them are hardly more complicated than a child’s puzzle. Press three buttons in the proper sequence and the gates open. The gates of Aulis and the gates of hell. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Suddenly I could contain my anger no longer and it boiled over. “I abandon the argument. Your political and social ideas have the fascination of the horrible as far as I’m concerned. And the horrible loses its fascination very quickly.”

What Peter said had convinced me that if he wasn’t a Nazi intellectual he had missed his calling. I stood up with a vague notion of walking out of the house, but the thought of Ruth held me. She was coming there to-night and evidently didn’t know what kind of family she was walking into.

Peter stood up and said, “Come now, Dr. Branch, you must learn to be a better loser. We must have no hard feelings over a small argument of purely academic interest.”

I bit back my anger and said, “I suppose I did fly off the handle. I must be getting the professorial habit of resenting contradiction.”

Dr. Schneider produced an artificial laugh which bounced twice against the roof of his mouth and fell flat.

“Not contradiction, sir. Merely disagreement,” Peter said. “We are probably using different words to mean the same thing.”

I let even that pass.

Dr. Schneider got out of his chair and said, “It’s some time before we’re due at the station, Dr. Branch. Would you care to look over my house?”

I said I would and Peter excused himself. A moment later I heard his light feet go up the stairs two or three at a time. His father showed me the library with its shelf of first editions, the copper-screened back porch overlooking the lights of Arbana, the small, warm conservatory opening off the porch, and even the utility room where the furnace sat drinking oil and glowing contentedly. Dr. Schneider became quite amiable again after Peter left us, and he waxed lyrical over his radiant heating system which kept the floors warm enough to sleep on all winter. He seemed to love his house better than he loved his son.

I listened enough to answer when I had to, but material possessions bore me, especially when they belong to other people. I pricked up my ears, though, when he offered to show me the salle d’armes. A special room for fencing seemed incongruous in the house of a man of Dr. Schneider’s age and weight.

“I’m rather interested in fencing,” I said. “Do you fence?”

“When I was a student, I indulged in some sabre-play.” He touched his left cheek, which was seamed with scars. “But I have not fenced for thirty years. Peter is a considerable fencer, I believe.”

“Really? I did some intercollegiate fencing when I went to college, but I’ve never competed with the sabre. We used foils and epee, with masks, of course. I’ve got no scars to show for it.”

“Our sabre-fencing at Heidelberg was a crude and bloody business,” Dr. Schneider said with an emotion that surprised me. We moved out of the utility room under the staircase into the central hall, and I noticed Peter coming down the stairs. “Since my Heidelberg experiences I must confess I have detested fencing, and especially the sabre. It is a butcher’s implement.”

Peter was at the foot of the stairs now, and he stood there listening.

“If that’s the way you feel,” I said, “it’s surprising that you have a fencing salle in your house.”

“It was part of the house when I bought it, and I left it as it was. Peter sometimes uses it when he is here, and, of course, it lends a certain touch to the house.”

“The manorial touch,” I said. “Your establishment is on a feudal scale, Dr. Schneider. I’d like to see your fencing room.”

As we went down the hall, Peter joined us and said, “My father has been maligning the sabre, Dr. Branch. It is the most beautiful of weapons, and the most difficult.”

“The Italian sabre has its points, certainly. I’ve played around with it but I never really learned it.”

We went on discussing the sabre as we entered the salle d’armes, but after Dr. Schneider switched on the light my mind wasn’t on what I was saying. It was wondering where Peter Schneider had picked up the smudge of lipstick on his cheek. I hadn’t seen it there before he went upstairs, and Frau Shantz, the middle-aged housekeeper, didn’t look as if she used lipstick or as if Peter Schneider could conceivably kiss her.

Dr. Schneider pointed at a row of long, narrow cases on a table at the end of the room and said, “There are the foils, Dr. Branch, if you are interested.”

When I went to look at them, Dr. Schneider spoke in an angry whisper which I couldn’t catch. When I turned around, the lipstick had disappeared from Peter’s cheek and he was casually tucking a handkerchief into his breast pocket.

“I’m afraid it’s the least interesting room in the house,” Dr. Schneider said.

“On the contrary. It brings back very pleasant memories, probably because I won a round-robin once and this recalls the scene of my former triumph. It was the only thing I ever got a letter for in school.”

To anyone but a fencer the room would have been less interesting than an average hotel room with nobody living in it. It was a large, square, empty room on a rear corner of the house, with tall windows on two sides. There were crossed sabres over the door, and a few wire masks and pads hung on the white plaster walls. A corrugated rubber mat ran across the exact center of the room.

But the black rubber mat and the faint memory of old sweat along the walls excited me for a minute. I took a foil out of its case and moved it in the air.

Peter stood beside his father watching me. I looked at him and his mouth moved into a smile like soft rubber, but under the rosy flesh the strong and passionate bones of his skull were fixed in a durable, clenched grin. His blonde hair looked senescent in the white light.

“Would you care to play with the foils a little, Dr. Branch, since you do not affect the sabre?”

“I’d like to,” I said, “if you’ll be forebearing. I’m years out of practice.”

Peter clicked his heels and bowed and started to take off his coat. I started to take off mine.

“I’m sorry to interfere with your sport,” Dr. Schneider said, “but there’s hardly time, I’m afraid.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s not eight-thirty,” I said.

Peter spoke to his father in low, intense German. He must have thought that I didn’t know enough colloquial German to understand him, because what he said was, “Hold thy noise, thou doddering fool.”

Dr. Schneider said nothing, but he turned green like old bronze. He turned and walked stiffly out of the room.

“We’d better skip it,” I said. “Your father seems to object.”

“Of course not. There is plenty of time. My father is a wet blanket. Do you care to select a foil and a mask?”

“If you wish.”

We put on masks, faced each other on the rubber mat, and saluted with our foils. The blunt, harmless blades crossed and disengaged. He lunged and I parried and lunged. He moved away very quickly and parried and lunged.

If you have once learned to swim, your muscles never forget what to do in the water. Though I had not fenced for years, my muscles remembered the parries and ripostes that had been trained into them. My footwork was slow but the foil lightly held in my fingers followed their direction like an extension of my hand. I touched Peter three times while he touched me twice.

He laid down his foil and took off his mask and I took off mine.

“You are quite an expert fencer, Dr. Branch.” He spoke with what used to be called old-world courtesy before the old world lost its manners. But his fair skin was strained tight over the bones of his face.

“Hardly,” I said. “I’ve probably spent more time with the foils than you have.”

“No doubt you have. The sabre is my weapon. The foil is a pretty toy but the sabre is an instrument of war.”

He moved quickly to the doorway and took down the two sabres from over the door. He thrust the hilt of one towards me and said, “Just feel it, Dr. Branch, the weight and balance and versatility.”

While he stood opposite me on the mat and made his sabre whistle in the air, I looked at the one he had given me. It was not an Italian fencing-sabre with truncated point and blunted cutting-edge. It was a cavalry sabre, heavy and long, pointed like a pen and sharp enough to cut bread or throats. It was an instrument of war, all right.

Peter said, “On guard,” and I looked up to see him giving me the fencer’s salute with the other sabre. His blade whirled in the air and leveled out towards my bare head. Fear came down on me like a cold shower but there was exhilaration in it, too. My blade sprang up almost without my willing it to keep my skull from being split, and I parried the cut.

The sabres crossed and arced in the air. He struck at my head again and I riposted and tried to kill him by sinking my blade in his neck. He parried very easily and smiled at me. He struck at my head and I parried. A drop of sweat ran down my forehead and tickled the end of my nose. I was sweating with exertion and with the terror of death. The movements of my raised arm began to feel laborious and remote.

Two well-matched men can carry on unbroken play with sabres for minutes at a time, but we were not well matched. After the first few strokes, I could hardly meet his descending sword. My weapon became a burden too heavy to hold and the flashing metal dazzled my eyes.

He forced me back steadily towards the wall, his sabre falling like steady hammer-blows. The sweat ran into my eyes and clouded my glasses. Through them I saw the skull-grin shining in his face like a sign of death. My left heel struck hard against the wainscoting and ended my retreat. He struck at my head and I parried and he changed his tactics and thrust at my throat.

My nerve broke down and I forgot about everything but saving my neck. I dropped my sabre and moved sideways along the wall and his point crunched into the plaster. I started running across the bare room and his sabre came between my legs and tripped me. I went down hard on the concrete floor and my glasses fell off and smashed in front of my face. The back of my neck tingled for the final blow.

No blow came, and Peter’s footsteps went past me towards the doorway in the second that I lay breathless. I raised my head and looked towards the door. My eyes were dimmed and stinging with salt sweat, but between his moving legs I thought I saw a woman in the dark hall outside the open door. She was shaking her head from side to side, so violently that her loose hair fell across her face.

Before Peter closed the door behind him, I saw enough to make me think that Ruth Esch was standing there waiting for him. Then I thought that there were shadows in the hall, that Ruth had been in my mind for hours, that my imagination was wild with fear and anger, and I half-doubted what I had seen.

I was suddenly conscious of my position, crouched on my hands and knees like a beaten dog, and I stood up. I picked up the broken pieces of my glasses and wrapped them in a handkerchief and put them in my pocket. The knob of the door turned quietly and I picked up the sabre I had dropped and stood facing the door as it opened.

Dr. Schneider was standing in the doorway wearing a topcoat and holding his Homburg in his hand. He showed his false teeth in a smile under his moustache and said, “I hope you enjoyed your exercise, Dr. Branch. I can see that you are a true swordsman. You hate to relinquish a sabre even for a lady’s sake. But I’m afraid we must go now if we are to meet the train with any time to spare.”

“Isn’t Ruth here now?” I blurted.

“Why, no, it’s only twenty to nine. I thought you understood that we were to go together and meet her.”

“Of course,” I said, and laid the sabre on the table. The last fifteen minutes seemed unreal to me already. I was not sure what was real and what was imaginary. The only thing I knew for certain was that I had felt panic and had made a fool of myself.

I said, “Let’s go.”

There was nobody in the hall and I said, “Where’s Peter?”

“He asked me to excuse him to you. He suffers from migraine and the unaccustomed exercise brought on an attack. He has gone to his room.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. Will you give him a message?”

“Of course,” he said as he let us out the front door. “What message do you wish me to give him?”

“Tell him that the épée is an instrument of war as well as the sabre, and that I know the use of the épée. Tell him that I’d be very glad to instruct him in its use.”

“You are very kind, Dr. Branch. I’ll be sure to tell Peter.” He smiled with the deep irony I had seen in his smile before and left me at the door to get his car out of the built-in garage at the side of the house.

It was dark night now, and the stars were brilliant among the tall trees. The black Packard rolled up to the door like a gliding house, and Dr. Schneider got out and opened the right-hand door for me. I got in and he shut it behind me. He moved around the front of the car like a clumsy black bear in the headlights, and slid behind the wheel.

He shifted gears and we moved down the driveway in a cavern of elms.

I hadn’t heard the door on his side close, and I said, “your door’s open.”

He said, “Oh, thank you,” and banged the door, but when the car turned right into the road his door swung open a little and I saw that he was holding it with his hand. The beginning of a new, bewildered panic squirmed in my chest but I said nothing for fear of making a fool of myself again.

The car picked up speed as we approached the curve where the road dipped down the side of the escarpment. I saw the headlights glare on the white posts of the guard fence and the scrubby bushes on the other side. The headlights swept dark space beyond the head of the cliff, as black and empty as the space between burnt-out stars.

My hand found the inside handle of the door on my side and I tried to pull it up. Then I put my weight on it to push it down. It wouldn’t move. I looked at Schneider and he was staring straight ahead. The car was doing about forty and was heading for the guard fence.

His hand on the wheel jerked down and the car swerved to the right. I yelled, “Brakes!” but it was too late. The car crashed through the fence and plunged into the bushes towards the edge of the cliff.

Schneider cried, “Jump!” and tumbled sideways off the seat. His door swung open under his weight but I hadn’t time to reach it. The big car was tearing through the bushes like a half-track.

I knew I couldn’t find the brake with my feet in time to stop it, so I wrestled the wheel with my left hand and reached for the brake with my right. The car veered and bucked and came to a halt at an angle.

I got out on the driver’s side and looked at it. One wheel was over the edge and the car seemed to tremble there like a balance on a knife-blade. Its headlights stared blindly out into the empty darkness like a stupid animal. I was angry and elated at the same time, and I put my shoulder against the front fender and heaved.

The Packard rolled over the edge of the cliff and I listened to hear it strike. For three seconds it was as if the two tons of metal had dissolved in air, and then I heard the rending crash of its fall into the shallow creek at the foot of the cliff. For two more seconds I listened to the water it had splashed up falling like heavy rain into the stream.

I felt better now. Schneider had tried to kill me and though I probably couldn’t prove it, I had given him an accident that he’d have to report to the police. And they weren’t making Packards for civilians any more. After five years of sedentary life broken only by hunting and hand-ball and an unsatisfactory duel with sabres, it felt good to push a valuable automobile over a cliff with a clear conscience.

I heard scramblings in the low bushes behind me and I turned quickly with my fists clenched. I could see Dr. Schneider’s shadowy bulk coming towards me in the darkness.

“I’m sorry that I was unable to save your car, Dr. Schneider–”

“But thank God you are safe, my dear boy–”

“And don’t come any nearer,” I said, “or I’ll be tempted to throw you down after it.”

“What is that? What do you mean?” But he stood still.

A light went on in the front windows of the house across the road and a moment later the porch-light went on. A man came out the front door in a dressing-gown and trotted across the lawn towards us.

I said to Schneider, “Figure it out for yourself,” and walked around him to the road.

The man in the dressing-gown came running up to me and said, “What happened?”

I said, “We’ve had an accident. That gentleman’s car went off the road and over the cliff.”

“Good Lord! Did anybody go over in it?”

“No,” I said. “May I use your phone?”

“Of course, certainly. In the front hall. The door’s open.”

He turned to question Schneider, who had limped diffidently up to the road, and I ran across the lawn to the house and called a taxi.

I went down the road and met the taxi at the foot of the hill. When I got into the front seat beside the driver, the clock on the dash said five to nine. The train from Detroit was just pulling in when we reached the station. Ruth Esch did not come on that train and nobody I knew was at the station to meet her.