by Ellis Peters
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.”
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.”
