by Ellis Peters
Afterwards he admitted to George that he had some qualms about Helmut. Maybe the difficulties of his position had not been sufficiently appreciated. Maybe England still owed him one more chance; but how was it to be arranged, in order to protect both parties? People must be a little tired of taking risks on Helmut.
“To tell the truth,” said the old man candidly, “I have a horror of doing the young wretch less than justice. Maybe I’m leaning over backwards to avoid it—I don’t know—if he were anything but German it would be easier to discount the feeling. But at any rate, I would like to see him have one more shot before we decide he’s quite irreconcilable.”
“The difficulty,” said George, “is what to do with him. He might have ideas himself, but I very much doubt it. I think he intends to be carried. He’ll work—oh, yes, everyone admits that!—but he won’t take one crumb of responsibility for himself if he can leave the load on us.”
Selwyn Blunden pondered, and stroked his broad brick-red forehead, from which the crisp gray hair had receded into a thick, ebbing wave. He was very like his son Charles; the authentic yeoman flavor, indefinably not quite county, glossed him over healthily and brightly, like a coat of tan. He was between sixty-five and seventy, but he still looked somewhere in the fifties, walking as straight as his son, carrying himself, thought George, rather like a retired general, if generals ever retired in such good condition. He had a beautiful big white moustache, behind which he was accustomed to retire when deep in thought, caressing it meanwhile with a large and well-shaped hand to enlarge the screened area.
“I could say a few words for him in quite a few directions,” he said thoughtfully, uttering no more than the truth, since he probably carried more influence than any other man in the district, “but I want to see him somewhere where he can’t do any more mischief—and not on false pretenses, either—must let ’em know what they’re biting off, whoever’s bold enough to take him on. Wouldn’t bother about him, as a matter of fact, only the fellow’s so young, after all.” He fingered the moustache’s gleaming curves, emerging from its shelter reluctantly. “Tell you what, I think the best bet might be the opencast contractors. Tough company there, all right, tough enough to hold him down, I should think. They’re still taking on men when they can get ’em, I’m told, and everybody admits the boy does at least work.”
“Seems to be his one virtue,” said George.
“Well, no harm in trying, at least. I’ll have a word with the contractor’s man, give him the facts straight, and we’ll see how he feels about it.” He frowned for a moment, and George guessed that he was thinking about the delicate matter of the appeal, still pending, still threatening the effectiveness of the unit’s operations in Comerford. “Hm! Equivocal position, very!” he said cryptically, but shook the embarrassment away from him with a twitch of his big shoulders and a flash of his old, bold blue eyes. Better-looking than Charles, on the whole; sharper-boned, more acid in him. “I’ll have a word with the young fellow, too,” he decided. “Might do more good in private. I don’t know—never been a P.O.W. myself—I dare say it does seem as if we’re all incurably against him.” He shook his head doubtfully, sadly but firmly, and marched away. It was curious that the back view of him undid some of the effect of talking to him face to face. His gait, after all, wasn’t so young; he bowed his shoulders a little, he leaned forward heavily. One was reminded that he was getting old, that he had had his reverses in his time. From behind it was possible to be sorry for the old man; from in front one wouldn’t dare.
When Bunty heard the story, her eyes opened wide, and she laughed, and said: “The cunning old devil!” almost in her son’s tone. “What effrontery!” she said, but with admiration rather than indignation. “He pretends it’s an embarrassing position for him, to have to approach those people when he’s doing his best to keep them off his own ground; but he knows jolly well they’ll jump to do as he asks them all the more eagerly, because they’ll think, if we oblige the old boy over this he can’t very well go on being awkward about the appeal. Maybe that would be their reaction, but it won’t be his. No amount of favors done for him could restrain him from being awkward where his own privilege is concerned, and they ought to have sense enough to know it by now. They’ll find out later!”
“He says he’s abiding by the result, bad or good,” said George, “and I believe he means it. The old chap’s getting a streak of fatalism in his latter years, and honestly, I don’t think he minds as much as he would have done ten years ago. The world’s changing, as he’s never tired of reminding us.”
“He’s fondest of reminding other people of that, though,” said Bunty, grinning. “He might not be so keen on having it pointed out to him.” She added, thoughtfully tossing the probabilities in her mind: “Bet you five bob, evens, Helmut gets taken on!”
George looked scandalized, pulled her hair, and told her she would get him into trouble yet. The truth was, as Bunty maintained, that he was afraid of losing his money. By and large, Blunden was the next thing to God around here.
However, he was absolutely frank with the agent in the little concrete hut office above the gouged-out valleys of the coal-site. The name of Gerd Hollins had not even been mentioned in court, but for all that, the old man had not missed her significance; and the story he told was the full story.
“I’m no racialist myself, thank God! But that boy’s had the principles drummed into him ever since he began school, I suppose, and we can hardly be surprised if he retains ’em still. Telling’s not much use to that kind of fellow. Now if you could surround him with Jews doing the same work, doing it better than he does, and well able to knock him down if he reverts to type—well, to my way of thinking it might be more effective. But that poor, well-meaning lady at the farm has had more trouble, I fancy, than she’s let anyone else know. Tugg has eyes, and a brain. I may be wrong! I may be quite wrong! But I fancy that’s very much what happened. A Jewess is still a Jewess to Helmut, and a Jewess going out of her way to be kind to him was asking to be trampled on.”
“That at least couldn’t happen here,” agreed the agent, watching him respectfully. He was a young, hard, experienced man, but he was not past being flattered; and besides, if the old boy could bring himself to ask favors, even in this fashion, he could be handled, he could be sweetened. Up to this they had had no direct contact, and men can keep up an enmity on paper which won’t survive the personal touch. “If he steps out of line here he’s liable to get hurt; and being that kind of chap, he’ll have gumption enough to size up the odds, and stay in line.”
“I can’t guarantee it, but I think he will. And the one good thing about him, as everyone agrees, is that he will work. Strong as a horse, willing, handy, even, in that way, entirely trustworthy. It’s an odd thing, that, but at any rate it gives one some hope of him. I tell you frankly, he’ll need keeping in his place; but duly kept there, he could be a useful man.”
He could, if he only managed to place the old fellow under a very small, but strongly binding, obligation. Costs on this site had been, to tell the truth, alarmingly high, and though the extended range was a desirable way of bringing them down, if Blundens were going to put all their weight into the appeal and fight every inch of the way, frankly it wasn’t going to be worthwhile pushing the matter. But if this tiny seed of love was going to stay the defending hand, ever so lightly, and let the thing go through in comparative peace, then it was going to be very well worth it. One hypothetically troublesome hand, thought the agent contentedly, was a very small price to pay for that consummation.
“All right!” he said, making his decision. “He can start, if the employment people O.K. it. We’ll make the experiment, at any rate. I take it he’ll want help with getting somewhere to lodge? There might be a vacancy where some of the men are staying. Anyhow, we can see to all that for him.”
He thought: This really ought to be worth a little goodwill. Hope the old boy appreciates it! And it appeared to him by small but gratify
ing signs—for of course one must not expect too much too soon—that the old boy did.
Helmut came, and it appeared that he did too, for a more anxiously accommodating, earnest, subdued young man had never been seen on the site. He had shrunk a little from his full size again, his face was tight shut and gray with reserve, he applied himself grimly to the safe outlet of work, picked up things very quickly, and heaved his weight into the job as if his life depended on it. Perhaps the old man, briefing him for this third onslaught on reconciliation, had succeeded in impressing on him the fact that, indeed, his life did depend on it.
Four
« ^ »
Charles and Chad came down through the silvery woods, between the quivering birches, the intervals of naked whitish clay crunching and powdering softly under their feet after the hot, dry summer. They were still arguing, in much the same terms as they had argued three weeks ago, when this expedition had first been suggested.
“I still don’t see that such poor-quality coal is worth getting at all, at a time when there’s no shortage of deep-mined stuff. The question of how to get it ought not to arise.”
“But it would arise some time—or there’s a long chance it would.”
“Not in my time, or yours,” scoffed Charles, as if that clinched it.
“And that’s all you damn well think about! My God, you sound like something from the nineteenth century! ‘It’ll last our time!’ Is that all that matters?”
The suggestion that anything else ought to matter certainly jolted Charles, but some sensitivity in him recognized at once, against the whole armory of his training, that he ought to resent the implication of his short-sightedness.
“I dare say I do as much thinking a generation ahead as you do, for that matter—”
“So you never put a plough into the ground, or plant a tree, until you’ve calculated whether it’s going to be you or your grandchildren who’s going to get the benefit of it! Leaving clean out of the question anybody else’s grandchildren!”
“You’re a damned sanctimonious prig!” said Charles, and unexpectedly scored a hit. Chad was sometimes horribly afraid that he was. His dark cheeks flushed. But even if it was true, it couldn’t be helped; and what he had said of Charles was certainly no less true.
“Sorry! It’s something you’ve got to decide yourself, I suppose. Do it how you like!” He kicked at the thick blond tussocks of grass, and the trailers of bramble in his path, and moved a little aside from Charles to skirt a place where the rains of many years had made a deep channel, too permanent for even this dry season to obliterate. Aside among the scattered trees and clearings of new saplings, funnel-shaped pits, a dozen yards across and often as deep, punctured the level crest of the mounds. These were so frequent, and so taken for granted, that the infants of Comerford, though reared only a mile from genuine and normal hills, thought it more fitting to have them of waste clay, and pitted with holes.
Charles, strolling moodily with his hands in his pockets, thought: I suppose we do rather tend to talk about uneconomic propositions where we can’t look forward to covering costs inside a very few years. Maybe it is a mistake, at that! Only it seems crazy to have to look thirty years ahead for a thing to pay for itself—even if it saves no end from then on. And even the entertainment of the doubt was new to him, and made him feel like looking guiltily over his shoulder.
“Anyhow,” he said generously, “you were right about the numbers. I didn’t think there were so many shafts—never bothered actually to count ’em.”
“And about the mess they made?” asked Chad, with a fleeting grin.
“Oh, well, I knew they didn’t exactly improve the place. Being brought up in the middle of it, one forgets about it, rather, but the facts were always there to be seen. It didn’t need you to point ’em out.”
“Some of the ground could be put back into use, I’m sure of it. Oh, I know it sounds odd to be recommending surface mining as a method of reclaiming land, but it does happen. There was a piece of the old canal-bed running round one side of a field at Harsham, and they had it all up, and put it back level. Farmer’s got a field double the size now. If it does nothing else, it certainly can iron out the creases, and you must admit you’ve got more than your share of the creases up here.”
“Oh, in that way there isn’t all that much to lose, I suppose. Except that even a rather seedy wood with some sort of growth on it is better than a bare patch. After all, hasn’t this generation got its rights, too, as well as the next? They’ve had their fair share of ugliness, I should have said. Is it so selfish to leave a bit for the future?”
Chad said nothing. They came to the hedge, and the gate in it, and leaned looking down on the undulating slope, and over into the crater where the scored underworld of red-and-yellow machines lay, with its knife-edged deep where the water drained down into a dwindling mud-circled pool. Deep as a quarry in places, with lorry tracks running up the beaten clay mountains, and the larger, cruder marks of tractors patterning the whole surface. A growth of huts lay on the distant rim from them, with the canyon in between made deeper by the blue evening shadows.
“I’m not really so sure,” said Charles, gazing into the depths, “that they’re as keen on going here as they were. They haven’t had much luck lately, and they say the cost per ton is getting rather alarming—I mean alarming even to the people who believe in the method. Naturally the contractor isn’t going to carry the can back if he can help it. Did you know they lost a digger over the edge there the other day? Lord knows how! Sort of accident you get sometimes in stone quarries— probably the driver’s miscalculation, but there’s no knowing. The kid driving was pretty lucky to come out of it alive, but the digger’s a dead loss. Crazy expensive business! The boy’s in hospital, but they say he’ll be all right.”
“I heard about it,” said Chad. “They’ve had quite a run of accidents lately. Must have some pretty deadly mechanics, to judge by the number of tractors they’ve had to send away for major repairs.”
“You hear all about ’em, evidently,” said Charles.
“What my boys don’t know about every piece of machinery down there isn’t worth knowing. We have no train-spotters any more, only tractor-spotters. On the whole I think it’s a safer amusement.”
They moved on, detaching themselves with a countryman’s reluctance from the top bar of the gate. The undulating ground, dryly prolific with brambles and bilberry wires, descended with them on its many and complicated levels, here and there cracking and falling away into new funnels about the bricked-over shafts, more often falling clear into holes, only half-boarded up, and already rotting away within.
“The old man had a lot of these filled,” said Charles, “in 1941, after he lost a calf down one of ’em at the back of the long field. It wasn’t a very good job, because labor was busy on other things, and all they could find time to do was rush round about twice with a tractor, and shove as much clay and stuff down ’em as the machines could move. But they didn’t do the lot, and even those they did do are falling in again. Some of ’em have sagged yards in these few years, and I wouldn’t care to trust any stock around them now. I hand you that much, if it’s any use to you.”
“You don’t need me,” said Chad, surveying the wreckage of land still beautiful. “It speaks for itself. What made your old man suddenly decide to fill the things, just when labor and machinery were nonexistent? Not,” he added frankly, “that that isn’t typical!”
“Oh, I suppose the calf touched it off, turned it into that particular channel; but the fact is he was trying to work himself to death at that time, any way that offered, to take his mind off his troubles. Don’t you remember the business about my stepmother? But I suppose you were walled up somewhere in Europe at the time, it wouldn’t reach as far as that—not even my dad’s troubles carried that far in 1940. She left him, you know—went off with some fellow he didn’t even know existed, and left him a characteristic note saying it had all been a failure and a mi
stake, and he wasn’t to try and find her, because she could never be happy with him. I dare say you heard bits of it afterwards. They still talk about it round the village, when there’s no more recent stink to fill their nostrils.”
“Oh, yes, I did hear something about it, of course. Not very much. But I remember seeing her around, just prewar—she was rather pretty, wasn’t she, and quite young?”
“Not so frightfully, but too young for him. Old man’s folly, and all that. I wasn’t surprised,” said Charles, “when it went smash. Tell you the truth, I never could stand her myself. Stupid, fluffy-brained, self-centered woman—I never could see why it cut him up so. But you know, it wasn’t so much being deserted, it was the way she did it. It was 1940, and the scare was on, and lots of people, especially comfortably-off old-style lads like my father, were talking about getting the women and children out of the country and clearing the decks for action—expecting invasion any minute, and all that. She had quite a lot of property in jewels, and securities and so on—not terribly rich, but it was a good little nest-egg, all told. She went about quietly realizing the lot, turned everything into cash, explaining in confidence to every dealer that the old boy was sending her to the U.S.A. to be safe and off his mind. Her nerves! She was one of those women who have nerves! Well, you can see it made sense, he was just the chap who might do exactly that. Then she disappeared. Just left him this note, saying she was off with her lover— Well, he’s a stiff-necked old devil, and he didn’t try to find her, he let her go, since that was what she wanted. But it knocked him, all the same, especially as the rotten story leaked out gradually, as they always do. That was the first he’d heard of this tale she’d put up. Poor, silly old devil, he was the only one who knew nothing whatever about it! People didn’t talk about it in front of him once they had the rights of it—but how would you feel, having been made to look that kind of a doting fool?”
