INDIFFERENT HEROES

by MARY HOCKING

  Hers was the peasant’s hatred of the stranger; the deep, instinctive awareness that in any exchange he will be the loser. Probably there were other people like her in this small town; people whose passions were rooted in something older than the idea of country.

  I am a stranger, he thought. How safe am I? He wanted to survive. He feared capture. His nerve was good when playing the game of suspense; under physical pressure, he would crack. There were German soldiers in the town, but the Allied armies were getting nearer. Soon he would be safe. Why, then, must he do something so foolhardy on this day?

  When he had fed the chicken, he did not return to the house. Instead, he walked across the track, and pushed open the door of the Jews’ house. It smelt of damp and dust. Had he expected something more, a smell of putrefaction, the charnel house? He went slowly up the stairs. There was a smell on the landing, oily, perfumed, which triggered memory. He stood sniffing, moving his head from side to side, but could not catch it again. The memory was vivid though: Katia, standing outside a cinema, on an April day. It was his own reactions he remembered, his envy of her vitality. About Katia herself, he had forgotten more than he had ever known. The slovenly schoolgirl with the crude make-up and the tight-fitting, shabby clothes was no part of his vision. In his mind he saw her as a mature woman, magnificently endowed with sexual energy. Which she might have become – or might not.

  Yes, he thought. I am approaching understanding. He walked from room to room, hoping for what? For stone walls to cry out, to make the inexplicable surrender to his reason? He found bird, droppings, dead mice; a table, a few broken chairs; no personal possessions.

  And yet, surely he was nearer to Katia than he had ever been, standing in this place from which Jews had been taken? They must have heard the soldiers coming. He could get that far in understanding. He knew about the steps that fall regularly through all our nightmares, which cause us to wake in terror, or rouse us to take charge of our dreaming so that the unthinkable never happens. He recalled a waking moment, in a shop doorway. It was a rule that no pupils should leave the school during break period. He and his friend had gone out to get cigarettes, and on their way back had seen a master walking down the street. They had dodged into the doorway of a gents’ outfitters. As he heard the footsteps coming nearer, he had experienced a moment of sheer terror which had nothing to do with any punishment likely to be meted out at school. The master, at that moment, was the archetype of the irrational terror which forever stalks abroad; if one gets in his path, the civilized façade will give way to the dark reality that lies beyond. On that occasion, the archetype had passed by.

  Yes, he was near to knowing. It was the Jewishness which prevented him from completely entering into her fate; a thousand years and more of being a stranger in every land on the face of the earth.

  In the downstairs room, there was a cat with a litter of kittens. There were no books, no pictures, nothing to give a clue to identity. Only on the wall, near the ground, some words had been scrawled. He studied them with that vicarious thrill of horror, never entirely free from self-indulgence, which the gruesome can arouse. Not French, perhaps not words at all? What did they signify, these hieroglyphics? Praise of God, fear of Death? A game? Why on the wall? So that it might outlast them? Or had someone come in afterwards – a child, perhaps, leaving this proof of daring?

  The kittens were rubbing round his legs, screeching and clawing. Starving, probably. He shrank from them, but they persisted. Their tiny heads seemed hung at an odd angle from their sticklike bodies, giving the appearance of deformity. Their mother watched, crouched in the corner, a skeleton creature too exhausted to meet the needs of her young. She opened her mouth in faint entreaty. It was most unpleasant. He felt tempted to take them all out and drown them, to put an end to their discomfort and his own. But when he bent down, he found he was afraid to touch these wriggling bundles of bone.

  Suddenly, he was aware that someone was coming along the track. He went to the window and saw an SS officer. It was too late to get out. The worst possible mistake is to be seen retreating; however dangerous the situation, it is wiser to stand one’s ground. But it would be bad to be found here. No one came to this house, and the Germans knew it and knew why. What could he say to explain himself? Would it serve to take a risk, to say, ‘I was curious. I have never been in the house of a Jew. I wondered if it would be different . . .’

  The steps came nearer. This time it was going to happen; he would not wake, and the footsteps would not pass on. For one moment, it was as though all life ceased, and he was suspended out of time. Then the shadow fell across the doorway. It was a big, blond man with a full mouth and bright, dancing eyes. Angus knew of him. He had a reputation for cruelty. Prisoners had died under this man’s hand, women among them. He said, ‘What are you doing here?’

  Angus replied conversationally, but with the requisite hint of subservience in the pitch of his voice, ‘It was the cat. She was having kittens; today I noticed she had had them. So, I followed her . . .’ He pointed, wondering as he did so if he would have used another human being as a diversion as readily as he used the cat.

  The man looked down. The kittens were already fawning about him, opening their hideous pink mouths. Angus stood in the shadows, watching while the boot which could crush to a pulp toed one of the kittens. Shall I, Angus taunted himself, at the first downward thrust of that heel, spring forward and rid the earth of this creature while he is engrossed by the prospect of brutality? The man bent down and prodded the kitten in the stomach; it curled around his finger in a furry ball. The mother came towards him, mewing desperately. Angus remained still; as always, the onlooker. The man put out his other hand and stroked the head of the mother. ‘There, there!’ he said reassuringly. ‘Such a good little mother! But so thin!’

  Angus said, ‘I was going to drown them. They’ll die anyway.’

  ‘Ach, no, no! Think of all the effort she has made to keep them alive. I will get milk for them. I am on my way to the farm, anyway.’

  Angus and the SS officer walked out of the house together. Angus accompanied him down the track to the farm until he reached the chicken coop, where he made an excuse that he must feed the chicken. He watched the German walk away. The sun still shone on the wet grass and a few birds were singing. The cat and her kittens would survive: the indecipherable writing remain on the wall.

  And he must go. He sensed that this place was no longer safe for him.

  A sharp November evening; the grass already coated with hoar¬frost and cold air rasping in the throat. Judith and Austin had had several walks together in recent months. In spite of his lame leg – or perhaps because of it – he was a resolute walker. ‘The next best exercise to rugger,’ he had told her. Although it had crippled him, his devotion to rugger was absolute. On this particular day, they had walked further than usual and it was dark by the time they came to the field footpath which led to his village. Judith glowed with that sense of virtue which comes from winter exercise, of having challenged cold and disinclination and come through triumphant. For Louise, lonely and frustrated without Guy, wartime Sussex had been a place under siege, hemmed in by dark hills and barbed wire. Judith would remember the vast expanse of the night sky shimmering with stars; there would never be such skies again once the war was over. ‘Look at that!’ she exclaimed, seeing the brilliant flash in the sky. A split second later, there was an earthbound roar, and she and Austin were lying face down in the field, while echoes rumbled all around them.

  ‘It must be the thing Louise wrote about,’ she said, raising her head cautiously and peering through the wet grass. ‘They say it’s gas mains – but gas mains can’t be blowing up all over the country, can they?’

  ‘Something has gone up in the village.’ He pointed to a cottage, flames streaming from its thatch, eerily resembling a cartoon figure with hair on fire.

  It was, in fact, an adjacent barn which had been fired, but by the time Austin and Judith reached the scene, t
he fire had a hold on the cottage thatch. In the field beyond, a torn tree marked the crater where the weapon had come to earth. It stood up-ended, its chalky roots spraying out, as grotesquely indecent as an old woman dragged precipitately from her bed. The elderly couple who lived in the cottage were huddled, dazed, in their small garden, while neighbours handed out what furniture and prized possessions could be extricated. Judith and Austin hurried into the cottage.

  Here, they were greeted by a man who had appointed himself director of removals. ‘Two more pairs of hands and we’ll have that settee out. Not you. Momma, sit down!’ He was greatly excited and kept up a barrage of encouragement, interspersed with catchphrases from BBC shows which were not always appropriate. ‘Make way, make way for the lady with the china dog. After you, Claude!’ . . . ‘The glass decanter? I don’t mind if I do, sir!’

  The room pulsed with rosy light which gave a Wagnerian intensity to the activities of the removers. At any moment, the music of Götterdämmerung might rise above the roar of flames and the director’s inanities.

  Judith and Austin took hold of one end of the settee. As soon as they did this, however, the man who had been tugging at the other end desisted. ‘Why, Austin Marriott! I have been trying to get hold of you for days. I’ve been going through those letters of my father’s . . .’ He was dressed in a velvet smoking jacket – the explosion had probably interrupted his perusal of the letters. The flickering light reflected in his pince-nez and gave to his thin, scholarly face a look of mild insanity.

  Austin said, ‘Suppose we get this settee out?’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ He strained ineffectively. ‘I was once told that it is possible to lift a heavy piece of furniture with two fingers, if leverage is applied in the right place. Now, where, I wonder . . .’ Judith went to his assistance.

  The director shouted, ‘Make way, make way for the lady and gents with the settee. After you, Cecil!’

  The stairwell was now a smoking chimney. As they struggled, half-blinded, to get the settee through the narrow doorway, Judith’s helpmate said, ‘He is quite affectionate about Lloyd George; whereas you will recall that in the essays he has nothing good to say of him.’ One leg came off the settee and this enabled them to manoeuvre it out into the open.

  Austin said to Judith, ‘This is Harry Makepiece.’

  Harry Makepiece shook hands with Judith, then, excusing himself, he darted back to the cottage and returned with the leg of the settee. ‘You might like to have a glance at them. There are some amusing anecdotes . . .’

  An Air Raid Warden came running up the garden, arms thrashing like a veritable Don Quixote. ‘Get that stuff out of the way! The firemen can’t get through.’

  ‘But, my dear chap, where are we to put it?’

  ‘I am not your dear chap, Mr Makepiece, I am an Air Raid Warden.’ He inflated as he made this announcement, standing on tip-toe as if about to levitate.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know perfectly well who you are, my dear . . .’

  ‘You take your instructions from me, see.’ He danced from one foot to the other. ‘Put it out in the lane.’

  ‘Then we shall block the lane. But if that is the way you want it . . .’

  ‘Yes, that is the way I want it. I know more about this than you, even if I didn’t go to Eton. Put it out in the lane. How do you think the firemen are going to get through, you silly old sod.’ He whirled into the cottage, where he engaged in furious debate with the director of removals.

  ‘How extraordinary these people are!’ Mr Makepiece wiped smuts from his pince-nez. ‘I have lived here for twenty-five years and all that time he has been harbouring the suspicion that I went to Eton.’ He spat on the glass and rubbed vigorously. ‘Eton, indeed!’

  Firemen came stumbling through the cluttered garden, their hose falling foul of chairs and china cupboards, which seemed to arouse the old couple from their stupefaction – a broken cup being so much more within one’s capacity for grief than the loss of a home. There was a disorganized attempt to clear the area around the burning cottage. Austin and Judith, salvaging china, lost contact with Harry Makepiece.

  ‘What an interesting life you must have!’ Judith said, piling willow-pattern plates on one of the cushions from the settee.

  ‘Well now, I am glad you have said that.’ He added a Toby jug to her collection. ‘Because I had been intending to ask you to share it.’

  ‘I’m not used to your sort of person.’ She stood by the sundial, embracing her bundle, and feeling like a peasant victim of aristocratic assumption. ‘Where am I to put this down?’

  ‘No one is used to Harry Makepiece. I should think over there, under the hedge, wouldn’t you? Much better than blocking the lane.’ He guided her through trampled shrubs and rows of squashed cabbages. ‘You mustn’t take writers seriously. Their books are life to them. Literature is all they know about – when they talk shop, you should see it as their equivalent of women exchanging recipes.’ Burning straw drifted on the night breeze and Judith smelt her hair singeing. Austin put out the spark with his hand.

  She laid her load down gently, just as a ceiling caved in, rendering up its burden with an agonizing crack of timber. The fire fanned out to claim new territory. Austin took off his jacket and put it over Judith’s head to protect her hair. She said fiercely, ‘Women do not spend their time exchanging recipes!’

  ‘Make way there!’ The director, worsted in his battle with the Air Raid Warden, was now taking charge of the clearance of the garden. A couple edged past Judith and Austin carrying the settee piled precariously with rugs, cutlery and silverware. ‘You’re doing splendidly, my dears, you’re . . . wooah! Obstacle to be circumnavigated. Steer her to the port side, madam . . . the port side! Ah well, and they call us a seafaring nation!’

  The warden erupted onto the front path, shouting, ‘Get out, all of you! Get out into the lane.’

  ‘That is what we are doing.’ The director turned to Austin, momentarily shedding the mask of comedy to speak from the heart, ‘Officious little bugger. Can’t control himself, that’s his trouble, I was at school with him. Always getting into a tantrum and wetting himself, even then. His mother was a decent sort, though. Married beneath her.’ He resumed his responsibilities. ‘We’ll have to store this stuff for the old folk. Could you take some of it at your place?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But, which seems more to the point, where are they going?’

  ‘The vicarage. Then they will go to their daughter in Crowborough tomorrow.’ He walked away, singing ‘This is a lovely way to spend an evening’.

  ‘The vicar has them for the night, and I have their effects for the duration,’ Austin said glumly, as a small, burdened procession began to make its way towards his house.

  The helpers, rewarded with tea and stale biscuits, showed a natural inclination to relax and relive the events of the night.

  ‘I said to him, “Now, Vicar, I know you want to help like everyone else; but it’s those two poor souls who really need you now.” I wasn’t having him in there with his two left hands.’

  ‘Well, how much do you reckon we salvaged, then?’

  ‘I was surprised at what they’d got in there, I’ll tell you that! And her always acting as though they hadn’t two-ha’p’orth to rub together!’

  ‘Glass decanter! And both of them teetotal!’

  ‘Her old father never signed no pledge!’

  Judith, an outsider, was hardly noticed. But at one moment, as she dispensed further cups of tea, she was aware that, during a lull in the conversation – no one having further revelations to contribute – more than one person was watching her. When the eyes had made their inventory, they turned to Austin. No judgements were made. These people were not involved, they merely noted with indifference something which was happening outside the framework of their own lives. Judith thought, alarmed, ‘This has gone too far.’ She must have time to think.

  It was now very late and she knew that Austin would insist that she could not bicyc
le back to her lodgings. ‘How are you going to get back?’ she asked a man whom she recognized as a farmer.

  ‘I’ve got my old van. Want a lift?’

  ‘If you can take my bike?’

  ‘No trouble.’

  He was a good-natured man and had promised a lift to a couple who lived at the far end of the village. ‘I’ll drop ’em off and come back for you,’ he said.

  So, when everyone had departed, Judith was left alone with Austin. ‘We must get all this cleared up for you,’ she said, as though addressing an unseen assembly. She began to stack cups and saucers.

  ‘We must indeed,’ he said. ‘So stop fiddling with the crockery.’

  She looked round the room, which seemed full of books now that the people had gone. Stanley had had a lot of books, but nothing to compare with this. ‘You bring your work into the house,’ she said. ‘I should get bored with it.’ If he had been a farmer treading muck, it wouldn’t have worried her.

  ‘I get bored, too,’ Austin said. ‘Do you realize that for every book we publish, I read dozens we don’t accept?’

  ‘I don’t mind about the books, or your reading them.’ She spoke as if his intellectual pursuits were toys left lying about. ‘It’s the people. When I don’t find them boring I shall be overawed by them.’ She screwed up her eyes, thinking of Tolstoy and Gide and others who might be relied upon to create awe.

  ‘Nothing overawes you for long,’ he said drily. ‘But I concede it may cause difficulties.’

  She could visualize the people who would come to this house, sitting here, exchanging literary small talk long into the night, when she wanted to go to bed, dropping names along with cigarette ash. Then there would be the others, people of greater stature, magnificent in their intellectual pride. And she would range among them, like a cat, picking its way amid treasures, tilting china in order to attract attention. Indeed, there would be difficulties!

  He took her hand and drew her down beside him on the couch. ‘The work doesn’t have to come home. This is far enough from London for me to arrange my life in separate compartments which don’t overlap, like a civil servant.’ Stanley had always been earnest; Austin sounded as if he had some difficulty in taking himself seriously. Judith did not know which she found the more irritating. ‘In London, I would be a publisher . . . But what would happen here? It would be a place I escaped to at week-ends. Would you build a life in the village? I expect so. And you would find little jobs for me to do so that I felt included, a part of village life.’