“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.”
He was no comfort. He said the same things to Gerd, and in much the same words. She heard him attentively, fixing her great, black, young, sad eyes on him trustfully, for he was friend as well as shepherd. When he had done, she said: “You may be right. Yet if it could be only one accidentally decent boy, he would do. If I could
“Some there may be,” he said, “but don’t look for them here. The best go back, they want to do something for their own country. What do you expect to find here? There’s so little in any of them except what someone with more will has planted—they’ve got no bones of their own to stand up by.”
“I cannot go on all my life hating,” said Gerd. “I wasn’t made for it.”
Jim turned his dark, massive face toward her and said: “While there’s hateful things going on every day side by side with us, what’s wrong with hating?”
“It’s painful. It deforms one. Perhaps it even kills.”
“Not a chance!” he said with a fiery smile, sultry and sudden like the red of a bonfire breaking through the damp smoldering blanket of sods. “It keeps alive, sometimes. With no other solitary thing to live for, hate can keep you alive.”
“It is not a way in which I can maintain life,” she said, looking at him plaintively; but she was never angry, never condemned his angers, never said things heatedly without considering first if she truly meant them. And therefore, for one who loved her, it was necessary always to listen to her earnestly, and try to make the adjustments which alone could help you to understand her.
“No,” he said, staring at her steadily, “no, I don’t suppose you could.” She did not know, because she thought so little of herself she did not guess, even when he looked at her like that, that he adored her. Why should she suspect it? She was a few years older than he, and looked older still; she was graying, her figure was growing soft and shapeless and middle-aged, and her face had never been striking, even in first youth. “Try, then!” he said, and abruptly turned away. “Have it your own way! If it doesn’t come off—if he’s all I think he might be—there’s always me around to deal with him. But if he turns out to be the usual kind,” said Jim Tugg, “I’ll kill him.”
She did not think anything of that, not because he was given to saying such things, but because everyone says them sooner or later. Her mind had gone too far with the idea to turn back; if she had retreated from her purpose now it would only have been one more ghost close on her heels, like the spectral bastard of the older memories.
So Helmut came. He came lumpishly, defensively, with closed face and warding-off eyes, as if he feared everyone he met might hit him. They received him without fuss or too much favor, like any other hand, lodging him in the attic room over the house end of the stables, and feeding him at their own table. But getting his head out from between his shoulders was a labor for Hercules during the first few days, and tools were needed to prise out a few whispered words. He worked willingly, even anxiously, and looked years younger than his age because he seemed so lost and timorous; but it was true that the actual lines of his face, in their solidity and stillness, did not quite bear out the unformed, grieved questing of his eyes. He seemed so young that Gerd was moved, and the warmth of it came into her heart gratefully, and she believed she had succeeded.
She was not even very unwise. She called him Helmut, because Jim was always Jim, but used it very seldom because it came stiffly to her tongue. Only if she had to use a name for him, that was the name. And on his part there were few words except: “Yes, Mrs. Hollins!” and “No, Mrs. Hollins!” like a dutiful boy new from school. Jim behaved to him with careful but competent coolness, as to an awkward gate-post freshly painted. And in a few days Helmut began to expand to his full size, instead of going about shrunk defensively into himself; and in a few days more, when he had his true height, only an inch below Jim’s, and his great, loose young breadth of shoulder spread for all to see, his gait and all his movements, down to the extending of a hand to accept a plate, acquired a glossy, exultant smoothness, his step an effortless spring, his voice a resonance hitherto unsuspected.
“He comes to himself,” said Gerd, and was pleased, as if the triumph had been hers.
He did come to himself, and with a vengeance. He was late in to his dinner one day, having stayed to finish a repair job on one of the distant fences; and by the time he arrived Hollins was away again, and Jim just leaving. She served Helmut alone. He watched her as she came and went, and his light blue eyes had quite stopped being young and pathetic, and were bright, opaque and interested. They traveled all over her, and enjoyed their sapience. Suddenly in the very same tone in which he had just thanked her for his pudding he said in German: “You like it better here than at home, do you? The English are more long-suffering?”
Her step faltered for only the fraction of a second. She put a cup of coffee at his elbow, and said quite calmly and levelly : “Do not speak German to me. I prefer not to use it.”
“You want to forget it?” he suggested sympathetically, and flashing up at her a quick, cold grimace which was not quite a smile.
“I prefer not to use it. If you speak in it I shall not answer you.”
