“In English then,” he said, and laughed so briefly that the sound was gone almost as soon as recognized. He stretched himself, leaning back in his chair to have her the more securely in view. “Do you think even the English do not tire at last? There are some who are tired already of harboring you. They make little noise yet, but the time will come when you will hear it, even in this very nice comfortable place.”
No protests came to her lips, because there was no use in them. She turned her back and went away from him, carrying dirty dishes into the scullery, as if he did not exist, or only as precisely the same rather lumpish and harmless young man he had been five minutes before. Behind her he said, a little more sharply for her apparent calm, but still with a shy, subtle quietness: “You hear already, but a Jew crawls away only when he must. Even when you kick him out at the door he creeps in by the window again.”
She closed the door between them, and began to fill the sink, as if nothing in the world had happened; her heart in her breast was like a white-hot stone, heavy, dragging her body down into a dark place she did not know, but she began to whisk soap powder into the water, to slide the knives into it, and clatter them out again on to the draining-board.
Presently he brought his dishes in to her there, the door opening almost apologetically as on his first day, and his big, fair body coming in sidelong. She felt him there, though she did not turn her head, and all she saw was his hands as he put down the plate and cup on the table at her right hand. Then, as he was going, he touched her; his fingertips, first so softly that the contact was hardly perceptible, then with a sly, savoring firmness, in the soft flesh of her back, drawing lines, drawing a subtle shape there on her body.
“Even in this nice country,” he whispered, with a stupid little giggling breath of excitement and pleasure in her ear, “you will wear here, some day, a yellow star.”
He was gone, even a little hastily in the end, shutting the door loudly over her motionless silence. She stood there at the sink staring at her raised hands with a slight, concentrating frown, while the lather dried on them in little iridescent bubbles with the smallest of moist, bright sounds. She seemed to be contemplating some domestic complication such as the next week’s grocery order. What she was actually seeing was a long, dark earth corridor, and six people walking down it, father, mother, Walter, Hans, Frieda, Josef; and at the end of it a crematorium trolley, into which, one by one, they quietly climbed and vanished.
II—The Place
One
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The farms at Comerford, cheek by jowl with the collieries, lay round the rim of a misshapen bowl which circled a bend of the River Comer. Over all the high ground sheep-pasture jostled with the waste tips and shafts of the mines, and the relics of old forest filled every cranny of the hills still left to them. But the greatest acreage on these levels belonged to new and fantastic forest, which had eaten at the pastures until almost sixty percent was absorbed. The pits had begun to dump here a hundred and fifty years ago from great numbers of sudden, shallow shafts; and having created about itself queer mud-pie shapes of clay, each shaft finally failed and was abandoned, the area being thereupon left for the wind to plant again, and the seasons to reclaim. On the better places a wild, deep, elastic grass grew, then heather, then the unconquerable silver birches which came from nowhere, by fragile-seeming colonies, to seed and flourish upon starvation. The casing of the shafts fell in, their perfunctory wooden surrounds disintegrated or were impounded in bad winters for firewood, and there remained, quite simply, a series of highly dangerous holes in the ground, which were nobody’s business. Presently about these death-traps the high woodlands thickened with bramble and heather and bilberries, and made soil enough for other trees to feed there; and a few more enterprising landowners, like Selwyn Blunden of the Harrow, covered the barren places with young plantations, and turned parts of them into preserves, since they would raise no other crop. So from forest Comerford circled round again to forest, but these woods had the bizarre outlines of the high places of Assyria, instead of the suave folded lines of the primeval England.
Slithering inward from the cooler winds, the village coiled itself inside the bowl, three convoluted streets, so involved that one could nowhere see more than fifty yards ahead, and a maze of footpaths kept clear by the obstinacy of the inhabitants, who used them on principle even when they proved to be the longest way home. And downward still from the village went the rich, sheltered fields of the lower farms, greening, greening into the black prolific water-meadows, and the serpentine curves and bright calm pool of the Comer.
The main road, winding up the valley, made the passage of the village perforce, for as yet there was no bypass to spare motorists the convolutions of the Comerford street. The railway was just over the coal-rim and out of sight, with the local station nestling a lane’s length from the last wood of the Harrow preserves.
On the rim the opencast unit camped like a giant circus, leisurely stripping up the more naked of the clay hills, under which the coal seams ran obliquely toward the Harrow; and on this sacred land, too, the Coal Board had designs, so that the contractor and his men sat and looked with shining eyes at the fat wooded lands, and the heathery open levels extending from the edge of their present site round to the skyline above the river. Old Blunden had shrugged his shoulders over the hectic changes in the landscape, in the social pattern of England and Comerford, even in the day-to-day business of farming, and had seemed to accept the necessity of adjusting himself to all these things; but he was human, and when the encroaching finger of change tried to creep over his own boundaries he stopped being quite so philosophical about it.
The odds were that if the fight went against him he would pay up and look big, for he had always been a sporting old chap; but he would see to it that there was a fight first. His appeal was a massive responsibility, for he was one of the powers in the district still, for all his virtual retirement. The farm might be nominally his son’s responsibility now, even his son’s property, but their voices in this matter were one voice, and that was the old man’s.
Meantime, the large, leather-coated, weather-beaten Gypsies and their monstrous machines went on methodically building new mountains and gouging out new valleys, and the dark topsoil, neatly isolated, began to grow a fresh young grass even in the autumn, in the first decline of the beautiful year. And for the time being this edge of Comerford looked like a stretch of the baked clay deserts of Sinkiang. People who had never turned a hair about the open shafts in the woods were never tired of lamenting this temporary devastation. Even the more thoughtful residents looked forward to the day when the lie of coal would be exhausted, and the site would be folded level and bare again to heal slowly in the soothing flow of seasons. Only the little boys, exulting in strange friendly men and the pleasures of change, collected new grotesque tractors and grabs and loaders as they had formerly collected cigarette packets and stamps, and gravitated to the site on their way home from school as dogs to a bone. Just as the twentieth-century nomads, the new navigators, gravitated inevitably to the pubs of Comerford in the darkening evenings, and boiled among the regulars like an incompatible ingredient in some chemical mixture, with larger bodies, louder voices and different accents, a race of good-humored giants left over from the primitive world.
The Shock of Hay was the largest pub in the village, snug under the shadow of the church tower, with the trim oval green drawn around it like a nicely arranged skirt about a demure woman posing for her portrait. It had a creaking picture-sign so faded that it might have been anything, and a large stable-yard from the heyday of horses,
