of a childhood in which Selwyn Blunden had loomed large and fixed as any eighteenth-century squire.
“Oh, I don’t know! It hasn’t been all one way with him. Just before the war he had a bad patch—not that he ever confided in me, I was still looked upon as a bit of a kid. But I knew he’d had a disastrous spell of trying to run a racing stable. It wasn’t his line of country, and he should have had sense enough to leave it alone. He did, luckily, have sense enough to get out of it in time.” Charles laughed, but affectionately. “A great responsibility, parents! It was after that woman left him, though, that he first began to seem almost old. When I came home he was glad to turn over the farm to me, I think, and sit back and feel tired.”
“Not too tired to continue calling the tune,” said Chad provocatively.
“It would be diplomatic to let him think he called it, in any case. Besides, his tune usually suits me very well.”
“This appeal, for instance?”
“This appeal, for instance! You haven’t made me change my mind, don’t think it.”
They went on amicably enough down the rutted track through the blond grass, toward the spinney gate and the dust-white ribbon of the lane.
“If you did change your mind,” said Chad to himself, “I wonder, I really wonder, which way the tune would be whistled then?”
III—And the Loved One
One
« ^ »
Gerd Hollins went down to the end of the garden in the late September evening, past the small green door in the high wall, which Jim Tugg had painted afresh that afternoon. The screen of the orchard trees separated her from the house and from her husband’s uneasy, questioning eyes, and now there was no living creature within sight or sound of her but the silly, self- important hens, scratching and pecking desultorily in their long runs. They came screeching to meet her when she went in and filled their troughs. She filled her basket with eggs, going from shed to shed, stooping her head under every lintel with the same patient, humble movement, rearing it again as she emerged with the same self-contained and self-dependent pride. But as she was dropping the peg into the last latch, her back turned to the narrow path by which she had come, she stiffened and stood quite still, her fingers frozen in the act, her breath halting for a moment. She heard and knew the step, though he walked on the grass verge to soften it. She had asked Jim to lock the door in the wall when he finished the job, but he must have forgotten. She could scarcely blame him, when the door had never been locked before in his experience.
“You didn’t expect me?” said Helmut, in the soft, pleased voice every inflection of which she knew and hated. “You are not glad to see me? It is ungrateful, when I go to so much trouble to pay you these visits. How would you remember your own language, if it were not for me?”
Gerd let the peg fall into place, and picked up the basket. When she turned to face him, she saw him astride the path, where it closed in hedge to hedge, so that she could not pass him unless he chose to let her. Everything about him was now hideously familiar to her: the heavy spread of his shoulders, the forward jut of his head upon the thick young neck, the blond, waving hair, and the coarser, duller fairness of the face, now fallen a little slack with enjoyment. He had scarcely to speak at all, only to appear, and drink and eat the quiet despair and loathing of her looks; he did not need to have any power to touch or harm her, because he was a reminder of all the harm she had already suffered, all the rough hands which had ever been laid on her.
“I like to spend a few minutes with you,” he said softly. “It is like home again for you, isn’t it? Like home, to see someone look at you again not like these stupid sentimental people—someone who doesn’t weep silly tears over you as a refugee, but sees only a greasy, fat, aging Jewess, a creature to spit on—” He spat at her feet, leisurely, and smiled at her with his blue, pleased eyes. “You Jews, you like to have a grievance, it is bad for you when you cannot whine how you are persecuted. I am something you need—why are you not grateful to me?”
“Why do you come here?” she said, in a very calm and level and unreal voice. “You have been beaten already, more than once. Do you want to be killed for this amusement? Is it worth that much?”
She had never spoken to him like that before; in the whole incredible relationship she had spoken as little as she could, in his enforced presence remaining still and withdrawn, shutting him out from her spirit as well as she might. Now she came suddenly out of her closed space to meet him, and he was stimulated by the new note in her voice, and came closer to her, giggling softly to himself with pleasure. He put out his big right hand, and felt at her arm, digging his fingers into it curiously, probingly, as into a beast.
“You Jews, you think to grow soft and fat on this country now as you did on us. You are like slugs, without bones. You will not take much crushing, when the English learn sense.”
“You had better go,” she said, “if you wish to be safe. You’ve had your fun; be warned, it can’t last forever.”
“Safe? Oh, I know already where your men are, both of them. 1 am quite safe. Presently I will go—when it pleases me—when the smell of Jew is too strong for me.”
“Why do you come here?” she said. “What do you hope to gain? You can’t harm me. We are in England now, not Germany. I am protected from you here.”
“You are not protected,” he said triumphantly, “because you will not claim protection. Why don’t you tell your fool of a husband how I come to torment you? Because you want a quiet life, and still you hope to find one. You don’t want to tell him, or the other one, either, because they will want to kill me if they know, and it will be nothing but trouble for you all, whether they succeed to kill me or fail, only trouble. And then to help them you would have to stand up in court and tell all this for the papers to take down, and they would make a good story with all your sad past in Germany, for people to buy for a penny and read, people who don’t know you, don’t care more for you than I do. You will die before you do that—you have only one kind of courage. So you hope if you keep very quiet and pretend not to hear, not to see me, this bad time will pass, and no trouble for these men of yours, and even for you only a short trouble. No, you don’t go to the law! Not to the law, nor to your husband! It is just a nice secret between you and me, this meeting. I am quite safe from everyone but you. And you are too soft to do anything—too soft even to be angry.”
She looked at him without any expression, and said in the same level tone: “It might be a mistake to rely too much on that.”
Helmut laughed, but looked over his shoulder all the same, and took his hand from her arm, which had all this time refrained from noticing his touch sufficiently to wish to shake it off. He was, for him, very careful now; he
