Fallen Into the Pit

prospect of insinuating herself with shocking news into the middle of the Road Safety Committee’s lecture began to tickle her resilient fancy with suggestions of enviable notoriety. She actually made a spring upon her way, and then looked back and suddenly peeled off her blazer.

“Here, you have this, if you’re staying here in the cold. I shall be warm enough, running. You would come out without a coat of any sort, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, it was quite warm enough then,” said Dominic, startled and recoiling.

“Well, it isn’t now. Don’t be silly, put it on. You look pretty green still.” She thrust it into his arms, and ran, and her white blouse and flying plaits signaled back to him from the rising path until she crossed the crest, and disappeared from view without a glance behind.

Dominic sat where she had left him, hugging the blazer and staring after her. He felt hollow, and queasy and limp, and if he did not actually feel cold, he was nevertheless shivering; and besides, he had given himself inevitably the inactive part which left him nothing to do but think; and thought, at this moment, was no very pleasant employment. He had lived no nearer to this sort of thing than Pussy had, but he knew instinctively rather more of its implications. The first, the worst, shock was that it could happen here; not in someone else’s village, in some other county, but here, less than a hundred yards from where he sat huddled in the grass like a rather draggled bird. Once that had been assimilated, the rest was not so bad. And most potent of all, he had his share of curiosity, too, and curiosity can cure as well as kill.

Something else was in his heart, too, something presumptuous, perhaps, but none the less authentic and strong and full of anxiety. Dominic felt himself to be a piece of his father, accidentally present here ahead of the rest. Every crisis is also an opportunity. And he wanted George to do everything surely and perfectly; he was very fond of George, though he had never bothered to be aware of it. That was the chief reason why he pulled himself up out of the crushed grass, and went back to the hollow of clay behind the well, dragging Pussy’s blazer about his shoulders as he went. And with every step his brand-new, burning zeal to be helpful flamed up a little higher. He needed its warmth badly to take him down the darkening slope, for he felt very empty within, and the air was growing acidly cold, and the silence and loneliness which he had not noticed before hung rather heavily upon his senses now that he had such quiet and yet such unforgettable company.

The light was failing, but it was still sufficient to show him most of what he had seen before. He stepped down to the trodden edges of the water, where the tufts of long grass were powdered with clinging white dust; and climbing out upon the corrugations which the cows had trampled up to bake in the sun, above the small pits of dark, oily, ocherous water, he looked closely and long at the body of Helmut, face downward, composed and straight under the trembling flow of the water.

Pale things at this hour had a lambent light of their own, and the back of the blond head, breaking the surface with a wave of thick fair hair, was the first alien thing he had seen, and fascinated him still. The face he could not see, but the head was just as unmistakable from the back; and the clothes, too, the old Army tunic faded and stripped of its buttons and tabs, the worn gray cord trousers, the soft woolen scarf round his neck, these were familiar enough to identify him. He lay there half-obscured by the cloudy, ocherous quality of the water, which reddened him all over, all but the patch of fair hair. And to Dominic, staring intently with eyes growing bigger and bigger, it seemed, as it had seemed at first, that the arch of skull under the hair was not quite the right shape.

Three

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Pussy sneaked into the chapel schoolroom by the side door, and found the room full of people, and all dauntingly attentive to George, who was in full flood, and doing rather well. Interrupting him was not, after all, quite the picnic she had foreseen; the respectful hush of concentration, real or simulated, shut her firmly into the obscure area off-stage for several minutes before she recovered breath and confidence and a due sense of her own importance. The vicar, as chairman, was firmly ensconced between her and her quarry, and hedged about with cardboard models and miniature working traffic lights, George looked as inaccessible as any lighthouseman from the mainland. But he also looked large, decisive and safe, and she wanted this most desirable of reinforcements to reach Dominic with all speed. She edged forward among the cardboard buses, and became for the first time visible to the audience as she plucked the vicar by the sleeve. The audience stirred and buzzed, deflecting its keenest attention with suspicious readiness; the vicar frowned, and leaned down to her to say: “Hush, little girl! You can ask your questions later.” Pussy recoiled into a cold self-confidence which had needed some such spur as that. She said very firmly: “I must speak to Sergeant Felse at once—it’s urgent!”

“You can’t interrupt now,” said the vicar with equal but more indulgent firmness. “Wait ten minutes more, and the sergeant will be closing his little talk.”

This conversation was conducted in stage whispers, more disturbing by far than firecrackers; and its quality, but not its import, had reached George’s ready ear. He looked round at them, and paused in mid-sentence to ask directly if anything was wrong. The vicar opened his lips to assure him confidently that nothing was, but Pussy craned to show herself beyond his stooping shoulder, and said indignantly: “Yes, Sergeant Felse! Please, you’re wanted at once, it’s very serious. Please come!”

And George came. He handed back the meeting to the vicar with the aplomb and assurance of one presenting him with an extra large Easter offering, slithered between the cardboard showpieces, and in a few minutes was down with Pussy in the wings of the tiny stage, and heading for the quiet outside the door, steering her before him with a hand upon her shoulder until they were out of earshot of the audience.

“Now, then! What’s the matter? Where’ve you left Dom?” For it went without saying that Dom was in the affair somewhere. “He isn’t in trouble, is he?” But the excitement he saw in Pussy was not quite of the kind he would have looked for had any accident happened to Dominic.

“No, Dom’s all right. At least—he was sick; and I nearly was, too, only don’t tell him—and besides, he really looked, and I only half-looked—” She threw off these preliminaries, which were supposed to be perfectly clear to Dominic’s father, in one hopping breath, and then took a few seconds to orientate herself among events, and become coherent. “He’s at the brook, just behind Webster’s well. He said when one found something like that one ought to keep an eye on it until the police came, so he stayed, and I came to get you. We found a man in the water there,” she said explicitly at last. “He’s dead.”

“What?” said George, jolted far past the limit of his expectations.

“It’s that German who had the fight with Jim Tugg—Helmut somefhing-or-other. But he’s quite dead,” said Pussy, large-eyed. “He doesn’t move at all, and he’s right under the water.”

“Sure of all that?” demanded George. “Not just something that might be a man who might be that particular man?”

“I didn’t look who it was, but it was a man, all right. And Dom said it was him.”

“Did you come straight down? Any idea what time it was? Did you hang around up there—before or after