Fallen Into the Pit

with iron hooks; there were seats set into the ingle on either side of the fire, and only the firelight, no daylight, lit their faces here. It was a room looking forward to winter before summer was over the hill; and she was a tired, autumnal woman, content with a retired quietness and a private warmth for the rest of her life. She had seen too much and traveled too far already to have any palate left for wilder pleasures. However, they drank tea together, and blinked at the fire, which she kept rather high for so bright an autumn day.

“I came to ask you about Helmut Schauffler,” said George. “Your husband, too, of course.”

“But it’s a month now since he left us. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can tell you about him since then.” She looked up and met his eyes without a smile, but tranquilly. “You know already all about that affair. It was an experiment that failed, that’s all.”

“I wouldn’t care to say I know all about it,” said George. “I always wondered what made you take him on.”

“Considerations which ought to have kept him out, I suppose. It was my suggestion.” She gave him a long, clear look, as if she wondered how much she could express and he understand. “I am legally an Englishwoman, perhaps, but I am still German. You can’t get rid of your blood. I lived for years by ignoring mine, but you can’t even do that forever. I hoped to be able to reconcile myself with my race through just one man who should prove to be —at any rate, not altogether vile. It sounds romantic, but it was in reality very practical. I was asking for very little, you see, even an occasional impulse of decency would have done—even the most grudging effort to live at honest peace with me. It would have been like recovering a whole country.”

“But it didn’t work out,” said George. “I see!”

“He was what he was. He was satisfied with what he was. You must know it as well as I do by this time.”

“I doubt if anyone knows it as well as you do,” said George, watching her squarely. “Better tell me exactly what did happen to the experiment. It wasn’t so simple, for instance, was it, as if you had been merely an Englishwoman who took a similar chance on him?—or even any other German woman!”

“No,” said Gerd, after a long minute of silence, during which her eyes seemed to him to grow larger, darker and deeper in her still face. “My case was that of a German Jewess, exactly as it would have been in 1933. I think, Sergeant Felse, you have wasted your war!”

“Tell me!” said George. And she told him; from the humble entry of Helmut to the shock of his first expansion, through dozens of similar moments, nightmare moments when she had been left alone with him only by the normal routine of the day, only for seconds at a time, but long enough to look down the dark shaft of his mind into the abyss out of which she had climbed once at terrible cost. “And you think you have changed something, with your war! You think you have drained that pool! It’s only frozen over very thinly. Wait for the first, the very first thaw, and the ice will give like tissue-paper, and you will be swimming for your lives again. And so shall we!” she said, with piercing quietness.

“You didn’t tell your husband anything about this persecution. Why not?”

She told him that, too. He believed her. She was accustomed to containing her own troubles rather than make them greater by spreading them further, like ink through blotting paper.

“But Jim Tugg found out? Or at any rate, suspected!”

“I never told him anything, either, but he is better acquainted than my husband with people like that boy. He often pestered me with questions, and I tried to put him off. But yes, he knew. Knew, or guessed. There was some trouble between them once or twice, and Jim began to try to stay in between us. It was—sometimes—successful. Not always!”

“And the night when he attacked Schauffler in the village? He told us as little as possible to account for it, but it was a determined attack, and my impression is that he’d followed him that evening with a very definite purpose. He meant driving him off this farm at least, if not off the face of the earth.” George watched her eyes, but they met his gaze emptily, looking through him and beyond, with a daunting, dark patience. “What happened to bring that on? Something even worse than usual?”

“Only the last of many scenes like those I’ve described already. But I was tired, and Jim came at the wrong moment, and I said more than I meant. It was a weakness and I was sorry for it. But it was too late then. He went away to find him, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.”

“Did you want to stop him?” asked George simply.

Her look remained fixed, and a little strained. “I would sometimes have been very glad to see Helmut Schauffler dead. Why not admit it? I had every reason to dislike him. But I have never quite reached the point of wanting someone to kill him. There has been more than enough killing. Yes, I would have stopped Jim if I could. But if you know him you certainly know he is not an easy man to stop.”

“And so you got rid of Helmut,” said George, “without much cost to Jim, as it turned out. But your husband must have had more than an inkling of what was going on, by then? He could hardly miss it, after that, could he?”

“There was no longer any need to make a secret of it, when the boy was gone. I told Chris all he needed to know—there was no need to dwell upon details. It was over.”

“Was it?”

She looked at him with the first disquiet she had shown, and raised her head a little warily. “What do you mean?”

“He was still in the village. Didn’t he come near you again? It could happen.”

“After Jim had beaten him like that? Helmut was brave only when he knew the odds were on his side.”

“But very painstaking and persistent in seeking situations where they were on his side. Remember,” he said, “I’ve seen him in action before, on a boy who was probably much less capable of dealing with him than you were, but in similar circumstances. I know how patient and devious he could be in pursuit of amusement.”

“He didn’t trouble me again,” she said firmly.

“He never came here—when you were on your own, for instance?”

“No, I had no more trouble.”