Fallen Into the Pit

you the answer.”

George gave him a light, and said: “I’m listening.”

“I hated his guts! Who didn’t, that ever had anything to do with him at close quarters? I could have killed him and liked it, I dare say. I did bash him, more than once, and I liked that, too, I liked it a lot. I should have liked to bash him again on the twenty-sixth of September, and I wouldn’t have minded even if it had turned out one bash too many, either. Nothing more probable ever happened. Only this didn’t happen. I never saw him that day, or it likely would have done—but I didn’t see him, and it didn’t happen.”

“What had he done to you?” asked George with deceptive mildness.

“Nothing. He was like a leech creeping round me feet, he loved me the way a leech loves you. Until I hit him the first time. Then he kept out of my way all he could, unless there was half a dozen other fellows close at hand.”

“Then what did you have against him so badly?”

“You know already,” said Jim, looking up under his black brows from cavernous dark eyes. “You’ve been to the house, I saw you come round the orchard to my gate. You know what I had against him.”

“Only the persecution of Mrs. Hollins?”

“Only?” said Jim, and small, rose-colored flames spurted up inside the dark pupils of his eyes, burning out the angry center of his being into a hollow, sultry fire.

“Don’t mistake me! Nothing on your own account?”

The flames subsided. He sat leaning forward easily with his elbows on his knees, and his hard, sinewy forearms tapering down strangely into the lean, grave hands which held the pipe between them, ritually still. He thought about it, and thought with him was leisurely on the rare occasions when he let it come of itself, instead of igniting it like explosive gas while it was still half-formed. He narrowed his eyes against the spiral of smoke, and said: “Yes, maybe there was something on my own account, too, growing out of all the rest. Sergeant, we only just finished a war. I don’t kid myself I won it single-handed, but I had my hand in it all right, and what’s more, I knew what it was in there for. I wanted my war used properly. God damn it, didn’t I have a right to expect it? And every time I looked at that deadly, dirty, arrogant, cringing little spew of a Nazi, and knew him for what he was, I knew we’d won and thrown the whole stakes away again, poured it down the drain. Look, Sergeant, I don’t know what other fellows feel, but me, I didn’t much like Arnhem, I didn’t much like any damn part of the whole dirty business. It’s no fun to me, in the ordinary way, to get another chap’s throat between my hands and squeeze—and the hell of a lot of fun it was picking up the pieces of other chaps I knew who didn’t squeeze hard enough. Well, it made some sense while we thought it was for something. But if the Schaufflers can come squirming out of their holes only a few years later, and spit on Jewish women, and tell ’em they’re marked already for the camps and the furnaces—here in our own country, my God, in the country that’s supposed to have licked ’em—will you tell me, Sergeant Felse, what the hell we tore our guts out for?”

George looked somberly between his boot-heels on the bare wooden floor, and said: “Seems to me someone else, though, was due to collect that particular bash on the head—if everybody had his rights.”

Jim grinned. It was like looking down the shaft of a pit, such improbable dark depths opened in his eyes.

“Ah!” he said, “if we only knew where to deliver it! But Schauffler was here under my feet, something I could get at. I could land off at him with some prospect of connecting. Only I didn’t. Don’t ask me why. I let him alone so long as he let her alone; and if he didn’t, I thrashed him—when I was let, but there were too many of your lads about, half the time. He got a bit more careful after the first mistake, but he only went farther round to work, and kept a bit sharper an eye on me. He couldn’t leave her alone, not even to save his life— after all, torturing people was what he lived on.”

“But after all,” said George, arguing with himself as well as with the shepherd, “he couldn’t actually harm or kill her here.”

“No, he couldn’t kill her, he could only sicken her with living. She had a war, too, and it looked as if all her efforts were gone to hell, same as mine. You ought to try it some time,” said Jim acidly, “it’s a great feeling.”

After these daunting exchanges it was none too easy to get back to straight question and answer, to the small beer of where were you on the evening of Wednesday, September 26th. But he was forthcoming enough.

“I was down at my sister’s place, in the village, until about eight o’clock that evening. Mrs. Jack Harness—you know her. Then I went to the Shock of Hay, and I was in the snug there a goodish time. I don’t remember what time I left, except it was well before closing-time. Maybe about half-past nine, maybe not quite that I dare say Io might have noticed, or Wedderburn, or some of the fellows who were there.” He mentioned several names, indifferently, drawing heavily on the packed clay pipe. “I came home up the back way, over the fields. It’s quicker. Didn’t meet a soul, though; you won’t get no confirmation of my movements once I slipped up the lane by the pub.” He looked once around the clean, hard little room, monastically arid in the slanting light of the evening. “Nor you won’t get no confiding woman here to tell you what time I got in that night. I could tell you, roughly—soon after ten. But I can’t prove it. There’s nobody here but me and the dogs, and they won’t tell much.”

Hearing himself mentioned, the collie thumped the floor with his tail for a moment, and lifted his head to look at his master. He was a one-man dog, nobody existed but Jim. He would gladly have deposed for him if he could.

“Then that’s all you can tell me about this business?” said George.

“That’s all I can tell you, and that’s no better than nothing. I never touched him that night. If I had, I’d tell you—but if I had, he wouldn’t have been stuck in the brook to finish him off. My way’d be no better, maybe—but that ain’t my way.”

George looked at him with blankly thoughtful eyes, and asked: “Would you say it was more a woman’s way?”

Jim straightened from his leaning attitude, not suddenly, not slowly, and came to his feet. The scrubbed deal table in between them, blanched and furry with cleanness, jarred out of line as his hip struck against it; and the startled collie rose, too, and growled from between his knees. He stood staring down at George, and his face had not taken fire, but only glowed darker and more savagely self-contained in shadow, averted from the window.

“What do you mean by that? What woman’s way?”

“Any,” said George. “Do you think they haven’t got the same capabilities as you? But they might not have the same strength, or the same knowledge of how to do that kind of thing. And that’s where the water would come in very handy. Wouldn’t it?” He looked up at the gaunt, weathered face looming over him, and smiled, a little wearily. “Sit down, can’t you! Do you think I found Helmut any more pleasing than you did?”