Mark’s first waking thought was Lisa’s laughing eyes. ‘This,’ he told himself sternly, ‘will never do. She’s nothing but a healthy peasant girl. I couldn’t think of her seriously and I should be a beast to think of her in any other way. I must think of nothing but my mission.’
It did not occur to Mark that the way Lisa thought of him also mattered. The strictness of his code had never been a problem to him – because hitherto he had never been even slightly attracted by any girl out of his own class. Lisa was just as much without refinement as she was without vulgarity. It was probable that she had never had one single thought in common with Mark. Yet lying there in the chill dawn, under blankets and a duvet that must have come from somewhere while he slept, and feeling as snug as a fieldmouse in its nest, Mark continued to think about Lisa. She was, he knew, wholly preoccupied by the cares of the earth itself – the animals or nearest human beings on it – and probably with less frequency the inhabitants of Heaven. She went to church regularly every Sunday, two thousand feet away, into the nearest mountain hamlet, on skis in the winter, and on foot in the summer. She talked with everyone in the church porch before she went in and after she 72came out. Each of the few families on the mountainside had their own jokes. Some of these they shared with their neighbours – and indeed the jokes were often evoked by their neighbours, and gained an added flavour by arising out of conversation with them. Within the church, Lisa would talk, of much the same natural interests, to God and the saints. The Virgin Mary she accepted as she accepted her mother. She did not always agree with what God and the Virgin Mary wanted from her, but she realized that they meant her well, and could be trusted to stand by her in any difficulty beyond her own power or experience.
Lisa knew exactly what to think of Hitler and the Nazis, because even before the Occupation a handful of Nazis had crossed the border and blown up the Flauerling Church. They had blown it up quite wantonly with dynamite as a mere exercise of derisive power. They were, therefore, enemies. ‘Bad acts only come from bad men,’ Father Planer told his family. ‘Now we know what to think of this Hitler, who keeps promising us the moon.’
But there was nothing to be done about it. If Hitler promised the moon with one hand he could obliterate the homes and happiness of the whole mountainside with the other. It was best, the Planer family decided, to stand quite still in your tracks – blotting yourself out, as near as possible like a young rabbit against a clump of bracken, relying upon protective colouring and complete invisibility. But of course if you could do any one a good turn who was evading Hitler, you did it. Even if Lisa had not liked Mark she would have provided him with food and shelter, at the risk of her life.
Mark found food within reach of his hand, the best that could be provided cold – bread, butter, cheese, two boiled eggs and a jug of cider. A small window had been cleared of 73hay, so that he could look straight up the pathway towards the farm.
He had light enough to see the enormous back of Franz Josef beneath him, and to watch his ill-tempered antics.
Franz Josef’s quarrel with the world was as deep as Hitler’s. He pawed and trampled the straw under his feet, as if to destroy it. He tried to gnaw his manger, and heaved his great barrel of a body about, as if every movement he made was an attack upon an invisible enemy.
The cows in the stall had begun to moo in order to attract attention. This must mean that the Planers had already started their five o’clock prayers. Soon Lisa would start down the ice-blue pathway with her pails, and open Franz Josef’s half-door, so that he too could look upon the promise of the March world.
‘Herrlich wie am ersten Tag,’ Mark murmured softly to himself. But he and Franz Josef were not to be allowed to enjoy this First Day Beauty – both of them had got to be shut up in a community of ill-feeling and restraint. ‘I must go mad to-morrow,’ Mark remarked to himself, looking into the rapture of the awakening world, but he no longer believed it. His spirit had already passed into the rapture of the day.
He ate and drank the cold, clean food with fierce enjoyment. All the things he had done all his life grew dim. Hot water – shaving, a cold plunge, an early run before breakfast, bacon and egg, marmalade and toast – the usual ritual of an English breakfast table; newspaper and politics; boys; his work – how seriously he had taken those archaic classes he called ‘Work’; how pompously that relationship had been carried on between him and the politely subservient, well-guarded boys! What had happened to them all now? Mark neither knew nor cared. All his eager senses were sharpened into unknown ecstasies. 74
There was Lisa in the doorway again, shaking the gaily coloured rag rug that lay in front of the kitchen stove, and even Mark realized that it probably didn’t need shaking, an electric current told him that it was being used this morning, at any rate, as a greeting.
Lisa wore a quantity of warm petticoats, a thick skirt and a wool jacket; over these she had tied her second-best apron, matching the blue handkerchief that covered her corn-coloured hair. Lisa had thick chestnut eyebrows above large grey eyes set rather far apart. Her short upper lip seemed to have a perpetual joke with the lower one. Her teeth, when she smiled and she smiled often, were large and white. Her cheeks were a wind-whipped pink and nothing like paint or powder had ever been on her face. Soap and water twice a day were enough. Lisa’s expression might have been described as permanently receptive; and, indeed, Lisa was always in love – in love with so many, that she had never yet been able to make up her mind to any particular bridegroom. ‘Why,’ something within her deep capacious heart seemed to say to her, ‘shut out anyone?’ The sunshine didn’t. Birds sang alike to all the world, even the rain rained alike upon the just and unjust person. Lisa could not have explained why she failed to fall in love even with the Nazi guards. They were men – lonely men – preoccupied by an ardent desire to be loved. Nor was it that they were overanxious for all ceremony to be dispensed with, so that they sprang at her behind doors, caught hold of her in passages, and generally waylaid and obstructed her. Lisa was not repulsed by their primitiveness. She was exceptionally well able to take any care of herself that she wanted taken, yet without any preconceived arrangement one or other of her family was always within call. It was simply that she felt something about these Nazis was all wrong. They were, 75she explained to her mother, ‘unheimlich!’ One of them kicked a pig, a perfectly good and inoffensive pig that had happened to be on the path at the same time he was. Badly kicked it too, so that you could see the marks of his nails on the pig’s thick hide – as if he meant to hurt it. A gentle kick would have been quite in order – if you want to go your way and the pig wants to go the same way at the same time, and the path is narrow, it should be the pig that gives it up – after some gentle physical hint. But Lisa saw the kick. She screamed as involuntarily and loudly as the pig had screamed. No love-making from people that kicked pigs like that, was deeply registered upon her lively senses. Two big hairy hands appeared simultaneously upon Lisa’s shoulders while she was shaking the rug in the direction of the barn. Without the slightest hesitation Lisa flung the mat backwards upon whoever was behind her. ‘You go and get your breakfast,’ she said sternly to the Nazi guard who ruefully extricated himself from the carpet. ‘It’s on the stove, and leave me to get on with my work; or I’ll let loose Franz Josef on you!’ She gave a shriek of laughter, that rather shocked Mark, in spite of which he was quite unable to control his impatience for her to finish with the Nazi – the pigs, the cows, the ducks; and fetch Franz Josef’s pail. When Lisa at last arrived, wind-blown and breathless, she didn’t close the barn door after her. She left it wide open for all the world to see – if they cared to look – what she was up to. She did not even glance towards the hole over which Mark was cautiously peering although she was perfectly aware that he was gazing down upon her. She looked and spoke only to Franz Josef, who was snorting at her with unmistakable hostility.
‘Na! Na!’ she said soothingly, ‘what a fine boy you are, Franz Josef! And what a shame it is we can’t let you 76out into the brave sunshine! But the cows aren’t out yet either – you can see that for yourself, though I don’t say I shan’t let them take a little walk later when the sun is up. You-know-who has to go down the mountain this morning to change guard, and no one’s due to take his place till late to-morrow. Ah – there’s freedom for you, Franz Josef! As soon as he’s safely off, I’ll wave my red petticoat out of the top window!’ Lisa gave a laughing cautious flicker of a glance upwards and was gone. Franz Josef’s half-door was still down. He could look out at the world, and snort and paw his deep disfavour at whoever passed anywhere near the barn. Mark, too, could see all that there was to see – Father Planer, for instance, crawling slowly like the very old man he pretended to be – so that he could keep his sons to work on the farm for him, until he reached the back of the chalet where he could no longer be overlooked by any Nazi, when he went to work chopping wood as rapidly and skilfully as any young man of twenty.
That was Andreas starting to milk the cows at the further barn. Peter piled wood on a sledge. Both dawdled a little because they wanted to see Mark before they set off for their day’s work.
At last Credner, the Nazi guard, appeared, not in the best of moods, because Lisa had rather taken the edge off his day, but at least, since he was to report to his superior officer, in the best state of spit and polish.
Lisa, looking down at him safely from a bedroom window, begged him to be careful or he would surely turn all the girls’ heads in the street.
The Planer men had nothing to say to Credner. They always managed to be just beyond earshot of him when he appeared; only Mother Planer never made any efforts to avoid him. She went about her business exactly as if he 77weren’t there. She didn’t walk through him, or fall over him – but she only just didn’t. Nevertheless it was to Mother Planer, that in default of other auditors, he had to address most of his demands or warnings. Mother Planer seldom answered him, sometimes she stopped what she was doing and listened to him, with her head on one side, much as she might have listened to a cockerel crowing in the distance: ‘Something,’ she seemed to say, ‘is making a noise! Never mind – it’s its usual noise – there can’t be much wrong with it!’ and then she would return to whatever it was she had been doing before he spoke.
Credner growled at her now, as he passed, shot a malevolent curse at Franz Josef, who returned it with a hideous bellow, and then started off down the path. Could it have been made purposely slippery by a little water lightly flung over the most shadowed spot by one of Lisa’s pails? Suddenly he slipped and sat down with a cruel crash exactly where the ice was hardest. Now it was difficult to know which expressed more rage by his noise – Credner or Franz Josef – who naturally felt, since the accident took place a few feet from his nose, that it had happened on purpose to annoy him. Every single Planer had a ring-seat view of the performance. Gusts of ill-suppressed merriment punctuated the silent landscape. Credner got up, muttering savagely, shook his fist at the farm, and shuffled painfully out of sight. A few minutes later, the scarlet petticoat shook joyfully from the window. A smell of concealed and greatly prized coffee came from the kitchen door. With one accord the Planer men threw down their tools and set off for the barn. Cautiously descending the ladder, Mark swung himself clear of Franz Josef’s stall, taking a flying leap from the lowest rung, and found himself gripped and patted all over by hard and friendly hands. 78
It was as if a frost had melted from the landscape. Birds sang, pigs grunted cheerfully and without agitation, ducks quacked with the urgency of greed rather than that of fear. Every living creature drank, ate and breathed in an easier manner, as if a weight had been removed from their chests. The March sun grew so hot that the Planers pulled benches from the kitchen, so that Mark and the whole family could drink their unaccustomed coffee in the open air.
It was two years since Mark had seen them, two years of grinding poverty under the Tourist tax; years of uncertainty and danger and final enslavement. Yet it might have been yesterday, for nothing had changed about them – their jokes, their habits, and their hearts were exactly the same. Only Mark was different for what had once seemed to him an amusing pause in mountaineering – a mere pleasant sideshow to the real business of life – had somehow grown in value. He knew now these were his friends. They were more to him than the mountains themselves. The Planers – not his pleasures – were part of reality. He looked from one to the other with gratitude and relief, as if they read his unspoken words – they began to tell him one by one all that had happened outwardly since they had last seen him. The Nazis had at first threatened to take both sons away. Something, Father Planer said, had had to be done about it – so Peter got married. They weren’t, it seemed, taking young married men away from farms, only the young unmarried ones. ‘A nice girl,’ Mother Planer explained, in the mountains, who had already given him two good children, so it was certain that she would be a decent wife for any man. She was still with her own people, and Peter was working by turns on both farms, her father’s and here, month by month. It was hard to have him go so far away – at least three miles – to the left of the Wetterstein, but it was a 79lesser evil. Andreas had developed fits, Lisa stated. ‘No! No! Of course not real ones!’ It was all arranged. The doctor had taught him how – you did it with soap suds – and rolling your eyeballs backwards – you had to bite at everything – even your own tongue – and make a noise like a cow in labour. The doctor gave him a certificate to say he’d had these fits from birth; and who was to say he hadn’t? He was therefore also released from being sent into any service. Lisa herself was obliged to serve in the Stadt during the summer, at the Three Red Crabs, but there was no harm in that. She had done it before. Tips were always useful and now necessary. The taxation swallowed all the cows earned. Still, Father Planer said, they could keep going. The earth didn’t change to suit the Nazis. What, Peter wanted to know, was Mark doing? Andreas evidently thought this was too direct a way of opening any subject, so he hastily interrupted to say politely that it was good England had started fighting – though it was a pity she hadn’t done it before, when Hitler was so small you could roll him over. Now many other things would have to be rolled over as well. England had waited far too long – there was no doubt about it. Still, better late than never! You could get out of the way of an avalanche when it began to move if you were near the edge of it – but if not – not. The trouble with Austria and Czechoslovakia was that they were on the track of the avalanche.
Mark explained that he had come to find out a lot of things it would be good for Britain to know. He didn’t say what things or where he expected to find them; and no Planer would have dreamed of asking him. But he explained that he wanted to get well over the border and off the mountains with the least possible trouble into the Innthal. He might too be coming back with what information he 80needed if it weren’t too dangerous for them to have him again? No one would come to the farm but himself, and no one but himself would know that he was coming. Still there was always a certain amount of danger for those who hid enemies. The Planers listened intently. Lisa’s eyes spoke, but she said nothing. Father Planer always spoke first, but this didn’t make what Mother and Lisa had to say any less important. At length Father Planer said, ‘Enemies? But who are my enemies? I have no use for guns against the French and English; but I have a use for corn! Yet the Nazis take my corn to buy themselves guns to fight England and France. No man’s goods belong to him now, nor a man’s sons, nor even his daughters – as for his soul – to hear these Nazis talk you would think their souls belonged to Hitler. And who is Hitler? Here in Austria we know who Hitler is. It is a pity that we hatched him – but at least we know what we have hatched. He got no white collar job from us!’
‘As for fighting,’ Andreas said, ‘if it were fighting against the Nazis, I’d soon show them I could fight!’
Peter added slowly, with pained eyebrows, ‘Herr – the Nazis killed our people. Aren’t the Jews our people? They are Austrian Jews! Our doctor is a Jew. All of us were born with the help of his hands. They bombed our railways while we were at peace. The Tourist tax broke up our farms – now they want to be loved! Pah! That’s the Germans all over. Kick you in the face and ask for a daisy chain!’
Mother Planer said, looking pensively at the barn, ‘We never had a killer bull up there before. Seems as if Providence had sent him.’
Lisa gave a low contented laugh. ‘It’ll be all fixed up, when you come back,’ she said. ‘I’ll make a rope ladder, so that you can get from the loft to the floor without having to scramble through Franz Josef’s stall again. And you watch 81the weather-cock – it got struck by lightning and the part that moved doesn’t any more however the wind blows. But I can get up and change it myself. If it’s south you can come in – if it’s north the guard is about. And if you come by night – I’ll show you where the rope ladder’ll be kept – and up you get into the loft, till you see the coast’s clear.’
Mark drew out his pouch, all the Planers’ men’s eyes grew fixed in an opposite direction. They had no tobacco but they knew Mark’s was for them. They took it, when he offered it, with silent joy. He had half a pound of the best coffee for Mother Planer too, and a silver brooch with an airman’s wings on it for Lisa. She caught it as a squirrel seizes on a nut and ran with it into the house to hide it.
The golden day deepened slowly round them; the sun drank the apricot light off the Thal, and spread broad purple shadows across the snow. On the Wetterstein slope, a released stream powdered the winter grass with giant kingcups. The men went to their work, and Mother Planer to her kitchen. Mark helped Lisa with her tasks in the stall. They took the cows out for their first stroll to the stream at the back. Each cow followed Lisa up the path in turn sedately, until they reached the melted fields and felt the freedom of the light and the spring fresh upon them. Half frightened and half enchanted, they bucked and plunged about, trying the wet grasses with their long tongues. ‘You are an airman. You fly up in the sky?’ Lisa asked Mark. She looked up anxiously as if testing the familiar distant element.
‘I passed my pilot’s test, but I’m generally only a passenger,’ Mark explained. ‘Still, it’s useful to be able to fly. You will see a lot of fliers one day, Lisa, even here. For we must win the war by what we can do on the sea or in the sky. We have no great land armies like the Nazis.’ 82
‘But will you win it?’ Lisa asked anxiously. The smile vanished from her face and she looked at him with deep and unaccustomed gravity. ‘Oh, Herr, the Nazis are wicked and strong – but very strong!’ she murmured. She laid her hand on his arm, as if partly to protect him and partly to measure the strength she felt there. Mark found himself looking deep into her eyes – into their pity and their friendliness. He had not meant to touch her, but his hand stretched upwards over her hand.
‘We must win,’ he said, ‘or else lose everything on earth we have ever cared for!’
As he touched Lisa he no longer felt a shy and separate person, he found himself part of her. She moved suddenly into his arms, against his heart. His lips found her lips. Lisa laughed softly, exploring his head with her hands, and then drew it down against her soft full breast. ‘You are not strange,’ she whispered. ‘You are like other men!’
The short brilliant day closed about them – every breath Mark drew was a separate rapture. He had a strange and bewildered feeling of being something he had never been before, and might never be again, part of a woman’s heart. Wherever Lisa went he followed her – to the byre and the barn; and everything they did together appeared to have an acute and sacramental value. Lisa did not stop her practical, unhurried tasks, though she lingered over them. The farm was utterly silent and undisturbed. The golden day was as still as a picture – drenched with light – cut off from all life before or after.
Mark forgot his mission – forgot the Nazis – forgot more deeply still his home and his respectable island habits. Everything they did broke into laughter.
‘To be happy,’ Lisa said once, ‘that is what the Nazis never know! And they try to make all the world forget it! 83But do not forget this, mein Herr! All I have of life I will give you! Do not forget – when you are in danger – when you are alone – when you are unhappy! Remember that there is happiness!’
‘But, Lisa,’ Mark said gravely, ‘I am afraid I will spoil your happiness. I am Andreas’s and Peter’s friend. You are all my friends – this new thing that has come between us – what will they feel about it?’
Lisa laughed. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We none of us – in our family – say anything about what we do, to each other. Why should we? We know very well that we are the same people – we have no new feelings! Father and Mother – did they never love? Andreas and Peter – do not they have sweethearts in the Thal or on the mountains? I am not a young girl either. I know already all there is to know. If I give you what I have, it is because I have always liked you. But before, when you came here – you were not wanting anything from me – now you want it. I am happy – when anyone wants something from me, and I like the person, I am as happy as they are! Why should we not enjoy what there is to enjoy?’
Mark sat down beside her on a bench that stood with its back to the barn. From it they could look over the mountainside into the far off valley. ‘But the future,’ he said half to himself and half to Lisa. ‘What is going to happen about that, Lisa?’
Lisa tossed her head. ‘That is for God to see to!’ she told him. ‘He made us – didn’t He? Well then – He made us like this – and He will make the future – what it is – when it comes.’
Mark put his hands on her shoulders. He felt their splendid firmness; and as he met the fearless laughter of her eyes, his heart grew freer and freer, until life seemed no longer 84something bindable and heavy, but something light and uncontrolled.
Often in his adult life Mark had known what wrestling with passion meant, but he had always been the master. Now he knew nothing about it – nor was he aware of any struggle in himself or in Lisa.
‘To-night,’ she said softly, ‘very early – but when all are asleep, I will come to you! Now we must fetch the cows in – and the men will soon come home for supper. After supper we will all sing to you. That is what I like best – to sing and then to love!’
‘But to-morrow at dawn, I must go,’ Mark reminded her.
The laughter died out of Lisa’s eyes, but not the fearlessness. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, ‘I know! The Nazis – they have made life so silly! and so ugly! It is a pity; but it is true – what you say – we must fight them. But, Mark, why should you go empty? You will feel stronger if you are a lover! And I – I shall be stronger against the Nazis if I am loved!’
The ground had begun to grow colder under their feet as they went up the path to the meadows to bring in the cows – the burning blue of the sky turned first to violet, then to a dazzling crimson – the air itself seemed to become a colour – and to move out over the snow towards them. One star came out and gleamed very cold, and far away against the lightless air. From the valley below the deep reverberation of a distant bell climbed upwards towards the white and silent fields. The cows, after their first outing, seemed glad to leave the cold frosty meadows for their warm stall. One after the other the solid fawn-coloured shadows followed Lisa down the darkening path until, with a final clatter of bells, they passed sedately into the barn. The light on the path was still pure gold, and side by side Mark and Lisa passed into it.