Mark lay face downwards in the pitiless brilliance of his empty cell. The hard light beat on his nerves like blows. Why had he been unable to keep himself aloof from the repulsive jangled minds into whose company he had been thrust? Why had his lifelong practice of self-control failed him again so suddenly? What was the use of the complete repression, which had made his senses cringe before him like beaten slaves all his waking life, if before Ida – and against a sane attendant who was only attempting to do his duty – he had to break out once more like a furious child?
Mark tried to find refuge from his stinging sense of shame by spreading out the maps and notes Father Martin had given him on the floor and forcing his trained and capacious memory to soak up the facts like a sponge, but his memory jibbed; and his brain became a curious blank into which a confused mass of conflicting images jammed themselves. Very slowly they sorted themselves out until at last only those of Lisa stood firmly above the rest. Lisa, leaning over Mark with her eyes full of a profound and bottomless mercy. Not once since Mark had found himself crying out her name in ‘The Three Bitter Cherries’ had he let himself remember Lisa. He had skirted her image as 165a man refuses to look down at an abyss beneath his feet. It was not safe to know that the kindly earth lay so far beneath him. But the earth was kindly, if you were not too far above it. Even the memory of Lisa released something in Mark; he felt reassured against an inner panic, as he had felt when in the chapel he had suddenly heard Father Martin’s voice speaking to him from the confessional box. What was it that the peasant girl and Father Martin possessed in common which was stronger than the madness that was even now impinging its dreadful night on Mark’s sensitive mind? Was it that they had helped him lose his self-consciousness and had let him out into a limitless universe? Perhaps he had felt release just because the universe they let him out into was limitless so that even the thought of them made him feel safe. Was it because there was no shelter from their easy loving so that it was no use even trying to hide? The light in his cell felt less piercing. Once more Mark turned to the maps and figures and now, as if a barrier had been suddenly swept away, he found that he could concentrate again. Hour after hour passed by and they might have been so many minutes – nothing eluded or held him back from his task. He must have slept at last for when he woke the light was off. Somebody had entered the cell in the course of the long night and given him the mercy of the dark.
At eight o’clock Felix unlocked the door and took him up to his own quarters. Neither of them spoke until they found themselves secure in the little civilized world that Felix had made for himself, where everything sane and natural was once more open to them. It seemed a miracle to Mark to see the spotless bathroom with its shining glass, and the razor-case beneath it; a clean white bed, a writing table by an open window looking out over the tops of pines; 166books and a tray with real china on it – and actually a knife beside his plate.
‘Don’t look at the papers yet,’ Felix begged. ‘They’re all German anyway, and no one knows even what kind of lies they are likely to tell. Wash – and eat your breakfast. Take a long rest. I must go and do my work and no one will bother you. Probably we shall see you on your way, later on in the day. The Frau Doktor is making the necessary plans. Everything we do has of course to go through her father, but she understands him. I daresay you got a bad impression of him at my place the other day, that’s only because he’s afraid. I mean he’s not sure of himself enough to understand how little – if anything – there is to be afraid of, but when he feels normally secure he’s quite a good fellow. Only the very sane can afford to behave decently with the insane, if you know what I mean; and no one who’s half a Nazi can be wholly sane.’
Mark held his coffee cup suspended in the air; ‘Do you mean if you’re insane you must be a Nazi?’ he demanded.
‘Well – yes, I suppose I do,’ Felix said laughingly as he turned to leave the room. ‘It’s very much the same thing, isn’t it? Nazis are out to destroy individual responsibility, which is sanity – madness is individual irresponsibility – so the Nazis must believe in madness! Believe in spreading it at any rate among those they conquer; and I don’t quite think you’d want to spread madness unless you were mad, would you?’
‘No,’ Mark said reflectively. ‘I suppose not.’ He felt for a moment, alone in the clean and happy little room, full of sunshine and silence, as if he had got hold of the missing piece in a picture puzzle, and then his eyes fell on the newspaper; Felix had suggested his not reading till after breakfast; and he read of the destruction of Rotterdam.
The Germans did not seek to justify their act, nor did 167they realize that their act itself had judged them. This was the culture they felt it their duty to spread over all the civilized world. In one night’s senseless fury they had killed twenty-five thousand harmless, undefended souls – after the Dutch had already sued for peace. This was more than an act of war against an enemy; it was a profound and deadly power set loose against mankind.
What was there in the rest of the world to stand against it, Mark asked himself in horror. The earth had suddenly become a very small and easily overrun planet. One by one the European territories had fallen, now the enemy stood before the naked citadel. Only France remained between her lifelong antagonist and the rest of the world – France and the small island off the coast of Europe which was Mark’s home. How prepared was the brain of Europe to take the impact of a mailed fist so pitilessly trained to smash? Can you keep an army of human beings valiant, buried in a box like the Maginot line? Above all, such a people as the French whose ardour and sagacity have always lain in attack and flourished best in the light?
What were his own people doing behind the rampart of the French army in their small land? Mark stopped reading the paper. The sunshine and the silence became as ominous as the light in the padded cell. He felt as if he were being hideously, inescapingly beaten by an unseen power. He crouched in his chair, covering his face with his hands, trying to hide from himself the end of Rotterdam, which might be the end of London.
The door opened and closed softly, and Ida stood looking at Mark dispassionately as if she were trying to find a new way of tackling a difficult subject.
‘I had forgotten,’ Marie said bitterly, dropping his hands from his face, ‘that in this place there was no privacy.’ 168
‘I see you have read the paper,’ Ida said quietly. ‘Why should you try to hide your pain? Nothing we could feel would be enough! There is no need – and no time – for privacy any more in the world we live in, Herr Pirschl! We fight for or against this one thing: and it is much easier if we fight together and seek to hide nothing.’
‘I must apologize to you for last night,’ Mark said, rising to his feet. ‘Twice I seem to have made a fool of myself, without sufficient reason. Being forcibly handled is, I must confess, an offence that I find I cannot easily submit to.’
Ida shook her head, as if it were a matter of no importance either way, whether Mark submitted to it or not.
‘You have destroyed what you had to destroy thoroughly?’ she asked instead.
‘I burned the papers and scattered their ashes in the wind. There is plenty of it,’ Mark said with a gesture of his hand towards the window. ‘I am ready now for anything you suggest. What are your plans?’
A flicker of a smile passed over Ida’s face. ‘We have planned of course a little,’ she admitted. ‘We needed the horses and the carriage you came in – we have them – also papers – also a little arrangement for a visit to a Nervenheilanstalt for you to have lead injections. Only you will not have them – and there will be no visit. The chief at this Home is a friend of ours and no friend of the Nazis. Such things arrange themselves nowadays though not always easily. Much has to be done through the hands of those who do not know what they are doing it. But now we plunge – and in general in this awkward business of ours, I must tell you, we plunge more than we plan! Fortunately the Germans are at this moment in a state of dazzled contemplation of their own successes. Also they have got used to stamping on us here in Austria. We are so 169flat by now that it is barely a form of exercise, so though they still take precautions, of course, it is without any real conviction that such precautions are necessary. I think that we have a chance to evade them. I came to tell you that our carriage is at the door. Everything that we need for a two days’ climb – and it will take us two days and nights of hard climbing to put you safely on your way to Trafoi – is packed and hidden under the floor of the carriage.
‘We start dressed suitably for an entrance into the new hospital. We must drive away from our goal first, only turning back later, having shed Felix and the carriage in the outskirts of Innsbruck.
‘I shall return home by rail from Landeck when you are once safely on your way above the pass. I am sorry that I have no better guide to offer you than myself, but we cannot use the passes as they are always watched, and I happen to have been brought up on these mountains, so that there are few paths that I do not know. In moments of emergency an offensive guide who knows his route, is better than a sympathetic one with less sense of direction! There is no need for you to return to the ward – everything is in order and arranged for, but I find you still have too much emotion in your shoulder-blades. Have you forgotten that Depressive’s shamble? You are a Depressive until you reach the mountains. You can then become an officer and a gentleman again – or what would be better still a Tiroler at home in his own country!’
Mark tried to relax the rigidity of his backbone. He could not easily forgive Ida for having seen him in a moment of despair. He was all the more determined, as perhaps she had hoped he would be, that it should be his last. He would have been more astonished than pleased if he had known that Ida had liked him the better for his emotion. 170
‘Then he’s human, after all!’ she had said to herself. ‘It is worth while running a risk to serve him!’
They met no one on the stairway; and the courtyard, except for the pigeons and the waiting carriage driven by Felix, was empty.
The snow had melted off the roads; the mountainside sang with the voices of a hundred streams and little waterfalls.
The strong ungainly field horses snorted, pawing at the soft ground with pleasure at their unexpected release from heavy labour.
There was no sign of anxiety, or effort of concealment in Mark’s two companions, yet each of them was fully aware that they were driving straight into the jaws of a ferocious monster ready to crush them without pity, if they presented the slightest obstacle to its insensate will. But they had been aware of this fact too long for it to over-cloud their daring courage. Nor did they feel the shock of Rotterdam as Mark felt it. They knew it was one more nail driven into the coffin of their old life; but they knew also that their old life was dead. It was their business to create a new one – if it could be created.
The pinewoods rang with the sudden joy of mating birds; the floor of the valley beneath them was brilliant with May flowers. The unflecked, burning blue of the noon sky hung above their heads like the bell of a giant gentian. Every breath they drew of the keen, tempered air was like a new creation.
In spite of himself – in spite of the shock that had overwhelmed him, Mark became conscious of the piercing beauty of the day. His eyes as they met Ida’s dancing eyes, could not resist smiling at the audacity of their common exploit. What they were doing matched the racing splendour of the day. 171
‘No! No!’ Ida told him, laughing outright at his reluctant smile. ‘I beg of you, Herr Pirschl, be your natural self! Look preternaturally grave and raise your eyebrows a trifle as if at an unpleasant smell! Leave the smiles to us – for we belong by nature to a land that is incurably gay. “Leichtsinnig” our teutonic brothers call us. A people so frail, so mild that we can be almost instantly brushed into the insignificance where we belong. So they have brushed us. But they have not cured us of our gaiety. We laugh still – at ourselves – at each other – and at Them. At the bottom of our hearts we have a faith – that is perhaps a sort of courage – we still believe that we shall be the ones – who will laugh last!’