In the last months of that terrifying year, the European fugitives came in greater numbers, and more hurriedly; and the ugly panic of August flowered and seeded freely in September, and, with the coming of the hot and avid summer months, died and seemed to have vanished. But the seed lay waiting in our hearts and minds—seeds of a blank and mindless fear for most, who had seen from a great distance the first purposeful parade and triumph of the new German military and air strength unmatched, it was plain, in the world or history; the Colossus shadow fell across southern Europe, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean and beyond, across this greatest and youngest of the continents, to which the refugees were coming like locusts, swift, shy and ravenous.
For some, however, there was a thrill of excitement in the brief threat and eventual postponement of war. To these groups, the profit-makers and the armed forces in particular, the withdrawal of the threat at Munich that September, the apparent shelving-away of a promise that armed force would be used in the end, was not so much a shame upon British integrity and a bloodless defeat of the Imperial arms as a sort of personal betrayal. One man, a clothing manufacturer whom I had long known as a man of intelligence and peace, asked me to luncheon with him expressly, one would have thought, to show me the account-books of his father’s firm (of which he was now managing director) for the years between nineteen-fifteen and nineteen-twenty. On those figures, which even I could see were enormous, the whole present wealth and solidarity of his company were based, he explained. The business done then had enabled the firm to survive even the depression years, to gather strength up to this very day, this moment, when another war would have made him a millionaire.
He was unusually excited.
‘The chance was there,’ he said, his mild eyes snapping strangely. ‘The Empire could have fought and won a war, as it did before. Hundreds—thousands of men in my position were waiting for it. Don’t imagine I’m a complete scoundrel, old boy. What I know, what the rest of us know, is that a war would have been the making of this country. Not just financially, though that would have come. It would have brought us political maturity. When a young country gets that, it goes ahead in a big way . . . And now that bastard Chamberlain . . .’
‘Pardon the interruption,’ I said, for I was beginning to feel angry, ‘but I think if you take a long, calm look at the situation you will see that that bastard Chamberlain, as you call him, has done more than any other man living to guarantee you your war all in good time. Think it over.’
‘These fluctuations in the popular state of mind,’ he said, ‘are bad for other things than business. A war all in good time is not what I meant. It might be another five years—another ten. We can’t afford to wait that long.’
‘All my information points to next year, and at about this time,’ I said, made reckless by anger. That caused him to put on a blank face, to hide the suddenness of his feelings, no doubt. He wished to appear neither dubious, out of respect towards me as a newspaper man with—as he had always supposed—a huge store of secrets; nor yet hopeful, out of respect for himself. He looked down to stir his coffee.
I had, in fact, told him the truth as far as guesswork could hit upon it. The men and women with whom I worked had shared, perhaps too freely and more fully than most, that appalling wave of panic of which I have spoken. The raw cablegrams and wireless messages, in the very brevity of the jargon in which they are written, at these times always look so much worse than the fluidly formal English into which the sub-editors translate them, according to the Gazette’s invariable ‘no-panic’ ruling on the handling of crisis news of that sort. It was the crude messages: ‘Chamberlain Munichwise tomorrow conciliatory more Sanger’ and the replies: ‘Urgent Sanger Hellbach Munichwise full cover Sydney’—things like that were what we saw or heard about, before the more shocking and reassuring copy began to flood in after the office rumours, let loose somehow by private secretaries and made impetuous by the very lack of facts, had taken hold of all imaginations.
The same thing happened as happened when even the least of domestic office changes was foretold. The men fell into murmuring groups, the women came down more than was customary from their own floor, and the talk went on and on, turning supposition into fact, and from fact brewing a slow-working but potent fearfulness. I recall most particularly the strange new look of life in the women’s faces. It was partly fear, partly an unconcealed nervous excitement such as I have seen on the faces of women at the scene of some filthy crime, or in the streets when a brawl is on the point of beginning. It was the few older women on the staff who were the more frankly excited and wet-lipped; the younger ones and the cadets were no less frankly scared; but I recall also, still with the same sense of pain and shame now dulled by time passing, that on the day when the agreement at Munich was made known to the world, when I paid my usual brief afternoon visit to my friend Barbara Conroy, who had recently become women’s editor of the Gazette, I found her in tears at her big table, in a distraction of grief over something she could not express or even understand, and of relief that the shrill strain of the foregoing days was ended.
Her son Brian, barely seventeen, had been accepted by the Royal Australian Air Force fourteen months earlier and was training at Point Cook; and though there were two other boys she favoured him most, secretly and with much self-criticism as I knew, because he was most like her dead husband, whom she had loved with joy and passion. Her feeling of relief, I could perceive, was intensely personal to herself, and would not last; the other distracting emotion, of mysterious physical shame which many of us felt, as at having touched in the dark some disgusting substance, was beyond description or measurement to her—‘a world of shame’ was what she said when she had composed herself after I entered. It was the shamed feeling, almost too deep to be borne, which a good man suffers after having done a bad deed unwittingly. The deed is so foreign to what he knows himself to be that he wonders in the end whether his own sanity is in doubt. Seek as he will, he cannot find in himself the fault which, he now perceives, had momentarily endangered the structure of what he was used to think of as a life of integrity; and such moments of remorseful bewilderment can sound as it were the frightening prelude to calamity.
‘Why is it,’ I said to Barbara, ‘that so many of us are simply disappointed, instead of feeling what you and I feel—this sort of shame? Who is right? If we do feel shame, does that mean that we would have preferred to be party to a state of war? Surely, if we had preferred that, we would have even more cause to feel ashamed? No sane person deliberately wishes for the sort of war the next one must be.’
‘Must be?’ she said. ‘Do you think it’s inevitable?’
‘I know it is,’ I said, ‘and so do you. Words are irrevocable. “Peace in our time” was a mad thing for that unfortunate man to say. The ancients would have killed him on the spot for defying the gods. The best that can be said about this business is that it gives Britain a little more time, a very little, but some, anyhow.’
Unexpectedly—for I had as I thought forgotten her—there came to my mind the grave face and clear voice of the refugee girl on the Empire Queen in that airless cabin just after sunrise, several weeks ago now. ‘There will be war. It is certain. He is not ready this year. It will be next year . . .’ she had said in her suddenly gentle tone as though speaking to a child.
‘It will be next year now,’ I said vaguely, not seeing Barbara’s fine, tired face and beautifully kept grey hair in the September afternoon sunlight that fell down into the narrow ravine of the street outside. ‘Germany is not quite ready yet, it seems. One of these refugees who has been mixed up in politics in Europe gave me to understand that there is still a good deal of consolidation to be done in Europe before Herr Hitler feels he can defy the English-speaking world openly.’
Woman-like, Barbara brought the conversation back to the personal.
‘What will our children say of us—what will they think of us, Lloyd?’ she said with passionate inquiry.
‘Does it matter?’ I said. ‘All children think unkindly of their parents at some time or another, for this reason or that. I recall a period when I disliked my father because of his Homburg hat and his beard. Beards were going out of fashion. To me he seemed coarsely conspicuous, and I hated being seen in his company by boys of my own age who knew me. Well—look at me now.’
‘I love your beard, Lloyd. It’s perfect for you. In fact, I love you altogether, probably because I’m nearly old enough to be your mother—your sister, anyhow,’ she added, looking at me with a deep, tired look.
‘Whatever they think of us,’ I said, ‘they will know in time that although we were ashamed of Munich we were not among those who were disappointed just because there was no firmer stand—and so no war this year. They will know we were not on the side of the people who are ready to shed other people’s blood. Could you kill anyone yourself, or even agree to someone else’s death, if it lay in your hands?’
‘No more than you could,’ she said. ‘You know that. Excuse me just a moment.’
She used the house telephone to speak to the printer, referring to a page-proof in front of her from which—a minute sign of the times—a twelve-inch double-column advertisement had been dropped the day before. From time to time she looked up from the proof to me where I sat in the comfortable visitors’ chair facing the light. Her eyes were unseeing, but although her face looked weary there was no dullness in it; the strained and hectic manner of most of the older newspaper women I knew was not her manner, but instead she had an air of constant and intelligent watchfulness which, with her perfection of dress and bearing, made her always seem younger than she was. She was, at most, twelve years my senior—in her early forties, perhaps, a splendid age for many women of her physical type, so long as they be not employed on a daily newspaper.
In addition to editing the special Women’s Supplement which we published in the middle of each week, and supervising a small staff of variously dependable juniors, she personally covered most of the city’s important social occasions. She was related to the paper’s chief proprietor in some obscure tie of blood; but in spite of all this, and because she had what I can only call ‘style’, she never looked completely at home anywhere in the building outside her own rooms. Meeting her walking quickly along one of the corridors, you could well suppose her to be some visiting society woman whose slight eccentricity was to come hatless into the city’s fretful afternoon; but the sight of her down on the printing floor, apologetically making last-minute cuts on the stone, or in cool, smiling conclave with a few members of the chapel, was—to me at least—always rather astonishing. I had known her, we had been friends, since we joined the staff of that newspaper almost at the same time, and in all those long and sometimes embittered years I had never heard her say an unjust word or do anything petty or ungraceful. Among newspaper people this would not be a common record. If I say also that she was as easy in her generosity as she was shy in the frank bestowal of her affectionate regard, I flatter not her but myself, who had admired the one and enjoyed the other.
Not in spite but because of these two characteristics, she might well have been out of place even among the fairly conservative members of the Gazette staff of those days before the war; but she had social as well as personal grace, and moved as easily in vice-regal company as in that of the overalled, ink-stained members of the chapel downstairs. Nothing quite dismayed her, until today.
At this time—above all at this particular time—I had never so much admired a woman since Jean died when Alan was born. That girl’s death, as it were in the very ecstasy of life, so affected me that I very soon came to believe I had had and done with love for any woman. The fact that in time I found absolute celibacy no painful or unnatural state confirmed me in this belief, nor was I any way moved from it by my quite intimate association with Barbara. In marriage, my young wife and I had known, in due course, something near the absolute of bodily and mental and spiritual union and content. Death came like a wind; but, while it extinguished her as a lamp that has burned steadily and bright may be extinguished in an instant, to me it gave—I thought in my despair of those days—only a mortal coldness from which I could not die.
My mother, who lived on disconsolately after my father, reminded me at once that I had the child to think of, and must not give way to grief for too long. In fact, I had not given way to grief at all. Grief had given way to me. If I speak of despair, I mean chiefly the state of mind that would be suffered by a musician who had lost one hand, suddenly and for no apparent earthly or divine reason. Such a man, fatally wounded in mind and spirit, does not die. He lives on, perhaps in immaterial ways a little nobler as in obvious ways he is a little less perfect, physically, than his fellows. He does not die.
Nothing died in me except (as I thought) the power, and it is indeed a power, to love women. I see now that to say merely ‘the power to love’ would be wrong. Few who have had it lose that and live on. I had been deeply schooled in affection all my life; there remained, as my mother had hurriedly reminded me, the child; and I decided that another life, particularly a life so newly begun, so innocent, and so buoyantly sprung as it were from the dying body of my love, must be well worth cherishing with all my heart. I did honestly think, at that time, that it was indeed a conscious decision, so extremely had I come to rationalize and in a sense excuse even my simplest natural impulses. It is plain enough now that I had been intellectually over-educated but left in a pretty state of social ignorance. As a father and a newspaper reporter I was obliged, without knowing it, to narrow the gap between the two states. What happened, in fact, was that in most ways I put the child in the place of my wife. His life and being came as near to obsessing me as anything human ever did, until I began to know Irma: and even my relationship with her was conditioned, intensified and of course finally concluded by my deep and compassionate awareness of the whole identity of my son.
At the time of the Munich conference, in nineteen thirty-eight, he was in his eighth year. As Barbara pointed out, with simple pleasure on my account, I had nothing to worry about there. She was right, but only in a large and limited sense; for she could not really know how profound had become my mistrust of a world in which wars could still come into evil flower, and in which individuals could play with and brutally alter the myriad personal fates of whole nations of men and women. In such a world I thought I could find plenty of cause to be concerned for Alan; in such an insane, dangerous world, where the very soul, unawares, was vulnerable, I could impersonally imagine a father willingly and painlessly ending the life of a son before that life should fade and fray into the common background pattern of greedy passions and deliberate violence which is also the pattern of inevitable self-destruction.
Barbara was not to know of that grievous secret distrust of the human world and human society which later found its only self-forgetfulness in the Lithuanian refugee, for I could put it from my conscious mind in her calmly observant company. As I looked at her across the wide table’s spread of files and clippings, across the still, listening telephones and the first, earliest Queensland roses standing sweetly in a crystal bowl between us, I thought for one unwonted moment how strange it was that the extreme of our physical intimacy had been, in all these years, only an occasional brief handclasp at parting, after one of our rare evenings spent together when it had happened that we were both off duty; for I very well knew that she was a healthy and desirable woman. Possibly we were both impressed more deeply than we ever realized by the fact, scarcely spoken of between us, that we had first met in almost identical circumstances of bereavement; for though I had known Brian Conroy slightly, as a staff man much my senior, I did not even see Barbara until the day after his death, and did not meet her until some time later.
Conroy’s death left her with insufficient means to pay for more than food and clothing for herself and her three young sons. She owned the house they lived in, but there was not enough money to educate the boys. No real alternative to finding work could be envisaged, except marriage, which was then, as it continued to be, unthinkable to her. Her slight connection with the Gazette’s chief proprietor, and with the paper itself through her dead husband and through occasional work she had done for us as a contributor of special articles on everyday social and domestic problems, made it not unnatural that she should for rather more than charitable reasons be accepted as a new member of the staff which I myself had joined only a few months earlier.
I see now that the secret and intensely personal loneliness we must each have been enduring, which held us helplessly aloof from anything like intimacy with our new colleagues, did also perhaps inevitably urge us to take special notice of one another; for, of course, we soon knew something of each other’s story from hearsay. I do not doubt she learned mine with less impatience and disinterest than I did hers. She was by nature compassionate, and death at a blow had enlarged the springs of her sensibility as surely as it had frozen mine at their innermost source. Years later, she told me she thought she had never seen any man so desperately in need of pity and at the same time so remote from pity’s approach. It may well have been so, for I still had a horror, based on ignorance, of easy and casual human associations; I was, I suppose, afraid of the insensitive mutual intimacies to which such associations too often led.
For my own part, I never did tell her that my first impression of her had been of a woman secretly flaunting her widowed motherhood in a circumscribed world marked Men Only. I never told her because before long I was hotly ashamed of myself, not only for the cheap and unkind thought but even more for what it revealed of my appalling, unimagined egocentricity. Indeed, the eventual realization of this egotism so confounded me that sometimes, sleepless in the bitter vacuum after midnight, I caught myself groaning aloud and giving thanks to god that Jean had not lived to learn of it.
Or, I would think, had she? and was that why she had from the first treated me with a passionate and as it were wondering and watching tenderness such as I had never known? Later, when Alan had first learned to walk, and believed that this was the sum of all human learning, the final achievement of man’s highest ambition, I felt what I think was a similar tenderness in myself, compassionate, wondering and watching. It differed from hers mostly by the addition of a faint uneasiness lest physical harm come to the infant in his gay extreme of confidence on the brinks of unimaginable abysses; but later I thought: Perhaps to Jean in her womanly native wisdom I was much like that child—in my egotism which was childlike because it was unconscious and absolute; in what might be seen as the supreme conceit of my unthinking assumption of my right to love and adore her. The wise lover must surely have at times a lively doubt of the perfection of his selfhood? Looking at her, I had none—never . . .
Looking at Barbara across the buoyant roses and the telephones that seemed to lie on their trestles for ever ear-to-ground, like black men listening for mysterious tidings, I had doubts and to spare.
‘The worst thing about this Munich business,’ I felt moved to say at last, ‘is not the immediate sense of its ignominy—I for one do not care what France and America will say. It is the feeling that what you and I always thought of as a secure and robust social structure is really very shaky, on its higher levels at any rate.’
‘Not shaky, Lloyd,’ she said. ‘Simply just for the moment at the mercy of someone else’s ruthlessly mad conviction. As people, the British—you and I and most of them in this building and this city and this country, say—are very slow and unwilling to be ruthless, and we don’t feel too proud of ourselves when at last we’ve been forced to be. Whereas the Germans seem to me to prize ruthlessness in fact as much as the Americans do in theory, now that they have been taught for so long that it’s the only means to all worth-while ends. No end ever justified wrong means. We know that. Your father would have agreed that to justify the means by the end aimed at or even achieved is to throw aside what we call the law . . . Just because we’re not equally ruthless, I wouldn’t say we’re shaky.’
‘To me it’s shaky,’ I said. ‘And I do not mean the British empire, or any other empire or commonwealth of nations or what you will. I mean human society as you and I and all mankind have always known it. I mean the world of men—shaky in a way that the world of birds or animals or fish has never been, could not be. But perhaps I am being rather too heavy about it.’
She laughed as though I had suddenly said something pleasant.
‘You’re never heavy,’ she said, ‘but sometimes you’re rather—what shall I call it?—grave, and far too profound for a simple mind like mine. Con used to say that women arrive at a remarkable number of correct conclusions by thinking with their livers. When I said, why their livers? he said, “Well, any of their organs that happens to be unnaturally affected at the moment.” Of course I took the opening to point out to him that the brain is also an organ, but he said that was different—a woman never allowed her brain to interfere with what she called her thinking. He said we think organically, not cerebrally. He was really very nice about it.’
I was used to her talk of her dead husband, whom she called ‘Con’ very naturally still, as though he were away on a journey. It occurred to me now that, in spite of what the world inclines to think of female journalists, and to think with reason enough that they are febrile, nerve-ridden creatures functioning on the energy produced by the friction of fear with vanity, there are—as every newspaper man knows—worthy and admirable exceptions, where the woman fulfils her exacting, distressing, often ridiculous assignments easily and gracefully, and writes good level copy. Such an exception was Barbara. She was a woman of quality.
‘I believe women think as well as men do,’ I said. ‘The purposes of their thinking may differ because living is such a personal business for them, but not the mechanics of it. Still—I have been told,’ I said, ‘that I have an exaggerated respect for women.’
‘I think you don’t know a great deal about them,’ she said gently; and at that moment one of the telephones—as though the intensity of its recumbent listening had been at last rewarded—rang sharply for attention. She took it up at once without haste.
I watched her face while for some seconds she listened, and I had never seen it change so suddenly from calmness to an unfamiliar look of astonishment and anger. Finally she said, ‘No thank you, Mary—it’s not only impossible in fact, but it seems to me impossible even to think of it . . . Goodbye.’
I had never heard her speak so before. My astonishment must have been apparent, for when she had returned the receiver to its rest she looked over at me and laughed apologetically.
‘Did I sound as bad as that?’ she said. ‘Well, I’m not sorry, my dear. I’m not sorry. That, believe it or not, was—Yes, Nan, come in.’
The door behind me had opened, and the girl who went past me to the table said rather breathlessly, ‘Hullo, Mr. Fitz—excuse me, Mrs. Conroy, Mr. Franklin would like to know whether you can personally cover a party tonight at Lady Solomon’s?’
Barbara looked suddenly very tired again, very sick at heart.
‘Why didn’t Mr. Franklin ring me, child?’ she said quietly.
‘He was just going out when the call came, and I was near his door, so he asked me to ask you. He said to say he was sorry he hadn’t time to run along himself, but would you do it if you haven’t anything else important? He’ll be out for half an hour.’
‘All right, Nan, thank you. I’ll see him when he comes in.’
‘Thank you, Mrs. Conroy.’
The girl, a brilliantly pretty youngster of eighteen newly employed in the office, smiled at me as she went out. Her lips and eyes were all innocence and cleanness. She was on Barbara’s staff as a cadet. On that day of all days, I felt a pang of compassion for such beauty of youth and girlhood caught up in the excitement of the hour; and then I thought of Irma Maartens, irresistibly and for no reason other than that she too was eighteen. The comparison was ridiculous, but it made me realize how far the refugee girl had gone in her eighteen years; she was nothing like this—by contrast, she seemed aloof and ageless, invulnerable in the completeness of her femininity—but only eighteen, I thought. I wondered how she was thinking today, and what her own particular despair was like. That she would indeed despair of the world, if only for a moment, after the triumph and disaster of Munich, I never paused to doubt.
‘Now I’m in a proper fix,’ Barbara said ruefully, as the door closed upon the shapely figure in its delicate haste. ‘There’s more than mere coincidence here, Lloyd. I was just going to tell you that the caller I shocked you by being so rude to was Lady Mary Solomon, who considers herself a friend of mine as well as being some sort of a relative. Oh, Lloyd—I shall have to go. But I can’t now! What am I to do?’
‘Go to Franklin and tell him you’re tied up for this evening,’ I said recklessly. ‘What did she want?’
‘That’s just it,’ she said in exasperation. ‘She asked me to go to this party, don’t you see? Her exact words were—and this is what made me so mad—“Barbie darling, we’re having a whopper of an impromptu party at home tonight to celebrate the Munich victory, and you simply must come. Absolutely everybody will be there. I got in first on the ’phone the moment the news came through.” Do you wonder I was rude, Lloyd? I don’t care how many millions they’re worth—I just can’t do that sort of thing, I just can’t.’
Her distress turned again to anger, the anger of which I had not known her capable; her eyes, ordinarily so kindly watchful, became dark with pain.
‘What do they think we are?’ she said bitterly. ‘Do they think we’re all—all fools—like themselves, living from one minute to the next, without two consecutive thoughts to string together to make a third? Ready to dance round the open grave of our own children? Drunk with ignorance? Whatever in the world do they think—or do they?’
‘Barbara,’ I said, shocked in spite of myself, remembering the last time I had had to listen to wild metaphors springing from the lips of a woman, that morning on the Empire Queen, and wondering if perhaps all intelligent and educated women had to relieve their feelings in that unpleasant way instead of simply stamping and swearing and making a noise. Now she had turned her head away not to let the sudden tears be seen, but I had seen them as she turned to face the light of the spring afternoon lingering above the street outside the high windows.
I got up to go and finish a report that wanted some police confirmation. I am no good as a comforter, I thought. It is against every instinct as well as against reasoned habit to show what I feel, and Barbara’s distress, coming at such a time, had distressed me in turn. I was of no use there. No doubt she was thinking of her boy Brian, thinking he too and she with him shared in the general reprieve; no doubt Lady Solomon, who ‘considered herself a friend’, was not unreasonable in supposing that Barbara, the mother, along with the majority of the citizenry, would be very willing to make celebration. The Munich victory. It surprised me, that expression.
‘Where are you going?’
Her steady voice made me pause at the door. The tears were gone from her tired-looking face; she was smiling.
‘What is the good?’ I said. ‘We cannot really comfort one another—no one can comfort anyone in real need of comfort at a time like this. We must face it—I mean the fact that each one of us is alone, Barbara. Even Lady Solomon, whether she knows it or not. We cannot alter other people, or their lives, or their destinies, by offering them sweets to take away the bitter taste, any more than they can alter us. You and I happen to have children whose whole lives, as we foresee them, mean more to us, we think, than our own lives do. But do you not see how we do our utmost to shape those lives as we think best, we who say we cannot alter another human destiny? Who are we, anyhow, to know what is best? They are just as much individuals as we are. How can we interfere? The most we can do is to cherish them and love them. Our thoughts and beliefs cannot come into it. They will grow up to have different thoughts from ours, different ideas of how a society should work and enjoy itself and preserve itself. You wondered, a while ago, what our children would think of us for being—however unwillingly—a party to the Munich agreement, in the sense that each one of us is in some degree responsible for the world we live in, and what happens in it. Well, I doubt whether our children will think of Munich at all, outside the textbooks. Do you or I worry ourselves about the Versailles Treaty? No—not even as an episode in world history which has made a Munich victory possible. It does not affect our hearts. Munich will not affect our children’s. The best we can do is act in such ways that they will know we never intended evil or craved for power over others. To cry out aloud against the rest of society is as unfruitful of any lasting good as it would be to withdraw personally from that society altogether. It happens that to cry aloud sometimes relieves the heart of what seems—but is not—an intolerable burden of grief and pity. As for the cry itself, it does not get us very far, and I think we may be sure our children will never hear even the echoes of it when they are old enough to listen.’
She was looking at me very intently. ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘There is no more I can say. There is probably nothing I can say which would be new to you. Why do you look like that?’
‘When you talk as you were then,’ she said, ‘you make me think Con is in the room with me. If only you did it more often—No, don’t be impatient. I don’t want you to think I expect you to be like him, except to clear my mind when it needs it, as it does quite often these days. I think it’s good for you yourself to talk like that. My dear, you are altogether too silent.’
‘As I said,’ I reminded her, ‘words and cries don’t get us far, in my opinion. Now listen to me, Barbara. What I would do if I were you would be to ring Lady Solomon and say that after all you would like to go to her party. She may not have understood that you were being rude—sometimes those wealthy people don’t, though nothing is more vulnerable, to my mind, than the sense of invulnerability large quantities of money give the average person. Make some sort of explanation of your telephone conversation if you must. Thus you will have nothing to explain to Franklin, who is more important to you than Lady Solomon, I imagine. You will also be taking the correct bitter draught for such a time, if you go. Nor will you need to stay very long. Your photographer will be doing most of the work on the spot, won’t she?’
‘Perhaps you are right,’ she said slowly. ‘I think you are. Perhaps the flagellants were not as mad as I’ve always thought. A little self-discipline . . .’
‘That is not it,’ I said. ‘We have a far harder thing to do. We have to live with the belief that this is only the beginning. Let them give their parties. I suspect the future is going to wipe out Munich even for you and me and all those like us.’
At the time, as our minds and feelings then were, it was an easy thing to say. Heard in memory, after the dark years and all the shames of war, it merely sounds like an example of politico-philosophical cant of the worst sort. But that was how our feelings were that late September day when spring was blooming round us like a cold flower, from earth to heaven; that was how we felt, despite the most determined efforts of self-control. It is clear now that to have said ‘even for you and me’ was a mighty piece of egotism; but that was how we had been driven, by the state of the whole human society in its heart and its head and its corporal body, to feel: that there were not only good and bad people, but people blessed with degrees of goodness.
I had confidently put myself on the side of the angels, like the vainest of all the blessed Saints surrounding my Lord.
It happened that, after all, the winter of nineteen thirty-nine did not seem so frighteningly oppressive as the same months of the year before it. Seeds of panic dropped in our hearts and minds in that year did germinate and flourish, as though the autumn and winter rains from April onwards had softened them like other seeds in their resting-place of summer; but with them grew, as it were, the herb resignation, the mild bane so recommended by some sorts of Christian as an anodyne against the darker passions of misanthropy and despair.
As winter increased through June and July and in August hesitated, we witnessed a sterner repetition of Germany’s parade of incredible armed power during the—to us—antipodean summer in Western Europe; and again we were afraid, but this time with the more courageous fear of certainties.
My refugee acquaintance aboard the Empire Queen, whom I still sometimes remembered with all the vivid unreality of a brief dream, had not been wrong, that earlier August morning. For the Germans, even more than for Britain, Munich, as it now appeared, had been reculer pour mieux sauter in very truth. Lady Solomon had indeed had a victory to celebrate, provided she had been indifferent as to whose victory it was; the Berlin-Moscow pact of the twenty-third of August confirmed her in that, as surely as it showed war to be not only inevitable but imminent. Up to the time of the pathetic Henderson reports from Germany we had looked at one another daily in the turmoil of the Gazette office, where by now a kind of gay madness began to be evident, and silently or aloud had wondered, What week? but afterwards, through the latter part of August, through the mists and moonlight of the first slow turn of the year towards spring, we were wondering merely, Tonight—or tomorrow night? We did not know, from moment to moment of each working day, when the wireless and the clattering teletype machine sweating in its annexe off the sub-editors’ room would bring the one word War, an end and a beginning.
The days of the Russo-German pact I remember for two things. The second, which can be dismissed as of little importance now, was that on the Wednesday following the signing of the treaty between Hitler’s and Stalin’s governments, when much of our surprise had been replaced by reorientated speculation, I saw on the corner of Bligh and Hunter Streets, on my way towards Philip Street and the C.I.B., the bright pink street-poster of the Bulletin, most admirable of Australian weekly papers, and read with a shock of disbelief the three words in heavy five-inch type: HITLER PLAYS FALSE. A shadow not of rain-clouds seemed to fall over the early afternoon, and the corner-newsvendor’s monotonous clamour of the latest scare-headlines from the incoming European cables seemed suddenly more monotonous, trivial, meaningless than ever before. At that moment I had an impulse, rare enough with me, and without object or reason, to do immediate violence in some overpowering way to the consciousness of my fellow-men: to shout into the stuffed ears of mankind, Stop. Had I done any such thing, in any degree, the echo (as I knew even then) would have come back: Too late.
The other episode, which proved to be the most important personal event in my life since Jean’s death nearly nine years ago, took place some days before the non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany was made known. At first it seemed no more than an incident, surprising certainly but with no ominous aspect apparent to my ever-increasing self-preoccupation, my striving to discern in myself and my own life what was common to the self and the life of all men, and to come by that ultimate discernment to an ultimate understanding of the passions which must govern human behaviour; for through this understanding of common human passions I hoped to arrive one day at wisdom.
This ambition was not always in the forefront of my mind. It did not interfere with work or ordinary behaviour, nor did I bore and exasperate friends by talking about it; but it was there, like my religion, and it had the effect of making most of the immediate personal contacts and incidents of my days seem of no great importance. Overbearing all our intercourse at that time, in any case, was the talk of war; behind that, the thought of it.
When, therefore, one Friday afternoon in mid-August a boy brought me an envelope containing only my own business-card I supposed some colleague was playing a meaningless jest on me until I turned the pasteboard slip over and saw the words Irma Martin and Empire Queen inscribed in an impeccably neat hand on the back. The card was quite clean, and smelled now of some perfume I did not then recognize. The boy waited, grinning cheerfully when he caught my glance up from the card; and I thought briefly how reserves and barriers were already being broken down among us by the looming shadow far away beyond the equator to the north and west, and thought too that before all was over this gaily impudent lad would be in a uniform, perhaps in a grave or at the bottom of the sea.
‘Where did you get this?’ I said.
‘Lady out there gave it to me, Mr. Fitz.’ he said. ‘She said you would know her.’ He added gratuitously, ‘Some dame.’
‘I don’t know what you mean by that, but bring her along, will you, Peter?’
When he went away I glanced from habit at the stark face of the office clock on the wall above and to the left of my table. It stood at 3.20, and this was a Friday. Half an hour earlier I had left Barbara’s room, even more unwillingly than usual, for we had had some agreeable conversation, about her boy Brian and more particularly about Alan. He spent part of his summer holiday with me at Long Reef, and now thought of my flat as ‘our place’, rather than my mother’s house in Cremorne where he had been reared for eight years by a middle-aged companion-housekeeper whom he called Moley, and by my mother. Thoughts and talk of Alan, and of all the delicate problems of childhood and parenthood, more certainly than anything else moved my mind from preoccupation with the imminence of world calamity. I had found it hard enough to come back to the realities of the day’s engagements—a boring coroner’s-court session that morning to be written up briefly; talks with various people in the C.I.B.; a cabled special from New York, about drugs and juvenile delinquency, to read and return to the news-editor—and now to be obliged to talk to a young woman who, in memory, had suddenly become disturbing, for reasons I could not explain to myself in my surprise, made me feel thoroughly impatient. I wanted to return to the warm, dreamlike world of my own and Barbara’s children.
What did the young scallawag mean by ‘Some dame’?
When I was a boy, the expression would have been meaningless. The whole of the language was becoming corrupted by the drug known as the American way of life, by heavens. I looked round the room, which was emptier than usual because it was Friday afternoon. A typewriter pattered and stopped and pattered on at a table hidden from me by a concrete-and-plaster column, and a few men were talking noisily near the door; but many of them had done most of their work for the week and were out for a quiet afternoon drink before putting in the last hour or so of their day in tidying up details. Occasional fragments of conversation, punctuated now and then by a telephone bell ringing, by an arrival or a departure, let me know that as usual the talk was of war; but the atmosphere of the room was one of tired week’s-end peace. I heard the footsteps approaching, the boy’s and that young woman’s, and did not turn in my chair until the lad announced her presence.
‘Lady to see you, sir.’ Evidently she had given no name.
Even as I was about to turn and rise from my swivel chair, the picture came in a sudden, embarrassing flash, like the unexpected opening of a door upon privacy, and I did not want to look at it: the badly ventilated second-class cabin, the young woman wearing over her apple-green pyjamas a heavy, dark-green house coat cut in the Chinese fashion, the high collar fastened with a large gold button; the quick step forward, the upturned young Slavic face with wide-open eyes, the unexpected, unnecessary kiss, too swift to be astonishing, full upon my lips . . . Like a small dream it had been, and like a dream it remained. I turned and got up, watching the boy go before I allowed myself to look at her squarely.
She was looking round the room, guardedly and quickly, like an animal in strange surroundings. I remembered that look later, when I placed it correctly: it was just so I had seen accused persons look when led into open court. Her face was expressionless and almost rigidly blank, taut and hollow like a mask, and her smile when I greeted her did not show in her eyes as they at last met mine.
‘How do you do, Miss Maartens? Please sit down.’
‘Martin, please,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Irma Martin.’
Of course. It had been Martin on the back of my card; I glanced down at it to make sure. She must have found herself a job, or a reason for concealing her previous ‘adopted’ name that had been a memorial to her dead gentleman.
Instead of taking the wooden chair my various visitors of those days used, she stood where she was, resting one hand on the back of it. All around us the earnest or desultory talk proceeded, the raised voice of someone speaking on the telephone on a bad line, the occasional sound of feet in the corridor outside. Had anyone told me then that years later I would wait in this big, fusty, familiar room for news of her death, I would only have believed it because I seemed always to be waiting for news of death and violence and lawlessness.
‘Can we go where it is private, please?’
The words seemed to force themselves through her half-smiling, mirthless lips, as though they had nothing to do with her. Many of my callers asked the same thing; to most of them I gave the answer I now gave her.
‘We can talk as privately here as if we were in Pitt Street.’
Still she remained standing, her other hand holding a leather handbag swung from a shoulder-strap against her right side. She looked as though she were about to go, as though she regretted already having come; but her eyes held mine with such a direct look rather of command than of appeal, and so entirely without embarrassment, that I resigned myself to an interview in the wireless room, off the library, which was for my private use in emergencies—that is, if it were not occupied by the wireless programme monitor listening to news broadcasts. Wondering what the devil the mystery was all about, I led her between the tables towards the door. Not until later did I realize that she had not asked a second time for privacy, and that it was her look I was complying with. If I had, I might not have been so ready to go. As it was, I took her along without further argument.
All I knew about her at this time was that she had arrived a year before, with a shipload of other refugees, that her name was not Martin nor even Maartens, and that she had been a couturière and ‘secretary to a gentleman’ (her own vague expression) in Europe under the Hitler shadow. I supposed then that she had merely been the ‘gentleman’s’ mistress. I also knew, from her own account, that she had once been a member of the Communist Party, but not that she had also been a Nazi Party member. Because of my ignorance, what followed during that afternoon’s interview seemed to me at first both melodramatic and suspicious in the extreme. Only the fact that my year-old memory and my present observation of her disturbed me in some obscure and nervous way, which I did not yet try to understand, withheld me from passing her on to some unoccupied colleague—and the fact, too, that when I had given her my card it had been with an offer to help her if ever I could, if ever she needed it. That was, after all, a year ago, and in those days of August, nineteen thirty-nine, a year could seem an inconceivable nightmare stretch of time.
I led the way along the corridor to the library, feeling fairly sure that the wireless monitor’s room would be unoccupied, since we did not receive the next news-broadcast from London until four o’clock. On the way we passed Barbara coming towards us with her quick, confident step of a much younger woman; she and I greeted one another with our eyes—we had been talking intimately together barely half an hour before—but I understood later that she must have observed Irma with womanly shrewdness and accuracy during the few seconds of our approach. (She told me, for one thing, that the girl was noticeably well-dressed, though my eye had merely recorded, from habit, that with a black skirt and jacket she was wearing a white blouse done up to the throat with silver buttons, and that her small lop-sided black hat suited her pale face well.) It was not until we were seated in the small, quiet wireless room, with the big cabinet receiver silent against the wall between us, that I had much opportunity to look at her at all. Then I realized that she was afraid.
She lit a cigarette, after I had refused one, and her hands from which she had drawn off the long black gloves were shaking slightly as she held the cigarette and a small gold automatic lighter. This in itself was not unusual, for people who visit newspaper offices for some purpose of their own are usually in the grip of one excitement or another—anger, indignation more often, a natural nervousness of their surroundings, but seldom fear. An interview deliberately sought with a particular member of the staff is quite another matter, especially when, as in this instance, the man sought out is in close daily contact with the police force of a city as cosmopolitan and as large as Sydney was even in those days. In such an instance, the visitor is often nervous of the reporter as an individual.
But Irma was not nervous of me. She seemed indeed hardly aware of me for a time, while she inhaled her cigarette smoke sharply, exhaling it each time with a sort of finality as though about to speak, yet saying nothing, merely looking vaguely at me as though there were someone standing behind me.
There was no need to hurry her; she was a delight to look at, afraid or not, and to be alone with. I filled my pipe and lit it at leisure. We had been in that small, cramped room scarcely two minutes, though I would have supposed it to have been longer; and, in accordance with a habit which I have found to save time even while it seems to waste it, I was not going to break the silence. Let the visitor speak first. Meanwhile, setting aside my feeling of disturbed impatience, I was able to observe her at my ease.
‘Some dame’, the scamp of a boy had said. If he meant he found her beautiful, why, so did I. The taut, blank mask of her face—the same look, now I thought of it, with which she had faced me on board the Empire Queen a year ago, as she uttered the word ‘Police?’—in no way hid the fine underlying modelling of the bone; the slant of cheekbone and eyelid and eyebrow was alive with youth and intelligence, Slavic and glowing like the glowing ivory of her throat above the formal neck of the white bodice. Again I was forced—it is not too strong a word to say—forced to notice her disturbing power of imperturbable stillness. Only her bare hand, carrying the cigarette to and from her parted lips with a gesture of ineffable leisure, broke the immobility of her seated pose; and this physical appearance of being undisturbed was all the more remarkable to me because, with the passing of every few seconds, I knew as surely as if she had told me that she was afraid—not as afraid, perhaps, as she may recently have been, but still afraid, and unhappy in it.
Fear is like a smell to men trained to detect it; and in my particular job we so accustom ourselves to its aspects, in so many citizens, that if it is not there when it should be we wonder why. I had quickly known that Irma was afraid, or at least in the ebb of fear. I waited for her to speak, and for another full minute we both smoked in silence, and I listened to yet hardly heard the familiar quiet voices of the women of the library staff, the intermittent patter of typewriter keys on index cards, and the opening and closing of the drawers of cabinets where the incessant work of filing reference went forward in peace. Those peaceful sounds through the open door emphasized the dead hush of that little room whose only window, very dirty on the outside with the rough grime of the city, gave on to a central light well from which no light penetrated.
‘You told me, come to you if I wanted help?’ she said abruptly, and her questioning tone was as it were underlined by her hand holding the cigarette arrested in mid-air in front of her face, so that now only the upward rippling ribbon of bluish smoke moved where she was sitting.
‘Yes, I believe I did.’
‘You did . . . Now I think I shall need help.’
My first thought, of course, was that she must need money, yet when I looked at the obvious quality and newness of her handbag, her gloves and shoes—the usual points at which a woman’s impoverishment first shows itself—at the perfect condition of fingernails and hair and unobtrusive maquillage, and above all at the lack of speculation or embarrassment in the regard of her opaque blue eyes beneath the slanted brows, a request for financial assistance by her seemed wildly improbable. Nevertheless, stranger things had happened to me before this.
‘In what way do you think I can help you?’ I said; but she did not answer the question. After looking in vain for an ash-tray, she dropped the end of her cigarette on the linoleum covering the floor, and extinguished it with a quick movement of one foot. It was very neatly done, a curiously masculine trick which, in her, quite surprised me. I was still looking at the arched firmness of her black suede shoe, which had a very high heel and sported a silver button as big as a shilling, when she spoke in a low, confident voice, leaning forward suddenly without haste.
‘I have remembered you since that day when I arrive. You said we are to be friends—you, my first Australian friend, eh? I have thought of you often, again and again, and wished sometimes to see you. But, you understand, there was no occasion, was there?’
‘No,’ I said; and I was curiously moved by the calm, low-voiced confession of one of whom I myself had thought so seldom, and then with almost distrust, almost distaste, and no pity.
‘No.’ She sat back in the chair, her hands lying still in her lap. The fear was leaving her while she spoke.
‘I always thought, “Anyhow, that Mr. Fitzherbert is there,” and I look at your card, often—then,’ she smiled apologetically, ‘not so often.’ Her eyes were steady on my face. ‘One makes other friends. One learns to live in the new country. I have done it before. But I did not forget you. I can speak?’
Her rapid words somehow confused me. I could not follow as one usually can follow in advance the direction of this interview. Without my having suspected it, it had become a personal matter between the two of us—the last thing I desired or ordinarily allowed to happen in that office.
I could only nod my head and murmur rather coldly, ‘We are quite alone . . .’
‘I must trust you,’ she said with sudden enormous emphasis. ‘I am in danger, and you can maybe help me. Maybe not. If not, what I say you must forget. It is understood?’
Yes, it was personal now, beyond all doubt. Again I nodded, this time saying nothing. She seemed not fully reassured. I witnessed one of the impulsive gestures I was later to come to know so well, to delight in yet almost to shrink from. Leaning forward again, she took my right hand in both hers. Quite automatically—the man’s instinctive gesture of calm self-possession—with my other hand I put the mouthpiece of my pipe between my teeth and held it there.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘I must be sure. If we waste time, I go. If not, I tell you. It is all true, but you may say it is—what?—fishy. If you think that, you may also think it does not matter that you tell. My friend,’ with great weight, pressing my hand hard, ‘you must not talk. If you talk, it may harm you too.’
Freeing my hand, I pretended to be feeling for matches as I said, ‘Look here, you had better tell me. You have my word that whatever you say will be strictly between ourselves.’
She looked down at her two hands clasped together empty of mine. I could still feel the earnest, excited touch of her fingers, the only indication she had given of how profound her feelings were at that moment.
‘So,’ she said, with a sigh, whether of relief at the assurance of secrecy or of disappointment that I could not return stress for stress, I do not know. Leaning back in the leather armchair she let her hands lie again still and empty in her smooth lap, and looked at me intently, sidelong across her cheekbones with eyes half-closed—the look of so many foreigners I have known who wished to be impressive. Cautiously, I waited.
‘Those three men on the ship,’ she said. ‘You remember what I tell you?’
‘The three Communists. The police have not lost track of them, I can assure you of that.’
‘They are dangerous,’ she said with bland simplicity. ‘But I must tell you everything—everything. You know Russia?’
She spoke of Russia as of a mutual acquaintance. The remark was rhetorical, and again I needed only to incline my head as she went on with suddenly tense and joyless excitement.
‘Those three men say there is going to be a treaty with Germany. Soon, very soon. A treaty of non-aggression. For you it is perhaps already a rumour. Now I tell you it is fact. They know.’
I was so immediately astounded, my mind so jolted and incredulous, that it was like being in a street accident, in that moment before feeling and reason again take charge of action.
‘Impossible,’ I said quite automatically—exactly as one says the word in one’s mind at the instant of mechanical impact in the street; but a moment later I was crying inwardly, as the accident victim so often cries aloud, in the small self-deafening voice of horrified belief, ‘No . . . no . . . no . . .’
‘But no,’ she said. ‘You do not know Russia. He copies what he admires. What Hitler did at Munich, he too can do—that Stalin, that Molotov, and the others. I know. You see, Mr. Fitzherbert, I have been a member of the Party, in many European countries. I did many missions, I did many things for the Party, learned many things. Not any more—do not suppose.’ She made a gesture of cancellation without raising her arm from her black-clad thigh. ‘That is why I am in danger. Those three men, they did not come here because of me, but they know me. You see . . .’
She paused and looked at the window, which was closed as it had probably been since the building’s construction half a century earlier; and at the open door. With a movement of her head towards this, she said authoritatively, ‘Please close it.’
I do not mind confessing what I would not for anything have let her know—namely, that I was for the moment in a state of much mental confusion and distress. She did not seem to feel it. Perhaps she had known too long what even a child would have realized in those nightmare days, that a non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany was in fact a clear signal from Moscow to Berlin, to move, and that this time there could be no Munich. With a sensation of physical weakness, I rose and took the two steps necessary to bring me to the innocently open door. The whole brief series of movements between leaving and returning to my chair seemed to take a long time. I was thinking so fast that every act of mine appeared to me to be performed with dragging slowness. When I sat down she was looking at me with a sort of satisfaction.
‘You see,’ she said at once, as though there had been no interruption, ‘I know too much. And I have left the Party. This is not allowed, if you know many things. Now me—I will never tell of what I know—never. But this, of course, they do not believe. Why should they?’ She shrugged slightly. ‘I am a woman . . . If you do not help me, there will be an accident. An accident—you know. Today or next week. They hate me, because they are uncertain. I have friends here, I call them friends, who are Party members. These do not know how much I know. They think I was just a file-and-rank member, you see. Of my active work they know nothing. They hear these three men talk, and they wonder why they hate me, and so, because they are such friends, they tell me how these men hate me and what they say they would like to do. It is all a joke, my friends say. And Mr. Fitzherbert . . .’
For the first time, with the breaking of her quiet voice on my name, she openly showed emotion. She had talked fear back into herself. I waited while she took out and lighted another of her cigarettes; then, once more unemotionally, she went on.
‘Mr. Fitzherbert, what they say they would like to do, they will do that. Have no mistake—they will do it. That is why I am so relieved to know there is this treaty.’
It seemed to me the extreme of irrelevance.
‘I do not see what the possible treaty has to do with your safety,’ I said rather coolly, for, irrelevance apart, her words had rather shocked me. How could one possibly feel the gladness of relief at the spectacle imagination was pitilessly unfolding?
‘Possible, possible,’ she said impatiently. ‘It is sure. This is from Moscow, do you understand? And as for me, you cannot know your own government. They too are frightened—yes, yes, like me, as you so kindly do not remind me. Your Mr. Menzies will do the only logical thing when war comes. You know what I mean?’
As always, she began to speak with a gentle patience when she talked of matters political. I had noticed it, in retrospect, that morning on the Empire Queen; I noticed it again now, and was not offended even though, watching her while she spoke, I could not help remembering that she was much younger than, from her dress and self-command and the secret, as it were impatient, authority of her manner now and again, one might have supposed. She was no more than nineteen, I told myself, and was surprised that I should give her such attention and such credence; for at thirty-one I still supposed that years, rather than experience, demanded one’s chiefest respect.
‘I don’t know that I follow you,’ I said, ‘but if we were at war with Germany’ (I ignored her slight gesture and went on steadily) ‘and the pact you speak of had been signed and still existed, then the governments of the British empire would inevitably make the Communist Party illegal. It is the only logical action.’
‘Exactly,’ she said, pressing her hands one upon the other over her heart; and for a moment her widened eyes seemed to burn not blue but violet. ‘And those three men, they go—out of your country. I know the police watch them. Then, they are for deportation, yes? Yes. And I am safe again. Even if they try to denounce me to your police, I am safe from—from accident.’
She sighed, and let her hands fall to her lap, and lay back in the deep chair, staring blindly at the white wall opposite her. This attitude of repose, though it appeared exhausted, was merely a resuming of her beautiful mask of indifference. When she spoke again she spoke slowly and clearly, without looking in my direction.
‘That treaty. Do not be alarmed. I laughed when I heard. Your own secret agents will be laughing. It is just like Moscow. Hitler, he will now take Poland. There will be war with England this time, and France. Soon, my friend, there will be war with Russia too.’
Her voice, low-pitched and very clear, became dreamy as she looked into a future I myself could only envisage as indescribably terrible. She seemed to see it, like a play already played, a tale told. Had I but realized it, her vision was the measure both of her potential danger to the Party she had so recklessly quitted, and of the danger she herself was in. She had, in fact, that sort of fanaticism which fellow-fanatics do not dare to tolerate, even if they would, in a young woman who is also beautiful. All her life her physical quality must have been her worst enemy. Men put their real treasures into unprepossessing steel safes, dark and soulless, not into the frail and springing delicacy of a porcelain vase. Had I known it, she was in even more danger than she herself could have realized.
‘You talk of war,’ I said, ‘as though it were easy, desirable.’
She shook her head, but not impatiently; again she was talking to a child.
‘It is not easy. It is terrible. All that killing and dying for a few men who do not kill or die, all that hatred and fear. But, my friend, it is inevitable. You know it. There will always be these men . . . You are a Christian?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Your Jesus was just such a man,’ she said, with the unemotional simplicity of a child who has learned by heart a lesson far beyond its powers of thought or reason. The argument was not new to me, and I had given it much earnest thought. I was not going to waste time on it now, here.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I said.
‘You?’
She had been deep in her dream again, as though caught away from the present by some profoundly absorbing memory of the incredible past. Even as she breathed the one word, her momentary bewilderment vanished. She performed that boyish trick with the smouldering cigarette-end again.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking up straight into my face with such an unexpected look that to my surprise I felt my heart leap like a lad’s when he sees his girl in the distance. That delighted leap of recognition should have warned me, but did not; she was too close for me to see how far I had gone to meet her.
‘I thought—if you could tell me how to hide?’ she said. ‘I must disappear, you see. This is why I come to you, but when we talk so honestly together about the bigger things I forget, see? It will not be for long, I think, but I must get away. Do not worry—I have thought to leave the country, but there is nowhere else I could go, now . . . America is too hard, also too dangerous. And—you know—you got to have money and visas and all that. And a job. No.’ She shook her head quickly. ‘I must stay here, and I must hide. Other States are no different. They have agents all over, and all your laws are the same. Anyhow, I am too tired of this running.’
She looked at that moment too young to be tired of anything. Later I realized that what really tired her, intellectually, was her own youthfulness. She always tried to look older than she was; that explained the extreme sophistication and excellence of her dress, and in part the deliberate air of authority she often assumed towards people who did not know her real age, and even towards me, who did. As I was to find out for myself, she was driven by passions of a tempestuousness almost beyond belief or reason, or decency. That is why she had done whatever she had undertaken so well, with a sort of precocious genius, one might say ‘perfectly’ without misusing the word.
‘You must let me think,’ I said.
‘Think,’ she said quietly; and she subsided into that old chair in such a way, effacing herself so completely by means of some mysterious withdrawal of her consciousness of me, that I could have believed—save for my eyes’ irresistible evidence—that I was alone in that small cold room with the silent wireless receiver and the steady beating of my own heart.
I am not a rapid thinker as a rule. Looking at my watch, I saw that some twenty minutes remained before the wireless monitor would be coming to listen to and transcribe the four o’clock B.B.C. news broadcast. There were several things to be considered.
First, the question whether this young woman really was in danger of being attacked in some way, perhaps killed, as she said. It seemed to me, even without knowing then that she had, by direction, been for a time a Nazi Party member in Berlin, that her danger was quite credible enough to give her cause to be afraid. Already since the first stream of refugees had become so to speak a flood, we had had more than a few extremely mystifying crimes of a sort we could only think of as ‘unAustralian’. The character of a crime depends, of course, not upon the method by which it is committed but upon the original motive. At the back of every major crime of violence is someone’s conscious or subconscious self-fulfilment, which is why the cui bono approach in attempting to solve such crimes is often a heartbreakingly difficult one; for only too often the answer to the question who benefits? concerns gratifications not material but emotional, spiritual or even—as in the case of a crime arising out of a conflict of political ideologies—intellectual. So, at any rate, my friends in the C.I.B. had learned, as I in turn had learned from them. Thus it had been found that the ‘unAustralian’ crimes, from common assault to murder, demanded a deal of new thought based on new knowledge of a sort seldom called for during the previous century and a half of this community’s existence.
Looking at Irma absent, as it were, in the dark depths of the leather armchair, I had to admit that more than one crime still unsolved even during my own short experience had had about it many of the obscure but unmistakable characteristics of ideologically-inspired violence; and by no means all had stopped short of murder and the victim’s absolute silence thereafter. More difficult in fact were those where the criminals (there were usually at least two) had refrained from actually taking life, leaving the victim capable, sooner or later, of helping the police, but so badly terrified by his experiences and the threat of further persecution that he would literally rather die than speak. I wondered which of these two methods her mysterious ‘three men’ might have had in mind for Irma. My guess was murder. Women do not react to torture and other methods of terrorism as profoundly as do men, chiefly because their nervous system is not nearly so cerebral and complex.
On the whole, it was safest to assume that she was in serious danger of her life from now on; and my immediate suggestion, which I made to the armchair in which she had effaced herself, was that she seek police protection—what is known as protective custody, which the police are not eager to give unless there has been some actual threat or attempt against the safety of the individual, but which I thought I could arrange through my newly-promoted friend, Detective-Sergeant Harry Hubble of the C.I.B., for whose intelligence in his most difficult profession I had admiration and respect. He would see to it for me, I said. But, emerging from her voluntary self-effacement, she showed such scarcely-controlled alarm at the mere suggestion of involving the police at this time that I was compelled to question her further.
It was thus I found out at last, with mixed feelings, that she had been a passive but genuine member of the Nazi Party during her Berlin operations for the Communists; and for the first time I realized—knowing the dreadful persistence of those people, of both parties—that her danger was indeed real and probably immediate.
For the first time, too, I felt a sudden deep pity for her, in her youth, her unorthodox beauty, and her unconsciously pathetic alienation, wherever she might find herself, anywhere in the world. She had no country now. Australia itself was for her no more than a refuge. As she herself had said, so recently that the tones of her voice seemed still to hang upon the musty air in all their sad dispassionate sincerity, ‘there is nowhere else I could go, now . . .’ That ‘now’ summed up, in one evanescent breath like a sigh, her whole life.
‘Well then,’ I said, ‘you must move from where you live now, for a start.’
‘That I have done, of course,’ she told me calmly, surprised.
‘Where are you living, then?’ I said, and she laughed, a true laugh at last such as I had not heard in her voice before; and for all my gloomy state of mind at that moment I was charmed by it.
‘At Wynyard station.’
‘Good lord,’ I said, ‘how silly. You mean you have nowhere to sleep?’
She gave me a very curious look, almost as though to assure herself I was in earnest; then, seeing I was, she sighed shortly, and once more reverted to that air of patient gentleness that hid god knew what thoughts.
‘My friend, look at me . . . Now tell me if you think I shall ever be in want of a place to sleep.’
It was said with such gentle irony that if I was shocked it was only with a new thrill of pity and understanding. She was quite right, of course. With that face, and a form which the fitted black jacket and skirt by their very severity revealed quite frankly to any imagination not utterly moribund, she would, if she chose, never lack a bed.
‘You say you have friends,’ I said. ‘Could they not help?’
‘You must understand,’ she told me, as though it were an instruction I should already have learned, ‘that I am in danger. Yes, I have friends—and I would not go to them to save my life. They are not such friends as that. And it would not be fair. Do you see that?’
‘Yet you come to me,’ I could not help saying, ‘because you think of me as a friend.’
‘Ah—see, though, the difference!’ she put in quickly with sudden animation, as though I were at last showing some real sense. ‘Who are you? A decent respectable gentleman who writes for a sort of proper paper like the Gazette, non-political and not very interesting. You must forgive me. It is so it seems to my friends.’
‘And to you?’
She waved that aside with a small gesture, smiling.
‘I read all your newspapers in Sydney. To me they are all interesting. But do you see? No one knows that I know you, no one who matters. The place where I have been living, at Kings Cross, that has been under surveillance of a sort. I tell you, there are more things going on in this city than you and your policemen will ever know. How could you? For you, there is not time to study all these passions, these ideas, these ambitions and all things in the refugees’ world here. But I tell you, I am watched. So I take my luggage, all my luggage, and it is not much, to the Central station and then I go by train to Wynard station and leave it there, and come to see you. At Wynard is a man waiting for me to go back for my luggage. Let him wait, eh?’
She was quite amused at the thought.
‘You are earning your living?’ It was a silly question, perhaps, but I did not know if a straight inquiry as to how she lived would force her into unnecessary evasions or equally unnecessary and detailed truths.
She answered readily enough.
‘I am a model—in a dress salon. Also sometimes I design for Madame.’
‘And there is no help there?’
‘No—they do not like me very much. I do not talk enough. There is too much I cannot say. Also I do not have boy friends’—she made a wry mouth, giving me a sidelong look out of the corners of her eyes, a look that was not challenging but baffling—‘and this they do not understand. I will not tell them lies, so I tell them nothing. I have no past.’
That seemed to amuse her, too.
‘All I can see for it is to leave Sydney,’ I said. ‘You will never lose them here, if they mean trouble. I know the comrades.’
‘They will never lose me,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘And—forgive me—I do not think you do know the comrades. You in Australia do not know them. I have lived in Europe. These three men come from Europe. There are some others here like them already when they come. Already in one year these men have done much trouble. Australia is so hospitable to the poor refugees, and the vision of the Party is very far—I tell you. It remains a few details. I am one—and, my friend, not a very important one. But I want to live. For them, you see, there is no hurry. Here, no one feels the alarm in advance. A kind but foolish country. No one is afraid—only the refugees, yes? Refugees like me. So, you understand, I must disappear.’
She concluded with smiling resignation, watching me. The talking had done her good; the fear was gone from her flesh. I suspected also that for some reason of her own she now had no hope of aid from me—she had talked away her own blinding urgency, she saw me more clearly. I had been too unmoved, it would seem to her, when what she wanted was a spontaneous impulse to meet her half-way, to share her fear. Nothing she could say had made me show excitement, once I had mastered my first concern over what she had told me of Russia and Germany.
Nevertheless, even while we spoke so quietly of such fantastic matters, an idea had been forming on the edge of conscious thought, waiting like a newly-engaged player to walk the stage of consciousness and submit to appraisal. I would have scorned the suggestion that this idea arose from any personal interest I felt in Irma then. To me, she was still a young woman unfamiliar and so to be dealt with cautiously. For all her physical attraction and the young, cool swiftness of her mind, she was a stranger, remote, speaking rather good English with a light, agreeable foreign accent that suggested not any one country but Europe itself, a fair part of which she might be said to represent in her moody self-control, her quick alarms and discontents and eagerness to be moving on, always moving on.
She was a stranger still, and so she remained to the end; and I seek comfort in the possibility that, since I never had a profound and complete understanding of her, so she too may have been aware to the end of some few mysteries, some final reserves in me. It would be obscurely comforting to believe this.
Anyhow, my idea turned out to be not so absurd as it might have seemed to anyone else who knew me as little as she did.
‘I have a place in the Blue Mountains,’ I told her. ‘There is some land and a cottage with no one living in it. An old fellow I have there farms part of the land and keeps an eye on the whole place for me. I suggest you go there for a time. I suggest you take a friend and go there,’ I added more firmly, not only because I thought for a moment she was looking doubtful and I had nothing else to offer, but also because the idea, once it had been put into words, seemed to me curiously attractive.
What I had taken for a look of doubt was in fact an expression of slow pleasure, doubtfully entertained, which lit up her whole face. Again she allowed herself that rather theatrical gesture of putting her hands over her heart, and breathed deeply in, sighing out the breath with such an exaggeration (as I thought) of relief that I thought she was laughing at me, and was embarrassed to the point of stroking my beard—a detestable yet irresistible gesture as theatrical, I suppose, as hers, and one which my father used now and then when he wished to hide what he thought might be considered unseemly amusement.
‘I knew you were my friend,’ she said with delight. ‘You see?’
‘The only thing is,’ I said repressively, ‘have you someone to go with you? Quite frankly, I would not like you to stay there alone, for two reasons. The first is that old Jack, my man there, would quite possibly leave if he thought I was making him responsible for you. Freedom from all ties is a passion with him. It has been ever since he escaped from his wife and daughter.’
She looked interested, but I had no more to say about Jack.
‘The other reason is that it is very lonely and isolated. You could quite easily get lost in the mountains without knowing it, if you went walking alone. That would mean the police, search parties, and publicity—the very things you are trying to avoid,’ I could not help adding.
‘I understand,’ she said gravely. ‘I must not go alone. Good. Then if I find a friend I may go? When? Now? Tonight? It is far?’
‘First of all,’ I said, ‘about this friend. Who is he, and is he to be trusted?’
She looked at me in utter amazement; she was so amazed that for a moment her mouth hung open and her eyes went wide like a very caricature of surprise. I cannot say why I should have felt such a lift of the heart again when she began to laugh: for I repeat, she meant nothing to me then more than the symbol of a sort of problem I had not previously met with, and one which for the time I was finding increasingly absorbing.
Her laughter was not loud. Indeed, our entire interview had been so quiet that had the door remained open none of the women working diligently and peacefully in the library would have heard a sound, I think. With it closed, they had probably forgotten we were there; at any rate, I hoped so. Nevertheless, such was the impression of conspiratorial secrecy she had made upon me, with her talk of non-aggression pacts and ‘accidents’ and hiding from pursuit, that I could not repress a gesture of warning, which silenced her.
‘My friend is not a man,’ she said abruptly. ‘You Australians.’
Following upon her stifled laughter, the remark should perhaps have embarrassed me. Perhaps she intended it should; for, as I was to find, no matter how serious her situation might be she could seldom resist a thrust of words or intonation, an ironic glance or a shrug of her straight shoulders, apparently just to see what the reaction might be. It gave the impression sometimes that she was for ever watching herself and her fortunes from without, and it was very disconcerting. Already there had been moments when I was inclined to think her scatterbrained, or at least prone to irrelevances which she would pursue with an enthusiasm equal to her pursuit of the main theme of talk. This was not true. She could keep the main argument sharply in mind while playing all sorts of trivial small games with word and look as opportunity offered. Such had been her training. It was this, as much as anything, which left me to the end mystified by her, even after I had realized that she was a creature prone to sudden devastating passions which she never allowed to devastate her, whatever their effect upon others might be.
‘Who is this friend, then?’ I said with assumed indifference, though once more I had felt that ridiculous stir of relief in my breast.
‘Her name is Linda Werther,’ she said almost repressively, as though that should satisfy me.
‘Who is she, and what does she do?’ I said, not satisfied at all. Irma I could almost imagine at Hill Farm, but I was not going to have the ragtag and bobtail of the refugee milieu clustering over the place like flies.
She began to answer with a shrug of the shoulders, and then thought better of it, I suppose; for she leaned forward in that sudden leisurely way, so near me this time that I could smell the same faint, inscrutable perfume my business card had taken to itself, apparently through being carried about with her.
‘Linda is a German Jewess,’ she said. ‘She is a good woman, but rather fat. She is very kind and not at all sad, though her father and her brother have been killed already by the Nazis. She has no husband, no lover now, only me. She is not a Party member. In Australia in a few years she has made much money in a shop—furs. If you let her come with me, she would look after me. Because of these men, I have not been seeing her for a long time. But we talk on the telephone, often. She is very brave, a brave woman—but too fat to walk far in the mountains and get lost,’ she added irresistibly. ‘As for me, I do not like walking alone. And Linda—she is a German Jewess, she understands this hiding.’
I put a match to my pipe again. Certainly, by its very attraction for me, the suggestion she had accepted so readily was already taking on in my mind the suspect character of an irresponsible escapade. I thought of my cottage fifty miles to the west, looking down from its unusual mountain plateau across the eastern coastal plain towards the unseen Pacific; and I thought of these two foreign women there, disturbing the peace of the man and the dogs, and the forest behind the cottage, hanging over it like a guardian thought, and the enveloping silence, with clear, lilting talk in some language foreign to everything there that was mine; foreign to the listening trees and the earth itself; to the fearless blue wrens coming for crumbs into the kitchen and to the swift grey thrushes whose large liquid eyes matched the liquid notes of their singing in the apple and apricot and peach trees outside the kitchen door; foreign to the faint voice of the stream from the spring that never died, and to the thin, pure mountain air, itself like spring water, that drifted or rushed down the lonely mountainside, or ran softly up it like an ocean in flood when the wind was in the tender east . . .
Drawing at my burnt-out pipe that would not relight, I thought of all this, my only personal refuge from the smell of that city life that meant to me violence and coarse human passions and ceaseless essays against the immaculate spirit. Suddenly, though only for a moment, what I contemplated appeared as a subtle act of treachery, a piece of selfish vanity, or worse: as though, like Faust in legend, I had suggested trading my mind’s and spirit’s sanctuary for the gratitude of this young and lovely mortal.
If it were indeed treachery I contemplated, it was a treachery against myself; from another point of view it could have looked like an act of decency, for the girl with me was helplessly in danger from circumstances against which, whatever part she had played in creating them, long ago, she could not now defend herself alone. She was afraid to ask the law’s protection in the least degree, for her past record made her presently unfit for official investigation; and I later found on inquiry that she had never been near the Dutch consulate for the good reason that her papers were false. As one of a crowd of foreigners, she might have got away with that as she had done in England. As an individual she must have felt she had little chance. Once in the hands of the police, she would have faced deportation as surely as did the men she feared; and deportation to Holland would now have meant certain death. Treachery or not, to dispatch her for a short while into the oblivion of my mountain hiding-place seemed not merely obligatory but somehow inevitable, I thought; and I avoided looking deeper into my mind for other reasons.
She was still leaning forward, watching me without much expression. I could detect that faint perfume breathed from her body and her hair by which, if by nothing else, she must remain unforgettable.
‘That sounds suitable,’ I said. ‘Can you get into touch with her by telephone?’
Immediately, she said, and this too was satisfying, for having made my decision about Hill Farm I wanted to get the matter moving at once, that very minute—almost as if I feared I might lose her by a moment’s delay.
‘How soon could she be ready to go with you?’
‘In one hour, or less.’ She smiled with that light irony I already began to look for in her replies to simple questions of fact. ‘We are practised in these matters.’
‘She will not be missed?’
‘She often goes away. She has money, you understand. At the shop is a woman in charge of all. Linda trusts her. She does not go there always.’
‘And you?’
‘Yesterday I leave my job.’ She laughed impulsively. ‘My job, my room—finished. My friends will not be surprised. Also, do not worry—I too have a little money now. It is easy to save money in your country. There is nothing—nothing . . .’ She hesitated, then said instead, ‘I know how to live poor.’
On top of the wireless cabinet there was a direct-line telephone. I indicated it to Irma.
‘Ring her. Ask her to come here and ask for me in an hour’s time. Tell her where you are going—never mind, tell her you are going into the mountains for a while, to live in a comfortable cottage. You will not need much clothing—strong shoes and warm undergarments. You understand? Food we can arrange about later. There is nothing else. I keep the place always in readiness, and old Jack is there. He has two cows and some hens. You may be lonely but you will not starve. And there are books. You will not die of boredom. Now tell me—can you imagine what it will be like?’
‘Yes,’ she said gravely, and to my surprise she repeated what I had just said, word for word, with hardly a pause or hesitation. ‘It is a trick I was taught. But the sentences must always be short.’ She rose to use the telephone, standing in that way I remembered, with her feet together and her back straight like a well-bred child. I supposed it to have been part of her training as a mannequin, and, finding I was staring like a boy at her shape from behind, so straight and flat across the shoulders, straight-backed and trim at the waist above the well-developed pelvis and strong legs, I looked down quickly at my two hands turning about the cold pipe, and found myself listening without comprehension to her conversation in what I guessed was German, rapid, low-toned and emphatic, with her friend Miss Werther.
Meanwhile, I tried to think unemotionally what I must do. One of the garage attendants would bring the car I seldom used except in Alan’s holidays and to go to Hill Farm occasionally; a telephone call would arrange that. What really troubled me, what had been worrying at the edge of consciousness for some time, was the question whether, without involving her, I could pass on at once Irma’s warning about the impending pact. Scott, the editor, the news-editors and Blake should all know about this; but I did not see exactly what use it would be to pass it to them as something more than hearsay yet less than fact, and in any case my connection with political rounds was still of the slightest. Their reception of anything I had to say would, I saw, depend necessarily upon their opinions of my integrity, not as police roundsman but as a source of information that had at present nothing to do with my own job. When the pact was signed—if it ever was to be signed; professional caution forced me to remember this condition—the police would at once start moving quietly and secretly to complete their checking not only of German-born immigrants (a task they had begun, I knew, the previous year) but of the Communist members of the community. When that happened I should of course be involved, technically at least. It seemed right that I should strongly hint the probability to Scott and Hubble.
There was, above all, the ethics of my proposed action in helping Irma herself. Her past activities might easily make her, for no reasons other than those suggested by official caution, as ‘hot’ here as she had become at the time of her ‘gentleman’s’ murder in Holland. No one, on the facts, would blame the authorities if they treated her as a dangerous alien, carrying false papers and with a record which could be traced at the London end easily enough. My own position would be, to say the least, invidious.
I decided to keep secret my whole acquaintance with her and what I was about to do. Judged by the ethics of my profession, as it held me close to the police and in their confidence, my proposed actions would be wrong—in fact, a sort of felony; and of this I had no doubt at all; but another, older ethical code, inherited through a dozen generations of variously law-abiding and devout but invariably gentlemanly Fitzherberts, gave me confidence not to hesitate. My idea, quite in keeping with the melodrama of this whole interview, was about to become actuality, with myself as the chief and only responsible mover.
Irma finished speaking, and hung up the receiver.
‘She will come,’ she said soberly.
‘Listen to what I am going to say, Miss Martin,’ I said. ‘It is to do with what you tell me about Russia and Germany. I want to ring my editor on this telephone, and warn him. You will not be involved—no names, no mention of any one person, you understand? You can stand here and listen, and if you do not like what I am saying you can press down this hook on the telephone. No questions will be asked that I cannot answer safely.’
She agreed more readily than I expected, as though it were of little importance. ‘I trust you. I must, now, isn’t it so?’
That seemed in its simplicity quite the most pleasing thing anyone had said to me for many a day. My gratification must have been apparent, for with a smile of sudden intimacy and charm she put her ungloved hand on my arm and added gently, ‘You are so kind.’
It is quite likely that at that moment she was hardly aware of me at all, as a person. I did not then know her mannerisms, developed since childhood as a sort of bright, protective armour and also as weapons to win for her whatever contest she undertook. It is probable, too, that in my concentration upon what I was planning to do I had already half-forgotten the original causes of this action—her fear of violence, her direct appeal to me before anyone else, and something more . . . a vanity of my own, a sense of obscure flattery . . . I could not have said, though now I know, that her obsession of my mind, my body, my imagination—I would sometimes even think, of my immortal soul—had begun, at some unplaced moment during our scant half-hour in that dreary little room with its two old-fashioned leather chairs, its brooding quiet, the bulky wireless receiver and the outmoded telephone instrument outlined against the grimy blur of the closed window.
Hill Farm, as it was already called when I bought it just before my marriage, is high on a mountain plateau and faces east. Towering forested spurs wall it in to the north and south. The sun sets early on it behind the main crest which runs north and south like a dark, gigantic wave, but until afternoon subsides into final darkness, it receives from the east a cool reflected light that casts no shadows and seems, indeed, to become brighter than before during the hour or more of sunset and dusk before night falls like a caress over the land.
By driving at a speed uncomfortably fast for my liking, I managed our arrival there while there was still a little of this beneficent luminosity falling shadowless from the high eastern sky. In that direction, the vast coastal plain below was ocean-blue and cold, with lights pricking through the misty air as far as vision reached, to south, east and north. Nearest at hand, twelve miles or more away below, the street and aerodrome lights of the old town of Richmond glittered in rigid stillness; far off, Parramatta was a haze of bright crowded points of illumination, and beyond that, fifteen miles more in the concealing distance, the huge sprawling glow of the metropolis outshone the advancing night that had already hooded the Pacific in a starry darkness.
My last hour in the office had brought upon me a feeling of unreality. Irma, introduced to the monitor as a friend of mine, remained in the wireless room during and after the B.B.C. news broadcast, while I hastened through what I had to do. No one but the monitor, a small, grey-haired woman of modest demeanour, realized that she was still in the building; probably no one else except Peter, the pert and cheerful copy-boy who had brought her to me, knew she had come at all. Throughout the place, the haste and self-consideration of Friday afternoon spread like a fever, almost supervening upon the fretful fever of the times themselves; throughout the building and through the whole city. The irrepressible Australian week-end optimism in the streets made the dirge-like cries of the newsvendors on the corners sound hollow and desperate. This air of adventure and unreality began to pervade my whole mind.
Scott’s manner of receiving my rather diffident warning over the telephone—he did not know I was ringing from within the office: it was a chance I felt I must take—was in keeping with the character of the man and the paper he edited in more than name only. His interests were world-wide, and he had a long vision of national and international affairs as they developed. Like most thinking men among us (and every newspaper has a few such), he was at once ready to believe that what had never been ruled out as a possibility—namely, a rapprochement between the apparently antithetical Foreign Offices of Berlin and Moscow—might well become an accomplished fact before, as he put it, ‘our overloaded stomachs are ready to digest any further morsels of that sort of meat.’
‘I felt bound to pass it on to you,’ I said, ‘because it sounded of particular significance that we here should hear of it so far in advance—if it is far—in Australia itself, and not from overseas sources’.
‘You can’t give me your source of information, I suppose?’ he said in his booming voice, which usually made it necessary to hold the telephone receiver away from one’s ear. I looked at Irma standing near, her body inclined forward as she listened with deep concentration frowning slightly but with no other expression; I felt her light, even breathing on the back of my wrist and inhaled half-unconsciously her faint unknown perfume, and shook my head as though Scott himself could see me. (Clearly I could envisage his tanned yachtsman’s face with the crest of white hair and the look of benevolent anger he always wore, whatever was going on.)
‘No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. Even speaking to you is rather a breach of promise. My informant is quite clear of any political involvement, but you know that with these foreigners there is a deep-rooted fear of the police—particularly the secret police. I find that the very fact of not seeing even a hint of anything like Gestapo or N.K.V.D. activities in Australia only makes them the more sure such things do go on.’
‘Yes. Well—we’ve had rumours of this from London already, of course. It’s one of those occasions when one man’s guess is as good as another’s. It may be as well to let them know at that end what you tell me, especially if what you tell me has come on the red tape.’ This was his way of referring to what scanty news we had direct from Russia, from our own men there.
‘We can at least get a few things ready here, too,’ he shouted thoughtfully. ‘Thanks, anyhow, Fitz. Sorry we can’t check your sources, but I suppose we’ll know the worst soon enough . . . If the whole thing wasn’t so calamitous and final I’d like to get in early with it. Still, it’s not a time for scoops, I suppose—not even for scooping the Herald . . . Goodbye.’
The unreality took hold of my mind as I put down the receiver and looked again at Irma. I wondered for a moment whether it was not all some mad prank being played upon me by someone who knew my temperament; until I remembered the card she had kept for so long. She was standing erect, very close to me, still now with the stillness of overmastering decision. We remained for a few seconds staring steadily at each other, like a couple of conspirators committed to something far more fateful than a plan of escape and disappearance. It almost seemed to me as though, unwittingly, we had somehow pledged ourselves to a deep and timeless association of the mind and the spirit—as though, even if after this moment we were never to see each other again, we should live out our days in the obscure conviction of a frail yet indissoluble union.
Such an experience; for all its brevity, was new to me. It was all part of the unreality of that hour, and had not the slightest effect upon my subsequent thoughts and actions up to the moment I left the office finally, soon after five o’clock. We stood so close that when I looked down and saw without surprise that our hands were joined and clinging idly together I did not know whether the childish, unfettered gesture had been hers or my own. Her fingers were cold, and I could feel a faint trembling, too slight to be visible, running down her arms from her whole body. For the first time I realized, in spite of my self-absorption, that since she had come into that office she must have been in a state of the most intense nervous strain, which she had managed to conceal or disguise the whole time. She knew my connection with the police; she was risking everything, she must have felt, on one chance meeting a year old, and on a vague promise made then and perhaps forgotten, or—worse—regretted.
‘Courage,’ I said to the chilly air above her head, and for a moment she leaned heavily towards me, resting her forehead against my breast and gripping both my hands with hers in a clutching grasp. Then she freed me of herself entirely, stepping back to look up at me.
‘It is you, my friend, who will need courage,’ she said gently. ‘You must pardon me—I am very tired.’
Then she moved quickly back to her chair and sank into it and crossed her knees, taking her cigarette-case and lighter from her shoulder-bag and motioning me sharply to the other chair. No sooner had I sat down than the door behind me opened—she must have been watching it all the while, listening—and the wireless monitor stepped briskly into the little room.
After her unflurried apology, I introduced Irma to her by the first name that came into my mind, and explained that she would wait there for me. Then I went out, forced to admit to myself that my heart and mind were by now considerably disturbed by the interview just concluded. I am by no means of a nervous temper, and even in those distracting days I knew I had a fair command not only over my outward expression but also over those inner tides of ebb and flux which most men feel when abrupt changes outside themselves find inward echoes and responses; when new circumstances which the mind alone can fully comprehend and assess prove to have the power also of calling, as it were by surprise, upon the secret life of the emotions.
These unknown quantities in the ratio of behaviour to outward events I believed I could, if not know, at least control, to the end that I might live and work well. But it must be remembered, as I myself was remembering with a sensation of physical pain, that until a few minutes ago I had not been in such familiar proximity to the youth and beauty and compelling bodily power and subtly exhaled essences of womanhood for more than nine years. I had already assured myself that complete celibacy caused me no bodily distress now. Was I to have to reconsider that assurance, and perhaps to start out on that hard and secret road to physical peace all over again?
It was, somehow, unthinkable; and as I opened the door of my locker in the general room to take out my hat and overcoat I swore to myself that it would not be so. I would avoid the occasion. I had had, I believed, all that one man could hope for from the mysterious hoard of woman—love, and a boy-child, and perfect companionship; in return I had given faithfulness of heart and mind. Oh Jean, Jean, I thought desperately, let me feel again the reassurance of your imagined touch. Blind me with the fair clouds of your hair. Let the memory of what was so good bring quiet in a bad moment.
Evidently I had said some of this audibly, for over the door of the locker on my left, open like my own, a voice I knew said sternly and gaily, ‘What’s that you’re muttering into your beard there, Fitz?’
The speaker was Tim McMahon, at present doing State political rounds, and a more amiably dangerous man I never knew. As it was Friday afternoon, he was as usual already drunk, in his unobtrusive way. His beaming, bespectacled face, the perfect mask of innocence for one who could recite more recondite scandal, of a personal sort, from the Australian political sphere than anyone I ever heard of, regarded me affectionately as we closed our locker doors (his causing a heavy clink of bottle against bottle). For some reason which he probably understood as little as I did, he considered me his closest friend. As far as I knew, he had no other, for men were wary of him. It had begun when he was at last recalled quietly from Canberra, where for years he had surveyed the Federal political scene in weekly articles that varied between the brilliant and the useless, and whence he had sent us, time and again, items of news almost too scandalous not to be true, and far too libellous to use—much to Scott’s regret, for Scott was a bold man who combined a conservative policy with a love of truth-telling and a bitter contempt for most politicians. McMahon’s own usefulness there was deemed to have ended when he began repeating news-items in subsequent dispatches. His weakness for liquor, like the weaknesses of most members of that large staff both at home and overseas, was known well enough. The day came when complaints of him were received from more than one Minister in the Federal capital. Because these were of a personal sort, he was replaced. In common with most publications, the Gazette held that a man’s private life was his own affair until it affected his work, when it became the concern of his employers. In Sydney he could be watched.
McMahon, however, seemed pleased to be recalled, pleased to be given the comparatively less important assignment of State Parliament; but at first he was naturally lonely in Sydney, where he had never worked since his engagement by the Gazette some years earlier. (He was a Melbourne man.) As I was in the office a good deal during the earlier part of the day, I saw him often, and occasionally gave him lunch or a drink—usually both. Like others of his sort, he seemed never to have much money, although he was a high-salary journalist and had been for years. His borrowing habits soon became known, and few men now cared to find themselves alone with him between pay-days. However, I was obliged to enjoy his company—and perversely enough it was worth enjoying, even when he was not sober—more than most; and although he never offered or attempted to project our association outside the varying limits of our working day, he did linger near my table, or sit nonchalant and laughing in my visitors’ chair, for long hours sometimes when we should both have been finishing our work, entertaining me against my will with his scandalous and witty reminiscences. Hours meant little to him; like many a lonely journalist I have known, he was never quite happy away from the office itself, where he was to be encountered at any time, on most days, from morning till late at night.
The fact, too, that like him I had had a Catholic upbringing was soon known to him—he had this unashamed flair for the personal in every human contact he made—and without trading on it, in that predominantly Protestant atmosphere of the Gazette of those days, he took it, as so many Catholics since the time of Henry Tudor have taken this irrelevant matter of religious denomination, to be a secret additional tie between us.
Today I not only had no time for him: I definitely and actively wanted him away from me, out of the building and away from Irma’s neighbourhood, for though I liked him I trusted him no more than one can trust a cat. He followed me to my table, disappointment in his round thin face where every feature was of a pinched, classic neatness, almost feminine, from the small square jaw and the little, tender mouth topped by a restrained moustache to the round brow with its widow’s-peak of dark hair, and the almost wistful directness of his blue eyes behind shallow lenses in dark frames.
I took up the telephone book without a word, and quite rudely turned my back upon him while I looked for the number of the garage where, for most of the year, and year after year now, my car stood on chocks, polished and unused—‘part of the furniture’ the garage men called it, patting it in a friendly fashion as newer and smarter models came and went.
McMahon for once took my crude hint, and wandered away among the brown wooden tables of the general room. I asked for the car at the side entrance in an hour’s time, and then stood fingering in my pocket the receipt slips for Irma’s luggage which I had got from her at the last minute, and wondered what to do next. The luggage would wait until the car was at hand. There remained the C.I.B.—particularly Hubble—and a vague feeling that I ought to let Barbara know what I was about. For some reason or other, I felt as though I were about to say goodbye to these two people, like a man making preparations for a long journey.
Above all there was Alan, and at the thought of him the old loneliness and longing for my own kin ached like a healed wound in threatening weather. I seldom left town for long between one annual holiday and the next, except on occasional police assignments, and until this year had never gone away even for a weekend at Hill Farm without first seeing him at my mother’s house.
Now, however, things were different, for at the beginning of the year he had been enrolled at S. Johns, the Townsends’ unique (as it then was) co-educational school in Vaucluse as a boarder, and had long since learned to be happy there—so happy, indeed, in the company of boys and girls of his own age and social origins that my jealousy at our parting soon gave way to a lonely contentment at the rightness of my own and my mother’s decision to send him there. He was in any case an extraordinarily happy child, from the days of his earliest infancy, and though it sometimes made my throat ache to think he must live his life without having ever known the arms and the breasts and the tender lips of an earthly mother, I felt a deep joy in watching develop the innocence and optimism of his nature towards a replica of Jean’s own. Being myself inclined sometimes to moods of black gloom and despair, both of myself and of my kind, I could observe with admiration his freedom, so far, from a single moment of self-doubt or self-consciousness, and the sturdy growth of his child mind towards what promised (and indeed proved) to be a healthy and cheerful independence of thought sweetened by much spontaneous and untutored affection for those with whom he lived. He was in fact all Jean in his nature and temperament, and all Fitzherbert in his physical appearance.
Townsend and his wife, who ran the domestic side of the small school between them, discouraged visits by parents. Boarders came home for one week-end each month, and there was only one full-scale holiday each year, covering the Christmas and New Year celebrations during eight flying weeks of summer. May and September holidays were observed by the usual termination of class studies, but the children remained at the school as though it were their own home—as indeed it seemed to them to be—and the course of social training which to the Townsends was designed for the greatest good both of the individual child and of the future community was preserved without serious interruption the year through.
Alan had been there for six months, and I knew he was already benefiting from the well-disciplined informality of that environment. Without doubt, for all her affection and good-will towards her only grandchild, my mother had had some repressive effect upon him. Her love, starved now of almost all other outlets, would have seen to that . . .
I rang S. Johns and spoke to Townsend briefly, asking after the boy and letting him know I would be out of town overnight. He seemed surprised and impatient, as he always did when I made these, to his mind, unnecessary calls to warn him of my absences. His attitude towards parents was one of suspicious tolerance, at best, and of blunt and outspoken criticism when they threatened any interference with his thoughtfully-devised ‘system’.
I rang off, supressing a great longing to hear the boy’s voice lightly saying my name, and went up to see Barbara.
Still overwhelmed now and then by the recurring thought of what I had learned from Irma, I believe I was fully intending to tell her what I had told Scott. If I was, it was for different reasons—mainly because of the habit of friendship’s confession; for we had become over the years such firm friends, so easy in each other’s company, that many of the staff, I think, supposed us to be lovers. Our innocent intimacy was of the sort that makes all but the most personal secrecies impossible. Matters that affected our professional and private lives and the lives of our children we discussed with the day-to-day ease of brother and sister, with the same sense of kinship and the same lack of much emotion; and at that time the precarious balance of our civilization on the crumbling cliff-top of incalculable disaster was indeed such a matter.
However, I changed my mind abruptly when she looked up with her invariable smile of welcome and I observed—not without a soft wrench of envy—the expression of calm anticipation in her face, and realized that she must have been thinking with contentment and joy of the two days of freedom before her, and of herself surrounded by her sons—for Brian was at home on a short leave. That look of almost animal well-being, when the flesh itself is informed by the mind’s contented purpose, is so peculiar to motherhood that only in the face of a priest who once befriended me in my university days have I seen anything comparable with it in a man, on whom, as it happened, not a child but a fatal cancer was feeding.
Barbara had no bodily ailments that I ever knew of, but she had some of the mental sickness and the sickness of the heart from which our generation suffered in those unbearably threatening days of August in that year. It was like waiting for a blow which we knew must fall, but which would not. Now, in the last hour of her usual working week, she had shrugged off the worry and the fear, setting them aside as firmly as she was setting aside the week’s completed tasks. I could not spoil her rare moment of pleasure in seeing herself as once more all woman, all mother.
‘You are off, Lloyd?’ she said with cheerful surprise. ‘Free? Come over and have dinner with us at home. Brian will be there, and the boys haven’t seen you for an age. Do us all this favour.’
When I said it was not possible, she seemed unusually disappointed. Then she smiled and remarked teasingly, ‘I know—it’s that rather startling young woman I saw you with.’
‘It is, in fact,’ I said. ‘I’m taking her up to Hill Farm with me tonight.’
‘It must be her clothes,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet anything you don’t know how particularly well dressed she is. I was almost going to ask you where I could have seen her before. Is she Australian?—no, forgive me. It’s no affair of mine, except that her clothes are perfect and she wears them perfectly. Did you know that?’
‘I have not your trained eye in such matters,’ I said, feeling suddenly depressed. ‘The fact is, I really am taking her and a friend of hers to the mountains this evening, and I can’t stay long now. I need not tell you the whole story at this time, but briefly, she is in danger and wants a hiding-place, and I could only think of the farm. To tell the truth, I’m not very happy about it. I don’t know how Jack will take it. You know how he is about women. I don’t want to lose him . . . I could think of nothing else except protective custody, and when I did suggest that, she was pretty badly frightened.’
‘Dear me,’ Barbara said, ‘that sounds bad. I suppose my place wouldn’t be any good?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She has to run for it, you see—right away from Sydney, if what she tells me is true—and I have some reason to believe her. As for your question—no, she is not Australian, she is a refugee I happened to speak to about a year ago, when I was doing a boat for Bob Roberts. She tells me she has been a mannequin here for some time. That is all I know about her life here—a mannequin or model and an occasional designer somewhere in town.’
Barbara nodded.
‘I knew I had seen her before,’ she said slowly. ‘She’s first model at a rather posh place called Chez Madame—a really lovely creature. I remember her particularly because she has never let herself be photographed. I must say your taste is good, Lloyd.’
‘I assure you this is none of my choosing,’ I said irritably. ‘But that would be the girl.’
‘Why no photographs? Usually the particularly lovely ones are particularly vain.’
‘She was probably frightened,’ I said. ‘Off and on for the past five years she has been running for her life—literally. She is doing it again now, she believes.’
‘Oh, the poor little thing . . . Tell me, is this part of the general European picture?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It has come near home at last—a rather unusual sample of it, for this country, but common enough over there, I gather. They take their politics rather more seriously than we do. And now I must go and see my police friends. I just came to let you know I shall be at Hill Farm until tomorrow evening or perhaps Sunday—I cannot simply set them down there on old Jack’s doorstep and disappear. You see how it is. And thank you for this evening’s invitation.’
‘Let me know if I can be of any help,’ she said earnestly; and, as I was closing the door, she added, ‘And take care of yourself as well as of other people, my dear.’
On my way to the main staircase, I called two of the boys from where they sat chattering on their long bench, waiting impatiently to become special correspondents, and gave them Irma’s cloakroom receipts and some money.
‘Bring whatever it is to the side entrance not a minute later than five to five, will you? I shall be in again about then. One of you please wait with the luggage until I come. Divide the change up between you, and keep sober.’
I got on rather well with our copy-boys. Because of my van Dyke beard and moustaches, they at first thought me rather a comic figure; because of their confident youth and friendly impudence when no one else was near, I thought them comic too. As each of us knew what was in the other’s mind, and no harm was meant, we rubbed along very satisfactorily. It is an unfortunate newspaper man who cannot get on happily with his office subordinates. They were still alternately thanking me, hinting at corpses in trunks, and telling each other to shut up when I went down the staircase, past the front business office, and into the street.
A taxi took me to Phillip Street and the C.I.B. The tremulous August afternoon was fading, the air already turning cold. I had a flashing glimpse of the gilded globe high above the entrance to the Sun building, where our afternoon colleague was running off final extras: it was catching the last of the city’s sunlight, while a dozen floors beneath it the news-editors were sorting out late cables and home news under the shaded glare of desk lights. Over the whole city was spreading the care-freed Friday afternoon mood. Seeing so many week-end suitcases being hoisted into trams and taxis, I was reminded of the need to buy food as soon as I had seen Hubble.
He was sitting, as in imagination I always saw him, with his shirt sleeves rolled up, leaning his elbows on the table and smoking. His pipe was drawing well and his brow was clear and untroubled as a boy’s. Like many professional wrestlers’—and in his youth he had won belts—his body looked ill-proportioned while he was seated; as soon as he stood up you saw that, unlike a lot of them, he had the height to carry his weight, almost majestically I sometimes thought; and he had brains and intelligence enough to carry the weight of his present exacting job as a senior member of the criminal investigations branch. He might have been ten years older than I was. The shining fairness of his short-cut hair at the temples might have been silver. No one, in either case, could have said with any certainty.
‘Hullo, Fitz—how’s crime?’
It was his unvarying greeting. To the clerk busily typing at a small table near him he indicated the door and added, ‘See if Mr. Inkpen has finished with that Dodds letter, Bill, and put it back in our file if he has, or we’ll lose track of it. I won’t be long.’
When the constable had gone out, I told him why I had come.
‘As near as that, is it?’ he said. ‘It’s something outside my own sphere just now, this political stuff, but forewarned is forearmed, eh?’
‘To coin a phrase, yes,’ I said. He gave me a sharp look, then slung one large knee over the arm of his groaning swivel chair and let his head fall back as he laughed. I knew, however, that he was watching me and thinking of what I had told him.
‘Where did you pick this up?’ he said abruptly, putting his knee down again and leaning forward.
‘I’m not free to say—and you need not think you can catch me out with your trick questioning,’ I said. ‘It comes from a refugee, an ex-Communist who still hears things from Moscow occasionally on the grape-vine. You know what chance there is of keeping a thing as big as this secret in countries like Russia and Germany. It actually came out during a personal conversation. Needless to say, we ourselves cannot do much about it either, until it is official, but, to borrow your phrase, forewarned may be to some extent forearmed. Like you, I don’t see myself connected with it—yet. Both of us may be in it if this pact does happen, if we do find ourselves at war with Germany by next month, and if our own government acts quickly. As far as I am any judge, the whole of the immediate future depends on the relationship between those two countries. I imagined your people would like to know it is talked about here. The country’s full of aliens.’
‘Lousy with ’em,’ he agreed, taking up his pipe again when I lit my own, which I had been filling while I spoke, ‘And now tell me, my dear Watson, what’s really on your mind?’
‘Nothing more.’ He was always surprising me in this uncanny way, though I knew him well. I believe it was partly habit, partly shooting in the dark; I knew he had more than once found the trick useful when he saw himself stopped in an investigation by his own ignorance of where he was heading, at a certain moment; but invariably his instinct, his choice of the exact instant for asking that direct question, was infallible.
‘Nothing?’ he said. ‘I thought you looked paler than usual—worried.’ His own plump red-brown face of a healthy and active man still showed no trace of worldly care.
‘Not unless you can give me something to worry about.’
‘The trouble with you and me, Fitz,’ he said amiably, ‘is that we don’t trust each other like partners in crime should. All right. Have it your own way.’
It had not taken long, but I was anxious now and felt a need for haste, like one approaching the real purpose of a mission. By the time I got back to the side entrance of the office, carrying several food parcels that did not fit together anywhere, it was ten to five.
Fortunately, my boy was already waiting inside the unostentatious steel double doors beside a small collection of travelling luggage.
‘Go and stand somewhere near the inquiry desk,’ I told him. ‘A fat woman will be asking for me at about five o’clock, probably carrying a suitcase. Bring her here, will you?—tell the girl I asked you to meet the woman. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, Mr. Fitz,’ he said, impressed by these mysterious goings-on so obviously that I forgot my own nervous irritation and had to hide my smile from him.
‘All right, all right,’ I said, ‘there’s a couple of shillings waiting here in my pocket for your trouble. Now be off with you—and listen—if anyone wants you, say you’re doing an urgent job for me. It won’t keep you late.’
When he had gone, skipping up the shadowy concrete stairway rising round the lift-well, I looked at Irma’s luggage. There was a small cabin-trunk, as well as two suitcases and a heavy coat; nothing more. It seemed unlikely that she could have lived the life she had lived for a whole year with so little. There was something pathetic in the thought. I stared at the luggage, and at my own parcels—two batons of bread, coffee, fish, a dressed fowl, two bottles of white wine—and wondered momentarily if it were not all a dream, the whole afternoon and these last minutes of it, so far was it all from my life as I had taken it up on waking that morning. Then I began to wonder what Irma was doing up in that little cold room alone, and why I should find myself in this fantastic, nerve-wracking and yet fascinating situation. No criminal investigation in which I had ever taken part had seemed so improbable; and it was made all the more unreal, yet somehow all the more convincing, by one sound familiar to the hour above all others—the beginning of the tramp of feet in the street outside.
This sound, to one who is not part of it, is like the sudden rise of a tide that as suddenly ebbs. The feet and the voices surge in ruthless crescendo between the darkening walls of the narrow streets with the lighted windows of shops at their base. At first the onlooker, absorbed in thought perhaps, waiting in a backwater of time, does not know that he hears, but abruptly becomes conscious of the sound and its significance: the leeching from the city itself of all that which, living, keeps the city alive. As the exodus increases, when men and women in their hundred thousands spill from the entrances of the drab buildings into the drab thoroughfares, so the sound increases; and with it the sense of release, in that vitiated air that smells of petrol fumes, metal, tar, humanity, tobacco smoke, food, heat and grime, becomes almost irresistible, and the moored onlooker feels impelled, as if by a mob’s panic, to turn, leave his place, and join the hurrying, intent throng. With every second that passes, he sees himself left behind, left behind like a strayed sheep at a crossing; he feels homeless, lonely, unwanted, of no significance to the stream of human life and affairs, and a sense of gloom and defeat emphasizes the creeping melancholy of his situation.
I stood in shadow, and listened to the beginning. Already on the doors of the lifts in the lobby behind me the drivers, physically disabled men, were hanging out their Automatic signs. One leaf of the double doors of the dark office building opposite was closed; and at my back, as I stood staring into the street watching lights go off and others come on in unforeseen places, there sounded on the shadowy stairway the footsteps of the first people to leave the business offices upstairs.
It was my car I looked for in the street outside, with a futile and increasing anxiety as the minute-hand of every timepiece in the city moved upwards to twelve. When there were still three minutes to go, I saw it slide in to the kerb opposite the door-way, and the driver, whom I had known for years, edged himself across the seat and got out by the near door, leaning in again to remove the ignition key.
When he turned and, seeing me, raised one hand in casual salute, I beckoned him over and together we quickly stowed the luggage, and the coat and the clumsy parcels in the back seat. We had just finished this to our satisfaction when the boy Peter appeared on the darkening stair looking down over the smart hat of a small round woman who was descending the last steps in front of him carrying a big travelling bag. When he caught my eye, he made a short indicative gesture, and grinned with some embarrassment. I approached the round woman, who was glancing about her with eyes as black and polished as ripe berries, and whose face even in its present watchful expectancy was full of signs of laughter. Indeed, when she saw me she laughed outright, her dark red lips curling back like thick rubber bands from teeth as white as Irma’s own, and perceptibly larger; and as she came sailing forward with the light step of a fat woman whose insteps bulge above the cut of her shoes without apparent discomfort, she was holding out one plump hand on which the fingers were being eternally strangled by rich rings that sparkled in the pallid ceiling lights of the lobby, and saying with an air of merry joy, ‘Mr. Fitzherbert? Ah—Irma told me. I am Linda Werther.’
‘Go up to the wireless room off the library,’ I said to the amused boy, who was hovering, ‘and show the young lady there the way down here, will you, Peter? Tell her her friend is waiting.’
Miss Werther, dark-eyed and happily smiling, turned to me in the impulsive, enveloping way those people have, and said with subdued intensity, ‘Mr. Fitzherbert, Irma told me all, over the telephone. How terrible it is for her—terrible—here where she thought she was safe at last. You know her well, Mr. Fitzherbert?’
‘I don’t know her at all,’ I said, looking down at the Jewess’s distressed, smiling face and wondering what I had let myself in for. ‘She came to me for help, and I suggested this cottage of mine in the mountains. That is all.’
‘But it is perfect,’ she said. ‘It is the only thing, Mr. Fitzherbert—she must get away from cities for a while. Too many accidents happen in cities. Every day, if you read the papers . . .’
‘I help write them,’ I said gloomily.
‘Yes—ah, of course!’ she said, laughing heartily. ‘So you know . . . Irma is a real refugee, you see—not like me. I came here when I could have stayed, but there was nothing left to stay for. The accidents had not started in Germany then. But Irma, she came because she must. To her, Australia is the refuge. Forgive me if I say I think it was also a refuge from herself. She was taking life the hard way. You know her story?’
‘Only in broad outline,’ I said, ‘from what she was obliged to tell me this afternoon. You must understand, Miss Werther, that this sort of thing is all very unusual to me. I have no experience of playing St. George, you know.’
She exuded optimism and confidence in a dark world, just as the diamonds on her fingers and ears and bosom gave out a mad light where there seemed to be none to awaken them. In spite of my distaste for many of her sort I have seen and met, I could not help but begin to feel a wary liking for her rich, simple cheerfulness, and a sort of respect for the shrewdness with which, as I knew, she was watching me out of her black, shining eyes while she talked with such subdued feeling about Irma.
‘St. George?’ she said. ‘Ah yes—of course. The man that rescued the lady from the dragon.’ Her voice was like a nudge in the ribs; she assumed an air of great slyness, deliberately. I turned to look at the last visible flight of the stairway where it emerged downwards from behind the lift-well.
‘I only remember him,’ I said, ‘as a symbol of a sort of chivalry I seldom have time or cause—or inclination—to practise.’
She was unabashed. She put her jewelled, throttled fingers on my sleeve where I let them rest, thinking that I should, after all, be grateful at this moment for her mere existence.
‘You are too modest,’ she said. ‘Though you say you don’t know her, Irma has mentioned you to me sometimes since she met you on the boat. She always said how kind you were to her that day, obviously a gentleman. Forgive me laughing. It is at what she said: “Not at all like what one supposed Australians to be, and not at all like what one finds they are”.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘she has not met many Australians in the world she seems to have lived in here.’
‘No, how right you are. We are so ready to judge, we Europeans, without knowledge. We expect to find all the world is Europe. When we find it is not, we make a little exclusive Europe of our own, speak our own languages, and have the cheek—it is nothing less—to think of the people of our adopted country as the foreigners, the interlopers.’
She said all this in a very lively way, as one who had said it before—as one whose appeal perhaps lay partly in her willingness to admit, on behalf of the foreign community, what most of us had already seen for ourselves, with varying degrees of anger, amusement or indifference. I could only guess: whatever her mannerisms might be, however well-developed her inevitable façade, they did not really conceal a shyly confident good-hearted quality which made me begin to find her not preposterous but likeable. I was pleased that Irma, so much younger, volatile, more unpredictable, would be in her care and her cheerful company. How would old Jack receive her? I frankly could not say. Judging by her whole appearance, one would have supposed that to pack a travelling bag, however capacious, and at a few minutes’ notice leave everything for a wild and unknown destination, must have called for a generous sacrifice of the creature comforts to which, clearly, she was used. The shining black fur of her long coat, whose name I did not know, absolutely smelt of ten-pound notes in large, soft quantities; yet there had been no moment when she showed either surprise or uneasiness, any impatience whatever, since she had arrived. From her manner of unforced gaiety and friendliness, she might at that moment have been judged ignorant of Irma’s very existence.
‘With her it is not so,’ she was saying in her lilting and accented colloquial English. ‘She is truly cosmopolitan, but she has known so much unhappiness and fear, you see, that she really feels she has no world of her own anywhere. A world of one’s own is a place of safety. She has been so lonely, and so brave . . . You see, Mr. Fitzherbert, it came to this, that no one would what you might say claim her—she seemed too dangerous for everyone, in Europe, even in England. That is why she comes here, and then—pfft!—on the same boat are three bad types, who know all about her. It is too much. Certainly, they come on other business, to make trouble with the leaders of your workers, that is well known, but also they do her all the harm they can, on the side, and so—all through this country too her record is known here and there, people are afraid. She is called a traitor. For myself, it does not matter, and I have friends, too, who do not know or care. For us, she is a woman. But even so, there are too many people, Party members, who know about her, and so she is never at peace, in her own mind. She has nothing—no religion, no lover, no family—no future, you might say—yet because she is brave this does not break her heart. The worst you can say of her is that she must always act first for herself, and most of us do that. If it were me, I should go mad.’
She drew the distressing picture with cheerful, dispassionate precision, making Irma for the first time a third person in my mind, and so real that I was increasingly impressed by the clear accuracy of her mind behind the flowery, bejewelled and ornate exterior. Over her tilted head I had been looking at the stair so unseeingly, my mind so filled with the growing portrait of that unfortunate young woman which my companion’s lilting, murmured words built up, by stroke after stroke, that when Irma herself did appear at the turn of the stairway, coming quickly down with my boy following, it seemed as though she had been there in the very flesh all the time Miss Werther was speaking.
The two women embraced one another in their different fashions, but briefly, before Irma stepped back and turned to me. Her face was like a wooden mask now—not expressionless, but stiff with the strain of waiting there alone in a strange office, held there by her desperate determination to risk, as she thought, at least her freedom if not her personal safety by trusting me and taking my word. Later I learned that she did not know, until the boy came, whether I would not return with the police, or whether, instead, I might simply have washed my hands of her affairs after all, and have left her there to wait until she was asked to leave the building. It was the sort of thing that could happen to her. She had had similar experiences, but this—if it had happened—was to have been the last of them; and it was then that she showed me the innocent-looking little ampoule of potassium cyanide which they called ‘the death capsule’. She had had it all the time, that day, in her glove, fitted into the tip of the thumb. She showed me how, as the glove is casually removed, the glass ampoule falls unnoticed into the palm of the hand and can be slipped into the mouth in the middle of a yawn. I had seen the result of the swift working of that particular poison. In a sweat of retrospective horror I took and threw the shining little thing into the waters of the harbour . . . That was long afterwards, however.
Now, the tramping of feet outside on the pavements was rising with the roar of traffic and the yelling interjections of the newsvendors in their final frenzy of the day to an obliterating tide of sound. All over the city, young women of Irma’s age were leaving the doorways of buildings and stepping into friends’ cars. It was the natural moment for our departure. I dismissed the boy with a few shillings and thanks—indeed, I could not have hoped to manage the business so unobtrusively without him—wondering at the same time whether the watcher at Wynyard were still loitering there; and then, just as we were about to walk quickly to the car, the women following me, McMahon came in, bumping lightly against the door-frame as he turned out of the crowded street, lightly but with sufficient speed to send him straight into my arms. His hat fell off, and in the dim light from above, his face, blandly drunk and smiling already in senseless apology, was revealed. I heard Irma step behind me with the ghost of an exclamation, and then McMahon drew himself free and upright, and said in his soft voice, with that damnably accurate perception of the practised drunkard, ‘Ah—the little Communist lady. Pardon me, Fitz, old boy old boy—sheer clumsiness if you know what I mean, I mean.’
I picked up and returned to him his hat, murmuring in a voice I could barely keep from sounding thoroughly cross, ‘For heaven’s sake, Tim, keep out of the office and go home. Don’t be a fool. Take my tip and go, or you’ll find yourself going for good.’
‘Hey—easy, Fitz, easy,’ he mumbled, trying to get another look at Irma, as, acting mechanically and from instinct, she walked quickly out to the car with her face averted, and opened the door of the rear seat, Miss Werther at her elbow all the time. Without difficulty—for he had taken hold of my wrist in a strong, drunken grasp—I kept myself between McMahon and the very ordinary street scene of two women dressed in businesslike black getting into the back seat of a car, and, when the door was closed, settling themselves in the interior darkness to wait for the driver. When I heard that door slam shut, I stood away from McMahon, whose breath and clothes smelled strongly of a mixture of beer and rum. He stared past me into the shadowless light of the street, a mixture of daylight and lamplight, and frowned in hazy puzzlement.
‘Funny thing,’ he said conversationally, ‘I could have sworn I saw a young dame here I know quite a bit about . . . A very choice piece, Fitz, old man, honestly, no, honestly. You see her? or am I a bit—you know—seeing things?’
‘Why don’t you head for home?’ I said, my annoyance going as his bewilderment persisted. ‘You know quite well you will only make trouble for yourself with the subs if you go up now. Blake has his eye on you, you know.’
He would not listen to me, but muttered something unrepeatable about Blake and made for the lifts. While his back was turned, and his attention focused uncertainly on the choice of buttons to be pressed, I almost ran from the building and round the back of the car into the crowded roadway beyond. A passing driver, important with the moment’s crazy haste, called out irritably, ‘Look out, whiskers,’ as I got into the driver’s seat, slid home and turned the ignition key, and took the chance of pulling out at once behind a careering tram into the homeward-bound, savage flood of competing traffic. In the rear-vision mirror I caught a glimpse of the two women’s faces pale in the gloom when the shop-window lights flickered on them as we went forward.
Irma’s head was resting against the back of the seat, and her delicate eyelids were closed as though in the extreme of an absolute exhaustion. She looked frightened. With an air of lively concern, Miss Werther was caressing her dark hair, from which her hat, like McMahon’s, had fallen or been flung.
Beyond Richmond the branch road turns north-west. We had driven aslant the sunset glow above the blue blackness of the mountains where the light flowed up into the cloudless sky with a pure radiance almost white at the level of the aerial horizon, and faded through pale gold to the imperceptibly deepening blue of the zenith. After eight miles we began the slow series of climbs towards Hill Farm, leaving a last village to sink with the land behind us as the road swept in arbitrary curves and zigzags between taller and taller trees.
Hill Farm is on a curious, roughly defined plateau which drops suddenly on the eastward side. The road became a firm bush track, and the towering trees that seemed to but actually did not meet overhead so darkened the way that I had to switch on the headlights. In their penetrating downward glare the most recent wheelmarks of old Jack’s light cart could clearly be seen, and I knew by this, and by the sweet, nippy smell of the thin mountain air, that rain had fallen here more recently than it had in town. As I drove up the familiar way I thought again how wise and leisurely the original maker of Hill Farm had been, to cut his track so that the place was approached from the rear in a gradual ascent and a final level stretch northwards along the mountain side, rather than to attempt to breast the swelling bosom of the plateau’s eastern limit with deep cuttings into that dead clay subsoil which becomes like a cold reddish glue during the winter rains.
After Miss Werther had helped Irma into her coat, nobody spoke at all during that unpleasantly fast progress which only the foothills beyond Richmond slowed down. I was glad to be able to concentrate on handling the car, a business at which I am no expert but which does not interfere, as speech does at such times, with thinking. Once we had left the outskirts of the city, the grime and slickness of the factory district south of the University, and the hugely depressing sprawl of residential wildernesses beyond, my mood changed. It always does, here. When the unsullied plain is visible at last on either hand, and the mountains in the distance slowly cease to be a flat navy-blue dado at the foot of the wall of sky and begin to show themselves in all their depth and complicated splendour, a surge of joy and content gathers force in my breast like the urge to sing on a fine morning; and I think, always, that I should leave the city and live a country life, farming the plateau with old Jack to guide me, keeping myself for ever away from the deadly contact with the people of the city, from the greedy fears and the frightened greeds which seem to be the two aspects of their whole being.
I think this, many times each year, whatever the season, whatever my city preoccupations; but—like most other escaping travellers in the same scene, who must think similar thoughts—I shall never do it. Because I am not a nervous man I shall never have the impulse, pure and strong, to break with habits of living and working, and above all with the more subtle and implacable habits of memory.
We passed occasionally by tree-trunks and open spaces that I recognized, signs of the home-comings of years. Remotely below on the right the blur and sparkle of the lights of civilization’s fringes could be seen sometimes in passing vertical panels opening and closing between the crowded trunks of huge turpentines and aspiring red and white gums; and over the plain thus briefly revealed hung the pale, forgiving haze of the last blue daylight. The thought came into my mind that, as it was Friday, as likely as not Jack had shut Donna in her wire cage, milked early, and gone off on his grey horse to the nearest pub, at North Richmond, south-east of us and miles away. If so, he would not be back until midnight, asleep on his homing animal as comfortably as an Oriental prince in a howdah. As the trees thinned and the boundary fence halted us, I looked for his light, and as I was closing the sliprails behind the car I saw it, bobbing through the orchard between the cottage and the shed where, years before, he had built a big brick fireplace and set himself up, solitary but not lonely, silent but always ready with an answer and a sharp jest (especially about marriage and the horribleness of women), and casually skilful at everything he had need to do.
He saw my lights at the same time, and raised in salute the storm-lantern he was carrying through the dusk. Underfoot the earth was still clearly visible, and above the mutter of the engine I heard the sudden minatory barking of Donna, and the graver bull-roaring of Jack’s dog Ike. It was a moment of such comfort that I did not get into the car at once, but for a full minute stood waiting until Donna’s approaching clamour became, abruptly, a series of exclamations of wonder, incredulity and delight as she allowed herself to recognize who had come.
‘We are here,’ I said into the darkness of the rear seat; and again for a moment the thought of those two women, distracted, over-civilized and alien, in these still and empty solitudes made me frown. No imagination could force them to fit, here; but I realized this now without undue dismay, for my sense of my own ease, like that of a man closing his front door after him as he comes home, gave me strength and confidence in what I had undertaken.
The small bitch flashed like living copper across the steady beam of the headlights, and welcomed me with small whines and groans of pleasure until I felt god-like for that moment. When I let her in upon the seat beside me, however, she went rigid and the hair of her thick winter coat rose stiffly between her shoulders.
‘Speak,’ I said. ‘It is my spaniel—her name is Donna.’
Both the women said her name, but she was not reassured. In her two years of life she had never seen a female human being, nor smelled one. She growled unhappily on a high protesting note, and as we moved forward towards the barn, where I kept the car beside Jack’s cart among odd bits of farming machinery, she put one paw, with an air of mingled question and authority, upon my left knee and let me see the whites of her eyes. Not only was she quite unused to strangers, but she was pathetically jealous of my attention whenever I was about, though Jack assured me she grieved little once I was gone.
He was waiting with the lantern. He smelled pleasantly of rum, his evening refreshment after the day’s work. I took the usual half-bottle of it out of the glove-box and watched him slide it into his hip pocket without a word, before I explained about our visitors. He listened in silence, sucking at his cold pipe, and nodded when I added that there were peculiar circumstances and that the younger woman was unofficially under my protection for the present.
‘I remember,’ he murmured gravely into my ear, ‘I found one woman quite peculiar circumstances. I reckon two would be very peculiar.’
They would have to stay on for a while, I said, and he must not let them worry him, for it would not be for long. Then I helped the two of them out of the car on to the warm earth floor of the barn, where the air carried the sweet ancient odours of the cow and her milk and her feed from the byre next door. Jack held the lantern high so that he could see who was here. For the coldest part of the winter the cow lived under the same roof with him for a time each night, but for most of the year she came in only to be milked at night and in the morning. A wooden partition wall divided their quarters, and through a square opening cut in it he could commune with her when he felt like it. He was partial to cows.
The two women stood close together while I introduced Jack, who looked sharply at them, pulled some inches of pipe-stem out of his toothless mouth, and to my surprise shook the hand of each in turn. My mind was set finally at rest when of his own accord he led the way to the kitchen door of the cottage with the lantern held so that they could see their steps, and, once inside, began to light the lamps.
It is a comfortable cottage, made and lined with hardwood that has darkened with the passing of half a century or more to the colour of cedar where it is protected from the weather. Two rooms, used as bedrooms, open out of the living-room, which has the biggest floor-space in the house, with casement windows looking north and east across a wide veranda.
In winter, the north side is warmed by the northerly sun; in summer the eastern side, the front, is cool from midday onwards. Whoever built it must have found good timber cheap to obtain, for the floors are of that loveliest of building hardwoods, Western Australian jarrah, polished to a deep rosy brown and as indestructible as teak. It had been Jack’s habit, since first he saw the interior of the cottage several years ago, to polish these floors once a week with a paste of his own making—a concoction of bees’ wax and turpentine to which he added the dissolved crystallized gum of one of the mountain eucalypts—and this he did whether the cottage was in use or empty. Thus it invariably had a welcoming air of masculine fastidiousness, with the clean old furniture that matched nowhere except in its look of comfortable ease, the gentle brilliance of the bookshelves which the floor hazily reflected as it did the windows and the pale winter curtains we put up every April, and the fireplace of scrubbed brick, where in the colder months I always found a clean fire set ready for my match.
It was these details of care, which I could not myself have seen to, that made me prize Jack’s tenancy of part of my land—as much of it as he could manage alone—and consider well any act of mine that might send him wandering again; for he had an independence entirely his own, which was either the cause or the result of his sincere indifference as to where he lived or what became of him. He was by far the most solitary human being I have ever known, but he was not what is called, with weak slickness, ‘anti-social’. It was simply that, like the miller of Dee, but without his minor-keyed jollity, he cared for nobody.
So I had a disproportionate pleasure in the sight of him laying and lighting a fire in the kitchen range which, if Jean had not died, I had meant to replace with a kerosene stove. For men’s use, the range was far more pleasant, and I was glad I had never done what I once intended. Jack, I saw, was playing the host’s assistant, and if the grimace of a smile he wore in any company was, as I suspected, a little wider and thinner than usual, it was still untroubled. I left the women in the larger bedroom in front, where we carried in Irma’s luggage and Miss Werther’s travelling bag, and changed into more comfortable clothes in the other room, which was my own. Already beyond my open window the south was dark and starry above the high wall of the spur, and the sweet and nourishing air had the edged cold that follows rain in the mountains and threatens a wind from the west. Passing into the golden lamplight of the big room, where as I bent to light the fire I could hear the subdued voices of the two women through their closed door, I brought my wandering and lazy thoughts back to consider my immediate duty.
They would need warming drinks and hot food. The night was far colder than night in the city. I remembered the coffee among my parcels, the fish and the batons of white bread, with satisfaction. There were always eggs and cream and several sorts of tinned food in the tiny pantry which shared with the neat bathroom one end of the long kitchen itself. I had partitioned this off at Jean’s wise suggestion, when I was having the cottage and its outhouses repaired and extra tanks installed to ensure a sufficient household water supply in case of the unpredictable winter or summer droughts. There was little now that the human heart could wish for, here, I thought, as I came to a decision to turn the kitchen and the food supplies over to the women, so that as soon as possible they might feel that first faint authority which makes for comfort in a strange place.
Miss Werther joined me where I knelt in front of the fire watching it draw up sweetly while I felt over Donna’s skin for ticks. This human habit caused her much bliss and self-abandonment.
‘I have been telling Irma you would not mind if she went to bed,’ Miss Wether said, ‘but it is useless. She says it would be bad manners, also she wishes company.’
She too had changed from her city clothes into a tweed skirt and a brilliant woollen jumper with a high neck, and she looked both younger and more agreeable, for her sallow skin and jetty eyes had not gone perfectly with the black coat and frock she had worn earlier. There was another improvement—no diamond flashed back the streaming firelight from anywhere about her person. She was rubbing her plump fingers together slowly, as though to restore normal feeling to them; when I raised my eyes to hers I caught her smiling down widely at me, showing her large white teeth.
‘You miss my jewels,’ she said, nodding. ‘They are locked up where I usually keep them. In Europe, Mr. Fitzherbert, the refugees carry their savings with them, so, for safety. Today I too am a refugee, a little. Who knows what can happen?’
She was laughing as she spoke. I stood up and moved in a chair for her. Irma’s voice called from the bedroom with startling gaiety, ‘I am not going to bed, if that is what you are saying.’
Donna sprang up from under my hands, and barked sharply once. Miss Werther called back, ‘It’s all right, darling.’ I quietened the bitch again, thinking that those two women, far from being ill at ease in unfamiliar surroundings, were now in a vast good humour.
‘We are both excited,’ Miss Werther explained in her lilting voice, sinking comfortably into the chair and stretching out to the fire her feet on which she now wore strong golfing shoes with rubber soles, so that her fat insteps no longer bulged. ‘We are excited,’ she repeated, drawling the word nonchalantly, ‘because this is such a very nice place, and you are a very nice person, and you have a very nice little dog.’ She glanced sideways at me with a sly and friendly humour, folding her hands in her lap peacefully.
‘That is what I hoped,’ I said, ‘though it may be a bit early to judge. Except about Donna. She really is very nice. Would you both like a drink? I have whisky and sherry in that sideboard.’
‘Thank you, I drink very seldom,’ she said, ‘but it would be good for—’ and she jerked her head sideways and back to indicate the bedroom door. Automatically I looked that way, and as I looked Irma came out, turning to close the door behind her very carefully, as though it were fragile. Once again, as when I had first seen her, she was wearing pyjamas and over them what I believed to be the same thick green house-coat, cut Chinese fashion and fastened high at the neck with that golden medallion or button as big as a florin. Her hair hung fine and loose to her shoulders, and she stood for a moment very still and erect against the dark wood of the door, looking round the room with a kind of severity before she came towards us and with a smile sank down on the floor beside Miss Werther’s chair.
At the same time Jack looked in from the kitchen and said to me with a leisurely wink, ‘If you folk want a cup o’ tea, kettle’s boilin’.’
Nothing could have been more matter-of-fact; and nothing could more surely have made me aware of how peace, the great maternal, mysterious and timeless peace of the mountain night, had settled over us, over the cottage and the land, like a blessing spoken from the altar of a supreme divinity.
At Hill Farm one sleeps well. The enormous silence of the mountains at night is oppressive at first to some ears, half-sealed against the imperfect night of the city, where always there is an unbroken undertone of sound from darkness to dawn. In the mountains, night sounds are only of bird or animal, sudden, subtle and brief, emphasizing without even ruffling the silence itself, which flows down from the peaks and up from the valleys like the light of the summer noons, embracing and engulfing consciousness.
All round and over the cottage the silence held fast, but some unfamiliar stirring movement within the walls woke me after midnight. At that hour a man wakes as a rule with difficulty from the depths of first sleep, but tonight I came full awake at once, and from habit looked at my watch in the same movement.
Somewhere, the sound of stealthy, mysterious movement continued; stopped; resumed. Lying in the dark open-eyed, I decided after a minute’s bewilderment what it was. Someone was at the fireplace in the big room, pushing the burned logs together over their bed of coals. I lifted back the bedclothes and swung my feet to the floor, feeling for slippers. The cold had become hard and sharp, giving the sensation when I moved of ice passed lightly over the skin of my ankles.
No light showed under the door, but when I opened it I saw that the tall old standard lamp whose wick I had left turned low was still alight by the hearth, and that a dark scarf had been placed round the yellow shade. In the faint downcast radiance below this screen I beheld Irma’s bent back and bared heels as she knelt on the hearth rug. Her face, intent and quite lonely, was lit rosily by the glow of the embers she was softly coaxing into flame under the half-burned wood.
In the last few hours she had become so accustomed to my presence that I had been able to watch her unguardedly, and thus in my turn I had come to be more at ease where she was. My position as host and as it were custodian in my own place was a strong one. By my very passivity, which was only at first an effort, I let her know this, and let her know I knew it too. While they with cheerful talk and frequent questions to Jack or me, where we sat silent by the inside fire, had made a meal ready, it had occurred to me—for I admit that by now I was thinking of her constantly—that she had likely never been able to depend completely upon the presence and behaviour of a man. With men she could not relax herself inwardly; there was always a game, often dangerous and never wholly pleasant, to be played; from moment to moment she must, so to speak, count her cards.
Here, in the safe solitude of Hill Farm, her safe friend by her side and two safe men thinking not hers but (as she supposed) their own age-old fireside thoughts, she found herself without an opponent, and—to persist in the metaphor—without use for whatever cards she might pick up. All that had been to do was done: there was no conceivable outcome to this situation, yet she was more secure from fear or the need to act for herself than she had ever been since early childhood.
What her own thoughts might have been I could not know. Abruptly, the years of flight and pursuit, real or half-imagined according to the circumstances, had ended, in a way she could not have foreseen, in a place that until tonight did not exist for her; and at the beginning, when she came out from the bedroom and looked about her with that air of severe investigation, rather like an animal in strange surroundings, she must have been bewildered by it all. As one sometimes does, she may have had the feeling that her mind and her consciousness were not functioning properly for her.
Then, little by little, mind and consciousness revived. When we three sat down to supper at the kitchen table of scrubbed pinewood—where Jack would by no means join us, preferring his own fire and his own food—she was like another person altogether. Even her face had changed, and for the first time I saw it naturally animated, with a moist shine in her eyes and lips and a glow of warm blood in her cheeks and sometimes her throat, as though the warmth and a little wine and the stronger draught of this strange freedom of the spirit had renewed the very tissue of her blood itself. With her dark hair drawn back now to the nape of her neck and enclosed chignon-wise in a net, as she always wore it for kitchen tasks, she had a brave, naked look of candour, in spite of the queer, sly, Slavic slant of her eyes and brows and cheekbones. She looked at once slightly cunning and more than slightly vulnerable; and for the first time I saw how small and flat her ears were, with that clean, unweathered, delicate look of women’s ears, naked as shells newly warmed and dried on a beach in the sun, and with round lobes as red in that light as if they had been rubbed with geranium petals. The lamp on the table between us showed her clearly to me, while I hid comfortably in my own peace of mind and watched the change arise and finally claim her.
How completely it had claimed her, this released and little-known self, I was quickly to learn. She now was quietly and steadily blowing upon the responsive embers, and small rags of flame were flapping noiselessly up and down from the heated logs. She could not have heard my door opening, for she did not turn her head or falter in her task, and the look of loneliness remained in her face. But of this I am not sure, for she neither moved nor faltered either when I crossed the room silently and seated myself on the rug at her side, drawing up my knees under the thick dressing-gown I had hurriedly put on in the dark; for the cold was gnawing at my ankles like icy water. She remained kneeling and bowed forward, supported on her elbows and hands like someone doing homage to Prometheus; her loosed hair hid part of her face that was at once pale and ruddy in the increasing firelight, and her pursed lips were dry with the heat, so that now and then she licked them and pressed them together before inhaling and blowing out another earnest breath. Not for years had I seen anything so moving and lovely, in my world of gas-fires and electric radiators, and vain, self-conscious women. My heart went out to her as it sometimes did to Alan when I watched him absorbed in one of the tremendous occupations of childhood.
At last she sat back on her heels, flushed and pale, and turned upon me the curious deep gaze of her eyes now again—as I had seen them the previous afternoon—not cool opaque blue but hot violet; and with a sort of scared, childish triumph she smiled.
‘You could not sleep?’ I murmured casually, though my pulse had quickened as I watched her with something more than compassion.
‘No,’ she said in a soft, unpenetrating whisper, ‘it is too quiet . . . Never have I known such quiet as you have here.’
‘The mountain silence,’ I said; but she shook her head quickly, watching my lips with listening eyes.
‘It is not silence. I can hear it—something—I do not know what. I can hear the mountains themselves.’
I thought of D. H. Lawrence in the Darling Ranges in Western Australia, listening to the overpowering self-assertion of lost Lemuria in the seething stillness of the moonlit valleys. Here, on the fringe of the eastern coast, the mountains have a different psyche, a different voice, more vigorous perhaps, less ancient and toneless and indestructible; but it is there, the same mysterious, compelling sense of being, quiescent and all-powerful like a tiger watching, which travellers say is to be discerned nowhere else on the earth’s surface. It has the quality of a threat withheld and a hunger so profound that the mind at first turns from it in alarm, and sleep, as Irma had found, seems impossible; as though only by remaining awake can one avoid suffering some gigantic and obscure conquest of the soul.
‘It will pass,’ I said. ‘Do you want anything—a drink, or food?’
‘Thank you.’ She shook her head, turning back to the vigorous spectacle of the revived fire burning upwards for ever yet never able to depart in flight. By leaning sideways I could reach a pipe and tobacco on the top of the low flanking bookshelves on my left. I felt a need to move, to make the small, protective movements with my hands that the business of filling a pipe and lighting it calls for. While I did this I watched her, and she watched the flames in steadfast, dreamy immobility. So some minutes passed, and the night bent over the cottage. I too felt as though I were about to fall into some timeless and beneficent trance as I smoked and looked my fill at my companion in this solitude.
At length she moved, careful to make no carrying sound, and sat down with her slippered feet stretched out towards the warmth. My hand lay on my knees, and she hesitantly put her own hand under my arm and covered my fingers with hers; and this time there was no force or urgency in her touch, which seemed to be without thought.
‘I have been thinking,’ she murmured. ‘You are so kind that I do not know what to do.’
Once again, outside all reason, my heart which had been stilled began to beat more hastily. I felt a great urge to silence her, to put my hand over her murmuring lips and ensure silence; for it suddenly seemed to me that only silence would save us both. But I could not move and I could not speak. Some word of warning stuck in my throat like a solid thing which would not be properly swallowed. I could only remain carefully unmoving, hoping to appear unmoved, and stare into the flames, while that small part of my mind which was not wholly absorbed by its violent awareness of her wondered what time it could be, what time had passed.
‘Why are you so—rigid? We are alone. There is no one.’
Her whispering voice seemed to come from another part of the room, because she had turned her head away like a person hiding laughter or grief or some feeling not in keeping with her lightly-breathed words. I still found nothing to say, still felt my own inward cry of warning stifled in my throat. It was a moment of extreme peril, and I knew I must at all costs survive it; yet I was paralysed, powerless to draw away from her in body or mind, for she had become mistress not only of my fleshly desire but of my compassion, and, though I could master the one from long habit, I could not quell and drive down the other which, freed, must—I thought—take all with it.
What was at stake here—and for all my agitation I saw it clearly, clearly—was not my simple faith-keeping with the memory of my dead wife. I found no virtue in that now save a way towards peace of mind sometimes. What was at stake was that life of the mind to which I still aspired, and in which I believed my eventual spiritual salvation lay. The girl at my side with her averted face and her arm linked with mine held out to me not only the trivial temptations of the flesh, from the yielding to which any priest can absolve an indulgent man, but also, and far more terribly, the temptation to abandon a strengthening way of thought which alone made possible the worldly life I lived.
I was afraid now, in my turn. It is clear to me now, long afterwards, that my faith in my own carefully-nurtured inner strength had not until this moment been tried with any force. At the time all that was clear was that abruptly, unforeseen as an abyss at the feet of a night wanderer, a choice of my own devising was being put to me. It was a choice between possessing her, as instinct and bodily wisdom so tenderly urged me, and possessing myself, now and for ever; for even then, in the turmoil of my mind, I knew that such a moment could never again in my life come upon me with this fierce, unpardonable surprise.
In the same instant as I knew this, my choice was made.
I thought out all this afterwards, certainly, in the long and leaden years of war and separation. At the time I was aware only of the profound confusion of mind and spirit when, of all the three aspects of being, only flesh saw clear the way and leaped up strong to pursue it. The rekindled fire at our feet was a springing reflection of the fire burning up again, after a long time, in the secret places of my body and my imagination, burning so well and eagerly that I felt no shame, only an agony of regret, pang after pang of futile longing for what was within my grasp; tearless and bitter as the juice of desert aloes whose bitterness is that of an earthen desolation.
It needed no words to let me know what was in her mind, but she did speak, with her face still averted from me.
‘I do not know what to say to thank you for this kindness and as you know, there is nothing I can do in return, nothing. Only one thing, and for a woman it is too easy to be enough.’
‘It is also too easy to accept, believe me. I would not impair the value of your generosity so readily.’
‘You want me—you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then take what you want. It is so little—if you knew . . .’
‘I do know, but it is not so little to me.’
‘It is yours.’
She moved very slightly towards me, and I saw her face at last, and realized, confusedly, that she had been hiding tears. Without hesitation now I took her in my arms, in the silence that followed our quick whispered exchange. She came to me irresistibly, and I supported her so that she was half-sitting, half-lying across my knees, her head and shoulders in the bend of my left arm. For a moment she remained arched and rigid; then as her form sagged against me she reached up with her free hand to pull my head down near her lips, and began a whispered babble of words.
What she said I would not recall if I could. Even at the time, even when she spoke in English, I did not understand one half of it. It was like the endless nightmare spate of words uttered in delirium, and seemed to have little to do with me myself; I remember thinking oddly, as a man will on occasion think of anything to save himself, that her breath bearing such words as I recognized should rightly have scorched me, instead of striking so gently warm and sweet upon my cheek, and that her still form should have been contorted to give a final force to her soft, frantic speech. With my ear near her mouth I found, when I opened my eyes again, that I was looking at the shadowy hollow of her bosom where the silken pyjama jacket had fallen open as she lay back in my arms; and if I closed my eyes it was not so that I might not see but that I might see for ever, and for ever breathe the delicate, warm perfume of her hidden breasts; for it is by such mortal things, and not by nobility or badness of character, that a woman in the end becomes unforgettable.
Minute after minute, for I know not how long, she whispered her urgent confessions of desires and despairs, now and then pulling me closer with her arms across my shoulders for emphasis. It did not matter that I understood so little, and that little unwillingly. It was enough that she was making a full, incoherent confession of all that life had done to her, all she had done to life. She was a soul in torment, I thought; and I held her in my arms as though that were the most natural thing in the world, as though we had always been together so. Of all her hurried whispering, I retained (of course from vanity, and as a kind of solace to my aching flesh, to the immense regret that had come with my inevitable choice) only one phrase, which she repeated two or three times at intervals: ‘Only you have’—I think the word was ‘abstained’; that at least was its meaning. ‘Only you have abstained,’ she said, not knowing of course that my abstinence, if so it could be called, was in fact a positive choice in favour of what I believed to be my own salvation; not knowing consciously, it seemed, that every part and fibre of my body at that moment craved her with a need that, had I spoken, would have cried aloud. In fact, had she not lain so still in my arms, whispering on with such apparent necessity to speak, I do not think whatever resolution I still clung to would have withstood her. But when, for the third or fourth time, she said, ‘Only you . . .’ I turned my face so that my lips came against her rapid mouth. I did not want to hear any more, and I kissed her so that she fell silent and began to tremble like someone in a fever. With my free hand I caressed her face and hair until the trembling ebbed, became spasmodic like the sobbing of an exhausted child, and finally ceased. Her fragile eyelids lay so still upon her eyes that she seemed to sleep; and only by a deeper breath now and then, by a sigh, by the slight movement of her fingers behind my shoulder, did she show that sleep had not in fact come upon her.
So for a long while she lay in my arms. The fire sank down and I could not move to feed it. All sense of time’s passing had gone from my mind, and my body had put aside its craving unawares. Like a boy with his first love in his incredulous embrace, I wished that the timeless moment were timeless in very truth, and that our two selves at one, with nothing given, nothing received, might rest in this waking dream.
‘Your lady friends is gone, I took them to the buss stop in the cart yes-day, they might of bin headin west or back Sydney way, didnt say. The young one nearly through a fit when she found you was gone without sayin but the other she just larghed she reckoned you was no fool whatever you done. The night you left the skreetch owl come down the mountin, that scared em a wile til I told em what it was, said it was a sine of rain not a murder or a gohst!!! If you can get Horderns to send new shoes for the cultivater, arent any in Richmond yet and I got to get on with the top field.’