The Refuge (16 page)

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.