Free Horizon by Helen MacInnes Page B

appearance of being normal and unworried. Don’t think that, young man.”
    Peter Lennox rose and went towards the door of the kitchen. “I’ll get back to my room,” he said. Rules of the House. When Frau Schichtl went out he had to stay upstairs with the bedroom door locked. Then he added, “I’m sorry. I’ve worried you. I never thought you did worry, because you always look so calm. If I had known your brother was here I would have kept my remarks for him.” He touched her awkwardly on the shoulder. She smiled suddenly, and the lines of her mouth were no longer tired or unhappy.
    She moved slowly towards the entrance-door. “Perhaps I should have told you more this winter,” she said, “and then you wouldn’t have worried because you thought there was nothing to worry about.”
    Lennox had no answer to that. He began to climb the stairs. He was glad, unexpectedly, that he hadn’t made the speech he had prepared. He ought to have remembered that women, no matter where they came from or what language they spoke, always had the last word. Never argue with a woman, he thought: it’s a waste of good breath. When he reached the small square landing he heard the entrance-door open and then shut. The heavy sounds seemed to tell him that the conversation in the kitchen—as far as Frau Schichtl was concerned—was equally closed. Even the way a woman shut a door could be her last word. He smiled in spite of himself.

9
    He loitered in the darkness of the upper hall for some moments, wondering in which room Johann and his uncle were sleeping. This wooden house was solidly built: he could hear nothing. The silence oppressed him. He moved quickly into his own room, and, out of habit, twisted the clumsy key in its iron lock. From the window, shielded by the white starched curtain from outside eyes, he could see Frau Schichtl making her way carefully round the pools of heavy mud. The road to Hinterwald was scarcely more than a cart-track. It served as a link between Hinterwald and these outlying houses, and as a short-cut over the wooded hillside to the next village. A better but longer road twisted through the meadows farther to the west. It was the “foreigners’ road,” Frau Schichtl had said. But whether that meant it was built by foreigners or used by foreigners, Lennox didn’t know. At least, the Germans didn’t use this cart-track. The Schichtl house, and the Kasal farmhouse some fifty yardsaway, might have been a hundred miles from anywhere. Lennox could have counted on one hand the number of strangers whom he had watched passing in the last eight months.
    The Kasals’ eldest daughter was waiting at the doorway of the farmhouse as usual. Her yellow hair gleamed in the early morning sunlight as she ran to join Frau Schichtl. The girl was laughing. Her bare feet and legs ploughed carelessly through the spring mud. Her shoes were held safely together in one hand, her school books were in the other. He envied her the freedom with which she could walk and laugh. He opened the window carefully, slowly. The fresh air brought the smell of grass and rain, of pine-trees and free mountain winds into his small room. He had an impulse to lean out of the window and feel the touch of the early morning sun on his face. But he stayed dutifully behind the white screens, under the broad, overhanging eaves, and looked at the green alp sloping gently down towards the village.
    The Kasal house was silent now. Smoke was trickling placidly from its wide stone chimney. Its broad roof was safely anchored against winter storms by large stones roped together. The bright blue shutters, whitened at the seams, needed their spring coat of paint. The pile of logs under the ground-floor windows had grown small. Soon the woodcutters would need to go to work in the forest. The window-boxes on the carved wooden balcony, which ran across the front of the house, waited for their load of flowers. The five gaunt cows had been allowed into the