He paused. The break was rhetorical, and would have been prelude to more had it not been for his daughter’s interpolation.
“I think,” she said, “there are some soap-boxes in the tool shed. Shall I get one?”
Otto stared, and Ingolls laughed again. He said:
“All right. All right. But you see what I mean, Jorgensen?”
Otto was slow and careful. “Yes. Yes, I am sure I understand.”
He had been too slow. He became aware that Ingolls’ grey eyes, hard and intent and unsmiling now, had fixed upon him suddenly.
“Unless, of course,” said Ingolls slowly, “you don’t sympathize with the viewpoint I’ve just expressed.”
The girl got to her feet. Otto saw her cross to the bookshelves at the other side of the room, but Ingolls appeared not to notice any movement. He kept his eyes on Otto’s face, waiting for an answer.
Otto smiled. “I assure you,” he said, “that I am anti-Nazi almost to the point of insanity. At least, that is what my friends have told me.” He was on the old familiar ground and, although it seemed strangely distasteful now to gambol upon it, it was firm and solid beneath his feet. He let the smile die and the well-rehearsed gleam of earnest fanaticism replace it. He turned his body towards Ingolls and rested on an elbow. He said:
“I am sorry that you should doubt me, Mr. Ingolls. If you knew me better, you would not.” The stiffness of his English was mercifully fading. “I am a Swede, but my father and mother, some years ago, went to Norway. They lived in the region of Narvik.” He heard Clare’s light footstep as she came back across the room but he would not let himself so much as glance at her. His eyes must be fixed upon Ingolls’ and his voice dry and harsh with suppressed emotions. He said:
“Their house was de . . . demolished by Nazi bombs—and they were in it!”
There was silence, broken first by a thin, slight rustling of paper, then by Ingolls’ voice.
“I’m sorry,” said Ingolls. “I wasn’t doubting you, as you call it. I just like to be sure.”
But Otto went on, making his voice harsher yet, and slightly, ever so slightly, broken. He said:
“They were both killed. There was not anything left of them. And there were no soldiers near their house, nor anything which could be in any way mistaken for a military objective. They were both killed.” He leaned further towards the man in the chair, half his body out of the bed.
“But perhaps that was better for them,” he said. “I am sure that it was better for them. They died—but they are free now. My father would not like to live under a rule which forbids a man even to think his own thoughts.”
He laughed suddenly—and it was a wilder sound than he had intended. His head was hurting him now, and his eyes. But he must finish the work. He thought that Ingolls was about to speak and hurried on before he could. He tried to raise his voice a little more, but somehow miscalculated and heard that he was shouting and went on, not caring.
“It was better, maybe. They were old—they could not fight. But people who are not old must fight—and that is what they must fight for, to keep the right to think as they think, not as others tell them they must think!”
He might have gone on too long, but his head helped him. It suddenly hurt him so much that he was forced to put it back upon the pillow and lie still, his lungs labouring, until the pain died down.
Clare’s voice dropped cool and quiet into the rough-edged silence.
“Waldemar Ingolls,” it said, “you are sometimes awfully dumb!”
Then Otto felt her hand upon his forehead. The pain was fading rapidly now. He held his eyes tight shut for a moment; then suddenly opened them. He was rewarded: the strategy worked, and he caught her eyes with his and hers were not guarded. The clouded veil was not over them, and they could not find any pretext upon which to avert themselves from his and again came the strange and fearful and ecstatic shock of recognition.
She took the hand from his forehead and turned away. She spoke without looking at either man, as she was moving towards the low table which stood behind the bedside chair. Her voice was unhurried, and yet to Otto’s ear there was somewhere in it a little vibrant tightness. She said:
“Perhaps I’d better fetch two soap boxes!”
Ingolls took the cue. He laughed, and the tension eased. He saw Otto’s look of puzzlement and explained the boxes. He said, after that:
“But I owe you an apology, Jorgensen. . . .”
His daughter interrupted him again. She stood beside him with an opened magazine in her hands, and Otto recognized the red and black cover of Kosmo. He knew what was coming—and instead of relief felt an undefined but far from pleasant mixture of emotions.
“Look!” said Clare to her father. “Look—and then blush!” Under his nose she had thrust the full-page portrait of the profile of Nils Jorgensen, hero of the Vulcania.
Ingolls muttered something. He sounded startled. He darted glances from the photograph to Otto. He said:
“Well, I’ll be damned!” and wheeled upon his daughter. “Vixen!” he said. “Female jackal! Viper-cub! You couldn’t, I suppose, have shown me this before? Or told me about it? Or even hinted? No, of course you couldn’t—or you wouldn’t have had the exquisite pleasure of watching me make a fool of myself! I shall wait for the next full moon and weave a withering spell about you!”
Clare sat herself once more upon the arm of his chair. “Oh, not a withering one,” she said. “Anyway, I wasn’t sure myself until Dr. Brandt took the last dressing off his head.” She looked at Otto. She was smiling, but the eyes were guarded again. She said:
“But why did they take you in profile like that? Why in the world?”
“I had a black eye,” said Otto—and, for no reason that he could lay name to, felt momentarily less oppressed.
It was afternoon and he had just eaten and the sun was bright in the trees outside his window. He was alone and he was tired, very tired. He supposed the fatigue must be from the effort he had made this morning; the same effort which had used to amuse him sometimes and sometimes cause him a sort of savage exultation but which this time had filled him with a grey and futile and slimy aching.
He was alone—and he felt sleep wrapping about him. And she wasn’t here with him and it was dangerous to sleep like this because of the dreams. But perhaps they wouldn’t come this time. . . .
Sleep took him; heavy and merciless sleep from which he could not break. . . .
His shoulder was being shaken, very gently, by a small strong hand. It helped him—and he tore himself out of the clinging darkness.
Clare was standing over him. Her face was troubled as he first opened his eyes, but she smiled at once. In his ears an echo of his own voice was ringing.
“Hey!” she was saying. “You’d better wake up. Wake right up!”
He could still hear the echo of his own voice and wondered desperately what it had been saying—and in which language. He said:
“I am awake now,” and tried to smile.
“Bad dreams?” she said, and bent over him so that he could not see her eyes and gently readjusted the tape-fixed dressing which was all now that covered the scar upon his head.
“Yes,” he said. “Was I speaking?”