While Still We Live by Helen Macinnes

Author:Helen Macinnes [MacInnes, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781781161616
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2013-05-09T23:52:00+00:00

24

AMBUSH

The journey to Korytów had begun. So quickly, so strangely, that for the first five minutes Sheila’s thoughts and hopes and fears had become one huge jumble inside her brain. The rigid control with which she had defended herself in Streit’s office could relax in this car; but she seemed to have lost all power of arranging her thoughts in a logical order. She had had to think too tensely; now she couldn’t think at all. Then a panic seized her; the journey in this high-powered, smooth-running car with the efficient driver at its wheel would be short; but all she could do now was to keep repeating to herself, “I’ve so much to do, I’ve so much to do.” The more she tried to think how she should try to plan, the more she thought how much there was to plan.

Strangely enough it was the Germans, the cause of this panic, who now helped her out of it. The car was halted after it left the city. As the driver gave his brief answers, Sheila suddenly saw her face reflected by some oblique ray of sunshine in the windshield before her. She didn’t look afraid. She didn’t look worried. Her face was quite expressionless. It was like a portrait done by an artist more interested in line and texture than in emotions. Where did I learn all this? she wondered. She stared coldly at the image of quiet assurance. Her mind became as calm as the face she saw in the windscreen. The car moved on. The image in the glass disappeared. The wide road and wider fields were all she saw ahead now, but this feeling of calm stayed with her.

There was no sense of triumph when she thought of the last hour. She had been partly lucky, partly careful, and partly trying very hard. She had never been so hard-tried in her life. But this journey, this car, the snub to Dittmar, gave her no sense of triumph. All she had done was to let herself be entangled more deeply in the Nazi web. When she returned from Korytów, Hofmeyer would have to start disentangling her. One Gestapo interview, even a friendly one, was quite enough for one lifetime. She could never manage another. There was a limit to the length of time an amateur juggler could keep his eyes fixed on three balls at once. If Streit had detained her just five minutes more, she would have been lost. She might as well admit that, now. Heroics only gave you a false idea of yourself. Heroics would only land her firmly trussed in the centre of the web.

But one thing she had accomplished as well as Korytów. Now she could warn Hofmeyer that Dittmar was suspicious, and she could have Olszak warned that Dittmar had a theory about the little-known Kordus. That was at least something. Having allowed herself that crumb of comfort, she began to plan the method of approaching Korytów and the manner of leaving the village.

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