Meanwhile the fire on the hearth went out, and the sticky air of the night penetrated through the shutters. The dining-room had become very cold too. We did not dare to make fires: our wood in the cellar was running short and should we fail in our attempt to hire a van, who knew how long we might have to stay here?
Later on I went up into my room and collected my papers. All the time I could hear my mother’s steps down below: it was a step that I could recognise among a thousand others. It always sounds as though she drags one of her feet slightly, but she does not do so really, it only sounds like it, and it gives her gait a kind of swaying rhythm. I love to hear it, for it always reminds me of my childhood. Whenever I dreamed anything frightful in my little truckle bed that step would come slowly across the room, and even before it reached me all that was terrifying had disappeared.
On the ground floor a cupboard was opened: the noise sounded like a sigh; then drawers were gliding in and out. Beyond the garden the dogs barked. Now and then violent outbursts of firing rent the hills. But even then my mother’s steps never stopped. I could hear them passing quietly backwards and forwards between the trunks in the hall and her room.
CHAPTER III
Dawn of November 2nd.
It was long after midnight before my mother’s door closed. I hung a silk handkerchief over the lamp so that its light might not be seen from outside and then I went through the letters accumulated on my writing-table. Suddenly a bell rang in the hall. The telephone.... Who could call so late? What has happened? I ran quickly down the stairs. An unfamiliar voice spoke to me from the unknown. A terrified, strange voice:
“Save yourself! The Russian prisoners have escaped from their camp. Three thousand of them are coming armed. They kill, rob and pillage. They are coming towards the town. They are coming this way....”
“But....” I wanted to express my thanks, but the voice ceased and was gone. It must have gone on, panting, to awaken and warn the other inhabitants of lonely houses. For an instant my imagination followed the voice as it ran breathless along the wires in the night and shouted its alarm to the sleeping, the waking, the cowardly, the brave. It comes nameless, goes nameless, waits for no thanks, flies on the torn wings of shattered, despised human fellowship.
The Russians are coming....