FIFTH CHAPTER
One morning Mona hears of something that seems to strengthen her against her secret enemy. A prisoner in Compound Four, which lies nearest to the hill, has been captured during the night in an attempt to escape by means of a tunnel from his dormitory to the open field under “Corrin’s Folly.” The case has been brought before the Commandant, and he has referred it to the civil court in Peel. With nothing to complain of now, what ingrates these Germans are!
Mona hurries to the court-house. It is full to overflowing with police, guards and townspeople. The Governor of the island has been sent for, and he is sitting on the bench with the High Bailiff. The prisoner is in the dock with a soldier on either side of him. His appearance is a shock to Mona. Instead of the hardened sinner she had expected to look upon, she sees a thin, pale, timid-looking man with fever in his frightened eyes.
The facts are proved against him by the captain of the guard, and by one of his fellow-prisoners. For two months at least he had been tunnelling the ground from beneath his bed to the field outside the barbed-wire fences, working at night, while the other prisoners were asleep, and concealing the soil he dug out of the ground in the empty space under the stage of the camp theatre, which was also the camp chapel. At the last moment, just as he was about to emerge from the earth in the darkness of night, he had been caught by one of the guard, who had acted on the information of his nearest bed-fellow.
Already the story of this treachery has swallowed up Mona’s feeling against the prisoner, but when, in reply to the Governor, who addresses him sharply, he tells his own story, in halting words and with a tremor in his voice, she finds the tears dropping on the military medal she is wearing on her bosom.
He is a hairdresser, married to an Englishwoman and has two children, both little. After his marriage he had always meant to take out his nationalization papers, but when he had saved enough money to do so his wife was not well, for she was expecting her first baby, so he spent it in taking her to the seaside for a holiday. Afterwards they set up a shop in a suburb of London and that took everything.
“Come to the point. Don’t waste the time of the court,” says the Governor.
The prisoner struggles on with his story. At first when he was brought to the camp his wife wrote every week, telling him how she was and how the children were. His eldest little girl had been going to a private school, and when her schoolmates asked her where was her father she used to say: “Daddy is at the war,” for that was what his wife had told the child. But the truth got out at last, and then the parents of the other children demanded that his little girl should be dismissed, and she was, and now she was on the streets.