Horizon by Helen MacInnes

highest field today and were guarded there by the Kasals’ dog, so that they would not wander into the lower pastures, which were still waterlogged. From across the fields Lennox could hear Alois Kasal’s voice giving encouragement and commands,and the sound of the harness-bells on the plough-horse as it obeyed him. Spring, Lennox thought, and hope was stirring everywhere. The dead sleep of winter was gone. Now he knew the reason for his mounting bitterness: when it was the time for hope, and you knew that there could be no hope, you became bitter. He hated everyone and everything in that moment. Most of all, he hated himself.
    He looked at his watch. It was now eight o’clock in the morning. At two o’clock Frau Schichtl would be home and would start preparing dinner. At five o’clock they would have their one real meal of the day. At seven o’clock they would sit round the kitchen oven. Frau Schichtl would prepare her work for school next day. Lennox would practise drawing with his stupid left hand, and wonder bitterly if ever it could be taught to obey his mind. At eight o’clock they would try to hear the news from Allied broadcasts. They would strain to catch a small piece of information through the constant background of interference. And then, if the weather were good and the moon was weak, Lennox would take a short walk towards the pine forest at the back of the house. Or more often, when the weather was so bad that it was dangerous to move outside, he would stand in the shadows of the opened back door with a darkened room behind him, and stare into the freezing, windswept night. He would lose his thoughts in the swaying mass of pine branches, in the hard resolute face of rocky peaks which rise behind the forest’s crest. He would wait until the blood in his veins froze with the cold mountain air in spite of the green loden cape round his shoulders. He would wait until his hope was frozen, too. (No one was coming: this mission was useless. He was wasting his time, losing his energy, bringing danger onthis house and its neighbours. And each month his maimed right hand became gradually and steadily more helpless, as if the old wound were now paying him out for the perfunctory treatment it had been given in a prison camp.) Then, before nine o’clock, Frau Schichtl would stand shivering behind him, prodding him on the spine until he turned back into the house and closed the door, barring it, shutting out another day of his life. At nine o’clock the lights were extinguished, the oven fire was carefully banked for the night, and he would lie in this lonely room, listening to the roof’s strange groans and the uncanny noises of the wooden walls. At first he used to think they were the sounds of movement outside the house, and he would rise quickly to stand beside the cold window. But now his alarms had vanished with his hopes, and he no longer leaped out of bed in anxiety or expectation. Now he expected exactly nothing.
    For a moment he hesitated, his eyes still on his watch. What should he do today? He could read the books he already knew by heart. He could straighten the bed and put things into order. He could practise some more left-handed writing on the few precious pieces of paper he had borrowed from Frau Schichtl’s school note-book. He could do some physical exercise, which was the only way he kept his muscles firm. He could slump on the bed and memorise once more the things he had learned in the last months. Or he could slump on the bed and think of the old days. Or he could slump on the bed. After eight months these suggestions had lost all variety. He went over them nonchalantly, and was no longer amazed that his thinking was not done in English but in the Austrian dialect of the Tyrol. He had started this habit about Christmas, so that he wouldreally learn the language. Now it seemed the natural way to express his thoughts. He wasn’t laughing any more, either, at the strange place names of the