A House in Order Read Online Free PDF Page B

hour. There are many plants that should be brought in.
    Q : The Colonel is amazed, but he will consider the suggestion … He asks if he is right in thinking that you are fairly obstinate, in spite of your cowardice?
    A : Fairly – about plants – yes.
    Q : And arrogant, too – when you feel safe? Only humble when you are in danger?
    A : I don’t know.
    Q : He wishes that all your countrymen were like you, because it would make the war much shorter. However, he will keep a close eye on you – just in case your character undergoes a change. Do you understand?
    A : Yes, very well.
    And that was the end of their ‘inspection’ – a very embarrassing half-hour of a typically military nature. It left me shaken and with new problems to fear, but consolation came the same afternoon, when I was allowed to leave the house under the guard’s eye and provided with a huge spade.
    Consolation, but not at once. When I found myself outside the door in the sunshine gripping the enormous spade, my instinct was to run in again and shut myself up. Four walls, even made of glass, seem like armour plate, and it is paralysing to be stripped of them suddenly and expected to act sensibly in a void where anything may happen. Who would kill a man in a glasshouse – but who would not kill him the moment he stepped outside? Who can bend to dig with a rifle just behind him, let alone throw a cool eye over a ravaged garden and pick out the right shoots and seed-pods? That whole garden seemed enormous and filled to the brim with empty air: I stood leaning on my spade outside my door convinced that after I had taken a few steps and drawn clear of my glass shell, a shot would come from every window behind the verandah and I would be left wriggling on the ground like a lizard. I was sure, suddenly, that it was all a plot to get me out – that it could be nothing else, that they had decided it would be inefficient and a breach of regulations to destroy me in a glittering shower of glass.
    But I moved forward, because during the whole hour before they let me out my mind had been in a real frenzy, thinking of how I could dodge being sent to the camp by obeying them absolutely and working for them to the last degree of my strength. This need pushed me forward, just as terror of the open garden pushed me back, so I found myself tottering on but longing every second to be snug behind my glass again.
    But when I put my big spade into the ground for the first time, nothing yielded one millimetre, the spade just slid off: all was sun-baked stone that needed a pick-axe to get into it, not a trembling fool with a tool only fit for digging graves. This made my fright so much worsethat I began to struggle more successfully, swearing that I would rather tear my nails off to the bone trying to get into the ground than give them an excuse to murder me where I stood or turn me over to the camp authorities. Stabbing down with a dull corner of that huge spade, I got my first seedlings up in a botched and mutilated way, suddenly telling myself recklessly that once they and I were safe in our glass hospital, skill and security would heal our wounds.
    So I hacked away, leaving my victims in small heaps and telling myself that the sooner I got the job done the sooner I should be safely back in my prison. In fact, I hacked up far too many things, as well as things that were not fit to bring inside at all: but it was only when I had half a dozen heaps that I began to sober up and look at the garden with discrimination. I was like troops who have been let loose to pillage a town: they stuff their pockets with rubbish from the very first house they raid, so, soon they must run like mad from house to house, throwing more and more of their earlier thefts into the gutter to make room for better ones. Like them, I ended up in a sweat with bulging shirt and bursting pockets and the conviction that if only I had been canny from the start I’d