Read The Tunnel for Free Online Page A

to the private room where he had eaten and the other to the street outside. The policeman, with the flap of his revolver holster unbuttoned, sat between him and the door. Behind him was the staircase up which the girl had gone to bed; but even if he managed to reach the top without being hit, there was still the possibility of a guard outside the house. He must find out.
    He would sing. He would get the others to join in, and they would make so much noise that if there were a man outside he would look in to see what all the row was about. But it must look natural. He was not the singing type; organized singsongs usually filled him with embarrassment. And it must be a song in which the others would join. It would have to be a song of the last war … Simulating drunkenness, he caught the policeman by the arm and began a personal, almost tuneless version of Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kitbag.
    At first the policeman looked at him with owlish astonishment. Then, surprisingly, he recognized the tune. (It was not until some time later that Peter learned that the Germans had their own marching song to the same tune.) The policeman sang with him in German. The foresters joined in. Peter’s tuneless voice was drowned in a roar of Teutonic fervour. It was magnificent. It was just what he wanted. He beat time with his mug on the table, shouting at the top of his voice, while the policeman, the present forgotten, sang in an older war; a war in which he too had fought as a soldier.
    Surely enough the door opened and a forester armed with a rifle looked in. He shouted something in German, pointed up the stairs, and withdrew.
    Then the policeman passed out. Without any warning he fell flat across the table, his hands sprawling out in front of him, his absurd helmet rolling across the floor and coming to rest against the bar. Suddenly he seemed pitiful to Peter – an old man in his cups, his scanty hair lying in the spilt beer on the table top.
    The foresters would have left him there – continued with their song – but Peter lifted the old man’s head from the table and leaned him back in the chair. His head fell forward with a loose heaviness, his whole body limp and sagging.
    ‘Water!’ Peter said, and made the motion of throwing water in the policeman’s face.
    The foresters grinned. The one with the pipe took the old man’s head, the other his knees, and they carried him across the room and into the lavatory at the back. For a moment Peter sat alone in the smoke-filled room. This was his chance and he must take it now. He crossed the floor silently in his socks, retrieved his boots from behind the bar and quickly climbed the stairs to the floor above. Which was the girl’s room? He knew that if he went in there her screams would attract the attention of the man outside. Would there be a bathroom? If so, it was probably immediately above the lavatory.
    Quietly he opened the door on the far side of the landing. This must be the back of the house; he knew that there was a guard on the front. The room was a bedroom. Inside, he could see the gigantic wardrobe and a high bed heaped with eiderdowns. There was a figure in the bed and he hesitated in the doorway for a moment listening to the heavy breathing and wondering what to do. He thought how terrified the sleeper would be, should he or she awake – and how harmless he actually was.
    The window was open, its lace curtains blowing into the room, and he decided to climb through. There was no time to waste. He went in, carefully closing the door behind him. The figure in the bed was moving restlessly. He paused by a bundle of clothes lying on a chair by the bed, hoping that their owner was a man. They were women’s clothes. He thought of changing into them, but the awful possibility of being caught half-dressed in this woman’s room made him dismiss the idea.
    He climbed out of the window, dropped on to the roof of a lean-to shed, and down into the yard below. So far there