‘I wanted you to come early,’ Caroline Bury said, ‘to ask you about Drover. People say he’s going to be hanged. It’s absurd.’
‘Did you know him?’ he asked her with surprise.
‘I wish I had,’ she said. ‘I know them all too late.’
‘Oh come, Caroline, you know – er – what is the phrase,’ he brought it out with a touch of irony, ‘everybody.’
‘Too late,’ she said. ‘I know them when they’ve made a name.’ She never troubled to explain herself; the bareness of her sentences contrasted with the intricacy of her handwriting; she offered innumerable opportunities to her enemies. Now it would have been possible for a malicious person to assume that she was complaining at not being able to discover and advertise talent. The Assistant Commissioner was not subtle; he found it easy to follow her; he knew that she regretted that her help was always given to those who were beginning to need no help. She said: ‘You could help Drover.’
‘It’s out of my hands,’ he said.
‘Nonsense. Beale has asked you for a report.’
The Assistant Commissioner was startled. ‘How do you know that?’
‘His secretary told me.’
‘That young man,’ he said with distaste, ‘is capable of doing, that’s to say, he’s – I don’t like him.’
‘What are you saying in your report?’
‘Really, you know, Caroline, it’s private.’
‘Don’t be absurd. You know you can trust me.’
But he could not trust her; it was impossible to trust anyone with so ardent, so unscrupulous a longing to help. Her charity had always been heroic; it had led her in and out of police courts; she had declaimed from innumerable witness-boxes; she had broken confidences, disclosed secrets, libelled and perjured in her desire to help.
‘I came here to see you, Caroline, not to talk about Drover. The case is over; the appeal’s been heard; you ought to talk – to talk to Beale.’
‘He’s a nonentity. I don’t talk to nonentities.’ Even the bric-à-brac supported her boast; the signed photograph of James, a great swollen brow floating over gloved hands; the cigarette box from the great dead Liberal leader; the pictures by Margaret Surrogate upon the wall.
‘So Surrogate’s gone Communist,’ the Assistant Commissioner said, worming away from the subject of Drover.
‘It’s fashionable. But Margaret was a genius. Those pictures –’
He made a pretence of studying them. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand pictures. Aren’t they rather – artificial?’
Caroline Bury laughed with a hand on her thin throat. ‘You and she are the most natural people I’ve ever known.’
The Assistant Commissioner was startled at the personality. He did not like to be connected with the woman who had painted those pictures; there was something about them hysterical and unhealthy; they smelt of sex as strongly as a bush of flowering May. ‘I shall never like them.’
‘Too phallic for you? Her husband, you see, didn’t satisfy her.’
The Assistant Commissioner did not know where to look; his old yellow face set obstinately; he was familiar enough with Caroline to recognize that her coarseness was calculated. She was angry with him and this was her way of baiting him. ‘Of course her dissatisfaction made her as an artist. But what happens to the wives of all the men you shut up? They take in washing, don’t they? They don’t paint. I suppose they all find a man somewhere.’
‘You’ve got a low view, Caroline, of human nature.’
‘Here I am trying to do something for Drover, and all the time I’m forgetting Drover’s wife. He’s got one, hasn’t he? What will she do if he’s reprieved? Oughtn’t I to be urging you to see that he’s hanged?’
‘This is all Beale’s business.’
‘Don’t be absurd. He’s waiting for your advice.’
‘Well, if you must know, Caroline, I’ll tell you. I’m simply writing that it will have no effect, whether he hangs Drover or reprieves him. Beale always imagines the country’s on the edge of revolution. The truth is, nobody cares about anything but his own troubles. Everybody’s too busy fighting his own little battle to think of the, the next man. Except you, Caroline.’ He had never said so much to her at one time.
‘Dinner is served.’
‘Are we alone, Caroline?’ he asked with astonishment.
‘Yes,’ she croaked at him, ‘alone,’ and trailed before him to the door in her absurd, her expensive, her timeless dress. She might have added that they were alone, so far as she knew, in not caring for their own troubles, for not fighting their own battle in ignorance of the general war.
‘Really,’ the Assistant Commissioner said, sitting down opposite her. He stopped and cleared his throat; he had forgotten the bowed head and the mumbled grace; impossible to catch the words, which were neither English nor Latin. ‘Really,’ he began again as the gaunt unhappy face lifted. ‘I’m, you know, honoured.’
‘You are busy and I’m tired. If you won’t help me over Drover, there’s no more to be said.’ But the Assistant Commissioner doubted that. ‘I wanted to see you anyway before this absurd operation.’
‘Operation? You never told me there was to be an operation?’
‘You would think me quite capable of inventing it to get what I wanted.’
‘You are certainly the most – er – generous.’ He found himself to his own amazement absurdly moved by the sharp cynical features opposite him. ‘The most noble.’ He hummed and ha-ed for want of words; suddenly, dangerously, he wanted to offer her anything she asked of him. She had never, he believed, received anything from anyone except Justin; she had given and given, time and money and nerves. ‘You are very brave,’ he concluded.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m frightened of pain. I’ve never been able to stand pain. That’s why I’m cross and worried and unwilling to see people. I’ve been trying to make a will. But there’s no individual I want to leave money to, and I won’t leave it to the State as it’s run at present; it would help to buy a few aeroplanes or tanks.’
‘The hospitals?’
‘It’s banal, but I suppose I shall have to. Now I should have liked to help Drover, but Beale would be frightened of taking a bribe, I suppose?’ It was another of her fantastic tactless plans.
‘Caroline, Caroline, we aren’t in South America.’
‘I’ve been told that before, but I’m not convinced. Do you believe in the way the country is organized? Do you believe that wages should run from thirty shillings a week to fifteen thousand a year, that a manual labourer should be paid less than a man who works with his brains? They are both indispensable, they both work the same hours, they are both dog-tired at the end of their day. Do you think I’ve the right to leave two hundred thousand pounds to anyone I like?’
‘No.’
‘But you support it. You support it more than any other single man. Without the police force such a state of affairs couldn’t last a year.’
‘Who would take the place of Beale and – er – the others? Surrogate?’
‘He’s absurd, of course, but it’s not a difficult thing to run a department of state. It’s not so difficult as running a farm or driving an engine. There’s a lot of pretence about these things. Put one of Beale’s clerks in Beale’s place, and he’d do as well as Beale.’
‘It hasn’t been tried. It’s too dangerous.’
‘It has been tried.’
‘Russia,’ the Assistant Commissioner said with distress; ‘we don’t want starvation here.’
‘We’ve got starvation here. It’s only that you and I don’t share it.’
The Assistant Commissioner fell silent; automatically his fork dipped and dipped; he had no idea what he was eating. Caroline Bury said: ‘It would be maddening to die now, with the world in the state it is, if one hadn’t Faith.’
‘Faith?’
‘Faith.’
‘Christianity, you mean?’
‘No, no, not Christianity.’ He
waited with his fork poised and wondered whether the problem of Caroline Bury’s religion was to be solved at last; from the drawing-room came a faint smell of incense cones slowly burning. ‘You mean – just faith,’ he prompted her.
‘Well, haven’t you faith?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘of course one – er – hopes,’ and crumbled his bread and found himself again faced with the question; how can so cynical, so clear-sighted a woman bemuse herself with incense, Indian idols (there were several in the spare bedrooms), ikons (there was one on the staircase), pictures of the Virgin (they were everywhere)?
‘What do you hope?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘one lives and then, that is, one dies.’ It was the nearest he could come to conveying his sense of a great waste, a useless expenditure of lives: Caroline in the operating theatre, Drover on the scaffold, the girl on Streatham Common, Justin in Spain. It was impossible to believe in a great directing purpose, for these were not spare parts which could be matched again. He was filled, under the shadow of retirement, beneath the nausea which fogged his sight as he rose too quickly from the table, with a passionate desire for an eternal life, but an eternal life on earth watching the world grow reasonable, watching nationalities die and economic chaos giving way to order. But when that time came, he thought, it would not be enjoyed by the most selfless: Justin was dead; Caroline would be dead, several men in his old company whom he had admired. . . . It would be enjoyed arbitrarily by certain people who happened to be alive in a certain century, by adventurers and politicians and swindlers among the rest. Those who had fought hardest for it would probably be dead. That he himself would be dead was not unfair; he had not helped; he had served those who paid him; he had stood aside. But Caroline who had wanted to bribe the Home Secretary with an inheritance deserved to live, and following her trailing dress back to the incense and the shaded crowded room he felt small and mean and ashamed. His excuse had always been that he did his job, but remembering Justin he thought: she did her job, but she did a great deal more.
‘I must be going,’ he said.
‘And you can’t help with Drover?’
‘I’m sorry, Caroline.’
‘Good night then.’ She held out a bony chalk-white hand. ‘You used to find your own way out.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said and realized suddenly how old they were, two old people who could not part with any warmth but who should have been able to part with greater ease. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again and thought: it’s lucky she has got Faith, whatever she means by it, she’s got nothing else: an ageing haggard woman in a dark room crowded with the relics of a taste which had been enthusiastic, never impeccable.
He searched a long while in the unlit hall for the Yale latch. She was an unconventional woman; she did not care for a maid to shut the door behind a friend as if he were a stranger; she wanted to give the impression of a door always open. But it would be more convenient in that case if the light were left turned on. He pulled himself up; he had nearly joined all her other friends in criticizing her. His hand found the latch, pushed the door open; he had forgotten while he had been with her the man who so persistently followed him. At the top of the three worn steps he remembered. The man stood in the middle of the street and held something forward in his hand. For a moment the Assistant Commissioner failed to recognize what it was.
When he saw that it was a revolver, he quietly closed the door of number fifteen. He did not want Caroline startled if anything happened. He was not afraid; he was supremely confident; his spirits rose like a rocket through the mist of indecision, dissatisfaction, regret; they dropped his ageing body to earth like the rocket’s stick, while they soared higher. But though his spirits soared, he was not reckless; he knew exactly what he had to do. He must remain still, make no sudden movement; with any luck at all a taxi would presently appear, or a car might be driven between them and give him an opportunity to cross the pavement. He held the man’s gaze, standing there three steps above him –
*
as yellow as the light behind the shoulder, old, calm, the enemy, the joker outside the Berkeley. ‘A pram on a taxi,’ and the fume of hatred smouldering at the base of the brain rose and coiled and rose, and the fingers tightened and one thought: Now. Shall I fire now? Where must I aim? At the top stud of his evening shirt? But my hand is shaking. I must be calm. If he moves an inch I’ll fire; but old, calm, yellow in the face, with his thin lips and his upper class lids, he waited, and one thought: He knows I’ll miss. Have I come all this way, tracked him down so many pavements, waited and waited without food, only to miss him in the end because my hand shakes? And one thought again: If a car comes I must fire at once. I mustn’t wait. There’s nobody in the world who wouldn’t help him against me. I’m alone.
He was separated from everyone he loved by his hatred. But when the shot was fired and the man was dead, his hatred would leave him. He would have let it run its course and it would leave him. And he thought of the dark steep stairs he had trodden at prostitutes’ heels and afterwards was calm again, except for the dim feeling that this was not the kind of life a man should have to lead. His hand rose, he did not look at the other’s face but at the top stud in his evening shirt, somewhere a car hooted, he was aware, at the edge of the left eye, of headlamps blasting the darkness at the top of the long Bloomsbury street . . .
Then, I said to Milly, I fired. You told me that I could never hold a gun, but my hand was still for long enough. He fell down the three steps and lay in the road. The car tried to stop, but the road was slippery after the rain, and it skidded fifty feet. I put the pistol in my pocket and came away. I hated you last night, but now I hate no one. I feel quite at ease again. They will not trace me, because he does not know me, and I had so little motive for anger against him. I love you now without hatred or jealousy or lust. It is as if I had driven my own nightmare into his body through the hole the bullet made.
He was telling himself a fairy tale; but this was true: his hate narrowed to a stud in a man’s shirt, the headlights of a great car splashing the road and pavement between them, the thought: he’ll run when it comes between. He steadied his hand; somebody shouted to him and he heard the brakes grind and the wheels scream as they failed to hold the surface of the road; he took his final aim at the man outside the door, at the policeman in the witness-box, at the jester outside the Berkeley, at the director’s nephew, at the manager, at the voices calling, ‘Conrad, Conrad’, across the asphalt yard. You can’t frighten me with the name of murderer: Jim is a murderer. He pulled and pulled and the rusty trigger did not move. Then he was struck in the body and thrown a dozen yards and could not think: what has done this? nor wonder: why am I here? lying with his face over the pavement edge, watching the black water trickle down the gutter and fall through a grating, aware of pain and voices and pain, pain in the back and a worse pain in the jaw (the dentist’s drill ground and ground and Milly came up the church and the smell of anthracite choked him).
‘Do you know him, sir?’
‘I haven’t any idea who he is.’
‘The ambulance is coming.’
‘He wouldn’t have done any damage; the revolver’s loaded with blanks.’
Mr Bernay said: ‘You’ll have to pay me for the risk,’ and smiled and checked the smile and blew his nose. He thought: soon I shall be unconscious, nobody could bear this pain for long, and as the great drill thrust again between his teeth, he tried to move, he tried to scream, but he could hear nothing but the voices talking: ‘Really, you know it wasn’t our fault. He stepped forward. The road’s so slippery.’ Again he tried to scream, because pain was scratching now like little sharp finger-nails at his spine, and this time he heard: the sound was a low grunt. It gave no satisfaction. Pain was like a bird frantic for freedom, dashing from wall to wall of the imprisoning room; his brain was bruised with the beat of its wings. Again and again he flung the window wide as it drove towards the glass, but back it went to the furthest wall: beaten and b
ruised and never exhausted. If I could faint, he thought, if I could scream.
‘Better not move him; his back may be broken.’ His hand touched the black water trickling in the gutter; he could see his own blood joining the water, flowing thickly off the pavement edge. The bird ceased to blunder back and forth in his brain; it was resigned; it lay in a corner exhausted; it knew that it could never get out. The words which people spoke dropped slowly through the air: ‘Listen . . . I . . . can . . . hear . . . it . . . coming.’ He could hear each word drop from the lips and his brain shrank with fear, waiting for the sound to reach him and pierce him like an aerial dart on the base of the skull. Even light was retarded; the headlights brushed the street slowly like a yellow broom. Somebody knelt on the pavement beside him, and the slight touch of the overcoat on Conrad’s side stung like iodine on an open sore.
But when they lifted him the bird was roused again; the walls of the brain throbbed and trembled with its assaults; if I could scream, if I could faint.
He remained conscious and they lifted him into an ambulance and a police constable and an attendant sat beside him and they drove back the way he had walked. He could tell when they reached Trafalgar Square, because they drove round and round for what seemed a long while in a circle. Then he was out in the street, he was carried up steps and he tried to scream, and Big Ben struck the half-hour. He was on a wheeled bed passing down long corridors, nurses walked the opposite way and stared at him and he tried to scream; he was in a small room and they held a little box in front of his face and he tried to scream. Then the pain became unbearable and he closed his eyes and opened them and Milly sat beside him and a metal flask hung above his head and a tube dropped saliva into his mouth and he felt no pain. The pain, he knew, was still there, but it was exhausted, it lay still and cramped in a corner, stiff with the bandages which confined him too; one pretended not to notice it; everyone walked softly on tiptoe not to wake it.