White got Beth to agree not to see Mitchell when he called, but to ask him to wait in the saloon on the pretext that she was visiting her mother. There he was joined by a few guests who commiserated with him over his bad luck and Beth’s protracted visit to her mother.
Meanwhile Tommy was up in Beth’s room setting the stage. He knocked over a couple of chairs, kicked the carpet aside, poured some red ink on it and told his mate Harry Biggers to sprawl on it, face down. On the dressing-table he threw the little silver Browning that Mitchell had given Beth for her birthday. While he was about it – this was not in the agreement with Beth – he took Mitchell’s photograph from the dressing-table, tore it up and threw it in the wastepaper basket. Then he fired the Browning into the fireplace and laid it back on the dressing-table.
When he stumbled into the saloon ‘with every appearance of horror’ Mitchell was sitting gloomily in a corner. But he quickly got up when he heard that ‘something had happened to Mrs. Heewater’. The men went upstairs and took a look at Mrs. Heewater’s room and then went to Tommy’s room to put their heads together.
Pouring out whiskies all round, Tommy explained that Harry Biggers had bailed Heewater out to the tune of a tidy sum during his lifetime. Now that business was booming he had asked for his money back. But Beth had not been keen to pay up. It looked as though she had chosen to shoot him instead. At any rate they had to make up their minds what to do. As he said this he looked at Mitchell. Mitchell said he was for bringing Beth back and discussing with her what they should tell the police. They could say that the mate had tried to get fresh with her, for instance.
As soon as he said that he saw them all smile. It was a very unpleasant smile.
‘Are you suggesting that we should bring in the police?’ Tommy asked, giving the others a look.
‘No, I was suggesting that we should try to bring Beth back,’ said Mitchell.
‘You know, I thought we might perhaps take care of this business for Beth,’ said Tommy with a show of contempt. ‘I mean, we men could do something for her.’
‘That makes it my pigeon,’ said Mitchell. ‘What do you suggest?’ Mitchell was no longer quite sober. He had been downing drinks steadily as he waited for Beth in the saloon. It was not too difficult to impress a few points on him. Tommy said the worst of it was, as his mate had told him, that there was a letter somewhere which Harry Biggers had received from Beth. She had asked him in this letter to come and see her. They had to get hold of it.
They all went up to Beth’s bedroom and looked for the letter. Harry Biggers did not have it in his pocket, and it was not in the waste-paper basket. What there was in the basket was a torn-up photograph and Mitchell fished it out. Understandably, he did nothing to draw attention to it, but just slipped it casually into his pocket. This he was to regret.
In Tommy’s room they all sank a few whiskies. Then Tommy suddenly decided that little Jane, the ‘mite with the glasses’ who was often in Harry Biggers’s company, might have it. He remembered having seen the two of them together in the hall. Mitchell was sent to fetch her.
In the Heewater boarding house there was a young girl called Jane Russell who helped out in the kitchen and bedrooms, an unprepossessing creature with a long apron, thick stockings, glasses and very little of what is known as sex-appeal.
Mitchell was almost alone among the guests in sometimes treating her civilly. When the men in the boarding-house decided to prove to Beth Heewater that her fiancé was a coward, little Jane with her crush on Mitchell was given the central role in their plan of campaign.
Mitchell took the girl into a vacant room and questioned her. She told him straight out that she did not even know Biggers, nor had any letter been passed to her by him. Mitchell had plenty of drink in him by this time, but he could still see that she was telling the truth. With Jane Russell that was not hard to tell.
When he told the gentlemen that Jane did not have the letter, he again saw that fatal smile. Then Tommy said suddenly. ‘And what about that letter you have in your pocket?’
Mitchell was slightly taken aback. He did in fact feel in his trouser pocket, and there of course was the torn-up photograph. He could not bring himself to produce it. They smiled again.
Then they brought a car round, loaded Harry Biggers into it and put Mitchell behind the wheel while the chauffeur was having a whisky in the bar. Mitchell was to put the body aboard the Surface, Tommy White’s ship. He knew where she was lying and drove off.
But when he got there he found a police car at the foot of the gangway. No wonder. Tommy had phoned the police while Mitchell was questioning Jane and had told them that paraffin had been found in the coal bunker of the Surface and arson was suspected.
Mitchell nonetheless stumbled out of the car and went to the water’s edge. He saw policemen on the Surface and turned unsteadily. When he got back to the car the body was gone. He took fright and drove to Beth’s boarding house by a roundabout route.
Meanwhile back at the house something had happened to Jane. Since her cross-examination by Mitchell she had been keeping her eyes open and watching everything that happened in the house. She knew that Mrs. Heewater was confined to the room where the linen was kept. She saw Mr. White and Mr. Mitchell carry the seemingly drunk figure of Harry Biggers down the stairs, and she saw Mr. Mitchell drive off with him. Then she heard Mr. White talking to the chauffeur and telling him that a guest had made off with the car, while Mrs. Heewater stood by. She saw the man go to the phone and she heard him call the police.
This was when she stepped in. She went up to the chauffeur and told him that the man who had taken his car was a gentleman, and that the whole thing was a joke and no concern of the police. Beth Heewater interrupted her curtly and even tried to drag her away. But at this point little Jane went wild and fought with Beth Heewater in the hall, whereupon she was sacked. However Mitchell was at least spared the ordeal of being questioned by the police in a situation where he would not have been able to say anything.
There was something else which he was not spared.
He opened the saloon door and thought he was not seeing right. In a corner were Beth, Tommy and the others, ensconced behind glasses of whisky, and beside Beth, grinning, was Harry Biggers. And Beth, Tommy and the others were grinning too.
‘You were going to tell us you had got rid of Harry?’ said Tommy White to greet him, and there was nothing Mitchell could say. He stumbled out again and stood for a time in front of the house.
After a while he noticed that there was someone standing beside him, and that it was Jane Russell with tears in her eyes and suitcases in her hands. He discovered that Beth had thrown her out ‘because she had assaulted Mrs. Heewater on Mitchell’s behalf’. She had no relatives in London and did not know where to turn, and it was getting late. Mitchell told her she could come back with him and that was how he came to bring her home in the early hours. He gave her his own room and lay down on the living room sofa, still very drunk.
In the morning an awkward situation arose. His sister to her great surprise found little Jane in his bedroom. Mitchell sputtered incoherently, especially when he noticed a distinct coolness as his sister listened to him. He did however manage to make it clear that Jane was a servant, so she was given breakfast in the kitchen. This was not entirely what he would have wished, and, worse still, he then had to talk to Jane in the presence of the family. He put on a friendly face and asked her about her intentions, agreeing that it would be best for her to go into a certain home where servants were boarded cheaply. Unfortunately he had spoken with Jane about this very same home as they were returning in the night. She had said that it was very bad and too expensive for her anyhow, at best a last resort for two or three days.
When Jane had left with her cases Mitchell had the feeling for the first time that he was a coward.
In the next few days he pursued his search for a new appointment with renewed zeal. His family played ostrich and simply took no notice of the change in
the situation. His sister even bought a piano on hire purchase just at that time.
He found no new appointment. They seemed to have heard all about him everywhere. There were not too many commands for captains of luxury liners, even courageous ones.
Preoccupied as he was, he even forgot to enquire about Jane at the home for three days. On the fourth his sister asked him about her and he went along. She had moved out after two days. But that evening he was offered a command.
Down by the East India Docks was a firm run by two brothers which had an extremely bad reputation. These two sent word that they might have something for him. He went along and was told there was a chance for him to take a collier to Holland for them.
‘You’ve had bad luck of late, Mitchell,’ said one of the brothers, grinning, ‘but this is just the job to get you out of the rut. You won’t put out another SOS in a hurry, will you?’
Mitchell swallowed this and went to look at the collier with them. It was the oldest, dirtiest, most battered old tub he had ever seen. There was no way in which a hulk like this could ever make Rotterdam. Nor did the brothers want it to. It was a clearcut case of an insurance swindle, nothing else.
Mitchell’s good name and his sense of responsibility (which is after all only the reverse side of cowardice) made him the ideal captain for the trip.
He felt a certain gut reaction, but he fought it down and did not say no. He asked for time to think it over and turned on his heel. From time to time he stopped in front of a shop window and talked to his own reflection.
‘Are you a coward?’ he asked, and Mitchell in the mirror shrugged his shoulders.
‘Have you always been one?’ he asked, and Mitchell in the mirror shook his head.
Then he met Jane. She was standing in a doorway waiting for something. He thought the worst and did not dare to walk past her. So it was from the other side of the road that he watched a man, who no doubt thought the same as him, accost her. But she appeared to reject his approaches very vigorously. Then Mitchell went across to her and invited her into a café. She replied that would be fine, provided she could sit at the window and watch the street. She was expecting a friend who knew of a job.
During those twenty minutes in the café Mitchell’s life touched rock bottom.
In an effort to be friendly he opened the conversation by remarking that she looked well.
That surprised her, she said, looking him straight in the eye. She was no coward. And without turning a hair she ate up all the cakes that he pushed towards her. She had no objection to letting him see that she had not eaten.
In some confusion he then went over to telling her that she would have to do something about her appearance if she wanted another job. He criticised her hair-do and even took off her glasses. She had beautiful eyes.
She replied that she would rather not have the kind of job where she had to look pretty. Though she feared that the job her girl-friend had heard of was one such.
Thereupon he began, to his own astonishment, to press her not to take that kind of job. He even went so far as to suggest that she should accept money from him and live off that until such times as she found something better.
To his annoyance she did not seem to take his offer seriously at all. For at this juncture she saw her girl-friend (the one with the bad job), stood up and hurried out. He just managed to get her address.
After this little experience he should have been completely shattered, but in fact he was rather cheered. He now knew that something had to happen to put an end to the whole sad tale. He went into a bar and drank several whiskies, rather more than he could hold. It was only when he realised that he was no longer seeing one glass where there was only one that he left.
He went straight home.
His father and his younger sister were sitting in the living room. They were listening to Traviata on the wireless. He turned off the music and told them without beating about the bush that they would have to move out of their eight-room flat into a two-room flat, and that his sisters would have to find office jobs, since the company had thrown him out for reasons that need not concern them.
Then he slept like a log, and in the morning he took his sisters, including the elder one, to an employment agency. They were quite cowed. It was clear to him that some of their lost respect for him was returning. There was not even any protest from his elder sister when he told her to give her fiancé his marching orders if he seemed dissatisfied with his prospective brother-in-law.
The second thing he did was to ring the brothers with the collier boat. He said he would sign up with them and asked them to have the papers ready. He fixed the day of departure with them. They were to come aboard the collier the evening before and hand over the papers. He meanwhile would muster a crew. The evening in question was to be a Tuesday.
The third thing he did was to ring up a goodly number of people and invite them for Tuesday to a little supper aboard the Almaida. Among them were the gentlemen from the boarding-house, among them was Beth Heewater, among them was even his former owner. They all accepted, even J. B. Watch. Outwardly Mitchell’s relations with his colleagues and with his former boss had remained just as they had been before the ‘incident’. They still slapped him on the back when they met him anywhere. The only thing now was that all of them had that damned smile which Mitchell did not like, not one little bit.
Then he sent an invitation to a reporter of his acquaintance, ordered an excellent supper from the Savoy with waiters to serve it on board the Almaida, and addressed himself on the Tuesday morning to point four.
Point four was Jane.
He managed to find her in a crummy boarding-house, still without a job. There was only one subject in this doss-house that he viewed with pleasure, and that was his (torn) photograph. She had managed to get hold of it on that decisive evening and there it was on the dressing-table. Jane made no effort to conceal it.
‘Don’t you want to hide it from me at least?’ he asked, but she shook her head. This being the case everything else was comparatively simple. There was a certain conflict when he took off her glasses (‘I will be your guide and see for both of us’), and as he combed her hair into a new style (‘Beth doesn’t think hair combed over your forehead is pretty’).
On the Almaida everything was ship-shape. The waiters raised an eyebrow at the room in which they were to set up their classy and expensive things. Keynes, the reporter, was there already and they had a good laugh over what was to come.
About nine the first guests rolled up. By a quarter to ten the whole lot were there. Jane had done the honours, and Beth’s face showed that she registered this as a courageous move on Mitchell’s part. Mitchell stood up and made a short speech.
He explained that he had decided, at the behest of Messrs. Knife (he bowed to the brothers), to take this ship to Rotterdam. He was doing this because making a fresh start showed courage, and certain doubts had been cast on his courage of late. To ensure that everybody who had recently taken an interest in his courage would have the chance to see that courage in action, he would take the liberty of inviting them along in this little voyage.
At that moment the ship began to vibrate as ships do when they put to sea, and the engines started up so that everybody could hear them.
The surprise was quite striking.
In the improvised dining room there was absolute panic. The men made for the door. The door was locked. The women screamed: then Mitchell went on.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘if you were familiar with the state of the deck of my Almaida, you wouldn’t rush around on it like that. The door you are heaving at is more or less the only sound piece of wood on the ship, it won’t give. The state of the ship is the reason why it was so highly insured, am I right, Messrs. Knife? Given the uncertainty of her making her destination, she had to be insured. Of course it takes no little courage to take a thing like this out on the high seas, but that courage I have. You will be pleased to hear this, and I fancy
there will be one or two things you will wish me to forgive. You too, Beth, doubted whether I would have the courage to do away with something nobody wanted to see again. Well this ship, the Almaida, is just such a thing. And I will get rid of it, fear not! And you, Watch, need not fear that I will call for the assistance of another ship before this one has gone to the bottom. I did so once and I will not do it again. Cowardice needs to be resisted, does it not?’
I shall cut it short. There were a few more rather unworthy scenes. Most of those present were most regrettably lacking in courage. J. B. Watch even offered his former captain his old job back, before witnesses. Tommy White behaved like a madman. And Harry Biggers almost died in earnest.
Mitchell, disgusted and at the same time satisfied with the results of his experiment, let his guests tread dry land again before too long. When the door was opened it became apparent that Mitchell had just let the ship ride on steel hawsers in the current to make it move. His guests’ cars were visible from the ship.
Keynes promised Mitchell that he would sit on the story, at least for the time being.
‘You see, I’m certainly not such a coward as to turn down J. B. Watch’s offer,’ said Mitchell gaily. ‘So long as he sticks by it,’ added Jane, pressing close to him.
‘He will,’ said Keynes cynically.
The Soldier of La Ciotat
After the First World War, during a fête to celebrate the launching of a ship in the small port town of La Ciotat in the South of France, we saw in a public square the bronze statue of a French soldier with a crowd pressing round it. We went closer and found that it was a living man standing there in a dun-coloured greatcoat, a tin hat on his head, his bayonet fixed, motionless on a plinth in the hot June sun. His face and hands were coated with bronze paint. He did not move a muscle, not even his eyelashes flickered.
At his feet a piece of cardboard was propped against the plinth with the following legend:
HUMAN STATUE
Bertolt Brecht Page 15
