A House in Order

by Nigel Dennis

  After the same laughter and noise as before, there was dead silence again and the first spokesman got up to ask the Colonel questions. They must have been harmless enough – only the sort of legal questions that are put to a man whom everyone knows as if in fear that he is not that person after all: the colonel answered them plainly and easily. Once, he added an extra word or so after a pause, in a lazy way, and all the witnesses in our row broke into a grin, as if to say: ‘Yes, that’s the man we know!’, and even the young officer lost his tense look and seemed happy to admire his chief. But for me, it was all a dumb-show, understanding nothing, so that no matter how much they talked I had only their faces to judge by until my own turn came.

  This happened first when the clock showed three. Because the whole story began with me, I suppose, I was the first proper witness – and everybody looking at me with a lot of attention, as well they might, because but for me they could all have stayed at home. My guards stood me up and all four spokesmen took turns to have a shy at me – every single question that I had answered over and over again ever since the day I arrived in autumn – who I was, how I had spent my life, whether I was famous as a grower, etc., etc. It was all news to most of them – and every word I said scribbled down in earnest by all parties as if vital. But it was the first spokesman, who stood for the Prison Commissioners, who kept me longest about my history, trying to make it sound secret and me a dangerous person:

  Q: For how many years have you drawn maps?

  A: Since I was twenty-two.

  Q: So, if you are now forty-four, you have had twenty-two years’ experience as a cartographer?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: The firm you worked for – did it ask you for maps of a local or general nature?

  A: I did both, sir.

  Q: Accurate, detailed, scale maps?

  A: Oh, yes.

  Q: They were published?

  A: Oh, yes.

  Q: By whom?

  A: Dunstable & Praeger, sir.

  (This had to be written down, with the full address.)

  Q: Could you draw the geography of this country from memory?

  A: Oh, no.

  Q: What! With twenty-two years’ experience?

  A: I was never very interested in my work, sir. It was only my living.

  Q: However, your Army was very interested in your work, wasn’t it?

  A: I was called up, sir.

  Q: Exactly so. And after preliminary training, this was the area to which you were sent?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: And yet you say that you could not draw the geography of this area from memory?

  A: Not accurately, sir.

  Q: That is not the reply you gave before, is it?

  A: I don’t remember, sir.

  Q: The Court remembers … At whose suggestion did you remain behind when your battalion surrendered?

  A: At nobody’s, sir.

  Q: You ask us to believe you were such a coward, you hid when the rest surrendered?

  A: I have always said that, sir.

  Q: I am aware that you have always said that. It is the story you told the Colonel, is it not? That officer over there?

  A: Yes.

  Q: You told him you were a frightened horticulturist with no interest in maps and no motive but to save your hide?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: And you told him that you had sat on his doorstep for a whole day, hoping to attract his attention?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: And he was happy to believe this tale?

  At this, the Colonel’s spokesman rose and spoke sharply and I was forbidden to answer. It being then exactly five o’clock, they adjourned until the next day, but not until after the President had addressed me through the interpreter as follows:

  ‘You are a foreigner and an enemy and the Court assumes that you are not informed as to what is happening here. However, probably you have guessed the nature of some of the questions that are involved – including the important one of why you are not a prisoner of war at all and come under no specified control, bureau or regulation. But none of this is any business of yours. You will be asked questions to which you will be expected to give truthful answers. That is all that need concern you.’

  At nine sharp next morning, they started in again and I was the first to be called. This time it was the second spokesman, who was only interested in undoing today what his colleagues had done up the day before:

  Q: During your sojourn in the adjacent glasshouse, how did you occupy yourself?

  A: I grew a variety of plants, sir.

  Q: Can you show the Court those fruits of your labours?

  A: Oh, yes, sir. They are all these here.

  Q: All these plants at present in this hall?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: How many are there?

  A: There should be 283, sir.

  Q: What! Do you know each one individually?

  A: Oh, yes, sir.

  Q: Do you think that any man who was not dedicated to horticulture could have grown all these plants and be able to recognize each one?

  A: No, sir.

  Q: Could you have done so yourself if you took map-making seriously?

  A: Oh, no.

  He then waved his hand rather airily and smiled, like a man who has pushed over an elephant with one hand, and we both sat down. The chairman or president then gave an order and four soldiers left the hall, returning at once with a broad stretcher on which were the remains of the poor beast who had taken me prisoner. After some uncertainty where to put it, they brought in trestles and laid it across them, just below the thick bank of my flower pots that had been arranged under the president or chairman. I may say, though it is needless to say, that the buffoon who had robbed my greenhouse, or one of the brainless arrangers among the uniformed females, had made a point of putting all the plants that were most forward and breaking out of bud in the well of the hall, where they were most noticed and got the least light, while all the plants that could have managed in the well had been massed in the bow-windows – what could be more characteristic? Anyway, the stretcher with its miserable remains was laid alongside the best I could offer, as in a memorial chapel.

  An abominably fat and dirty woman, perpetually in tears, was brought in from outside, I suppose the corpse’s mother, because she was the first to identify it. Everyone put on a show of patience and let her stream on and babble, but when, after she had nodded her head a number of times, staring everywhere but in the direction of the rotten remains, she was thanked shortly and taken away, everyone got back to business with relief. Various soldiers stepped forward to confirm the identification, and the order in which it was done was the order of the corpse’s life. I did my turn, being led down to the stretcher, though all I recognized was the shirt pocket where he had put my glasses, the only part of his uniform that was as it had been. Then came almost all our row, one by one, every officer, the Colonel himself, the firing-squad, until after one hour everyone was content with who the corpse had been and able to wrangle for an hour more about points I never discovered. It then being lunchtime, all filed out except me and my guards, and the four men came in again and took the stretcher off.

  All four spokesmen questioned me in the afternoon, all managing to make a fool of me and to prove that everything I declared was an invention. One gets tired for some reason of always answering a question in the same words when it is put four times, so I no longer remember my different answers though I do remember many of the questions:

  Q: If the lock of the cupboard you hid in was outside, how did you succeed in opening it from inside?

  Q: As a cartographer you must have known the points of the compass and whether you were running, as you insist you were, N. S. E. or W.?

  Q: You say he came from the side of the road where he had been sitting down. Can you tell us no more than that?

  Q: What do you mean by ‘hundreds of yards’ between you and the prisoners who had surrendered?

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p; Q: What! Do you tell the Court in all seriousness that though you had no glasses and it was almost dark. you could both see all the things that you have just mentioned and not see the uniforms of those from whom your captor asked assistance?

  Q: He turned away and left you standing there. Did this not strike you as extraordinary?

  Q: You say you had no money. By what means, then, did you persuade this simple soldier to leave you where he did?

  Q: Yes, you have told us more than once that fear was your only emotion. May I suggest that you are much braver and cleverer than you have chosen to admit?

  Q: And you insist that most of your countrymen are like you – that they give their best to their hobbies and try to forget what they do for a living?

  Q: May I put it to you that this was merely the beginning of a treatment of yourself that has been irregular and scandalous continually?

  When they were finished with me – at least, finished with the part about how I got to the greenhouse at all – they had run through another day and got me in the condition where nothing I said was of any use and seemed so even to me. And it was all like double nonsense in the end, what with every question and every answer needing to be said twice over, in their own language and in translation for me. Like everyone who finds himself in that kind of mess, I suppose, I began to lose hope that anyone at all was believing me and to be afraid that three of them were determined, for various reasons, to turn me into a sort of MACKENZIE, who had the heart of a lion and would serve my country to the death. It was the aim of two of the spokesmen, I saw, to show how justified the Colonel had been in shooting the brute who was somehow in the pay or under the influence of a bold, clever spy like me, while the third spokesman was out to show how culpable the Colonel was for confining a terror like me only in a house with glass walls and pots of flowers to hide my secrets.

  The next day – though this is not the order in which things proceeded and some must have been even on the day after that – all three went on begging me to confess my bravery, assuring me in different ways that it was too obvious to be denied:

  Q: Now, my audacious friend, there you are with nothing but a glass wall between you and your compatriots a few hundred yards away. Did no messages of any sort pass between you?

  A: No, sir.

  Q: Stop to reflect a minute now … You are for six months adjacent to this house – time enough to learn what goes on in it. For that same length of time, you have every imaginable way of passing your information to the Camp below you. And a few days before this Court sits, a prisoner escapes from the Camp. What information does he carry home from you?

  A: I think they sang to cheer me up.

  Q: Well, well, we are getting somewhere at last! After that admission, can you still insist that there was no exchange between you and your fellows in the Camp?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: No message of any sort has ever passed between you?

  A: No, sir.

  And so on, and praising my pluck through the long winter, etc., etc., until mine were the only lies, really, and they were speaking the truth – that I had endured that winter all alone, that MACKENZIE depended on me, that messages had passed, that the escaped man was not unknown to me.

  Q: They sang these songs – what were they? …

  Q: And when they sang – you danced …?

  Q: Your orders when you left your homeland – what were your orders? …

  Q: The leader of the prisoners – who is he? …

  Q: Aren’t you either the world’s cleverest spy or biggest idiot …?

  – and yet in all this they didn’t care tuppence for me – though I saw sympathetic faces for what they had made my bravery – because it was the Colonel they meant to get and the Colonel whom they called at last. But first came all those involved in my arrival and the shooting of the soldier – the adjutant, soon streaming with sweat, the firing-squad, jumpy and dry-mouthed, and the young officer, who tried at first to talk like his colonel with a haughty, smiling manner, but after three hours was turned to a baby. But I was sorriest for my interpreter, who was trembling from the start and having to account, I suppose, for every order he had brought me from the Colonel and say exactly what it had been. The fourth spokesman, representing the Colonel, was rudest to him – as if the interpreter had invented the orders himself – but he was the kindest to me and tried his best to represent me naturally as an imbecile whose fate was of no consequence and whom the Colonel was therefore justified in treating as a joke:

  Q: A life devoted to house-leeks and cranesbills, is that it?

  A: No, sir. It was only when I came here, I saw my chance with them.

  Q: You thought, did you: ‘Here I am in enemy territory, in danger of being shot – what a chance to grow house-leeks and cranesbills!’?

  A: I never thought that, sir, but it happened to be.

  However, though he tried his best to make me the Colonel’s joke, his amusement wasn’t shared by anyone else and it was a pity that he tried to present the truth at all, because the more laughable he tried to make me, the graver everyone looked and the more reasonable it seemed that I was a sterling hero – though nobody really believed for a moment that I was that either. But thanks to my poor interpreter they managed to prove at last what they never believed, because he had to confess in the end – and me to confirm – that the Colonel recently had threatened to shoot me out of hand, though when I tried to play this down it only made matters worse, because clearly it was in my interest to appear a harmless fool.

  Their questioning of the Colonel began properly on the morning of the fifth day, but by then I was as good as dead to what the Court was doing because in two more days, MACKENZIE was going to send me his second visitor and all I could think of was his being found in my hut. Now, when they asked me questions, I could think of no exact answers, whether true or false, because they had made the whole occasion themselves and given me my place in it and there was nothing real any more to defend or assert. But the compliments three of the spokesmen kept paying me for my courage were very welcome to me, because there was nothing I could give myself to cheer me up and I was ready to believe anything:

  Q: Now, my friend, you have been told more than once that honesty is the best policy for leniency. Do you still insist that your superiors at home never so much as hinted that when you arrived at this house you would find at least one ally among its officers?

  The chairman or president was displeased when they asked me such questions and forbade me to answer them, as if it would be quite satisfactory to prove the Colonel irregular and utterly irresponsible, and no need to make him my accomplice too. I began my questioning with nothing and was built up by them into something, but they did it the other way with him, slowly degrading him from much into nothing. On the first day of his close questioning, he was his old self and made all the worried people in our row more confident and happy, just as he had when he came back to the house six months before and found them so deadly serious about me. He was polite to the Court, but took his time answering the inquisitors and smiled at them sometimes as if to suggest that he, too, could enjoy a put-up job. I suppose he never said frankly that nobody in the Court cared a scrap whether he had shot a soldier or made me a prisoner and were only out to get him because he had shown contempt for their rules, but his manner gave him away and made the three spokesmen more indignant than ever – and even believing, possibly, what they said. He was hoarse on the second day and answered everything more shortly, and on the third day not straight up in his chair and just giving the impression that so many voices and so many words were a worse punishment than dying of wounds. On that third day, I was only called once:

  Q: Did this officer at any time declare to you a contempt for the Commandants of prison-camps?

  A: No, sir.

  Q: Did he ever say to you, either directly or through his interpreter: ‘A Commandant is a fat behind whose uncle disposes of cushy places’?

  A: Oh, no, sir. />
  So by that evening, the questioning was over, and the chairman or president wound up with an address to each of the four spokesmen in turn, then to the clerk below, then to all the witnesses – with the exception of me, who was of no interest any more. I had all the next day in my greenhouse, to wait for the verdict and MACKENZIE’S second visitor.

  He arrived as the other had, with hardly a sound at night through the back of the hut – but he had had a run, at least over the last lap, because he was panting hard and obliged to stand still a long time, never moving, until his breathing got lighter and then silent. Soon after he came, one of my new guards came to the greenhouse door and shone his light down the middle strip, where all he saw was me at full length under my blanket, with closed eyes. And at about two in the morning, a strange officer came round with the same guard and inspected me with his own eyes, so I was thankful that my terror of having any truck with my visitor had driven me out of the hut as before, because if they had not been able to see me they would certainly have walked in to look and found the pair of us.

  Like MACKENZIE’S first visitor, this one was perfectly disciplined and well behaved – he, too, had had his ORDERS, I could tell. I heard him relieve himself in my bucket, and just so I could hear it under his breath, whistle ‘Open the door, Confucius’, but then he made his bed exactly where the first had lain and went straight to sleep, of all things – which I knew by the fact that he laughed unconsciously and even muttered, until, waking himself up, as snorers and talkers do, he sighed, changed position and went on sleeping without a sound. At the very first light of dawn, with everything in the garden sodden and drooping, they changed the guard and I was inspected afresh, lying in my own sweat and my heart banging on the cement – which I had to go on doing until sunrise, there being no pretext I could think of for getting up earlier, with only the naked staging to tend. So I got up with the Camp reveille, sure I would never be able to stand, but running the cold water from the brass tap and washing in the first sunlight with tears pouring down my cheeks and shaking so that I thought I would never stop – and all watched curiously by the guard each time he passed, as I was a novelty to him. I put off the putting out of my bucket so long, through fear of seeing my visitor or being spoken to by him, that I delayed it almost an instant too long: they were sending to fetch me into Court at the very moment I got into the hut and began trying to get the bucket out with a foot, but somehow it went through, with a helping hand I managed not to see, and the back door closed again. Not knowing my usual routine, of course, they gave me my coffee and bread after they had lugged me into the house – and took for granted that I should sit on a bench, twitching and trembling like a criminal and trying to drink from a hot mug like someone paralysed. I was in my place at eight-thirty and still shivering when nine struck and the shouting and laughing stopped as always instantly.