by John Fowles
‘Did you try this on my predecessors?’
‘John Leverrier was neither a fool nor a coward. Even Mitford was not the second.’
And he had me. It was absurd, but I would not let my bluff be called. I reached for the shaker.
‘Wait.’ He leant forward, and put his hand on my wrist; then placed a tooth by my side. ‘I am not playing at make-believe. You must swear to me that if the number is six you will take the pill.’ His face was totally serious. I felt myself wanting to swallow.
‘I swear.’
‘By all that is most sacred to you.’
I hesitated, shrugged, then said, ‘By all that is most sacred to me.’
He held out the dice and I put it in the shaker. I shook it loosely and quickly and threw the dice. It ran over the cloth, hit the brass base of the lamp, rebounded, wavered, fell.
It was a six.
Conchis was absolutely motionless, watching me. I knew at once that I was never, never going to pick up the pill. I could not look at him. Perhaps fifteen seconds passed. Then I smiled, looked at him and shook my head.
He reached out again, his eyes still on me, took the tooth beside me, put it in his mouth and bit it and swallowed the liquid. I went red. Still watching me, he reached out and put the dice in the shaker, and threw it. It was a six. Then again. And again it was a six. He spat out the empty shell of the tooth.
‘What you have just decided is precisely what I decided that morning forty years ago at Neuve Chapelle. You have behaved exactly as any intelligent human being should behave. I congratulate you.’
‘But what you said? The perfect republic?’
‘All perfect republics are perfect nonsense. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?’
‘But the dice was loaded.’
‘Patriotism, propaganda, professional honour, esprit de corps – what are all those things? Cogged dice. There is just one small difference, Nicholas. On the other table these are real.’ He put the remaining teeth back in the box. ‘Not just ratafia in coloured plastic’
‘And the other two – how did they react?’
He smiled. ‘Another means society employs to control hazard -to prevent a freedom of choice in its slaves – is to tell them that the past was nobler than the present. John Leverrier was a Catholic. And wiser than you. He refused even to be tempted.’
‘And Mitford?’
‘I do not waste time teaching the blind.’
His eyes lingered a dry moment on mine, as if to make sure I took the implicit compliment; and then, as if to limit it, he turned out the lamp. I was left in more than the literal darkness. What last thin pretence had remained that I was merely a guest lay discarded. He had evidently been through all this before. The horrors of Neuve Chapelle had been convincing enough as he described them, yet they turned artificial with this knowledge of repetition. Their living reality became a matter of technique, of realism gained through rehearsal. It was like being earnestly persuaded an object was new by a seller who simultaneously and deliberately revealed it must be second-hand: an affront to all probability. I was not to believe in appearances… but why, why, why?
Meanwhile he had started weaving his web again; and once more I flew to meet it.
20
‘The middle six hours of that day we passed in waiting. The Germans hardly shelled us at all. They had been bombarded to their knees. The obvious thing would have been to attack at once. But it takes a very brilliant general, a Napoleon, to see the obvious.
‘About three o’clock the Gurkhas came alongside us and we were told an attack on the Aubers Ridge was to be launched. We were to be the first line. Just before half past three we fixed bayonets. I was beside Captain Montague, as usual. I think he knew only one thing about himself. That he was fearless, and ready to swallow the acid. He kept looking along the lines of men beside him. He scorned the use of a periscope, and stood and poked his head over the parapet. The Germans still seemed stunned.
‘We began to walk forward. Montague and the sergeant-major called incessantly, keeping us in line. We had to cross a cratered ploughed field to a hedge of poplars, and then across another small field lay our objective, a bridge. I suppose we had gone about half the distance we had to cover, and then we broke into a trot and some of the men began to shout. The Germans seemed to stop firing altogether. Montague called triumphantly. “On, lads! Victoree!”
‘They were the last words he ever spoke. It was a trap. Five or six machine guns scythed us like grass. Montague spun round and fell at my feet. He lay on his back, staring up at me, one eye gone. I collapsed beside him. The air was nothing but bullets. I pressed my face right into the mud, I was urinating, certain that at any moment I should be killed. Someone came beside me. It was the sergeant-major. Some of the men were firing back, but blindly. In despair. The sergeant-major, I do not know why, began dragging Montague’s corpse backwards. Feebly, I tried to help. We slipped down into a small crater. The back of Montague’s head had been blown away, but his face still wore an idiot’s grin, as if he were laughing in his sleep, mouth wide open. A face I have never forgotten. The last smile of a stage of evolution.
‘The firing stopped. Then, like a flock of frightened sheep, everyone who survived began to run back towards the village. I as well. I had lost even the will to be a coward. Many were shot in the back as they ran, and I was one of the few who reached the trench we had started from unhurt – alive, even. We were no sooner there than the shelling began. Our own shells. Owing to the bad weather conditions, the artillery were shooting blind. Or perhaps still according to some plan established days before. Such irony is not a by-product of war. But typical of it.
‘A wounded lieutenant was now in command. He crouched beside me, with a great gash across his cheek. His eyes burned dully. He was no longer a nice upright young Englishman, but a neolithic beast. Cornered, uncomprehending, in a sullen rage. Perhaps we all looked like that. The longer one survived the more unreal it was.
‘More troops came up with us, and a colonel appeared. Aubers Ridge must be captured. We had to have the bridge by nightfall. But I had meanwhile had time to think.
‘I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan – that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.’
He was silent; I could just make out his face, his staring to sea, as if Neuve Chapelle was out there, grey mud and hell, visible.
‘We attacked again. I should have liked simply to disobey orders and stay in the trench. But of course cowards were treated as deserters, and shot. So I clambered up with the rest when the order came. A sergeant shouted at us to run. Exactly the same thing happened as earlier that afternoon. There was a little firing from the Germans, just enough to bait the trap. But I knew that there were half a dozen eyes watching down their machine-guns. My one hope was that they would be truly German. That is, methodical, and not open fire until the same point as before.
‘We came to within fifty yards of that point. Two or three bullets ricocheted close by. I clasped my heart, dropped my rifle, staggered. Just in front of me I had seen a large shell-crater, an old one. I stumbled, fell and rolled over the edge of it. I heard the cry “Keep on!” I lay with my feet in a pool of water, and waited. A few seconds later there was the violent unleashing of death I had expected. Someone leapt in the other side of the shell-hole. He must have been a Catholic, because he was gabbling Ave’s. Then there was another scuffle and I heard him go in a falling of bits of mud. I drew my feet out of the water. But I did not open my eyes until the firing had stopped.
‘I was not alone in that shell-hole. Ha
lf in, half out of the water opposite me was a greyish mass. A German corpse, long dead, half eaten by rats. Its stomach gaped, and it lay like a woman with a stillborn child beside it. And it smelt… it smelt as you can imagine.
‘I stayed in that crater all night. I accustomed myself to the mephitic stench. It grew cold, and I thought I had a fever. But I made up my mind not to move until the battle was over. I was without shame. I even hoped the Germans would overrun our positions and so allow me to give myself up as a prisoner.
‘Fever. But what I thought was fever was the fire of existence, the passion to exist. I know that now. A delirium vivens. I do not mean to defend myself. All deliria are more or less anti-social, and I speak clinically, not philosophically. But I possessed that night an almost total recall of physical sensations. And these recalls, of even the simplest and least sublime things, a glass of water, the smell of frying bacon, seemed to mc to surpass or at least equal the memories of the greatest art, the noblest music, even my tenderest moments with Lily. I experienced the very opposite of what the German and French metaphysicians of our century have assured us is the truth: that all that is other is hostile to the individual. To me all that is other seemed exquisite. Even that corpse, even the squealing rats. To be able to experience, never mind that it was cold and hunger and nausea, was a miracle. Try to imagine that one day you discover you have a sixth, a till then unimagined new sense – something not comprehended in feeling, seeing, the conventional five. But a far profounder sense, the source from which all others spring. The word “being” no longer passive and descriptive, but active … almost imperative.
‘Before the night was ended I knew that I had had what religious people would call a conversion. A light in heaven indeed shone on me, for there were constant starshells. But I had no sense of God. Only of having leapt a lifetime in one night.’
He was silent for a moment. I wished there was someone beside me, an Alison, some friend, who could savour and share the living darkness, the stars, the terrace, the voice. But they would have had to pass through all those last months with me. The passion to exist: I forgave myself my failure to die.
‘I am trying to describe to you what happened to me, what I was. Not what I should have been. Not the rights and wrongs of conscientious objection. I beg you to remember that.
‘Before dawn there was another German bombardment. They attacked at first light, their generals having made exactly the same mistake as ours the day before. They suffered even heavier casualties. They got past my crater and to the trenches we had attacked from, but they were driven back again almost at once. All I knew of this was the noise. And the foot of a German soldier. He used my shoulder for a support while he was firing.
‘Night fell again. There was war to the south, but our sector was quiet. The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed. Thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes – because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself-and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.
‘At midnight I crawled back to the village on my stomach. I was afraid I might be shot by a startled sentry. But the place was manned by corpses, and I was in the middle of a desert of the dead. I found my way down a communication trench. There, too, only silence and corpses. Then a little further on I heard English voices ahead, and called out. It was a party of stretcher-bearers, passing round for a final ascertaining that only the dead remained. I said I had been knocked out by a shell-blast.
‘They did not doubt my story. Stranger things had happened. From them I learnt where what was left of my battalion were. I had no plan, nothing but the instinct of a child to return to its home. But as the Spanish say, a drowning man soon learns to swim. I knew I must be officially dead. That if I ran away, at least no one would be running after me. By dawn I was ten miles behind the lines. I had a little money and French had always been the lingua franca of my home. I found peasants who sheltered and fed me that next day. The next night I marched again, over the fields, always westwards, across the Artois towards Boulogne.
‘A week later, travelling always like this, like the émigrés in the 1790s, I arrived there. It was full of soldiers and of military police, and I was near despair. Of course it was impossible to board a returning troopship without papers. I thought of presenting myself at the docks and saying that my pocket had been picked … but I lacked the impudence to carry it off. Then one day fate was kind to me. She gave me an opportunity to pick pockets myself. I met a soldier from the Rifle Brigade who was very drunk, and I made him drunker. I caught the leave ship while he, poor man, was still snoring in a room above an estaminet near the station.
‘And then my real troubles began. But I have talked enough.’
21
There was silence. The crickets chirped. Some night-bird, high overhead, croaked primevally in the stars.
‘What happened when you got home?’
‘It is late.’
‘But–’
‘Tomorrow.’
He lit the lamp again. As he straightened up from adjusting the wick, he stared at me.
‘You are not ashamed to be the guest of a traitor to his country?’
‘I don’t think you were a traitor to the human race.’
We moved towards his bedroom windows.
‘The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.’
‘I suppose one could say that Hitler didn’t betray his self.’
He turned.
‘You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.’
He led the way through to my room, and lit the lamp there for me.
‘Good night, Nicholas.’
‘Good night. And
But his hand was up, silencing me and what he must have guessed were to be my thanks. Then he was gone.
When I came back from the bathroom, I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to one. I undressed and turned out the lamp, then stood a moment by the open window. There was a vague smell of drains in the still air, of a cesspool somewhere. I got into bed, and lay thinking about Conchis.
Or losing him, since all my thoughts ended in paradox. If in one way he seemed much more human, more normally fallible, than before, that was tainted by what seemed like a lack of virginity in the telling. Calculating frankness is very different from the spontaneous variety; there was some fatal extra dimension in his objectivity, which was much more that of a novelist before a character than of even the oldest, most changed man before his own real past self. It was finally much more like biography than the autobiography it purported to be; patently more concealed lesson than true confession. It was not that I was so self-blind that I saw nothing to be learnt. But how could he presume this on so little knowledge of me? Why should he care?
And then there were the footsteps, a whole tangle of unrelated ikons and incidents, the photo on the curiosa cabinet, oblique looks, Alison, the little girl called Lily with her head in sunlight…
I was about to go to sleep.
At first hallucinatorily faint, impossible to pinpoint, it began. I thought it must be coming through the walls from a gramophone in Conchis’s bedroom. I sat up, put my ear to the wall, listened. And then I leapt out of bed and went to the window. It was creeping down from outside, from somewhere far to the north, well up in the hills a mile or more away. There was no light, no obvious sound except the crickets in the garden. Only, so barely perceptible that it fringed the imagined, this faintest drone of men, a lot of men, singing. I thought: fishermen. But why should they be in the hills? Then shepherds – but shepherds are solitaries.
It grew a little clearer, as if on a gust of wind – but there was no wind; swelling, then fading away. I thought for an incredible moment that I caught something familiar in the sound – but it couldn’t be. And it sank away, almost to complete silence.
I went to the door of my room and opened it. I had some idea that the record-player must be in Conchis’s room. Somehow he had had the sound relayed to a speaker, or speakers, in the hills – perhaps that was what was in the little room, relaying equipment, a generator. But there was absolute silence in the house. I closed the door and leant back against it. The voices and the song washed dimly down out of the night, through the pine-forest, over the house and out to sea. Suddenly the humour, the absurd, tender, touching poetry of the whole thing, made me smile. It must be some elaborate joke of Conchis’s, mounted for my exclusive benefit; and as a subtle test of my own humour, tact and intelligence. There was no need to rush about trying to discover how it was done. I should find that out in the morning. Meanwhile, I was to enjoy it. I went back to the window.
The voices had become very dim, barely audible; but something else had grown penetratingly strong. It was the cesspool smell I had noticed earlier. Now it was an atrocious stench that infested the windless air, a nauseating compound of decomposing flesh and excrement, so revolting that I had to hold my nose and breathe through my mouth.
Below my room there was a narrow passage between the cottage and the house. I craned down, because the source of the smell seemed so close. It was clear to me that the smell was connected with the singing. I remembered that corpse in the shell-hole. But I could see nothing anomalous, no movement.
The sound faded, went completely. After a few minutes, the smell too was fainter. I stood another ten or fifteen minutes, straining eyes and ears for the faintest stir. But there was none. And there was no sound inside the house. No creeping up the stairs, no doors gently closed, nothing. The crickets chirped, the stars pulsed, the experience was wiped clean. I sniffed at the window. The foul odour still lingered, but under the normal antiseptic smell of the pines and the sea, not over it.
