Tales of Adventurers

by Geoffrey Household

  “I’ll get hold of him and see what he says, if you’ll just stand by the car, Medlock, and keep an eye on Dupont.”

  He took Smith a little apart, and asked him what exactly his orders were.

  “To assist you in every possible way, sir,” Smith answered.

  Virian was uneasy. There was a light in the young eyes which looked uncommonly like hero worship. Yet Smith’s expression was tough and set. The very smoothness of the skin hid emotion more absolutely than the mobile lines of an older face.

  “You understand, of course, just exactly what the job is?”

  “I did the reccy with the colonel,” Smith assured him.

  He produced the word reccy with a certain pride, which suggested to Virian that he had not been long in the army. Well, God knew what some of these young commando chaps, quickly, violently trained, must have seen and done already!

  “Then will you go up with that gentleman and the prisoner to the mine-shaft? He, of course, is going to – to take the necessary steps. And, look here, Smith, refuse if you want to! This is no part of your duty as a soldier.”

  “I understand that, sir.”

  There wasn’t any shaking that firm professional. His attitude was so matter-of-fact that Virian began to doubt the value of his own scruples. He gave full credit to Fayze for choosing a murderer’s mate whose cold-blooded morale was an example to them all.

  They took Dupont out of the car. The polite smile with which he had brightened his formal conversation was fixed at half its full extent. He looked at them, his eyes searching each face in turn with the uneasy instinct of an animal at the shambles gate.

  The French major reassured him with deliberate ambiguity.

  “This is the rendezvous,” he said. “It is here that you will shortly meet certain Free Frenchmen.”

  Dupont again anxiously reviewed the faces. What he saw relieved him – for their orders were to keep him quiet, and even their eyes were obedient. His smile returned to its natural mobility. Two big drops of sweat trickled down his fat cheeks, shaved to a piglike smoothness for the morning inspection of his person and his cell.

  Smith, Dupont and the executioner walked up over the grass towards the hut. The French major remained by the car, torturing a cigarette between his fingers. Medlock went to the curve of the road; Virian to the top of the hill. So long as both held their hands in their pockets, the road was clear. When their hands were exposed, it was a sign that traffic was approaching. Smith stood by the door of the hut, relaying their gestures to the interior.

  Virian could see quarter of a mile of empty road. He put his hands in his pockets, dismissing quickly a thought of Roman thumbs. On a distant slope was a small convoy moving down towards him, but the job would be over by the time it arrived.

  Medlock, at his end, kept his hands very plainly in sight. A baker’s van came round the corner, along the straight and up the hill past Virian – who now also revealed his hands, for the approaching convoy was too close. A motorcycle, a truck and six heavy lorries bumbled interminably past at regulation intervals and twenty miles an hour, adding to Dupont’s store three more minutes of October noon.

  Medlock put his hands in his pockets. Virian waited for a faraway car, and damned the wheels that flashed in the sunlight for not turning more slowly. They passed, and he found his hands playing noisily with the coins in one pocket and keys in the other. He waited for the shot. It didn’t come. He was furiously angry. What were they doing inside the hut? After all this trouble! Why couldn’t they get on?

  Ten minutes went by with no movement on the road but the lumbering, swift shadow of a carrion crow impatient to return to his perch. Then Medlock’s hands came out with a gesture as if he were flinging at the hut the contents of his pockets. An oldish man, instantly recognizable as a retired colonel or general, deprived – and no doubt uncomplainingly – of petrol, drove round the corner in a dogcart with his two little granddaughters. He called in cheerful comradeship that it was a lovely day. Bitterly Virian put him down as a merciful and honorable man. He could afford those virtues in the simpler wars that he had known.

  Again both ends of the road were clear for long minutes, and again there was no shot. Medlock came striding back from his corner, his face that of a sergeant-major who was about to tell his paraded and incompetent squad exactly what he thought of it. Virian, too, hastened back to the car in fear lest his companion should hurl some blunt protest or, worse still, some unfeeling denial of protest, into so delicate an occupation.

  “Man doesn’t know his job!” Medlock stormed.

  “Would you expect him to?” retorted Virian.

  The French major at the car turned on them, illogically angry as themselves. Some cutting irony at the expense of the English came beautifully shaped from his lips and died away as he became conscious of the brutal absurdity of any blame.

  While they were staring at the hut, a melancholy procession came down the hill towards them – Dupont, Smith and the Frenchman, more sad than ever. Even Dupont looked disappointed. Very likely, he was. The Free French detachment, the larger public among which he would, for a little while, be safe, had not turned up.

  Dupont was again left with Fayze’s tame tough, while the other four went aside.

  “Couldn’t Smith relay the signals to you?” Virian asked.

  “Yes,” the French civilian replied. “Yes.”

  “Well, then? Well then, for God’s sake?” the major demanded.

  “The hut is too small. I cannot get behind him. Perhaps he will not let me get behind him. And to draw the pistol before his eyes – no, I cannot do it.”

  “Well, we daren’t hang about here any longer,” said Virian. “Someone may get inquisitive, and start watching us. We had better drive off now and come back later.”

  The party packed into the car, still unexpectedly six. Dupont conversed with polite, tacit sympathy, identifying himself with the unknown derangement of plans which all had suffered. He behaved as if he were an embarrassing but useful prisoner – a double agent, for example, about to be sent off on some dangerous journey. He may even have persuaded himself that such a destiny was possible.

  He addressed himself particularly to the French civilian, perhaps trying to allay his own suspicions. Dupont was a type to be successful, Virian decided, as minor businessman or major traitor, for he had an insistent cunning. He talked and talked, closely watching with eyes that held a decent pretense of geniality the impact of his words. The failure in the hut was very understandable. Dupont was tiresome; Dupont’s fat face was that of a crook; but it was impossible to treat him with anything but courtesy. To draw a gun before his face was a task as awkward as to get him out of the office without giving him a small order.

  Smith had been pale and self-controlled when he returned from the hut. He now returned to his puzzling and casehardened temperament. He asked sharply where he was to go.

  Well, where? Just a drive. Out for a drive. A pleasant occupation for a family on Sunday afternoon. Such aimlessness was intolerable. An order had to be given, some destination found.

  “Oh, stop at the first pub when we’re off the downs,” Virian replied, his voice military and exasperated.

  It was a considerable place, more of a roadhouse than a pub, which had no doubt been gay enough before the war with thirsty and fast-driving youth. Now, however, the long lounge was vacant and frustrated of purpose. Fireplace and imitation beams had been excitably decorated with paper flags and regimental badges. All this dust-laden patriotism, exposed to sunlight, had the depressing unreality of a night club on the morning after. Smith, Dupont and the Frenchman sat down at once and together, as if bound by a hard, common experience, in a corner of the room.

  “I won’t drink with him,” Medlock whispered. “God damn it, there are limits!”

  Virian carried three drinks to Dupont’s table, and himself remained with Medlock and the French major at the bar. For once he found himself in wholehearted sympathy with Medlock.
A curious atavism, to refuse to drink with a man you were about to kill. He couldn’t remember that there was any such law of hospitality in the Christian religion; it was wholly pagan – a rule of Viking hovel or Arab tent. Where the devil, he wondered, had he inherited it? And why should Medlock observe it, too?

  The French major seemed also unwilling to join Dupont, either from the same scruples or because he was busy disassociating himself from the whole affair and its mismanagement. The three of them drifted through the door to a bench on the clean stone flags outside. After a while the other Frenchman joined them, confidently leaving Smith alone with Dupont.

  “I must offer my excuses,” he said. “I did not anticipate—”

  Here, away from the victim, his character no longer appeared of any extraordinary determination. He admitted nothing (and one could hardly put the direct question) but plainly for him as for them this was a first experience.

  “Look here!” Virian exclaimed, suddenly as compassionate for the civilian as for Dupont. “I am prepared to go back and report that this can’t be done.”

  “But, alas, it must be done.”

  “Why? We can keep the blighter in prison for you. If they can’t find a way of holding him, it’s their business to think of one. What do you say, sir?” he asked the French major.

  “Me? I have not the right to interfere. It is your service which took Dupont, and your service which has requested us to get rid of him. Sooner or later our duty as Frenchmen must be done, but I admit I should prefer it to be by due process of law.”

  So, even to him, there was no point in immediate punishment. There was a more complex, far more insistent motive for Dupont’s death than mere justice. Fayze and his precious colleague in Spain were terrified lest their too impulsive act should become known to the enemy, with whom they had a rogues’ agreement that kidnaping and assassination were barred. Such unsporting practices would have interfered with the daily game of collecting information. The end of all fun and promotion – like placing a bomb on a football field. Fayze didn’t at all want his agents kidnaped by way of retaliation; so Dupont could never be allowed to mix with other internees, to appear on any list, to write a letter or answer a question. He had to vanish for good.

  It was the uncleanness of this necessity which revolted Virian. For this, for the sake of what in the end was nothing but inefficiency, he and Medlock and young Smith – it was the youth of Smith which appalled him, whether or not the man was callous – were to be turned into murderers.

  “What about our orders?” Medlock asked.

  “Damn our orders! If we report that the thing is too risky, they must accept our opinion. I’m not saying that Dupont doesn’t deserve to be shot. I’m saying that we can’t take the responsibility.”

  “That is between you and your superiors,” the French major remarked unhelpfully.

  “And mercy – doesn’t that come in?”

  “One can have too many scruples,” added the other Frenchman, his voice bitter with longing for the simplicities of peace.

  He, at least, had no doubt that Dupont’s sentence was just. He had become more deeply obsessed than they by the demands of war and civil war, so that in his eyes this killing served a spiritual purpose which transcended its vileness. It was only the incapacity of his own hand which tormented him.

  “Well, we’ve got them. So why not admit it? We hate this. We can’t go on expecting you to do it, and looking the other way. We can’t go on testing Smith to breaking point by making him drink with Dupont just as if the man weren’t a ghost come back from the grave. Why not admit that we do have scruples and take the brute back to prison?”

  Virian let himself go. A limited and painful eloquence. It couldn’t be for the defense, since his client – they all acknowledged it – was guilty; it couldn’t even be for mitigation of sentence, since that sentence, though highly irregular, though the motives behind it stank to heaven, was just. No, it seemed to him in retrospect that he had preached the virtue of mercy in futile abstract, as any poet or parson.

  “The defeated cannot afford mercy,” cried that tortured executioner.

  It was astonishing that a man could pronounce so neat and closed a phrase with such emotion. Evidently it was the profession of faith with which he comforted his soul – and unanswerable by citizens of a nation which did not for a moment believe itself to have been defeated.

  Virian got up – it would do no harm to let the leaven of mercy work in his absence – and went into the lounge to look after Smith. His conscience was raw on every surface.

  Smith was playing shove ha’penny with Dupont, like an old, experienced warder in the condemned cell.

  “All right?” Virian asked. “How are your glasses?”

  “Don’t mind if we do, sir.”

  Virian went over to the bar and ordered two stiff gins. He beckoned to Smith to join him.

  “Would you like to go outside for a breath of air?” he asked.

  “I’m all right, sir,” Smith answered, with a strong, impatient accent on the right.

  Hidden in the impenetrable sternness of youth he carried the drinks away to his corner, and resumed his game with Dupont. Virian returned to the others, telling himself that he was the only man among them who was not fit to be a soldier.

  The French civilian, with the quick sympathy of his race for emotion, put a friendly hand on the Englishman’s shoulder and said:

  “I cannot permit Dupont to live. The responsibility is mine.”

  “But what do you suggest?” Virian asked harshly. “Are we to go back to that damned mine-shaft?”

  “No. Somewhere else, I beg you.”

  “I can’t take you anywhere else. My superiors have worked this out very well. I’ll say that for them at least.”

  “In the hut I cannot – arrange it.”

  “But that is only what I am saying,” Virian insisted. “It can’t be done – for the reason that it’s humanly impossible for us.”

  “You would report that?” asked the French major.

  “Certainly. Without hesitation.”

  “We should appear to be cowards.

  Medlock gave a grunt of scorn. As an old professional soldier, he had no objection to appearing a coward so long as the situation called for cowardice. Only amateurs and Latins bothered about appearances.

  “And who the hell cares?” he said.

  “Alas, it must be done,” repeated the civilian.

  “But you’ve just said it can’t be done.” Virian almost shouted.

  “I say the hut is too small,” the other insisted. “You are slow. You wait for traffic. I wait for you. And then by that time Dupont is not where I want him. I say that I cannot –” and his voice, though it was low, vibrated with agony “– I cannot raise the pistol before his eyes.”

  It was the note which Virian had already heard, for a single instant, in Smith’s voice also. Through the door he could see him still playing his forced and melancholy shove ha’penny with Dupont. The situation, futile and mismanaged, was intolerable to all of them. They were like children who had broken the back of an animal by brutal thoughtlessness and then were without courage to put it out of pain – and he himself the worst of them.

  This couldn’t go on. Mercy. No mercy. It can’t be done. It must be done. That civilian and Smith had first call on any mercy. If this infirmity of purpose went on much longer, one of them would hysterically free Dupont, or take him out and shoot him before the eyes of some astonished farm laborer.

  “Damn Fayze! Damn his precautions!” he cried. “Listen! We get out of the car. You walk at once up to the hut with Dupont in front of you and Smith behind you. Medlock and I go to our posts on the road. We shall all arrive at about the same time. Unless there is traffic right on top of us, we shall give no signal. As soon as Dupont is over the threshold – do it! He’ll have his back to you, and he will never know a thing.”

  The decision was instantly and gratefully accepted. Virian had fought fo
r Dupont’s life and Virian had condemned him to death. He himself was well aware of what he had done. Inconsistency be damned! If one couldn’t have heaven, then hell was preferable to chaos.

  “Well, Dupont,” he said, breaking up the shove ha’penny game, “let’s have another shot at it.”

  The sound of his own voice in that unfortunate phrase, which he had cheerfully pronounced without thinking, made him wince and turn away.

  Dupont hoped politely that the luck would be better, ingratiating himself like a circus pig that had been trained to smile. He left the board, and took down his coat and hat. He had plainly decided that for this day at least he had nothing to fear. The drinks, the genial delay and the resolute acting of his companion had put him at ease.

  As Dupont heaved at his tight overcoat, Virian caught Smith’s questioning eye and beckoned to him to remain behind for a moment.

  “Same positions, but it will be done through the back of the neck the moment he steps into the hut. A few seconds, and all over.”

  Smith ran his tongue round his lips, and seemed about to speak. There was no longer any light of adventure in his sturdy blue eyes; they had matured, as if searching deeply, far down beyond the presumed limit of his vision, into probable consequences.

  “Yes? What is it?” Virian asked, trying to put into his smile the eagerness which he dared not show in his voice.

  “O.K., sir,” said Smith.

  He drove the party back to the mine-shaft. The journey had the nightmare quality of life in reverse. Pub to lowland hedges, to gray villages under the downs, to clean sweep of hill turf, to the crest of the road and first glimpse of the hut – all the way back, inevitably, to the hated beginning that should have been left forever.

  The French civilian told Dupont to get out and walk up to the hut. He himself followed a pace or two behind, and Smith strolled purposefully after.

  Medlock hurried to the curve of the road; Virian up the blind hill. There was a car approaching which would be on them in twenty seconds. He made no signal. That was time enough if all went smoothly.