It's a Battlefield
Page 20
They had put screens round his bed, but through a gap he could see the wards, rows of men wearily sleeping, and a sister sitting reading at a table where one light burned. Milly bent forward over the bed. ‘They found a note for me in your pocket.’ He tried to answer her, but he could not move his bandaged jaw; the artificial saliva dripped, dripped on his tongue.
‘What was the use, Conrad, what was the use?’
He could not answer her. He tried to convey through his eyes some hint of the pain it caused him to be questioned and to be unable to reply.
‘Why didn’t you ask me first, Conrad?’ She leant her face close to his and whispered: ‘What was the good? Why couldn’t you have waited?’ He stared back at the skin drawn tightly over the bone and tried to raise his hand. But he was strapped and plastered and he could not move.
‘You couldn’t have thought it would do any good?’ He struggled to answer her. The nurse came round the screen and whispered: ‘You mustn’t talk to him. You’d better go.’
Milly put her hands on the edge of the bed and whispered with desperation, ‘I must tell him – I’ve got to tell him – about Jim,’ but the nurse pulled at her arm and said: ‘Tomorrow. You’ll excite him. He’s got to be quiet.’ She looked down at him; he could tell at once how bad was the news she had received; and he struggled to understand. It was as if all the impressions of the room, the sight which had been wasted on the screen, on the nurse, on the ranged beds, could be driven back into his brain to reinforce the vitality he needed if he was to understand: he closed his eyes. He closed his ears to every trivial sound, the pinned watch ticking over the nurse’s heart, the breathing of men asleep, the drip of saliva down the rubber tube, so that he might only hear what the nurse and Milly whispered. He pushed his toes against the bed’s end, feeling the iron cold through sheet and blankets, drawing all his remaining strength to one centre, so that before she went he would have power, in spite of bandages and plaster, to sit upright, to move his jaw and speak, asking her what it was she had heard of Jim.
He opened his eyes and saw Milly, quite clearly, in relief against the reading-lamp, blackness all round her, and he was aware that she was bewildered and hopeless and needed him and that he was dying; it seemed to him that she was watching him with horror as if he was the first of all the men whom sooner or later she must come to know; he unsealed his ears and heard the breathing catch in her throat. He put his foot against the rail and urged his jaw to open, his muscles to respond; then there was pain and a sense of something breaking and the taste of blood and his throat filling and a struggle to breathe.
He never knew that he screamed in spite of his broken jaw; but with curious irrelevance, out of the darkness, after they had left him and his pulses had ceased beating and he was dead, consciousness returned for the fraction of a second, as if his brain had been a hopelessly shattered mirror, of which one piece caught a passing light. He saw and his brain recorded the sight: twelve men lying uneasily awake in the public ward with wireless headpieces clamped across their ears, and a nurse reading under a lamp, and nobody beside his bed.
*
Incomprehensible, the Assistant Commissioner thought, incomprehensible. He trod slowly up the stairs step by step, paused at the landing: a steel engraving of Frith’s ‘Railway Station’ (the thief in handcuffs, the abandoned wife), on an occasional table a naked bronze child withdrawing a thorn from his foot. He opened the door of his flat, and the light gleamed on the carved gourds and flashed back from the native spears. A middle-aged man rose from the one arm-chair. ‘Your housekeeper let me in.’ He hesitated. ‘You don’t remember me.’
‘I remember you, of course,’ the Assistant Commissioner said. ‘You used to be chaplain at Leeds Prison. You’ve been – er – transferred here.’
‘I wanted to see you.’ He hesitated: a pale man in a heavy tweed suit with an ordinary collar and tie.
‘Give me one moment,’ the Assistant Commissioner said. ‘I’ve just been shot at – with a blank cartridge.’ It was the blank cartridge which worried him. He went into his bedroom and sponged his face. ‘Forgive my keeping you waiting,’ he called through the door. But the chaplain was glad of the delay; he never found it easy to speak directly. Since he entered the prison service fifteen years before, his life had been spent in breaking things gently, the deaths of relatives, the treachery of wives. It had affected his manner, so that now he could not speak directly on any subject; he broke his views on wine, the theatre, revised prayer books, with interminable circumlocutions. The Assistant Commissioner watched him in the mirror of the dressing table, as he stood uneasily in front of a skin shield and tried to find words.
‘You know Beale’s secretary?’
They progressed very slowly towards understanding: one, old and inarticulate and thinking all the time of the blank cartridge; the other middle-aged and shy, and, as it soon appeared, angry and unhappy.
‘That young man been talking again?’
‘He told me you were advising the Minister about Drover.’
‘He seems to have told everyone. I am – er – prejudiced against that young man.’ He squeezed out his sponge. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ But in the mirror he could see that the chaplain preferred to roam; he took up a gourd and examined it, touched the edge of a spear.
‘I’m going to resign.’
The Assistant Commissioner examined his hands; on one cuff there was a smear of blood. ‘Will you excuse me while I, that is, change my shirt?’ He picked out the links slowly: a blank cartridge; never seen him before; incomprehensible.
‘I’m going to resign,’ the chaplain repeated.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Assistant Commissioner said. ‘I’ve heard often – how much the men like you.’
The chaplain said: ‘I can’t stand human justice any longer. Its arbitrariness. Its incomprehensibility.’
‘I don’t mean, of course, to be, to be blasphemous, but isn’t that very like, that is to say, isn’t divine justice much the same?’
‘Perhaps. But one can’t hand in a resignation to God.’
The Assistant Commissioner took off his shirt and searched in a drawer. Through the open door he could see the chaplain fidgeting with a wooden tobacco jar.
‘And I have no complaint against His mercy.’ He was coming to the end of the long and rambling road; the object of his visit was in sight. He said with sudden fury: ‘Of course I am a fool to be here. Red-tape. Bureaucracy. Once a thing is done, it can’t be undone.’ The Assistant Commissioner put in his links. ‘It’s quite useless, I suppose, to ask you to undo the mischief when once you’ve done it?’
‘Really,’ the Assistant Commissioner said, ‘I don’t, don’t understand –’
‘They’ve acted on your advice.’
The Assistant Commissioner tied his tie. ‘You mean the execution –’
‘It’s off. They’ve reprieved him.’
The Assistant Commissioner came back into his sitting-room and sat down. ‘I haven’t sent them my report. I haven’t even written it. I think they ought to have let me know. It would have saved me a good deal of time, of trouble. As you see, I’ve got, got a lot of work to do.’
‘The Governor had a message from the Home Office this evening. As usual, of course, it was I who had to break the news.’
‘The good news.’
The chaplain said: ‘I had no illusions about that. Drover wasn’t afraid of death, but he’s very fond of his wife. She’ll be a middle-aged woman when he comes out of prison; do you think any woman can be faithful for eighteen years to a man she sees once a month? And they love each other.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said nothing. He’s not a talkative man. But when they were taking him to one of the top cells in Block A, he tried to kill himself. He flung himself over. Of course he was only bruised. The wire net caught him. Have you got a drink?’
The Assistant Commissioner opened a cupboard. ‘I’m sorry, the bottle’s empty.’
‘He should have decided in the first place,’ the Assistant Commissioner said. ‘He had the judge’s notes.’ The chaplain found his hat. He did nothing so definite as to shake hands, a man prematurely old, a man bent under the misery of many deaths, he wavered at the door. ‘Eighteen years,’ he said, almost dumb with the misery of too protracted a life.
‘I shouldn’t resign,’ the Assistant Commissioner said, ‘if I were you,’ but his advice was rejected with less circumlocution than the chaplain had shown for a long while: ‘It’s already in writing’; and after he had gone and the telephone bell had checked the Assistant Commissioner’s hand on the first leaf of the latest report, he found himself doubting his own statement. ‘If I were you,’ he had said. Now the voice from the hospital was telling him: ‘He’s dead. We’ve got his name. It’s Conrad Drover. He’s the brother of . . .’; and the Commissioner thought: Resign? He’s right. I’m half inclined to resign myself.
The voice vibrated over the wire: the threatened storm was breaking: hummed and whistled through the black orifice. ‘The operation was successful. Death due to shock. The only thing we can’t find out is why he loaded with blank . . .’ The voice faded; it could hardly be distinguished as it promised a full report, wished the Assistant Commissioner good night; and the first spatter of rain brushed the panes, blew through an open window, damped the papers on the desk.
Resign? He rose, shut the window, drew the curtains. The word seemed to usher him into an empty room, cold, fireless, without light, a room in which he might have expected company, but the only sign of their former presence was in the litter they had left behind them: the cigarette ash, the empty coffee-cups, which showed they had once been there, but had gone on.
He sat down again at his desk. I am a coward, he told himself; I haven’t the courage of my convictions; I am not indispensable to the Yard; it is the Yard which is indispensable to me. He began to read the papers before him, but it was not his conscious mind which took their meaning in. If I had faith, he thought wryly; if I had any conviction that I was on the right side; Caroline has that; when she loses it, she has only to change her side.
Then without warning, from his dissatisfaction and self-distrust and shame, his spirits rose; all that worried him dropped away, like the little figures running back from the landing ground as an airship lifts. He was alone in the wide phosphorescent air with his idea. He forgot the chaplain, he forgot Drover, he forgot the blank cartridge. He began to write in his small meticulous handwriting across the top of the Streatham report: ‘What the officers in charge of this case have not realized is the significance of the prostitute’s evidence that she saw Flossie Matthews waiting on a Park chair as early as 6 p.m. Taken in conjunction with the other evidence. . . .’ It was for these moments of unsought revelation that the Assistant Commissioner lived.
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