VISITORS TO THE CRESENT

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘But what are the right answers?’ Harper asked irritably. ‘I’m not sure that I know.’

  He flicked through the pages of a report. ‘Nothing interesting there.’ He turned to another one.

  ‘Born in Udovsk. Ever heard of it?’

  MacLeish shook his head. He hoped they weren’t going to waste time with a lot of research into Saneck’s past. Harper said:

  ‘Chap who wrote this seems to know it quite well. Listen to this.’

  He read aloud, his deep, north-country voice in dour contrast to the rather dramatized wording:

  ‘ “One of those quiet villages that has gone on the same way for centuries” – didn’t know they had any places like that in Poland, did you? “Secure, without conflict; the kind of place where you get your whole pattern of life mapped out for you from birth; religion, thought, behaviour all ready to hand . . .” ’ He glanced up at MacLeish and said slyly: ‘Probably like one of your little villages up in the Hebrides, eh?’

  ‘Not at all.’ MacLeish was annoyed. ‘The power of thought is very important to a Scot; we don’t accept anything: we examine critically.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Harper murmured, and returned to the report.

  ‘There were a lot of upheavals all around, but this place was too small to be much affected and the people weren’t interested in politics. They farmed their land and minded their own business. Seems he fitted into this little backwater very happily until he was in his early twenties. Quite what happened after that isn’t known, but he next turns up in Warsaw, married, and involved with a rather desperate band of people who wanted to free their country from slavery. Who would have been enslaving them about that time? The Germans, I suppose.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Perhaps not. Whoever it was, it spelt trouble for him. He and his wife got themselves involved in an underground movement. After the war, they were still fighting for freedom, only this time it was the Russians who were the enemy. In 1948 he was arrested for harbouring an escaped prisoner who came to his house late one night. The wife was in hospital at the time, expecting a baby and ill with tuberculosis. He was tortured; but whether he betrayed anyone or not, we don’t know, though of course he said he didn’t. He spent a couple of years in prison. Some time after that there was a slackening of pressure in Poland, a movement towards liberalism which didn’t last long. But it lasted long enough for some prisoners to be released and he was one of them. But by that time, he was pretty broken up; his friends arranged for him to escape. There seems to have been no question of his wife going with him – maybe she was ill again.’

  ‘So he went?’ MacLeish asked. ‘Leaving his wife and child behind.’

  The contempt in his tone stung Harper. He put the report down and said dryly:

  ‘It’s not a story that appeals to you, I gather.’

  ‘A man who walks out on his wife and kid!’ MacLeish stared angrily across the table at Harper as though accusing him of lack of feeling. ‘And he had been given his freedom; he could have stayed where he was without harm.’

  Harper stared back at MacLeish, his face wooden as though he did indeed lack all feeling.

  ‘Not very heroic,’ he murmured. ‘But he would have lived in fear of re-arrest. Perhaps he felt he had paid enough for his beliefs.’

  ‘Your beliefs are pretty cheap if you sell out so easily,’ MacLeish answered.

  Harper studied MacLeish thoughtfully. He reckoned MacLeish must be in his early thirties; he would have been at school during the war, somewhere up in the Highlands where he probably never even heard an air-raid warning.

  ‘How do you know how easily you would sell your beliefs’ he enquired. ‘No one has ever given them so much as a kick.’

  MacLeish, thinking that Harper was baiting him, became more inflexible than ever.

  ‘And what is he doing now?’ he demanded. ‘Accepting our protection and handing over our secrets to the very people he was fighting when he was in Poland. Selling out again, in fact, and using his wife and child as an excuse.’

  ‘If you were in his position you would leave them to take their chance and stick to your principles, would you?’

  ‘My wife wouldn’t want me to make that kind of compromise.’

  ‘And your kids?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have left my kids.’

  So they were back where they started, only a good deal angrier. Harper tried to put a rein on himself.

  ‘Well, a lot of this is conjecture and it won’t help to prove anything.’ He pushed the report away from him. MacLeish got up to collect some of his papers; he prayed fervently that Harper was going to pack up and go home. But instead he sat there, staring down at the desk, looking more tired than MacLeish had ever seen him look before.

  ‘It’s just that I hate to think we have to get this man in the same net as Vickers,’ Harper said.

  ‘But he is in the same net as Vickers,’ MacLeish retorted impatiently. ‘And he put himself there. There’s plenty of other people in his position who wouldn’t have got themselves involved in this, decent men, men with stronger characters . . .’

  ‘But some people don’t have strong characters.’

  ‘Then the weak must go to the wall.’

  And Harper, quite suddenly, was white with rage. MacLeish who had never associated passion with this man, was as shaken as though Harper had struck him across the face when he rapped out:

  ‘Don’t ever speak to me like that again, my lad! Perhaps that kind of talk goes down well in your Sunday School, but don’t make the mistake of playing God with me.’

  It wasn’t the words so much as the tone that rocked MacLeish; no one had ever spoken to him with such utter contempt before and got away with it.

  It seemed a very long time before either of them spoke again. Harper sitting at his desk and MacLeish standing in front of him. It was Harper who came to his senses first. He saw MacLeish standing there, his face ashen, his arms strained behind his back as though they were tied there. He saw, too, the fatigue in the young face.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Apology never came easily to him, but he tried to make it sound genuine. ‘I had no right to talk to you in that way.’

  But MacLeish was not having any of that; he remained where he was, quite rigid, like a prisoner waiting for dismissal. Harper got to his feet.

  ‘It’s later than I realized,’ he said. ‘We’d better pack up now.’ He went across to a cabinet in the far corner and put one of the files away. He took a long time doing it and when he turned round again MacLeish had relaxed a little.

  ‘I’ll run you home,’ he offered.

  ‘I can manage, thank you.’

  All right, Harper thought, keep your anger if you need it to clothe your dignity.

  ‘Off you go, then.’

  Harper collected some papers and then he, too, went out of his room. In the corridor he met a friend.

  ‘You must be overworking in the Special Branch, Robert,’ the friend said. ‘I saw young MacLeish going out, looking like a ghost.’

  ‘We don’t hit it off very well, and I ride him too hard.’

  ‘I’ll take him from you. That puritan zeal might have a devastating effect in the vice squad.’

  They went out towards the car park.

  ‘You don’t look too good yourself,’ the friend said. ‘Have a night out. There’s a little place just opened off the Cromwell Road – really hot show. Go along there – take your mind off things.’ He chuckled. ‘If you see anything you shouldn’t – report it to me.’

  But Harper went back to his flat. As he drove towards Hammersmith he scarcely noticed the interminable traffic hold-up in Knightsbridge and along Kensington High Street. What had made him flare up like that? he wondered. MacLeish had made a remark that was fundamentally true. In the last emergency, the weak do go to the wall. He was in a better position to know that than MacLeish; he had seen them, watched their skinny hands grope, loose their grip on life and slip away. There was
nothing that he could have done about it. But sometimes it seemed to him that men like himself, whose bodies were stronger and whose spirits more stubborn, were living on borrowed time.

  III

  The light was fading. Already the outlines of the room were becoming blurred. Now was the time when the past came creeping slowly, insidiously over him like a gentle mist; the present and the immediate past would recede and in their place soon, very soon, the remote past of childhood would claim him. It was the time when Edward usually closed his eyes and waited for the magic of the world where the old fiddler played his tune and the sleigh bells rang again.

  But tonight, Edward did not close his eyes. He was fairly sure that if he did he would hear, not the sleigh bells, but Superintendent Harper’s voice repeating the word ‘sanctuary’. Sanctuary: it implied an obligation. But an obligation to what? To the state, the community, society? He had left that kind of thing behind him when he turned his face to the West; he had laid responsibility aside with a great deal of relief and he never wanted to be troubled with it again. Besides, surely he could argue that he had an obligation to protect his wife and child which absolved him from any other commitment? Automatically his eyes wandered across to the bureau where he kept Sonya’s letters. The thought of them should have given him strength. He should have felt that he could confront Superintendent Harper with them and say: ‘How could any decent man blame me?’ But the scene lacked some essential authenticity, and the uncomfortable thing was that it was not Harper’s decency – suspect though that might be – which was in question. If only he had not begun to think in this way. Sanctuary, responsibility, obligation, absolution: these terrible words had started a dialogue in the mind.

  ‘Christ!’ he groaned suddenly. ‘Dialogue in the mind!’

  That was the kind of thing they had talked about, Sonya and her friends – the dialogue in the mind, the battle for the mind, freedom of the spirit, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom . . . He put his head in his hands and pressed his fingers against his ears. He had escaped from all that when he left Poland; he had escaped to England and a blessed anarchy, to a wilderness in which there were no beliefs, no creeds, no right and wrong, no agonizing battle of the conscience. He pressed his fingers tighter and tighter against his ears until the pain made his head feel as though it would burst. And still he heard Harper’s voice saying:

  ‘He killed himself on Sunday evening.’

  He had felt the thrust go home, piercing the fragile shell which had protected him but which, it seemed, had not healed the old wounds, because every question after that fell like a whip across an open sore. ‘He didn’t try to confide in you? . . . Or ask your help?’

  Edward closed his eyes. Why was it that the cry for help always came when you least expected it, when you felt you were safe? At night, with the fire burning low and the shutters down; then, the knock on the door, the stranger you could not turn away . . . But he had turned Blantyre away: he had learnt some wisdom under the lash.

  He groaned aloud: ‘What would have been the good, anyway? What could I have done for him?’

  He had nothing to offer Blantyre; he was hollowed out, scraped to the bone, nothing to give to Blantyre or anyone else. The only person who could still make demands on him was Sonya.

  He got to his feet and paced about the room. It had become a prison rather than a refuge, thanks to Harper. But was Harper really to blame? Wasn’t it much longer ago that he had forfeited his right to peace of mind?

  ‘No!’ he cried. ‘No! I will not think.’

  Thought was dangerous; it had got him into a lot of trouble in his life and over the last few years he had managed very well without it.

  ‘Think,’ Sonya had said. ‘Think and question. Never accept anything. Always question.’

  But in that, at least, Sonya had been wrong. It was a mistake to question, to examine, to splinter all the straightforward, comforting simplicities into a mass of irreconcilable complexities. It was a mistake to think. When you unleashed thought you set a rat to gnaw at the centre of your being until in the end your subconscious spewed up its disgusting horde.

  He went to the window. The West Indian who lived in the house next door was cleaning his car, singing to himself. When he had made enough money, Edward supposed that he would go home and buy a plantation, or whatever it was that West Indians did when they were rich and went home. That particular course of action was irrevocably barred to Edward. The thought did not give him quite so much pain as it should have done and he veered away from it with the feeling of having avoided a precipice by a hair’s breadth.

  He wondered, with a sudden gush of self-pity, whether he might kill himself and leave a tragic note accusing his persecutors; but he knew that the old religious fear would always prevent him from taking that way out. He stood in the middle of the room and he felt as though a net were closing in on him, gradually restricting all his movements until in the end there would be nothing he could do but think. Freedom of thought, Edward decided, was the greatest torment of all.

  Chapter Six

  I

  A discussion took place in a house in Mayfair the next evening which might have made even MacLeish alter his opinion with regard to the powers-that-be and their willingness to take risks. A tall stooping man, with a long, sad face like a disillusioned bloodhound, was saying:

  ‘What the devil was Robert Harper doing crashing around down there, putting the wind up everyone? Why didn’t he leave the enquiries about the burglary to the local man?’

  The man to whom he was talking was staring out of the window at the dishevelled garden. The garden had responded in a muddled, untidy way to the touch of spring but the face of the man belonged to winter: bloodless, the skin stretched transparent across the sharp cheekbones, the eyes bleak and the lips bleached, it was a face withered to the bone. The brief smile that twisted the lips was not reflected in the eyes.

  ‘You think Harper made a mistake?’

  ‘Mistake!’ Lines furrowed the sad man’s brow making him more like a bloodhound than ever. ‘I think he must have gone clean out of his mind. And he doesn’t take a sergeant with him, you notice; he has to go thundering down there with an inspector. It must be the silly season at the Yard.’

  ‘You mustn’t be too hard on Harper. He was rather doubtful about it himself when I suggested it.’

  ‘When you . . .’ The sad man tightened his grip on the arms of his chair as though to assure himself that he was safely anchored to earth. ‘You mean you asked him to . . .’

  ‘I suggested he might take a look round himself, stir things up a little,’ the dry voice went on. ‘He seemed to me an ideal man for the job; he looks a tough, but he’s an astute, balanced individual who won’t go too far and land us all in trouble.’

  His companion regarded him in awe, wondering just what his conception of trouble might be. The old man, aware of this scrutiny, said:

  ‘You think I have gone clean out of my mind, perhaps?’

  The slate-grey eyes were very cold; it occurred to the sad man that madness was not impossible.

  ‘It’s all against the rules of the game,’ he protested.

  ‘But we make the rules. And sometimes it is advisable to alter them to suit the players.’

  ‘But we have shown our hand now, haven’t we? Given the prey a scent of danger.’

  ‘Suppose he likes danger?’ The voice had become a whisper now; he might have been talking to himself. ‘Suppose it stimulates him as nothing else will, goes to his head as wine or drugs would another man? He may start making mistakes; he’s made one or two already, very careless mistakes, but with a certain bravado about them, as though he thought himself invulnerable. If he goes on like that . . .’

  ‘But suppose he does the normal thing and gets out quick?’ The sad man surprised himself by shouting in his anxiety to bring the discussion down to what seemed to him to be the realm of plausibility.

  ‘That would be very unfortunate.’ T
he reply was calm, almost unconcerned. ‘But I know this man, and I think he will stay even if he brings the whole structure crashing down with him.’ He sat back in his chair and began to talk with a certain wintry pleasure: ‘He is really a most interesting specimen. Cool, courageous – if one can have courage without fear. He has a good brain, ingenuity, he is capable of working with great care and precision, and he is a fine organizer. He might have got almost anywhere in life. But there is a maggot at work that has turned him into the kind of creature that ranges far outside the human stockade. He did some strange things during the war; he collected a gang around him during the fighting in France – he was on our side then; they carried out raids on the German lines, but they never brought back any prisoners; once they crucified a man. Since then, however, he has had very little opportunity to indulge his talent for destruction. For a long time the side of his mind that works carefully has been in control; but lately, I fancy, there has been some conflict. It will be interesting to see which side of his nature wins.’

  ‘Oh, very,’ the sad man breathed. ‘Very interesting indeed.’ To himself, he thought: Of course, he is old; he has got to the stage where people are little more than pawns on a chessboard; he is so near the end of his life that he can’t see that some of us might be concerned with mundane things like keeping our jobs. And, in any case, he isn’t interested in all the little people that will be broken if this net gets tangled. The sad man counted himself among the little people.

  His companion said: ‘You obviously think that I have behaved very irresponsibly?’ A hint of malice crept into the dry voice: ‘Tell me about your own practical, down-to-earth successes. What did your young men find when they broke into the shop?’