Violently irritated, Gary said,
“I asked you what’s the matter?”
Lucius did not answer.
Pulling himself up, Gary leaned forward across the table: he felt the rough surface of the wood under his fingers. He stooped so that he could look into the other’s face with a malignant curiosity.
“Are you like everyone else — afraid to talk to me?”
“You are mad,” Lucius said.
Gary drew back, supporting himself by pressing his thighs against the edge of the table, and put his hands to his ears: what he felt there was hateful and familiar, a number was swelling in his brain to an insufferable size; another instant of pressure, and it would explode and kill him. He sat down and forced himself to attend to it, coldly; it shrank, became a shadow, vanished. He felt relief, the usual relief. Looking ironically at Gerlach, he said,
“Rubbish!”
“Only a madman dreams of putting himself in the place of God in the world,” Lucius said calmly.
Gary succeeded in controlling the rage he felt mounting in him; the effort exhausted him, and he leaned forward until the ball of blood in the back of his head dispersed and sank. After a minute he knew what he was going to say: in a reflective voice, he said,
“Oh no, I shan’t go mad. That’s not what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of dying. To think that there will be long hot afternoons, and I shan’t feel them or hear the small noise of the water at the edge of Lake Avie, or smell the pines.”
He looked at Lucius again.
“Didn’t you once ask me why I haven’t married? It wasn’t, as with you, because the woman I might have married died. At that, you’re wrong — there are plenty of women. The fact is, I can’t marry. I’m deformed, impotent — since 1918. One of the benefits of war.”
“Why tell me?” asked Lucius sternly.
Smiling,
“You’ve become a sort of priest. That’s not the reason. It’s scarcely true that I’m afraid of dying. I’m much, much more afraid of seeing myself as ridiculous. To tell you about it is — this should please you — a spiritual exercise.”
He watched Gerlach with intense curiosity. In a deliberate voice, Lucius said,
“You’re lying. You told me because you thought I should refuse you nothing after such a confession. . .”
He stood up, doubled by his elongated shadow.
“I do refuse. I’ll tell you something about yourself. Your — your deformity only feeds your ambitions, you like to think of yourself as a monster of lucidity, you like to think that disgust with people gives you the right — the right? — the duty to assassinate their freedom. It’s nonsense. You know less than a child. Even your benevolence is monstrous. You’ll do endless harm and it won’t signify.”
He hesitated, and added, quietly, without looking at Gary,
“You fool, you believe in yourself.”
“Shut up,” Gary said.
Impossible to hate a man without having loved him. Impossible, to this degree, to hate and to keep quiet. He kept quiet.
“I would have pretended to believe in you if I could,” Lucius said tenderly.
He saw that the one phrase Gary would not forgive him was this last. I should have held my tongue, he thought. Gary stood up.
“Really? Why?. . . About your Jew — I can’t promise you. I’ll see.”
His hands found the knobs of the malacca sticks.
“I’ll walk with you to the car —”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Gary said, with indifference.
He added,
“If you change your mind about leaving this hovel, I should like, before I go home, to arrange something better for you.”
“Thank you.”
Leaning on his sticks, he made his way in the darkness, over the stones and rank weeds of the uneven earth. Arnold came hurrying to meet him and helped him into the car.
Looking absently at the back of his pilot’s head, he thought with a spring of malicious joy that he could arrange to save Lucius and not Kalb. Have Lucius sent, on some official pretext or other, to England, then leave the wretched Kalb to be hanged or (is it?) guillotined. The contempt of Lucius for himself when he realised what had been done. Only for himself? Respect, love, vindictive anger, which of these, if he put his hand down on his thoughts of Lucius, would he touch first?
Arnold turned his head for a second, and smiled at him.
“You all right, sir?”
“Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“You were a long time.”
He did not answer. Pulling down the window of the car, he stared out. At a little distance, the beams and steel girders of a collapsed building pushed up like a monstrous cactus. The moon rising behind it moved in jerks from frond to steel frond. Below it, at ground level, nothing moved except the antennæ of his own and other cars, feeling a way through the growth of stones and dust. But there was another movement, inaudible and unseen, as pervasive as the ceaseless scurrying of insects everywhere over the surface of the earth. The furtive life of human beings in these ruins. Children made their first gestures to loss, girls made what terms they could with the tides of their life, men and women sought each other’s bodies in blind joy or habit, or for the brief comfort of spending. But what other ferment? Fear, hatreds, a landscape where all that was absent weighed most heavily — as, in the ruins, the heaviest pressure was not that of the mountainous piles of dust and rubble but of the nearly weightless dead they concealed. Of what humanly goes on in a ruined and defeated city the occupier knows nothing. Nothing that matters.
When they were in the house he let Arnold help him upstairs to his bedroom.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re getting bored here, aren’t you? I’ve an errand for you. You’ll fly yourself to London — what’s today? — Monday? — on Wednesday. I want you to take some papers for me to a man in the Foreign Office, and bring a letter back. All right?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked closely at the young man. Arnold was standing in a hesitant way, a vexed or baffled frown altering his face, head thrust forward.
“What is it?” asked Gary gently.
He’s got himself into a scrape of some sort. . . He repressed a movement of pleasure in the thought of scolding the boy, then putting things right. In an effort to speak as though he were not nervous, Arnold said loudly,
“There’s a fellow called Kalb, sir, has been tried this morning, and told off to be hanged, or whatever they do. I think it’s a mistake, and I wondered if there was anything you could do. Speak to somebody at Headquarters or wherever — or anything.”
Surprised and vexed, Gary said roughly,
“Who’s been getting at you about it?”
The pilot met his glance directly — clouded unwavering eyes.
“No one. I formed my own opinion.”
“Did you indeed? Have you opinions on other things? Or only on the decisions of military courts?”
He felt an acute pleasure in Arnold’s silent humiliation. It was the cutting edge of his joy in being able to restore the boy’s confidence in himself. Easy enough, and to do it gave him a profound sense, very strange, of security. In the end, he thought — it was scarcely a thought — I shall repair all my losses with this one gain. He had no doubts, no trace of doubt or misgiving, of Arnold’s affection for him — and none of the constraint he would have felt if the boy had been his son.
“I’ll tell you the whole mortifying truth,” he said gaily. “You mustn’t repeat it. I was asked about the fellow some time ago, before he was tried. He’d told his defending counsel that I — someone got him for me — had asked him for an opinion on a picture I bought during the war. I said I didn’t remember him from Adam, but to be quite honest, I did have a very vague and confused memory. But, it was only this evening, when I was talking to Dr Gerlach, that I remembered him, his name, and the I believe very sound opinion he gave me. In fact, I remember the poor little beast perfectly well.
I may be able to do something for him. At any rate, I’ll try.”
“I think he’s innocent,” Arnold said.
He hesitated, moved his fingers as if freeing them, smiled warmly, almost lovingly.
“I needn’t have bothered you about him then, sir. I’m sorry. . . it’s good of you, though. You have other things to do than fish out poor little beasts. It’s extremely kind.”
What the devil can one make of the human brain? Why, in this instant, one instant, should Gary remember and plainly hear the air of an idiotic song of the last war (Goodbye-ee, don’t cry-ee, wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee), and, quick, through the door so thoughtlessly opened, feel the hard bitter entry into him of grief for a dead girl, long dead, her image effaced? God knows. He pushed them out of the way and said lightly,
“You can leave Kalb to me. Now sit down — I want to talk to you...”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Gary had been gone a little more than an hour when the boy arrived; he knocked, and on top of his knock opened the door. Gerlach looked at him as he came forward. On the body of a child of nine or ten he had an older face, pointed, delicate, a slight down darkening the upper lip. He walked gracefully and impudently. There was no impudence in his glance, which was bright and vacant, like a bird’s. His fingers holding out an envelope were stained darkly with nicotine — where had he got so many cigarettes? — and dirty. From a glance at his short mouth, it was impossible to know whether he were smiling or pouting. He was very thin.
Gerlach read the letter. Three lines. . . Am in serious trouble, can you come? I ought not to ask you, but if you can, do come, the bearer knows where I am. Rudi.
“Do you know what is in the letter?” Gerlach asked.
“Yes.”
Gerlach waited. Staring round him, the boy added nothing. His glance at things was furtive and very sharp. He held his head on one side, a hand pressed to his skinny thigh.
“Where is Mr Gerlach?”
“I don’t know the names of any of those streets,” the boy said calmly. “I can take you there.”
“Is it far?”
“Not for me. May be for you.”
Reading the note again, Gerlach had a pang of fear, as though he had laid his hand on a piece of wood and felt it move. The certainty that Rudi was in danger invaded him. It was a waste of time to ask this youth questions. Snatching his overcoat from its nail, he gestured to him to go.
There were cold veins in the October darkness. The boy skipped quickly beside him, turning this way and that in the ruined streets, plunging confidently into uncleared deserts of rubble, twisted metal, dust, along a path which was there only as they followed it. He knows his way about as the rats know it, thought Gerlach. When they crossed a square of eyeless houses stared through by the moon, the boy kept close to the walls.
Through all this blind lunar desert, as through the nerves of a mind, crept a primitive terror and anxiety. What if it were not an imagined landscape, but real?
They took so many of these short cuts that Gerlach was surprised when they came into a less damaged street he recognised. He was obsessed by anxiety, as in a nightmare. And by another thought he refused to look at yet. . . he might have to appeal to Gary for help. He quickened his steps. Now almost running beside him, the boy turned sharply left into another of these confused corridors between ruins. He stopped, out of breath.
“Here — it’s here.”
He put his hand out and touched Gerlach’s arm. In the coldly deceitful light, his face was avid and smoothly docile.
Gerlach followed him to the back of a wrecked house, through a yard, into what had been the kitchen of the house, its shadows diluted by a vapour of light rising from the walled-in staircase of the cellar; he followed down these stairs, and along two or three feet of passage. The light came from a left-hand opening in the brick walls: stepping through on the boy’s heels, he knew at once that he had been made a fool of — like any mother’s boy walking into a trap laid for him by his malicious fellows. His annoyance with himself made him clench his hands. He stood still.
Leist was sitting at the other side of a table. Looking at him, Gerlach thought: What a ridiculous creature he is. Almost indecently ridiculous. The exaggerated stiffness with which the fellow sat, his cheeks gleaming as if varnished — what an ass!. . . He was seized by an immense, an overwhelming relief. Rudi was not here. At once his mind offered him a confused explanation of the letter — it was an old letter, written to one of the boy’s friends, nothing to do with this grotesque business. He shook it off. All that could — must — wait. A contemptuous anger exploded in him — with a flash of something like humour. The fellow was more absurd than contemptible.
He saw that his silence vexed Leist.
“I had you brought here, Gerlach, to answer certain questions — accusations, rather. . .”
He forced himself to listen attentively to the farrago of nonsense the fellow was pouring out in a neat satisfied voice: he was accused of preaching defeatism, of insulting the national honour by his talk of guilt, of denouncing people to his English friends — obviously a prepared speech and none the better for it. Listening, he stared curiously about the room. Immediately behind Leist a good half of it was cut off by heavy curtains (excellent and hideous curtains) which had been thrown over a rope stretched from wall to wall between two hooks. What must have been a grating or an area window in the ceiling had been boarded over, recently: the marks in the cracked plaster were fresh. From one of the boards heavy drops fell on the floor, at long intervals, the rain earlier in the evening was seeping through. . . The table was a rough kitchen table like his own. Nothing on it except the oil-lamp, and the service revolver lying an inch or so from Leist’s hand. . . With a slight shock, he realised that two men had been standing behind him, in a recess of the staircase wall. Of course. It wasn’t likely the fellow would dispense with the nonsense of guards. He turned his head to look at them: one, a young fellow, had a face of almost vacant smoothness; the other, lean, haggard, shut-up, could be a lawyer or an old soldier. . .
Leist struck the table with an opened hand.
“Have the goodness to attend to me.” Controlling himself at once, he added in his normal voice, “You’ll oblige me by taking this seriously, Gerlach. If you have anything to say, any defence, I’ll listen to it now.”
He looked at the fellow with profound distaste. Contempt invaded him so roughly that he was scarcely able to speak. It touched off in his belly a disagreeable angry laughter. Nothing, he saw, could have annoyed Leist more.
“What is it you want me to take seriously? This so-called trial? Your speech for the prosecution — I suppose you would call it that? Yourself?”
“You are talking to your judges,” Leist said. “Arrogance is only useless.”
“Really? Who are they? You yourself, my good man, don’t strike me as being capable of a judgement. In ten minutes you’ve talked more nonsense, told more indecently fatuous lies, than any ignorant ass. I can’t think why you gave yourself the trouble, unless it was to impress these poor fellows.”
“That’s enough.”
Gerlach smiled. . . With shame, he realised that he was deliberately trying to provoke Leist to kill him. Why? Because he loathed him, and a whole obscure dwarfish malignance, German malignance, in him? Because it was a way out for himself? Because what he loathed was also in himself? He felt a terrible confused bitterness. I am being tempted, he thought calmly. . . He struggled with himself for a moment, and said quietly,
“I don’t know what I could say that would convince you of my innocence — at least of the crimes you are laying on me. I give you my word that I have never, by any word, denounced any person, nor ever shall. I have never said or done anything that could harm the country.”
He hesitated, and added, with simplicity,
“How could I? I’m a German.”
“Yes, a German traitor,” said Leist.
He talks like a bad-tempered sch
oolmaster, thought Gerlach.
A silence. This fellow is determined to kill me, he said to himself. He was surprised to feel grief. For whom? Nothing I say will make any difference; he distrusts me far too well — as a Catholic, as the well-to-do man I was. He distrusts still more the sort of human being I am. . . An extraordinary sense of intimacy with Leist seized him for a moment, and vanished. Roused by it, he stared at him again with sharp, almost good-tempered curiosity. Even at this moment, it was impossible to respect him.
“Suppose — I simply say, suppose — you are let off,” Leist said slowly, “will you hold your tongue for the future? I’ll be quite plain. No attempt to write, none of the speeches you make with the intention of corrupting young people. Are you willing to give your word?”
He considered for a moment, calmly. Have I the right to let him kill me? If a promise to hold my tongue would prevent him killing me, have I the right to promise? Have I the right to hold my tongue? He decided quickly. Shaking his head, he said quietly,
“No. I’m not.”
Leist began,
“Do you understand —”
“I understand well enough,” he interrupted. In spite of himself, his voice became arbitrary and a little rough. “If you kill me, you’ll injure other people more than me. A man of your sort can’t injure me, but what you are beginning again in Germany will destroy more than a generation. I don’t know that you’re capable of understanding anything I say, but there it is. . . You’re opening a door for me I have no right to open for myself. The men you’re condemning to die are the young men you’ll infect and ruin. . . That’s all I have to say.”
Leist had listened to him with attention, but — he saw — it was an attention in which there was not even the excitement, repressed, of his prosecuting speech: somehow he had managed to withdraw behind a neutral space, wired off. Bless me if he hasn’t become an official, Gerlach thought, with irony.
Leist said drily,
“You’re making one mistake. I can see that you have a romantic idea of your importance; you imagine people being shocked — it wouldn’t surprise me to know that you imagined yourself becoming a legend or an influence. I’ll remind you that we have too much to contend with to be moved by the death of one man, even — ” he smiled briefly — “of Lucius Gerlach himself. You’ll certainly be forgotten. If a legend is needed for any purpose it can be provided, but it will not be a legend about one Gerlach. Besides — no one will know at first whether you have died or left the country, and later on who will care? There won’t be any fuss.”
The Black Laurel Page 30