“A really beautiful day,” he said gaily.
Gary looked at him attentively.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, my dear George. When do you retire?”
“I shall be sixty in March,” he said, smiling.
“Really? My dear fellow, you don’t look it. But it suits me very well — I need rather urgently just the sort of advice you could give me. Unless you’re determined to do nothing — but that’s nonsense — men like you don’t do nothing — as soon as you feel like it, come and see me. Will you? And without my having to remind you?”
The relief Lowerby felt was so profound that it left him tranquil and completely master of his emotion. He made a brief calm friendly reply.
Chapter Thirty-four
Kalb took the pencil from his pocket again and tried once more to write the letter begun how many times? This time it went. He was writing to the friend in England with whom he had left his few things, the two pairs of thick socks, the muffler — he had expected to be home in November — a packet of letters, two or three books. The pencil zig-zagged across the paper like a hen. He signed his name — Heinrich Kalb. How strange to be writing, for the last time, what were the first words he ever wrote — he had a fleeting sense of the spidery-thin frail-tissued little boy, head well down, left arm curved defensively round the page, tongue between his teeth, labouring to join the letters. What had become of the child? Don’t mind, don’t be frightened, Kalb murmured, it won’t hurt you.
He went over to the small grated window, high in the wall. Two days ago he had been moved to this room — it was a room, not a cell — the window was the size of a handkerchief, but it had given him back the whole of space, pure empty space. Freedom itself was less free than his sense of it, pouring from this tiny vein, through him, and back into openness. By raising himself on his toes he could see the corner of a stone window-sill. Empty when he first saw it, when he looked the second time someone had set on it a plant-pot with one sickly chrysanthemum growing in it. It had no flowers, a bud at the top of the nearly leafless stalk. He did not like chrysanthemums, never had liked them, but he felt an intense anxiety that it should flower before he left. There was not really much chance, it was a wretched thing, and these were the last minutes.
He heard footsteps. His heart stopped, raced, his grasshopper limbs stiffened.
The key was turned in his door, it opened — his one friend in Berlin came in.
“Oh, how pleased I am to see you,” he cried. “How well you look, how happy I am.”
Renn began a phrase, changed it, paused, said,
“I’ve been away, I came back yesterday, Sunday.”
“Just in time,” Kalb smiled.
“One or two of us tried, and failed. Forgive us.”
Eager to comfort him, Kalb laid a hand on his arm — and took it quickly away again. He had remembered Gerlach.
“You are not to mind,” he said warmly. “England is still the best country, the English are the kindest of all peoples.”
Speaking in a curt voice, Renn said,
“I’m sorry I can’t come with you. It’s too far —”
He checked himself. A flush appeared on his forehead; the point of his tongue darted out and moved quickly over lips as colourless as the rest of his face.
“Yes, too far,” Kalb echoed, with a faint irony.
He paused and went on brightly,
“I must tell you once again — I am not guilty. At least of this crime. So what they are doing is unjust. It doesn’t matter. No, no, not at all. Why? Because we know, I know, you, my dear sir, know, that it is an injustice. Therefore, if we know that, we know justice. Therefore there is justice.”
His little turn of dialectic pleased him. He looked at Renn with a smile of delight and triumph. Since Renn was silent, and he felt an overmastering desire to talk, he said,
“In a few years everything will be better and different. Do you know, I’ve thought often that we’re moving towards a quite different kind of world — men more like birds, freer, innocent and light-minded. What do you think?”
“Birds?” said Renn gently. “Well, why not?”
The confusion of words in Kalb’s mind was like a swarm of bees, pressing to escape from the hive. No, he thought, not bees — like a fountain of the sea, rising for ever, endless, endless. Never now to be said. I should have been saying it all these years, he thought; how slow, how stupid I’ve been.
“Do you know,” he cried, “my dear sir, for years I’ve been poor. But I have no ambitions, so I was happy. I knew, in my heart, that there was no foundation for my happiness, no safety. I tried not to know it. Now I accept it. I’m not really afraid of death. Not now. The only thing I still fear a little is pain. . .”
He hesitated. A feeling of mischief possessed him; he gave way to it, smiling:
“What was I saying? Yes — if a powerful country feels that it has to kill anyone so insignificant, so nothing, it must be afraid of something. Of what? Surely not of me?”
A silence. Renn said,
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Yes. This letter,” Kalb answered, giving it to him.
Suddenly, he felt exhausted. What use — even if he could say them, what use are words? Going to the window, he looked unhopefully at the chrysanthemum. It was still the same, a greenish-grey stem, a few olive-grey leaves, a hard thin unpromising bud. The same — yet, for an instant, it filled him as the jet of words had filled him; his life, his death, sprang in him together, in this one stem; he could hold both, feel both, to the last tip of olive-grey leaf: with all his strength he died through it into open space, celandine-yellow like the mornings of his childhood, taking with him, too, in his arms, the child forming his letters, the boy slipping along a dark street, the refugee — even the small hissing gas-fire; he must take that with the other things, and with his whole life, lifting it up — to what arms? He turned from the window, to look fondly at Renn, and cried,
“There are no victims.”
Now he had said everything. Staring at Renn, he saw him with an extreme clarity. The delicate colourless face, the hint in it of cruelty, the long fine mouth. Yes, cruelty, he thought, but only kindness to me.
He heard the sound of two or three people coming down the corridor. He smiled at Renn.
“Is it time?”
“I think so,” Renn said, with great gentleness.
Without meaning to, Kalb laughed.
“If I must die, I must,” he said. “I hope it’s not a long journey to the place, I hope they are quick.”
He ran to the window.
“My dear friend, did you ever see such a plant?” he cried.
The footsteps were almost at the door now. He smiled again, eagerly, peering at Renn. “I’m very frightened,” he said under his breath.
It was scarcely true.
Chapter Thirty-five
It’s not going to be pleasant, thought Lowerby. Used, all his life, almost since childhood, once his mind had been made up, to swift action, he suffered from the indecision he had fallen into when Gary left him. That was yesterday afternoon. Since then he had spent his first bad night since an illness of his eldest son, when, for three endless nights, he sat by the boy’s bed, willing him to live. But they were not nights, only the darkened sector of a curve of anxiety. The one just past had been a nightmare of wakefulness. Lying in bed, or seated on the edge of it, he went over the arguments, for and against getting rid of Brett, in a lucid fury. Never, before a decision to be taken, before a battle due to start in the morning, had he behaved with such abysmal folly. Even when his wife died he had let her spend alone her first night of being dead; he had slept. Why — now that he was going one way and his friend another — why not let him start off alone?
Because there was still time to change? Was there? In front of him, waiting nakedly for him to put his hand on it, a new decision — which he was free to make?
He sat idly at his desk, his strong thin
hands, the hands of a clever fencer, folded in front of him. In five minutes Humphrey would come through the door facing him — and he would decide.
Brett came in.
This morning, as often when he had been drinking a great deal, he looked like himself at Marlborough. The fewness of the lines on his heavy face was astonishing; his eyes, above the semicircles of loose flesh, had the innocence of their boldness: he walked with the same lively rolling energy, throwing his body forward, impatient. . . The general felt a warm affection.
“Well?”
With an impassive face, Brett laid in front of him on the desk a half sheet of paper.
“What’s this?”
It was an anonymous letter, in English, addressed to Renn. Written by a German who knew very little English, or by a lunatic, it suggested — or it seemed to suggest — that Dr Gerlach was seriously in danger. The last sentence ran: His cousin Hugo v. Rechberg is knowing what becomes him, and can bring the answer.
“Ridiculous,” the general said, smiling.
Anonymous letters, Germans accusing each other — an old woman accusing her neighbour or her disobedient grandson, a tenant his landlord — were routine.
“Yes, ridiculous,” agreed Brett.
“Well? Cut out the office for a moment, Humphrey. Say what you feel.”
“I wonder what we know about this damned country? They prance all round us, business men, civil servants, members of the Herrenklub, lying, hoping for something from us, cheating us. You put your hand down and find a nasty scum of informers sticking to it. And you know perfectly well that it’s nothing. All the notes between the well-behaved civil servant and the terrified crawling informer are mute — to us. This country, my God, is Europe’s bad conscience, a mediterranean of monsters — more fear and hatred, more self-righteousness and guilt, than any mind can hold without bursting. A violent desperate cruelty, covered by the voices of children singing Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht. There are moments when I think the only thing to do with them is to scatter them over the earth — let the country go back to forest and sleep off its nightmares.”
The general smiled imperceptibly.
“Did you draw all this from an anonymous letter?”
Brett stretched his face into a derisive mask.
“I agree, the letter’s senseless. . . Would you be so absolutely sure it was if it had denounced not Rechberg but some unprepossessing little rat like the one we’re beheading in a few hours?”
“Why the devil,” the general asked, “do you worry about this wretched Boche?”
Brett looked at him with an unsmiling irony.
“Is that a question you want answered?”
Lowerby felt a sudden acute irritation. Without knowing why he was doing it, he said lightly,
“My dear boy — I told you we weren’t in the office.”
“In any case you don’t need to be told what I think. The poor devil’s innocent, or I’m a Jew.”
A lucid energy invaded Lowerby. In a smiling voice,
“Suppose — in spite of being caught red-handed — and in spite of being a refugee — this fellow Kalb were reliable and innocent. And suppose you knew that the final result of not executing him would be a crop of assassinations — of our own men — would you still insist on sparing his quite superfluous life?”
“Certainly.”
“You’re mad, my dear boy.”
“Thank God for it,” Brett said.
How he dislikes being laughed at, thought Lowerby. He laughed gently.
Thank God you’re not in a position to act on your nursery sentiments. I begin to understand why you’re still where you are.”
He saw the effort Brett made to control his tongue. He failed.
“All right. I’m mad. And you’re bloody sane and a scoundrel.”
Lowerby felt an overwhelming relief.
“I think we’ve had enough,” he said.
As always when he had allowed somebody to hang himself, he felt a point of curiosity in his disdain. He asked gently,
“Do you mean anything at all?”
Brett looked at him.
“Something you wouldn’t understand, sir. I see you really believe you’re saving lives by choking off one obscure Boche. Or you don’t care. Or both. As you like. In a few years or in a generation or two some other intelligent and ambitious realist will be using your argument to justify political hangings and gas chambers. If England is going to be run by clever chaps, it’s the end. There’s no saying where the results of a single clever bit of expediency will end — short of the death of society. Ours. Damn it, I’m not interested in other countries.”
He looked at the general again, with a hard smiling arrogance.
“You invited me to speak out of my turn. As a matter of curiosity — did you do it deliberately; or was it a gratuitous kill?”
Lowerby felt cool and sure of himself. The moment of decision moved gently into its place. His muscles contracted slightly, as in the second before a leap. He half thought: I’m deciding — felt that he could not move his hands, and said in a good-humoured voice,
“Dear old boy, you look tired — you’ve let things get on top of you. This place is a strain; you feel it, we all do. You’re saying things you don’t mean — a bad sign. What you need is a rest. I’ve written to the War Office, to M. S., asking for an exchange for you. I shall be sorry to be without you here, but. . .”
From the single movement Brett made — lowering his head as though he were going to charge the wall — he knew, he felt in himself, Brett’s sense of being spun, trapped. For a moment he felt that things were atrociously unpleasant. His mind cleared again: he waited coolly to hear what Brett had to say. Let him get it out, he thought tolerantly.
Nothing happened except that Brett said quietly,
“I see. . . I should like to recommend Thomas to you. He’s extremely competent. Ambitious, but he knows his job. The fact that he has three children partly accounts for his anxiety to get on.”
Lowerby stared.
“I’ll remember what you say.”
I should have held my tongue, thought Brett. I’ve finished Thomas off. Poor fellow. Standing up, he said formally,
“Very good.”
With a feeling of anxiety, the general said warmly,
“You’ll be just as well off, you know — and you’ll be out of this squalid heap of ruins.”
Hardly glancing at him, Brett said, slowly,
“When I get home there won’t be a job for me. I shall go on half pay for twelve months — and then be retired.”
“Nonsense, nonsense, my dear boy,” Lowerby said eagerly.
The worldliness of his ancestors invaded for a moment Brett’s hard lightless stare and rough voice.
“You’re a politician, Smiler. I wonder why it’s taken me so many years to see it. But you’re my age, and I don’t mind betting that so far as any success goes, you’ve had it.”
“You can go,” Lowerby said.
An extraordinary expression of grief and mockery stretched Brett’s mouth and raised his eyebrows. He looked at the general.
“Poor little monkey,” he said drily, pressing his lips over the rest of a contempt, an anger, a sorrow, he preferred to keep to himself.
The general remained for a moment tense. His hands relaxed slowly. He felt tired and clearheaded. It’s perfectly true, he thought, and — since yesterday — unimportant. The boys are safe.
He ordered himself to feel sorry for Brett. A thought made its way directly to his heart like a worm. . . I shan’t see him again. . . He seized the edge of the desk, trying with both hands to close the crack opening in him. A breeze blowing through the open window, a soft warm south-west breeze, carried the sickening smell of the unnumbered crowd of buried alive. He shivered and rang his bell.
“Shut that window.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Instead of going to Wannsee Arnold went on into Berlin from the airfield. He wanted to see Renn befor
e he talked to Gary. Why? He had no reason. An instinct. The wish once more to know that he preferred Gary to Renn before starting off on a road that would take him, he knew, entirely away from a friend he was attached to — in spite of the difference in age, mind, opinion, everything — by an old habit of respect. Almost brotherly respect.
At the office he was told that Renn was at home, at his flat. He went there. When he came into the room, Renn was startled by his air of exhaustion and young severity. It was familiar: he had seen it in the faces of his friends in the other war, the war of trenches and deathly prolonged strain. This business with Kalb has shocked him, he thought.
“Don’t worry,” he said gently, “you did your best.”
Arnold frowned.
“What d’you mean?”
He hasn’t heard. Then what —? Renn chose his words, said, almost brutally,
“Kalb has been taken to Wolfenbüttel, to be guillotined. He doesn’t rate Pierrepoint and his rope.”
A silence.
“Oh God,” Arnold said, between his teeth.
His image of Kalb, eager, friendly, smiling gaze projected through his frightful spectacles, was too sharp. He saw that Renn was about to make a comforting remark. He hated sympathy and was afraid of it. Seized by exasperated anger, he said,
“Couldn’t Gary do anything with the fools, then?”
Renn reflected. Shall I tell him? Of course. Not, for all his affection for the young man, without a point of malice,
“He didn’t try. I heard that from the man in the D. G.’s office. He did nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Arnold felt the mortification and bitterness of a child whose parents have made a fool of him in public. He looked at Renn with a blank face.
“I suppose he really was innocent?”
“You saw him,” said Renn, drily. He had no wish to humiliate the young man — still less to rouse his morbid distrust, scarcely below the surface, of pity. “He was given a perfectly fair trial, the machine worked fairly. The only attempt to cheat it was made by the one or two people who believed he was innocent. It failed. Because everybody else — I include Gary — was indifferent to the fate of a dubious little nobody.”
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