by Alec Waugh
There was a general tittering laugh. Looking round, Carson had the impression of fifty staring faces turned toward him. They all seemed to be grinning. He was conscious of nothing but that grin, a single gaping maw. How they’re enjoying this, he thought: then the many faces blurred, and one face only was distinct. Doris Kellaway‘s. She was laughing too, louder than anyone; with contempt, disgust, delight in his discomfiture. He felt immensely tired; tired and ill. There must be something for him to do, to say, some gesture he could make. He could not think what. Was there a flicker of friendship there? No, not any. Why should there be? He turned away. He walked back to the bar.
“I’ve smashed a glass, Joe, you might clear it up, then give me a whisky soda; yes, a large one.”
It was not two minutes since he had been leaning here against the wall, since he had glimpsed Leisching coming from the card room. In that two minutes the whole structure of his life had collapsed about him. Blank and utter despair settled on him. H.E. had been right. He’d told him to get out. The old boy had put it friendlily, had wrapped it up, paid him compliments first. The old boy knew how he had got like this: and knowing, sympathized. But it was quite clear what he had been saying. “You’re a nuisance in a small place like this. In a big place it wouldn’t matter. You’d pass unnoticed. But everything one does in a place this size is everybody’s business. You carry too many guns to be overlooked. You are an embarrassment.”
That’s what the Governor had been saying. The Governor was right. No one liked him here. How they had gloated, taken that German’s side. In all that mist of faces was there one that was not hostile? H.E. was right. He knew men, he was used to commanding men. How often in his years of service had he not said to a difficult officer, “There’s a vacancy at Division for a Staff Captain ‘Q.’ It’s the kind of work that you’d do very well. If you like, I’ll be only too happy to recommend you.” That was what H.E. had been saying tonight. “Clean up the mess you’ve made and then either clear out or find yourself a wife.”
Find yourself a wife, indeed. What a mess he’d made of that. He looked toward the far end of the veranda. Doris was leaning forward across the table. She was no longer in profile, she was directly opposite. There was an eager expression on her face. How young she was, how fresh and wholesome. She had thrown the scarf off her shoulders. He could fall in love with her very easily. Strange that he had not realized it until this evening. How one’s subconscious worked when one was not watching it. His instinct told him that if he played his cards correctly, he could turn this evening’s calamity to his own advantage. At the moment she was thinking of him as a silly old man who had made a drunken approach to her and then made an idiot of himself. But, if handled adroitly, an attitude of contemptuous disgust was a far better starting point than one of negative indifference. It created a situation. It would make it possible for him to talk to her about himself.
Suppose the next time they met, he were to make a point of speaking to her alone, of saying, “I made an exhibition of myself the other night. I want to explain. I don’t care what the others think, but I want you to understand me.” If he could make her feel that she was someone special, that she was selected, picked out, she would feel herself enrolled under his standard. She would find herself compelled to take his side. “I know he’s difficult. I know he’s tiresome, I used to feel the same way about him once, but when you get to know him…”
It was no bad thing to make a bad first impression. It was much more dramatic to have a friend of whom your friends disapproved, far more exciting to fight battles on that friend’s behalf than to sit in a circle agreeing with everyone how marvelous he was. Everyone wanted to feel someone special. He could do that for Doris. In a flash of intuition he foresaw the whole course of his courtship. This evening’s incident could be made the perfect prelude.
For a moment he allowed himself to be dazzled by the prospect. Then despair returned. It was no good, it was too late. He mustn’t fool himself. “A whisky soda, Joe.” He must face the looking glass. It wasn’t that Doris was seventeen and he thirty-eight. It wasn’t that he was a widower; that he’d been badly wounded, that his system had been shattered, that he wasn’t likely to make old bones; those were handicaps, those were disadvantages; but they could with another kind of man have been surmounted. Himself he was in a different pass. Something had died inside him. Something had gone with Daphne, something irrecapturable.
He looked back to the days when he had known her first. He had been a different person then. That person existed in the world no longer. He lived again the tumult and rapture of the honeymoon. How completely he had given himself to Daphne. Nothing had been held back: no part of himself had been denied. And that was woman’s birthright, that a man should give himself to her completely, that they should become one person.
He looked again at Doris. What could he give her in comparison with what he had given Daphne? He could take what she had to offer, and she had much to give: he could take it and gloat over and relish it. But what had he to offer in return? In his heart he was married still to Daphne. He still belonged to her. He would be cheating Doris of her birthright. Remembering what he had given once to Daphne, he would find no relief in Doris, take no real happiness in such a burglary: and in the perverse way that the human mind worked, he would hold it against Doris that he had robbed her. He might be cruel to her, when the black mood was on him, when his head ached and there was that throb in his right toe.
“A whisky soda, Joe.”
It was no good. He must face the fact. The old boy was right. Things had turned out awry. He was an encumbrance. What was more tiresome than the retired, bad-tempered soldier with a ruined liver? All those jokes in Punch. “He’s not young enough to be young, poor fellow, and he’s not old enough to be old.” Marry or clear out. That was the ultimatum. And he couldn’t marry: not with any dignity. Go while the going was still possible. Tomorrow he’d keep his promise to the Governor; go to the Jamestown Club at noon, eat humble pie; make his apology to that pompous Hun.
Tomorrow. He’d wake with his head aching, with agony in every limb, with shame in his heart. How he’d hate himself tomorrow. If only tomorrow hadn’t got to come.
He leant his head back against the wall. He closed his eyes. For a moment he lost consciousness, in a mist of sleep. He was all washed up. Daphne. He would never have got like this if he had not lost her. How had he come to lose her? The war. The separation of the war. Their not having had children. She’d never have left him if they had. Why hadn’t they? They had tried. She had had children all right that second time. Why couldn’t he have had the luck, on that embarkation leave, that second honeymoon? She’d never have left him if there had been a child. All along the dice had been loaded against him. Why, why, why?
Once again he closed his eyes and once again a veil of sleep slid over him. From a waking dream he heard himself repeating Why. His opening eyes noticed the Archdeacon, seated at the nearest table. He’d have an answer, he supposed. And even as he said it he knew what the answer would be: “You tried to get it both ways,” the priest would say. “You tried to take nature’s gift which is God’s gift, on your terms, not on nature’s. You thought you had solved the problem of the universe with your little books. You thought you could have children when you chose. You thought you had fooled nature, but nature took its revenge on you; nature which is God. You weren’t unlucky. You didn’t deserve good luck. You can’t hedge your bets.”
That’s what the holy man would say. And maybe the holy man was right. At any rate it was too late now; everything was too late now. And tomorrow morning at noon he would go into Jamestown and in a room full of colored men apologize to a German renegade. What would he have thought on the eve of that last attack at Alamein—against real Germans who were men—if he had known that one day he would be doing that. Tomorrow, in less than eighteen hours. If only tomorrow hadn’t got to come. Tomorrow and all the tomorrows after it. He must be going. It was getting late.
He looked across the room toward the young girls’ table. At that moment Doris raised her head. Their eyes met. Again a shiver passed along his nerves, but a shiver this time of a different quality; he had a sense of leave-taking. He lifted his hand and waved. He smiled. Did he fancy it or was there in her eyes a flicker of response? A wave of nostalgia struck him. If they’d met at a different time, at a different place; if the years by some miracle could have been telescoped. But it was too late now.
He turned aside. At that moment the Archdeacon pushed back his chair and rose. They were standing within three steps of one another. The Archdeacon had not been here when he had had the scene with Leisching. The Archdeacon smiled in his usual friendly way. This was the last time that anyone in the island would smile at him like that. Within a few hours everyone would know about the incident. They would feel embarrassed when they met him. They would avoid him or be over-friendly. This was his last chance of meeting an acquaintance on the old, on equal terms. A sense of leave-taking, of finality, urged him to make the most of it.
Affection for the Archdeacon struck him. Silly old Father Roberts, but all his faults were on the surface. He was a scholar and a gentleman. He was a good man. Carson wanted to say something to him, half in appeasement, half to placate the fates that pestered him. The chance would not come again. His head was aching, there was that throbbing in his toe and thigh. He had drunk far too much, but he had a sense of clarity, of seeing into the root of things. He knew now why things had turned against him. He knew and the Archdeacon knew. You couldn’t hedge your bets, not in the things that mattered.
He needed to make his peace. He laid his hand on the Archdeacon’s arm.
“You mustn’t think, Father, that because I don’t go to church too often I don’t appreciate all you stand for, all you do. I don’t know how we’d get on without you. We all feel that really, though we never say it. Don’t forget that we do realize it. Good-night, Father.”
His hand pressed for a moment on the Archdeacon’s arm, then he turned quickly, before Father Roberts had a chance to answer. He wanted to make his exit quickly. Tomorrow. If only tomorrow had not got to come.
3
At that moment Maxwell Fleury was hurrying with angry strides toward the club. He had delayed his arrival as long as possible. He wanted to reach the club when it was crowded. He wanted to make an entrance. He did not want to stand at the bar, greeting each new group as it arrived, noting each fresh expression. He wanted to meet them all at once, to enforce his own atmosphere on theirs, to storm a fortress. When he came round the corner of the veranda there would be an immediate hushing of every conversation, every head would turn toward him, the same question would occur to everyone at the same moment, “How is he taking it?” He wanted to show them all, in a single flash, that he did not care a damn for any of them, that he was behaving as though nothing at all had happened. He was roused, belligerent; spoiling for action.
He turned into the road that ran past the police station. At the end of it he saw, in silhouette against a street lamp, a figure walking with a limp. Only one man limped like that. Carson. His temper mounted. Carson, the man who had smoked that cigarette. In the light of Bradshaw’s article he understood Carson’s conduct. Carson had known about that Jamaican ancestor. Carson had thought that Sylvia was fair game, the white man’s droit de seigneur. He’d show Carson where he got off. He was in a mood for the settling of accounts. Here was one that he could settle. He waited at the corner of the dark, unlit lane that led to Carson’s house.
“There’s something I want to say to you,” he said.
“You do. Who are you?”
“Fleury. Maxwell Fleury.”
“Are you? So you are. What do you want? A subscription for the Belfontaine Committee?”
Belfontaine Committee, what was that, thought Maxwell. Then let the matter slip. “I want to talk to you alone. There’s something that needs settling between us.”
“Is there? I can’t think what. You’d better come inside.”
They walked in silence past the blank wall of the police station, turned into the blind alley at whose end stood the entrance to Carson’s house. Carson was carrying a torch. He flashed it on, guiding Maxwell’s steps over the uneven flagstones. The light in the hall was off. Carson closed the door behind him as he switched it on. Through the open doorway Maxwell could see the dining room table set with plates and glasses. In readiness for some girl most likely. His fists clenched against his sides.
“We’ll go in here,” said Carson.
He walked ahead into the sitting room. The college and regimental groups upon the walls fed Maxwell’s anger. What chance did he stand against a man like Carson? In the back of his mind he still admired Carson. Carson was everything that he would like to be himself; everything that he was not, that he could not be. The extent of his admiration goaded him. Why could not Carson, who had so much, have let him alone? Why had Carson interfered with him? There was a look on Carson’s face that maddened him: a look of superior indifference. How dared Carson look at him like that?
“You leave my wife alone,” he snapped.
“Your wife?”
An incredulous, puzzled look came into Carson’s face. What was this idiot talking about?
“Yes, my wife. You needn’t think that you’ve fooled me. I’ve had my eye on you, sneaking round to the house when I’m not there, thinking yourself so clever. You weren’t clever enough though, were you; making the place reek with those fancy cigarettes of yours.”
“Have you gone mad?”
“Mad. I should say I hadn’t. Come to my senses. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve had enough of this, do you get me? Kindly stop sneaking round my house in future.”
It was more than Carson was prepared to stand. He had been through too much during this last three hours. He was not prepared to be patient with this young maniac.
“Are you suggesting that I’ve been making passes at your wife?”
“I’m not suggesting it, I’m stating it.”
“Then you can bloody well unstate it, and you can apologize to me, right now. I never heard such damned impertinence. I’m not the kind of man who chases after married women. I don’t share my women.”
He was so angry that he could hardly get the words out. Some dirty Polish sneak might have stolen his own wife from him. He wasn’t that kind of a person. He didn’t take a part share in a woman. He might buy a woman for a night: but even so he had exclusive rights in her for that one night. That he should try to seduce the wife of a man fifteen years younger than himself! He had never felt so insulted in his life.
“Get this into your dumb skull,” he shouted. “I’m not the kind of man who makes passes at the wives of his acquaintances. And even if I were…” He paused, searching for something to say that would be really wounding, sought and found it in the memory of that morning’s issue of the local paper. “If I were,” he said, “I wouldn’t be taking the leavings of a man like you, with a tarbrush rubbed across his face.”
It was the last coal of fuel on Maxwell’s mounting fury. The clenched fist against his side shot out. Carson saw the blow coming and stepped back; the blow caught him on his cheek-bone, with quarter force but he was off his balance. He staggered and the rug slipped under him; he flung out his arms in an attempt to save himself, but his hand missed the back of the armchair and he fell spreadeagled on the floor, his arms flung wide. Maxwell leapt down on him, kneeling across him, pinioning each arm beneath a knee, his hands upon his throat; he lifted Carson’s head and banged it on the ground.
Choking, half stunned, Carson through dimming eyes saw glaring down at him a face distorted by hatred, from which it seemed to him every trace of white blood appeared to have been drained away leaving the negroid features.
“Tarbrush, I’ll teach you. Tarbrush, I’ll teach you.”
The words repeated like a chant, beat through Carson’s fading consciousness. The fingers were tightening at his t
hroat. His head was again banged against the ground. He tried to raise his arms, but he was powerless under the heavy knees, he could not breathe, his chest was bursting; a mist was before his eyes. The face above his blurred. He was conscious of his head being raised again. There was a roaring in his ears, through which beat the refrain, “Tarbrush, I’ll teach you. Tarbrush, I’ll teach you.” Then once again the hands at his throat plunged forward: his head cracked against the floor. There was a roar of cannon, like that night at Alamein; then silence.
4
“Tarbrush, I’ll teach you. Tarbrush, I’ll teach you.”
Maxwell’s fingers tightened their hold upon Carson’s throat, as he beat the head rhythmically against the floor. He was in a trance, unconscious of what his fingers did, rocking as he chanted, like a drummer in an orchestra, his knees pressing on the pinioned arms.
“Tarbrush, I’ll teach you. Tarbrush, I’ll teach you.”
Slowly he came out of his trance. His fingers felt cramped. He stretched them, and the lifeless head fell back. He stared at it. Carson’s eyes were open, but they were glazed. They had lost their power. The person whom he had known as Carson was no longer there. He moved his knee, so that the right elbow joint was free. He lifted the arm; it fell back like an object. He did that, because he had read in books of people doing that. But there was no need. Carson was dead. He knew it.
He rose to his feet. His heart was thudding. A man had insulted him and he had killed him. That would show those idiots at the Country Club. They’d thought him a no account ineffective, the runt of a fine family. He chuckled. He knew what they had said about him, how could such a father have produced such a son. At this very moment they were discussing him, talking of his humiliation at the meeting, explaining it and his whole record in terms of Bradshaw’s article. Bad blood will out. They’d be talking the other side of their mouths tomorrow evening. He could hear the incredulous intonation in their voices. “What, killed Carson, with his own hands, Maxwell Fleury.”