It's a Battlefield Read online

  He put out his hand and pulled the bell and heard the iron jangle behind the barred and shuttered windows, behind the strips of scarlet print: ‘Sale. Premises Damaged by Fire.’ I’ve done it now, he thought, I’ve set something going that must go on, and a moment later while the echoes died, he was thinking again of the Assistant Commissioner and of how a word from that man might have saved Jim; if the police evidence had been given a little more sympathetically, if they had admitted to having clubbed women, the jury would have recommended him to mercy.

  Then again Milly was in his arms, they were struggling in the bed, she was crying and close to him, he experienced the pitiful pleasure of their union.

  ‘Mr Bernay?’

  ‘Come inside.’

  He was so absorbed in Milly’s misery, the idea of how empty her life must be for her to accept his love, that he did not notice for some minutes Mr Bernay’s secrecy and promptitude. It only came to him when he sat down opposite the long polished empty face and Mr Bernay asked him non-committally in what he could serve him: ‘I don’t think I know –’ He wore a black tail-coat and showed lengths of stiff white cuffs. These he presently shot with an air of getting down to business and remarked: ‘I was just off to church.’

  Conrad said: ‘I see you have a sale of your old stock.’

  ‘Damaged by fire,’ Mr Bernay corrected him.

  ‘Weren’t you insured?’

  ‘That’s typical of me,’ Mr Bernay said. ‘I’m too sociable. I forget things. Your face now –’

  Conrad said: ‘You don’t know me. I belong to the Regal Assurance Company,’ and noted with pleasure a faint unease touch the wide white face, like the shadow of a man in a cinema crossing the empty screen.

  Mr Bernay said: ‘I don’t know why you come to see me on a Sunday.’

  ‘Privately,’ Conrad said. ‘I thought that as you’d had dealings with my firm, you might oblige me. I wanted to buy something cheap.’

  Mr Bernay watched him and Conrad waited. He knew the kind of thoughts which were passing now through the other’s head, and the knowledge gave him the sense of power. The other was neatly dressed, was well-off, was a Church-goer, wore starched cuffs on a Sunday, but a few words had rendered him speechless. Mr Bernay began to pick his nails.

  ‘We were surprised,’ Conrad said, ‘that you didn’t press your claim.’

  ‘I couldn’t wait,’ Mr Bernay said, ‘the damage was trifling: you insurance companies are so slow. What is it you want?’

  ‘A revolver.’

  Mr Bernay said: ‘Of course, I have to see your licence. In any case, I don’t believe I have one.’

  ‘I haven’t got a licence.’

  ‘Why do you want one?’

  ‘I’m so much alone.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mr Bernay said, leaning back behind the desk, grasping, as it were, with both hands this opportunity for assertion, ‘I don’t understand that. I, you see, am never alone.’ His face was temporarily lighted by the lamps of innumerable social occasions. He permitted Conrad to glimpse vistas of red carpet, to stare like an outcast through the lit windows from his own darkness and loneliness. For he was lonely, as lonely as he had ever been in spite of his passion and what he would once have considered his success. There had been times when he had thought that to be a woman’s lover would armour anyone against shame, when there had seemed promise of infinite confidence in one short movement. Now he knew that he needed more than a physical act. He wanted years together.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Mr Bernay said, ‘I’d just like to creep away. Far from the madding crowd,’ Mr Bernay said, shooting his cuffs. His large soft trustless eyes swept Conrad like a couple of arc lamps, picking out his misery and loneliness. ‘There’s such a thing,’ Mr Bernay said, ‘as too many friends.’ He pretended to envy Conrad his solitary condition as a parsimonious millionaire turns off a tramp with words of envy for his irresponsibility.

  ‘The revolver,’ Conrad said. But Mr Bernay had quite recovered; he was again the social figure. It was impossible to suspect that behind that blank respectable façade there had ever been a pawnbroker afraid of questions.

  ‘You must get a licence. How can I tell what you might be up to? Violence. Anything. Look at the way you’ve come to me, on a Sunday when the shutters are up. And your hand. Look how it’s shaking. Your nerves are all upset, you ought to have a tonic. You aren’t fit to be out, let alone with a revolver.’

  In the shop several clocks began to strike the hour. ‘There,’ Mr Bernay said. ‘I’m too late for church.’

  ‘Why should you have scruples?’ Conrad said. ‘I know all about you. I’ve handled all the papers about your fire.’ It had seemed to him during the night a very easy thing to get what he wanted from the pawnbroker. It was to have been a kind of safe blackmail; he had pictured a very frightened dealer, not Mr Bernay with his cuffs and his patronage and his broad shining face and his blandness.

  Mr Bernay said gently: ‘I’ll report you to your firm. You have driven me to it. I don’t like doing harm to anyone. I’m as good a Christian as the next man.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to do it for nothing.’

  ‘It’s your tone I dislike,’ the pawnbroker said. ‘I’d stretch a point for a friend (and I tell you there aren’t many men with a bigger acquaintance than mine), when I wouldn’t raise a little finger for an enemy. Not a little finger.’ The large soft eyes seemed to push Conrad very far into the distance, until he was a minute figure on the very horizon of Mr Bernay’s consciousness; with such a small figure one could do anything; raise a hand, it would be sufficient reproof, a smile would be sufficient forgiveness, or if one were, after all, to do business, somebody so inconsiderable could not complain at the hardest bargain.

  ‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ Conrad said. It seemed to him now that he wanted the weapon more than anything else in life; he had wanted love, but he had had that; it was over.

  ‘What do you want it for?’

  ‘Against an emergency.’ It was true; he had no clear idea of its use; there were people he hated, his fellow-clerks, the director’s nephew, the manager, the police commissioner, the man who pushed him on the pavement, but he did not really want to kill these people any more than he wanted to kill himself. Less, because he had more reason to hate himself; he loved his brother and he had done his brother what people seemed to consider the bitterest of wrongs. It had been difficult to believe in the wrong during the commission; it had been so easy, so short, so lovely, so unsatisfying, but afterwards, awake and silent in bed, he had pasted the proper labels on his memory of it. ‘A mortal sin.’ ‘The bitterest wrong.’ ‘A broken commandment.’ But the labels were not his; he had taken them from others; others had made the rules by which he suffered; it was unfair that they should leave him so alone and yet make the rules which governed him. It was as if a man marooned must still order his life according to the regulations of his ship.

  He entreated the pawnbroker, stretching a hand across his desk. ‘As a favour. I might be able to help you at the office.’

  ‘That’s better,’ Mr Bernay said, ‘That’s a better tone. People have got to learn that they can’t threaten me. I’m as good a Christian as the next man, but I won’t be threatened.’

  ‘Please –’ Conrad said.

  ‘What’s wrong with you is nerves. You ought to take Sanatogen, see people, go about. I’m sixty-five,’ Mr Bernay said, ‘though I know you won’t believe it. And I attribute my health more than anything to social life. I don’t have time to think. Here to lunch and there to dinner. A ring on the ‘phone.’

  ‘Please –’ Conrad said.

  Mr Bernay opened a cupboard without rising from his desk, swivelling his chair. He put a cardboard box in front of him and began to remove cameo brooches and cuff-links, a pair of spurs, an egg-cup and a dusty revolver. ‘You’ll have to pay me for the risk,’ Mr Bernay said and smiled and checked the smile and blew his nose. ‘Five pounds with a box of ten rounds.’

  ‘A
cheque.’

  ‘Four pounds ten cash.’

  ‘Will it work?’ Conrad asked, and Mr Bernay began to recede very rapidly with his brows raised in interrogation. ‘Work,’ a voice said a long way off, ‘of course it will work’; he was very hot and then very cold and then Mr Bernay ran smoothly back towards him, as if propelled from behind like a Guy Fawkes in a pram. ‘Thank you,’ he said and paid and struggled back as quickly as he could to the open air and heard the chains go back on the door and the bells ringing for Matins.

  And now what? Conrad thought. What is this for? A Joke to tell Milly, something with which to frighten people who push me on the pavement, who want my job, who call, ‘Conrad, Conrad,’ across the asphalt yard, who threaten me, who hang my brother, who do not (that was the worst crime) take me seriously, as a man, as a chief clerk, as a lover. You cannot frighten me with the name of murderer; a murderer is only Jim; a murderer is strength, protection, love.

  When a cannibal ate his enemy, he received his enemy’s qualities: courage or cunning. When you lay with your brother’s wife, did you not become, receiving the same due as he received, something of the same man, so that if you were weak, you became strong, clever, you became stupid? For an instant last night he had been his brother, he became capable of killing a man.

  The impetus of that belief returned to him, carried him down Shaftesbury Avenue, across Trafalgar Square, halfway down Northumberland Avenue before it left him without the faintest idea of what he had meant to do. A policeman saluted, a door slammed, and up a by-street towards him the Assistant Commissioner came walking, umbrella over his arm, a file of papers in his hand.

  He came, yellow-lined face; he came, thin bureaucratic body; he came slowly, justice with a file of papers; he came, respectability with bowler hat and umbrella; he came, assurance, eyes on the pavement, safe in London, safe in the capital city of the Empire, safe at the heart of civilization (‘I see no reason to reverse the judge’s decision’; the raised truncheon; the forbidden meeting; ‘after one year we allow them to embrace’; reduced staffs, unemployment; the constant struggle with your fellow man to keep alone upon the raft, to let the other drown; desire; adultery; passion without tenderness or permanence); down the street the upholder of civilization, eyes on the pavement, neat file under his arm.

  A word from him, Conrad thought, and Jim would live; a word from him to the Home Secretary, that his police were out of hand at the meeting. And it seemed to him that he might appeal personally, here in the street, to the Assistant Commissioner. He was walking slowly; but in half a minute he would be close enough to touch. Conrad trembled at the approach of authority; always in managers’ rooms he had to hide behind him the trembling of his hands, while he waited for a reprimand, for dismissal; the trembling did not cease at unexpected words of praise or of promotion.

  I daren’t speak to him.

  He put his hands into his pockets to hide them and felt the rough rusty chamber of the revolver. With this in my hand I ought never to be afraid again; I have only to point this and others will fear me; even that old flat face would be afraid. The Assistant Commissioner was beside him; was passing him, crepitating a little in his old-fashioned boots and stiff Sunday clothes like a yellow grasshopper.

  Conrad put out a hand. ‘Sir. . . . One moment.’

  *

  The Assistant Commissioner hesitated, went on, his whole bearing altered; he was an officer inspecting barracks, stiff with resentment at some breach of convention, which someone would later hear about; one could not reprimand a junior officer before the ranks – the ranks were the cabmen in their taxis, the waiting charabanc load.

  It’s disgraceful, the Assistant Commissioner thought, a respectably dressed man like that begging. He can be thankful I didn’t put him into custody, but he had hardly turned into Northumberland Avenue before his attitude changed. His business was not justice; his business was only to catch the right man; but in private, in his secret life, he was troubled by the slightest deviation from the strictest justice. In private life one could not leave justice to the Home Secretary, to Parliament, to His Majesty’s Judges; possibly to God, but the Assistant Commissioner was not fully satisfied of His existence. Now again he had forgotten that unemployment was not a mark of the lazy man; that the beggar did not beg because he would not work; that had once been the case in the England he knew best, but things were different now.

  The Assistant Commissioner turned and went back. He was anxious to apologize for his attitude, to give the poor man half a crown, but when he got to the corner the man had gone. The Assistant Commissioner was perturbed; there had been no need of harshness. What was it that made one recoil from a beggar, shut up the face and hurry on? It was partly sympathy; one did not care to look at a man in such straits; but the beggar could hardly be expected to understand that turning away was a form of sympathy. The Assistant Commissioner stood at the corner as if he had forgotten something. In fact he had remembered; he had had a vision of the innumerable shut faces which a beggar sees. I wish I had spoken to that man, the Assistant Commissioner thought, I wish I had asked him how he came to be unemployed; it might have been possible to find him work; but what good after all would that have been? he is only one; it is impossible for me to help these men, only the State can do that, the State which employs me to keep order, to see that the unemployed beg and do not demand.

  The Assistant Commissioner told himself that this train of thought was doing him no good; I’m paid; I’ve got to do my job. One did not question during the war why one fought; one waited till the war was over for that. I can think about these things when I retire; but the idea of retirement chilled him. He turned his back on the source of his perplexity and walked up towards Trafalgar Square. He wished he had had these new reports sent by messenger to his flat, not fetched them himself as an excuse for a walk on a fine Sunday morning. The men on duty at the Yard would never believe that to be his only reason, a liver that had to be nursed, legs that needed exercise, a glittering autumn morning with the bells ringing.

  He turned his back on the spot where the man had stood, but his thoughts were too slow for him easily and quickly to escape from any one of them. When I retire. Once after three days in the jungle, steaming heat and one of his men stabbed and the ration of water nearly exhausted and the men they pursued as far away as ever, they had broken with relief out of the trees into the clearing where a trading station stood; here they could get fresh water, rest, eat, talk. It was the end of their jungle pursuit; from the station a rutted road, at least as good as an English country lane, drove straight for miles. Over the station (a bungalow, a tin-roofed store, a couple of native huts), a yellow flag dangled; there was no wind, the place seemed deserted, the flag hung like a sausage from its pole and at first he did not notice its colour. It meant, of course, fever, a wide berth to water, rest, talk at that particular station. They had to march by at the edge of the clearing, down the straight rutted road, and it seemed hours before the flag ceased to be visible. Now it was the man with his hand out, begging, the thought ‘when I retire’, which hung like a yellow flag in his rear; useless to walk faster; there it stayed.

  The Assistant Commissioner remembered that before the buildings dropped behind a haze of heat, he saw a man come out of the bungalow and move about the huts. He was strongly tempted to return; he could send the men on under his native sergeant; he could have rest, something to drink, and if he caught the fever, he would be able to dismiss for ever the fear of retirement. It was characteristic of him that the idea of saving a man’s life weighed a little with him, the thought that his return might be considered meritorious never occurred to him at all. Finally he dismissed the idea as an indulgence; it was not what he was paid to do; he was not paid to risk his life in that way, but to punish and to preserve. Certainly he was not paid to escape retirement. Maddeningly every time he looked back there dangled the yellow flag.

  He had been tempted once more before he left the East; one hot day in t
he capital, escaping from the glare and the glitter of the temples, the reflection of the sun on pieces of tin, old petrol cans and squares of coloured glass, he became aware in the dim overhung shaded street that he was followed. It was not exactly a sound that warned him, though unconsciously he may have picked out from the pad of oxen, the cries of vendors, a certain recurrent rhythm of soft feet persisting at a distance, persisting round corners, persisting when he crossed the road; but what he noticed was a physical uneasiness, an inclination to stoop. He knew of no particular reason why anybody should want to attack him; there were always general reasons, political reasons; he was the paid servant of an unpopular government. He was seriously tempted to walk on, turn down an even more shaded road; he did nothing of the kind, he went back to the main street and stopped the first car he saw.

  The fountains rose, unfurled and dropped through sunlight. Elderly men in top hats hurried late into St Martin’s-in-the-Fields; two barelegged children dipped their feet into the pool of a fountain and scrambled away as a policeman came across the Square. The Assistant Commissioner stopped him. ‘A little – er – latitude today, constable,’ he said, ‘turn, turn your back when you can.’

  Up to the National Gallery; along Pall Mall. He could not help a momentary pride in London, the gentle gleam of autumn on the buildings, the gentle movement of Sunday in the streets, only one bus in sight, nobody hurrying. All the buildings in sight had dignity and proportion; the boots was shaking a carpet outside Garland’s Hotel. It was something to realize that the defence of this city was in his hands; it was easy to imagine for a moment that its enemies were all outside, that evil did not naturally belong in this peace, this ease and contentment, that the death at Streatham was a successful foray from the country; but always he had only to turn and the yellow flag would be there, dangling in his rear. The war which he fought was a civil war; his enemies were not only the brutal and the depraved, but the very men he pitied, the men he wanted to help; if he had done his duty the unemployed man would have been arrested for begging. The buildings seemed to him then to lose a little of their dignity; the peace of Sunday in Pall Mall was like the peace which follows a massacre, a war of elimination; poverty here had been successfully contested, driven back on the one side towards Notting Hill, on the other towards Vauxhall.