It's a Battlefield Read online

  But the Assistant Commissioner, like Pilate, washed his hands; justice is not my business; politics are not my business. God help the men responsible for the way that life is organized; I am only a paid servant, doing what I am told; I am no more responsible than a clerk is responsible for the methods of the business he serves. He had only his pay on which to live; it had been hard to save in the East; he had preserved nothing but the gourds, the native weapons, the sentimental débris of a hard career. It often occurred to him that he was less the general in control than the private soldier fighting in a fog, like the men at Inkerman, in a fury of self-preservation.

  Up the Haymarket, along Jermyn Street, past the Turkish baths and the shuttered haberdashers’, walking for the sake of exercise, for the sake of his liver; at least he could show that wound in evidence of zeal to his employers. With that sneer, unlike him in its bitterness, his thoughts reached the edge of the jungle through which for years they had toiled and hacked their way. The progress he made was slow, but it was not the first time he was aware of a thinning of vegetation. In the clearing would be water, rest, talk; would be the glimpse of an organization of life he need not serve for pay, which would win his fidelity by its fairness, its rationality, its just distribution of reward. But at the edge he inevitably turned back to the jungle; he was afraid of disappointment, the yellow flag; he was afraid too of. the demands which might be made on him; he was old, he had a habit of life.

  He was almost glad when he realized that he was being followed. To be followed was previously part of his profession and he was not at ease in his new life, at one remove from the battle he fought. He was not afraid, though the knowledge came to him in a physical form, a stooping of the back; the things he feared were all intellectual, questions, doubts, suggestions. It pleased him too that the walk which had been taken merely for the benefit of his health should be given a professional interest. He turned sharply up St James’s Street, walked rapidly towards the Circus, took the turning by Fortnum & Mason’s and waited. A policeman passed, several women, and then a flood of people coming out from morning service at St James’s. It was useless to try to identify his follower.

  The Assistant Commissioner walked slowly to the Circus, went slowly downstairs into the subway, walked slowly, watching the reflections behind him in the shop windows, into the circular parade. It was almost empty; the woman policeman did not recognize him. The Assistant Commissioner suddenly increased his pace and made a complete circle very rapidly. He made a mental note of a man in dark clothes who stood in a telephone box with his back turned. Then he climbed thoughtfully up to the pavement by the London Pavilion and bought two papers.

  It’s odd, he thought, very odd; I must be mistaken. Why should he have followed me this distance? My memory’s played me false; after all, I didn’t see his face. I must see his face. But now that his consciousness was aroused, his instinct failed him. He could not tell whether he was any longer followed; impossible among all the footsteps on a London pavement to pick out a pair more persistent, more purposeful or more secretive than the rest. As he turned into the cocktail room of Lyons’ Corner House he was convulsed with dry amusement, but he did not allow himself to smile. I’m being driven into queer places this morning, he thought, and studied the menu with disapproval and distaste. Concoctions! He said with secret irony, ‘Can you let me have a – a whisky and – er – soda?’ and pushed the bowl of potato crisps to the furthest limit of the table. Eating between meals!

  He looked round him; the small room was nearly full; but the man who had been in the telephone box was certainly not here. The Assistant Commissioner would have welcomed his presence; they had something in common; but here he was not at home. His surroundings gave an impression of shrillness and bright colour, and the air seemed full of the boasts of owner-drivers. He felt conspicuous because of his age and because he was alone. If his follower had come in he would have invited him to his table.

  As he had to pass the time somehow, he opened the portfolio and took out the latest Drover reports. They were too contradictory to mean anything at all. He scowled at his glass of whisky and thought: this is not my job. Men seemed to be increasingly unwilling to accept their proper responsibilities. The Minister had the full report of the trial, the judge’s notes; why must he try to shift the responsibility for hanging or reprieving a man on to someone else? He was afraid of the strike continuing a few days longer, of more taxes, of a Government defeat; the secretary had been quite frank, but it was a frankness which reminded him of a certain business man he had interviewed a few months ago at the Yard. He, too, had been frank; he had admitted frauds on the income tax amounting to more than twenty thousand pounds; he had (he said so himself) laid all his cards on the table. What it was he concealed the Assistant Commissioner never found out.

  Nor would he ever know what motive, even shabbier, he supposed, than the ones named, the Minister had for hesitation. The Assistant Commissioner remembered grimly the medical certificates produced at the director’s trial, how the Income Tax authorities had accepted twelve shillings in the pound to save the director from bankruptcy, to save him from a nervous breakdown. When he thought of the heavy sentences passed on men who stole a little jewellery from a rich man’s house, the Assistant Commissioner was more than ever thankful that justice was not his business. He knew quite well the cause of the discrepancy; the laws were made by property owners in defence of property; that was why a Fascist could talk treason without prosecution; that was why a man who defrauded the State in defence of his private wealth did not even lose the money he had gained; that was why the burglar went to gaol for five years; that was why Drover could not so easily be reprieved – he was a Communist. Again, it was not his business; he resented having to report to the Minister that in his opinion neither the reprieve nor the execution of Drover would have any public effect. I shall send in no report till Tuesday, the Assistant Commissioner thought, they can wait for it. It’s not my duty to put on the black cap.

  He had never wanted to leave the East; his duty there had been plain; he caught murderers and thieves. There was no interference with justice by politicians or business men; it had been like an old-fashioned war; you fought in person; you did not sit at headquarters.

  He sighed and drank his whisky and got up. Younger men, he thought, might live to serve something in which they believed. They would think of him with slight contempt, as of one who had not the courage of his convictions. His answer was that he had caught the murderer of an old woman in Paddington, that one day soon he would catch the Streatham murderer; that was what he should be judged by; not by the general standard of justice.

  He stood for a moment at the door. He could see no one, and he began to believe that either his instinct had deceived him, or else that the shadowing was over. He could imagine no motive for it; here, thank God, he was not mixed up in politics. He left behind him with relief the coloured drinks, the belted coats, the tinted mouths, the potato chips, and walked home. Down Charing Cross Road he was not disturbed by the dead peace after a massacre; Edith Cavell with white lips and sightless eyes and prim rectitude stared across at the pavement artist; under the statue of Henry Irving a man was selling patent medicines. The fountains played and the children paddled and the constable turned his back. The Assistant Commissioner raised his hat to the Cenotaph without remembering even for a moment his battered company coming back through the mud at Passchendaele. He walked out into the road to avoid a ladder and touched a piece of wood when he thought: I was mistaken, certainly I was mistaken. One had to choose certain superstitions by which to live; they were the nails in the shoes with which one gripped the rock. This was what a war threw up: a habit, a superstition, one more trick by which one got through the day. The Assistant Commissioner bought poppies, took the outside of the pavement, was silent for two minutes a year, touched wood, drank soup from the side of the spoon, raised his hat to the Cenotaph. It was as well to be conventional when one fought so fierce and so i
ndecisive a war; one’s thoughts had to be canalized: Streatham, Paddington, wireless inventions, these principally held the mind, so one bought a poppy and saved the time which might have been wasted on the dead; one raised a hat and forgot the done-with past; one wore one’s school tie and dispensed with introductions; one touched wood and saved the harassing and useless thought: perhaps I am wrong.

  Along the Embankment and into Great College Street, and mechanically before putting his latch-key into the door, he turned his head. No one was in sight; he did not register the thought because no person, unexplained, was ever in sight; but when he was in the dim hall, among the steel engravings, he did not go up the stairs to the flat, but decided on a final test, opened the front door again and stepped out on to the pavement. There on the opposite side of the street stood the man in clerk’s clothes who had put out his hand to beg. But it could not have been money he wanted, the Assistant Commissioner thought, and stood quietly in front of the door to allow the man to approach him. He looked white and tired and sick and could have alarmed no one; it was impossible to watch him without pity. The Assistant Commissioner took a step towards him and the man turned and went, disappeared round the corner without hurry; he seemed too tired to hurry, too hopeless to have an object in hurrying.

  *

  Conrad convicted himself of cowardice. It was only one more conviction. He had already convicted himself of lust, incompetence, ingratitude. The act which was to have been his armour against life, the secret inner pride, ‘Even I am loved,’ had betrayed him, and driven him along streets too many to count, had trailed him like a dusty coat behind the Assistant Commissioner. Milly, too, had betrayed him; she had given him the only thing he wanted, a thing he had never had the least hope of obtaining, and it had proved: something lovely over too quickly, weeping in the night, sleeplessness, condemnation, despair. He clenched his hands in a fury of useless hatred.

  He could not discover whom he hated. His brother stared at him through the glass, whispered through the wire: ‘Look after Milly.’ Conrad leant closer and begged him not to despair: the appeal, the petition. His brother shook his head like an old dog with canker. ‘It’s Milly I’m worried about.’ He seemed unable to think about his own death; anxiety was greater than fear; he seemed haunted by his responsibility for Milly. A missionary tapped the screen in the stove-heated schoolroom with a long pointer, begged with passion: ‘Look at these,’ and the children stared back with uncomprehending eyes, expressions of bored and stubborn stupidity; impossible to convey to them that these flat figures flashed one after the other upon the white sheet, naked, thin, bony-kneed, were children themselves; only Conrad knew, only Conrad felt the unbearable responsibility for their starvation, could not forget them, though soon they were overlaid with foliage, with grinning chiefs smoking pipes, with a view of the Victoria Nyanza.

  Milly came down the church while the electric drills rattled in the High Street, and she peered sideways on the look-out for an enemy.

  Conrad dug his nails into his palms and tried to see himself in the window of a shop in Parliament Street. People are looking at me, he thought; there’s something wrong with my appearance. He took out a handkerchief and rubbed his face: it may be dirt. He circled on the empty pavement before the shop front: my shirt may be hanging out; with shocked horror, my trousers may be open. He leant forward and stared so closely at his reflection that the glass touched his forehead. He would not look at himself directly; that would be indecent; it would be like examining a naked body; nor would he think of Milly directly, Milly lying back across the bed, hungry and unhappy and reaching for him; his mind reeled away from it to distant reflections of Milly, to a trodden slipper slapping the floor, to the smell of anthracite and the sound of drills, to the starved naked children on the screen.

  But you are all right, his image seemed to say, your hat is straight, your tie is straight, your shirt tucked in. There is no dirt on your face. Your clothes are neat and suited to your station. There is no reason at all why people should turn and look over their shoulders at you. He circled in front of the mirror and a small boy laughed and a woman stared at him across the street.

  They know I’m full of hate, he thought with an obscure and aching grief, as if he were a judge, aware of his own secret sin, who must still sit there and condemn; they are frightened of me, they are trying to drive me mad. It was a devilishly clever method, to stare and stare, and encourage others to stare and stare, till you thought your face was dirty, or your shirt hanging out, and found it was not that at all; and then the only explanation could be that you were behaving oddly and never knew it. Perhaps, he thought, all this time I am speaking aloud, and he tried to listen to himself, but was unsatisfied by the apparent silence and went back to the window to see whether his lips were moving. They were quite still, but that was not a final proof, for he remembered ventriloquists whose lips never stirred but the voice came. I may be shouting from windows all down the street, he thought; that is why I can hear nothing; I am out of hearing of my own voice.

  He began to walk very rapidly up towards Trafalgar Square. He had never seen ventriloquists move about; they sat on dining-room chairs and held dolls, and sometimes people thought of numbers and the dolls guessed the numbers. He considered seriously, I should be good at that, being an accountant, and presently quite forgot his fear. It was as if his madness had been a little fume of smoke which had coiled upwards and now subsided and burnt unobtrusively at the bottom of his mind.

  But the sense of guilt remained, and it seemed to him that it was of the guilt people were aware and not of the madness. It irked him; he wanted to get rid of it. It grew inside him as sexual unrest sometimes grew, until he had to go into the street and buy a woman and then after awhile he was at peace again, except for the dim conviction that this was not the way a man should live. It occurred to him that hate perhaps could only be dispelled in the same way, by giving way to it, and a strange homesickness overcame him for the moment when the Assistant Commissioner had come out of his door to watch him across the street. Then he had had only to press a trigger. It was almost as if he had missed happiness for ever in Great College Street, and he recalled the opportunity for murder with the same poignant sadness as a city-bred child might remember a field of grass or corn.

  People came out of churches after long sermons, putting on gloves, looking for taxis, impatient for lunch. Clocks struck and moved on and struck again; the crowded buses plunged down the street towards Kew and Richmond. Conrad felt no hunger; in any case he had no money with which to buy food, all but a few pence of his week’s salary had gone into the pawnbroker’s pocket. But he could not go back, because if he went back all would inevitably happen again: passion, sleeplessness, condemnation, despair. He would not even have the excuse that he loved her, for he loved her no longer; he had loved Milly riding on bus tops to Kew, in the next seat at the cinema, talking with frightened bravery, with harmless malice in the kitchen; but now he did not dare to think of her, but of the trodden shoe, the black children, the murmur of the gas. Even these images had power to repel him and to draw him to them; the trodden shoe spoke of the insecurity of his love, the whispering fire was home, was safety, was an absence of thought. They filled his mind, he saw nothing else: Piccadilly was a shoe, Knightsbridge a fire. The distance he walked all through the afternoon could only be judged by the tiring of his feet; he could not tire his hatred. He grew more clearly than ever aware that he could only rid himself of that in one way.

  And yet there remained, even below the hatred, the belief that if he had been able to love naturally and without shame, if he had been loved with tenderness and permanance, there would have been no need of the pistol in the pocket, the aimless walking and the guilt. A green chair was close to him and he sat down; immediately someone came and asked him for money. He withdrew a hand from a trouser pocket with five pennies in the palm, and the man took two and went away; Conrad could hear his feet crunch on the gravel; every time they paused a
bell rang. There were other noises; he might have been at the edge of a great army hidden by mist; and for a moment it was not a shoe, a fire, a lantern slide which held his thoughts, but a faint memory of his secondary school, of a Latin lesson, of an army which waited on a hillside above a lake while an invisible enemy marched in the mist below. Suddenly the mist had cleared –

  He saw a nurserymaid leading a child across a grassy plain, a Guardsman in uniform leaning over railings, a girl with puffed sleeves and long thin legs trailing a borzoi down a gravel path. Dogs were barking, children were shouting, and two lovers lay and whispered in the grass behind him. He sat alone, with hate curled inside him, and envied them all, the shouting children, the barking dogs, the lovers whispering. A man pushed a perambulator down the gravel and four children hung along the sides, impeded the wheels, stumbled and cried and talked. It seemed to Conrad that he was watching a great victory; this stranger was not alone, he would never be alone, not only in the sense that he was the centre of a crowd but because the crowd included him and recognized his existence; they asked him questions, they complained to him, they demanded his approval. Even the harassed face was, in Conrad’s eyes, a token of victory: a conquering general is not free from care.

  The lovers whispered, and the girl with the borzoi raised a gauntleted hand and waved to someone whom Conrad could not see, and the sunlight lay flat on the flat glass. The gravel was like gold and the light flooded under the lowest bar of the palings. In ten minutes it would be dusk and the nurserymaids would stand up with the perambulators under the trees, calling to the children to come in to supper (a glass of milk and two petit beurre biscuits) and bed with a nightlight burning and the sun sunk out of sight below the Park and the horses going home and the lamps being lit and the cars drawn waiting to the kerb, like black cats crouched on a narrow leaden roof.