The Tenth Man Read online

  "Oh," Charlot said, "I remember enough."

  "We can't pay much here at present," the old man said, "but when things get back to normal... there was always a great demand for our product..."

  "I would begin," Charlot said, "at a low salary..."

  "The great thing," the old man said, "is enthusiasm, to believe in what we are selling. After all, our product has proved itself. Before the war our figures were very good, very good indeed. Of course, there was a season, but in Paris there are always foreign visitors. And even the provinces bought our product. I'd show you our figures, only our books are lost." From his manner you would have thought he was attracting an investor rather than interviewing a would-be employee.

  "Yes," Charlot said, "yes."

  "We've got to make our product known again. When once it's known, it can't fail to be as popular as before. Craftsmanship tells."

  "I expect you are right."

  "So you see," the old man said, "we've all got to put our backs into it... a cooperative enterprise... the sense of loyalty... your savings will be quite safe." He waved his hand above the wilderness of tubular chairs. "I promise you that."

  Charlot never learned what the product was, but on the landing below a wooden crate had been opened and standing in the straw was a table lamp about three feet high built hideously in steel in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. The wire ran down the lift shaft like the rope of an ancient hotel lift, and the bulb screwed in on the top floor. Perhaps it was the only table lamp the old man had been able to obtain in Paris: perhaps—who knows?—it may have been the product itself...

  Three hundred francs wouldn't last long in Paris.

  Charlot answered one more advertisement, but the employer demanded proper papers. He was not impressed by the prison dossier. "You can buy any number of those," he said, "for a hundred francs," and he refused to be persuaded by the elaborate measurements of the German authorities. "It's not my job to measure your skull," he said, "or feel your bumps. Go off to the city hall and get proper papers. You seem a capable fellow. I'll keep the job open until noon tomorrow..." But Charlot did not return.

  He hadn't eaten more than a couple of rolls for thirty-six hours: it suddenly occurred to him that he was back exactly where he had started. He leaned against a wall in the late afternoon sun and imagined that he heard the ticking of the mayor's watch. He had come a long way and taken a deal of trouble and was back at the end of the cinder track with his back against the wall. He was going to die and he might just as well have died rich and saved everybody trouble. He began to walk toward the Seine.

  Presently he couldn't hear the mayor's watch any more: instead there was a shuffle and pad whichever way he turned. He heard it just as he had heard the mayor's watch and he half realized that both were delusions. At the end of a long empty street the river shone. He found that he was out of breath and he leaned against a urinal and waited for a while with his head hanging down because the river dazzled his eyes. The shuffle and pad came softly up behind him and stopped. Well, the watch had stopped too. He refused to pay attention to delusion.

  "Pidot," a voice said, "Pidot!" He looked sharply up, but there was no one there.

  "It is Pidot, surely?" the voice said.

  "Where are you?" Charlot asked.

  "Here, of course." There was a pause and then the voice said like conscience almost in his ear, "You look all in, finished. I hardly recognized you. Tell me, is anyone coming?"

  "No." In childhood, in the country, in the woods behind Brinac one had believed that voices might suddenly speak out of the horns of flowers or from the roots of trees, but in the city when one had reached the age of death one couldn't believe in voices from paving stones. He asked again, "Where are you?" and then realized his own dull-wittedness—he could see the legs from the shins downward under the green cape of the urinal. They were black pin-striped trousers, the trousers of a lawyer or a doctor or even a deputy, but the shoes hadn't been cleaned for some days.

  "It's Monsieur Carosse, Pidot."

  "Yes?"

  "You know how it is. One's misunderstood."

  "Yes."

  "What could I have done? After all, I had to keep the show going. My behavior was strictly correct—and distant. No one knows better than you, poor Pidot. I suppose they are holding things against you too?"

  "I'm finished."

  "Courage, Pidot. Never say die. A second cousin of mine who was in London is doing his best to put things right. Surely you know one of them?"

  "Why don't you come out from there and let me see you?"

  "Better not, Pidot. Separately we might pass muster, but together... it's too risky." The pinstriped trousers moved uneasily. "Anyone coming, Pidot?"

  "No one."

  "Listen, Pidot. I want you to take a message to Madame

  Carosse. Tell her I'm well: I've gone south. I shall try to get into Switzerland till it all blows over. Poor Pidot, you could do with a couple of hundred francs, couldn't you?"

  "Yes."

  "I'll leave them on a ledge in here. You'll take the message, won't you, Pidot?"

  "Where to?"

  "Oh, the same old place. You know—on the third floor. I hope the old lady's still got her hair. The old bitch was proud of it. Well, goodbye and good luck, Pidot." There was a scuffle in the urinal, and then the shuffle and pad went off in the other direction. Charlot watched the stranger go: tall and stout and black-clothed, with a limp and the kind of hat Charlot himself would have worn—so many years ago—between the Rue Miromesnil and the law courts.

  On a shelf of the urinal there was a screw of paper—three hundred francs. Whoever Monsieur. Carosse was, he had the rare virtue of being better than his word. Charlot laughed: the sound was hollow among the metal alcoves. A week had gone by and he was back exactly where he had started with three hundred francs. It was as if all that time he had lived upon air—or rather as if some outwardly friendly but inwardly malign witch had granted him the boon of an inexhaustible purse, but a purse from which he could never draw more than three hundred francs. Was it perhaps that the dead man had allocated him this allowance out of his three hundred thousand?

  We'll soon test that out, Charlot thought; what's the good of making this last a week and be only a week older and a week shabbier at the end of it? It was the hour of aperitifs and for the first time since he had entered Paris, he deliberately stepped into his own territory, the territory of which he knew every yard.

  He had not until then properly appreciated the strangeness of Paris: an unfamiliar street might always have been an unfrequented one, but now he noticed the emptiness, the silent little bicycle taxis gliding by, the shabbiness of awnings and the strange faces. Only here and there he saw the familiar face of the customary stranger sitting where he had sat for years, sipping the same drink. They were like the remains of an old Bower garden sticking up in a wilderness of weeds after a careless tenant's departure.

  I am going to die tonight, Charlot thought: what does it matter if someone does recognize me? And he pushed through the glass door of his accustomed cafe and made for the very corner—the right-hand end of the long sofa under the gilt mirror—in which he had always sat as a kind of right. It was occupied.

  An American soldier sat there: a young man with high cheekbones and a rough puppy innocence; and the waiter bowed and smiled and exchanged words with him as though he were the oldest customer in the place. Charlot sat and watched: it was like an act of adultery. The headwaiter, who had always stopped for a word, went past him as though he did not exist, and he too paused by the American's table. The explanation soon came—the big bundle of notes the Yankee produced to pay with—and suddenly it occurred to Charlot that he too formerly had possessed a big bundle of notes, had been a payer; it wasn't that he was a ghost now: he was merely a man without much money. He drank his brandy and called for another: the slowness of the service angered him. He called the headwaiter. The man tried to avoid him but at last he had to come.

/>   "Well, Jules," Charlot said.

  The shallow eyes flickered disapproval: the man only liked his intimates—the payers, Charlot thought—to call him by his name.

  "You don't remember me, Jules," Charlot said.

  The man became uneasy: perhaps some tone of voice echoed in his ear. The times were confusing: some customers had disappeared altogether, others who had been in hiding had returned changed by imprisonment, and others who had not been in hiding it was now in the interests of his business to discourage. "Well, monsieur, you have not been here for some time..."

  The American began to hit loudly on the table with a coin. "Excuse me," the waiter said.

  "No, no, Jules, you can't leave an old customer like that. Leave out the beard." He laid his hand across his chin. "Can't you see a fellow called Chavel, Jules?"

  The American beat again with his coin, but this time Jules paid him no attention, simply signaled another waiter across to take the man's order. "Why, Monsieur Chavel," he said, "you are so much changed. I'm astonished... I heard..." But it was obvious that he couldn't remember what he had heard. It was difficult to remember which of his customers were heroes and which traitors and which simply customers.

  "The Germans locked me up," Chavel said.

  "Ah, that must have been it," Jules said with relief. "Paris is nearly itself again now, Monsieur Chavel."

  "Not quite, Jules." He nodded at his old place.

  "Ah, I'll see that seat is kept for you tomorrow, Monsieur Chavel. How is your house—where was it?"

  "Brinac. There are tenants there now."

  "It hasn't suffered?"

  "I don't think so. I haven't visited it yet. To tell you the truth, Jules, I only arrived in Paris today. I've barely enough money for a bed."

  "I can accommodate you a little, Monsieur Chavel?"

  "No, no. I shall manage somehow."

  "At least you must be our guest this evening. Another cognac, Monsieur Chavel?"

  "Thank you, Jules." The test, he thought, has worked: the pocketbook is inexhaustible. I still have my three hundred francs.

  "Do you believe in the Devil, Jules?"

  "Naturally, Monsieur Chavel."

  He was moved to recklessness. "You hadn't heard, Jules, that I am selling Brinac?"

  "Are you getting a good price, Monsieur Chavel?"

  Suddenly Charlot felt a great distaste for Jules: it seemed to him incredible that a man could be so crass. Had he no possession in the world for which a good price was an insufficient inducement? He was a man who would sell his life... He said, "I'm sorry."

  "What for, Monsieur Chavel?"

  "After these years haven't we all reason to be sorry for a hundred things?"

  "We have no reason to be sorry here, Monsieur Chavel. I assure you our attitude has always been strictly correct. I have always made a point of serving Frenchmen first—yes, even if the German was a general."

  He envied Jules: to have been able to remain "correct": to have saved his self-respect by small doses of rudeness or inattention. But for him—to have remained correct would have meant death. He said suddenly, "Do you know if any trains are running yet from the Gare Montparnasse?"

  "A few and they are very slow. They haven't got the fuel. They stop at every station. Sometimes they stop all night. You wouldn't get to Brinac before morning."

  "There's no hurry."

  "Are they expecting you, Monsieur Chavel?"

  "Who?"

  "Your tenants."

  "No." The unaccustomed brandy was running along the dry subterranean channels of his mind: sitting there in the familiar cafe, where even the mirrors and cornices were chipped in the places he remembered, he felt an enormous longing just to be able to get up and catch a train and go home as he had often done in past years. Suddenly and unexpectedly to give way to a whim and find a welcome at the other end. He thought: After all, there is always time in which to die.

  8

  THE BELL LIKE MOST THINGS ABOUT THE PLACE WAS OLD fashioned. His father had disliked electricity, and though he could well have afforded to bring it to Brinac, he had preferred oil lamps almost until his death (saying they were better for the eyes) and ancient bells which dangled on long fronds of metal. Himself he had loved the place too much to change things: when he came down to Brinac it was to a quiet eave of dusk and silence—no telephone could petulantly pursue him there. So now he could hear the long twanging wire before the bell began to swing at the back of the house, in the room next to the kitchen. Surely if he had been in the house that bell would have had a different tone: one less hollow, more friendly, less sporadic, like a cough in a worn-out breast... A cold early-morning breeze blew through the bushes and stirred at ankle level the weeds in the drive: somewhere—perhaps in the potting shed—a loose board flapped. Without warning the door opened.

  This was Janvier's sister. He recognized the type and in a flash built her up on the lines of her brother. Fair and thin and very young she had still had time to develop what must have been the family trait of recklessness. Now that he was here and she was there, he found he had no words of explanation: he stood like a page of type waiting to be read.

  "You want a meal," she said. She had read the whole page like so many women do at a glance, even to the footnote of his thin shoes. He made a gesture which might have been deprecation or acceptance. She said, "We haven't much in the house. You know how things are. It would be easier to give you money."

  He said, "I've got money... three hundred francs."

  She said, "You'd better come in. Make as little dirt as you can. I've been scrubbing these steps."

  "I'll take off my shoes," he said humbly, and he followed her in, feeling the parquet floor cold under his socks. Everything had changed a little for the worse. There was no question but that the house had been surrendered to strangers: the big mirror had been taken down and left an ugly patch on the wall; the tallboy had been shifted, a chair had gone; the steel engraving of a naval engagement off Brest had been hung in a new place—tastelessly he thought. He looked in vain for a photograph of his father, and exclaimed suddenly, furiously, "Where's...?"

  "Where's what?"

  He checked himself. "Your mother," he said.

  She turned round and looked at him as though she had missed something on the first reading. "How do you know about my mother?"

  "Janvier told me."

  "Who's Janvier? I don't know any Janvier."

  "Your brother," he said. "We used to call your brother that in the prison."

  "You were with him there?"

  "Yes."

  He was to learn in time that she never quite did the expected thing: he had imagined that now she would call her mother, but instead she laid her hand on his arm and said, "Don't speak so loud." She explained, "My mother doesn't know."

  "About his death?"

  "About anything. She thinks he's made a fortune somewhere. Sometimes it's England, sometimes South America. She says she always knew he was a clever son. What's your name?"

  "Charlot. Jean-Louis Charlot."

  "Did you know the other one too?"

  "You mean... Yes, I knew him. I think I'd better go before your mother comes," A high old voice cried from the stairs, "Therese, who's that you've got?"

  "Somebody," the girl said, "who knows Michel."

  An old woman heaved herself done the last stairs into the hall, a huge old woman draped in shawl after shawl until she appeared like an unturned bed: even the feet were swathed, they padded and slopped toward him. It was difficult to see pathos in this mountain or appreciate the need to shelter her. Surely these huge maternal breasts were there to comfort, not to require comfort. "Well," she said, "how's Michel?"

  "He's well," the girl said.

  "I didn't ask you. You. How did you leave my son?"

  "He was well," Charlot repeated. "He asked me to look you up and see how you were."

  "He did, did he? He might have given you a pair of shoes to come in," she said sharply. "H
e hasn't done anything foolish, has he, lost his money again?"

  "No. No."

  "He bought all this for his old mother," she went on with fond fanaticism. "He's a foolish boy. I was all right where I was. We had three rooms in Menilmontant. Manageable they were, but here you can't get help. It's too much for an old woman and a girl. He sent us money too, of course, but he doesn't realize there's things nowadays money won't buy."

  "He's hungry," the girl interrupted.

  "All right, then," the old woman said. "Give him food. You'd think he was a beggar the way he stands there. If he wants food why doesn't he ask for food?" she went on just as though he were out of earshot.

  "I'll pay," Charlot snapped at her.

  "Oh, you'll pay, will you? You're too ready with your money. You won't get anywhere that way. You don't want to offer money till you're asked for it." She was like an old weatherworn emblem of wisdom—something you find in desert places, like the Sphinx—and yet inside her was that enormous vacancy of ignorance which cast a doubt on all her wisdom.

  One turned out of the hall on the left, through a door with a chipped handle. This led to a long stone passage leading halfway round the house: he remembered in winter how the food was never quite hot after its journey from the kitchen and how his father had always planned alterations, but in the end the house had won. Now without thinking he took a step toward the door as though he would find his own way there: then stopped and thought, I must be careful, so careful. He followed silently behind Therese and thought how odd it was to see someone young in that house where he only remembered old, trustworthy, crusty servants. Only in portraits were people young: the photograph in the best bedroom of his mother on her wedding day, of his father when he had taken his degree in law, his grandmother with her first child. Following the girl he thought with melancholy that it was as if he had brought a bride to the old house.