The Heart of the Matter Page 6

  ‘Give me two hundred and fifty pounds,’ Scobie said with a nervous attempt at jocularity.

  ‘You people always think a bank’s made of money,’ Robinson mechanically jested. ‘How much do you really want?’

  ‘Three fifty.’

  ‘What’s your balance at the moment?’

  ‘I think about thirty pounds. It’s the end of the month.’

  ‘We’d better check up on that.’ He called a clerk and while they waited Robinson paced the little room—six paces to the wall and round again. ‘There and back a hundred and seventy-six times,’ he said, ‘makes a mile. I try and put in three miles before lunch. It keeps one healthy. In Nigeria I used to walk a mile and a half to breakfast at the club, and then a mile and a half back to the office. Nowhere fit to walk here,’ he said, pivoting on the carpet. A clerk laid a slip of paper on the desk. Robinson held it close to his eyes, as though he wanted to smell it. ‘Twenty-eight pounds fifteen and sevenpence,’ he said.

  ‘I want to send my wife to South Africa.’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes.’

  ‘I daresay,’ Scobie said, ‘I might do it on a bit less. I shan’t be able to allow her very much on my salary though.’

  ‘I really don’t see how …’

  ‘I thought perhaps I could get an overdraft,’ he said vaguely. ‘Lots of people have them, don’t they? Do you know I believe I only had one once—for a few weeks—for about fifteen pounds. I didn’t like it. It scared me. I always felt I owed the bank manager the money.’

  ‘The trouble is, Scobie,’ Robinson said, ‘we’ve had orders to be very strict about overdrafts. It’s the war, you know. There’s one valuable security nobody can offer now, his life.’

  ‘Yes, I see that of course. But my life’s pretty good and I’m not stirring from here. No submarines for me. And the job’s secure, Robinson,’ he went on with the same ineffectual attempt at flippancy.

  ‘The Commissioner’s retiring, isn’t he?’ Robinson said, reaching the safe at the end of the room and turning.

  ‘Yes, but I’m not.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that, Scobie. There’ve been rumours …’

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to retire one day, but that’s a long way off. I’d much rather die in my boots. There’s always my life insurance policy, Robinson. What about that for security?’

  ‘You know you dropped one insurance three years ago.’

  ‘That was the year Louise went home for an operation.’

  ‘I don’t think the paid-up value of the other two amounts to much, Scobie.’

  ‘Still they protect you in case of death, don’t they?’

  ‘If you go on paying the premiums. We haven’t any guarantee, you know.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Scobie said, ‘I see that.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Scobie. This isn’t personal. It’s the policy of the bank. If you’d wanted fifty pounds, I’d have lent it you myself.’

  ‘Forget it, Robinson,’ Scobie said. ‘It’s not important.’ He gave his embarrassed laugh. ‘The boys at the Secretariat would say I can always pick it up in bribes. How’s Molly?’

  ‘She’s very well, thank you. Wish I were the same.’

  ‘You read too many of those medical books, Robinson.’

  ‘A man’s got to know what’s wrong with him. Going to be at the club tonight?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Louise is tired. You know how it is before the rains. Sorry to have kept you, Robinson. I must be getting along to the wharf.’

  He walked rapidly down-hill from the bank with his head bent. He felt as though he had been detected in a mean action—he had asked for money and had been refused. Louise had deserved better of him. It seemed to him that he must have failed in some way in manhood.

  II

  Druce had come out himself to the Esperança with his squad of F.S.P. men. At the gangway a steward awaited them with an invitation to join the captain for drinks in his cabin. The officer in charge of the naval guard was already there before them. This was a regular part of the fortnightly routine—the establishment of friendly relations. By accepting his hospitality they tried to ease down for the neutral the bitter pill of search; below the bridge the search party would proceed smoothly without them. While the first-class passengers had their passports examined, their cabins would be ransacked by a squad of the F.S.P. Already others were going through the hold—the dreary hopeless business of sifting rice. What had Yusef said, ‘Have you ever found one little diamond? Do you think you ever will?’ In a few minutes when relations had become sufficiently smooth after the drinks Scobie would have the unpleasant task of searching the captain’s own cabin. The stiff disjointed conversation was carried on mainly by the naval lieutenant.

  The captain wiped his fat yellow face and said, ‘Of course for the English I feel in the heart an enormous admiration.’

  ‘We don’t like doing it, you know,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Hard luck being a neutral.’

  ‘My heart,’ the Portuguese captain said, ‘is full of admiration for your great struggle. There is no room for resentment. Some of my people feel resentment. Me none.’ The face streamed with sweat, and the eyeballs were contused. The man kept on speaking of his heart, but it seemed to Scobie that a long deep surgical operation would have been required to find it.

  ‘Very good of you,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Appreciate your attitude.’

  ‘Another glass of port, gentlemen?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do. Nothing like this on shore you know. You, Scobie?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘I hope you won’t find it necessary to keep us here tonight, major?’

  Scobie said, ‘I don’t think there’s any possibility of your getting away before midday tomorrow.’

  ‘Will do our best, of course,’ the lieutenant said.

  ‘On my honour, gentlemen, my hand upon my heart, you will find no bad hats among my passengers. And the crew—I know them all.’

  Druce said, ‘It’s a formality, captain, which we have to go through.’

  ‘Have a cigar,’ the captain said. ‘Throw away that cigarette. Here is a very special box.’

  Druce lit the cigar, which began to spark and crackle. The captain giggled. ‘Only my joke, gentlemen. Quite harmless. I keep the box for my friends. The English have a wonderful sense of humour. I know you will not be angry. A German yes, an Englishman no. It is quite cricket, eh?’

  ‘Very funny,’ Druce said sourly, laying the cigar down on the ash-tray the captain held out to him. The ash-tray, presumably so off by the captain’s finger, began to play a little tinkly tune. Druce jerked again: he was overdue for leave and his nerves were unsteady. The captain smiled and sweated. ‘Swiss,’ he said. ‘A wonderful people. Neutral too.’

  One of the Field Security men came in and gave Druce a note. He passed it to Scobie to read. Steward, who is under notice of dismissal, says the captain has letters concealed in his bathroom.

  Druce said, ‘I think I’d better go and make them hustle down below. Coming, Evans? Many thanks for the port, captain.’

  Scobie was left alone with the captain. This was the part of the job he always hated. These men were not criminals: they were merely breaking regulations enforced on the shipping companies by the navicert system. You never knew in a search what you would find. A man’s bedroom was his private life. Prying in drawers you came on humiliations; little petty vices were tucked out of sight like a soiled handkerchief. Under a pile of linen you might come on a grief he was trying to forget. Scobie said gently, ‘I’m afraid, captain, I’ll have to look around. You know it’s a formality.’

  ‘You must do your duty, major,’ the Portuguese said.

  Scobie went quickly and neatly through the cabin: he never moved a thing without replacing it exactly: he was like a careful housewife. The captain stood with his back to Scobie looking out on to the bridge; it was as if he preferred not to embarrass his guest in the odious task. Scobie came to an end, closing the bo
x of French letters and putting them carefully back in the top drawer of the locker with the handkerchiefs, the gaudy ties and the little bundle of dirty handkerchiefs. ‘All finished?’ the captain asked politely, turning his head.

  ‘That door,’ Scobie said, ‘what would be through there?’

  ‘That is only the bathroom, the w.c.’

  ‘I think I’d better take a look.’

  ‘Of course, major, but there is not much cover there to conceal anything.’

  ‘If you don’t mind …’

  ‘Of course not. It is your duty.’

  The bathroom was bare and extraordinarily dirty. The bath was rimmed with dry grey soap, and the tiles slopped under his feet. The problem was to find the right place quickly. He couldn’t linger here without disclosing the fact that he had special information. The search had got to have all the appearances of formality—neither too lax nor too thorough. ‘This won’t take long,’ he said cheerily and caught sight of the fat calm face in the shaving-mirror. The information, of course, might be false, given by the steward simply in order to cause trouble.

  Scobie opened the medicine-cabinet and went rapidly through the contents: unscrewing the toothpaste, opening the razor box, dipping his finger into the shaving-cream. He did not expect to find anything there. But the search gave him time to think. He went next to the taps, turned the water on, felt up each funnel with his finger. The floor engaged his attention: there were no possibilities of concealment there. The porthole: he examined the big screws and swung the inner mask to and fro. Every time he turned he caught sight of the captain’s face in the mirror, calm, patient, complacent. It said ‘cold, cold’ to him all the while, as in a children’s game.

  Finally, the lavatory: he lifted up the wooden seat: nothing had been laid between the porcelain and the wood. He put his hand on the lavatory chain, and in the mirror became aware for the first time of a tension: the brown eyes were no longer on his face, they were fixed on something else, and following that gaze home, he saw his own hand tighten on the chain.

  Is the cistern empty of water? he wondered, and pulled. Gurgling and pounding in the pipes, the water flushed down. He turned away and the Portuguese said with a smugness he was unable to conceal. ‘You see, major.’ And at that moment Scobie did see. I’m becoming careless, he thought. He lifted the cap of the cistern. Fixed in the cap with adhesive tape and clear of the water lay a letter.

  He looked at the address—a Frau Groener in Friedrichstrasse, Leipzig. He repeated, ‘I’m sorry, captain,’ and because the man didn’t answer, he looked up and saw the tears beginning to pursue the sweat down the hot fat cheeks. ‘I’ll have to take it away,’ Scobie said, ‘and report …’

  ‘Oh, this war,’ the captain burst out, ‘how I hate this war.’

  ‘We’ve got cause to hate it too, you know,’ Scobie said.

  ‘A man is ruined because he writes to his daughter.’

  ‘Daughter?’

  ‘Yes. She is Frau Groener. Open it and read. You will see.’

  ‘I can’t do that. I must leave it to the censorship. Why didn’t you wait to write till you got to Lisbon, captain?’

  The man had lowered his bulk on to the edge of the bath as though it were a heavy sack his shoulders could no longer bear. He kept on wiping his eyes with the back of his hand like a child—an unattractive child, the fat boy of the school. Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast. Scobie knew he should have taken the letter and gone; he could do no good with his sympathy.

  The captain moaned, ‘If you had a daughter you’d understand. You haven’t got one,’ he accused, as though there were a crime in sterility.

  ‘No.’

  ‘She is anxious about me. She loves me,’ he said, raising his tear-drenched face as though he must drive the unlikely statement home. ‘She loves me,’ he repeated mournfully.

  ‘But why not write from Lisbon?’ Scobie asked again. ‘Why run this risk?’

  ‘I am alone. I have no wife,’ the captain said. ‘One cannot always wait to speak. And in Lisbon—you know how things go—friends, wine. I have a little woman there too who is jealous even of my daughter. There are rows, the time passes. In a week I must be off again. It was always so easy before this voyage.’

  Scobie believed him. The story was sufficiently irrational to be true. Even in war-time one must sometimes exercise the faculty of belief if it is not to atrophy. He said, ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do about it. Perhaps nothing will happen.’

  ‘Your authorities,’ the captain said, ‘will blacklist me. You know what that means. The consul will not give a navicert to any ship with me as captain. I shall starve on shore.’

  ‘There are so many slips,’ Scobie said, ‘in these matters. Files get mislaid. You may hear no more about it.’

  ‘I shall pray,’ the man said without hope.

  ‘Why not?’ Scobie said.

  ‘You are an Englishman. You wouldn’t believe in prayer.’

  ‘I’m a Catholic, too,’ Scobie said.

  The fat face looked quickly up at him. ‘A Catholic?’ he exclaimed with hope. For the first time he began to plead. He was like a man who meets a fellow countryman in a strange continent. He began to talk rapidly of his daughter in Leipzig; he produced a battered pocket-book and a yellowing snap-shot of a stout young Portuguese woman as graceless as himself. The little bathroom was stiflingly hot and the captain repeated again and again. ‘You will understand.’ He had discovered suddenly how much they had in common: the plaster statues with the swords in the bleeding heart: the whisper behind the confessional curtains: the holy coats and the liquefaction of blood: the dark side chapels and the intricate movements, and somewhere behind it all the love of God. ‘And in Lisbon,’ he said, ‘she will be waiting, she will take me home, she will take away my trousers so that I cannot go out alone; every day it will be drink and quarrels until we go to bed. You will understand. I cannot write to my daughter from Lisbon. She loves me so much and she waits.’ He shifted his fat thigh and said, ‘The pureness of that love,’ and wept. They had in common all the wide region of repentance and longing.

  Their kinship gave the captain courage to try another angle. He said, ‘I am a poor man, but I have enough money to spare …’ He would never have attempted to bribe an Englishman: it was the most sincere compliment he could pay to their common religion.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Scobie said.

  ‘I have English pounds. I will give you twenty English pounds … fifty.’ He implored. ‘A hundred … that is all I have saved.’

  ‘It can’t be done,’ Scobie said. He put the letter quickly in his pocket and turned away. The last time he saw the captain as he looked back from the door of the cabin, he was beating his head against the cistern, the tears catching in the folds of his cheeks. As he went down to join Druce in the saloon he could feel the millstone weighing on his breast. How I hate this war, he thought, in the very words the captain had used.

  III

  The letter to the daughter in Leipzig, and a small bundle of correspondence found in the kitchens, was the sole result of eight hours’ search by fifteen men. It could be counted an average day. When Scobie reached the police station he looked in to see the Commissioner, but his office was empty, so he sat down in his own room under the handcuffs and began to write his report. ‘A special search was made of the cabins and effects of the passengers named in your telegrams … with no result.’ The letter to the daughter in Leipzig lay on the desk beside him. Outside it was dark. The smell of the cells seeped in under the door, and in the next office Fraser was singing to himself the same tune he had sung every evening since his last leave:

  ‘What will we care for

  The why and the wherefore,

  When you and I

  Are pushing up the daisies?’

  It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn�
�t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old death-bed? He wrote: A steward who had been dismissed for incompetence reported that the captain had correspondence concealed in his bathroom. I made a search and found the enclosed letter addressed to Frau Groener in Leipzig concealed in the lid of the lavatory cistern. An instruction on this hiding-place might well be circulated, as it has not been encountered before at this station. The letter was fixed by tape above the water-line …

  He sat there staring at the paper, his brain confused with the conflict that had really been decided hours ago when Druce said to him in the saloon, ‘Anything?’ and he had shrugged his shoulders in a gesture he left Druce to interpret. Had he ever intended it to mean: ‘The usual private correspondence we are always finding.’ Druce had taken it for ‘No.’ Scobie put his hand against his forehead and shivered: the sweat seeped between his fingers, and he thought, Am I in for a touch of fever? Perhaps it was because his temperature had risen that it seemed to him he was on the verge of a new life. One felt this way before a proposal of marriage or a first crime.

  Scobie took the letter and opened it. The act was irrevocable, for no one in this city had the right to open clandestine mail. A microphotograph might be concealed in the gum of an envelope. Even a simple word code would be beyond him; his knowledge of Portuguese would take him no farther than the most surface meaning. Every letter found—however obviously innocent—must be sent to the London censors unopened. Scobie against the strictest orders was exercising his own imperfect judgement. He thought to himself: If the letter is suspicious, I will send my report. I can explain the torn envelope. The captain insisted on opening the letter to show me the contents. But if he wrote that, he would be unjustly blackening the case against the captain, for what better way could he have found for destroying a microphotograph? There must be some lie to be told, Scobie thought, but he was unaccustomed to lies. With the letter in his hand, held carefully over the white blotting-pad, so that he could detect anything that might fall from between the leaves, he decided that he would write a full report on all the circumstances, including his own act.