Rogue Male (19 page)

‘There’s no point in being rude,’ he laughed. ‘Limelight has just the same effect on the emotional public as Westminster Abbey and a sovereign’s escort—and it’s a lot cheaper. But I’m glad you have grown out of these rather childish allegiances, because we shan’t have any difficulty in coming to terms.’

I asked him what his terms were. He pushed a paper down the ventilator with a stick. I collected it, also with a stick.

‘Just sign that, and you are free,’ he said. ‘There is only one serious restriction. You must undertake not to leave England. We leave you at complete liberty in your own country. But if you attempt to reach the Continent, this will begin all over again and we shall show no mercy. I think you’ll admit that, after what you did, it’s a reasonable condition.’

I asked him for a light. I wasn’t going to use up candles and oxygen. He poked his torch down the hole without hesitation. He knew by this time that he could force me to give it back.

The form they wished me to sign was lengthy but simple. It was a confession that on the -th August I had attempted to assassinate the great man, that I had undertaken this with the knowledge (they didn’t quite dare to write approval) of the British Government, and that I had been released without any punishment on condition that I remained in England. The document was signed by their chief of police, by witnesses, and by a London notary public attesting my signature, although it did not then exist. He was, to judge by his address, quite a reputable notary too.

It was a good torch, and I employed it for the next quarter of an hour in getting order into my excavations. Then I gave it him back together with his paper. There was no object in showing indignation.

‘I wouldn’t try to persuade you,’ he said, ‘if you had the usual bourgeois nationalism. A man of your type would rather be a martyr. But since you don’t believe in anything but yourself, why not sign?’

I told him that I cared for public opinion.

‘Public opinion? Well, we shouldn’t publish this document unless there was imminent danger of war and your government was acting its usual morality play. And from what I know of the English public’s temper in time of crisis, they would probably make you a popular hero.’

‘They possibly would,’ I answered. ‘But I don’t sign lies.’

‘Now, now, no heroics!’ he begged me, in his blasted patronizing manner. ‘You’re a good Englishman, and you know very well that truth is always relative. Sincerity is what matters.’

I blame myself for being drawn into argument with him, but what else could I do? I was glad to hear a cultured voice, even his, after so much solitary confinement. It was, in a sense, not unlike being stuck in the club with some bore whose opinions are very left or very right. You can’t do anything but listen to the man. You know he is wrong, but since you argue from the standpoint of individuals and he argues about a mythical mass, there is no common ground. And it’s utterly impossible to explain yourself.

I lay no stress on the great physical weariness and discomfort to which I was subject. They gave him an enormous advantage over me in intellectual power, but he had that in any case. He drove me gently from one untenable position to another. He might have been a kindly doctor investigating a moral delinquent.

‘I think,’ he said at last, ‘that it would make it a lot easier for both of us if you told me why you attempted assassination.’

‘I told your people long ago,’ I retorted impatiently. ‘I wanted to see whether it was possible, and his death would be no great loss to the world.’

‘You did then intend to shoot,’ he said, accepting my statement quite naturally. ‘I couldn’t really help you, you see, till you had admitted that.’

I perceived that I had given myself away to him and to myself. Of course I had intended to shoot.

Their methods of interrogation are devastating to the muddle-minded—ninety per cent of us, whatever class we belong to. It’s easy to make a man confess the lies he tells to himself; it’s far harder to make him confess the truth. And when by their technique the truth has been dragged from him, he is so plastic and demoralized that he will accept any interpretation the questioner chooses to put upon it. The process is equally immoral and effective whether used by psycho-analysts or secret police. They make us see our own motives, and in the horror of that exposure we are ready to confess to any enormity.

I had been through all this before, of course, but at the hands of much coarser and less intelligent examiners than Quive-Smith. Physical torture merely increased my obstinacy. I was so occupied in proving to myself that my spirit was superior to my body that the problem of whether my intelligence had not been hopelessly over-shadowed by my emotions did not arise.

‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I intended to shoot.’

‘But why?’ he asked. ‘Surely political assassination settles nothing?’

‘It has settled a good deal in history,’ I said.

‘I see. A matter of high policy then?’

‘If you wish.’

‘Then you must have talked it over with someone?’

‘No. I went alone, on my own responsibility.’

‘For the sake of your country?’

‘Mine and others.’

‘Then even though your government knew nothing about you, you were acting in a sense on their behalf?’

‘I don’t admit that,’ I said, seeing where he was heading.

‘My dear fellow!’ he sighed. ‘Now, you say you don’t sign lies. Let me make your mind a little clearer, and you will see that I don’t want you to. You have a number of friends in the Foreign Office, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You sometimes give them an informal report on your return from trips abroad. I don’t mean that you are an agent. But if you had any interesting impressions you would pass them to the right man over the lunch-table?’

‘I have done so,’ I admitted.

‘Then suppose you had succeeded and we had hushed the assassination up, would you have informed your friends that he was dead?’

‘Yes, I expect so.’

‘You do, you see, consider yourself a servant of the State,’ he said.

‘Not in this matter.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ complained Quive-Smith patiently. ‘A man with your experience of foreign society shouldn’t have this English dislike of reasonable conversation. It is precisely and only in a matter of such importance that you consider yourself a servant of the State. In your daily routine you do not. You are an individualist obeying his own laws. Yet you admit that in this matter you acted for reasons of State and that you intended to inform the State.’

I repeat that I could not escape from him, that I was imprisoned in a space eight feet by four feet high by three feet wide. The fact that he was free and I was buried alive gave me a sense of inferiority to him. Of course it did. Obviously it did. Yet why should it have? I knew that he understood nothing which mattered to me, that he had not the faintest idea of my scale of values. Therefore, myself being sure of those values, our physical circumstances should have made no difference.

I see now that he was destroying a great deal of nonsense in my mind. It was possibly that, more than anything else, which gave me the sense of wriggling at the end of a hook.

‘But I did not act at the orders of the State,’ I said.

‘I haven’t asked you to sign your name to that. With the knowledge of the government, is the phrase. That wouldn’t be a lie at all. We needn’t even stick to those words. With the knowledge of my friends—how would that be?’

‘It isn’t true.’

‘I’m not suggesting you were paid. No, I think you undertook this, as you say, more or less in a sporting spirit!’

‘I told you so,’ I said.

‘Ah, yes. But a sporting assassination! Now, really, you wouldn’t believe it yourself, you know.’

‘Why not?’ I asked furiously.

‘Because it is incredible. I want to know why you hate us to such a degree that you were ready to murder the head of the State. What were your motives?’

‘Political.’

‘But you have admitted that you care nothing for politics, and I believe you implicitly. Perhaps we mean the same thing. Shall we say that your motives were patriotic?’

‘They were not,’ I answered.

‘My dear fellow!’ he protested. ‘But they were certainly not personal!’

Not personal! But what else could they be? He had made me see myself. No man would do what I did unless he were cold-drawn by grief and rage, consecrated by his own anger to do justice where no other hand could reach.

I left the ventilator, and lay down with my head at the entrance to the inner chamber; it was the most privacy I could attain. His voice murmured on, grew angry. I didn’t care. I was fighting against the self-knowledge he had forced upon me. At last he was silent, and I surrendered to misery.

I will try to write of this calmly. I think that now I can. I am a man who has loved once, and did not know it till she was dead. Perhaps that is not quite correct. I loved with all my heart, but had little self-consciousness about it—not, at any rate, compared to the ecstasy and glory which love meant to her. I was too disciplined, too civilized. I loved her as a Chinese mandarin might love a flower, beautiful in itself, unquestionably beautiful to live with.

When I heard of her death, I did not weep. I told myself immediately that love was an illusion. I grieved that so exquisite a work of nature had been destroyed. I grieved, in my conscious mind, with that same sorrow which I would have felt had my house, in which fifteen generations have lived, been burned—an irreparable, terrible sense of loss, transcending any injury, but no hot, human grief.

That, I say, is what I thought I felt. He who has learned not to intrude his emotions upon his fellows has also learned not to intrude them upon himself.

Yet I was mad with grief and hatred. I describe myself as then mad because I did not know it. The tepidity of my sorrow was not indifference; it was the blankness which descends upon me when I dare not know what I am thinking. I know that I was consumed by anger. I remember the venomous thoughts, yet at the time I was utterly unaware of them. I suppressed them as fast as they came up into my conscious mind. I would have nothing to do with them, nothing to do with grief or hatred or revenge.

When I went to Poland I considered that I was taking quite a conventional course: to go out and kill something in rough country in order to forget my troubles. I had not admitted what I meant to kill. I did not admit it till Quive-Smith destroyed all possible self-deception.

She was so swift and sensitive. She could do no other than make a generous cause her own. Impulsive, spiritual, intelligent, all at such energy that she seemed to glow. A boy who saw such things told me that sometimes there was a visible halo of light around her. To that I am insensible. But, as I remember her, life extended beyond her body; neither touch nor sight could quite surely say—here she begins and here she ends. Her skin was not a surface; it was an indefinite glory of the palest rose and orange that chose to mould itself to those tense limbs.

She knew, I suppose, that in our mixture of impulse and intelligence we were alike. Her emotions governed her brain; though she would support her side with devastating logic, logic had nothing to do with her devotion. I should never have suspected that of myself, yet it is true. I have never taken sides, never leaped wholeheartedly into one scale or the other; nor do I realize disappointments, provided they are severe, until the occasion is long past. Yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth.

They caught her and shot her. Shot her. Reasons of State. Yes, I know, but surely the preservation of such an individual is why we suffer, why we fight, why we endure this life. Causes? Politics? Religion? But the object of them is to produce such a woman—or man, if you will. To put her, her, against a wall—there is no cause that justifies an act so satanic. It is the life of such a creature which justifies any cause she chooses to adopt. What other standard have we? In all history has any man become a Christian because he was convinced by the Athanasian creed? But how many millions have been convinced by the life of a single saint!

I declared war upon the men who could commit such sacrilege, and above all upon the man who has given them their creed. How ridiculous that one person should declare war upon a nation! That was another reason why I hid from myself what I was doing. My war was a futile cause to me, to be smiled at sympathetically just as I used to smile at her enthusiasms. Yet in fact my war is anything but futile. Its cost in lives and human suffering is low. Seek out and destroy the main body of the enemy—and I should have destroyed it but for a change of wind.

I realized that since the day I was caught I had been defeated only by the loneliness and uncertainty. How could I admit to myself that I, the mandarin, was declaring war, that I, the unfeeling lover, had been so moved by the death of my beloved? That I, the civilized, scrupulous sportsman, was behaving like an ice-cream merchant with a knife?

Well, all that, as I lay in the silence of my temporary grave, was at last admitted. And so I passed to a spiritual offensive.

The offensive! Again, how ridiculous for a man who hadn’t the room to stand up to feel on the offensive! But I was no longer the passive sufferer. My demoralization had been appalling while I knew no cause for which I suffered. Now that I did know—my God, I remembered that there were men at Ypres in 1915 whose dugouts were smaller and damper than mine!

I do not know how long I lay there. I passed in thought over great distances of geographical space, over all the movement of my attack and retreat, but there was no activity in myself or the outer world by which time could be measured. At last I was roused by the perceptible rising of the water.

I thought at first that there must be heavy rain outside, and thrust a stick down my two drains to clear them. It met hard obstructions. Of course they had found and plugged the holes. That added to my discomfort—if anything could—but put me in no danger. The water would leak out under the door as soon as it rose to the height of the sill.

I spoke through the ventilator almost with gaiety. I was buoyed up by a feeling of light-heartedness, much the same, I suppose, as that of a penitent after confession. I knew why I was in my burrow. I felt that what I had done had been worthwhile.