It’s a Battlefield (11 page)

A man was talking. He could hear the voice before he could see the face. The window above was open.

‘Come to Jesus,' the voice said. ‘Come to Jesus.' The Assistant Commissioner mounted slowly; there was no lamp in the yard below, there was darkness everywhere now that the moon had gone, except where the bulb in the room lit a few feet of steel platform and a step or two. ‘Oh, come to Jesus all of you. Come to Jesus.' The Assistant Commissioner was alone with the voice. The policeman at the back door, in the pool of night, made no sound; the house had swallowed up Crosse and his companions. ‘Don't think I don't understand you. Oh, I've sinned too, friends, believe me, I've sinned too.' The Assistant Commissioner's shoe struck a spark on the penultimate step, but the voice with its absurd unction and its intolerable theatricality went on. ‘I've got a bleeding heart, friends. If you could see inside –'

The Assistant Commissioner stood on the platform and stared in. He gripped his stick and listened for Crosse's coming. He did not believe that the man would shoot, but he was a little disturbed by the flow of sweet words. The man stood before a mirror buttoning a jacket with a high collar across a great naked chest, tufted between the breasts with red hair. The Assistant Commissioner was puzzled for a moment at the blue braided uniform, but then he noticed on a chair a cap with a red band. ‘I've been as big a sinner as any of you. But I've come to Jesus and I've been forgiven.' The Assistant Commissioner swung his stick, listening for the feet upon the stairs, and the man moved and pursed his lips and turned his head to see that he was clean behind the ears. When he spoke he circled his lips as if to whistle, and the words popped out one by one like little sticky sweets.

‘Oh, if you only knew, friends, the sweetness of forgiveness, the balm, the peace.' It was impossible to doubt his sincerity. He was as sincere as the actor-manager aware for an act, for a scene, for a soliloquy's length, of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, before the packed stalls and the respectful ‘gods'.

‘When you feel the flames of Hell, friends, tearing at your heart, don't say, “It's too late”. Then's the moment to come to Jesus, and oh, the balm of it and the peace.'

The Assistant Commissioner wondered: Has he locked the door? He'll break for the window. Where's he put his revolver?

‘I've felt the flames, but I've been forgiven. I've felt the flames, but I feel the peace.' He held back his lips and examined his teeth and gums, while his voice absent-mindedly hummed: ‘Peace and balm, peace and balm.' He drew a loose match from his pocket and picked his teeth, then rubbed them up and down with his handkerchief. ‘Peace and balm, peace and balm,' he said, buttoning up his pockets, laying large plump hands across his scalp, smoothing the brossed reddish hair with a bishop's benedictory and confirming touch.

Somebody outside pulled at the door.

The man turned; peace and balm withered on his lips. ‘Who's that?' Nobody troubled to answer, but the lock shook and shivered. The Salvationist turned to the window and saw in the splash of light on the steel platform the Assistant Commissioner swinging his stick in his right hand, his legs a little apart expecting a charge. Before the lock broke he was at his bed, fumbling under the pillow; while the door poised ajar before the crash, he was back at the window with the revolver pointed. ‘Get off that escape.'

The Assistant Commissioner watched him, swung his stick, saw for a moment not the brossed hair and the fat desperate face, but an old woman, who had been too close with her money, raising her hands and screaming, while the steam from Paddington Station rose across the window and a goods train plodding down to Westbourne Grove hooted on a higher note than she could reach, so that no one heard her; any more than later the couple who lived below had heard the dreadful little sounds of sawing.

‘Get off that –' but the door was open and he swung to meet it, unable to make up his mind at whom to shoot, still dithering and undecided when the handcuffs were on his wrists. The Assistant Commissioner climbed in through the open window, Jenks examined the gun with curiosity, weighing it in his hand, opening the magazine, Crosse put the key of the cuffs in his pocket and said: ‘You're under arrest on a charge of murdering Mrs Janet Crowle at Paddington on the 4th. Anything you say –'

Jenks said: ‘It's a 1916 type. They're slow on the trigger.'

‘Come on,' Crosse said, ‘put on his cap.' The room was full of men picking things up. Somebody put the cap on the man's head. ‘Collins, you stay and clear up with Jenks,' Crosse said. He pushed the man between the shoulders so that he stumbled. ‘Get on, can't you. You'll be keeping us up late enough as it is.' The man lowered himself painfully down the stairs as if he had been beaten. ‘You ought to be ashamed,' he said, ‘hitting me.' He began to speak again in an undertone of Jesus and how he had been forgiven. ‘Holy martyrs,' he said, and on the bottom step, ‘company of the blessed.' He was impregnably entrenched against shame or retribution; he was touched only by a little momentary fear.

‘Are you coming back to the Yard, sir?' Crosse asked.

‘No,' the Assistant Commissioner said. ‘No. I'll see your report in the morning. I want to look, to look through the Streatham papers tonight.' He drew his coat carefully past the splintered woodwork and remembered what the secretary had said, sipping sherry in the Berkeley, ‘It's a battlefield.' But he had been referring to something else, the Assistant Commissioner could not remember what. I suppose, he thought, this is a victory, but there's no such thing as a decisive victory. He looked at his watch and calculated that he might perhaps allow himself twenty minutes for a little food before he sat down to the Streatham papers; the time would not be quite wasted, over his food he could consider Drover.

3

M
R
S
URROGATE
rose later than usual. At 8.30 Davis came in and drew the blinds, and a flow of pale autumnal sun filled the wash-basin and spread across the bed. Mr Surrogate grunted and turned on his side. He did not wake again until eleven.

The machines in the match factory stopped working for five minutes while everyone drank a glass of milk and pretended to eat a dry water biscuit. Some slipped it into their pockets to throw away in the lavatory at lunch time, others dropped it on the floor among the litter of discarded boxes.

Conder sucked a sweet and stared into the melancholy future. ‘Take this to the subs,' he said, and watched his exclusive story disappear in the hands of a messenger down the stairs; soon it would be leaden type and soon a column of print, and twenty-four hours later it would be pulp. It did not seem fair to Conder that the products of his brain should be condemned to the same cycle as his body. Something should be left. His body must decay, but some permanent echo should remain of the defective bathroom, the child with whooping cough. He began to write, again without thinking: ‘Reds clash behind locked Doors'. No story left his hands with the truth unheightened. Condemned to the recording of trivialities, he saw the only hope of a posthumous immortality in a picturesque lie which might catch a historian's notice as it lay buried in an old file.

Mr Surrogate rolled on to his back, opened his eyes and met his wife's wide innocent gaze. The picture did her more than justice, for she had not been beautiful and she had not been innocent. Mr Surrogate could not have endured a realistic portrait on the wall, but he was sometimes able to persuade himself that this was the essential woman, that now she was not malicious and adroit and knowledgeable, that now she understood him as he wanted to be understood. While he dressed he told the portrait that it was not every widower who would refrain from bedding with an attractive and willing girl out of respect for a dead woman. He used the term ‘bedding' for its Anglo-Saxon flavour, he had no use for Gallic flippancy; ‘she would certainly have bedded with me', he told himself and had a momentary vision of flaxen-haired warriors tumbling earnestly upon rushes before departing to their curved boats. He remembered that he had made an appointment with her for the afternoon and decided that he would notice the effect upon her intelligent but uncultivated brain of the new abstract film at the Academy. ‘She is worth studying,' he informed his wife, who dangled with propriety on the wall.

If she could only stay there, and in the small engraved casket at Golders Green (‘with love for the wife and homage to the artist'), but she leapt at him from every wall of Caroline Bury's drawing-room. He was alone for three minutes with her; nowhere to turn, nowhere to look; this she had painted in Greenwich Park, this at Antibes; he could remember the very occasion in Cornwall when this picture had composed itself in her mind, and she had left him immediately to make a note of it; he had complained afterwards in a letter to Mrs Bury that she did not respect his manhood. Now in the rather dim and shrouded room he turned with real agony to meet the only person left alive who knew him thoroughly, to whom in past years he had confessed all his hesitations and indeterminacies, his meannesses and studied generosities, his intellectual chaos. ‘How are you, Caroline? How long it is,' but he winced and withdrew from the recognition of time passing, time greying the hair, making the body less agile and the brain more hopeless.

Caroline Bury advanced into the room with an air of vagueness and distinction. She gave an impression of not knowing whom she might find in her own house, what curious personality would speak from between the bric-à-brac with which the rooms were a little overcrowded. Her haggard sunken face would have had its beauty recognized at once on an ancient fresco or an Eastern tomb, but in a theatre or a bookshop or a modern street it was likely to arouse only curiosity; Mr Surrogate had never seen her outside her home.

She peered at him shortsightedly and grated a greeting in a voice full of discords, but again the hearer had to recognize that in another age and in another continent this sound like the scraping of metal discs, might have been thought beautiful. ‘I want to talk to you before the others come.' In her brain Mr Surrogate knew were stored all his wife's letters, but though he was embarrassed and embittered by the knowledge, he could not resist the compliment of her interest. After all, in this room Henry James had constructed his sentences like Chinese boxes which held at the centre a tiny colloquialism; Wilde had unloosed a torrent of epigrams; Hardy had wondered what it was all about.

‘Tell me about Drover.'

Mr Surrogate had spoken of enlisting her interest; he had known, at the time, that was unnecessary. Listening to the writers round her table, Caroline Bury appeared to have a passion for literature, listening to the politicians she seemed the last of the political hostesses; those who knew her well were aware that literature and politics were only the territories in which she had chosen to exercise her passion for charity, a charity that was satirical, practical to the point of cynicism, the kind of charity which no man was too proud or vain to refuse.

He told her all he knew, humbly, a little grudgingly, watching the wheels of a fine intellect beginning to turn. He was jealous. Beneath Drover's story, buried only just beneath the succeeding words, ‘policeman – wife – Hyde Park – appeal', buried so shallowly that between the phrases scraps of the old bones showed plain (‘It reminds me . . . by the way . . . you remember'), lay his own tale, the first example he knew of Caroline Bury's passion to help.

‘Of course I remember. But go on. I want to hear about Drover.'

The grey sea lapped the shingle and the rain drummed on the asphalt promenade. Mr Surrogate, a much thinner and much younger Mr Surrogate, walked up and down in the rain talking to himself, a telegram crumpled in his hand. He had been married six months and he had no money and his wife was ill in London and the doctor said that she must go south. He returned wet to the skin to Justin Bury's house, where he was spending the week-end, and at lunch he had broken down, shivering and sneezing and weeping. It was his first complete humiliation, and when in later years he had humiliated himself again and again, Mr Surrogate himself could not have said how far he was influenced by the knowledge of how well it had paid the first time. Caroline Bury had sent them both to Hyères. Soon after that Justin died, of a cold, during the hot summer of 1921, in Spain.

‘Do you remember your house by the sea?'

‘Of course I do. But go on. How old is his wife?' When he had finished, Caroline Bury said with a high bird-like screech of amazement and disbelief: ‘But it's absurd. They can't hang him. A fit of temper.'

‘On Thursday,' Mr Surrogate said.

‘Too absurd. We must do something. I'll ask the C.I.D. man – what's he called? – the Assistant Commissioner to lunch.'

‘Do you know everyone, Caroline?'

‘I haven't seen him since he came back from the East. But we were very dear friends once. Of course he's incredibly pompous.'

‘He won't be able to do anything.'

‘My dear Philip, don't be so defeatist. The whole thing is absurd and therefore something can be done.' Mr Surrogate opened his lips to protest against this assumption that life of its nature was not absurd, but cleared his throat instead. What was the good? Caroline Bury had Faith. He was not quite certain in what she had faith, whether in the God of the Jews, of Rome, of Canterbury, of Mrs Eddy or of Mrs Besant, but however vague her faith, it was unshakable; perhaps it was unshakable because of its vagueness. It was useless to disprove the divinity of Christ, for then it would be found that this was not one of the articles of her belief. She could waive the divinity of Christ, she could waive the Old Testament and the Gospels and the Acts. She could waive the Koran, she could even waive the sacred books of India; these were minor points. She had Faith.