Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (18 page)

“Well … (look out, somebody’s listening!) … Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!” says Crowne. And so they part.

Hands walks East. Soon he pauses: stands, biting his nails—just as he’s biting them now—and then goes into a telephone booth. He dials a number and talks:

“Give me 55X,” he says. “Here is CBH/888. Take this down.
Crowne.
Got it. 76,
Goering
Boulevard.
Got it? Yes. Seditious talk. Subversive activities. Spreading discontent. Treasonable propaganda. An enemy of the Reich. Go get him. He will be home at six.”

*

A pause. A horrified silence. “What?” says Hands. “What? Do you mean to tell me that I’d do that? Me? Me, Hands? Why, you…. What, me? Turn nark? Turn informer? Rat? Me? On my pal? On my pal Crowne? Or on any man, let alone Crowne? You …”

Old Silence replies: “Listen a moment, Sergeant Hands. We were imagining a case. Still imagine that the Nazis came to power here.”

“Well?”

“You’ve got a daughter.”

“Two.”

“And a son?”

“Two.”

“In ten years’ time, your daughters will be young women, and your sons young men. You love them, Sergeant?”

“Better ’n anything.”

“And if a Nazi official threatened to send your girls to a House, for the entertainment of German soldiers, or workers? And to do some terrible things to your sons? You’d do anything on earth to stop that, wouldn’t you? You’d consider your daughters and sons more
important
than your old pal, wouldn’t you?”

With a strange touch of tenderness, the savage Sergeant Crowne says: “Hands. I wouldn’t bear you any grudge if you turned me in to save your kids. I’d see your point, and we’d still be pals.”

“By Christ,” says Hands, quietly, “I wouldn’t be alive to see that day, Old Silence. Not while I had even a tooth left to fight with.”

“That is how Dictatorships are kept going, though,” says the Schoolmaster.

“Over my dead body,” says Hands.

“And mine,” says Crowne.

*

Sunday. We rise thirty minutes later. This being a day of rest, we only have to scrub the hut. The Catholics go out early, for
Communion
. There is a United Board service; a spiritual coalition of Baptists and Congregationalists, held in the place called the U.B., in which there is a tea-bar … a good tea-bar, at which there presides an old soldier with one finger missing, and an Alsatian dog with a
nonconformist
air. Almost everybody else is marched off to Church Parade. The Camp is silent. In our hut only four or five men remain—three Catholics, a Jew called Shaw, and Old Silence, who is down as an Agnostic.

Shaw
is the four letters in the middle of
Warshawsky.
The name was sawn down to fit English tongues, when Guardsman Shaw’s father
came West from Czestochowa, where the Black Virgin is, in
Southwest
Poland. There had been rumour of a pogrom. In Kishinev,
unborn
children of Jews had been delivered prematurely and
posthumously
with bayonets. Warshawsky got out. Guardsman Shaw was born on British soil; but only just. He is a tallish, slender, pensive man, to whom are attributed strange rites and outlandish ceremonies.
During
eight days every year, he eats no bread, because the bread of the ancient Israelites, delivered from the Land of Egypt and the House of Bondage, had not time to rise before they packed it. There is a period of twenty-four hours in which no food and drink passes his lips, and he keeps the Great White Fast in a synagogue, to the accompaniment of ardent prayers and strange, nostalgic songs. Here, he eats what he gets; but at home nobody would dream of cooking meat which did not come from a beast that chewed the cud and also had cloven hoofs, and had not been killed according to a certain ritual. His father has never shaved, in obedience to Mosaic law, and would die sooner than eat a milk pudding after a dash of meat, and wouldn’t eat at all if he couldn’t wash his hands first. Shaw has never tasted pork, oysters, lobsters, eels, rabbits, or anything that creeps or crawls, or any fish that has not both fins and scales. He gives away his breakfast bacon, and will not smoke after sunset on Friday until after sunset Saturday, on account of the law which forbids the kindling of a flame on the Sabbath. There is money in his family: his father made a good deal out of gowns. Guardsman Shaw, in civilian life, is an accountant. He went to a good school. A studious and on the whole unworldly person, he abandoned his office and volunteered for the Guards because he felt that in this manner he stood a good chance of getting at some Nazis hand-to-hand. Beneath his bookish exterior, something simmers. He is the type of the fighting student that held the walls of Jerusalem against Titus, and argued over the split hairs of the Law as the catapults quivered and the javelins hissed past. He smokes interminably, never drinks, and possesses a kipper-coloured violin upon which he plays melancholy music. He needs to be watched: otherwise, he will switch the radio
on to a quartette in Something Minor or a Concerto in D before you know where you are.

A young Catholic named Dooley says, rather severely:

“You know what, Shaw? I bet they wouldn’t let you do things like this in Germany. Believing what you like, and all that.”

Shaw, who tends to sententiousness in argument, says: “They couldn’t stop me believing. They could stop my expressing my beliefs,” and he picks a phrase of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D, pizzicato, out of the violin on his knee.

“You ought to think yourself lucky,” says Dooley.

“I do,” says Shaw; and tries to get the viola parts of Beethoven’s Quartet in C Molle, but fails. “I am lucky. This is the best place in the world to live in. My father came from Poland, when Poland was part of the Russian Empire. He was astonished when he found that the English police were polite to him, and that they didn’t expect bribes. He couldn’t believe that I, his son, would have equal rights with any other British-born man. Jews had no rights worth mentioning where he came from.

“He came here just before I was born, with my mother and a sister of mine, two years old. Well, it happened that he did fairly well after a good deal of hard work, and after a year or so was actually able to afford a holiday at the seaside for us all. I was a very little baby. My sister could walk: she was a beautiful child. One morning, my father took my sister and me for a walk along the front. He was pushing me in a pram, very slowly, while my sister toddled along by his side, holding on to him. I believe he was just about to cross the road, when a great big man—my father must have told me this story a hundred times—a great big man in a check suit, with a beard and a fine
swaggering
air, stopped and looked at me, and gently pinched my cheek; and looked at my little sister, and patted her on the head, and said: ‘Fine children.’ ‘Thank God,’ said my father. The gentleman in the check suit then asked him how old we were, and my father told him: ‘The boy is eleven months old, and the girl is four, bless them, Mister.’
Then the gentleman put a hand in his waistcoat, and took out a golden sovereign, and gave it to my sister; said: ‘Good morning to you,’ and walked on. My father, looking after him, saw men who were passing raising their hats to him. He asked somebody who it was. It was King Edward the Seventh.

“My father was overwhelmed. There was a country for you! A King, an Emperor! And he walked along without a bodyguard, and stopped a poor Jewish tradesman, and was civil to him and kind to his children, in the open street! And my poor old father, who had some very bad times still fresh in his memory, burst into tears. My sister cried too. I, catching the infection, howled at the top of my voice. After that my father walked with his head held high. He felt he was part of a
wonderful
country, and he would have died for England after that. So would I. Sometimes I feel that even the English don’t realise what they’ve got, in England. That wireless…. The other night somebody got Hamburg, and we listened to Lord Haw-Haw: listened, and laughed, and of our own accord cut him off. Does it occur to you how marvellous it is that we can do that? Fascists and Nazis are sent to prison for listening to English broadcasts. And in the library, there’s a copy of
Mein
Kampf,
though nobody bothers to read it. Think myself lucky? I am lucky. So are you.”

“And you, Silence,” says Dooley. “I bet you wouldn’t be allowed not to believe in anything anywhere else.”

“And you, Dooley,” says Old Silence. “The Catholics have been persecuted in their time, too. But who says I believe in nothing?”

“You’ve got no religion,” says Dooley.

“Well?”

“Then what can you believe in?”

The man called Old Silence sits still and looks out at the bright morning, while Shaw, caressing the strings of his violin with the white bow, produces a gentle melody.

“The other night,” says Old Silence, almost to himself, “I couldn’t
sleep. I was thinking. I was thinking of gods, and men, and prayers; and there came into my mind something …”

“What?” asks Dooley, for Old Silence has paused.

“… something that might be a prayer.”

“To
who?
To
what?”
asks Dooley.

“
For
what?” asks Shaw.

“It went something like this,” says Old Silence. Half-closing his eyes, and looking at a beam of sunlight in which the tiny dust-motes dance, he gravely declaims: