Youth Without God (15 page)

“Here, meet a former colleague of mine.”

Nelly looked up at the ceiling, while her comrade eyed me critically. She straightened her brassière.

We sat down. The schnapps warmed me to the heart. We were the only party in “The Lily.” The proprietress put on her glasses and started reading the newspaper. She leant
over the bar and gave you the impression that she wanted to cover her ears with her hands. She hadn’t an inkling as to what was going on, and it was a matter of indifference to her.

I wondered what Caesar had meant when he called these two women the bait—the lob-worms.

“Well, what’s the plan?” I asked him.

He bent very close to me.

“My original idea was to keep you out of this, my dear colleague, for it’s a pretty mess, and I didn’t want you implicated. But then it occurred to me that it couldn’t do any harm if we had another witness. The three of us, the two ladies and myself, wanted to reconstruct the crime.”

“Reconstruct the crime?”

“After a fashion, yes.”

“How d’you mean?”

“We want the fish to give us a repetition of the murder.”

“What?”

“Yes. According to an old-fashioned and very ingenious plan, I wanted to reconstruct the whole affair in a bed.”

“In a bed?”

“Note well, colleague”—he nodded and lit up his death’s head. “Miss Nelly was to wait for the fish outside the cinema. He thinks she loves him.”

He laughed. But Miss Nelly didn’t join in. She made a face, and spat.

“Don’t do that here,” grinned her comrade. “Spitting forbidden by the authorities.”

“The authorities can go to hell.”

“Now, now, no politics,” Caesar broke in, and turned to me again.

“Our plan was to get the fish drunk here in this box, till he couldn’t go on swimming. Then we could have caught
him in our hands. Then the two ladies would have taken him through that unobtrusive little door into their room: and then the logical sequence of events would be this—”

The fish, Julius Caesar went on to explain, would drop off to sleep, while Nelly lay on the floor, her comrade having covered her with a sheet and made her look like a corpse.

Then the buxom little girl was to rush in and shriek at the sleeping fish: “What have you done, lad, what have you done?”

Caesar himself would open the door at that moment, call for the police, and accuse the drunken fish of having murdered Nelly, as he’d murdered that other one.

“We’d have had a great scene, colleague. I’d have given him a box on the ear into the bargain—I’ll bet he’d have given himself away, if only by the merest word—and I’d have landed him by now.”

I had to smile.

Caesar looked at me, perhaps indignantly. Then he went on:

“You’re right. Man proposes and God disposes. While we sit here getting annoyed because somebody won’t bite, all the time they may be floundering in the net.”

The net …

Then I heard Caesar saying:

“You can’t forget the girl who’s innocent; but I’m thinking of the murdered boy, too.”

The murdered boy? Yes, N. I’d totally forgotten him. I’d thought of everything else—I’d even thought of his parents, if not very graciously. But never for a moment of N himself.

N, murdered, struck down by a stone. N, who existed no more.

I LEFT “THE LILY” AND TURNED HOMEWARDS; and now my thoughts of the dead N would give me no peace. They stayed with me even in my room, they were in my bed. I tried to force myself to sleep. It was useless.

I kept hearing N’s voice.

“You’ve forgotten, sir, that you too share in the guilt of my murder. Who broke open the box? You or I? Didn’t I appeal to you then, ‘Help me, sir, I really didn’t do it!’? But you wanted to frustrate those plans—I know, I know, it’s over now.”

Yes, finished.

Time may pass, but there are wounds that remain.

The minutes seemed to go faster and faster, passing me by. Soon the clock struck. I heard N’s voice again.

“Do you remember a history lesson, sir, last winter term? We were doing the Middle Ages and you told us that the executioner, before the execution, would always ask the culprit’s pardon for the wrong he was about to do him—for guilt can only be redeemed by guilt.”

Was there no other way?

Am I the executioner? I wondered. Must I ask T’s pardon? My thoughts overwhelmed me. I started up.

“Where are you going?”

“Away—far away.”

“Stop.”

N stood before me, barring my way. I could not get past him: I wanted his voice to cease.

He had no eyes now, and yet I could not escape his stare. I switched on the light, and noticed the lamp-shade. It was covered in dust.

And still I thought of T. Was he swimming up to the bait?

“Why do you think only of yourself?” asked N suddenly.

“Of myself?”

“You’re still thinking of the fish. But you and the fish are one.”

“One?”

“You want to catch him—don’t you?”

“Yes—but how does that make him and me one?”

“You forget the executioner, sir—the hangman that must ask the murderer’s pardon. In that secret hour when one sin is redeemed by another, the murderer and the executioner melt into one being—can you understand?”

Yes, gradually, I began to understand. But I wished to know no more.

Fear?

“Still you let him go on swimming,” came N’s voice. “Already you begin to pity him—”

Yes, his mother had no time …

“But you should think of my mother too, and, above all, of me. Even if you catch the fish, not for my sake, but for the sake of the girl—this girl who is in your thoughts no longer—”

He was right, I realized. It was many hours since I had thought of her. What was her plight now? It was growing colder and colder.

I hardly knew her. I’d seen her, yes, but that was in moonlight, and clouds darkened the earth. What colour was her hair? Fair or dark? Funny, I didn’t know.

I was very cold. Everything was floating away from me.

I saw the court-room again. My other memory—how she nodded to me before she told the truth. I felt that I was there on her account.

N had listened to my thoughts.

“She nodded to you?”

“Yes.”

And her eyes were before me again.

“But her eyes aren’t like that,” said N. “She has little, shrewd, shifty eyes that are everywhere at once. Thief’s eyes.”

“Thief’s eyes?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly N became an awful figure.

“The eyes that you saw were not hers. They were another’s.”

IN THE DEPTHS OF THE NIGHT, I HEARD THE doorbell ring. Could it be anyone at that hour, or had my senses played me a trick? But there it was again. I sprang out of bed, put on my dressing-gown, and left my room, to run into my landlady who stood sleepy and bewildered on the landing. She looked at me anxiously.

“Who can it be?”

I went to the door and raised my voice.

“Who’s there?”

“The police.”

“Heaven help us!” cried the landlady, terrified. “What have you done?”

“I?—nothing!”

Two policemen entered. They asked for the teacher. I told them I was the man they wanted.

“We’ve only come for information. Get into some clothes and hurry. You’re coming with us—”

“Where?”

“All details later.”

I dressed in bewilderment, and in a few minutes found myself in a car, with the policemen silent at my side.

Where was our destination? The smart houses came to an end, the poor quarter followed—but those ugly streets passed and we came to the villas of the rich.

“In God’s name—what’s happened?” I asked, in growing fear.

“We’ll tell you later.”

We drove on past the tramway terminus.

Now I knew.

The high gates stood open, we drove through without a pause.

The hall was full of people—among them I recognized the old porter and the footman who had shown me into the rose and gold drawing-room. A high official of the police was sitting at a table, with a clerk taking notes at his side. I was greeted by hostile looks. What was my crime, then? The official called me to him. What did he want with me?

“We have a few questions to ask you. Yesterday afternoon you wished to see this lady—” He glanced to his right.

I saw a woman in a wonderful evening frock, a woman of elegant and sheltered life—T’s mother. Why was that hatred in her eyes as she stared at me?

“Answer,” ordered the official.

“Yes—I wanted to speak to her, but unfortunately she had no time.”

“And what did you want to tell her?”

That would have sounded absurd. I stopped. Yet I was determined to tell no lies now, for I saw the net.

“I wanted to tell this lady,” I began slowly, “that I had certain definite suspicions regarding her son—”

The mother sprang up before I could get any further.

“Lies!” she shrieked. “A tissue of lies. He’s guilty—he alone!
He
drove my son to his death!”

To his death? I reeled.

“What’s happened, then?” I cried.

“Quiet!” ordered the official.

And now I realized that the fish had swum into the net. He lay stretched out on the land now, floundering no longer. It was finished.

An hour before, on her return home, his mother had found a note on her dressing-table: “The teacher has driven me to death.” She ran to T’s room, to find it empty. She spread the alarm through the house. A close search revealed nothing, whereupon the household scoured the grounds, shouting the boy’s name. There was no answer.

He was found at last—near a ditch. Hanged.

His mother looked at me now. She wasn’t crying. Perhaps she couldn’t cry. The official showed me the note—a torn slip of paper, without signature. Suddenly I wondered: had he written something more? I looked at his mother.

“Is that all he wrote?” I asked the official.

The mother averted her eyes.

“Yes, that’s all,” answered the official. “Explain it.”

T’s mother was a beauty. I noticed that her
décolleté
was lower at the back than in front. She had certainly never known what it meant to starve. Her shoes were modish, her stockings so sheer that she appeared to wear none; but her legs were thick. Her tiny handkerchief was scented with some very expensive perfume. I couldn’t recall the name of it.

But if her husband had no business, she would only have the scent of her own sweat.

Her stare was almost contemptuous now. Two bright, round eyes. What had T told me over that ice-cream?—“But I haven’t got fish eyes. I’ve got eyes like a doe, my mother always says so.” Did she say that she had too? I couldn’t remember now. I looked at her. Wait, my gentle doe! Snow will fall soon, you’ll run nearer to men. But I’ll
drive you back into the forest, where the snow lies fathom deep. You’ll stay and hunger there, in ice and frost. Look at me once again, I’ll speak.

AND I TOLD THEM ABOUT THE BOY WHO HAD murdered N: I told them how T always wanted to watch and to observe how a human being came into the world, and how he died. Birth and death and all that lay between—he must know everything. He would have probed into every secret, but only to remain aloof, with his own contempt. He knew no awe: it was only cowardice which composed his fear. His love for reality was but a hatred for the truth.

And as I spoke I felt, suddenly, a wonderful sense of relief that T existed no more. I was glad, glad! For in spite of one’s own guilt towards him, it is splendid and beautiful when an evil-doer is destroyed.

I kept nothing back.

“There is a saw-mill that lies idle,” I told them, “and there are children who sit in the windows painting dolls—”

“What has that to do with the case?”

The mother glanced out of the window, where the night lay. She appeared to be listening—for what? A step? The high gates were still open.

Suddenly I heard myself saying:

“It was absurd to try and frustrate those plans—”

T’s mother stared at me again.

“It is possible that I drove your son to his death—”

I stopped.

Why was she smiling—still? Had madness come? She began to laugh—louder and louder. Hysteria: she shrieked and whimpered.

I heard only the word “God.”

Then she screamed:

“It’s no good!”

The others tried to calm her, but she fought them off, though the footman retained a firm hold.

“It’s sawing, it’s sawing!” she wailed.

What?—the saw-mill? Could she see the children in the windows? And that One who did not care whether she had time or not? For He goes through every street, great or small.

She was still fighting the others off: and she let fall a scrap of paper—as if it had been struck out of her hand. The official picked it up.

The torn, crumpled half sheet belonged to the note which had been left on the dressing-table—“The teacher has driven me to my death.”

And here T had written his reason: “For he knows that I murdered N. With the stone.”

An intense stillness held the room.

The mother seemed to have collapsed. She sat quite motionless now.

Suddenly she smiled again and nodded to me.

But it was not she who smiled.

Nor were those her eyes.

Still as the dark pools in the little woods of my homeland.

And sad, like children without light.

So God looked upon us here.

Once I had thought that His eyes would be malicious, piercing—but no. For God is Truth.

“Tell them it was you who broke open the box”—I heard the voice again. “Do my will and grieve me no more.”

The mother went slowly up to the table and began to speak—quietly, but firmly now.

“I had wanted to spare myself the humiliation,” she said. “But when the teacher mentioned the children in the windows, I thought, ‘It’s no good!’ ”

TO-MORROW I AM GOING TO AFRICA.

There are flowers on my table—a parting present from my good landlady.

My parents have written to me. They are glad I have a job again, but sad because it is overseas and so far away.

There is another letter on the table too. In a blue envelope.