Free Fall (16 page)

The more I have thought over his action in adopting me, the more I have seen that there is what I might call one and a half explanations. First, of course, he would tell himself and perhaps believe that I must be suffered to come, that the shame of my reception at the altar must be atoned for, that it were better for a millstone and except ye do it to one of these little ones and so on. That is what I call the half explanation. The whole one is nastier if you
have the conventional view of things, but if not, heroic. I was like the full bottle of gin that the repentant cobbler stood on his bench so as to have the devil always in full view. He must have thought that to know a child properly, to have as it were, a son, might exorcise the demon; but he had not the art of getting to know. We remained strangers. He became, if anything, more eccentric. He would be walking in the street shaking his head, striding along, knees bent, arms gesticulating—and then he would cry out from the heart of his awful battle.

“Why? Why on me?”

Sometimes half-way through his cry he would recognize a face and turn his voice down into the social gesture: “Why—how do you do?”

Then he would writhe away, muttering. As he got older he got higher and higher in this attempt to get away from himself; and finally I think he came right out at the top to find himself a man who has missed all the sweetness of life and got nothing in exchange, a derelict, old, exhausted, indifferent. I cannot see then that we did each other much harm but little good either. He fed me, clothed me, sent me to a dame school and then the local grammar school. He was well able to afford this and I do not make the mistake of confusing his signatures on cheques with human charity. He effectually lifted me from the roaring squalor and happiness of Rotten Row to the luxury of more than one room to a person.

But where does the fear of darkness come in? The rectory itself was more daunting than he, full of unexpected levels and cupboards with one storey of vast rooms and two others of shadows and holes and corners. There were religious pictures everywhere and I liked the bad
ones much better than the few that had any aesthetic merit. My favourite Madonna was terribly saccharine, coming right out of the picture at me with power and love, buckets of it. Her colours were lovely, like the piled merchandise in Woolworth’s, so that she eclipsed that other lady floating impossibly with her child in Raphael’s air. The house itself was cold with more than lovelessness. It was supposed to have central heating from some arrangement of gas tubes in a cellar like the engine-room of a ship. Mrs. Pascoe told me that if the arrangement was turned on it ate money; a vivid phrase which combined with the dark house and the rector’s eccentricity to give me much thought. But
whether
the machinery ate money or not, what could a few puffs of lukewarm air do against those twisting stairs and corridors, those doors that never met the floor, those dormer windows, those attics where the warmth poured up and away through the warped boards? I have sat in the great drawing-room at the rectory, warming my hands at my Madonna before going up to bed and I have heard the slow tapping as a picture beat against the brown panelling though all the doors and windows were closed. I got little warmth in that house to take up to bed with me. And bed meant darkness and darkness the generalized and irrational terror. Now I have been back in these pages to find out why I am frightened of the dark and I cannot tell. Once upon a time I was not frightened of the dark and later on I was.

After the sound of the feet died away I did not know how to react or what to feel. My pictures of torment were unformed and generalized. Somewhere there was a bench in my mind, a wooden bench with clamps and a furrowed surface; but Nick Shales stood behind that bench and demonstrated the relativity of sense impressions. So I began to wonder on which side of my confusion the bench was and where my tormentors were. All that I felt or surmised was conditioned by the immediacy of extreme peril. I could not know how much warning I should have before they hurt me. I could not know whether they would speak or not or whether theirs was only the more bitter business of dealing with excruciated flesh. So I knelt in the thick darkness, holding my trousers up with both hands and flinched and listened for breathing. But an outside breathing to be heard must have been gusty indeed to penetrate that riotous duet of my lungs and heart. Also the composition of experience was disconcerting and unpredictable. Who could have told me, for example, that the darkness before my blindfolded eyes would take on the likeness of a wall so that I would keep lifting my chin in order to look over it? And I held up my trousers not for decency but protection. My flesh, though it crawled, cared nothing for the recent brain nor the important, social face. It cared only to protect my privates, our privates, the whole race. So at last in the riot of air and pulse, one hand still down at my trousers, I put up the other and tore the soft bandage away.

Nothing happened at all. The darkness stayed with me. It was not only trapped under the folds of cloth, it wrapped me round, lay close against the ball of the eye. I lifted my chin again to see over the wall which rose with me. A kind of soup or stew of all the dungeon stories flew through my head, oubliettes, walls that moved, the little ease. Suddenly, with pricking hairs, I remembered rats.

If necessary, I will kill you.

“Who’s there?”

My voice was close to my mouth as the darkness was to the balls of my eyes. I made a sweeping movement out into the air with my right hand, then down, and felt smooth stone or concrete. I had a sudden panic fear for my back and scrabbled round in the darkness and then round again. Now I could no longer remember where the door was, and cursed suddenly as I felt the first thrust of Halde’s ingenuity. He wanted me to move myself towards whatever there was here of torment and deception, would play with me, not to increase any suffering but solely to prove conclusively that he could call any reaction out of me he wanted—I let my trousers slide down and moved cautiously back on hands and knees. I found the back of my neck was hurting with the strain of my rigidity, I saw flashes of unreal light that obstructed my absence of view. I told myself fiercely that there was no view to be seen and I loosed the strain in my neck, bowing my head down towards my hand so that the pain and the lights passed away. My fingers found the bottom of a wall and instantly I doubted that it was a wall, was prepared to agree that it might be one but was too clever to be trapped by an assumption, and began to feel up, inch by inch. But Halde was cleverer than I after all, inevitably cleverer, for I
crouched up, squatted, stood, then stretched on tiptoe with one hand up; and still the wallness of the wall went with me and derided my refusal to be caught, went beyond my reach, up to where there might be a ceiling or might not according to some insoluble equation of guess and probability and me and Halde. I squatted, then crouched and worked my way to the right, I found an angle and then wood. All the time I was trying to hold a new diagram in my head without displacing the old conjectural, instinctive one of a bench and a judge. Yet the new diagram was so rudimentary that it furnished at least a place for my back. Here was a corner which was a concrete wall coming to the wood of a door. I was so glad to be guarded at my back that I forgot my trousers and huddled down, huddled into the corner, tried to squeeze my backbone
into
the right-angle. I got my knees up against my chin and put my crossed arms before my face. I was defended. The attack from no matter where would find me with flimsy bulwarks of flesh to ward it off.

Eyes that see nothing soon tire of nothing. They invent their own shapes that swim about under the lids. Shut eyes are undefended. How then, what to do? They opened against my will and once more the darkness lay right on the jellies. My mouth was open and dry.

I began to touch my face with my hands for company. I felt bristles where I should have shaved. I felt two lines from nose down, cheekbones under the skin and flesh.

I began to mutter.

“Do something. Keep still or move. Be unpredictable. Move to the right. Follow the wall along or is that what you want? Do you want me to fall on thorns? Don’t move then. I won’t move; I shall stay defended.”

I began to hutch myself to the right out of the angle. I pictured a corridor leading away and this picture had definition and was restful therefore; but then I guessed that at the far end would lie some warped thing that would seize on the shrieking flesh so though I was not more than a yard from my corner I yearned for its safety and flurried back like an insect.

“Don’t move at all.”

I began again, moving right, along the wall, a yard, five feet, hutch after hutch of the body; and then a wall struck my right shoulder and forehead, cold but a shock so white sparks spun. I came hutching back, knowing that I was returning to a right-angle next to a wooden door. I began to think of the diagram as a corridor leading sideways, a concrete corridor with a stain like a face.

“Yes.”

Hutch and crawl. My trousers got under my knees and I allowed myself enough freedom from the wall to pull them up again. Then, on knees and not hutching, I crawled sideways along this wall and hutched along that one.

Another wall.

I had a whirling glimpse in my head of mazy walls in which without my thread and with my trousers always falling down I should crawl forever. But trousers can only fall to the feet. I tried to work out in my head how many walls would be sufficient to strip me completely. I lay in my right angle, eyes shut, hearing the various sentences of my meeting with Halde and watching the amoeboid shapes that swam through my blood. I spoke aloud and my voice was hoarse.

“Took it out of me.”

I? I? Too many I’s, but what else was there in this
thick, impenetrable cosmos? What else? A wooden door and how many shapes of walls? One wall, two walls, three walls, how many more? I visualized a curious shape and an opening leading to a corridor—with many angles, a bench and an oubliette? Who was to say that the floor was level? Might this very concrete beneath me slope down, gently at first then turning more steeply till it became a footless skitter into the ant-lion’s funnel, ant-lion not in the children’s encyclopaedia, but here with harrow-high jaws of steel? I hutched and cowered my flesh over my slack pants into my angle. No one to see. A solo performance, look no eyes. No one to see a man turning into a jelly by the threat of the darkness.

Walls.

This wall and that wall and that wall and a wooden door——

But then I knew and had to confirm, even though until I could touch proof with my finger-tips I should not let the knowing loose in me. Busily I hutched along the walls, knees down, hands against concrete, fingers searching; and I came round four walls to the same wooden door, back to the same angle.

I scrambled up, trousers down, arms stretched against the wood.

“Let me out! Let me out!”

But then the thought of the Nazis outside the door hit me and a sense of the terrible ways in which steps might go down, many steps to the ultimate whatever that was, but at least worse off, worse even than uncompanioned darkness. So with instant appreciation I choked off that cry before it could bring them in. I whispered instead against wood.

“You Nazi bastards!”

Even this defiance was terrible. There were microphones which would pick up a whisper at half a mile. My bare knees ground down the floor to the concrete, I knelt among the concertina’d folds of my trousers, face crushed against wood. All at once defeat became physical and movement therefore too much effort. To flex a muscle was more than a man could do. The only life was to lie huddled, every fibre let lie as it would.

Not a corridor. A cell. This was a cell then, with concrete walls and floor and a wooden door. Perhaps the most terrible thing was the woodenness of the door, the sense that they did not need steel in their power but kept me there by sheer will of Halde. Perhaps even the lock was a fake, the door yielding to a touch—but what good was that? The old prisoner fooled by such a ruse, the man who had wasted twenty years, lived in a plain time when an open door was synonym for exit. Christian and Faithful pushing the door were escapers as soon as they found a way out. But the Nazis mirrored the dilemma of my spirit in which not the unlocking of the door was the problem but the will to step across the threshold since outside was only Halde, no noble drop from a battlement but immured in dust behind barbed wire, was prison inside prison. And this, I saw clearly as a demonstrated proposition when I lay huddled, this view of life blighted my will, blighted man’s will and was self-perpetuating. So I lay on the concrete, having discovered that the place was a cell: examined dully the view of total defeat.

And then the arithmetic of Halde’s intentions stood up before me. I was accepting something as final which was only the first step. There were many steps to follow so
that the whole flight would be an accurate picture of his learning and genius. On which step would a man at last give up his scrap of information? If a man had a scrap of information to give up?

Because—and the strength of a nervous spasm came
into
my muscles—how could a man even be sure that he knew anything? If he had not been told where the radio was, but nevertheless could plot back through the months how the news had reached him, till all the plots pointed to one group of three men and still he had nothing but that plot to go on, did he know anything? How good is a guess? What use is an expert?

I began to mutter against the concrete, like Midas among the reeds.

“There are two men in that hut—I can’t remember the number and I don’t know the names. I might be able to point them out to you on parade—but what would be the good? They would deny everything and they might well be right. If they are like me then they know nothing; but if I am right and they know where the radio is hidden, do you think white hot hooks would tear the place out of them? For they would have something to protect, some simple knowledge, some certainty to die for. They could say no because they could say yes. But what can I say who have no knowledge, no certainty, no will? I could point out to you the men like myself rather who are to be ignored, the grey and hapless helpless over whom time rolls bringing them nothing but devaluation and dust——”

But there was no answer. Nothing communicated with nothing.

How large a cell? I began to move and break up the granite of my immobility, stretched myself carefully along
my own wall; but before my knees were straight my feet came against the concrete of the other wall; and hutching round through what might be ninety degrees until my body lay along by the door I found the same. The cell was too small for me to stretch myself out.

“What did you expect? A bed-sitting room?”

Of course I could lie slantwise across the cell and then my feet would be in the unvisited far corner and my head in my own angle. But who could sleep with only the level floor as a contact? What dreams and phantoms might visit one unprotected at his back and not rolled up in cloth? And for that matter who could push his feet forward across the open space in the middle of this cell and not care what they might meet? Halde was clever, knew what he was at; they were all clever, far cleverer than one rotting prisoner whose hours were beginning to drip on him one by one. The centre was the secret—might be the secret. Of course they were psychologists of suffering, apportioning to each man what was most helpful and necessary to his case.

Unless, of course, they are cleverer even than you think. Why should they not sit back and wait for you to take the next step for yourself? Why should they rely on chance, and let you discover it in the middle there by accident? He was a student of Samuel Mountjoy, knew that Mountjoy would stay by the wall, would deduce the thing there in the middle, would endure all torment guessing and wondering and inventing—and would be forced in the end by the same insane twitch that avoids all the cracks between paving stones or touches and touches wood, would be forced, screaming but forced, forced by himself, himself forcing himself, compelled helplessly deprived of will,
sterile, wounded, diseased, sick of his nature, pierced, would have to stretch out his hand——

They knew you would explore. He knew you would not be British, you would be downhearted. They knew you would find this not-impossible confinement and go further, you might have sat slumped against the door, but
they
knew you would add a torment to the discovery of the confinement, would add the torture of the centre—and therefore would do. Would do what? Would put nothing there? Would let the whole thing be a joke? Would put there.

Would put there what is most helpful in your case, sum of all terror.

Accept what you have found and no more. Huddle into your corner, knees up to the chin, hand over the eyes to ward off the visible thing that never appears. The centre of the cell is a secret only a few inches away. The impalpable dark conceals it palpably. Be intelligent. Leave the centre alone.

The darkness was full of shapes. They moved and were self-supplying. They came, came and swam before the face of primordial chaos. The concrete ceased to be a material visualized because felt and became nothing but a cold feeling. The wood of the door was warm and soft by comparison; but not a female warmth and softness—only an absence of cold and immediate wounding. The darkness was full of shapes.

Was not the size of the cell adjusted to the exact dimension so that the impossibility of stretching out would become little by little more than the feeble will could bear?