Authors: Graham Greene
The Tenth Man (3 page)
Tripp is arrested by the police immediately he leaves the German Embassy. He is escorted home where he is allowed to pack a bag. Mrs Tripp is not there. Cobb shows him a decoded cable from London: ‘Dismiss Agent
XY
.27 [his wife]. Intercepted correspondence to school friend shows she is carrying on intrigue with … of Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry instead of … of Foreign Ministry. Unreliable.’
Tripp says goodbye to his home, to Cobb and Miss Jixon, to his make-up box, presented to him by the Anglo-Latesthian Society, to his collected works of Gilbert and Sullivan. He empties his pockets of the false moustache, soft hats, spectacles. ‘These were the trouble,’ he says sadly to Miss Jixon.
He is put on board a plane to England.
An official enquiry awaits him at
HQ
. His
Ambassador’s
report has been received, but opinion among his judges before he comes is divided. The trouble is that his reports have been welcomed by the armed forces. The whole Secret Service will look foolish if they have to recall hundreds of reports over the last two years—ones which have been acclaimed as ‘most valuable’. The head of the enquiry points out that it will discredit the whole Service. Any of their agents could have done the same. None of them will be believed in future.
A message arrives that Tripp is in the outer office, and the youngest member of the enquiry—a dapper, earnest
FO
type—goes out to see him. He whispers to him urgently, ‘Everything will be all right. Deny everything.’
‘If only,’ the chairman is saying, ‘he hadn’t sent that last message. All his other messages are matters of opinion. You remember the underground works at Leipzig. After all, they are underground—we can’t be
sure
he invented them. General Hays particularly liked that report. He said it was a model report. We’ve used it in our training courses. But this one—it gives a time and date for zero hour, and the source claimed—the German Military Attaché himself—you can’t get round that. Such and such divisions will cross the frontiers at ten o’clock today. If we hadn’t been warned by the Ambassador we’d have had the whole Army, Navy and Air Force ringing us up to know who the devil had sent such nonsense. Come in, Tripp. Sit
down
. This is a very serious matter. You know the charges against you.’
‘I admit everything.’
The dapper young man whispers excitedly, ‘No, no, I said deny.’
‘You can’t possibly admit everything,’ the chairman interrupts with equal excitement, ‘it’s for us to tell you what you admit and what you don’t admit. Of course this last message—’ The telephone rings: he raises the receiver: ‘Yes, yes. Good God!’
He puts the receiver down and addresses the enquiry board. ‘The Germans crossed the Polish frontier this morning. Under the circumstances, gentlemen, I think we should congratulate Mr Tripp on his last message from Latesthia. It is unfortunate that bungling in the British Embassy resulted in no use being made of it—but those after all are the chances of the Service. We can say with confidence among ourselves that the Secret Service was informed of the date and time of war breaking out.’
Tripp is given the
O B E
. He is also appointed chief lecturer at the course for recruits to the Secret Service. We see him last as he comes forward to the blackboard, cue in hand, after being introduced to the recruits as ‘one of our oldest and soundest officers—the man who obtained advance news of the exact date and even the hour of the German attack—Richard Tripp will lecture on “How to Run a Station Abroad”.’
THE TENTH MAN
PART
I
1
MOST OF THEM
told the time very roughly by their meals, which were unpunctual and irregular: they amused themselves with the most childish games all through the day, and when it was dark they fell asleep by tacit consent—not waiting for a particular hour of darkness for they had no means of telling the time exactly: in fact there were as many times as there were prisoners. When their imprisonment started they had three good watches among thirty-two men, and a second-hand and unreliable—or so the watch-owners claimed—alarm clock. The two wrist-watches were the first to go: their owners left the cell at seven o’clock one morning—or seven-ten the alarm clock said—and presently, some hours later, the watches reappeared on the wrists of two of the guards.
That left the alarm clock and a large old-fashioned silver watch on a chain belonging to the Mayor of Bourge. The alarm clock belonged to an engine driver called Pierre, and a sense of competition grew between the two men. Time, they considered, belonged to them and not to the twenty-eight other men. But there were two times, and each man defended his own with a terrible passion. It was a passion which separated them from their comrades, so that at any hour of the day they could be found in the same corner of the great
concrete
shed: they even took their meals together.
Once the mayor forgot to wind his watch: it had been a day of rumour, for during the night they had heard shooting from the direction of the city, just as they had heard it before the two men with wrist-watches were taken away, and the word ‘hostage’ grew in each brain like a heavy cloud which takes by a caprice of wind and density the shape of letters. Strange ideas grow in prison and the mayor and the engine driver drew together yet more intimately: it was as though they feared that the Germans chose deliberately the men with watches to rob them of time: the mayor even began to suggest to his fellow prisoners that the two remaining timepieces should be kept hidden rather than that all should lose their services, but when he began to put this idea into words the notion suddenly seemed to resemble cowardice and he broke off in mid-sentence.
Whatever the cause that night, the mayor forgot to wind his watch. When he woke in the morning, as soon as it was light enough to see he looked at his watch. ‘Well,’ Pierre said, ‘what is the time? What does the antique say?’ The hands stood like black neglected ruins at a quarter to one. It seemed to the mayor the most terrible moment of his life: worse, far worse, than the day the Germans fetched him. Prison leaves no sense unimpaired, and the sense of proportion is the first to go. He looked from face to face as though he had committed an act of treachery: he had
surrendered
the only true time. He thanked God that there was no one there from Bourge. There was a barber from Etain: three clerks: a lorry-driver: a greengrocer: a tobacconist—every man in the prison but one was of a lower social plane than himself, and while he felt all the greater responsibility towards them, he also felt they were easy to deceive, and he told himself that after all it was better so: better that they should believe they still had the true time with them than trust to their unguided guesses and the second-hand alarm clock.
He made a rapid calculation by the grey light through the bars. ‘It’s twenty-five minutes past five,’ he said firmly and met the gaze of the one whom he was afraid might see through his deceit: a Paris lawyer called Chavel, a lonely fellow who made awkward attempts from time to time to prove himself human. Most of the other prisoners regarded him as an oddity, even a joke: a lawyer was not somebody with whom one lived: he was a grand doll who was taken out on particular occasions, and now he had lost his black robe.
‘Nonsense,’ Pierre said. ‘What’s come over the antique? It’s just a quarter to six.’
‘A cheap alarm like that always goes fast.’
The lawyer said sharply as though from habit, ‘Yesterday you said it was slow.’ From that moment the mayor hated Chavel: Chavel and he were the only men of position in the prison: he told himself that
never
would he have let Chavel down in that way, and immediately began tortuously to seek for an explanation—some underground and disgraceful motive. Although the lawyer seldom spoke and had no friends, the mayor said to himself, ‘Currying popularity. He thinks he’ll rule this prison. He wants to be a dictator.’
‘Let’s have a look at the antique,’ Pierre said, but the watch was safely tethered by its silver chain weighted with seals and coins to the mayor’s waistcoat. It couldn’t be snatched. He could safely sneer at the demand.
But that day was marked permanently in the mayor’s mind as one of those black days of terrible anxiety which form a private calendar: the day of his marriage: the day when his first child was born: the day of the council election: the day when his wife died. Somehow he had to set his watch going and adjust the hands to a plausible figure without anyone spotting him—and he felt the Paris lawyer’s eyes on him the whole day. To wind the watch was fairly simple: even an active watch must be wound, and he had only to wind it to half its capacity, and then at some later hour of the day give it absent-mindedly another turn or two.
Even that did not pass unnoticed by Pierre. ‘What are you at?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘You’ve wound it once. Is the antique breaking down?’
‘I wasn’t thinking,’ the mayor said, but his mind had never been more active. It was much harder to find a chance to adjust the hands which for more than half
the
day pursued Pierre’s time at a distance of five hours. Even nature could not here provide an opportunity. The lavatories were a row of buckets in the yard and for the convenience of the guards no man was allowed to go alone to a bucket: they went in parties of at least six men. Nor could the mayor wait till night, for no light was allowed in the cell and it would be too dark to see the hands. And all the time he had to keep a mental record of how time passed: when a chance occurred he must seize it, without hesitating over the correct quartering of an hour.
At last towards evening a quarrel broke out over the primitive card game—a kind of ‘snap’ with homemade cards—that some of the men spent most of their time playing. For a moment eyes were fixed on the players and the mayor took out his watch and quickly shifted the hands.
‘What is the time?’ the lawyer asked. The mayor started as if he had been caught in the witness-box by a sudden question: the lawyer was watching him with the strained unhappy look that was habitual to him, the look of a man who has carried nothing over from his past to buttress him in the tragic present.
‘Twenty-five minutes past five.’
‘I had imagined it was later.’
‘That is my time,’ the mayor said sharply. It was indeed
his
time: from now on he couldn’t recognize even the faintest possibility of error: his time could not be wrong because he had invented it.
2
LOUIS CHAVEL NEVER
understood why the mayor hated him. He couldn’t mistake the hatred: he had seen that look too often in court on the faces of witnesses or prisoners. Now that he was himself a prisoner he found it impossible to adjust himself to the new point of view, and his tentative approaches to his fellows failed because he always thought of them as natural prisoners, who would have found themselves prisoners in any case sooner or later because of a theft, a default or a crime of sex—while he himself was a prisoner by mistake. The mayor under these circumstances was his obvious companion: he recognized that the mayor was not a natural prisoner, although he remembered clearly a case of embezzlement in the provinces in which a mayor had been concerned: he made awkward advances and he was surprised and mystified by the mayor’s dislike.
The others were kind to him and friendly: they answered when he spoke to them, but the nearest they ever came to starting a conversation with him was to wish him the time of day. It seemed to him after a while terrible that he should be wished the time of day even in a prison. ‘Good day,’ they would say to him and ‘Good night,’ as though they were calling out to him in a street as he passed along towards the courts. But they were all shut together in a concrete shed thirty-five feet long by seventeen wide.
For more than a week he had tried his best to behave like a natural prisoner, he had even forced his way into the card parties, but he had found the stakes beyond him. He would not have grudged losing money to them, but his resources—the few notes he had brought into the prison and had been allowed to keep—were beyond his companions’ means, and he found the stakes for which they wished to play beyond his own. They would play for such things as a pair of socks, and the loser would thrust his naked feet into his shoes and wait for his revenge, but the lawyer was afraid to lose anything which stamped him as a gentleman, a man of position and property. He gave up playing, although in fact he had been successful and won a waistcoat with several buttons missing. Later in the dusk he gave it back to its owner, and that stamped him for ever in all their eyes—he was no sportsman. They did not condemn him for that. What else could you expect of a lawyer?
No city was more crowded than their cell, and week by week Chavel learned the lesson that one can be unbearably lonely in a city. He would tell himself that every day brought the war nearer to an end—somebody must sometime be victorious and he ceased to care much who the victor was so long as an end came. He was a hostage, but it seldom occurred to him that hostages were sometimes shot. The death of his two companions only momentarily shook him: he felt too lost and abandoned to recognize the likelihood that
he
might himself be picked out from the crowded cell. There was safety as well as loneliness in numbers.
Once the wish to remember, to convince himself that there was an old life from which he had come and to which he would one day return, became too acute for silence. He shifted his place in the cell alongside one of the clerks, a thin silent youth who was known for some reason to his companions by the odd soubriquet of Janvier. Was it an unexpected touch of imagination in one of his fellow prisoners that saw him as something young, undeveloped and nipped by the frost?
‘Janvier,’ Chavel asked, ‘have you ever travelled—in France, I mean?’ It was typical of the lawyer that even when he tried to make a human contact he did so by a question as though he were addressing a witness.