Yet it had been a dirty business, inhabiting that man. He had had to be so base for so long. Temple had no particularly strong moral sense, but even so he felt a revulsion against the ugliness of it – so much truckling, so much fawning and cringing for life, so much flattery and lies up to the neck. He was stained through and through with an indeterminate greyish yellow.
Something was coming between him and his triumph. The warmth of the glow in his mind was diminishing. The pseudo-Temple was his own creation, as much as if it had been one of his pictures, or a book that he had written (very like a book) and apart from the fact that in certain aspects it was a naked exposure of himself the whole was a reflection of the mind that fathered it. It was a pity that it was not a more heroic character. But there was nothing heroic in Temple, nor in his desperate war: there was no room for anything but expediency and given his background and the circumstances of his capture pseudo-Temple was the right character for him. It had worked: that was the only criterion. It had worked at last.
I can move now, he said. The obscure time of propitiation was over, and if he stayed lying motionless upon the ground he would grow so stiff that the first movement would be an agony. Already it was painful to tighten the muscles of his left arm and his shoulder: he tensed them for a moment to try and sank back with his face against the damp concrete. He breathed that builder’s-yard and morgue-floor smell again, a smell like dust and yet humid, and he smiled again, secretly, into the ground. He was lying, as he had been lying all this time, on his face, lengthways down the cell, with his feet just clear of the arc of the door and his arms up as they had gone to break his fall; his hair was touching the wall and his left arm was doubled a little under his chest; his right arm cushioning his face, keeping it just off the ground. He would have to raise himself on his elbows, his left elbow first; then with a contraction of his belly-muscles he would bring his knees up, pivot round on his right hand and crawl over to the bench. It was the muscles of his stomach that he must spare as much as possible, for it was from there that the huge radiating pain began, the pain that shot pitiless fiery hooks from its red centre and with such power that his whole body would twist and jerk out of control: if once he provoked it into active life it would wrench him into those wild movements that made all the other pains vibrate and scream.
Now he tried again, ready for the inevitable protest of the stiffening weals on his shoulder. He came up on his elbows, and with his unseen face fixed in a mask of concentration, his mouth open and his eyes staring into the dark, he worked his knees under him. A roll over to his left side transferred the strain from his belly to his flank, and with his right hand spread out on the ground he was ready to crawl. But he waited there for a moment, equally balanced on his four supports, waiting to see if the great pain would begin. Besides, there was all the time in the world now; he could nurse himself – indulge in the slowest smooth creeping. There was all the time in the world for the four steps across to the bench.
Two; three; and very slowly the fourth step. He stretched out his hand for the wooden edge of the bench. It was not there. Groping out into the dark, his hand, which had been so unquestioningly sure of the feel of the wood, met nothing but the dark. For the instant he was stunned: then an intolerable suspicion seized him. They had put him in another cell. Something was terribly wrong. Quiet, now; quiet, he said to himself, but all the time the disrupting suspicion grew. He remained there without moving, with the surface of his mind blank: for the first time he felt the darkness as an enemy, stretching away to unknown limits, isolating him. Now in the elastic darkness the walls might be anywhere. They might advance, recede, or sweep together and crush him as he knelt. He felt blind, terribly blind, and he made a wild sweeping movement with his right arm, surging forward as he did so. His right shoulder jolted hard against the bench and he realised that he had been moving down rather than across the cell. His mind had wandered again: his orientation had let him down. It had happened before. He remembered it now as he clung to the familiar wood. He should never have forgotten it. Was he so bloody infallible? He was panting, and the beating of his heart struggled against his breath. He waited for a moment, collecting himself, and then, with no precaution, he climbed up on to the bench, still feeling for all the known shapes, the two knot-holes, the polished bolt-head, gripping hard and repeatedly upon them.
Fool, fool, to have let himself go so far: he was still trembling all over and his body was absurdly weak. To have had his triumph taken from him at that moment would have been more than he could bear: he had been so weak and vulnerable at that moment. He must take care, take care. His faculties were declining – they were probably declining more than he knew.
Sanity was coming back. What would it have mattered, anyway, if they had put him in another cell? It was to be expected soon enough, in any case.
Sanity was coming back, and the irrational tensions died away. He eased himself into the curled position on his side – the primitive attitude of the buried dead – where he could lie and protect the centre of his pain, and he let the certitude of victory come in again and spread; and he nourished it, the re-affirmed and infinitely precious victory, now far more true.
Up to this time there had been only one end and purpose, and it had necessarily shut out all other kinds of life; but now shockingly delightful visions thronged his head in spite of all that he could do. Why should he not come out alive? Why should he not come out at the other end alive? If he was once booked as a criminal he was almost clear of the firing-squad … had that been the firing-squad, he thought in a very quick parenthesis, that he had heard just before he woke? Certainly there had been the sound of shots echoing in his head; but they might have come from a dream. The likelihood was a camp in Germany. There would be companionship, men he could trust. Would he survive it? Surely he would survive it, an ordinary camp.
He was growing restless with the tumult of his thoughts. His controlling sense was tired with the effort of trying to keep them down to sober tranquillity and enjoyment – static enjoyment, the enjoyment of the end achieved, of the thing itself, not of possibilities. An uncontrolled imagining would soon run out into mad extravagance. The mental effort took physical shape: his body twitched and jerked; it would no longer lie in peace. He changed position, but it would not relax: a nervous tic began to pluck at the corner of his mouth, and as he put his hand up to his face he let his mind have its way.
Perhaps it was still dangerous to let this ebullience come in unchecked; perhaps it was. He felt it wicked, certainly, but he let it come, a series of racing day-dreams, crowding as fast as the evil visions of delirium, but ecstatic. They all bore towards the idea of perfect felicity in a world at peace.
His accustomed ear caught the distant sound, and at once he pressed his head against the smooth iron bolt. The faint vibration sounded right into his middle ear: he interpreted it as one man and the trolley. Yes, one man and the steady rumble of the trolley. Was it the big new man or Richter? He could not tell.
He prepared himself, facing the door: if it was the new man he would have to stand. But when the door opened he saw at once through his screwed-up eyelids that it was Richter; and in the moments that passed (his eyes’ use coming back to them) he could see that the guard’s pale, glabrous face was shining with tears: they ran in shining tracks upon his cheek, and where he had wiped them there was a gleaming patch – the face itself was moist. Richter put down the dish and from his bent head the tears dripped like sweat. He did not speak, and the tears fell silently. Temple put his hand out towards the guard’s arm, but checked the movement and looked quickly aside: he said nothing, and the door closed and the darkness came back.
Why? Why? But in this everlasting nightmare Temple’s curiosity, still more his sympathy, had atrophied. So many things were commonplace in that world that a man’s face wet with tears meant hardly anything at all. There was a certain attenuated