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the tenth man

Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later pro­duced the novel, The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa.

As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography - A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) - two of biogra­phy and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections Reflections and Mornings in the Dark. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. Graham Greene died in April 1991.

 

ACCONTENTS

Introduction

(including film sketches for Jim Braddon

and the War Criminal and Nobody to Blame)

page 7

The Tenth Man (Parts i-iv)

Introduction

In 1948 when I was working on The Third Man I seem to have completely forgotten a story called The Tenth Man which was ticking away like a time-bomb somewhere in the archives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in America.

In 1983 a stranger wrote to me from the United States telling me that a story of mine called The Tenth Man was being offered for sale by mgm to an Ameri­can publisher. I didn't take the matter seriously. I thought that I remembered—incorrectly, as it pro­ved—an outline which I had written towards the end of the war under a contract with my friend Ben Goetz, the representative of mgm in London. Perhaps the outline had covered two pages of typescript—there seemed, therefore, no danger of publication, espe­cially as the story had never been filmed.

The reason I had signed the contract was that I feared when the war came to an end and I left government service that my family would be in danger from the precarious nature of my finances. I had not before the war been able to support them from writing novels alone. I had indeed been in debt to my publishers until 1938, when Brighton Rock sold eight thousand copies and squared our accounts temporarily. The Power and the Glory, appearing more

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or less at the same time as the invasion of the West in an edition of about three thousand five hundred copies, hardly improved the situation. I had no confidence in my future as a novelist and I welcomed in 1944 what proved to be an almost slave contract with M G m which at least assured us all enough to live on for a couple of years in return for the idea of The Tenth Man.



Then recently came the astonishing and disquieting news that Mr Anthony Blond had bought all the book and serial rights on the mysterious story for a quite large sum, the author's royalties of course to be paid to M G M. He courteously sent me the typescript for any revision I might wish to make and it proved to be not two pages of outline but a complete short novel of about thirty thousand words. What surprised and aggravated me most of all was that I found this forgotten story very readable—indeed I prefer it in many ways to The Third Man, so that I had no longer any personal excuse for opposing publication even if I had the legal power, which was highly doubtful. All the same Mr Blond very generously agreed to publish the story jointly with my regular publishers, The Bodley Head.

After this had been amicably arranged mystery was added to mystery. I found by accident in a cupboard in Paris an old cardboard box containing two manu­scripts, one being a diary and commonplace-book which I had apparently kept during 1937 and 1938. Under the date 26 December 1937 I came on this

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passage: 'Discussed film with Menzies [an American film director]. Two notions for future films. One: a political situation like that in Spain. A decimation order. Ten men in prison draw lots with matches. A rich man draws the longest match. Offers all his money to anyone who will take his place. One, for the sake of his family, agrees. Later, when he is released, the former rich man visits anonymously the family who possess his money, he himself now with nothing but his life.. ..'

The bare bones of a story indeed. The four dots with which the entry closes seem now to represent the years of war that followed during which all memory of the slender idea was lost in the unconscious. When in 1944 I picked up the tale of Chavel and Janvier I must have thought it an idea which had just come to my mind, and yet I can only now suppose that those two characters had been working away far down in the dark cave of the unconscious while the world burnt.

The unexpected return of The Tenth Man from the archives of MGM led also to a search in my own archives where I discovered copies of two more ideas for films, and these may amuse readers of this book. The first idea (not a bad one it seems to me now, though nothing came of it) was called 'Jim Braddon and the War Criminal'.

Here is how the outline went—a not untimely story even today, with Barbie awaiting trial.

(ii)

There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double. This is the strange story of Jim Braddon.

Jim Braddon was a high-grade salesman employed by a breakfast cereal company in Philadelphia: a placid honest man who would never have injured anything larger than a fly. He had a wife and two children whom he spoilt. The 1941 war had affected him little for he was over forty and his employers claimed that he was indispensable. But he took up German—he had a German grandmother—because he thought that one day this might prove useful, and that was the only new thing that happened to him between 1941 and 1945. Sometimes he saw in the paper the picture of Schreiber, the Nazi Inspector-General of the con­centration camps, but except that one of his children pretended to see a likeness to this Nazi, nobody else even commented on the fact.

In the autumn of 1945 a captured U-boat comman­der confessed that he had landed Schreiber on the coast of Mexico, and the film opens on a Mexican beach with a rubber dinghy upturned by the breakers and Schreiber's body visible through the thin rim of water. The tide recedes and the land crabs come out of their holes. But the hunt for Schreiber is on, for the crabs will soon eliminate all evidence of his death.

The push for post-war trade is also on, and Braddon

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is .despatched by his firm for a tour of Central and South America. In the plane he looks at Life, which carries the story of the hunt for Schreiber. His neighbour, a small, earnest, bespectacled man full of pseudo-scientific theories, points out the likeness to him. 'You don't see it/ he says. 'I doubt whether one person in ten thousand would see it because what we mean by likeness as a rule is not the shape of the face and skull but the veil a man's experience and character throw over the features. You are like Schreiber, but no one would notice it because you have led a very different life. That can't alter the shape of the ears, but it's the expression of the eyes people look at.' Apart from the joking child he is the only person who has noticed the likeness. Luckily for Braddon—and for himself—the stranger leaves the plane at the next halt. Half-way to Mexico City the plane crashes and all lives but Braddon's are lost.

Braddon has been flung clear. His left arm is broken, he is cut about the face, and he has lost his memory from the concussion. The accident has hap­pened at night and he has cautiously—for he is a very careful man—emptied his pockets and locked his papers in his brief-case which of course is lost. When he comes to, he has no identity but his features, and those he shares with a dead man. He searches his pockets for a clue, but finds them empty of anything that will help him: only some small change, and in each pocket of the jacket a book. One is a paper-covered

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Heine: the other an American paperback. He finds that he can read both languages. Searching his jacket more carefully, he discovers a wad of ten-dollar notes, clean ones, sewn into the lining.

It is unnecessary in this short summary to work out his next adventures in detail: somehow he makes his way to a railroad and gets on a train to Mexico City. His idea is to find a hospital as quickly as he can, but in the wash room at the station he sees hanging by the mirror a photograph of Schreiber and a police descrip­tion in Spanish and English. Perhaps the experiences of the last few days have hardened his expression, for now he can recognize the likeness. He believes he has found his name. His face takes on another expression now—that of the hunted man.

He does not know where to go or what to do: he is afraid of every policeman; he attracts attention by his furtiveness, and soon the papers bear the news that Schreiber has been seen in Mexico City. He lets his beard grow, and with the growth of the beard he loses his last likeness to the old Jim Braddon.

He is temporarily saved by Schreiber's friends, a group of Fascists to whom Schreiber had borne introductions and who are expecting him. Among these are a brother and sister—a little, sadistic, pop-eyed Mexican whom we will call Peter for his likeness to Peter Loire and his shifty, beautiful sister whom we will call Lauren for obvious reasons of casting. Lauren sets herself the task of restoring Jim's

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memory—the memory which she considers Schreiber should possess. They fall in love: in her case without reserve, believing that she knows the worst about this man: in his with a reserve which he doesn't himself understand.

Peter, however, is incurably careless. His love of pain and violence get in the way of caution, and as a result of some incident yet to be worked out, Jim is caught by the Mexican police, while the others escape.

Schreiber could hardly have complained of rough treatment. Nor does Jim complain. He has no memory of his crimes, but he accepts the fact that he has committed them. The police force him to sit through a film of Buchenwald, and he watches with horror and shame the lean naked victims of Schreiber. He has no longer any wish to escape. He is content to die.

He is sent north to the American authorities, and the preliminary proceedings against him start. The new bearded Schreiber face becomes a feature of the Press. His family among others see the picture, but never for a moment does it occur to any of them that this is Jim.

Among the spectators at the trial, however, is the little spectacled pseudo-psychologist who was on the plane with Jim. He doesn't recognize Jim, but he is puzzled by Schreiber (Schreiber is not acting true to character), and he remembers what he said to the man in the plane, that likeness is not a matter of skull measurements but of expression. The expression of

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horror and remorse is not one he would have expected to see in Schreiber's eyes. This man claims to have lost his memory, and yet he denies nothing. Suppose after all they have got a man who is simply similar in bone structure . ..

Meanwhile Peter and Lauren, who escaped from the police trap which had closed on Jim, travel north. They plan a rescue. What their plan is I don't know myself yet. Violent and desperate, it offers one chance in a hundred. But it comes off. Jim is whipped away from the court itself, and the hunt is on again. But this is not Mexico, and the hunt is a very short one. They are trapped in a suburban villa.

But Peter has taken hostages: a woman and her child who were in the house when they broke in. Jim has been obeying his companions like an automaton: there hasn't even been time to take off his handcuffs, but at this last example of Fascist mentality his mind seems to wake. He turns on his friends and the woman he has loved. He knocks out Peter with the handcuffs and gets his gun. The woman too has a gun. They face each other across the length of the room like duellists. She says, 'My dear, you won't shoot me.' But he shoots and her shot comes a second after his, but it isn't aimed at him: it hits her brother who has regained his feet and is on the point of attacking. Her last words are, 'You aren't Schreiber. You can't be. You're decent. Who the hell are you?'

Braddon gives himself up, and the truth of the

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psychologist's theory is glaringly exhibited. The like­ness to Schreiber has proved to be physical only. I imagine the little man remembers at this point the man he talked to on the plane, he gives evidence, produces Braddon's family. The happy ending needs to be worked out, but the strange case of Jim Braddon really comes to an end with the shots in the suburban villa. After that there's just the reaching for the coats under the seats. Anyone in the stalls could tell you what happens now.

The second sketch for a film, entitled Nobody to Blame, was written about the same time for my friend Cavalcanti. He liked the idea, but our work on it never began, for when he submitted it to the Board of Film Censors, he was told that they could not grant a certificate to a film making fun of the Secret Service. So this story too joined the others for a while in the unconscious, to emerge some ten years later as a novel—simplified but not, I think, necessarily improved—called Our Man in Havana.

There is no censorship for novels, but I learnt later that MI5 suggested to Mi6 that they should bring an action against the book for a breach of official secrets. What secret had I betrayed? Was it the possibility of using bird shit as a secret ink? But luckily c, the head

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of Mi6, had a better sense of humour than his col­league in mi5, and he discouraged him from taking action.

Nobody to Blame

Richard Tripp is the agent of Singer Sewing Machines in some Baltic capital similar to Tallinn. He is a small inoffensive man of a rather timid disposition with a passionate love for postage stamps, Gilbert and Sul­livan's music and his wife, and a passionate loyalty to Singer Sewing Machines. Unofficially he is Agent 8.720 of the British Secret Service. The year is

I938/39-Mrs Tripp—Gloria—is much younger than Tripp

and it is to give her a good life that he has allowed himself to be enlisted in the Secret Service. He feels he must spend more money on her than Singer provide in order to keep her, although she has a genuine fondness for her dim husband. She knows nothing, of course, of his activities.

At hq in London Tripp is regarded as one of their soundest agents—unimaginative, accurate, not easily

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ruffled. He is believed to have a network of sub-agents throughout Germany and he keeps in touch with hq through the medium of his business reports written to his firm. What HQ does not know is that in fact Tripp has no agents at all. He invents all his reports and when London expresses dissatisfaction with an agent he simply dismisses one notional source and engages another equally notional. Naturally he draws salaries and expenses for all the imaginary agents.

His active imagination, from which he has drawn the details of a large underground factory near Leipzig for the construction of a secret explosive, does on one occasion lead to a little trouble with the local police. From an independent source London learns that 8.720 is being shadowed, and they send him an urgent warning, but the warning arrives too late.

At the end of a programme of Gilbert and Sullivan opera by the Anglo-Latesthian Society in which Tripp takes a leading part the Chief of Police, who is sitting in the front row, hands up a bouquet with a card attached and the request that he may have a drink with Tripp immediately in his dressing-room. There he tells Tripp that the German Embassy have complained of his activities. Tripp confesses to his deception.

The Chief of Police is amused and pleased that Tripp's presence will keep out any serious agents, and he accepts the gift of a sewing machine for his wife. He will ensure that Tripp's messages go safely out of the country—and to keep the German Embassy quiet, he

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decides, they can have a look at them on the way. London's warning comes on the heels of the interview, and Tripp sends back a message announcing that he has appointed the Chief of Police himself as one of his agents, enclosing that officer's first report on the chief political characters of Latesthia and requesting that as first payment and bonus the Chief, who he says is an ardent stamp collector, should receive a rare Triangular Cape, and when the stamp arrives of course he sticks it in his own album. This gives him an idea, and soon the Chief of the Secret Service is commenting to the hq officer in charge of Tripp's station, 'What a lot of stamp collectors he has among his agents.'

'It might be worse. Do you remember old Stott's agents? They all wanted art photos from Paris.'

'Stott's at a loose end, isn't he?'

'Yes.'

'Send him over to take a look at Tripp's station. He may be able to give Tripp some advice. I always believe in letting two sound men get together.'

Stott is a much older man than Tripp. He is bottle-nosed and mottled with a little round stomach and a roving eye. Tripp is naturally apprehensive of his visit and expects to be unmasked at any moment, but to his

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relief he finds that Stott is much more interested in the foods and wines of Latesthia, and in the night life, than in the details of Tripp's organization. There are even fleeting moments when Tripp wonders whether it could possibly be that Stott also had run his station on notional lines, but such a thought of course can hardly be held for long.

The first evening together Stott remarks, 'Now, the brothels, old man. You've got good contacts there, I suppose?'

Tripp has never been in a brothel in his life. He has to own that he has overlooked brothels.

'Most important, old man. Every visiting business­man goes to the brothels. Got to have them covered.'

He has a night round the town with Stott and gets into trouble with his wife for returning at two in the morning. Stott moves on to Berlin, but he has sown seeds in Tripp's mind. His notional agents in future follow a Stott line. London is asked to approve in rapid succession the madame of a high class 'house', a cafe singer, and, his most imaginative effort to date, a well-known Latesthian cinema actress who is described as Agent B.yao's (i.e. Tripp's) mistress. Of course he has never spoken to her in his life, and he has no idea that she is in fact a German agent.

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A second crisis—needing more delicate handling than Stott's—blows up. The threat of European war is deepening and London considers that Tripp's posi­tion in Latesthia is a key one. He must have a proper staff: Singer Sewing Machines are persuaded in the interests of the nation to build up their agency in Latesthia and they inform Tripp that they are sending out to him a secretary-typist and a clerk. Tripp is innocently delighted that his work for Singer has borne such fruit and that sewing machines are boom­ing. He is less pleased, however, when the clerk and typist arrive and prove to be members of the Secret Service sent to assist him in handling his now compli­cated network of agents.

The clerk is a young man with a penetrating cockney accent and an enormous capacity for hero-worship —and heroine-worship. His devotion is equally aroused by what he considers the experience and daring of Tripp and by the legs and breasts of Tripp's wife. His name is Cobb, and he has an annoying habit of asking questions. He says himself, 'You don't have to bother to explain things, Chief. Just let me dig in and ask questions, and I'll get the hang of things for myself.'

The typist—Miss Jixon—is a withered spinster of forty-four who regards everyone and everything with suspicion. She believes that even the most innocent

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labourer is in the pay of the secret police, and she is shocked by the inadequacy of the security arrange­ments in the office. She insists on all blotting paper being locked in the safe and all typewriting ribbons being removed at night. This is highly inconvenient as no one is very good at fixing typewriter ribbons. Once she finds a used ribbon thrown in the waste-paper basket instead of being burnt in the incinerator and she begins to demonstrate the danger of the practice by deciphering the impress on the ribbon. All she can make out is 'Red lips were ne'er so red nor eyes so pure', which turns out to be a line of a sonnet written by Cobb—obviously with Mrs Tripp in mind.

'He's really rather sweet,' Mrs Tripp says.

The chief problem that Tripp has to solve is how to disguise the fact that he has no sources for his reports. He finds this unexpectedly easy. He goes shopping and returns with envelopes that have been handed to him, he says, from under the counter: he makes a great show of testing perfectly innocent letters about sewing machines for secret inks: he takes Cobb for a round of the town and now and then in the restaurants points out his agents.

'A very discreet man. You'll see he won't show the least flicker of recognition.'

The monthly payments to agents present a diffi­culty: Miss Jixon objects strongly to the payments being made by himself.

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'It's irregular, insecure: hq would never coun­tenance it.'

By this time, for the sake of his assistants, he has drawn up an impressive chart of his sources: with the immediate head agents who control each gang. Miss Jixon insists that from now on he shall cut off his personal contacts with all but his head agents (of whom the cinema actress is one) and that he should meet them on every occasion in a different disguise.

Disguises become the bane of Tripp's life. What makes it worse, of course, is that his wife knows nothing. Miss Jixon shows a horrible ingenuity: Tripp's make-up box for the operatic productions of the Anglo-Latesthian Society is requisitioned. He finds himself being forced to slip out of back doors in red wigs and return by front doors in black wigs. She makes him carry at least two soft hats of varying colours in his overcoat pockets, so that he can change hats. Spectacles, horn-rimmed and steel-rimmed, bulge his breast pockets.

The strain tells. He becomes irritable and Mrs Tripp is reduced to tears. Cobb is torn between hero-worship and heroine-worship.

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Next crisis: the enemy begins to take Tripp seriously. He becomes aware that he is followed everywhere—even to the Anglo-Latesthian musical soiree—'an evening with Edward German and Vaughan Williams'. Miss Jixon's security arrange­ments have been a little too good and the Germans are no longer able to keep an eye on the reports he sends.

She has objected to the use of the Chief of Police as transmitter and has evolved an elaborate method of sending secret ink messages on postage stamps. (There is a moment when Miss Jixon skirts shyly round the possibility of bird shit as a secret ink.) Unfortunately the ink never develops properly—sin­gle words will appear and disappear with disconcerting rapidity.

Tripp, in order to be able to fake his expenses sheet and show the expenditure of huge sums for entertain­ment, is forced to dine out at least three times a week. He hates restaurant meals—and in any case it would be fatal if one of his assistants saw him dining alone. He therefore rents a room in the suburbs and retires there for a quiet read (his favourite authors are Charles Lamb and Newbolt) or the writing of a bogus report, taking a little food out of the larder with him. (In his account book this appears as 'Dinner for three (political sources) with wines, cigars, etc., £5. ros.od'.) This constant dining out had never been necessary in

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the old days before his assistants came, and Mrs Tripp resents it.

The domestic crisis reaches its culmination when on pay day Tripp has to pretend to visit the home of the cinema actress with pay for her sub-sources. Cobb keeps guard in the street outside and Tripp, wearing a false moustache, proceeds up to the actress's flat, rings the bell and enquires for an imaginary person. He turns away from the closing door just as Mrs Tripp comes down from visiting a friend in the flat above. His excuse that he was trying to sell a sewing machine seems weak to Mrs Tripp in view of his false moustache.

Domestic harmony is further shattered when Cobb, anxious to make peace between his hero and his heroine, tells Mrs Tripp everything—or what he thinks is everything. 'It's for his country, Mrs Tripp,' he says.

Mrs Tripp decides that she too will go in for patriotism. She begins to dine out too, and Tripp, not unduly disturbed, takes the opportunity of appointing her as agent with a notional lover in the Foreign Ministry.

'That fellow Tripp,' they say in London, 'deserves a decoration. The Service comes even before his wife. Good show.'

His notional mistress and his wife's notional lover are among his most interesting sources. Unfortunately, of course, his wife does not believe that

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his mistress is notional and her dinner companion, unlike the notional member of the Foreign Ministry, is a very real young man attached to Agriculture and Fisheries.

Mrs Tripp gets news of Tripp's hide-out and decides to track him down. She is certain she will find him in the company of the actress and that he will not be engaged in work of national importance.

The enemy are aware of his hide-out.

Tripp has got his legs up on the stove, some sausage rolls in his pocket, and he is reading his favourite poet Newbolt aloud, in a kind ofsub-human drone which is his method with poetry. Tlay up, play up and play the game ... the dons on the dais serene . . .' He is surprised by a knock at the door. He opens it and is still more surprised by the sight of his notional sub-agent, the cinema actress. Her car has broken down outside: can she have his help? Outside in the car two thugs crouch ready to knock Tripp on the head. A third—a tall stupid sentimental-looking German of immense physique—keeps watch at the end of the street. Tripp says he knows nothing about cars: now if it had been a sewing machine ...

Mrs Tripp is coming up the road. She has obviously lost her way. Tripp by this time is demonstrating the

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special points of the Singer sewing machine ... Mrs Tripp is cold and miserable. She leans against a fence and cries. A little further down the road the sentimen­tal German watches her. He is torn between pity and duty. He edges nearer.

Mr Tripp is talking about poetry to the cinema actress ...

Mrs Tripp weeps on the German's shoulder and tells him how her husband is betraying her at this moment, but she can't remember the number of the house...

The Germans in the car are getting very cold. They get out and begin to walk up and down ... Tripp is reading Newbolt to the actress ... 'His captain's hand on his shoulder smote.. .'Mrs Tripp and the German peer in at the window. He hasn't realized that this treacherous husband has anything to do with him. Mrs Tripp moans, 'Take me away,' and he obeys at once—in his comrades' car. Somebody—he is too sentimentally wrought up to care who—tries to stop him and he knocks him down. He deposits Mrs Tripp at her own door.

Tripp is still reading poetry when there is another knock at the door. One German pulls in the other German who is still unconscious. There is a babble of German explanations. 'He was trying to mend the car,' the actress explains, 'and it ran away from him.'

Til ring up the garage,' Tripp says. He goes in an alcove, where nobody has seen the telephone.

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They prepare to knock him out. 'Wrong number,' he says furiously. 'It's the police.'

When he puts down the receiver again they knock him out.

Mr Tripp has not returned home for some days. Cobb and Miss Jixon are worried. Mrs Tripp is furious but finds consolation.

Tripp comes to himself inside the German Embassy. Enormous pressure is put on him to betray his organization, but he has no organization to betray. The threat forcibly resolves itself into this: either he will remain a prisoner in the Embassy until war starts, when he will be handed to the Gestapo as a spy, or he will send a message for them—containing false infor­mation carefully devised to discredit him—to London and then in due course he will be released. They show him films of concentration camps, they keep him from sleeping: he is shut up in a cell with the sentimental German, now disgraced, who wakes him whenever he tries to sleep and reproves him for betraying his wife.

The German Ambassador, in collaboration with the Military Attache, plans out the message for him to send. On one sheet the Military Attache notes the facts to be concealed: the date of invasion; number of divisions etc. On the other they note the lies to be

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revealed. A breeze from the open window whips the papers around. The wrong notes (that is to say the true notes) are handed to Tripp to write in secret ink. Tripp gives way. To send one more message of false infor­mation seems a small price to pay.

To make all secure and ensure that no Tripp message will ever be believed again, the Germans instruct the Chief of Police to go to the British Ambassador and expose Tripp's dealings with him —the invented messages which he used to show to the Germans before transmitting them. He gives the impression that Tripp knew that the Germans saw them.

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 Ambas-

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sador'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 Attache himself-Xyou 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

(31) 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 qbe. 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

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 die 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

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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 sur-

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rendered 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 second­hand 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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

'Never been far out of Paris,'Janvier said, and then by a stretch of imagination he added, 'Fontainebleau. I went there one summer.'

'You don't know Brinac? It's on the main line from the Gare de 1'Est.'

'Never heard of it,' the young man said sullenly, as though he was being accused of something, and he gave a long dry cough which sounded as though dry peas were being turned in a pan.

'Then you wouldn't know my village, St Jean de Brinac? It's about two miles out of the town to the east. That's where my house is.'

'I thought you came from Paris.'

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'I work in Paris,' the lawyer said. <When I retire I shall retire to St Jean. My father left me the house. And his father left it to him.'

'What was your father?' Janvier asked with faint curiosity.

'A lawyer.'

'And his father?'

'A lawyer too.'

'I suppose it suits some people,' the clerk said. 'It seems a bit dusty to me.'

'If you had a bit of paper,' Chavel went on, 'I could draw you a plan of the house and garden.'

'I haven't,'Janvier said. 'Don't trouble anyway. It's your house. Not mine.' He coughed again, pressing his bony hands down upon his knees. He seemed to be putting an end to an interview with a caller for whom he could do nothing. Nothing at all.

Chavel moved away. He came to Pierre and stop­ped. 'Could you tell me the time?' he said.

'It's five to twelve.' From close by the mayor grunted malevolently, 'Slow again.'

'In your profession,' Chavel said, 'I expect you see the world?' It sounded like the false bonhomie of a cross-examiner who wishes to catch the witness in a falsehood.

'Yes and no,' Pierre said.

'You wouldn't know by any chance a station called Brinac? About an hour's run from the Gare de 1'Est.'

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'Never been on that run,' Pierre said. 'The Gare Montparnasse is my station.'

'Oh, yes. Then you wouldn't know St Jean ...' He gave it up hopelessly, and sat down again far from anyone against the cold cement wall.

It was that night that the shooting was heard for the third time: a short burst of machine-gun fire, some stray rifle shots and once what sounded like the explosion of a grenade. The prisoners lay stretched upon the ground, making no comment to each other: they waited, not sleeping. You couldn't have told in most cases whether they felt the apprehension of men in danger or the exhilaration of people waiting beside a sick-bed, listening to the first sounds of health return­ing to a too quiet body. Chavel lay as still as the rest: he had no fear: he was buried in this place too deeply for discovery. The mayor wrapped his arms around his watch and tried in vain to deaden the steady old-fashioned stroke: tick tock tick.

It was at three the next afternoon (alarm clock time) that an officer entered the cell: the first officer they had seen for weeks, and this one was very young, with inexperience even in the shape of his moustache which he had shaved too much on the left side. He was as embarrassed as a schoolboy making his first entry on a

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stage at a prize-giving, and he spoke abruptly so as to give the impression of a strength he did not possess. He said, 'There were murders last night in the town. The aide-de-camp of the military governor, a sergeant and a girl on a bicycle.' He added, 'We don't complain about the girl. Frenchmen have our permission to kill Frenchwomen.' He had obviously thought up his speech carefully beforehand, but the irony was over­done and the delivery that of an amateur actor: the whole scene was as unreal as a charade. He said, 'You know what you are here for, living comfortably, on fine rations, while our men work and fight. Well, now you've got to pay the hotel bill. Don't blame us. Blame your own murderers. My orders are that one man in every ten shall be shot in this camp. How many of you are there?' He shouted sharply, 'Number off,' and sullenly they obeyed, '.. . twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.' They knew he knew without counting. This was just a line in his charade he couldn't sacrifice. He said, 'Your allotment then is three. We are quite indifferent as to which three. You can choose for yourselves. The funeral rites will begin at seven tomorrow morning.'

The charade was over: they could hear his feet striking sharply on the asphalt going away: Chavel wondered for a moment what syllable had been acted —'night', 'girl', 'aside', or perhaps 'thirty', but it was of course the whole word—'hostage'.

The silence went on a long time, and then a man

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called Krogh, an Alsatian, said, 'Well, do we have to volunteer?'

'Rubbish,' said one of the clerks, a thin elderly man in pince-nez, 'nobody will volunteer. We must draw lots.' He added, 'Unless it is thought that we should go by ages—the oldest first.'

'No, no,' one of the others said, 'that would be unjust.'

'It's the way of nature.'

'Not even the way of nature,' another said. 'I had a child who died when she was five ...'

'We must draw lots,' the mayor said firmly. 'It is the only fair thing.' He sat with his hands still pressed over his stomach, hiding his watch, but all through the cell you could hear its blunt tick tock tick. He added, 'On the unmarried. The married should not be included. They have responsibilities . ..'

'Ha, ha,' Pierre said, 'we see through that. Why should the married get off? Their work's finished. You, of course, are married?'

'I have lost my wife,' the mayor said, 'I am not married now. And you ...'

'Married,' Pierre said.

The mayor began to undo his watch: the discovery that his rival was safe seemed to confirm his belief that as the owner of time he was bound to be the next victim. He looked from face to face and chose Chavel—perhaps because he was the only man with a waistcoat fit to take the chain. He said, 'Monsieur

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Chavel, I want you to hold this watch for me in case . ..'

'You had better choose someone else,' Chavel said. 'I am not married.'

The elderly clerk spoke again. He said, I’m mar­ried. I've got the right to speak. We are going the wrong way about all this. Everyone must draw lots. This isn't the last draw we shall have, and picture to yourselves what it will be like in this cell if we have a privileged class—the ones who are left to the end. The rest of you will soon begin to hate us. We shall be left out of your fear . . .'

'He's right,' Pierre said.

The mayor refastened his watch. 'Have it your own way,' he said. 'But if the taxes were levied like this...' He gave a gesture of despair.

'How do we draw?' Krogh asked.

Chavel said, 'The quickest way would be to draw marked papers out of a shoe ...'

Krogh said contemptuously, 'Why the quickest way? This is the last gamble some of us will have. We may as well enjoy it. I say a coin.'

'It won't work,' the clerk said, 'You can't get an even chance with a coin.'

'The only way is to draw,' the mayor said.

The clerk prepared the draw, sacrificing for it one of his letters from home. He read it rapidly for the last time, then tore it into thirty pieces. On three pieces he made a cross in pencil, and then folded each piece.

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'Krogh's got the biggest shoe,' he said. They shuffled the pieces on the floor and then dropped them into the shoe.

'We'll draw in alphabetical order,' the mayor said.

'Z first,' Chavel said. His feeling of security was shaken. He wanted a drink badly. He picked at a dry piece of skin on his lip.

'As you wish,' the lorry-driver said. 'Anybody beat Voisin? Here goes.' He thrust his hand into the shoe and made careful excavations as though he had one particular scrap of paper in mind. He drew one out, opened it, and gazed at it with astonishment. He said, 'This is it.' He sat down and felt for a cigarette, but when he got it between his lips he forgot to light it.

Chavel was filled with a huge and shameful joy. It seemed to him that already he was saved—twenty-nine men to draw and only two marked papers left. The chances had suddenly grown in his favour from ten to one to—fourteen to one: the greengrocer had drawn a slip and indicated carelessly and without pleasure that he was safe. Indeed from the first draw any mark of pleasure was taboo: one couldn't mock the condemned man by any sign of relief.

Again a dull disquiet—it couldn't yet be described as a fear—extended its empire over Chavel's chest. It was like a constriction: he found himself yawning as the sixth man drew a blank slip, and a sense of grievance nagged at his mind when the tenth man had drawn—it was the one they called Janvier—and the

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chances were once again the same as when the draw started. Some men drew the first slip which touched their fingers: others seemed to suspect that fate was trying to force on them a particular slip and when they had drawn one a little way from the shoe would let it drop again and choose another. Time passed with incredible slowness, and the man called Voisin sat against the wall with the unlighted cigarette in his mouth paying them no attention at all.

The chances had narrowed to one in eight when the elderly clerk—his name was Lenotre—drew the second slip. He cleared his throat and put on his pince-nez as though he had to make sure he was not mistaken. 'Ah, Monsieur Voisin,' he said with a thin undecided smile, 'may I join you?' This time Chavel felt no joy even though the elusive odds were back again overwhelmingly in his favour at fifteen to one: he was daunted by the courage of common men. He wanted the whole thing to be over as quickly as possible: like a game of cards which has gone on too long, he only wanted someone to make a move and break up the table. Lenotre, sitting down against the wall next to Voisin, turned the slip over: on the back was a scrap of writing.

'Your wife?' Voisin said.

'My daughter,' Lenotre said. 'Excuse me.' He went over to his roll of bedding and drew out a writing pad. Then he sat down next to Voisin and began to write, carefully, without hurry, a thin legible hand. The odds

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were back to ten to one.

From that point the odds seemed to move towards Chavel with a dreadful inevitability: nine to one, eight to one: they were like a pointing finger. The men who were left drew more quickly and more carelessly: they seemed to Chavel to have some inner information—to know that he was the one. When his time came to draw there were only three slips left, and it appeared to Chavel a monstrous injustice that there were so few choices left for him. He drew one out of the shoe and then feeling certain that this one had been willed on him by his companions and contained the pencilled cross he threw it back and snatched another.

'You looked, lawyer,' one of the two men exclaimed, but the other quieted him.

'He didn't look. He's got the marked one now.'

Lenotre said, 'Come over here, Monsieur Chavel, and sit down with us.' It was as if he were inviting Chavel to come up higher, to the best table at a public dinner.

'No,' Chavel said, 'no.' He threw the slip upon the ground and cried, 'I never consented to the draw. You can't make me die for the rest of you ...'

They watched him with astonishment but without enmity. He was a gentleman. They didn't judge him by their own standards: he belonged to an unaccountable

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class and they didn't at first even attach the idea of cowardice to his actions.

Krogh said, 'Sit down and rest. There's nothing to worry about any more.'

'You can't,' Chavel said. 'It's nonsense. The Ger­mans won't accept me. I'm a man of property.'

Lenotre said, 'Don't take on now, Monsieur Chavel. If it's not this time it's another ...'

'You can't make me,' Chavel repeated.

'It's not we who'll make you,' Krogh said.

'Listen,' Chavel implored them. He held out the slip of paper and they all watched him with compassionate curiosity. Til give a hundred thousand francs to anyone who'll take this.'

He was beside himself: almost literally beside him­self. It was as if some hidden calmness in him stood apart and heard his absurd proposition and watched his body take up shameful attitudes of fear and plead­ing. It was as if the calm Chavel whispered with ironic amusement, 'A grand show. Lay it on a bit thicker. You ought to have been an actor, old man. You never know. It's a chance.'

He took little rapid steps from one man to another, showing each man the bit of paper as if he were an attendant at an auction. 'A hundred thousand francs,' he implored, and they watched him with a kind of shocked pity: he was the only rich man among them and this was a unique situation. They had no means of comparison and assumed that this was a characteristic

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of his class, just as a traveller stepping off the liner at a foreign port for luncheon sums up a nation's character for ever in the wily businessman who happens to share the table with him.

'A hundred thousand francs,' he pleaded, and the calm shameless Chavel at his side whispered, 'You are getting monotonous. Why haggle? Why not offer them everything you possess?'

'Calm yourself, Monsieur Chavel,' Lenotre said. 'Just think a moment—no one is going to give his life for money he'll never enjoy.'

Til give you everything I've got,' Chavel said, his voice breaking with despair, 'money, land, everything, St Jean de Brinac ...'

Voisin said impatiently, 'None of us want to die, Monsieur Chavel,' and Lenotre repeated with what seemed to the hysterical Chavel shocking self-righteousness, 'Calm yourself, Monsieur Chavel.'

Chavel's voice suddenly gave out. 'Everything,' he said.

They were becoming impatient with him at last. Tolerance is a question of patience, and patience is a question of nerves and their nerves were strained. 'Sit down,' Krogh rapped at him, 'and shut your mouth.' Even then Lenotre made a friendly space for him, parting the floor at his side.

'Over,' the calm Chavel whispered, 'over. You weren't good enough. You've got to think up some-

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thing else ...'

A voice said, 'Tell me more. Maybe I'll buy.' It was Janvier.

He never really expected an offer: hysteria and not hope had dictated his behaviour, and now it took him a long moment to realize that he was not being mocked. He repeated, 'Everything I've got.' The hysteria peeled off like a scab and left the sense of shame.

'Don't laugh at him,' Lenotre said.

'I'm not laughing. I tell you I'll buy.'

There was a long pause as though no one knew what to do next. How does one hand over everything one possesses? They watched him as though they expected him to empty his pockets. Chavel said, 'You'll take my place?'

Til take your place.'

Krogh said impatiently, 'What'll be the good of his money then?'

'I can make a will, can't I?'

Voisin suddenly took the unlighted cigarette out of his mouth and dashed it to the floor. He exclaimed, 'I don't like all this fuss. Why can't things go natural? We can't buy our lives, Lenotre and me. Why should he?'

Lenotre said, 'Calm yourself, Monsieur Voisin.'

'It's not fair,' Voisin said.

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Voisin's feeling was obviously shared by most of the men in the cell: they had been patient with ChavePs hysteria—after all it's no joke to be a dying man and you couldn't expect a gentleman to behave quite like other people: that class were all, when you came down to it, a bit soft perhaps: but this that was happening now was different. As Voisin said, it wasn't fair. Only Lenotre took it calmly: he had spent a lifetime in business and he had watched from his stool many a business deal concluded in which the best man did not win.

Janvier interrupted, 'Fair?' he said. 'Why isn't it fair to let me do what I want? You'd all be rich men if you could, but you haven't the spunk. I see my chance and I take it. Fair, of course it's fair. I'm going to die a rich man and anyone who thinks it isn't fair can rot.' The peas rolled again on the pan as he coughed. He quelled all opposition: already he had the manner of one who owned half the world: their standards were shifting like great weights—the man who had been rich was already halfway to being one of themselves and Janvier's head was already lost in the mists and obscurity of wealth. He commanded sharply, 'Come here. Sit down here.' And Chavel obeyed, moving a little bent under the shame of his success.

'Now,'Janvier said, 'you're a lawyer. You've got to draw things up in their proper form. How much money is there?'

'Three hundred thousand francs. I can't tell you exactly.'

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'And this place you were talking about? St Jean.'

'Six acres and a house.'

'Freehold?'

'Yes.'

'And where do you live in Paris? Have you got a house there?'

'Only a flat. I don't own that.'

'The furniture?'

'No—books only.'

'Sit down,'Janvier said. 'You make me out—what's it called?—a deed of gift.'

'Yes. But I want paper.'

'You can have my pad,' Lenotre said.

Chavel sat beside Janvier and began to write: 'I Jean-Lkuis Chavel, lawyer, of Rue Miromesnil 019, Paris, and St Jean de Brinab ... all stocks and shares, money to my account at ... all furniture, movables ... the freehold property at St Jean de Brinac . . .' He said, 'It will need two witnesses,' and Lenotre imm%diately from force od habit offered him­self, coming forward as it were from the outer office just as though his employer had rung a bell and called him in.

'Not you,' Janvier said rudely. 'I want living men as witnesses.'

'Would you perhaps?' Chavel asked the mayor as humbly as if it were he who were the clerk.

'This is a very odd document,' the mayor said. 'I don't know that a man in my position ought to sign...'

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'Then I will,' Pierre said and splashed his signature below Chavel's.

The mayor said, 'Better have someone reliable. That man would sign anything for a drink,' and he squeezed his own signature in the space above Pierre's. As he bent they could hear the great watch in his pocket ticking out the short time left before dark.

'And now, the will,'Janvier said. 'You put it down —everything I've got to my mother and sister in equal shares.'

Chavel said, 'That's simple: it only needs a few lines.'

'No, no,' Janvier said, 'put it down again there ... the stocks and shares and money in the bank, the freehold property ... they'll want


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