Riotous Assembly

Chapter 19

On the morning of his execution Jonathan Hazelstone was denied the usual privilege of choosing a hearty breakfast on the grounds that before all major operations patients had to do with light refreshment. Instead of the bacon and eggs he had ordered, he was allowed a cup of coffee and a visit from an Anglican chaplain. Jonathan found it difficult to decide which was the more unpleasant. On the whole he thought he preferred the coffee.

His ties with the Church had been severed at the time of his trial and the Bishop had reached the conclusion that the refusal of the Church authorities to testify on his behalf had been due to the jealousy he knew to exist among his colleagues at the rapidity of his promotion to a bishopric. He had no idea that parts of his confession, particularly those chosen by Konstabel Els, had been shown to the Archbishop.

'I knew the fellow was progressive,' the Archbishop muttered as he read the extraordinary document, 'but really this time he has gone too far,' and he recalled Jonathan's admission that he had used every possible method to attract people into the Church. 'High Church in ritual, Low Church in approach, that's my way,' Jonathan had said and the Archbishop could see that he had meant it. To combine sodomy with genuflection was to be High Church and Low with a vengeance and it was hardly surprising his congregations had grown so quickly.

'I think the least said the soonest mended,' the Archbishop had decided, and in short the Church had disowned him.

The Chaplain who came to visit him in his last hours was not a South African. It had been impossible to persuade any self-respecting parson to minister to the needs of a man who had brought disgrace on his cloth and even the Bishop of Piemburg had declined the invitation.

'There are moments when a man needs to be alone,' he explained to Governor Schnapps over the telephone, 'and this is surely one of them,' and had gone back to compose a sermon on the Brotherhood of Man.

In the end it was the Chaplain of a Cambridge college who was visiting Piemburg during the long vacation who was inveigled into Piemburg Prison to attend to the prisoner's spiritual needs.

'I understand there is a particularly fine display of prickly pears in the prison garden,' the Vicar of Piemburg explained to the Chaplain who was far more interested in the physical needs of rock plants than in the spiritual ones of his fellow men and the Chaplain had jumped at the opportunity afforded by the hanging to see a riot of prickly pears.

Standing in the cell, the Chaplain found it difficult to know what to say.

'You weren't by any chance in the Navy?' he asked finally.

Jonathan shook his head.

'I just wondered,' the Chaplain continued. 'There was a middy on HMS _Clodius_ in '43 I think it was, or it might have been '44. His name was Hazelnut.'

'Mine's Hazelstone,' said the Bishop.

'So it is. How forgetful of me. One meets so many people in my profession.'

'I suppose so,' said the Bishop.

The Chaplain paused, and looked at the manacles and chains. 'Do you wear those all the time?' he asked. 'They must be frightfully uncomfortable.'

'Only when I'm going to be hanged,' said the Bishop.

The Chaplain thought he detected a note of bitterness in the remark, and recollected the reason for his visit.

'Is there anything you would like to tell me?' he asked.

The Bishop could think of a great many things he would like to tell him, but there didn't seem much point.

'No,' he said, 'I have made my confession.'

The Chaplain sighed with relief. These occasions are so embarrassing, he thought.

'I've never actually attended an execution before,' he mumbled at last.

'Nor have I,' said the Bishop.

'Nasty things,' continued the Chaplain, 'nasty but necessary. Still they do say hanging is quick and painless. I daresay you'll be quite relieved when it is all over.'

The Bishop, whose hope of eternal life had vanished along with his faith, doubted if relieved was quite the right word. He tried to change the subject.

'Do you come here often?' he asked.

'To the prison?'

'To South Africa, though it's much the same thing.'

The Chaplain ignored the remark. He was a staunch supporter of the South African point of view at high table in his college, and had no time for liberals.

'I try to get away to summer climes at least once a year,' he said. 'Undergraduates are so irreligious these days and my real interest lies in gardening. South Africa is full of lovely gardens.'

'Then perhaps you'll appreciate this poem,' said the Bishop and began to recite 'The Forerunners'.

'Lovely enchanting language, sugar cane,

Hony of roses, whither wilt thou flie?'

He was still reciting when Governor Schnapps and Hangman Els arrived. As the chains were removed and he was strapped into the harness that held his arms, the Bishop continued:

'True beautie dwells on high: ours is a flame

But borrow'd thence to light us thither.

Beautie and beauteous words should go together.'

'Bugger these buckles,' said Els, who was having difficulty with the straps.

The solemn procession passed out of Bottom into the bright sunshine of the prison courtyard. Stumbling between Els and the old warder, Jonathan looked round him for the last time. Incongruous against the dead black paint of the Death House stood a white ambulance. To everyone's amazement, the condemned man laughed.

'Bleak paleness chalkes the doore,' he shouted.

'The harbingers are come. See, see their mark

White is their colour and behold my head.'

The two ambulance men stared in horror at the shouting figure whose corpse they had been sent to collect for the transplant operation.

'But must they have my heart? Must they dispark

Those sparkling feelings which thereine were bred?'

The little group hurried on up the steps to the scaffold. The old warder helped Els to get the Bishop on to the trap and then rushed down the ladder and across the courtyard to his office. It wasn't that he was squeamish but he had no intention of being anywhere near the gallows when Els pulled the lever, and besides he had a good excuse for his absence. He had to phone the hospital the moment the ambulance left the prison.

Standing on the trap the Bishop continued his recitation. Governor Schnapps asked the Chaplain what a harbinger was. The Chaplain said he thought it was probably a member of the hydrangea family though he seemed to remember having served under a Captain Harbinger during the war. Els was trying to get the cloth bag over the Bishop's head. He was having some difficulty because the Bishop was so tall and the bag had evidently been made for a much smaller head. Els couldn't get the Bishop to bend his legs because the straps prevented any movement. In the end Governor Schnapps had to give Els a lift up before he could drag the hood down into position. He had to repeat the performance when it came to putting the noose round the condemned man's neck, and then Els pulled the rope so tight the Bishop was forced to stop his recitation.

'Must dulnesse turn me to a clo-' He ground to a halt.

'For goodness sake, Els, loosen the bloody thing,' Governor Schnapps shouted as the poem throttled to a stop. 'You're supposed to hang him down there, not strangle him up here.'

'They seem to grow best in sandy soil,' said the Chaplain.

'Is that loose enough for you?' Els asked after he had pulled the rope and loosened the noose so that it hung limply on the Bishop's shoulders. He was sick of people telling him how to do his job. If the Governor was so bloody knowledgeable about hangings, why didn't he do the job himself.

'What do?' Governor Schnapps said to the Chaplain.

'Hydrangeas.'

'Clod,' said the Bishop resuming his recital.

Els stepped over to the lever.

'Yet have they left me,' the Bishop's muffled voice came through the cloth bag. Els pulled the lever and the hooded figure disappeared through the trap into the well below, and his voice, already indistinct, was silenced by the dreadful thud that followed. As the trapdoor slammed and the scaffold rocked alarmingly under the impact, the Chaplain, recalled to the purpose of his visit by the intimations of mortality he had just witnessed, offered a prayer for the dead man.

'Let us pray for the soul of the departed wherever it may be,' he said, and lowered his head. Governor Schnapps and Els closed their eyes and listened with bowed heads as he prayed. For several minutes the Chaplain mumbled on before ending, 'And may Thy Servant depart in Peace, Amen.'

'Amen,' said Governor Schnapps and Els together. The men on the scaffold raised their heads and Els stepped forward to peer down into the well. The rope had stopped swinging and hung rather limply, Els thought, considering the weight of its burden. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness below Els began to realize that something was missing. The noose on the rope hung loose and empty. The Chaplain's prayer had been answered. Wherever God's servant might be, he had certainly departed and evidently in one piece too. The well of the scaffold was absolutely empty.

As the Bishop dropped into eternity he thought how appropriate his last words had been and was glad he hadn't reached the next line which went, 'Thou art still my God,' because he no longer believed. He braced himself for the awful shock to his neck, but the pain came from another extremity altogether. 'Corns,' he thought, as he hit the ground with a tremendous crash and rolled sideways, through the door and out into the sunlit courtyard. His cloth bag was ripped and his legs felt decidedly painful, but it was evident that whatever else had been broken, his neck had not. He lay still, waiting for Els to fetch him for a second attempt and wasn't surprised when he felt hands lifting his feet and shoulders.

A moment later he was lying on a stretcher and had been lifted into the ambulance. As the doors were slammed the ambulance moved off hurriedly, stopped for a moment while the prison gates were opened, and hurtled out into the street, its siren whirring.

Behind it the Death House had begun to fulfil the predictions of the old warder. Under the impact of the stampede that followed on the scaffold when the distraught hangman peering into the well slipped and grabbed Governor Schnapps' legs to prevent himself falling, the walls of the gallows slowly toppled inwards and with a roar of falling masonry, Governors, Hangmen and Chaplains, disappeared from view in a dense cloud of black dust. The old warder sat in his office and thanked his lucky stars. 'I said it wasn't safe,' he murmured and picked up the phone to dial the hospital.

As the ambulance sped through the streets of Piemburg, Jonathan Hazelstone felt the attendant undoing the straps that held his arms and legs. A hand slid inside his shirt and felt his chest.

'It's all right. It's still beating,' he heard the attendant tell the driver. Jonathan held his breath until the hand went away. Then he relaxed slowly. Around him the sounds of the city filtered through the canvas bag and as he lay there Jonathan Hazelstone realized for the first time that what lay in store for him might make death by hanging seem infinitely preferable.

'I'll be hanged if anyone is going to cut my heart out now,' he thought to himself as the ambulance swung through the gates of Piemburg Hospital, and stopped outside the mortuary.

Inside the hospital the news of the execution had been accompanied by the old warder's insistence that several more ambulances be sent to the prison to deal with the victims of the disastrous collapse of the Death House. The air of tension that was already present in the hospital developed into a state of wholesale panic. The Kommandant, already prepared for the operation, was given a general anaesthetic and wheeled unconscious into the operating theatre. While the surgeons prepared for the transplant, ambulance drivers rushed to their vehicles and preparations were made to receive the expected influx of victims from the prison. Nurses already distraught at having to deal with scores of lunatics injured in the massacre at Fort Rapier tried to ready themselves for this fresh disaster. When the ambulance carrying Jonathan Hazelstone arrived at the mortuary it was caught up in the general confusion.

'Get back to the prison,' yelled an orderly from a window when the two attendants carried the donor into the mortuary and deposited him on a trolley. 'There's been a major catastrophe there.' The two men dashed back to their ambulance and drove off. Alone in the mortuary for a moment the Bishop leapt off his trolley and snatched the cloth bag from his head and looked around him. Under the sheets that covered still forms on their slabs he found what he was looking for, and by the time two orderlies arrived to fetch the donor for the transplant, the body lying snugly under its white sheet and with its head covered by a grey cloth bag contained a heart that was far too cold and still to be of much assistance to Kommandant van Heerden.

As the operation got under way, what remained of the late Bishop of Barotseland was strolling with the faint suggestion of a limp up the hill towards Jacaranda House, and as it strolled it was singing:

Jonathan Hazelstone had begun to think that there might, after all, be reasons for recovering his faith.

The state of panic that reigned at Piemburg Hospital when the ambulance containing the Bishop arrived was as nothing to the chaos and hysteria which began in the operating theatre when the body of the donor arrived on the trolley. An incision had already been made in Kommandant van Heerden's chest when it was discovered that whoever had been responsible for the execution had made an altogether too thorough job of it. The corpse on the trolley had multiple injuries of the most appalling sort. The only thing that didn't appear to be broken on it was the neck. Not only was it fractured in a score of places but it had been dead for at least forty-eight hours. And when it was further revealed to be the corpse of a woman of eighty-nine, the surgeons knew that what they had considered stupid from the start, not to say criminal, had degenerated now to the point of sheer lunacy.

Dr Erasmus was frantic. 'Who said this was beating?' he yelled, slapping the withered object that hung out of the old lady's chest. (She had in fact been run over by a twenty-five-ton truck while crossing the road.) 'This hasn't beaten for days and, when it last worked, it didn't bloody beat. It winced once in a while. I wouldn't feed this heart to a starving dog let alone put it into that maniac's body.' He sat down and wept.

After half an hour during which the mortuary was searched again and again, and various possible donors in the hospital wards had their deaths hastened by teams of desperate surgeons who came masked and predatory to stare at them and feel their pulses hopefully, Dr Erasmus pulled himself together and taking a quick tot of ether addressed the heart team.

'Gentlemen and ladies,' he said, 'what we have all been witness to this afternoon is of such a regrettable and dreadful nature that the sooner we forget about it the better. As you know I never wanted to undertake this transplant in the first place. We were forced to agree to it by that bloody lunatic there.' He pointed to Kommandant van Heerden's unconscious body. 'We acted under immense pressure and, thank heaven, in absolute secrecy. And now owing to the prison authorities' delay in letting us have the donor, and looking at her injuries I can fully appreciate why there was this delay, we are quite unable to proceed with the operation. I intend to stitch the patient's chest up and leave his own heart beating perfectly healthily in place.'

There were murmurs of protest from the other members of the transplant team.

'Yes, I know how you feel and given any further provocation I would agree to remove his heart and let the bastard rot. But I have decided against it. Thanks to the secrecy that surrounds this whole irregular business I have a better plan. I think it will be better to allow the Kommandant to remain in complete ignorance of the good fortune that has prevented him from getting this,' and Dr Erasmus slapped the old woman's heart again. 'We will simply maintain the fiction that the transplant has been completed successfully and I have every confidence that his stupidity is so colossal that it will never cross his mind to question our statement that he has a new heart.'

Amid congratulations and a few cheers, the eminent surgeon turned to Kommandant van Heerden and stitched him up.

An hour later the Kommandant woke up in his room. He felt rather sick and the wound in his chest hurt when he moved but otherwise he didn't seem to feel any ill-effects from his operation. He took a deep tentative breath and listened to his new heart. It sounded perfect.