The Tenth Man

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 wristwatches were the first to go: their I 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 rumor, 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 wristwatches 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 menˇ 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 toward 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 gray 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 absentmindedly 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 toward 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.