The Tenth Man

2

LOUIS CHAVEL NEVER UNDERSTOOD WHY THE MAYOR HATED him. He couldn’t mistake the hatred: he had seen that look too often in Court on the faces of witnesses or prisoners. Now that he was himself a prisoner he found it impossible to adjust himself to the new point of view, and his tentative approaches to his fellows failed because he always thought of them as natural prisoners, who would have found themselves prisoners in any case sooner or later because of a theft, a default or a crime of sex-while he himself was a prisoner by mistake. The mayor under these circumstances was his obvious companion: he recognized that the mayor was not a natural prisoner, although he remembered clearly a case of embezzlement in the provinces in which a mayor had been concerned. He made awkward advances and he was surprised and mystified by the mayor’s dislike.

The others were kind to him and friendly: they answered when he spoke to them, but the nearest they ever came to starting a conversation with him was to wish him the time of day. It seemed to him after a while terrible that he should be wished the time of day even in a prison. “Good day,” they would say to him, and “Good night,” as though they were calling out to him in a street as he passed along toward the courts. But they were all shut together in a concrete shed thirty-five feet long by seventeen wide.

For more than a week he had tried his best to behave like a natural prisoner, he had even forced his way into the card parties, but he had found the stakes beyond him. He would not have grudged losing money to them, but his resources-the few notes he had brought into the prison and had been allowed to keep-were beyond his companions’ means, and he found the stakes for which they wished to play beyond his own. They would play for such things as a pair of socks, and the loser would thrust his naked feet into his shoes and wait for his revenge, but the lawyer was afraid to lose anything which stamped him as a gentleman, a man of position and property. He gave up playing, although in fact he had been successful and won a waistcoat with several buttons missing. Later in the dusk he gave it back to its owner, and that stamped him forever 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 everyday brought the war nearer to an end-somebody must sometime be victorious and he ceased to care much who the victor was so long as an end came. He was a hostage, but it seldom occurred to him that hostages were sometimes shot. The death of his two companions only momentarily shook him: he felt too lost and abandoned to recognize the likelihood that he might himself be picked out from the crowded cell. There was safety as well as loneliness in numbers.

Once the wish to remember, to convince himself that there was an old life from which he had come and to which he would one day return, became too acute for silence. He shifted his place in the cell alongside one of the clerks, a thin silent youth who was known for some reason to his companions by the odd soubriquet of Janvier. Was it an unexpected touch of imagination in one of his fellow prisoners that saw him as something young, undeveloped and nipped by the frost?

“Janvier,” Chavel asked, “have you ever traveled-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 Montparnasse.”

“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.”

“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 l’Quest.”

“Never been on that run,” Pierre said. “The Gare du Nord 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 sickbed, 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.