I
had stuck closely to him, as people say like a shadow. But that's
absurd. I'm no shadow. You can feel me, touch me, hear me, smell me.
I'm Robinson. But I had sat at the next table, followed twenty yards
behind down every street, when he went upstairs I waited at the
bottom, and when he came down I passed out before him and paused at
the first corner. In that way I was really like a shadow, for
sometimes I was in front of him and sometimes I was behind him.
Who was he? I never knew his name. He was short and ordinary in
appearance and he carried an umbrella, his hat was a bowler; and he
wore brown gloves. But this was his importance to me: he carried
something I dearly, despairingly wanted. It was beneath his clothes,
perhaps in a pouch, a purse, perhaps dangling next to his skin. Who
knows how cunning the most ordinary man can be? Surgeons can make
clever insertions. He may have carried it even closer to his heart
than the outer skin.
What
was it? I never knew. I can only guess, as I might guess at his name,
calling him Jones or Douglas, Wales, Canby, Fotheringay. Once in a
restaurant I said 'Fotheringay' softly to my soup and I thought he
looked up and round about him. I don't know. This is the horror I
cannot escape: knowing nothing, his name, what it was he carried, why
I wanted it so, why I followed him.
Presently
we came to a railway bridge and underneath it he met a friend. I am
using words again very inexactly. Bear with me. I try to be exact. I
pray to be exact. All I want in the world is to know. So when I say
he met a friend, I do not know that it was a friend, I know only that
it was someone he greeted with apparent affection. The friend said to
him, 'When do you leave?' He said, 'At two from Dover.' You may be
sure I felt my pocket to make sure the ticket was there.
Then his friend said, 'If you fly you will save a day.'
Then his friend said, 'If you fly you will save a day.'
He
nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his ticket, he would save a
day.
I
ask you, what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved
from what? for what? Instead of spending the day travelling, you will
see your friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you
will travel home twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will
fly home and again save a day? Saving it from what, for what? You
will begin work a day earlier, but you cannot work on indefinitely.
It only means that you will cease work a day earlier. And then, what?
You cannot die a day earlier. So you will realise perhaps how rash it was of you to save a day, when you discover how you cannot escape
those twenty-four hours you have so carefully preserved; you may push
them forward and push them forward, but some time they must be spent,
and then you may wish you had spent them as innocently as in the
train from Ostend.
But
this thought never occurred to him. He said, 'Yes, that's true. It
would save a day. I'll fly.' I nearly spoke to him then. The
selfishness of the man. For that day which he thought he was saving
might be his despair years later, but it was my despair at the
instant. For I had been looking forward to the long train journey in
the same compartment. It was winter, and the train would be nearly
empty, and with the least luck we should be alone together. I had
planned everything. I was going to talk to him. Because I knew
nothing about him, I should begin in the usual way by asking whether
he minded the window being raised a little or a little lowered. That
would show him that we spoke the same language and he would probably
be only too ready to talk, feeling himself in a foreign country; he
would be grateful for any help I might be able to give him,
translating this or that word.
Of
course I never believed that talk would be enough. I should learn a
great deal about him, but I believed that I should have to kill him
before I knew all. I should have killed him, I think, at night,
between the two stations which are the farthest parted, after the
customs had examined our luggage and our passports had been stamped
at the frontier, and we had pulled down the blinds and turned out the
light. I had even planned what to do with his body, with the bowler
hat and the umbrella and the brown gloves, but only if it became
necessary, only if in no other way he would yield what I wanted. I am
a gentle creature, not easily roused.
But
now he had chosen to go by aeroplane and there was nothing that I
could do. I followed him, of course, sat in the seat behind, watched
his tremulousness at his first flight, how he avoided for a long
while the sight of the sea below, how he kept his bowler hat upon his
knees, how he gasped a little when the grey wing tilted up like the
arm of a windmill to the sky and the houses were set on edge. There
were times, I believe, when he regretted having saved a day.
We
got out of the aeroplane together and he had a small trouble with the
customs. I translated for him. He looked at me curiously and said,
'Thank you'; he was – again I suggest that I know when all I mean
is I assume by his manner and his conversation – stupid and
good-natured, but I believe for a moment he suspected me, thought he
had seen me somewhere, in a tube, in a bus, in a public baths, below
the railway bridge, on how many stairways. I asked him the time. He
said, 'We put our clocks back an hour here,' and beamed with an
absurd pleasure because he had saved an hour as well as a day.
I
had a drink with him, several drinks with him. He was absurdly
grateful for my help. I had beer with him at one place, gin at
another, and at a third he insisted on my sharing a bottle of wine.
We became for the time being friends. I felt more warmly towards him
than towards any other man I have known, for, like love between a man
and a woman, my affection was partly curiosity. I told him that I was
Robinson; he meant to give me a card, but while he was looking for
one he drank another glass of wine and forgot about it. We were both
a little drunk. Presently I began to call him Fotheringay. He never
contradicted me and it may have been his name, but I seem to remember
also calling him Douglas, Wales and Canby without correction. He was very generous
and I found it easy to talk with him; the stupid are
often companionable. I told him that I was desperate and he offered
me money. He could not understand what I wanted.
I
said, 'You've saved a day. You can afford to come with me tonight to
a place I know.'
He
said, 'I have to take a train tonight.' He told me the name of the
town, and he was not surprised when I told him that I was coming too.
We
drank together all that evening and went to the station together. I
was planning, if it became necessary, to kill him. I thought in all
friendliness that perhaps after all I might save him from having
saved a day. But it was a small local train; it crept from station to
station, and at every station people got out of the train and other
people got into the train. He insisted on travelling third class and
the carriage was never empty. He could not speak a word of the
language and he simply curled up in his corner and slept; it was I
who remained awake and had to listen to the weary painful gossip, a
servant speaking of her mistress, a peasant woman of the day's
market, a soldier of the Church, and a man who, I believe, was a
tailor of adultery, wire-worms and the harvest of three years ago.
It
was two o'clock in the morning when we reached the end of our
journey. I walked with him to the house where his friends lived. It
was quite close to the station and I had no time to plan or carry out
any plan. The garden gate was open and he asked me in. I said no, I
would go to the hotel. He said his friends would be pleased to put me
up for the remainder of the night, but I said no. The lights were on
in a downstairs room and the curtains were not drawn. A man was
asleep in a chair by a great stove and there were glasses on a tray,
a decanter of whisky, two bottles of beer and a long thin bottle of
Rhine wine. I stepped back and he went in and almost immediately the
room was full of people. I could see his welcome in their eyes and in
their gestures. There was a woman in a dressing-gown and a girl who
sat with thin knees drawn up to her chin and three men, two of them
old. They did not draw the curtains, though he must surely have
guessed that I was watching them. The garden was cold; the winter
beds were furred with weeds. I laid my hand on some prickly bush. It
was as if they gave a deliberate display of their unity and
companionship. My friend — I call him my friend, but he was really no
more than an acquaintance and was my friend only for so long as we
both were drunk — sat in the middle of them all, and I could tell
from the way his lips were moving that he was telling them many
things which he had never told me. Once I thought I could detect from
his lip movements, 'I have saved a day.' He looked stupid and
good-natured and happy. I could not bear the sight for long. It was
an impertinence to display himself like that to me. I have never
ceased to pray from that moment that the day he saved may be retarded
and retarded until eventually he suffers its eighty-six thousand four
hundred seconds when he has the most desperate need, when he is
following another as I followed him, closely as people say like a
shadow, so that he has to stop, as I have had to stop, to reassure
himself: You can smell me, you can touch me, you can hear me, I am
not a shadow: I am Fotheringay, Wales, Canby, I am Robinson.
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