Guilty: The Lost Classic Novel

  In my already confused state I now became – for a space of time almost too brief to record – panic-stricken, my captor’s hateful touch evoking a whole chain of agonizing sensations. I ceased to be myself, feeling my being invaded by the personality of a criminal; the hand on my arm was the grip of the law – of the police, by whom I’d been arrested. What crime I’d committed I didn’t know; nor did this matter, since I knew I was guilty, and guilt itself was my crime. The shades of the prison house already enclosed me. There was no hope. I was being dragged deeper into some weird cavernous darkness, lit only by glow-worm glimmers of greenish light. Never again, I thought despairingly, should I see the sun.

  That all these impressions occupied only the merest fraction of time was proved by the fact that I hadn’t even regained my balance when someone exclaimed, ‘Hold up, there!’ continuing, as I steadied myself, ‘Sorry, but I had to make sure nobody saw you come in, or we’d have had the whole population battering on the doors.’ The matter-of-fact, disembodied voice helped me to return to myself and to expel the intruder who had burdened me with his crime, as it concluded, ‘There’s news for you. Come this way.’

  I’d already collected myself sufficiently to recognize the big room, which I’d previously always seen crowded and brightly lit, now dark and empty, only a few heavily green-shaded desk lamps scattered about. Though I wasn’t agitated any longer, I still felt half dazed by the shock of what had seemed my abduction and the associations it had aroused. I was so relieved now because the hand on my arm seemed kept there to guide and support, rather than to take me into custody, that I allowed myself to be led further into the darkness. I had no idea who was escorting me; there wasn’t nearly enough light to identify faces or even the colour of hair. The voice hadn’t sounded like Ginger’s, though, on the other hand, it was too cultivated to belong to one of the attendants. These reflections, too, helped restore my normality, while simultaneously arousing an undefined suspicion, which, despite its vagueness, at this point made me stand still and ask, ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘To the chief’s private office.’ Besides sounding surprised by my question, the speaker seemed to consider me unappreciative, for his tone became definitely reproachful. ‘He’s been waiting for you all the afternoon, though I happen to know he was looking forward to being at home for his children’s party today. “Go and look out for him,” he told me when it got dark. “I particularly want him to have the news today since it wasn’t possible to let him have it in time for Christmas.”‘ Thinking, no doubt, that he’d put me to shame by relating this instance of official benevolence, he again urged me on.

  But now I’d once more got my wits about me and refused to move. ‘How could he possibly have known I would come at all?’ I asked sharply, gratified by the firmness of my voice and the sensible sound of the question, which received no reply beyond a repeated request to hurry up that I ignored.

  My suspicions were all the time growing stronger and more defined. I’d become completely sceptical about the ‘news’, which I was sure would turn out to be some sort of fraud. We happened to be standing close to a desk, on the top of which the lamp cast a greenish circular glow like that of a night light. In the deep shadow beyond it I seemed to discern the dim shape of a seated figure, leaning forward a little, in an attitude of intense watchfulness. As if this provided the clue to the whole situation, my suspicions suddenly crystallized into certainties. All at once, everything seemed to stand out in a burst of illumination.

  Recalling how the red-haired man had taken offence and gone off without speaking to me, I felt convinced, in my new enlightenment, that everything that had taken place here today was part of an elaborate hoax, of which I was to be the victim. Fortunately, I’d seen through it. But I shuddered to think of the shock and disillusionment a more trusting person would have been in for and felt an obligation to protest, however ineffectively, against this heartless trick. ‘A cruel joke,’ I said coldly, putting as much sternness into my voice as I could.

  ‘Joke?’ my companion echoed, taken aback, presumably, because I’d already discovered the plot – or could it be that he knew nothing about it? His surprise sounded so genuine that the possibility of his innocence crossed my mind but seemed too wildly improbable to consider seriously, so I said, as coldly as before, ‘Tell your friend the chief, or whatever he calls himself, to choose another sucker next time. I’m not so easily fooled.’

  With this, I disengaged myself from the unresisting hand on my arm and began groping my way back to the door by which I’d entered so unceremoniously. To my surprise, no attempt was made to detain me. If each light represented a hidden watcher, there must have been a good many of them in the room; they could easily have overpowered me between them. But, like the bullying petty tyrants they were, they seemed to have collapsed completely as soon as I stood up to them. Throughout the great echoing place nobody moved; there wasn’t a sound, apart from the noise of my own blundering progress.

  Growing bold, I went up to one of the desks I was passing, meaning to look into the face of the shadowy form sitting there, apparently watching me. But either the greenish light was distorting or I was still in a confused state, for I got the somehow dismaying impression that I was confronting a mere bundle of clothing propped up in the chair, instead of a human being and stumbled away, disconcerted, without further investigations.

  I’d found the door at last and was on the point of opening it when the individual to whom I’d been speaking overtook me and held out a paper, saying, ‘Since you won’t come to the chief, he sends you this.’ My hand clenched automatically to crumple it in disgust; but then I hesitated, hearing, ‘A room has just become vacant in the street where your fiancée lives, and he thought you might like to take it until you find somewhere suitable for you both.’

  So Ginger insisted on playing his pitiless farce to the bitter end. How well the messenger was acting his part; that simple sincere voice and manner of his didn’t match the idea of deception. Though I knew the thing must be a fake, I couldn’t entirely suppress the thrill of pleasure that stirred my nerves at the prospect of living near Carla. I found that I was wavering, undecided. Could I trust this messenger with the convincing voice? On a sudden impulse, determined to get a glimpse of his face, I abruptly opened the door, admitting a wedge of pale light from outside. There, straight in front of me, was the narrow exit, at which I gazed with such relief that I might have been afraid it wouldn’t be there any longer. But it was the messenger who, in the brief moment while I was looking at it, seemed to have vanished. Peering into the dimness, I saw no sign of him anywhere, till a slight stir in the dense black shadow behind the door suggested that he’d concealed himself there when I opened it.

  ‘So you’re afraid to let me see your face!’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘I’m not surprised, after trying to play me such a mean trick with that sham document.’ I held the paper out in the light, hoping he would come forward to take it, so that I’d be able to see him. He didn’t move, and I went on in disgust, ‘You’re just as bad as the others. Heaven only knows why I should have imagined you might have retained some vestige of decent feeling. I see what a fool I’ve been to trust any of you, to believe you were trying to be helpful. You officials must have been laughing your heads off all this time. Well, my eyes are open at last. Now I can see you all in your true colours – corrupt, irresponsible, deceitful and totally callous. Not one of you cares a damn for the people you’re supposed to be helping. No wonder you’re ashamed to show yourselves when you indulge your infantile sadism at their expense in this sort of spiteful play-acting!’

  Silence closed on my angry voice, and I knew my anger was partly assumed. Was anyone listening to me? I could no longer be certain of the dark shape I thought I had seen in the shadows behind the door. In any case, why should I bother about the man any further? My indignation withered away now that I’d relieved my feelings by telling him what I thought of him and his colleagues. To hell with the w
hole lot of them! Suddenly losing interest, I decided to waste no more time and walked out through the door, through the narrow opening into the street beyond, glad to be leaving the place behind me.

  Like my feelings, it seemed to wither into unreality as I hurried along, conscious of nothing except the symptoms of my cold, which had been temporarily in abeyance but which now returned to burden me with heavy discomfort. Back at the flat I only remember thinking how many flights of stairs there were to be climbed laboriously. I’d even forgotten that Carla was coming.

  She’d already let herself in and was waiting for me, reading by a single light. When I opened the door, not expecting to see her – not even thinking of her – the shock of her beauty took me unawares, like a revelation, waking me momentarily from my stupor. For an enchanted instant the old magic revived, and I eagerly started towards her.

  I distinctly saw her stand up and come to meet me with a welcoming smile. There was no rational cause for my feeling that she receded as I approached, gliding away from me like an unattainable vision, too beautiful to be true. Nevertheless, the illusion seemed stronger than truth. My magic moment over, I stopped a short distance from her and stood still, relapsing into dull heaviness, as if not fully awake.

  I heard her say, ‘So you’ve been out?’ in a questioning tone. But my head was aching so much I could think of no answer and simply stood staring. She had moved out of the circle of soft lamplight, and against the shadows her face appeared palely lit, mysterious as a miracle or a dream.

  Her loveliness made me more aware of my ugly, heavy cold, which became exaggerated into something shameful. As if by contrast with her perfection, even my brain had grown ugly and stupid; its slow stupid thoughts didn’t seem to belong to me. I felt altogether strange and unlike myself, a combination of shame and incapacity having replaced the person I really was, and this seemed to be her deliberate doing. Sudden resentment flared through my daze. Why should she make me ashamed of having a cold? Her beauty, which had charmed me the previous moment, had turned into a source of grievance. The memory of yesterday’s unexplained painful events at her home thrust itself upon me, and a crowd of urgent questions clamoured for answers. ‘Why did you leave me alone so long in the library? Had you arranged to meet that official? Who is he? Just how well do you know him? Why haven’t you ever mentioned him to me?’ Instead of any of these, I asked abruptly, ‘Why are you in the dark?’ at the same time switching on the strong centre light we hardly ever used.

  This instinctive attempt to destroy her composure did not succeed, for, though the sudden light made her blink, she remained imperturbable as before. I had only exposed myself, and I stood revealed as a boorish, uncivilized lout to whom she would be eternally inaccessible.

  Beginning to sink back hopelessly into stupefaction, to rouse myself I started pacing the room, deliberately working myself up to make a scene, determined to penetrate her calm. If I couldn’t reach her, at least I would make her angry and bring her down nearer my own level. To concentrate on this was a fearful effort; my dull, estranged thoughts kept sliding away from me into blankness. But I stubbornly continued my pacing, persistently dwelling on the things I resented, as if with somebody else’s brain, taking care not to look at Carla; who, realizing no doubt the futility of trying any reasonable approach while I was in this mood, kept silent and out of sight.

  Presently I felt a faint itch of curiosity, wanting to know what she was doing. Stealing a furtive glance, I saw her bending over some frail wintry flowers she had brought, arranging them in a bowl on the table, her expression absorbed and withdrawn. Her cool, private self-sufficiency struck me as being assumed for the purpose of hurting and excluding me. Yet she seemed like some fabulous being at the same time, as if she wasn’t quite human; an ice maiden, perhaps, intent on her delicate frost flowers and immune from our emotions.

  A sudden monstrous desire to hurt her transfixed me; I wanted to assert my gross earthly condition over her ethereal otherness. What I experienced wasn’t so much a wish as an uncontrollable upthrust of malice, springing from unexplored depths of my being – depths so strange and unsuspected that they seemed utterly alien, augmenting the disconcerting sense of estrangement from my own self. I couldn’t bear this sense of a stranger’s vindictiveness, it was torture to me but a torture incorporating a perverse satisfaction as when one intentionally bites on an aching tooth.

  After the one quick glance, I hadn’t looked at Carla again. But the flowers, directly under the light, caught and held my eyes and I stopped to stare at them. All at once it struck me that they were staring back; their pale, still, imperturbable faces were lifted to me in utter indifference, deputizing for the girl’s face at which I would not look. This was the very last straw. The insult of those inhuman flower faces in league with her inhumanity against me was more than I could endure. I had to shut them out of my sight.

  My hand began moving upwards to cover my eyes; then, with a weird sensation of abstract malice, I felt it shoot out suddenly in a different direction, like the hand of another person, crashing into something smooth and hard and sending it flying, while, above the noise of smashing china, I heard incoherent shouting. ‘I can’t stand the sight of those things – don’t bring them into the place – so far and no further – it doesn’t belong to you, and neither do I – yet.’

  The excitement I’d been working so hard to raise surged over me and for a second swept me beyond myself. Gradually then it dawned on me that the cold-strangled voice with the ugly overtone of hysteria was my own; and with this realization the madness, delirium, or whatever it was, expired exactly as though it had never been, leaving only an incubus, a weight like a bad dream, from which I couldn’t wake, pinning me down and dividing me from the world. As if I’d dropped asleep on my feet, I stood mute and inert, no more than an upright mass of dead matter, except for a single point of anxiety, buried very deep down, warning me of sensation to come, some time in the future.

  Water, streaming over the table, cascaded on to the floor, carrying with it some of the scattered flowers, their fragile petals already bruised and crumpled. Without feeling I stared at the havoc I had created, unable to face the reality of what I’d done. It was as if my nerves had gone dead. There was the havoc, and the reality of it was there, like a man with his shadow, but the two wouldn’t come together. I kept my eyes lowered, not wanting to see Carla. The thought, I must apologize, was in my head but, like everything else, rendered meaningless and cut off from me by the heaviness, as of sleep, which oppressed me.

  She was the one who spoke first, asking me, with no trace of emotion, to stand aside, leaning over the table and wiping it with a cloth and, only when she’d cleared up the mess, confronting me very directly to say, ‘Why don’t you break off our engagement instead of trying to provoke me to do it for you?’

  I heard the words and understood them; but the pressure of aching heaviness in my head kept their meaning apart, and, to my mind peering through curtains of strangeness, it seemed barely possible that an answer should be expected of me. All I could do was to raise my head, most laboriously as if heaving up some unwieldy great object, so that we came face to face. Her lovely paleness, untroubled-seeming as always, again reminded me of a snow maiden – cold, disheartening association – with large lustrous eyes looking at me darkly from far away. But, thought I – someone else’s dull thoughts churning away in my dazed state – a snow maiden should have blue eyes or green, the colour of ice-shadows in a crevasse. Instead, there were these two dark crystals, very lovely and very strange. Was this all the strangeness I’d always seen in her face? Could the whole secret be merely that she had the wrong-coloured eyes?

  The distracting question opened and shut ephemeral wings on the brink of the situation, where Carla, beautiful and unreal, awaited the answer I could not feel called upon to give.

  Finally she spoke again. ‘I’ve felt for some time that you didn’t want to go on. But I hoped you’d be honest enough to tell me. However
…’

  The last word was scarcely more than a sigh. Still she watched, still expecting me to say something. Nothing suggested itself. What could I possibly say to a snow maiden? Her watchful eyes made me uneasy, and I started frantically searching my empty head, turning out every cupboard and dusty corner but only to find a few Latin phrases and names of schoolboys, unremembered for years. I was thankful when she relieved me of this fruitless quest for speech and slowly turned to the chair on which she’d left her outdoor things. I watched her move in bright, ethereal otherness among the ponderous down-to-earth shapes of the furniture, and my throat ached because she would soon be gone, back to whatever enchanted country she came from. But I did nothing to stop her going – that didn’t seem to be in my power.

  I felt utterly unfamiliar to myself, inextricably mixed up with headache and heaviness; and there was always that oppressiveness on me, like a waking sleep. The high room was so still I fancied that I could hear the tiny electric crackle of Carla’s hair as she combed it; and somewhere a drop of water fell regularly as a clock ticking, marking the seconds, while everything seemed to wait in suspense as she went to the door.

  At the last, at the open door, unbearably, she turned to look at me again, the dark landing behind her. I had no nerves, no emotions; I was asleep. And yet I couldn’t stand it and quickly looked away. And when I looked back at the door she was no longer there. I saw only the dark empty space where she’d been standing, as if the darkness had taken her with a huge black, silent hand while I wasn’t looking. All I heard was her light descending step on the stairs, receding from me, flight after flight, into the dark depths of the empty house; and, at the end, the final muted thump of the outer door.