“Come, I’m going to take you home.”
She obeyed him like a somnambulist, and together they walked down the dark staircase of the office. He had forgotten to retain the duty car, but at the street corner they picked up one of those ancient horse-drawn carriages which still did duty for taxis in Jerusalem. She sat, her arm inside his, but completely silent as they drove through the streets of the old town, which were now filling up with eager and excited people. From the Arab quarter, however, there was a noise of counter-demonstrations and the harsh scratching of Radio Cairo calling for the death and destruction of the Jews.
Now and again in the winding streets of the town, under this canopy of light, the carriage was almost brought to a halt by surging crowds shouting good-naturedly to them, “33 to 13!” And here and there an excited Jew cried to Lawton, “Britain, go home!”
The girl sat absolutely still and white as death, hardly taking anything in, until at last they reached the flat. Her teeth had begun to chatter now and, as they climbed the stairs, Lawton put his hand on her forehead to see if she gave any signs of fever.
Once in the flat she threw herself onto the sofa and, giving one long wretched moan, buried her face in the cushions. Lawton stood watching her, undecided. He felt awkward, helpless, furious. Should he perhaps insist that she go to bed? He lit a cigarette and walked to the window.
“Grete,” he said, “will you try and get some sleep?”
She did not answer and, as he was staring irresolutely at her, he heard the crisp note of the doorbell. Who could be calling at this time of night? He threw up the window and strained forward. Outside the block of flats on the pavement stood a small attentive-looking figure in the white robes of a Dominican priest. It did not look up, perhaps because the noise of the fireworks had drowned the sound of the window being opened.
Lawton crossed with swift steps to the hall and pressed the button which would release the front door spring. Then he returned to the sitting-room and said:
“Grete, there’s a priest coming up the stairs. Do you know who he might be?”
She did not hear him, and he crossed the room to shake her by the shoulder as he repeated the phrase. She raised her white tormented face and said incoherently:
“What priest?”
And as if in answer to her question, Father Gaudier was suddenly there. He materialized, or so it seemed, in the doorway of the room, his small white hands clasped in front of him. He was breathing rather hard from his exertions. He uttered her name on a note of interrogation with a kind of child-like submissiveness. He was a small and rugged little man, with a round cropped head of the type which is designated Alpine by ethnographers. His dark hair was cut en brosse, his skin was brown and tanned. His eyes were of the bright blueness of periwinkles. His manner suggested simplicity without archness, and he darted swift interrogative glances from Grete to the soldier and back again to Grete, smiling his simple smile. It took a few seconds only to register his appearance, but already the girl had scrambled into a sitting posture and made a desultory attempt to arrange her hair.
Lawton stood up and, feeling somewhat uncertain of himself, contented himself with a gruff “Good evening” and a short nod of the head.
The priest advanced with an air of uncertainty into the centre of the room and concentrated his glance upon Grete.
“I have some news for you,” he said.
“News?”
“I wonder if I might talk to you,” he said. “I was called to confess a man called Schiller late last night.”
The words had a mesmeric effect upon Grete. She rose from her seat white-faced and anxious. The little priest still smiled with his head on one side. His presence radiated a sort of doll-like composure. Lawton noticed his dusty little toes in their worn sandals.
“I think,” said the little man, “it would be better if I could see you alone for a few moments.”
Lawton took his point and instantly said:
“Of course. I shall be on my way. Good-night, Grete.”
“Oh, don’t run away,” said Father Gaudier. “What I have to say will not take long.”
But Lawton, despite his curiosity, gave them a cheerful “That’s all right” and closed the front door of the flat behind him, to leave the two of them alone.
Grete had clasped her hands in front of her body as she stared fixedly into the blue eyes of the priest. Father Gaudier, as if with a subconscious intention of reducing her obvious anxiety at what he might be about to reveal, came softly towards her and put two fingers of his right hand on her wrist. As if by his impulsion, she sat down once more and the priest took his place beside her, with his fingers still upon her hand.
“What did he tell you?” she managed at last to get out.
“May I smoke?” asked Gaudier humbly in a low voice.
“Of course.”
He helped himself to a cigarette from the enamel box on the table before them and thoughtfully blew a streamer of smoke into the air where it hung, slowly dispersing.
“He told me,” he said in a small, unemotional voice, “everything he could about his life and about yours. He committed many grievous sins, my dear, and like all sinners was more to be pitied than hated.”
“He promised to tell me about the child,” said Grete, in a voice which had a hysterical edge to it.
“Almost the only thing he did not tell me,” said Father Gaudier with an air of pensive reproach, “was that he intended to commit suicide.”
“And even that did not make sense,” she cried bitterly. “It was simply to cheat me. I knew the child was alive somewhere.”
The priest coughed behind his hand, doubling it up into a grubby little paw.
“That is what I came to talk about,” he said. “It is very cruel and very ugly and will cause you great suffering, but from what he told me I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt your child is dead. In fact he asked me to tell you.”
The centre of numbness in the middle of her mind gradually overflowed to encompass her whole body. It overflowed like ink or blood on her carpet and she felt spreading through her a slowly expanding stain of something like amnesia. The phrase had turned her into a pillar of salt.
The little priest did not take his eyes from her face.
“If I tell you that he showed remorse,” he said, “I would not expect you to believe it; indeed, I hardly know whether to believe it myself. With a man so complicated it is always difficult to determine these things. He himself would not have been able to tell us whether he was play-acting or not. He somehow did not know where to find his own feelings or how to interpret them.”
Grete was not really listening, but she was grateful for the sound of his low voice and the cool sympathetic feel of his fingers on her wrist. The priest sighed and went on, almost as if he were talking to himself:
“It makes one wonder whether the consciousness of good and evil is the fruit of instruction or whether it’s inherited like an instinct. Nobody can answer this one. Are there people born without souls? I have met a few people who made me almost believe it — almost, but not quite.”
“Can a man who believes in nothing believe in God?” she asked bitterly. “Or rather, could a man who believed in the Nazi party do so?”
Father Gaudier shook his head with a puzzled air, as though all these questions belonged somehow to the rhetoric of theology which was outside the orbit of ordinary human actions.
“The human heart,” he said helplessly, as if confronting the central enigma of his own profession. “It has no bottom, it has no top, no centre and no sides.”
Holding her voice very steady, and wearing an artificial expression of composure, she said: