'You can't do that,' the old warder told him, 'it's not legal. The best thing I can suggest is a sack filled with sand.'
'Fussy old sod,' thought Els and sent the convicts off to fill some sacks with sand. They were quite satisfactory as stand-ins and didn't complain when the noose was fitted round their necks which was more than could be said for the black convicts. The trouble was that the bottom dropped out every time one was hanged. Els went back into Bottom to consult the old warder.
'He's not here any longer,' the Bishop told him.
'Where's he gone to?' Els asked.
'He's applied for sick leave,' the Bishop said. 'He's got stomach trouble.'
'It's the same with those sacks,' said Els and left the Bishop wondering which was worse, hanging or disembowelling.
'I don't suppose it makes a great deal of difference,' he thought finally. 'In any case there is nothing I can do about it.'
Kommandant van Heerden did not share the Bishop's fatalism. His third heart attack had convinced him that he too was under sentence of death, but he had decided that there was something he could do about it. He had been assisted in reaching this conclusion by Konstabel Oosthuizen whose experience of major surgery made him an unrivalled source of medical information.
'The most important thing is to have a healthy donor,' the Konstabel told him, 'after that it's a piece of cake, compared to my operation.' Kommandant van Heerden had hurried off to avoid having to listen to a description of the operation in which the greater portion of Konstabel Oosthuizen's digestive tract figured so memorably.
Sitting in his office he listened to Luitenant Verkramp discussing very loudly the case of his uncle who had died of heart trouble. The Kommandant had noticed recently that an extraordinarily large proportion of the Verkramp family had succumbed to what was evidently an hereditary defect and the manner of their passing had been uniformly so atrocious that he could only hope that Verkramp would go the same way. The Luitenant's solicitude was getting on his nerves, and he was equally tired of inquiries about how he felt.
'I feel all right, damn it,' he told Verkramp a hundred times.
'Ah,' Verkramp said sadly, 'that's often the way it seems. Now my Uncle Piet said he was feeling fine the day he died but it came on all of a sudden.'
'I don't suppose it was quick,' the Kommandant said.
'Oh no. Very slow and agonizing.'
'I thought it would be,' said the Kommandant.
'A dreadful business,' said Verkramp. 'He-'
'I don't want to hear any more,' the Kommandant shouted.
'I just thought you'd like to know,' said Verkramp and went out to tell Konstabel Oosthuizen that irritability was a sure sign of incurable heart disease.
In the meantime the Kommandant had tried to occupy his mind by devising a suitably caustic reply to the Commissioner of Police, who had written ordering him to see that the men under his command got plenty of outdoor exercise and had even hinted that it might be a good thing to organize a brothel for the police barracks in Piemburg. The Kommandant could see that Konstabel Els' confession was still preying on the mind of the Police Commissioner.
'How do you spell taxidermist?' he asked Konstabel Oosthuizen.
'Oh, I wouldn't go to one of them,' the Konstabel replied. 'You need a proper surgeon.'
'I wasn't thinking of going to a taxidermist,' the Kommandant shouted. 'I just want to know how to spell the word.'
'The first thing to do is to find a suitable donor,' the Konstabel went on, and the Kommandant had given up the attempt to finish the letter. 'Why don't you have a word with Els? He should be able to fix you up with one.'
'I'm not having a kaffir,' said the Kommandant firmly. 'I'd rather die.'
'That's what my cousin said the very day he passed on,' Verkramp began.
'Shut up,' snarled the Kommandant, and went into his office and shut the door. He sat down at his desk and began to think about Konstabel Els' capacity for supplying a donor. Half an hour later he picked up the phone.
It was with some surprise that Jonathan Hazelstone learnt that Kommandant van Heerden had put in a request to see him.
'Come to gloat, I suppose,' he said when the Governor brought him the note from the Kommandant. He was even more astonished at the way the request had been worded. Kommandant van Heerden did not actually beg an audience with the Bishop, but his note spoke of 'a meeting perhaps in the privacy of the prison chapel, to discuss a matter of mutual interest to us both'. Jonathan racked his brains to think of some matter of mutual interest, and apart from his coming execution which Kommandant van Heerden must have had considerable interest in if his pains to achieve it were anything to go by, he couldn't think of any interests he might share with the Kommandant. At first he was inclined to refuse the request, but he was persuaded to go by the old warder, whose bowel trouble had stopped, now that Els had ceased rupturing the sacks.
'You never know. He might have some good news for you,' the warder said, and the Bishop had agreed to the meeting.
They met in the prison chapel one afternoon just a week before the execution was due to take place. The Bishop clanked over firmly chained and manacled to find the Kommandant sitting in a pew waiting for him. At the Kommandant's suggestion the two men made their way up the aisle and knelt side by side at the altar rail, out of hearing of the warders at the chapel door. Above them in the windows scenes of edifying horror done in late nineteenth-century stained glass filtered the sunlight that managed to penetrate the dense colours and the bars behind the glass, until the whole chapel was glowing with maroon gore.
While Kommandant van Heerden offered a short prayer the Bishop, having declined the Kommandant's invitation to say one, gazed up at the windows awestruck. He had never realized before how many ways there were of putting people to death. The windows provided a comprehensive catalogue of executions and ranged from simple crucifixion to burning at the stake. St Catherine on the wheel entirely merited her fame as a firework, the Bishop decided, while St Sebastian would have made an ideal trademark for pincushions. One after another the martyrs met their terrible ends with a degree of realism that seemed to mark the artist out as a genius and an insane one at that. The Bishop particularly liked the electric chair in one window. With a truly Victorian obsession for naturalism combined with high drama, the figure in the chair was portrayed encased in an aura of electric-blue sparks. Looking up at it, the Bishop was glad that he had agreed to the meeting. To have seen these windows was to know that his own end on the gallows, no matter how badly bungled by the incompetent Els, would be positively enjoyable by comparison with the sufferings portrayed here.
'I suppose I can be grateful for small mercies,' he said to himself as the Kommandant mumbled his final prayer which in the circumstances the Bishop thought was rather curiously worded.
'For what we are about to receive may the good Lord make us truly thankful, Amen,' said the Kommandant.
'Well?' said the Bishop after a short pause.
'You'll be glad to hear that your sister is doing very well at Fort Rapier,' the Kommandant whispered.
'It's nice to know.'
'Yes, she is in the best of health,' said the Kommandant.
'Hm,' said the Bishop.
'She has put on some weight,' said the Kommandant. 'But that is only to be expected with hospital food.' He paused, and the Bishop began to wonder when he was coming to the point.
'Overweight is something to be avoided,' said the Kommandant. 'Obesity is the cause of more premature deaths than cancer.'