cannot write to my daughter from Lisbon. She loves me so much and she waits.’ He shifted his fat thigh and said, ‘The pureness of that love,’ and wept. They had in common all the wide region of repentance and longing.
Their kinship gave the captain courage to try another angle. He said, ‘I am a poor man, but I have enough money to spare ...’ He would never have attempted to bribe an Englishman: it was the most sincere compliment he could pay to their common religion.
‘I’m sorry,’ Scobie said.
‘I have English pounds. I will give you twenty English pounds... fifty.’ He implored. ‘A hundred... that is all I have saved.’
‘It can’t be done,’ Scobie said. He put the letter quickly in his pocket and turned away. The last time he saw the captain as he looked back from the door of the cabin, he was beating his head against the cistern, the tears catching in the folds of his cheeks. As he went down to join Druce in the saloon he could feel the millstone weighing on his breast. How I hate this war, he thought, in the very words the captain had used.
The letter to the daughter in Leipzig, and a small bundle of correspondence found in the kitchens, was the sole result of eight hours’ search by fifteen men. It could be counted an average day. When Scobie reached the police station he looked in to see the Commissioner, but his office was empty, so he sat down in his own room under the handcuffs and began to write his report ‘A special search was made of the cabins and effects of the passengers named in your telegrams . -.. with no result’ The letter to the daughter in Leipzig lay on the desk beside him. Outside it was dark. The smell of the cells seeped in under the door, and in the next office Fraser was singing to him’ self the same tune he had sung every evening since his last leave:
‘What will we care for The why and the wherefore, When you and I Are pushing up the daisies?’
It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have mined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old death-bed? He wrote: A steward who had been dismissed for incompetence reported that the captain had correspondence concealed in his bathroom. I made a search and found the enclosed letter addressed to Frau Groener in Leipzig concealed in the lid of the lavatory cistern. An instruction on this hiding-place might well be circulated, as it has not been encountered before at this station. The letter was fixed by tape above the water-line ...
He sat there staring at the paper, his brain confused with the conflict that had really been decided hours ago when Druce said to him in the saloon, ‘Anything?’ and he had shrugged his shoulders in a gesture he left Druce to interpret. Had he ever intended it to mean: ‘The usual private correspondence we are always finding.’ Druce had taken it for ‘No’. Scobie put his hand against his forehead and shivered: the sweat seeped between his fingers, and he thought, Am I in for a touch of fever? Perhaps it was because his temperature had risen that it seemed to him he was on the verge of a new life. One felt this way before a proposal of marriage or a first crime.
Scobie took the letter and opened it. The act was irrevocable, for no one in this city had the right to open clandestine mail. A microphotograph might be concealed in the gum of an envelope. Even a simple word code would be beyond him; his knowledge of Portuguese would take him no farther than the most surface meaning. Every letter found - however obviously innocent - must be sent to the London censors unopened. Scobie against the strictest orders was exercising his own imperfect judgement. He thought to himself: If the letter is suspicious, I will send my report. I can explain the torn envelope. The captain insisted on opening the letter to show me the contents. But if he wrote that, he would be unjustly blackening the case against the captain, for what better way could he have found for destroying a microphotograph? There must be some lie to be told, Scobie thought, but he was unaccustomed to lies. With the letter in his hand, held carefully over the white blotting-pad, so that he could detect anything that might fall from between the leaves, he decided that he would write a full report on all the circumstances, including his own act.
Dear little money spider, the letter began, your father who loves you more than anything upon earth will try to send you a little more money this time. I know how hard things are for you, and my heart bleeds. Little money spider, if only I could feel your fingers running across my cheek. How is it that a great fat father like I am should have so tiny and beautiful a daughter. Now little money spider, I will tell you everything that has happened to me. We left Lobito a week ago after only four days in port. I stayed one night with Señor Aranjuez and I drank more wine than was good for me, but all my talk was of you. I was good all the time I was in port because I had promised my little money spider, and I went to Confession and Communion, so that if anything should happen to me on the way to Lisbon - for who knows in these terrible days? - I should not have to live my eternity away from my little spider. Since we left Lobito we have had good weather. Even the passengers are not sea-sick. Tomorrow night, because Africa will be at last behind us, we shall have a ship’s concert, and I shall perform on my whistle. All the time I perform I shall remember the days when my little money spider sat on my knee and listened. My dear, I am growing old, and after every voyage I am fatter: I am not a good man, and sometimes I fear that my soul in all this hulk of flesh is no larger than a pea. You do not know how easy it is for a man like me to commit the unforgivable despair. Then I think of my daughter. There was just enough good in me once for you to be fashioned. A wife shares too much of a man’s sin for perfect love. But a daughter may save him at the last. Pray for me, little spider. Your father who loves you more than life.
Mais que a vida. Scobie felt no doubt at all of the sincerity of this letter. This was not written to conceal a photograph of the Cape Town defences or a microphotograph report on troop movements at Durban. It should, he knew, be tested for secret ink, examined under a microscope, and the inner lining of the envelope exposed. Nothing should be left to chance with a clandestine letter. But he had committed himself to a belief. He tore the letter up, and his own report with it, and carried the scraps out to the incinerator in the yard -a petrol-tin standing upon two bricks with its sides punctured to make a draught. As he struck a match to light the papers, Fraser joined him in the yard. ‘What will we care for the why and the wherefore?’ On the top of the scraps lay unmistakably half a foreign envelope: one could even read part of the address -Friedrichstrasse. He quickly held the match to the uppermost scrap as Fraser crossed the yard, striding with unbearable youth. The scrap went up in flame, and in the heat of the fire another scrap uncurled the name of Groener. Fraser said cheerfully, ‘Burning the evidence?’ and looked down into the tin. The name had blackened: there was nothing there surely that Fraser could see - except a brown triangle of envelope that seemed to Scobie obviously foreign. He ground it out of existence with a stick and looked up at Fraser to see whether he could detect any surprise or suspicion. There was nothing to be read in the vacuous face, blank as a school notice-board out of term. Only his own heart-beats told him he was guilty -that he had joined the ranks of the corrupt police officers -Bailey who had kept a safe deposit in another city, Crayshaw who had been found with diamonds, Boyston against whom nothing had been definitely proved and who had been invalided out. They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.