Fallen Into the Pit

“Well, yes, most of us, I suppose. But in different degrees. And still you’re left with this great difference, that Tugg and Wedderburn have both had, as you might say, wide experience in killing. They knew how to set about it, easy as knocking off a chicken. And even more, they’d got used to it. Most people, even if they could bring ’emselves to the actual act, would shrink from the idea. But those two lived with the idea so long that it wouldn’t bother them.”

George continued to stare at him glumly, and said nothing. The door of the office, ajar in the draught from the window, creaked a little, naggingly, like a not-quite-aching tooth. It was evening, just after tea, and faintly from the scullery came the chink of crockery, and the vague, soft sounds of Bunty singing to herself.

“Well, it’s reasonable, isn’t it?” said Cooke.

“Reasonable, but not, therefore, necessarily true. You could argue on the same lines that people in London got used to the blitz, and so they did, but the reaction against it was cumulative, all the same. It was in the later stages they suffered most, not from the first few raids. Long acquaintance can sicken you, as well as getting you accustomed to a thing.”

“Yes, but in a way this death was like a hangover from the war, almost a part of it. You can easily imagine a soldier feeling no more qualms about rubbing out Helmut than about firing a machine gun on a battlefield. For years it had been their job, a virtue, if you come to think of it, to kill people like Helmut. And it was a job they were both pretty good at, you know—especially Wedderburn, if all the tales are true.”

George thought what he had been trying not to think for some time, that there was something in it. Not as much as Cooke thought, perhaps, but certainly something. In time of war countries fall over themselves to make commandos and guerrillas of their young men, self-reliant killers who can slit a throat and live off a hostile countryside as simply as they once caught the morning bus to their various blameless jobs. But to reconvert these formidable creations afterwards is quite another matter. Nobody ever gave much thought to that, nobody ever does until their recoil hits the very system which made and made use of them. Men who have learned to kill as a solution for otherwise insoluble problems in wartime may the more readily revert to it as a solution for other problems as desperate in other conditions. And logically, thought George, who has the least right of any man living to judge them for it? Surely the system which taught them the art and ethics of murder to save itself has no right at all. The obvious answer would be: “Come on in the dock with us!”

And yet he was there to do his best for a community, as well as a system, a community as surely victims as were the unlucky young men. And the best might have to be the destruction of one victim for the sake of the others. But he knew, he was beginning to feel very clearly, where the really guilty men were to be found, if Jim Tugg or Chad Wedderburn had committed murder.

“So your vote goes to the schoolmaster, does it?” he asked, stabbing the broken point of the pencil into the wood until powdered graphite flaked from its sides. The door went on creaking, more protestingly because the outer door had just opened, but he was too engrossed to remark it.

“Well, look at his record! It’s about as wild a war story as you could find anywhere, littered with killings.” Cooke, who had not suffered the reality, saw words rather than actualities, and threw the resultant phrases airily, like carnival balloons which could not be expected to do any harm. “He must be inured to it by now, however much he was forced into it by circumstances to begin with. After all, to a fellow like Wedderburn, who’s seen half the continent torn into bloody pieces, what’s one murder more or less to make a fuss about?”

Dominic’s entering footsteps, brisk in the corridor outside the open door, had crashed into the latter part of this pronouncement too late to interrupt it short of its full meaning. Too late Cooke muttered: “Look out! The ghost walks!” There he was in the doorway, staring at them with his eyes big and his mouth open, first a little pale, and then deeply flushed. George, heaving himself round in his chair, said resignedly but testily: “Get out, Dom!” but it was an automatic reaction, not too firmly meant, and Dom did not get out. He came in, indeed, and pushed, the door to behind him with a slam, and burst out:

“Don’t listen to him, he’s crazy, he’s got it all wrong! Chad Wedderburn isn’t like that!”

“Now, nobody’s jumping to any conclusions,” said George gently, aware of a vehemence which was not to be dismissed. “Don’t panic because you hear a view you don’t like, it’s about the five hundredth we’ve discussed, and we’re not guaranteeing any of ’em!”

“Well, but you were listening to him! And it’s such a lot of damned rubbish—” he said furiously. His hazel eyes were light yellow with rage, and his tongue falling over the words in its fiery haste.

“Dominic!” said George warningly.

“Well, so it is damned rubbish! He knows nothing about old Wedderburn, why should he go around saying such idiotic things about him? If that’s how the police work, just saying a man was a soldier five years ago, so this year killing somebody comes easy to him—I think it’s awful! I bet you hang all the wrong people, if you’ve got many Cookes! I bet—”

“Dominic!” George took him by the shoulders and shook him sharply. “Now, let’s have no more of it!”

“You listened to him,” said Dominic fiercely, “you ought to listen to me. At least I do know Mr. Wedderburn, better than either of you do!”

“Calm down, then, and stop your cheek, and you’ll get a better hearing.” He gave him another small, admonishing shake, but his hands were very placid, and his face not deeply disapproving. “And just leave out the damns,” he said firmly, “they don’t make your arguments any more convincing.”

“Well, all right, but he made me mad.”

“So we gathered,” said Cooke, still complacently swinging his leg from the corner of the desk, and grinning at Dominic with impervious good humor. “I never knew you were so fond of your beaks, young Dom.”

“I’m not! He’s not bad! I don’t like him all that much, but he’s decent and fair, anyhow. But I don’t see why you should just draw farfetched conclusions about him when you don’t even know him beyond just enough to speak to in the street.”

“And you do? Fair enough! Go on, tell us what you think about him.”

“Well, he isn’t like what you said. It went just the opposite way with him. In the war he got pushed into the position where he had to learn to live like you said, because there wasn’t any other way. And he did jolly good at it, I know, but he hated it. All the time! He only got so good at it because he had to—to go right through with it to get out, if you know what I mean. But he just hated it! I don’t believe anything could make him do anything like that again. Not for any reason you could think of, not to save his life. It’s because he learned so much about it, because he knows it