Sadly he listened to the ancient sound of the water lapping at the sands, and the rustle of the wind of morning in the palms overhead travelling the spring world and night sky like the endless questing spirit of God tracking its brief and imperfect container in man. He saw some junks go out to sea and the full moon come sinking down, fulfilled and weary, on to their black corrugated sails. The moon was now even larger than when he had first seen it. Yes. Now Hara’s last moon was not only full but also overflowing with a yellow, valedictory light. And as he was thinking, from a Malay village hidden in the jungle behind there suddenly rang out the crow of a cock, sounding the alarm of day. The sound was more than he could bear. It sounded like notice of the first betrayal joined to depravity of the latest and became a parody of Hara’s call of’ Merry Christmas’. And although it was not Christmas and the land behind was not a Christian land, he felt that he had betrayed the sum of all the Christmases.
Quickly he turned the car round. He would get back to the gaol, see Hara and atone for his hesitation. He drove recklessly fast and reached the gates as the dawn, in a great uprush of passionate flaming red light, hurled itself at the prison towers above him.
‘But of course I was too late,’ Lawrence told me, terribly distressed. ‘Hara was already hanged.’
I took his arm and turned with him for home. I could not speak and when he went on to ask, more of himself than of me or the darkening sky, ‘Must we always be too late?’ he asked the question, without knowing it, also for me. It hung like the shadow of a bar of a new prison between us and the emerging stars and my heart filled with tears.
The Seed and the Sower
Christmas Morning
1 The Morning After
THE CHRISTMAS MORNING after John Lawrence told me about Hara, I woke very early to find my mind not on the day but obsessed with the memory of Jacques Celliers. I rose quietly before it was light, before even our two children were awake, and went downstairs to my study. I unlocked the one compartment in my desk where I keep the things that mean most to me and took out seven cardboard folders. I opened the top one quickly to make certain the contents were intact and was instantly reassured to see Celliers’s tense thrusting hand writing on the coarse yellow sheets of toilet paper which was the only paper the Japanese would allow us in our prison. Although the edges of the frail paper were frayed and partially rotted from damp under the stone floor of the prison cell wherein they had lain wrapped in a remnant of an army groundsheet, the hand was remarkably fresh and clear, as if it had only just penned the description of events instead of some eight years before. Just for a moment as I held this slim parcel of writing between my hands my fingers tingled as if with shock at the miracle which had enabled it to survive not only the heavy damp of the dark Javanese earth but also the fanatical search by our captors. Finally, years after the end of the war, the Javanese civilian mason who had found it had even been moved with enough wonder to take it to an official. And the official happened to have known me. When this man saw my name and address in England written on the outside and read the entreaty that it should be delivered to me he ignored the normal formalities, not without some risk to himself, and posted it off to me at once.
I sat there for a while, thinking deeply again as I had done so often since I received it, how strange it was that Celliers should have chosen me as his recipient. There must have been many people in his own country who had known him far better. Indeed for some months I wondered why he had not sent it to the brother who figures so disturbingly in his narrative. But when I myself went to his old home I discovered how little that would have helped, though it deepened the strangeness of his action by an implication of a clear fore-knowledge of events still to come. But perhaps strangest of all to me, sitting there in the silence of the still Christmas dawn, was the fact that it should be there safe in my hands to show to John Lawrence. What he had told me about himself and Hara the evening before made me feel that Celliers might have written the document not for himself, not for me, not even for his brother, but specifically for Lawrence. I could hardly wait for full morning to come, to break away from the excited children, get out of church and, immediately after breakfast, to draw Lawrence to one side and ask:
‘D’you remember Jacques Celliers?’
As he looked puzzled I hastened to add: ‘Surely you must! That tall good-looking South African officer who was with me on my first raids behind the lines in North Africa and afterwards with the 51st Commando in the Western Desert? He used to dine with me in our mess from time to time.’
‘Good heavens!’ Lawrence exclaimed, his grey eyes quickening with interest: ‘Of course I remember him. He was a remarkable soldier. And apart from that he was almost the only man I’ve ever met whom one could call beautiful. I can see him now . . . walking about . . . almost like an animal, always on his toes and loose in the ankles. Had the guts of a lion too, and the endurance of a camel! That’s the man you mean, isn’t it? And didn’t he have some nickname . . . ?’
I nodded. ‘That’s Celliers all right: “Straffer Jack” the troops called him.’ I gave Celliers the name he was popularly known by all along the precarious Libyan front in 1941.’
‘D’you know,’ Lawrence went on: ‘I’ve thought of him a great deal lately. Only yesterday I found myself wondering what had become of him. I always had a feeling, he’d never come through alive. I never knew him as you did, of course, and as you know he never said much, at least to me. Indeed for a person who could talk so well when he wanted to I remember him as an oddly silent man . . .’ He paused. ‘But he seemed to me to behave sometimes as if he wanted to get himself killed.’
‘Perhaps you’re not far wrong,’ I said quietly.
‘Did he get himself killed then? What happened to him? Why d’you ask me now if I remember him?’ Lawrence questioned quickly, his imagination plainly aroused.
‘Look!’ I said. ‘I’d rather you first read this document that he wrote before I answer your questions. What we talked about last night made me feel that you, rather than I, should be its keeper. Read it. It won’t take long. And then we can talk.’
I left him alone sitting with his fine head and responsive face on which time had written its own meaning with such intimacy, bowed over the yellow paper. Behind him the soft, grey Christmas Day was lifting over the accepting fields which, in prison, had haunted my memory like a vision of heaven on earth. This, then, is what Lawrence read.
2 A Brother
I HAD A brother once and I betrayed him. The betrayal in itself was so slight that most people would find ‘betrayal’ too exaggerated a word, and think me morbidly sensitive for so naming it. Yet as one recognizes the nature of the seed from the tree, the tree by its fruit, and the fruit from the taste on the tongue, so I know the betrayal from its consequences and the tyrannical flavour it left behind it in my emotions. That is one of the fundamental things about betrayal, and which perhaps is better set down here, beyond doubt, right at the beginning. Though I say it without pride or humility but merely as a fact of my life, I speak now as an expert in this matter. And as such I can assure you that one of the most significant characteristics of betrayal is that it is neither spectacular nor presumptuous in origin. Indeed those treacheries destined to reach furthest in their consequences prefer not to be obvious or dramatic in their beginnings but rather to wait, humbly and unostentatiously, until they are ready to bear their bitter fruit in maturity. They seem to favour presenting themselves to the unguarded heart selected to become their own private seed-bed as trivialities in the daily routine of life, as insignificant occurrences so self-evident that no question of a choice and so no chance of rejection arises out of their appearance on the familiar scene of everyday events. In fact betrayal behaves as if it were worth no more than the miserable thirty pieces of silver that were paid for the greatest and most meaningful betrayal of all time. That I suggest is not only a fundamental but also one of the most frightening aspects of it. Contrast betrayal, for instance, with something else which also grows great out of very little, namely faith. No matter how far awareness pursues faith, even if it is to the outermost ends of being, faith still stands positively on the threshold of the world. There faith still will move mountains provided it has some substance in the heart. But betrayal has no need of anything particular in order to exist. It can begin most effectively as a mere refusal to be, a casual negation, as the insubstantial pollen of the deadly nightshade of nothingness. Like the geometric point in the intuitive heart of Euclid betrayal needs neither magnitude nor size for its existence but only position. Here then is the moment, the place and the circumstances; here the position in my own life of the betrayal of which I wish to speak.