However, as he continued talking, I did my best to understand, and I gathered that there was only one point in my confession that badly needed clearing up—the fact that I’d waited before firing a second time. All the rest was, so to speak, quite in order; but that completely baffled him.
I started to tell him that he was wrong in insisting on this; the point was of quite minor importance. But, before I could get the words out, he had drawn himself up to his full height and was asking me very earnestly if I believed in God. When I said, “No,” he plumped down into his chair indignantly.
That was unthinkable, he said; all men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt it, his life would lose all meaning. “Do you wish,” he asked indignantly, “my life to have no meaning?” Really I couldn’t see how my wishes came into it, and I told him as much.
While I was talking, he thrust the crucifix again just under my nose and shouted: “I, anyhow, am a Christian. And I pray Him to forgive you for your sins. My poor young man, how can you not believe that He suffered for your sake?”
I noticed that his manner seemed genuinely solicitous when he said, “My poor young man”—but I was beginning to have enough of it. The room was growing steadily hotter.
As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree. At which, rather to my surprise, his face lit up.
“You see! You see! Now won’t you own that you believe and put your trust in Him?”
I must have shaken my head again, for he sank back in his chair, looking limp and dejected.
For some moments there was a silence during which the typewriter, which had been clicking away all the time we talked, caught up with the last remark. Then he looked at me intently and rather sadly.
“Never in all my experience have I known a soul so case-hardened as yours,” he said in a low tone. “All the criminals who have come before me until now wept when they saw this symbol of our Lord’s sufferings.”
I was on the point of replying that was precisely because they were criminals. But then I realized that I, too, came under that description. Somehow it was an idea to which I never could get reconciled.
To indicate, presumably, that the interview was over, the magistrate stood up. In the same weary tone he asked me a last question: Did I regret what I had done?
After thinking a bit, I said that what I felt was less regret than a kind of vexation— I couldn’t find a better word for it. But he didn’t seem to understand. … This was as far as things went at that day’s interview.
I came before the magistrate many times more, but on these occasions my lawyer always accompanied me. The examinations were confined to asking me to amplify my previous statements. Or else the magistrate and my lawyer discussed technicalities. At such times they took very little notice of me, and, in any case, the tone of the examinations changed as time went on.
The magistrate seemed to have lost interest in me, and to have come to some sort-of decision about my case. He never mentioned God again or displayed any of the religious fervor I had found so embarrassing at our first interview. The result was that our relations became more cordial. After a few questions, followed by an exchange of remarks with the lawyer, the magistrate closed the interview. My case was “taking its course,” as he put it.
Sometimes, too, the conversation was of a general order, and the magistrate and lawyer encouraged me to join in it. I began to breathe more freely. Neither of the two men, at these times, showed the least hostility toward me, and everything went so smoothly, so amiably, that I had an absurd impression of being “one of the family.”
I can honestly say that during the eleven months these examinations lasted I got so used to them that I was almost surprised at having ever enjoyed anything better than those rare moments when the magistrate, after escorting me to the door of the office, would pat my shoulder and say in a friendly tone: “Well, Mr. Antichrist, that’s all for the present!” After which I was made over to my jailers.
II
THERE are some things of which I’ve never cared to talk. And, a few days after I’d been sent to prison, I decided that this phase of my life was one of them. However, as time went by, I came to feel that this aversion had no real substance. In point of fact, during those early days, I was hardly conscious of being in prison; I had always a vague hope that something would turn up, some agreeable surprise.
The change came soon after Marie’s first and only visit. From the day when I got her letter telling me they wouldn’t let her come to see me any more, because she wasn’t my wife—it was from that day that I realized that this cell was my last home, a dead end, so to speak.
On the day of my arrest they put me in a biggish room with several other prisoners, mostly Arabs. They grinned when they saw me enter, and asked me what I’d done. I told them I’d killed an Arab, and they kept mum for a while. But presently night began to fall, and one of them explained to me how to lay out my sleeping mat. By rolling up one end one makes a sort of bolster. All night I felt bugs crawling over my face.
Some days later I was put by myself in a cell, where I slept on a plank bed hinged to the wall. The only other furniture was a latrine bucket and a tin basin. The prison stands on rising ground, and through my little window I had glimpses of the sea. One day when I was hanging on the bars, straining my eyes toward the sunlight playing on the waves, a jailer entered and said I had a visitor. I thought it must be Marie, and so it was.
To go to the Visitors’ Room, I was taken along a corridor, then up a flight of steps, then along another corridor. It was a very large room, lit by a big bow window, and divided into three compartments by high iron grilles running transversally. Between the two grilles there was a gap of some thirty feet, a sort of no man’s land between the prisoners and their friends. I was led to a point exactly opposite Marie, who was wearing her striped dress.
On my side of the rails were about a dozen other prisoners, Arabs for the most part. On Marie’s side were mostly Moorish women. She was wedged between a small old woman with tight-set lips and a fat matron, without a hat, who was talking shrilly and gesticulated all the time. Because of the distance between the visitors and prisoners I found I, too, had to raise my voice.
When I came into the room the babel of voices echoing on the bare walls, and the sunlight streaming in, flooding everything in a harsh white glare, made me feel quite dizzy. After the relative darkness and the silence of my cell it took me some moments to get used to these conditions. After a bit, however, I came to see each face quite clearly, lit up as if a spotlight played on it.
I noticed a prison official seated at each end of the no man’s land between the grilles. The native prisoners and their relations on the other side were squatting opposite each other. They didn’t raise their voices and, in spite of the din, managed to converse almost in whispers.
This murmur of voices coming from below made a sort of accompaniment to the conversations going on above their heads. I took stock of all this very quickly and moved a step forward toward Marie. She was pressing her brown, sun-tanned face to the bars and smiling as hard as she could. I thought she was looking very pretty, but somehow couldn’t bring myself to tell her so.
“Well?” she asked, pitching her voice very high. “What about it? Are you all right, have you everything you want?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve everything I want.”
We were silent for some moments; Marie went on smiling. The fat woman was bawling at the prisoner beside me, her husband presumably, a tall, fair, pleasant-looking man.
“Jeanne refused to have him,” she yelled. “That’s just too bad,” the man replied.
“Yes, and I told her you’d take him back the moment you got out; but she wouldn’t hear of it.”
Marie shouted across the gap that Raymond sent me his best wishes, and I said, “Thanks.” But my voice was drowned by my neighbor’s, asking “if he was quite fit.”
The fat woman gave a laugh. “Fit?
I should say he is! The picture of health.” Meanwhile the prisoner on my left, a youngster with thin, girlish hands, never said
a word. His eyes, I noticed, were fixed on the little old woman opposite him, and she
