The Tenth Man Read Online Free Page B

the other prisoners regarded him as an oddity, even a joke: a lawyer was not somebody with whom one lived: he was a grand doll who was taken out on particular occasions, and now he had lost his black robe.
    ‘Nonsense,’ Pierre said. ‘What’s come over the antique? It’s just a quarter to six.’
    ‘A cheap alarm like that always goes fast.’
    The lawyer said sharply as though from habit, ‘Yesterday you said it was slow.’ From that moment the mayor hated Chavel: Chavel and he were the only men of position in the prison: he told himself that never would he have let Chavel down in that way, and immediately began tortuously to seek for an explanation—some underground and disgraceful motive. Although the lawyer seldom spoke and had no friends, the mayor said to himself, ‘Currying popularity. He thinks he’ll rule this prison. He wants to be a dictator.’
    ‘Let’s have a look at the antique,’ Pierre said, but the watch was safely tethered by its silver chain weighted with seals and coins to the mayor’s waistcoat. It couldn’t be snatched. He could safely sneer at the demand.
    But that day was marked permanently in the mayor’s mind as one of those black days of terrible anxiety which form a private calendar: the day of his marriage: the day when his first child was born: the day of the council election: the day when his wife died. Somehow he had to set his watch going and adjust the hands to a plausible figure without anyone spotting him—and he felt the Paris lawyer’s eyes on him the whole day. To wind the watch was fairly simple: even an active watch must be wound, and he had only to wind it to half its capacity, and then at some later hour of the day give it absent-mindedly another turn or two.
    Even that did not pass unnoticed by Pierre. ‘What are you at?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘You’ve wound it once. Is the antique breaking down?’
    ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ the mayor said, but his mind had never been more active. It was much harder to find a chance to adjust the hands which for more than half the day pursued Pierre’s time at a distance of five hours. Even nature could not here provide an opportunity. The lavatories were a row of buckets in the yard and for the convenience of the guards no man was allowed to go alone to a bucket: they went in parties of at least six men. Nor could the mayor wait till night, for no light was allowed in the cell and it would be too dark to see the hands. And all the time he had to keep a mental record of how time passed: when a chance occurred he must seize it, without hesitating over the correct quartering of an hour.
    At last towards evening a quarrel broke out over the primitive card game—a kind of ‘snap’ with homemade cards—that some of the men spent most of their time playing. For a moment eyes were fixed on the players and the mayor took out his watch and quickly shifted the hands.
    ‘What is the time?’ the lawyer asked. The mayor started as if he had been caught in the witness-box by a sudden question: the lawyer was watching him with the strained unhappy look that was habitual to him, the look of a man who has carried nothing over from his past to buttress him in the tragic present.
    ‘Twenty-five minutes past five.’
    ‘I had imagined it was later.’
    ‘That is my time,’ the mayor said sharply. It was indeed
his
time: from now on he couldn’t recognize even the faintest possibility of error: his time could not be wrong because he had invented it.

2
    LOUIS CHAVEL NEVER understood why the mayor hated him. He couldn’t mistake the hatred: he had seen that look too often in court on the faces of witnesses or prisoners. Now that he was himself a prisoner he found it impossible to adjust himself to the new point of view, and his tentative approaches to his fellows failed because he always thought of them as natural prisoners, who would have found themselves prisoners in any case sooner or later because of a theft, a default or a