Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler Read Free Book Online Page B

answer?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œBut you saw his point?”
    Bauman looked at him steadily:
    â€œWe cannot afford to see the other man’s point.”

6
    During the half-hour’s break at noon, two private cars came jolting up the wadi, escorted by a Bren carrier and followed by a cloud of dust. The first car carried the Assistant District Commissionerand Mrs. Newton, accompanied by a Major of the Police Force. Mr. Newton was a thin, tired-looking middle-aged man with a sparse and untidy moustache. He had been transferred to this country after eight years of service as an Assistant Commissioner in Roonah, North-West India. In the club in Roonah he had always been referred to by the men as a Decent old chap and by the women as Such a dear, followed by an imperceptible pause and a change of conversation. During his term of office in Roonah he had been involved in no scandal and acquired no distinction; he had vanished out of the colony as unobtrusively as he had entered it eight years before, leaving no memory-trace except for an occasional mild joke about his only known hobby, chess, and a compassionate reference to the only major blunder he had ever committed, the marrying of his wife.
    Mrs. Newton was the daughter of a Sergeant-Major in the Indian Army. An intimate analysis of the motives which had attracted timid Mr. Newton to that tall, bony and virginal female would have produced embarrassing results by unearthing Mr. Newton’s steady, stealthy and fervent loathing for Roonah, the Club, the Indian Civil Service and Army; and his oblique sense of humour which the first time led him to visualise the Sergeant-Major’s chaste and angular daughter in a series of those preposterous attitudes which the act of procreation entails. It started as a grotesque private joke and grew until it became an obsession of Mr. Newton’s starved and chess-trained mind, accustomed to visualising positions after both partners’ various moves. What he did not foresee—for he was a kindly man with no more repressed nastiness than the average—was; the stalemate which followed the first few opening moves almost immediately after their marriage. The real situation had none of the humour and mystery which made the imagined one so fascinating; but it was too late by then. A stalemate cannot be undone.
    The third passenger in the car, copper-faced Police Major Edwards, was in a bad temper because Mr. Newton, pretendingto be polite, had taken the seat next to the driver which the Major liked; while Mrs. Newton vaguely thought, as always when in the company of a man in uniform, how much happier she would be had she married into the Forces.
    In the second car sat Mr. Glickstein and Mr. Winter, both members of the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem, and wedged in between them an American newspaper man named Dick Matthews who was on a ten days’ tour through the country. On the front seat next to the driver sat the Zionist Executives official photographer, Dr. phil. Emil Lustig. The photographer and the driver were discussing in German Nietzsche’s influence on Fascist ideology. The journalist was listening with one ear to their conversation, looking bored. Glickstein noticed it.
    â€œDo you understand German?” he asked.
    â€œA little,” said Matthews.
    â€œWe. are a funny country, what?” said Glickstein. He had put on his propaganda smile, baring his gold teeth. “Our driver was a graphological expert at the Criminal Court of Karlsruhe before he became a pioneer.”
    â€œThey are all great guys,” said Matthews, bored.
    â€œThe photographer,” Glickstein continued, “was a lecturer of philosophy at Heidelberg.”
    â€œYeah,” said Matthews, who had stood two hours of propaganda in Glickstein’s bumpy English. “It reminds me of the taxi-drivers in Paris after the last war who were all Russian Grand Dukes.”
    Glickstein’s smile became