VI

It was an hour since they had left Newhaven.

The boat went steadily, inflexibly, without agitation, cutting the small,

crisp waves with a sound like the flowing of stiff silk. For a moment,

after the excited rushing and hooting of the ambulance car, there had

been something not quite real about this motion, till suddenly you caught

the rhythm, the immense throb and tremor of the engines.

Then she knew.

She was going out, with John and Gwinnie Denning and a man called Sutton,

Dr. Sutton, to Belgium, to the War. She wondered whether any of them

really knew what it would be like when they got there.--She was vague,

herself. She thought of the war mostly in two pictures: one very distant,

hanging in the air to her right, colourless as an illustration in the

papers, grey figures tumbled in a grey field, white puff-bursts of

shrapnel in a grey sky: and one very near; long lines of stretchers,

wounded men and dead men on stretchers, passing and passing before her.

She saw herself and John carrying a stretcher, John at the head and her

at the foot and Gwinnie and Dr. Sutton with another stretcher.

Nothing for her and John and Gwinnie but field work; the farm had spoiled

them incurably for life indoors. But it had hardened their muscles and

their nerves, it had fitted them for the things they would have to do.

The things they would have to see. There would be blood; she knew there

would be blood; but she didn't see it; she saw white, very white

bandages, and greyish white, sallow-white faces that had no features that

she knew. She hadn't really thought so very much about the war; there had

been too many other things to think about. Their seven weeks' training at

Coventry, the long days in Roden and Conway's motor works, the long

evenings in the ambulance classes; field practice in the meadow that

John's father had lent to the Red Cross; runs along the Warwickshire

roads with John sitting beside her, teaching her to steer and handle the

heavy ambulance car. An endless preparation.

And under it all, like a passion, like a hidden illness, their

impatience, their intolerable longing to be out there.

If there had been nothing else to think about there was John. Always

John. Not that you could think about him without thinking about the war;

he was so thoroughly mixed up with it; you couldn't conceive him as left

out of it or as leaving himself out. It had been an obsession with him,

to get into it, to get into it at once, without waiting. That was why

there was only four of them. He wouldn't wait for more volunteers. They

could get all the volunteers they wanted afterwards; and all the cars,

his father would send out any number. She suspected John of not really

wanting the volunteers, of not even wanting Gwinnie and Dr. Sutton. She

could see he would have liked to have gone with her alone. Queer, that so

long as she had thought he would be going without her, she had been

afraid; she had felt certain he would be killed or die of wounds. The one

unbearable thing was that John should die. But after it had been settled

that she was to go with him as his chauffeur she hadn't been afraid any

more. It was as if she knew that she would keep him safe. Or perhaps all

the time she had been afraid of something else. Of separation. She had

had visions of John without her in another country; they were coloured,

vaguely, with the horror of her dreams. It had been just that. Anyhow,

she hadn't thought any more about John's dying.

It was the old man, his father, who had made her think of it now.

She could see him, the grey, kind, silent man, at the last minute,

standing on the quay and looking at John with a queer, tight look as

though he were sorry about something--oh, but unbearably sorry about

something he'd thought or said or done. He was keeping it all in, it was

a thing he couldn't speak about, but you could see it made him think John

wasn't coming back again.

He had got it into his head that she was going out because of John.

She remembered, before that, his kind, funny look at her when he said

to John, "Mind you take care of her," and John's "No fear," and her

own "That's not what he's going out for." She had a slight pang when

she thought of John's father. He had been good to Gwinnie and to her

at Coventry.

But as for going out because of John, whether he went or not she would

have had to go, so keen that she hated those seven weeks at Coventry,

although John had been there.

With every thud of the engines her impatience was appeased.

And all the time she could hear Gwinnie's light, cool voice explaining to

Dr. Sutton that the British Red Cross wouldn't look at them and their

field ambulance, but the Belgians, poor things, you know, weren't in a

position to refuse. They would have taken almost anything.

Her mind turned to them: to Gwinnie, dressed in their uniform, khaki

tunic and breeches and puttees, her fawn-coloured overcoat belted close

round her to hide her knees. Gwinnie looked stolid and good, with her

face, the face of an innocent, intelligent routing animal, stuck out

between the close wings of her motor cap and the turned-up collar of her

coat. She would go through it all right. Gwinnie was a little plodder.

She would plod through the war as she had plodded through her training,

without any fear of tests.

And Dr. Sutton. From time to time she caught him looking at her across

the deck. When Gwinnie's talk dropped he made no effort to revive it, but

stood brooding; a square, thick-set man. His head leaned forward a little

from his heavy shoulders in a perpetual short-sighted endeavour to look

closer; you could see his eyes, large and clear under the watery wash of

his glasses. His features, slightly flattened, were laid quietly back on

his composed, candid face; the dab of docked moustache rising up in it

like a strange note of wonder, of surprise.

There, he was looking at her again. But whether he looked or listened, or

stood brooding, his face kept still all the time, still and sad. His

mouth hardly moved as he spoke to Gwinnie.

She turned from him to the contemplation of their fellow passengers. The

two Belgian boy scouts in capes and tilted caps with tassels bobbing over

their foreheads; they tramped the decks, seizing attention by their gay,

excited gestures. You could see that they were happy.

The group, close by her in the stern, establishing itself there apart,

with an air of righteous possession: five, six, seven men, three young,

four middle-aged, rather shy and awkward, on its fringe. In its centre

two women in slender tailor-made suits and motor veils, looking like

bored uninterested travellers used to the adventure.

They were talking to a little man in shabby tweeds and an olive-green

velvet hat too small for his head. His smooth, innocent pink face carried

its moustache like an accident, a mistake. Once, when he turned, she met

the arched stare of small china-blue eyes; it passed over her without

seeing, cold, dreamy, indifferent.

She glanced again at his women. The tall one drew you every time by her

raking eyes, her handsome, arrogant face, the gesture of her small head,

alert and at the same time set, the predatory poise of an enormous bird.

But the other one was--rather charming. Her features had a curious, sweet

bluntness; her eyes were decorations, deep-set blue in the flushed gold

of her sunburn. The little man straddled as he talked to them, bobbing

forward now and then, with a queer jerking movement from his hips.

She wondered what they were and decided that they were part of the

Commission for Relief in Belgium, bound for Ostend.

All those people had the look that John had, of having found what they

had wanted, of being satisfied, appeased. Even Sutton had it, lying on

the top of his sadness, like a light. They felt precisely as she was

feeling--all those people.

And through her wonder she remained aware of John Conway as he walked the

deck, passing and passing in front of her.

She got up and walked with him.

The two women stared at them as they passed. One, the tall one, whispered

something to the other.

"John--do my knees show awfully as I walk?"

"No. Of course they don't. Gwinnie's do. She doesn't know what to do

with them."

He looked down at her and smiled.

"I like you. I like you in that cap. You look as if you were sailing fast

against a head wind, as if you could cut through anything."

Their turn brought them again under the women's eyes. He took her arm and

drew her aside to the rail of the boat's stern. They stood there,

watching the wake boiling and breaking and thinning, a white lace of

froth on the glassy green. Sutton passed them.

"What's the matter with him?" she said.

"The War. He's got it on his mind. It's no use taking it like that,

Jeanne, as one consummate tragedy ... How are _you_ feeling about it?"

"I don't think I'm feeling anything--except wanting to get there. And

wanting--wanting frightfully--to help."

"Unless you can go into it as if it was some tremendous, happy

adventure--That's the only way to take it. I shouldn't be any good if I

didn't feel it was the most _romantic_ thing that ever happened to

me.... To have let everything go, to know that nothing matters, that it

doesn't matter if you're killed, or mutilated ... Of course I want to

help, but that would be nothing without the gamble. The danger."

He stopped suddenly in his turning and held her with his shining,

excited eyes.

"War's the most romantic thing that ever happened ... False romance, my

father calls it. Jolly little romance about _him_. He'll simply make pots

of money out of the war, selling motors to the Government."

"It's rather--romantic of him to give us those two ambulances, and

pay for us."

"_Is_ it? Think of the kudos he gets out of it, and the advertisement for

Roden and Conway, the stinking paragraphs he'll put in the papers about

himself: 'His second son, Mr. John Roden Conway, is taking out two Roden

field ambulance cars which he will drive himself--'Mr. John Roden Conway

and his field ambulance car. A Roden, 30 horse power.' He makes me sick."

She saw again, with a renewal of her pang, the old man, the poor, kind

man. Perhaps he wouldn't put the paragraphs in the papers.

"False romance. He lied. There's no such thing as false romance. Romance

is a state of mind. A state of mind can't be false or true. It simply

exists. It hasn't any relation to reality. It _is_ reality, the most real

part of us. When it's dead we're dead."

"Yes."

But it was funny to _talk_ about it. About romance and danger. It made

her hot and shy. She supposed that was because she couldn't take things

in. Her fatheadedness. It was easy not to say things if you didn't feel

them. The more John felt them the more he had to say them. Besides, he

never said them to anybody but her. It was really saying them to himself,

a quiet, secret thinking.

He stood close, close in front of her, tall and strong and handsome in

his tunic, knee breeches and puttees. She could feel the vibration of his

intense, ardent life, of his excitement. And suddenly, before his young

manhood, she had it again, the old feeling, shooting up and running over

her, swamping her brain. She wondered with a sort of terror whether he

would see it in her face, whether if she spoke he would hear it

thickening her throat. He would loathe her if he knew. She would loathe

herself if she thought she was going into the war because of that,

because of him. Women did. She remembered Gibson Herbert. Glasgow.... But

this was different. The sea was in it, magic was in it and romance. And

if she had to choose between John and her wounded it should not be John.

She had sworn that before they started. Standing there close beside him

she swore again, secretly to herself, that it should not be John.

John glanced at Sutton as he passed them.

"I'd give my soul to be a surgeon," he said. "That's what I wanted."

"You wanted to be a soldier."

"It would have been the next best thing.... Did you notice in the lists

the number of Army Medical men killed and missing? Out of all proportion.

That means that they're as much exposed as the combatants. More,

really....

"... Jeanne--do you realise that if we've any luck, any luck at all, we

shall take the same risks?"

"It's all very well for us. If it was only being killed--But

there's killing."

"Of course there's killing. If a man's willing to be killed he's jolly

well earned his right to kill. It's the same for the other johnnie. If

your life doesn't matter a hang, his doesn't either. He's got his

feeling. He's got his romance. If he hasn't--"

"Yes--if he hasn't?"

"He's better dead."

"Oh no; he might simply go slogging on without feeling anything, from a

sense of duty. That would be beautiful; it would be _the_ most

beautiful thing."

"There you are, then. His duty's his romance. You can't get away from

it."

"No."

But she thought: Supposing he went, loathing it, shivering, sick?

Frightened. Well, of course it would be there too, simply because he

_went_; only you would feel it, not he.

Supposing he didn't go, supposing he stuck, and had to be pushed on, by

bayonets, from behind? It didn't bear thinking of.

John hadn't thought of it. He wouldn't. He couldn't see that some people

were like that.

"I don't envy," he said, "the chaps who come out to soft jobs in

this war."

They had found the little man in tweeds asleep behind the engine house,

his chin sunk on his chest, his hands folded on his stomach. He had taken

off his green velvet hat, and a crest of greyish hair rose up from his

bald forehead, light and fine.

* * * * *

The sun was setting now. The foam of the wake had the pink tinge of red

wine spilt on a white cloth; a highway of gold and rose, edged with

purple, went straight from it to the sun.

After the sunset, land, the sunk lines of the Flemish coast.

There was a stir among the passengers; they plunged into the cabins and

presently returned, carrying things. The groups sorted themselves, the

Commission people standing apart with their air of arrogance and

distinction. The little man in tweeds had waked up from his sleep behind

the engine house, and strolled with a sort of dreamy swagger to his place

at their head. Everybody moved over to the starboard side.

They stood there in silence watching the white walls and domes and towers

of Ostend. Charlotte and Conway had moved close to each other. She looked

up into his face, searching his thoughts there. Suddenly from somewhere

in the bows a song spurted and dropped and spurted again and shot up in

the stillness, slender and clear, like a rod oft white water. The Belgian

boys were singing the Marseillaise. On the deck their feet beat out the

thud of the march.

Charlotte looked away.