She woke very early in the morning with one clear image in her mind: what
John had done yesterday.
Her mind seemed to have watched all night behind her sleep to attack her
with it in the first moment of waking. She had got to come to a clear
decision about that. If Billy Sutton had done it, or one of McClane's
chauffeurs, her decision would have been very clear. She would have said
he was a filthy coward and dismissed him from her mind. But John couldn't
be dismissed. His funk wasn't like other people's funk. Coupled with his
ecstatic love of danger it had an unreal, fantastic quality. Somehow she
couldn't regard his love of danger as an unreal, fantastic thing. It had
come too near her; it had moved her too profoundly and too long; she had
shared it as she might have shared his passion.
So that, even in the sharp, waking day she felt his fear as a secret,
mysterious thing. She couldn't account for it. She didn't, considering
the circumstances, she didn't judge the imminence of the Germans to be a
sufficient explanation. It was as incomprehensible to-day as it had been
yesterday.
But there was fear and fear. There was the cruel, animal fear of the
Belgians in the plantation, fear that was dark to itself and had no
sadness in it; and there was John's fear that knew itself and was sad.
The unbearable, inconsolable sadness of John's fear! After all, you could
think of him as a gentle thing, caught unaware in a trap and tortured.
And who was she to judge him? She in her "armour" and he in his coat of
nerves. His knowledge and his memory of his fear would be like a raw open
wound in his mind; and her knowledge of it would be a perpetual irritant,
rubbing against it and keeping up the sore. Last night she hadn't done
anything to heal him; she had only hurt.... And if she gave John up his
wound would never heal. She owed a sort of duty to the wound.
Of course, like John, she would go on remembering what had happened
yesterday. She would never get over it any more than he would. Yet,
after all, yesterday was only one day out of his life. There might never
be another like it. And to set against yesterday there was their first
day at Berlaere and the day afterwards at Melle; there was yesterday
morning and there was that other day at Melle. She had no business to
suppose that he had done then what he did yesterday. They had settled
that once for all at the time, when he said Billy Sutton had told him
she was going back with him. It all hung on that. If that was right, the
rest was right....
Supposing Billy hadn't told him anything of the sort, though? She would
never know that. She couldn't say to Billy: "_Did_ you tell John I was
going back with you? Because; if you didn't--" She would have to leave
that as it was, not quite certain.... And she couldn't be quite certain
whether the boy had been dead or alive. And ... No. She couldn't get over
it, John's cowardice. It had destroyed the unique, beautiful happiness
she had had with him.
For it was no use saying that courage, physical courage, didn't count.
She could remember a long conversation she had had with George Corfield,
the man who wanted to marry her, about that. He had said courage was the
least thing you could have. That only meant that, whatever else you
hadn't, you must have that. It was a sort of trust. You were trusted not
to betray defenceless things. A coward was a person who betrayed
defenceless things. George had said that the world's adoration of courage
was the world's cowardice, its fear of betrayal. That was a question for
cowards to settle among themselves. The obligation not to betray
defenceless things remained. It was so simple and obvious that people
took it for granted; they didn't talk about it. They didn't talk about it
because it was so deep and sacred, like honour and like love; so that,
when John had talked about it she had always felt that he was her lover,
saying the things that other men might not say, things he couldn't have
said to any other woman.
It was inconceivable that he--It couldn't have happened. As he had said
of the defeat of Belgium, it was so bad that it couldn't happen. Odd,
that the other day she had accepted at once a thing she didn't know for
certain, while now she fought fiercely against a thing she knew; and
always the memory of it, returning, beat her down.
She had to make up her mind on what terms she would live with it and
whether she would live with it at all. Supposing it happened again?
Supposing you had always to go in fear of its happening?... It mightn't
happen. Funk might be a thing that attacked you like an illness, or like
drink, in fits, with long, calm intervals between. She wondered what it
would feel like to be subject to attacks. Perhaps you would recover; you
would be on the look-out, and when you felt another fit coming on you
could stave it off or fight it down. And the first time wouldn't count
because you had had no warning. It wouldn't be fair to give him up
because of the first time.
He would have given her up, he would have left her to the Germans--Yes;
but if she broke with him now she would never get beyond that thought,
she would never get beyond yesterday; she would always see it, the
flagged road swinging with the swinging bulge of the stretcher, the
sudden stopping, the Flamand with his wound, the shafts of the stretcher,
suddenly naked, sticking out; and then all the fantastic, incredible
movements of John's flight. Her mind would separate from him on that,
closing everything down, making his act eternal.
And, after all, the Germans hadn't come round the corner. Perhaps he
wouldn't have left her if they had really come. How did she know what he
wouldn't have done?
No. That was thin. Thin. She couldn't take herself in quite in that way.
It was the way she had tried with Gibson Herbert. When he did anything
she loathed she used to pretend he hadn't done it. But with John, if she
didn't give him up, her eyes must always be open. Perhaps they would get
beyond yesterday. Perhaps she would see other things, go on with him to
something new, forgetting. Her unique, beautiful happiness was smashed.
Still, there might be some other happiness, beautiful, though not with
the same beauty.
If John had got the better of his fear--She thought of all the men she
had ever heard of who had done that, coming out in the end heroic,
triumphant.
* * * * *
Three things, three little things that happened that morning, that showed
the way his mind was working. Things that she couldn't get over, that she
would never forget.
John standing on the hospital steps, watching Trixie Rankin and Alice
Bartrum as they started with the ambulances; the fierce fling of his
body, turning away.
His voice saying, "I loathe those women. There's Alice Bartrum--I saw her
making eyes at Sutton over a spouting artery. As for Mrs. Rankin they
ought to intern her. She oughtn't to be allowed within ten miles of any
army. That's one thing I like about McClane. He can't stand that sort of
thing any more than I can."
"How about Gwinnie and me?"
"Gwinnie hangs her beastly legs about all over the place. So do you."
John standing at the foot of the stairs, looking at the Antwerp men.
Their heads and faces were covered with a white mask of cotton wool like
a diver's helmet, three small holes in each white mask for mouth and
eyes. They were the men whose faces had been burned by fire at Antwerp.
"Come away," she said. But he still stood, fascinated, hypnotised by the
white masks.
"If I were to stick there, doing nothing, looking at the wounded, I
should go off my head."
"My God! So should I. Those everlasting wounds. They make you dream
about them. Disgusting dreams. I never really see the wound, but I'm
just going to see it. I know it's going to be more horrible than any
wound I've ever seen. And then I wake.... That's why I don't look at
them more than I can help."
"You're looking at them now," she said.
"Oh, them. That's nothing. Cotton wool."
And she, putting her hand on his arm to draw him up the stairs, away.
John shaking her hands off and his queer voice rising. "I wish you
wouldn't do that, Charlotte. You know I hate it."
He had never said anything to her like that before. It hadn't struck her
before that, changed to himself, he would change to her. He hadn't got
over last night. She had hurt him; her knowledge of his cowardice hurt
him; and this was how he showed his pain.
She thought: Here's Antwerp falling and Belgium beaten. And all those
wounded. And the dead.... And here am I, bothering about these little
things, as if they mattered. Three little things.
* * * * *
The fire from the battlefield had raked the village street as they came
in; but it had ceased now. The curé had been through it all, going up and
down, helping with the stretchers. John was down there in the wine-shop,
where the soldiers were, looking for more wounded.
They had found five in the stable yard, waiting to be taken away; they
had moved four of them into the ambulance. The fifth, shot through the
back of his head, still lay on the ground on a stretcher that dripped
blood. Charlotte stood beside him.
The curé came to her there. He was slender and lean in his black cassock.
He had a Red Cross brassard on his sleeve, and in one hand he carried his
missal and in the other the Host and the holy oils in a little bag of
purple silk. He looked down at the stretcher and he looked at Charlotte,
smiling faintly.
"Where is Monsieur?" he said.
"In the wine-shop, looking for wounded."
She thought: He isn't looking, for them. He's skulking there, out of the
firing. He'll always be like that.
It had begun again. The bullets whistled in the air and rapped on the
stone causeway, and ceased. The curé glanced down the street towards the
place they had come from and smiled again.
She liked his lean dark face and the long lines that came in it when it
smiled. It despised the firing, it despised death, it despised everything
that could be done to him there. And it was utterly compassionate.
"Then," he said, "it is for you and me to carry him, Mademoiselle." He
stooped to the stretcher.
Between them they lifted him very slowly and gently into the ambulance.
"There, Monsieur, at the bottom."
At the bottom because of the steady drip, drip, that no bandaging could
staunch. He lay straight and stiff, utterly unconcerned, and his feet in
their enormous boots, slightly parted, stuck out beyond the stretcher.
The four others sat in a row down one side of the car and stared at him.
The curé climbed in after him, carrying the Host. He knelt there,
where the blood from the smashed head oozed through the bandages and
through the canvas of the stretchers to the floor and to the skirts of
his cassock.
The Last Sacrament. Charlotte waited till it was over, standing stolidly
by the tail of the car. She could have cried then because of the sheer
beauty of the curé's act, even while she wondered whether perhaps the
wafer on his tongue might not choke the dying man.
The curé hovered on the edge of the car, stooping with a certain
awkwardness; she took from him his missal and his purple bag as he
gathered his cassock about him and came down.
"Can I do anything, Monsieur?"
"No, Mademoiselle. It _is_ done."
His eyes smiled at her; but his lips were quivering as he took again
his missal and his purple bag. She watched him going on slowly down the
street till he turned into the wine-shop. She wondered: Had he seen?
Did he know why John was there? In another minute John came out,
hurrying to the car.
He glanced down at the blood stains by the back step; then he looked in;
and when he saw the man lying on the stretcher he turned on her in fury.
"What are you thinking of? I told you you weren't to take him."
"I had to. I couldn't leave him there. I thought--"
"You've no business to think."
"Well, but the curé--"
"The curé doesn't know anything about it."
"I don't care. If he's in a clean bed--if they take his boots off--"
"I told you they can't spare clean beds for corpses. He'll be dead before
you can get him there."
"Not if we're quick."
"Nonsense. We must get him out of that."
He seized the handle of the stretcher and began pulling; she hung on to
his arm and stopped that.
"No. No," she said. "You shan't touch him."