She looked at him steadily, a long look that remembered, that made
him remember.
"There isn't time," she said. "They'll begin _firing_ in another minute."
"Damn you." But he had turned, slinking round the corner of the hood to
the engine. While he cranked it up she thought of the kit that one of the
men had left there in the yard. She made a dash and fetched it, and as
she threw it on the floor the car started. She snatched at the rope and
swung herself up on to the step. The dying man lay behind her, straight
and stiff; his feet in their heavy boots stuck out close under her hand.
The four men nodded and grinned at her. They protected her. They
understood.
If only she could get him into a clean bed. If only she had had time
to take his boots off. It would be all right if only she could bring
him in alive.
He was still alive when they got into Ghent.
She had forgotten John and it was not until they came to take out the
stretcher that she was again aware of him. They had drawn up before the
steps of the hospital; he had got down and was leaning sideways, staring
under the stretcher.
"What is it?"
"You can see what it is. Blood."
From the hole in the man's head, through the soaked bandages, it still
dripped, dripped with a light sound; it had made a glairy pool on the
floor of the ambulance.
"Don't look at it," she said. "It'll make you sick. You know you can't
stand it."
"Oh. I can't _stand_ it, can't I?"
He straightened himself. He threw back his head; his upper lip lifted,
stretched tight and thin above the clean white teeth. His eyes looked
down at her, narrowed, bright slits under dropped lids.
"John--I want to get him in before he dies."
"All right. Get in under there. Take his head."
"Hadn't I better take his feet?"
"You'd better take what you're told to."
She stiffened to the weight, heaved up her shoulder. Two men came running
down the steps to help her as John pulled.
"They'll be glad," he said, "to see him."
* * * * *
She was in the yard of the hospital, swabbing out the car, when John
came to her.
The back and side of the hospital, the long barracks of the annex and the
wall at the bottom enclosed a waste place of ochreish clay. A long wooden
shed, straw-white and new, was built out under the red brick of the
annex. She thought it was a garage. John came out of the door of the
shed. He beckoned to her as he came.
"Come here," he said. "I want to show you something."
They went close together, John gripping her arm, in the old way, to steer
her. As they came to the long wall of the shed his eyes slewed round and
looked at her out of their corners. She had seen that sidelong, attentive
look once before, when she was a little girl, in the eyes of a schoolboy
who had taken her away and told her something horrid. The door of the
shed stood ajar. John half led, half pushed her in.
"Look there--" he said.
The dead men were laid out in a row, on their backs; greyish-white,
sallow-white faces upturned; bodies straight and stiff on a thin litter
of straw. Pale grey light hovered, filtered through dust.
It came from some clearer place of glass beyond that might have been a
carpenter's shop, partitioned off. She couldn't see what was going on
there. She didn't see anything but the dead bodies, the dead faces, and
John's living face.
He leaned against the wall; his head was thrown back, his eyes moved
glistening under the calm lids; the corners of his mouth and the wings of
his nostrils were lifted as he laughed: a soft, thin laugh breathed out
between the edges of his teeth. He pointed.
"There's your man. Shows how much they wanted him, doesn't it?"
He lay there, the last comer, in his uniform and bloody bandages, his
stiff, peaked mouth open, his legs stretched apart as they had sprung in
his last agony.
"Oh, John--"
She cried out in her fright and put her hands over her eyes. She had
always been afraid of the dead bodies. She didn't want to know where they
put them, and nobody told her.
John gripped her wrists so that he hurt her and dragged down her hands.
He looked into her eyes, still laughing.
"I thought you weren't afraid of anything," he said.
"I'm not afraid when we're out there. I'm only afraid of _seeing_ them.
You know I am."
She turned, but he had put himself between her and the door. She wrenched
at the latch, sobbing.
"How could you be so _cruel?_ What did you do it for? What did you
_do_ it for?"
"I wanted you to see what they've done with him. There's his clean bed.
They haven't even taken his boots off."
"You brute. You _utter_ brute!"
A steely sound like a dropped hammer came from behind the glass
partition; then the sliding of a latch. John opened the door a little way
and she slipped out past him.
"_Next time_," he said, "perhaps you'll do as you're told."
She wanted to get away by herself. Not into her own room, where Gwinnie,
who had been unloading ambulance trains half the night, now rested. The
McClane Corps was crowding into the messroom for tea. She passed through
without looking at any of them and out to the balcony, closing the French
window behind her. She could hide there beyond the window where the wall
was blank.
She leaned back, flattening herself against the wall....
Something would have to be done. They couldn't go on like this.... Her
mind went to and fro, quickly, with short jerky movements, distressed; it
had to do so much thinking in so short a time.
She would always have to reckon with John's fear. And John's fear was not
what she had thought it, a sad, helpless, fatal thing, sad because it
knew itself doom-like and helpless. It was cruel, with a sort of mental
violence in it, worse than the cruel animal fear of the men in the
plantation. She could see that his cowardice had something to do with his
cruelty and that his cruelty was somehow linked up with his cowardice;
but she couldn't for the life of her imagine the secret of the bond. She
only felt that it would be something secret and horrible; something that
she would rather not know about.
And she knew that since yesterday he had left off caring for her. His
love had died a sudden, cruel and violent death. His cowardice had done
that too.... And he had left off caring for the wounded. It was almost as
if he hated them, because they lay so still, keeping him back, keeping
him out under the fire.
Queer, but all those other cowardly things that he had done had seemed to
her unreal even when she had seen him doing them; and afterwards when she
thought about them they were unreal, as if they hadn't happened, as if
she had just imagined them. Incredible, and yet the sort of thing you
_could_ imagine if you tried. But that last devilish thing he did, it had
a hard, absolute reality. Just because it was inconceivable, because you
couldn't have imagined it, you couldn't doubt that it had happened.
It was happening now. As long as she lived it would go on happening in
her mind. She would never get away from it.
There were things that men did, bestial things, cruel things, things they
did to women. But not things like this. They _didn't_ think of them,
because this thing wasn't thinkable.
Why had John done it? Why? She supposed he wanted to hurt her and
frighten her because he had been hurt, because he had been frightened.
And because he knew she loved her wounded men. Perhaps he wanted to make
her hate him and have done with it.
Well, she did hate him. Oh, yes, she hated him.
She heard the window open and shut and a woman's footsteps swishing on
the stone floor. Trixie Rankin came to her, with her quick look that fell
on you like a bird swooping. She stood facing her, upright and stiff in
her sharp beauty; her lips were pressed together as though they had just
closed on some biting utterance; but her eyes were soft and intent.
"What's he done this time?" she said.
"He hasn't done anything."
"Oh yes, he has. He's done something perfectly beastly."
It was no use lying to Trixie. She knew what he was like, even if she
didn't know about yesterday, even if she didn't know what he had done
now. Nobody could know that. She looked straight at Trixie, with broad,
open eyes that defied her to know.
"What makes you think so?"
"Your face."
"Damn my face. It's got nothing to do with you, Trixie."
"Yes it has. If it gives the show away I can't help seeing, can I?"
"You can help talking."
"Yes, I can help talking."
The arrogance had gone out of her face. It could change in a minute from
the face of a bird of prey to the face of a watching angel. It looked at
her as it looked at wounded men: tender and protective. But Trixie
couldn't see that you didn't want any tenderness and protection just
then, or any recognition of your wound.
"You rum little blighter," she said. "Come along. Nobody's going to
talk."
There was a stir as Charlotte went in; people shifting their places to
make room for her; McClane calling out to her to come and sit by him;
Alice Bartrum making sweet eyes; the men getting up and cutting bread and
butter and reaching for her cup to give it her. She could see they were
all determined to be nice, to show her what they thought of her; they had
sent Trixie to bring her in. There was something a little deliberate
about it and exaggerated. They were getting it up--a demonstration in her
favour, a demonstration against John Conway.
She talked; but her thoughts ran by themselves on a line separate from
her speech.
"We got in six wounded." ... "That curé was there again. He was
splendid." ... They didn't know anything. They condemned him on the
evidence of her face, the face she had brought back to them, coming
straight from John. Her face had the mark of what he had done to
her.... "Much firing? Not so very much." ... She remembered what he had
said to her about her face. "Something's happened to it. Some cruelty.
Some damnable cruelty...."
"We'll have to go out there again."
They were all listening, and Alice Bartrum had made fresh tea for her;
McClane was setting down her cup. She was thirsty; she longed for the
fresh, fragrant tea; she was soothed by the kind, listening faces.
Suddenly they drew away; they weren't listening any more. John had come
into the room.
It flashed on her that all these people thought that John was her lover,
her lover in the way they understood love. They were looking at him as if
they hated him. But John's face was quiet and composed and somehow
triumphant; it held itself up against all the hostile faces; it fronted
McClane and his men as their equal; it was the face of a man who has
satisfied a lust. His whole body had a look of assurance and
accomplishment, as if his cruelty had given him power.
And with it all he kept his dreadful beauty. It hurt her to look at him.
She rose, leaving her tea untasted, and went out of the room. She
couldn't sit there with him. She had given him up. Her horror of him was
pure, absolute. It would never return on itself to know pity or remorse.