"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 cure 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.



XIII

And the next day, as if nothing had happened, he was excited and eager to set out. He could sleep off his funk in the night, like drink, and get up in the morning as if it had never been. He was more immune from memory than any drunkard. He woke to his romance as a child wakes to the renewed wonder of the world. It was so real to him that, however hardly you judged him, you couldn't think of him as a humbug or a hypocrite.... No. He was not that. He was not that. His mind truly lived in a glorious state for which none of his disgraceful deeds were ever done. It created a sort of innocence for him. She could forgive him (even after yesterday), she could almost believe in him again when she saw him coming down the hall to the ambulance with his head raised and his eyes shining, gallant and keen.

They were to go to Berlaere. Trixie Rankin had gone on before them with Gurney, McClane's best chauffeur. McClane and Sutton were at Melle.

They had not been to Berlaere since that day, the first time they had gone out together. That time at least had been perfect; it remained secure; nothing could ever spoil it; she could remember the delight of it, their strange communion of ecstasy, without doubt, without misgiving. You could never forget. It might have been better if you could, instead of knowing that it would exist in you forever, to torment you by its unlikeness to the days, the awful, incredible days that had come afterwards. There was no way of thinking that John had been more real that day than he had been yesterday. She was simply left with the inscrutable mystery of him on her hands. But she could see clearly that he was more real to himself. Yesterday and the day before had ceased to exist for him. He was back in his old self.

There was only one sign of memory that he gave. He was no longer her lover; he no longer recognised her even as his comrade. He was her commandant. It was his place to command, and hers to be commanded. He looked at her, when he looked at her at all, with a stern coldness. She was a woman who had committed some grave fault, whom he no longer trusted. So masterly was his playing of this part, so great, in a way, was still his power over her, that there were moments when she almost believed in the illusion he created. She had committed some grave fault. She was not worthy of his trust. Somewhere, at some time forgotten, in some obscure and secret way, she had betrayed him.

She had so mixed her hidden self with his in love that even now, with all her knowledge of him, she couldn't help feeling the thing as he felt it and seeing as he saw. Her mind kept on passing in and out of the illusion with little shocks of astonishment.

And yet all the time she was acutely aware of the difference. When she went out with him she felt that she was going with something dangerous and uncertain. She knew what fear was now. She was afraid all the time of what he would do next, of what he would not do. Her wounded were not safe with him. Nothing was safe.

She wished that she could have gone out with Billy; with Billy there wouldn't be any excitement, but neither would there be this abominable fear. On the other hand you couldn't let anybody else take the risk of John; and you couldn't, you simply couldn't let him go alone. Conceive him going alone—the things that might happen; she could at least see that some things didn't.

It was odd, but John had never shown the smallest desire to go without her. If he hadn't liked it he could easily have taken Sutton or Gwinnie or one of the McClane men. It was as if, in spite of his hostility, he still felt, as he had said, that where she was everything would be right.

And it looked as if this time nothing could go wrong. When they came into the village the firing had stopped; it was concentrating further east towards Zele. Trixie's ambulance was packed, and Trixie was excited and triumphant.

Her gestures waved them back as useless, much too late; without them she had got in all the wounded. But in the end they took over two of them, slight cases that Trixie resigned without a pang. She had had to turn them out to make room for poor Gurney, the chauffeur, who had hurt himself, ruptured something, slipping on a muddy bank with his stretcher.

Mr. Conway, she said, could drive her back to Ghent and Charlotte could follow with the two men. She had settled it all, in her bright, domineering way, in a second, and now swung herself up on the back step of her car.

They had got round the turn of the village and Charlotte was starting to follow them when she heard them draw up. In another minute John appeared, walking back slowly down the street with a young Belgian lieutenant. They were talking earnestly together. So soon as Charlotte saw the lieutenant she had a sense of something happening, something fatal, that would change Trixie's safe, easy programme. John as he came on looked perturbed and thoughtful. They stopped. The lieutenant was saying something final. John nodded assent and saluted. The lieutenant sketched a salute and hurried away in the opposite direction.

John waited till he was well out of sight before he came to her. (She noticed that.) He had the look at first of being up to something, as if the devil of yesterday was with him still.

It passed. His voice had no devil in it. "I say, I've got a job for you, Charlotte. Something you'll like."

There was no devil in his voice, but he stared away from her as he spoke.

"I don't want you to go to Ghent. I want you to go on to Zele."

"Zele? Do I know the way?"

"It's quite easy. You turn round and go the way we went that first day—you remember? It's the shortest cut from here."

"Pretty bad going though. Hadn't we better go on and strike the main road?"

"Yes, if you want to go miles round and get held up by the transport."

"All right—if we can get through."

"You'll get through all right." His voice had the tone of finality.

"I'm to go by myself then?"

"Well—if I've got to drive Mrs. Rankin—"

She thought: It's going to be dangerous.

"By the way, I haven't told her I'm sending you. You don't want her butting in and going with you."

"No. I certainly don't want Trixie.... And look here, I don't particularly want those men. Much better leave them here where they're safe and send in again for them."

"I don't know that I can send in again. We're supposed to have finished this job. The cars may be wanted for anything. They'll be all right."

"I don't like taking them."

"You're making difficulties," he said. He was irritable and hurried; he had kept on turning and looking up the street as though he thought the lieutenant might appear again at any minute.

"When will you learn that you've simply got to obey orders?"

"All right."

She hadn't a chance with him. Whatever she said and did he could always bring it round to that, her orders. She thought she knew what his orders had been.

He cranked up the engine. She could see him stooping and rising to it, a rhythmic, elastic movement; he was cranking energetically, with a sort of furious, flushed enjoyment of his power.

She backed and turned and he ran forward with her as she started. He shouted "Don't think about the main road. Get through.... And hurry up. You haven't got too much time."

She knew. It was going to be dangerous and he funked it. He hadn't got to drive Trixie into Ghent. When the worst came to the worst Trixie could drive herself. She thought: He didn't tell her because he daren't. He knew she wouldn't let him send me by myself. She'd make him go. She'd stand over him and bully him till he had to.

Still, she could do it. She could get through. Going by herself was better than going with a man who funked it. Only she would have liked it better without the two wounded men. She thought of them, jostled, falling against each other, falling forward and recovering, shaken by the jolting of the car, and perhaps brought back into danger. She suspected that not having too much time might be the essence of the risk.

Everything was quiet as they ran along the open road from the village to the hamlet that sat low and humble on the edge of the fields. A few houses and the long wall of the barn still stood; but by this time the house she had brought the guns from had the whole of its roof knocked in, and the stripped gable at the end of the row no longer pricked up its point against the sky; the front of the hollow shell had fallen forward and flung itself across the road.

For a moment she thought the way was blocked. She thought: If I can't get round I must get over. She backed, charged, and the car, rocking a little, struggled through. And there, where the road swerved slightly, the high wall of a barn, undermined, bulged forward, toppling. It answered the vibration of the car with a visible tremor. So soon as she passed it fell with a great crash and rumbling and sprawled in a smoky heap that blocked her way behind her.

After that they went through quiet country for a time, but further east, near the town, the shelling began. The road here was opened up into great holes with ragged, hollow edges; she had to skirt them carefully, and sometimes there would not be enough clear ground to move in, and one wheel of the car would go unsupported, hanging over space.

Yet she had got through.

As she came into Zele she met the last straggling line of the refugees. They cried out to her not to go on. She thought: I must get those men before the retreat begins.

* * * * *

Returning with her heavy load of wounded, on the pitch-black road, half way to Ghent she was halted. She had come up with the tail end of the retreat.

* * * * *

Trixie Rankin stood on the hospital steps looking out. The car turned in and swung up the rubber incline, but instead of stopping before the porch it ran on towards the downward slope. Charlotte jammed on the brakes with a hard jerk and backed to the level.

She couldn't think how she had let the car do that. She couldn't think why she was slipping from the edge of it into Trixie's arms. And stumbling in that ignominious way on the steps with Trixie holding her up on one side.... It didn't last. After she had drunk the hot black coffee that Alice Bartrum gave her she was all right.

The men had gone out of the messroom, leaving them alone.

"I'm all right, Trixie, only a bit tired."

"Tired? I should think you were tired. That Conway man's a perfect devil. Fancy scooting back himself on a safe trip and sending you out to Zele. Zele!"

"McClane doesn't care much where he sends you."

"Oh, Mac—As if he could stop us. But he'd draw the line at Zele, with the Germans coming into it."

"Rot. They weren't coming in for hours and hours."

"Well, anyhow he thought they were."

"He didn't think anything about it. I wanted to go and I went. He—he couldn't stop me."

"It's no good lying to me, Charlotte. I know too much. I know he had orders to go to Zele himself and the damned coward funked it. I've a good mind to report him to Head Quarters."

"No. You won't do that. You wouldn't be such a putrid beast."

"If I don't, Charlotte, it's because I like you. You're the pluckiest little blighter in the world. But I'll tell you what I shall do. Next time your Mr. Conway's ordered on a job he doesn't fancy I'll go with him and hold his nose down to it by the scruff of his neck. If he was my man I'd bloody well tell him what I thought of him."

"It doesn't matter what you think of him. You were pretty well gone on him yourself once."

"When? When?"

"When you wanted to turn Mac out and make him commandant."

"Oh, then—I was a jolly fool to be taken in by him. So were you."

She stopped on her way to the door. "I admit he looks everything he isn't. But that only shows what a beastly humbug the man is."

"No. He isn't a humbug. He really likes going out even if he can't stand it when he gets there."

"I've no use for that sort of courage."

"It isn't courage. But it isn't humbug."

"I've no use for your fine distinctions either."

She heard Alice Bartrum's voice calling to Trixie as she went out, "It's jolly decent of her not to go back on him."

The voice went on. "You needn't mind what Trixie says about cold feet. She's said it about everybody. About Sutton and Mac, and all our men, and me."

She thought: What's the good of lying when they all know? Still, there were things they wouldn't know if she kept on lying, things they would never guess.

"Trixie doesn't know anything about him," she said. "No more do you. You don't know what he was."

"Whatever he is, whatever he's done, Charlotte, you mustn't let it hurt you. It hasn't anything to do with you. We all know what you are."

"Me? I'm not bothering about myself. I tell you it's not what you think about him, it's what I think."

"Yes," said Alice Bartrum. Then Gwinnie Denning and John Conway came in and she left them.

John carried himself very straight, and again Charlotte saw about him that odd look of accomplishment and satisfaction.

"So you got through?" he said.

"Yes. I got through." They kept their eyes from each other as they spoke.

Gwinnie struck in, "Are you all right?"

"Yes, rather.... The little Belgian Army doctor was there. He was adorable, sticking on, working away with his wounded, in a sort of heavenly peace, with the Germans just outside."

"How many did you get?"

"Eleven—Thirteen."

"Oh good.... I've the rottenest luck. I'd have given my head to have gone with you."

"I'm glad you didn't. It wasn't what you'd call a lady's tea-party."

"Who wants a lady's tea-party? I ought to have gone in with the Mac Corps. Then I'd have had a chance."

"Not this time. Mac draws the line somewhere.... Look here, Gwinnie, I wish you'd clear out a minute and let me talk to John."

Gwinnie went, grumbling.

For a moment silence came down between them. John was drinking coffee with an air of being alone in the room, pretending that he hadn't heard and didn't see her.

"John—I didn't mind driving that car. I knew I could do it and I did it. I won't say I didn't mind the shelling, because I did. Still, shelling's all in the day's work. And I didn't mind your sending me, because I'd rather have gone myself than let you go. I don't want you to be killed. Somehow that's still the one thing I couldn't bear. But if you'd sent Gwinnie I'd have killed you."

"I didn't send Gwinnie. I gave you your chance. I knew you wanted to cut Mrs. Rankin out."

"I? I never thought of such a rotten thing."

"Well, you talked about danger as if you liked it."

"So did you."

"Oh—go to hell."

"I've just come from there."

"Oh—so you were frightened, were you?"

"Yes, I was horribly frightened. I had thirteen wounded men with me. What do you suppose it feels like, driving a heavy ambulance car by yourself? You can't sit in front and steer and look after thirteen wounded men at the same time. I had to keep hopping in and out. That isn't nice when there's shells about. I shall never forgive you for not coming to give a hand with those men. There's funk you can forgive and—"

She thought: "It's John—John—I'm saying these disgusting things to. I'm as bad as Trixie, telling him what I bloody well think of him, going back on him."

"And there's funk—"

"You'd better take care, Charlotte. Do you know I could get you fired out of Belgium to-morrow?"

"Not after to-night, I think." (It was horrible.)

He got up and opened the door. "Anyhow, you'll clear out of this room now, damn you."

"I wish you'd heard that Army doctor damning you."

"Why didn't he go back with you himself, then?"

"He couldn't leave his wounded."

He slammed the door hard behind her.

That was just like him. Wounded men everywhere, trying to sleep, and he slammed doors. He didn't care.

She would have to go on lying. She had made up her mind to that. So long as it would keep the others from knowing, so long as John's awfulness went beyond their knowledge, so long as it would do any good to John, she would lie.

Her time had come. She remembered saying that. She could hear herself talking to John at Barrow Hill Farm: "Everybody's got their breaking point.... I daresay when my time comes I shall funk and lie."

Well, didn't she? Funk—the everlasting funk of wondering what John would do next; and lying, lying at every turn to save him. He was her breaking point.

She had lied, the first time they went out, about the firing. She wondered whether she had done it because then, even then, she had been afraid of his fear. Hadn't she always somehow, in secret, been afraid? She could see the car coming round the corner by the Church in the narrow street at Stow, she could feel it grazing her thigh, and John letting her go, jumping safe to the curb. She had pretended that it hadn't happened.

But that first day—No. He had been brave then. She had only lied because she was afraid he would worry about her.... Brave then. Could war tire you and wear you down, and change you from yourself? In two weeks? Change him so that she had to hate him!

Half the night she lay awake wondering: Do I hate him because he doesn't care about me? Or because he doesn't care about the wounded? She could see all their faces: the face of the wounded man at Melle (he had crawled out on his hands and knees to look for her); the face of the dead boy who hadn't died when John left him; the Flamand they brought from Lokeren, lying in the road; the face of the dead man in the shed—And John's face.

How could you care for a thing like that? How could you want a thing like that to care for you?

And she? She didn't matter. Nothing mattered in all the world but Them.



XIV

It was Saturday, the tenth of October, the day after the fall of Antwerp. The Germans were pressing closer round Ghent; they might march in any day. She had been in Belgium a hundred years; she had lived a hundred years under this doom.

But at last she was free of John. Utterly free. His mind would have no power over her any more. Nor yet his body. She was glad that he had not been her lover. Supposing her body had been bound to him so that it couldn't get away? The struggle had been hard enough when her first flash came to her; and when she had fought against her knowledge and denied it, unable to face the truth that did violence to her passion; and when she had given him up and was left with just that, the beauty of his body, and it had hurt her to look at him.

Oh well, nothing could hurt her now. And anyhow she would get through to-day without being afraid of what might happen. John couldn't do anything awful; he had been ordered on an absolutely safe expedition, taking medical stores to the convent hospital at Bruges and convoying Gurney, the sick chauffeur, to Ostend for England. Charlotte was to go out with Sutton, and Gwinnie was to take poor Gurney's place. She was glad she was going with Billy. Whatever happened Billy would go through it without caring, his mind fixed on the solid work.

And John, for an hour before he started, had been going about in gloom, talking of death. His death.

They were looking over the last letter from his father which he had asked her to answer for him. It seemed that John had told him the chances were he would be killed and had asked him whether in this case he would allow the Roden ambulances to be handed over to McClane. And the old man had given his consent.

"Isn't it a pity to frighten him?" she said.

"He's no business to be frightened. It's my death. If I can face it, he can. I'm simply making necessary arrangements."

She could see that. At the same time it struck her that he wanted you to see that he exposed himself to all the risks of death, to see how he faced it. She had no patience with that talk about death; that pitiful bolstering up of his romance.

"If McClane says much more you can tell him."

He was counting on this transfer of the ambulances to get credit with McClane; to silence him.

There were other letters which he had told her to answer. As soon as he had started she went into his room to look for them. If they were not on the chimneypiece they would be in the drawer with his razors and pockethandkerchiefs.

It was John's room, after she had gone through it, that showed her what he was doing.

Sutton looked in before she had finished. She called to him, "Billy, you might come here a minute."

He came in, eyebrows lifted at the inquisition.

"What's up?"

"I'm afraid John isn't coming back."

"Not coming back? Of course he's coming back."

"No. I think he's—got off."

"You mean he's—"

"Yes. Bolted."

"What on earth makes you think that?"

"He's taken all sorts of things—pyjamas, razors, all his pockethandkerchiefs... I had to look through his drawers to find those letters he told me to answer."

Sutton had gone through into the slip of white tiled lavatory beyond. She followed him.

"My God," he said, "yes. He's taken his toothbrush and his sleeping draught.... You know he tried to get leave yesterday and they wouldn't give it him?"

"No. That makes it simply awful."

"Pretty awful."

"Billy—we must get him back."

"I—I don't know about that. He isn't much good, is he? I think we'd better let him go."

"Don't you see how awful it'll be for the Corps?"

"The Corps? Does that matter? McClane would take us all on to-morrow."

"I mean for us. You and me and Gwinnie. He's our Corps, and we're it."

"Sharlie—with the Germans coming into Ghent do you honestly believe anybody'll remember what he did or didn't do?"

"Yes. We're going to stick on with the Belgian Army. It'll be remembered against us. Besides, it'll kill his father."

"He'll do that any way. He's rotten through and through."

"No. He was splendid in the beginning. He might be splendid some day again. But if we let him go off and do this he's done for."

"He's done for anyhow. Isn't it better to recognize that he's rotten? McClane wouldn't have him. He saw what he was."

"He didn't see him at Berlaere. He was splendid there."

"My dear child, don't you know why? He didn't see there was any danger. He was too stupid to see it."

"I saw it."

"You're not stupid."

"He did see it at the end."

"At the end, yes—When he let you go back for the guns."

She remembered. She remembered his face, the little beads of sweat glittering. He couldn't help that.

"Look here, from the time he realised the danger, did he go out or did he stay under cover?"

She didn't answer.

"There," he said, "you see."

"Oh, Billy, won't you leave him one shred?"

"No. Not one shred."

Yet, even now, if he could only be splendid—If he could only be it! Why shouldn't Billy leave him one shred? After all, he didn't know all the awful things John had done; and she would never tell him.... He did know two things, the two things she didn't know. She had got to know them. The desire that urged her to the completion of her knowledge pursued her now. She would possess him in her mind if in no other way.

"Billy—do you remember that day at Melle, when John lost me? Did you tell him I was going back with you?"

"No. I didn't."

Then he had left her. And he had lied to both of them.

"Was the boy dead or alive when he left him?"

"He was alive all right. We could have saved him."

He had died—he had died of fright, then.

"You said he was dead."

"I know I did. I lied."

"... And before that—when he was with you and Trixie on that battlefield—Did he—"

"Yes. Then, too ... You see there aren't any shreds. The only thing you can say is he can't help it. Nobody'd have been hard on him if he hadn't gassed so much about danger."

"That's the part you can't understand.... But, Billy, why did you lie about him?"

"Because I didn't want you to know, then. I knew it would hurt you, I knew it would hurt you more than anything else."

"That was rather wonderful of you."

"Wasn't wonderful at all. I knew because what you think, what you feel, matters more to me than anything else. Except perhaps my job. I have to keep that separate."

Her mind slid over that, not caring, returning to the object of its interest.

"Look here, Billy, you may be right. It probably doesn't matter to us. But it'll be perfectly awful for him."

"They can't do anything to him, Sharlie."

"It's what he'll do to himself."

"Suicide? Not he."

"I don't mean that. Can't you see that when he gets away to England, safe, and the funk settles down he'll start romancing all over again. He'll see the whole war again like that; and then he'll remember what he's done. He'll have to live all his life remembering...."

"He won't. You'll remember—You'll suffer. You're feeling the shame he ought to feel and doesn't."

"Well, somebody's got to feel it.... And he'll feel it too. He won't be let off. As long as he lives he'll remember.... I don't want him to have that suffering."

"He's brought it on himself, Sharlie."

"I don't care. I don't want him to have it. I couldn't bear it if he got away."

"Of course, if you're going to be unhappy about it—"

"The only thing is, can we go after him? Can we spare a car?"

"Well yes, I can manage that all right. The fact is, the Germans may really be in to-morrow or Monday, and we're thinking of evacuating all the British wounded to-day. There are some men here that we ought to take to Ostend. I've been talking to the President about it."

And in the end they went with their wounded, less than an hour after John had started.

"I don't say I'll bring him back," said Sutton. "But at any rate we can find out what he's up to." He meditated.... "We mayn't have to bring him. I shouldn't wonder if he came back on his own. He's like that. He can't stand danger yet he keeps on coming back to it. Can't leave it alone."

"I know. He isn't quite an ordinary coward."

"I'm not sure. I've known chaps like that. Can't keep away from the thing."

But she stuck to it. John's cowardice was not like other people's cowardice. Other cowards going into danger had the imagination of horror. He had nothing but the imagination of romantic delight. It was the reality that became too much for him. He was either too stupid, or too securely wrapped up in his dream to reckon with reality. It surprised him every time. And he had no imaginative fear of fear. His fear must have surprised him.

"He'll have got away from Bruges," she said.

"I don't think so. He'll have to put up at the Convent for a bit, to let Gurney rest."

They had missed the Convent and were running down a narrow street towards the Market Place when they found John. He came on across a white bridge over a canal at the bottom. He was escorted by some Belgian women, dressed in black; they were talking and pointing up the street.

He said he had been to lunch in the town and had lost himself there and they were showing him the way back to the Convent.

She had seen all that before somewhere, John coming over the Canal bridge with the women in black.... She remembered. That was in one of her three dreams. Only what she saw now was incomplete. There had been something more in the dream. Something had happened.

It happened half an hour later when she went out to find John in the Convent garden where he was walking with the nuns. The garden shimmered in a silver mist from the canal, the broad grass plots, the clipped hedges, the cones and spikes of yew, the tall, feathery chrysanthemums, the trailing bowers and arches, were netted and laced and webbed with the silver mist. Down at the bottom of the path the forms of John and the three women showed blurred and insubstantial and still.

Presently they emerged, solid and clear; the nuns in their black habits and the raking white caps like wings that set them sailing along. They were showing John their garden, taking a shy, gentle, absorbed possession of him.

And as she came towards him John passed her without speaking. But his face had turned to her with the look she had seen before. Eyes of hatred, eyes that repudiated and betrayed her.

The nuns had stopped, courteously, to greet her; she fell behind with one of them; the two others had overtaken John who had walked on, keeping up his stiff, repudiating air.

The air, the turn of the head, the look that she had dreamed. Only in the dream it had hurt her, and now she was hard and had no pain.

* * * * *

It was in the Convent garden that they played it out, in one final, astounding conversation.

The nuns had brought two chairs out on to the flagged terrace and set a small table there covered with a white cloth. Thus invited, John had no choice but to take his place beside her. Still he retained his mood.

(The nuns had left them. Sutton was in one of the wards, helping with an operation.)

"I thought," he said, "that I was going to have peace...."

It seemed to her that they had peace. They had been so much at the mercy of chance moments that this secure hour given to them in the closed garden seemed, in its quietness, immense.

"... But first it's Sutton, then it's you."

"We needn't say anything unless you like. There isn't much to be said."

"Oh, isn't there!"

"Not," she said, "if you're coming back."

"Of course I'm coming back.... Look here, Charlotte. You didn't suppose I was really going to bolt, did you?"

"Were you going to change into your pyjamas at Ostend?"

"My pyjamas? I brought them for Gurney."

"And your sleeping draught was for Gurney?"

"Of course it was."

"And your razors and your toothbrush, too. Oh, John, what's the good of lying? You forgot that I helped Alice Bartrum to pack Gurney's things. You forget that Billy knows."

"Do I? I shan't forget your going back on me; your betraying me," he said.

And for the first time she realised how alone he was; how horribly alone. He had nobody but her.

"Who have I betrayed you to?"

"To Sutton. To McClane. To everybody you talked to."

"No. No."

"Yes. And you betrayed me in your thoughts. That's worse. People don't always mean what they say. It's what they think."

"What was I to think?"

"Why, that all the damnable things you said about me weren't true."

"I didn't say anything."

"You've betrayed me by the things you didn't say."

"Why should I have betrayed you?"

"You know why. When a woman betrays a man it's always for one reason."

He threw his head back to strike at her with his eyes, hard and keen, dark blue like the blade of a new knife ... "Because he hasn't given her what she wants."

"Oh, what I want—I thought we'd settled that long ago."

"You've never settled it. It isn't in you to settle it."

"I can't talk to you about that. You're too horrible. But I didn't betray you."

"You listened to people who betrayed me. If you cared for me in any decent way you'd have stood by me."

"I have stood by you through thick and thin. I've lied your lies. There isn't one of your lies I haven't backed. I've done everything I could think of to keep people from knowing about you."

"Yet you go and tell Sutton that I've bolted. That I'm a deserter."

"Yes, when it was all over. If you'd got away everybody'd have known. As it is, only Billy and I know; and he's safe."

"You insist that I was trying to get away? I own I thought of it. But one doesn't do everything one thinks of.... No.... Don't imagine I was sick of the war, or sick of Belgium. It's you I'm sick of."

"Me?"

"Yes, you. You had your warning. I told you what would happen if you let me see you wanted me."

"You think you've seen that?"

"I've seen nothing else."

"Once, perhaps. Twice. Once when you came to me on Barrow Hill. And when we were crossing; once. And each time you never saw it."

"Anybody can see. It's in your face. In your eyes and mouth. You can't hide your lust."

"My—'lust.' Don't you know I only cared for you because I'd done with that?"

They stopped. The nuns were back again, bringing great cups of hot black coffee, coming quietly, and going quietly away. It was wonderful, all that beauty and gentleness and peace existing in the horror of the war, and through this horror within horror that John had made.

They drank their coffee, slowly, greedily, prolonging this distraction from their torment. Charlotte finished first.

"You say I want you. I own I did once. But I don't now. Why, I care more for the scrubbiest little Belgian with a smashed finger than I do for you."

"I suppose you can satisfy your erotic susceptibilities that way."

"I haven't any, I tell you. I only cared for you because I thought you were clean. I thought your mind was beautiful. And you aren't clean. And your mind's the ugliest thing I know. And the cruelest.... Let's get it right, John. I can forgive your funking. If your nerves are jumpy they're jumpy. I daresay I shall be jumpy if the Germans come into Ghent before I'm out of it. I can forgive everything you've done to me. I can forgive your lying. I see there's nothing left for you but to lie.... But I can't forgive your not caring for the wounded. That's cruel.... You didn't care for that boy at Melle—"

John's mouth opened as if he were going to say something. He seemed to gasp.

"—No, you didn't or you wouldn't have left him. Whatever your funk was like, you couldn't have left him if you'd cared, any more than I could have left you."

"He was dead when I left him."

"He was still warm when I found him. Billy thought you were bringing him away. He says he wasn't dead."

"He lies, then. But you'll take his word against mine."

"Yes," she said simply. "And he says he didn't tell you I was going on with him. You don't care for me. If you'd cared you couldn't have left me."

"I thought you said if it was a toss up between you and a wounded man—? There were wounded men in that car."

"There was a wounded man with me. You left him.... Don't imagine I cared about myself, whether I lived or died. It was because I cared about you. I cared so awfully."

He jerked out a laugh. One light, short sound of dismissal and contempt.



XV

That light sound he made had ended it.

She remembered it afterwards, not as a thing that hurt her, but as an unpleasant incident of the day, like the rudeness of a stranger, and yet not to be forgotten. It had the importance of extreme finality; his answer to everything, unanswerable.

She didn't care. She had ended it herself and with so clean a cut that she could afford to let him have that inarticulate last word. She had left him nothing to do but keep up his pretence that there had never been so much as a beginning. He gave no sign of anything having been between them, unless his attitude to Sutton was a sign.

It showed the next day, the terrible Sunday that was ending everything. Yesterday he had given orders that Charlotte should drive Sutton while he drove by himself. To-day he had changed all that. Gwinnie was to drive Sutton and Charlotte was to go out alone. And he had offered himself to McClane. To McClane. That gave her the measure of his resentment. She could see that he coupled her with Sutton while he yet tried to keep them apart. He was not going to have more to do with either of them than he could help.

So that she had hardly seen or heard of him that day. And when the solid work began she found that she could turn him out of her mind as if he had never been there. The intolerable burden of him slipped from her; all morning she had a sense of cold clearness and lightness; and she judged that her deliverance was complete.

* * * * *

She had waited a long time with her car drawn up close under the house wall in the long street at Melle. McClane's car stood in front of her, waiting for John. He was up there on the battlefield, with Sutton and McClane. McClane had kept him off it all day; he had come to her when they started and told her not to worry. Conway would be all right. He would see that he didn't get into places where he—well, unsuitable places. He would keep him driving. But in the end one of the stretcher bearers had given in, and John had to take his turn.

He had been keen to go. Keen. She could see him swinging along up the road to the battlefield and McClane with him, running to keep up with his tall stride.

She had taken her turn too and she knew what it was like up there. Endless turnip fields; turnips thrown up as if they had been pulled, livid roots that rotted, and the wounded and the dead men lying out among them. You went stumbling; the turnips rolled and slipped under your feet. Seeing things.

Her mind looked the other way, frightened. She was tired out, finished; she could have gone to sleep now, sitting up there on the car. It would be disgraceful if she went to sleep....

She mustn't think about the battlefield. She couldn't think; she could only look on at things coming up in her mind. Hoeing turnips at Barrow Hill Farm. Supposing you found dead men lying out on the fields at Stow? You would mind that more; it would be more horrible.... She saw herself coming over the fields carrying a lamb that she had taken from its dead mother. Then she saw John coming up the field to their seat in the beech ring. That hurt her; she couldn't bear it; she mustn't think about that.

John was all right; he wasn't shirking. They had been away so long now that she knew they must have gone far down the battlefield, deep into it; the edges and all the nearer places had been gleaned. It would be dark before they came back.

It was getting dark now, and she was afraid that when the light went she would go to sleep. If only she wasn't so tired.

She was so drowsy that at first she didn't hear McClane speaking, she hadn't seen him come to the step of the car.

McClane's voice sounded soft and unnatural and a little mysterious.

"I'm afraid something's—happened."

"Who to?"

"We-ell—"

The muffled drawl irritated her. Why couldn't he speak out?

"Is John hurt?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Is he killed?"

"Well—I don't know that he can live. A German's put a bullet into him."

"Where is he?"

She jumped down off the car.

McClane laid his hand on her arm. "Don't. We shall bring him in—"

"He's dead then?"

"I think so—You'd better not go to him."

"Of course I'm going to him. Where is he?"

He steered her very quickly and carefully across the street, then led her with his arm in hers, pressing her back to the dark shelter of the houses. They heard the barking of machine guns from the battlefield at the top and the rattle of the bullets on the causeway. These sounds seemed to her to have no significance. As if they had existed only in some unique relation to John Conway, his death robbed them of vitality.

The door of the house opened a little way; they slipped into the long narrow room lighted by a few oil lamps at one end. At the other John's body lay on a stretcher set up on a trestle table, his feet turned outwards to the door, ready. The corners at this end were so dark that the body seemed to stretch across the whole width of the room. A soldier came forward with a lighted candle and gave it to McClane. And she saw John's face; the bridge of his nose, with its winged nostrils lifted. His head was tilted upwards at the chin; that gave it a noble look. His mouth was open, ever so slightly open ... McClane shifted the light so that it fell on his forehead.... Black eyebrows curling up like little moustaches.... The half-dropped eyelids guarded the dead eyes.

She thought of how he used to dream. All his dream was in his dead face; his dead face was cold and beautiful like his dream.

As she looked at him her breast closed down on her heart as though it would never lift again; her breath shuddered there under her tightened throat. She could feel McClane's hand pressing heavily on her shoulder. She had no strength to shake it off; she was even glad of it. She felt small and weak and afraid; afraid, not of the beautiful thing that lay there, but of something terrible and secret that it hid, something that any minute she would have to know about.

"Where was he hit?"

"In the back."

She trembled and McClane's hand pressed closer. "The bullet passed clean through his heart. He didn't suffer."

"He was getting in Germans?"

"I don't—quite—know—" McClane measured his words out one by one, "what—he was doing. Sutton was with him. He knows."

"Where is Billy?"

"Over there. Do you want him?"

"Not yet."

A soldier brought a chair for her. She sat down with her back to the trestle table. At the lighted end of the room she saw Sutton stooping over a young Belgian captain, buttoning his tunic under the sling he had adjusted. The captain's face showed pure and handsome, like a girl's, like a young nun's, bound round and chin-wrapped in the white bandages. He sat on the floor in front of Sutton's table with his legs stretched out flat. His back was propped against the thigh of a Belgian soldier seated on an upturned barrel. Her hurt eyes saw them very plain and with detail in the light of Sutton's lamp.

That part of the room was full of soldiers. She noticed that they kept clear of the trestle table as they went in and out. Only one of them, the soldier who supported the young captain, kept on looking, raising his head and looking there as if he couldn't turn his eyes away. He faced her. His rifle stood steadied by his knees, the bayonet pointing up between his eyes.

She found herself thinking. It was Sutton's back that made her think. John must have been stooping over the German like that. John's wound was in his back. But if he was stooping it couldn't have come that way. The bullet would have gone through his chest.... Perhaps he had turned to pick up his stretcher. Billy was there. He would tell her how it had happened.

She thought: No. I've had enough. I shall give it up. I won't ask him. But she knew that she would ask him. Once started, having gone so far, flash by flash and step by step, she couldn't give it up; she would go on, even now, till her knowledge was complete. Then she was aware again of the soldier's eyes.

They were very large and bright and black in his smooth boy's face; he had a small innocent boy's mouth that seemed to move, restless and fascinated, like his eyes. Presently she saw that he was looking at her, that his eyes returned to her again and again, as if he were aware of some connection between her and the thing that fascinated him, as if he were somehow connected.

He was listening to her now as Sutton spoke to her.

"We must get him away quick."

"Yes. Do let's get him away."

Sutton shook his head. He was thinking of the wounded captain.

"We can't yet. I'll come back for him."

"Then I'll wait with him here."

"Oh no—I think—"

"I can't leave him."

"It isn't safe. The place may be taken."

"I won't leave him." Sutton hesitated. "I won't, Billy."

"McClane, she says she won't leave him."

"Then," McClane said, "we must take him now. We'll have to make room somehow."

(To make room for him—somehow.)

Sutton and the soldier carried the captain out and came back for John's body. The Belgian sprang forward with eager, subservient alacrity to put himself at the head of the stretcher, but Sutton thrust him aside.

The Belgian shrugged his shoulders and picked up his rifle with an air of exaggerated unconcern. Sutton and McClane carried out the stretcher.

Charlotte was following them when the soldier stopped her.

"Mademoiselle—"

He had propped his rifle against the trestles and stood there, groping in his pocket. A dirty handkerchief, dragged up by his fumbling, hung out by its corner. All along the sharp crease there was a slender smear of blood. He looked down at it and pushed it back out of her sight.

He had taken something out of his pocket.

"I will give you this. I found it on the battlefield."

He handed her a small leather pocketbook that was John's. It had her photograph in it and his, taken together.

* * * * *

They were putting him out of sight, under the hood of the ambulance, and she waited there when the war correspondent came up.

"Can you tell me the name of the volunteer who's been killed?"

"Conway. John Roden Conway."

"What? That man? The man who raced the Germans into Zele?"

"Yes," she said, "that man."

* * * * *

She was in John's room, packing, gathering together the things she would have to take to his father. Sutton came to her there.

They had orders to be ready for the retreat any time that night.

Billy had brought her John's wrist watch and cigarette case.

"Billy," she said, "that soldier gave me this."

She showed him the pocketbook.

"What soldier?"

"The one who was with the captain."

"He gave it you?"

"Yes. He said he found it on the battlefield. It must have dropped out of John's pocket."

"It couldn't have dropped.... I wonder why he kept that."

"But he didn't keep it. He gave it to me."

"He was going to keep it, or he'd have handed it over to me with the other things."

"Does it matter?"

"Well—"

She thought: "Why can't he leave it alone? They had all his things, his poor things."

But Sutton was still thoughtful. "I wonder why he gave it you."

"I think he was sorry."

"Was he!"

"Sorry for me, I mean."

Sutton said nothing. He was absorbed in contemplating the photograph. They had been taken standing by the hurdle of the sheepfold, she with the young lamb in her arms and John looking down at her.

"That was taken at Barrow Hill Farm," she said, "where we were together. He looked just like that.... Oh, Billy, do you think the past's really past?... Isn't there some way he could go on being what he was?"

"I don't know, Sharlie, I don't know."

"Why couldn't he have stayed there! Then he'd always have been like that. We should never have known."

"You're not going to be unhappy about him?"

"No. I think I'm glad. It's a sort of relief. I shan't ever have that awful feeling of wondering what he'll do next.... Billy—you were with him, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"Was he all right?"

"Would it make you happier to think that he was or to know that he wasn't?"

"Oh—just to know."

"Well, I'm afraid he wasn't, quite.... He paid for it, Sharlie. If he hadn't turned his back he wouldn't have been shot."

She nodded.

"What? You knew?"

"No. No. I wasn't sure."

She was possessed of this craving to know, to know everything. Short of that she would be still bound to him; she could never get free.

"Billy—what did happen, really? Did he leave the German?"

"The German?"

"Yes. Was that why he shot him?"

"The German didn't shoot him. He was too far gone, poor devil, to shoot anybody.... It was the Belgian captain that he left.... He was lying there, horribly wounded. His servant was with him; they were calling out to Conway—"

"Calling to him?"

"Yes. And he was going all right when some shrapnel fell—a regular shower bath, quite near, like it did with you and me. That scared him and he just turned and ran. The servant shouted to him to stop, and when he wouldn't he went after him and put a bullet through his back."

"That Belgian boy?"

"Yes. I couldn't do anything. I had the German. It was all over in a second.... When I got there I found the Belgian standing up over him, wiping his bayonet with his pockethandkerchief. He said his rifle went off by accident."

"Couldn't it? Rifles do."

"Bayonets don't.... I suppose I could get him court martialed if I tried. But I shan't. After all, it was his captain. I don't blame him, Charlotte."

"No.... It was really you and me, Billy. We brought him back to be killed."

"I don't know that we did bring him—that he wasn't coming by himself. He couldn't keep off it. Even if we did, you wouldn't be sorry for that, would you?"

"No. It was the best thing we could do for him."

But at night, lying awake in her bed, she cried. For then she remembered what he had been. On Barrow Hill, on their seat in the beech ring, through the Sunday evenings, when feeding time and milking time were done.

* * * * *

At four o'clock in the morning she was waked by Sutton, standing beside her bed. The orders had come through to evacuate the hospital. Three hours later the ambulances had joined the great retreat.



XVI

They had halted in Bruges, and there their wounded had been taken into the Convent wards to rest.

Charlotte and Sutton were sitting out, alone together on the flagged terrace in the closed garden. The nuns had brought out the two chairs again, and set again the little table, covered with the white cloth. Again the silver mist was in the garden, but thinned now to the clearness of still water.

They had been silent after the nuns had left them. Sutton's sad, short-sighted eyes stared out at the garden without seeing it. He was lost in melancholy. Presently he came to himself with a long sigh—

"Charlotte, what are we going to do now? Do you know?"

"I know. I'm going into Mac's corps."

"So am I. That isn't what I meant."

For a moment she didn't stop to wonder what he did mean. She was too full of what she was going to do.

"Is that wise? I don't altogether trust old Mac. He'll use you till you drop. He'll wear you to the last shred of your nerves."

"I want to be used till I drop. I want to be worn. Besides, I know I'm safe with Mac."

His cold, hard indifference made her feel safe. She wasn't really safe with Billy. His goodness might disarm her any minute, his sadness might conceivably move her to a tender weakness. But for McClane she would never have any personal feeling, never any fiery affection, any exalted devotion. Neither need she be afraid of any profound betrayal. Small betrayals perhaps, superficial disasters to her vanity, while his egoism rode over it in triumph. He didn't want affection or anything fiery, anything that John had had. He would leave her in her hardness; he would never ask anything but hard, steel-cold loyalty and a willingness to share his risks.

"What else can I do? I should have come out if John hadn't. Of course I was glad we could go together, but you mustn't suppose I only went because of him."

"I don't. I only thought perhaps you wouldn't want to stay on now he's dead."

"More than ever now he's dead. Even if I didn't want to stay I should have to now. To make up."

"For what?"

"For what he did. All those awful things. And for what he didn't do. His dreams. I've got to do what he dreamed. But more than anything I must pay his debt to Belgium. To all those wounded men."

"You're not responsible for his debts, Charlotte."

"No? Sometimes I feel as if I were. As if he and I were tied up together. I could get away from him when he was alive. But now he's dead he's got me."

"It doesn't make him different."

"It makes me different. I tell you, I can't get away from him. And I want to. I want to cut myself loose; and this is the way."

"Isn't it the way to tie yourself tighter?"

"No. Not when it's done, Billy."

"I can see a much better way.... If you married me."

She turned to him, astonished and a little anxious, as though she thought something odd and dangerous had happened to him.

"Oh, Billy, I—I couldn't do that.... What made you think of it?"

"I've been thinking of it all the time."

"All the time?"

"Well, most of the time, anyhow. But I've loved you all the time. You know I loved you. That was why I stuck to Conway. I couldn't leave you to him. I wouldn't even leave you to McClane."

"I didn't know."

"I should have thought it was pretty, obvious."

"It wasn't. I'd have tried to stop it if I'd known."

"You couldn't have stopped it."

"I'm sorry."

"What about?"

"That. It isn't any good. It really isn't."

"Why isn't it? I know I'm rather a queer chap. And I've got an ugly face—"

"I love your face...."

She loved it, with its composure and its candour, its slightly flattened features, laid back; its little surprised moustache, its short-sighted eyes and its sadness.

"It's the dearest face. But—"

"I suppose," he said, "it sounds a bit startling and sudden. But if you'd been bottling it up as long as I have—Why, I loved you the first time I saw you. On the boat.... So you see, it's you. It isn't just anything you've done."

"If you knew what I have done, my dear. If you only knew. You wouldn't want to marry me."

She would have to tell him. That would put him off. That would stop him. If she had loved him she would have had to tell him, as she had told John.

"I'm going to tell you...."

* * * * *

She wondered whether he had really listened. A queer smile played about his mouth. He looked as if he had been thinking of something else all the time.

"What are you smiling at?"

"Your supposing that that would make any difference."

"Doesn't it?"

"Not a bit. Not a little bit.... Besides I knew it."

"Who—who told you?"

"The only other person who knew about it, I suppose—Conway."

"He betrayed me?"

"He betrayed you. Is there any vile thing he didn't do?"

And it was as it had been before. The nuns came out again, bringing the great cups of hot black coffee, coming and going gently. Only this time she couldn't drink.

"It's awful of us," she said, "to talk about him this way when he's dead."

"He isn't dead as long as he makes you feel like that. As long as he keeps you from me."

A long pause. And then, "Billy—he wasn't my lover."

"I know that," he said fiercely. "He took good care to tell me."

"I brought it all on myself. I ought to have given him up instead of hanging on to him that way. Platonic love—It's all wrong. People aren't really made like that. It was every bit as bad as going to Gibson Herbert.... Worse. That was honest. This was all lying. Lying about myself. Lying about him. Lying about—love."

"Then," he said, "you don't really know what it is."

"I know John's sort. And I know Gibson's sort. And I know there's a heavenly sort, Billy, in between. But I'm spoiled for it. I think I could have cared for you if it hadn't been for John.... I shan't ever get away from him."

"Yes. If you can see it—"

"Of course I see it. I can see everything now. All that war-romancing. I see how awful it was. When I think how we went out and got thrills. Fancy getting thrills out of this horror."

"Oh well—I think you earned your thrill."

"You can't earn anything in this war. At least I can't. It's paying, paying all the time. And I've got more things than John to pay for. There was little Effie."

"Effie?"

"Gibson's wife. I didn't want to hurt her.... Billy, are you sure it makes no difference? What I did."

"I've told you it doesn't.... You mustn't go on thinking about it."

"No. But I can't get over his betraying me. You see, that's the worst thing he did to me. The other things—well, he was mad with fright, and he was afraid of me, because I knew. I can't think why he did this."

"Same reason. You knew. He was degraded by your knowing, so you had to be degraded. At least I suppose that's how it was."

She shook her head. He was darker to her than ever and she was no nearer to her peace. She knew everything and she understood nothing. And that was worse than not knowing.

"If only I could understand. Then, I believe, I could bear it. I wouldn't care how bad it was as long as I understood."

"Ask McClane, then. He could explain it to you. It's beyond me."

"McClane?"

"He's a psychotherapist. He knows more about people's souls than I know about their bodies. He probably knows all about Conway's soul."

Silence drifted between them, dim and silvery like the garden mist.

"Charlotte—are we never to get away from him? Is he always to stick between us? That dead man."

"It isn't that."

"What is it, then?"

"All this.... I'd give anything to care for you, Billy dear, but I don't care. I can't. I can't care for anything but the war."

"The war won't last for ever. And afterwards?"

"I can't see any afterwards."

Sutton smiled.

"And yet," he said, "there will be one."



XVII

The boat went steadily, cutting the waves with its sound like the flowing of stiff silk.

Charlotte and Sutton and McClane, stranded at Dunkirk on their way to England, had been taken on board the naval transport Victoria. They were the only passengers besides some young soldiers, and these had left them a clear space on the deck. Charlotte was sitting by herself under the lee of a cabin when McClane came to her there.

He was straddling and rubbing his hands. Something had pleased him.

"I knew," he said, "that some day I should get you three. And that I should get those ambulances."

She couldn't tell whether he meant that he always got what he wanted or that he had foreseen John Conway's fate which would ultimately give it him.

"The ambulances—Yes. You always wanted them."

"Not more than I wanted you and Sutton."

He seemed aware of her secret antagonism, yet without resentment, waiting till it had died down before he spoke again. He was sitting beside her now.

"What are you going to do about Conway?"

"Nothing. Except lie about him to his father."

"That's all right as long as you don't lie about him to yourself."

"I've lied about him to other people. Never to myself. I was in love with him, if that's what you mean. But he finished that. What's finished is finished. I haven't a scrap of feeling for him left."

"Are you quite sure?"

"Quite. I'm not even sorry he's dead."

"You've forgiven him?"

"I'm not always sure about that. But I'm trying to forget him."

McClane looked away.

"Do you ever dream about him, Charlotte?"

"Never. Not now. I used to. I dreamed about him once three nights running."

He looked at her sharply. "Could you tell me what you dreamed?"

She told him her three dreams.

"You don't suppose they meant anything?" she said.

"I do. They meant that part of you was kicking. It knew all the time what he was like and was trying to warn you."

"To keep me off him?"

"To keep you off him."

"I see.... The middle one was funny. It happened. The day we were in Bruges. But I can't make out the first one with that awful woman in it."

"You may have been dreaming something out of his past. Something he remembered."

"Well anyhow I don't understand the last one."

"I do."

"But I dreamed he wanted me. Frightfully. And he didn't."

"He did. He wanted you—'frightfully'—all the time. He went to pieces if you weren't there. Don't you know why he took you out with him everywhere? Because if he hadn't he couldn't have driven half a mile out of Ghent."

"That's one of the things I'm trying to forget."

"It's one of the things you should try to remember."

He grasped her arm.

"And, Charlotte, look here. I want you to forgive him. For your own sake."

She stiffened under his touch, his look, his voice of firm, intimate authority. His insincerity repelled her.

"Why should you? You don't care about him. You don't care about me. If I was blown to bits to-morrow you wouldn't care."

He laughed his mirthless, assenting laugh.

"You don't care about people at all. You only care about their diseases and their minds and things."

"I think I care a little about the wounded."

"You don't really. Not about them. You care about getting in more of them and quicker than any other field ambulance on the front. I can't think why you're bothering about me now."

"That's why. If I'm to get in more wounded I can't have anybody in my corps who isn't fit."

"I'm fit. What's the matter with me?"

"Not much. Your body's all right. And your mind was all right till Conway upset it. Now it's unbalanced."

"Unbalanced?"

"Just the least little bit. There's a fight going on in it between your feeling for Conway and your knowledge of him."

"I've told you I haven't any feeling."

"Your memory of your feeling then. Same thing. You know he was cruel and a liar and a coward. And you loved him. With you those two states are incompatible. They struggle. And that's bad for you. If it goes on you'll break down. If it stops you'll be all right.... The way to stop it is to know the truth about Conway. The truth won't clash with your feeling."

"Don't I know it?"

"Not all. Not the part that matters most. You know he was all wrong morally. You don't know why.... Conway was an out and out degenerate. He couldn't help that. He suffered from some physical disability. It went through everything. It made him so that he couldn't live a man's life. He was afraid to enter a profession. He was afraid of women."

"He wasn't afraid of me. Not in the beginning."

"Because he felt your strength. You're very strong, Charlotte. You gave him your strength. And he could feel passion, mind you, though he couldn't act it.... I suppose he could feel courage, too, only somehow he couldn't make it work. Have you got it clear?"

She nodded. So clear that it seemed to her he was talking about a thing she had known once and had forgotten. All the time she had known John's secret. She knew what would come next: McClane's voice saying, "Well then, think—think," and his excited gestures, bobbing forward suddenly from the hips. He went on.

"The balance had to be righted somehow. His whole life must have been a struggle to right it. Unconscious, of course. Instinctive. His platonics were just a glorifying of his disability. All that romancing was a gorgeous transformation of his funk.... So that his very lying was a sort of truth. I mean it was part of the whole desperate effort after completion. He jumped at everything that helped him to get compensation, to get power. He jumped at your feeling for him because it gave him power. He jumped at the war because the thrill he got out of it gave him the sense of power. He sucked manhood out of you. He sucked it out of everything—out of blood and wounds.... He'd have been faithful to you forever, Charlotte, if you hadn't found him out. That upset all his delicate adjustments. The war upset him. I think the sight of blood and wounds whipped up the naked savage in him."

"But—no. He was afraid of that."

"He was afraid of himself. Of what was in him. That fear of his was his protection, like his fear of women. The war broke it down. Then he was cruel to you."

"Yes. He was cruel." Her voice sounded flat and hard, without feeling. She had no feeling; she had exhausted all the emotions of her suffering. And her knowledge of his cruelty was absolute. To McClane's assertion of the fact she had no response beyond that toneless acquiescence.

"Taking you into that shed—"

He had roused her.

"How on earth did you know that? I've never told a single soul."

"It was known in the hospital. One of the carpenters saw the whole thing. He told one of our orderlies who told my chauffeur Gurney who told me."

"It doesn't matter what he did to me. I can't get over his not caring for the wounded."

"He was jealous of them, because you cared for them."

"Oh no. He'd left off caring for me by then."

"Had he?" He gave a little soft, wise laugh. "What makes you think so?"

"That. His cruelty."

"Love can be very cruel."

"Not as cruel as that," she said.

"Yes. As cruel as that.... Remember, it was at the bottom of the whole business. Of his dreams. In a sense, the real John Conway was the man who dreamed."

"If you're right he was the man who was cruel, too. And it's his cruelty I hate."

"Don't hate it. Don't hate it. I want you to understand his cruelty. It wasn't just savagery. It was something subtler. A supreme effort to get power. Remember, he couldn't help it. He had to right himself. Supposing his funk extinguished something in him that could only be revived through cruelty? You'll say he could help betraying you—"

"To you, too?"

"To me, too. When you lost faith in him you cut off his main source of power. You had to be discredited so that it shouldn't count. You mustn't imagine that he did anything on purpose. He was driven. It sounds horrible, but I want you to see it was just his way of saving his soul, the only way open to him. You mustn't think of it as a bad way. Or a good way. It wasn't even his way. It was the way of something bigger than he was, bigger than anything he could ever be. Bigger than badness or goodness."

"Did 'it' do cowardly things to 'save' itself?"

"No. If Conway could have played the man 'it' would have been satisfied. It was always urging him." ... "Try," he said, and she knew that now at any rate he was sincere; he really wanted to help her; he was giving her his best. His voice was very quiet now, his excited gestures had ceased. "Try and think of it as something more real, more important and necessary than he was; or you and I. Something that is always struggling to be, to go on being. Something that degeneracy is always trying to keep under.... Power. A power in retreat, fighting to get back its lost ground."

Then what she had loved was not John Conway. What she had hated was not he. He was this Something, tremendous and necessary, that escaped your judgment. You couldn't hurt it with your loving or hating or your ceasing to love and hate. Something that tortured you and betrayed you because that was the only way it knew to save itself.

Something that couldn't save itself altogether—that clung to you and called to you to save it.

But that was what she had loved. Nothing could touch it.

For a moment while McClane was talking she saw, in the flash he gave her, that it was real. And when the flash went it slipped back into her darkness.

But on the deck in front of her she could see John walking up and down. She could see the wide road of gold and purple that stretched from the boat's stern to the sun. John's head was thrown back; he looked at her with his shining, adventurous eyes. He was happy and excited, going out to the war.

And she saw them again: the batteries, the cars and the wagons. Dust like blown smoke, and passing in it the long lines of beaten men, reeling slowly to the footway, passing slowly, endlessly, regiment by regiment, in retreat.

THE END