Chapter IV: Book TWO: John Roden Conway (3)

"Nobody knows," he said gently, "but you and me.... I want to talk to you about him. He must be got away from the Front. He must be got out of Belgium."

"You always wanted to get him away."

"Only because I saw he would break down."

"How could you tell?"

"I'm a psychotherapist. It's my business to tell."

But she was still on the defensive.

"You never liked him."

"I neither like nor dislike him. To me Conway is simply a sick man. If I could cure him--"

"Can't you?"

"Not as you think. I can't turn his cowardice into courage. I might turn it into something else but not that. That's why I say he ought to go home. You must tell him."

"I can't. Couldn't Billy tell him?"

"Well, hardly. He's his commandant."

"Can't _you_?"

"Not I. You know what he thinks about me."

"What?"

"That I've got a grudge against him. That I'm jealous of him. You thought it yourself."

"Did I?"

"You did. Look here, I say--I wanted to take you three into my corps. And you'd have been sent home after the Berlaere affair if I hadn't spoken for you. So much for my jealousy."

"I only thought you were jealous of John."

"Why, it was I who got him sent out that first day."

"_Was_ it?"

"Yes. I wanted to give him his chance. And," he added meditatively, "I wanted to know whether I was right. I wanted to see what he would do."

"I don't think it now," she said, reverting.

"_That's_ all right."

He laughed his brief, mirthless laugh, the assent of his egoism. But his satisfaction had nothing personal in it. He was pleased because justice, abstract justice, had been done. But she suspected his sincerity. He did things for you, not because he liked you, but for some other reason; and he would be so carried away by doing them that he would behave as though he liked you when he didn't, when all the time you couldn't for one minute rouse him from his immense indifference. She knew he liked her for sticking to her post and for taking the wounded man on her back, because that was the sort of thing he would have done himself. And he had only helped John because he wanted to see what he would do. Therefore she suspected his sincerity.

But, no; he wasn't jealous.

"And now," he went on, "you must get him to go home at once, or he'll have a bad break-down. You've got to tell him, Charlotte."

She stood up, ready. "Where is he?"

"By himself. In his room."

She went to him there.

He was sitting at his little table. He had been trying to write a letter, but he had pushed it from him and left it. You could see he was absorbed in some bitter meditation. She seated herself at the head of his bed, on his pillow, where she could look down at him.

"John," she said, "you can't go on like this--"

"Like what?"

He held his head high; but the excited, happy light had gone out of his eyes; they stared, not as though they saw anything, but withdrawn, as though he were contemplating the fearful memory of his fear.

And she was sorry for him, so sorry that she couldn't bear it. She bit her lip lest she should sob out with pain.

"Oh--" she said, and her pain stopped her.

"I don't know what you're talking about--'going on like this.' I'm--going--on."

"What's the good? You've had enough. If I were you I should go home. You know you can't stand it."

"What? Go and leave my cars to Sutton?"

"McClane could take them."

"I don't know how long McClane signed on for. _I_ signed on for the duration of the war."

"There wasn't any signing on."

"Well, if you like, I swore I wouldn't go back till it was over."

"Yes, and supposing it happens again."

"What _should_ happen again?"

"What happened this afternoon.... And it wasn't the first time."

"Do you _know_ what happened?"

"I _saw_ what happened. You simply went to pieces."

"My dear Charlotte, _you_ went to pieces, if you like."

"I know that's what you told Mac. And _he_ knows how true it is."

"Does he? Well--he shan't have my ambulances. You don't suppose I'm going to let McClane fire me out of Belgium?... I suppose he put you up to this...."

He stood up as a sign to her to leave him. "I don't see that there's anything more to be said."

"There's one thing." (She slid to her feet.) "_You_ swore you'd stick till the war's over. _I_ swore, if I had to choose between you and the wounded, it shouldn't be you."

"You haven't got to choose. You've only got to obey orders...."

His face stiffened. He looked like some hard commander imposing an unanswerable will.

"... The next time," he said, "you'll be good enough to remember that I settle what risks are to be taken, not you."

Her soul stiffened, too, and was hard. She stood up against him with her shoulder to the door.

"It sounds all right," she said. "But the _next time_ I'll carry him on my back all the way."

* * * * *

She went to bed with her knowledge. He funked and lied. The two things she couldn't stand. His funk and his lying were a real part of him. And it was as if she had always known it, as if all the movements of her mind had been an effort to escape her knowledge.

She opened her eyes. Something hurt them. Gwinnie, coming late to bed, had turned on the electric light. And as she rolled over, turning her back to the light and to Gwinnie, her mind shifted. It saw suddenly the flame leaping in John's face. His delight in danger, that happiness he felt when he went out to meet it, happiness springing up bright and new every day; that was a real part of him. She couldn't doubt it. She knew. And she was left with her queer, baffled sense of surprise and incompleteness. She couldn't see the nature of the bond between these two realities.

That was his secret, his mystery.

XII

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."

He flung her arm off and turned. "You fool," he said. "You fool."

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.

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.