Non-combatants and Others Part 16

'All right.... Aren't you well?'

She held on to his arm.

'Terry, I'm going home.'

He looked at her face.

'All right. I'll come too.... If you're going to faint, you'd better sit down first.'

'I shan't faint,' said Alix. 'But I think ... I think I may be going to be sick.'

'Well,' said Terry, 'just wait till the others have gone on, or they'll fuss round.... I say, good-bye, all of you; Alix is rather done, and we're going to the nearest station for the next train. No thanks, don't bother to come; we shall be all right.'

Alix heard far-away offers of help; heard Evie's 'Shall I come with you, Al?' and Basil's 'What bad luck,' and the others' sympathies and regrets, and Terry keeping them off.

7

Alix and Terry were alone together.

Then Alix was, as she had foretold, sick, crouching on damp heather by the roadside.

'Have you done?' inquired Terry presently.

'Yes. I hope so, at least. Let's go on to the station.'

'I wonder, is it something beginning? Do you feel like flu? Or is it biliousness, or a chill? Or have you walked too far? I was afraid you were.'

'I'm all right. Only that man--Mr. Ingram--told me things, and suddenly I felt sick.... He told me things about Paul.... He didn't know who I was, and then suddenly he knew, and I saw him know, and I knew too. Do _you_ know, Terry?'

'No,' said Terry, levelly. 'I know what some men who were out there thought, but it wasn't true.'

Terry was a good liar, but now no use at all. Alix twisted her cold hands together and whispered hoa.r.s.ely, 'You've known all the time, then.... Oh, Paul, Paul--to have minded as much as all that before you died ... to have been hurt like that for weeks and weeks....'

She was crying now, and could not stop.

'Don't,' said Terry gently. 'Don't think like that about it; it's not the way. Don't think of Paul, except that he got out of it quicker than most people, and is safe now from any more of it. One's got to keep on thinking of that, whenever any of them slip up.... I hoped you'd none of you ever know.... That bungling a.s.s.... Alix, don't: it was such a short time he had of it....'

Alix gasped, her hands pressed to her choked throat, 'It seemed hundreds of years, to him. Hundreds and hundreds of years, of being hurt like that, hurt more than he could bear, till he had to end it.... He was such a _little_ boy, Terry ... he minded things so much....'

'The thing is,' Terry repeated, frowning, and prodding the mud in the road with his stick, 'not to _think_. Not to _imagine_. Not to _remember_.... It's _over_, don't you see, for Paul. He's clean out of it.... It's a score for him really, as he was like that and did mind so much.'

'It would be easier,' said Alix presently, husky and strangled, 'if he hadn't liked things so much too; if he hadn't been so awfully happy; if he hadn't so loved being alive.... It isn't a score for him to lose all the rest of his life, that he might have had afterwards.'

'No,' Terry agreed, sadly. 'It isn't. It's rotten luck, that is. Simply rotten. That's one of the most sickening things about this whole show, the way people are doing that.... But there's one thing about Paul, Alix; if he'd come through it he'd have kept on remembering all the things one tries to forget. More than most people, I mean. He was that sort. Lots of people don't mind so much, and can get things out of their heads when they aren't actually seeing them. I can, pretty well, you know. I think about other things, and don't worry, and eat and sleep like a prize-fighter. A chap like Ingram's all right, too; lots of men are. (Though what I suppose Ingram would call his brain seems to have gone pretty well to pot to-day. My word, I shall let him hear about that this evening.) But Paul--Paul would have minded awfully always; it might have spoilt his life a bit, you know.... And worse things might have happened to him, too; he might have been taken prisoner.... Paul,' he added slowly--'Paul is better off than lots of men.'

Alix was staring at him now with wide, frightened eyes.

'I say, Terry,' she said hoa.r.s.ely, 'what--what on earth are we to _do_ about it all? It--it's going on now--this moment.... I've tried so hard not to let it come near ... and now ... now....' She was cold and shaking with terror.

'Now you'd better go on trying,' Terry suggested, and looked at his watch. 'Thinking's no good, anyhow.... We ought to hit off the 3.15 with any luck. Are you going to be sick any more, by the way?'

'I can never tell, till just beforehand,' said Alix gloomily. 'But I wouldn't be much surprised.'

That was a sad thing about the Sandomirs: when they began to be sick it often took them quite a long time to leave off. It was most unfortunate, and they got it from their father, who had sometimes been taken that way on public platforms.

'Well,' said Terry patiently.

8

The others walked, and had tea, and walked again, and took a train back.

Londoners like this sort of day. They like to see hedges, and gra.s.s, and pick berries, and hear birds. It refreshes them for their next week's work, even though they have been at the time cold, and tired, and perhaps bored.

CHAPTER X

EVENING IN CHURCH

1

Alix was huddled on her bed in a rug. She had taken two aspirin tablets because her head ached, and really one is enough. She felt cold and low.

She was occupied in not thinking about Paul or the war; it was rather a difficult operation, and took her whole energies. Paul was insistent; she pressed her hands against her eyes and saw him on the darkness, her little brother, white-faced, with the nervous smile she knew; Paul in a trench, among the wounded and killed, seeing things, hearing things ...

taken suddenly sick ... unable to leave off ... putting his head above the parapet, trying to get hit, called sharply to order by superiors....

Paul desperate, at the end of his tether, in the night full of flashes and smashes and laughter and grumbling and curses.... Paul laughing too, and talking, as she and Paul always did when they were hiding things....

Paul in his dug-out, alone ... unseen, he supposed ... with only one thought, to get out of it somehow.... The shot, the pain, like flame ...

the men approaching, who knew.... Paul's face, knowing they knew ...

white, frightened, staring, pain swallowed up in shame ... the end ...

how soon? Ingram hadn't said that. Anyhow, the end; and Paul, out of it at last, slipping into the dark, alone.... A n.o.ble end, Mrs. Frampton had said, not a wasted life.... Anyhow, all over for Paul, as Terry had said.

And then what? Ingram hadn't said that either; nor had Terry; no one could say, for no one knew. What, if anything, _did_ come then?

Darkness, nothingness, or something new?

'He has begun to live now, dear, for ever and ever,' Kate had said.

'World without end, amen,' Mrs. Frampton had rounded it off.

World without end! What a thought! Poor Paul, finding a desperate way out from the world, slipping away into another which had no way out at all. But Mrs. Frampton's and Kate's world without end was a happy, jolly one, presumably, and the more of it the better. It would give Paul s.p.a.ce for the life he hadn't lived here. Oh, could that be so? Was it possible, or was it, as so many people thought, only a dream? Who could know? No one, till they came to try. And then perhaps they would know nothing at all either way, not being there any more....

Yet people thought they knew, even here and now. Nicky's friend, Mr.

West; he, presumably, thought he knew; anyhow, if not going so far as that, he had taken a hypothesis and was, so to speak, acting, thinking, and talking on it. He was clever, too. Mrs. Frampton and Kate thought they knew, too; but they weren't clever. They believed in G.o.d: but Alix could have no use for the Violette G.o.d. Mrs. Frampton's G.o.d was the Almighty, an omnipotent Being who governed all things in gross and in detail, including the weather (though the connection here was mysteriously vague). A G.o.d of crops and sun and rain, who spoke in the thunder; a truly pagan G.o.d (though Mrs. Frampton would not have cared for the word), of chastis.e.m.e.nts and arbitrary mercies, who was capable of wrecking ships and causing wars, in order to punish and improve people. The G.o.d of the 'act of G.o.d' in the shipping regulations. A G.o.d who could, and would, unless for wise purposes he chose otherwise, keep men and women physically safe, protect them from battle, murder, and sudden death. An anthropomorphic G.o.d, in the semblance, for some strange reason known only to the human race, of a man. A G.o.d who somehow was responsible for the war. A G.o.d who ordered men's estates so that there should be a wholesome economic inequality among them.

Such was Mrs. Frampton's G.o.d, in no material way altered from the conception of the primitive Jews or the modern South Sea Islanders, who make G.o.d in their image. He had no attractions for Alix, who could not feel that a G.o.d of weather was in any way concerned with the soul of the world.

Kate's G.o.d, on the other hand, was for Alix enshrined in the little books of devotion that Kate had lent her sometimes, and all of which she found revolting, even on the hypothesis that you believed that sort of thing. They propounded ingenuous personal questions for the reader to ask himself, such as 'Have I eaten or drunk too much? Have I used bad words? Have I read bad books?' (As if, thought Alix, any one would read a bad book on purpose, life being so much too short to get through the good ones; unless one had the misfortune to be a reviewer, like Nicky, or to have bad taste, like many others; and then wasn't it rather a misfortune than a fault?) 'Have I been unkind to animals?' the inquiries went on. 'Have I obeyed those set over me? Have I kept a guard of my eyes?' (a mysterious phrase, unexplained by any footnote, and leaving it an open question whether to have done so or to have omitted to do so would have been the sin. Alix inclined to the former view; it somehow sounded an unpleasant thing to do.)