The Romantic Part 24

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 G.o.d! 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 cure 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 cure came to her there. He was slender and lean in his black ca.s.sock.

He had a Red Cross bra.s.sard 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 cure 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 compa.s.sionate.

"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 cure 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 ca.s.sock.

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 cure's act, even while she wondered whether perhaps the wafer on his tongue might not choke the dying man.

The cure 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 ca.s.sock 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 cure--"

"The cure 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.