The Romantic Part 32

"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 att.i.tude 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 m.u.f.fled 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed 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."