The Romantic Part 14

"He says we shall give away the position of the road."

"It's the one they told us to take. We've got to go on it. He's in a beastly funk. That's what's the matter with him."

The Belgian shrugged his shoulders as much as to say he had done his duty and things might now take their course, and they were mistaken if for one minute they supposed he was afraid. But they had not gone fifty yards before he begged to be put down. He said it was absolutely necessary that he should go back to the village and collect the wounded there and have them ready for the ambulance on its return.

They let him go. Charlotte looked round the corner of the hood and saw him running with brief, jerky strides.

"He's got a nerve," said John, "to be able to do it."

"What excuse do you think he'll make?"

"Oh, he'll say we sent him."

The straight d.y.k.e of the road went on and on. Seen from the sunk German lines the heavy ambulance car would look like a house on wheels running along a wall. She thought again of John on his exposed seat. If only he had let her drive--But that was absurd. Of course he wouldn't let her. If you were to keep on thinking of the things that might happen to John--Meanwhile nothing could take from them the delight of this dangerous run across the open. She had to remind herself that the adventure, the romance of it was not what mattered most; it was not the real thing, the thing they had gone out for.

When they came to the wounded, when they came to the wounded, then it would begin.

The hamlet began to show now; it sat on one side of the road, low and alone in the flat land, an open field in front of it, and at the bottom of the field the river and a line of willows, and behind the willows the Germans, hidden. White smoke curled among the branches. You could see it was an outpost, one of the points at which the Germans, if they broke through, would come into the village. They supposed that the house where the wounded men were would be the last of the short row.

Here on their right there were no houses, only the long, high flank of a barn. The parts that had been built out into the field were sh.e.l.led away, but the outer wall by the roadside still held. It was all that stood between them and the German guns. They drew up the car under its shelter and got down.

They could see all the houses of the hamlet at once on their left; whitewashed walls; slender grey doors and shutters. The three that looked out on to the barn were untouched. A few yards ahead a small, empty wine-shop faced the open field; its doorstep and the path in front of its windows glittered with gla.s.s dust, with spikes and splinters, and heaped shale of gla.s.s that slid and cracked under your feet. Beyond it, a house with its door and all its windows and the front slope of its roof blown in. A broken shutter sagged from the wall. Then the sh.e.l.l of the last house; it p.r.i.c.ked up one plastered gable, white and hard against the blue.

They found the men in the last house but one, the house with the broken shutter. They went, carrying their stretchers and the haversack of dressings, under the slanted lintel into the room. The air in there was hot and stifling and thickened with a grey powdery swarm. Their feet sank through a layer of pinkish, greyish dust.

The three wounded men lay stretched out on this floor, among brickbats and broken panes and slabs of dropped plaster. A thin grey powder had settled on them all. And by the side of each man the dust was stiffened into a red cake with a glairy pool in the middle of it, fed from the raw wound; and where two men lay together their pools had joined and overflowed in a thin red stream.

John put down his stretcher and stood still. His face was very white, and his upper lip showed in-drawn and dry, and tightened as though it were glued to his teeth.

"John, you _aren't_ going to faint or be sick or anything?"

"I'm all right."

He went forward, clenching his fists; moving in a curious drawn way, like a sleep walker.

They were kneeling in the dust now, looking for the wounds.

"We must do this chap with the arm first. He'll want a tourniquet."

He spoke in a husky whisper as if he were half asleep....

The wounded head stuck to the floor. They sc.r.a.ped round it, digging with their hands; it came up wearing a crust of powdered lime. A pad and a bandage. They couldn't do anything more for that ... The third man, with the fractured s.h.i.+n-bone and the big flesh-wound in his thigh, must have splints and a dressing.

She wondered how John would set about his work. But his queer, hypnotised actions were effectual and clean.

Between them they had fixed the tourniquet.

Through all her preoccupation and the quick, dexterous movement of her hands she could feel her pity tightening her throat: pity that hurt like love, that was delicious and exquisite like love. Nothing mattered, nothing existed in her mind but the three wounded men. John didn't matter. John didn't exist. He was nothing but a pair of hands working quickly and dexterously with her own.... She looked up. John's mouth kept its hard, glued look; his eyes were feverish behind a glaze of water, and red-rimmed.

She thought: It's awful for him. He minds too much. It hurt her to see how he minded. After all, he did matter. Deep inside her he mattered more than the wounded men; he mattered more than anything on earth. Only there wasn't time, there wasn't _time_ to think of him.

She turned to the next man and caught sight of the two machine guns with their tilted muzzles standing in the corner of the room by the chimney.

They must remember to bring away the guns.

John's hypnotic whisper came again. "You might get those splints, Charlotte."

As she crossed the road a sh.e.l.l fell in the open field beyond, and burst, throwing up a great splash and spray of brown earth. She stiffened herself in an abrupt gesture of defiance. Her mind retorted: "You've missed, that time. You needn't think I'm going to put myself out for _you_." To show that she wasn't putting herself out (in case they should be looking) she strolled with dignity to her car, selected carefully the kind of splint she needed, and returned. She thought: Oh well--supposing they _do_ hit. We must get those men out before another comes.

John looked up as she came to him. His face glistened with pinheads of sweat; he panted in the choking air.

"Where did that sh.e.l.l burst?"

"Miles away."

"Are you certain?"

"Rather."

She lied. Why not? John had been lying all the time. Lying was part of their defiance, a denial that the enemy's effort had succeeded. Nothing mattered but the fixing of the splints and the carrying of the men....

John was cranking up the engine when she turned back into the house.

"I _say_, what are you doing?"

"Going for the guns."

There was, she noticed, a certain longish interval between sh.e.l.ls. John and the wounded men would be safe from shrapnel under the shelter of the wall. She brought out the first gun and stowed it at the back of the car.

Then she went in for the other. It stood on the seat between them with its muzzle pointing down the road. Charlotte put her arm round it to steady it.

On the way back to the dressing-station she sat silent, thinking of the three wounded men in there, behind, rocked and shaken by the jolting of the car on the uneven causeway. John was silent, too, absorbed by his steering.

But as they ran into Ghent the romance of it, the romance of it, came back to her. It wasn't over yet. They would have to go out again for the wounded they had had to leave behind at Berlaere.

"John--John--It's like nothing else on earth."

"I told you it would be."

Slowly realization came to her. They had brought in their wounded under the enemy's fire. And they had saved the guns.

"Do you mind," John said, "if Sutton goes instead of me He hasn't been out yet?"

"N-no. Not if I can go too."

"Do you want to?"

"Awfully."