The Romantic Part 19

"I'd have come before only I didn't see him soon enough. I had an operation.... Is that a wounded man you've got there? I suppose he lost him, too?"

"He didn't know he was here."

"I see."

Then she remembered. Billy would know. Billy would tell her.

"Billy--was that boy dead when you left him! The boy in the house over there."

He was stooping to the Belgian, examining his bandages, and he didn't answer all at once. He seemed to be meditating.

"Was he?" she repeated.

It struck her that Billy was surprised.

"Because--" She stopped there. She couldn't say to him, "I want to know whether John left him dead or alive."

"He was dead all right." Sutton's voice came up slow and m.u.f.fled out of his meditation.

It was all right. She might have known. She might have known. Vaguely for a moment she wondered why Billy had come for her and not John; then she was frightened.

"Billy--John isn't hurt, is he?"

"No. Rather not. A bit done up. I made him go and lie down.... Look here, we must get out of this."

The McClane Corps were gathered on their side of the messroom. They greeted her with shouts of joy, but their eyes looked at her queerly, as if they knew something dreadful had happened to her.

"You should have stood in with us, Charlotte," Mrs. Rankin was saying.

"Then you wouldn't get mislaid among the sh.e.l.ls." She was whispering.

"Dr. McClane, if you took Charlotte out among the sh.e.l.ls, would you run away and leave her there?"

"I'd try not to."

Oh yes. He wouldn't run away and leave her. But he wouldn't care where he took her. He wouldn't care whether a sh.e.l.l got her or not. But John cared. If only she knew _why_.... Their queer faces sobered her and suddenly she knew. She saw Sutton coming out of the house with the narrow shutters; she heard him shouting to her, "Come on, Charlotte, hurry up!"

John must have heard him. He must really have thought that she had gone with him.

But he must have known, too, that she wouldn't go. He must have known that if he told her to wait for him she would wait. So that--

The voices of the McClane women ceased abruptly. One of them turned round. Charlotte saw John standing between the gla.s.ses of the two doors.

He came in and she heard Mrs. Rankin calling out in her hard, insolent voice, "Well, Mr. Conway, so you've got in safe."

She was always like that, hard and insolent, with her d.a.m.ned courage. As if courage were ever anything more than just being decent, and as if other people couldn't be decent too. She hated John because she couldn't make him come to her, couldn't make him look with pleasure at her beautiful, arrogant face. She disliked Sutton and McClane for the same reason, but she hated John. He treated her face with a hardness and insolence like her own. You could see her waiting for her revenge, watching every minute for a chance to stick her blade into him. He was pretending that he hadn't heard her.

His hair stood up in pointed tufts, rumpled from his pillow. His eyes had a dazed, stupid look as if he were not perfectly awake. But at the sound of the rasping voice his mouth had tightened; it was pinched and sharp with pain. He didn't look at Mrs. Rankin. He came to her, Charlotte Redhead, straight; straight as if she had drawn him from his sleep.

The McClane people got up, one after another, and went out.

"Charlotte," he said, "did you really think I'd left you?"

"I thought you'd left me. But I knew you hadn't."

"You _knew_ it wasn't possible?"

"Yes. Inside me I knew."

"I'm awfully sorry. Sutton told me you were going on with him, and I thought you'd gone."

XI

She would remember for ever the talk they had on the balcony that day while Antwerp was falling.

They were standing there, she and John Conway and Sutton, looking over the station and the railway lines to the open country beyond: the fields, the tall slender trees, the low mounds of the little hills, bristling and dark. Round the corner of the balcony they could see into the _Place_ below; it was filled with a thick black crowd of refugees. Antwerp was falling. Presently the ambulance train would come in and they would have to go over there to the station with their stretchers and carry out the wounded. Meanwhile they waited.

John brooded. His face was heavy and sombre with discontent. "No," he said. "No. It isn't good enough."

"What isn't?"

"What we're doing here. Going to all those little tin-pot places. The real fighting isn't down there. They ought to send us to Antwerp."

"I suppose they send us where they think we're most wanted."

"I don't believe they do. We were fools not to have insisted on going to Antwerp, instead of letting ourselves be stuck here in a rotten side show."

"We've had enough to do, anyhow," said Sutton.

"And there isn't anybody but us and Mac to do it," Charlotte said.

John's eyebrows twisted. "Yes; but we're not _in_ it. I want to be in it.

In the big thing; the big dangerous thing."

Sutton sighed and got up and left them. John waited for the closing of the door.

"Does it strike you," he said, "that Billy isn't very keen?"

"No. It doesn't. What do you mean?"

"I notice that he's jolly glad when he can get an indoor job."

"That's because they're short of surgeons. He only wants to do what's most useful."

"I didn't say he had cold feet."