The Romantic Part 23

He was sitting at his little table. He had been trying to write a letter, but he had pushed it from him and left it. You could see he was absorbed in some bitter meditation. She seated herself at the head of his bed, on his pillow, where she could look down at him.

"John," she said, "you can't go on like this--"

"Like what?"

He held his head high; but the excited, happy light had gone out of his eyes; they stared, not as though they saw anything, but withdrawn, as though he were contemplating the fearful memory of his fear.

And she was sorry for him, so sorry that she couldn't bear it. She bit her lip lest she should sob out with pain.

"Oh--" she said, and her pain stopped her.

"I don't know what you're talking about--'going on like this.'

I'm--going--on."

"What's the good? You've had enough. If I were you I should go home. You know you can't stand it."

"What? Go and leave my cars to Sutton?"

"McClane could take them."

"I don't know how long McClane signed on for. _I_ signed on for the duration of the war."

"There wasn't any signing on."

"Well, if you like, I swore I wouldn't go back till it was over."

"Yes, and supposing it happens again."

"What _should_ happen again?"

"What happened this afternoon.... And it wasn't the first time."

"Do you _know_ what happened?"

"I _saw_ what happened. You simply went to pieces."

"My dear Charlotte, _you_ went to pieces, if you like."

"I know that's what you told Mac. And _he_ knows how true it is."

"Does he? Well--he shan't have my ambulances. You don't suppose I'm going to let McClane fire me out of Belgium?... I suppose he put you up to this...."

He stood up as a sign to her to leave him. "I don't see that there's anything more to be said."

"There's one thing." (She slid to her feet.) "_You_ swore you'd stick till the war's over. _I_ swore, if I had to choose between you and the wounded, it shouldn't be you."

"You haven't got to choose. You've only got to obey orders...."

His face stiffened. He looked like some hard commander imposing an unanswerable will.

"... The next time," he said, "you'll be good enough to remember that I settle what risks are to be taken, not you."

Her soul stiffened, too, and was hard. She stood up against him with her shoulder to the door.

"It sounds all right," she said. "But the _next time_ I'll carry him on my back all the way."

She went to bed with her knowledge. He funked and lied. The two things she couldn't stand. His funk and his lying were a real part of him. And it was as if she had always known it, as if all the movements of her mind had been an effort to escape her knowledge.

She opened her eyes. Something hurt them. Gwinnie, coming late to bed, had turned on the electric light. And as she rolled over, turning her back to the light and to Gwinnie, her mind s.h.i.+fted. It saw suddenly the flame leaping in John's face. His delight in danger, that happiness he felt when he went out to meet it, happiness springing up bright and new every day; that was a real part of him. She couldn't doubt it. She knew.

And she was left with her queer, baffled sense of surprise and incompleteness. She couldn't see the nature of the bond between these two realities.

That was his secret, his mystery.

XII

She woke very early in the morning with one clear image in her mind: what John had done yesterday.

Her mind seemed to have watched all night behind her sleep to attack her with it in the first moment of waking. She had got to come to a clear decision about that. If Billy Sutton had done it, or one of McClane's chauffeurs, her decision would have been very clear. She would have said he was a filthy coward and dismissed him from her mind. But John couldn't be dismissed. His funk wasn't like other people's funk. Coupled with his ecstatic love of danger it had an unreal, fantastic quality. Somehow she couldn't regard his love of danger as an unreal, fantastic thing. It had come too near her; it had moved her too profoundly and too long; she had shared it as she might have shared his pa.s.sion.

So that, even in the sharp, waking day she felt his fear as a secret, mysterious thing. She couldn't account for it. She didn't, considering the circ.u.mstances, she didn't judge the imminence of the Germans to be a sufficient explanation. It was as incomprehensible to-day as it had been yesterday.

But there was fear and fear. There was the cruel, animal fear of the Belgians in the plantation, fear that was dark to itself and had no sadness in it; and there was John's fear that knew itself and was sad.

The unbearable, inconsolable sadness of John's fear! After all, you could think of him as a gentle thing, caught unaware in a trap and tortured.

And who was she to judge him? She in her "armour" and he in his coat of nerves. His knowledge and his memory of his fear would be like a raw open wound in his mind; and her knowledge of it would be a perpetual irritant, rubbing against it and keeping up the sore. Last night she hadn't done anything to heal him; she had only hurt.... And if she gave John up his wound would never heal. She owed a sort of duty to the wound.

Of course, like John, she would go on remembering what had happened yesterday. She would never get over it any more than he would. Yet, after all, yesterday was only one day out of his life. There might never be another like it. And to set against yesterday there was their first day at Berlaere and the day afterwards at Melle; there was yesterday morning and there was that other day at Melle. She had no business to suppose that he had done then what he did yesterday. They had settled that once for all at the time, when he said Billy Sutton had told him she was going back with him. It all hung on that. If that was right, the rest was right....

Supposing Billy hadn't told him anything of the sort, though? She would never know that. She couldn't say to Billy: "_Did_ you tell John I was going back with you? Because; if you didn't--" She would have to leave that as it was, not quite certain.... And she couldn't be quite certain whether the boy had been dead or alive. And ... No. She couldn't get over it, John's cowardice. It had destroyed the unique, beautiful happiness she had had with him.

For it was no use saying that courage, physical courage, didn't count.

She could remember a long conversation she had had with George Corfield, the man who wanted to marry her, about that. He had said courage was the least thing you could have. That only meant that, whatever else you hadn't, you must have that. It was a sort of trust. You were trusted not to betray defenceless things. A coward was a person who betrayed defenceless things. George had said that the world's adoration of courage was the world's cowardice, its fear of betrayal. That was a question for cowards to settle among themselves. The obligation not to betray defenceless things remained. It was so simple and obvious that people took it for granted; they didn't talk about it. They didn't talk about it because it was so deep and sacred, like honour and like love; so that, when John had talked about it she had always felt that he was her lover, saying the things that other men might not say, things he couldn't have said to any other woman.

It was inconceivable that he--It couldn't have happened. As he had said of the defeat of Belgium, it was so bad that it couldn't happen. Odd, that the other day she had accepted at once a thing she didn't know for certain, while now she fought fiercely against a thing she knew; and always the memory of it, returning, beat her down.

She had to make up her mind on what terms she would live with it and whether she would live with it at all. Supposing it happened again?

Supposing you had always to go in fear of its happening?... It mightn't happen. Funk might be a thing that attacked you like an illness, or like drink, in fits, with long, calm intervals between. She wondered what it would feel like to be subject to attacks. Perhaps you would recover; you would be on the look-out, and when you felt another fit coming on you could stave it off or fight it down. And the first time wouldn't count because you had had no warning. It wouldn't be fair to give him up because of the first time.

He would have given her up, he would have left her to the Germans--Yes; but if she broke with him now she would never get beyond that thought, she would never get beyond yesterday; she would always see it, the flagged road swinging with the swinging bulge of the stretcher, the sudden stopping, the Flamand with his wound, the shafts of the stretcher, suddenly naked, sticking out; and then all the fantastic, incredible movements of John's flight. Her mind would separate from him on that, closing everything down, making his act eternal.

And, after all, the Germans hadn't come round the corner. Perhaps he wouldn't have left her if they had really come. How did she know what he wouldn't have done?

No. That was thin. Thin. She couldn't take herself in quite in that way.