The Romantic Part 25

"No. No," she said. "You shan't touch him."

He flung her arm off and turned. "You fool," he said. "You fool."

She looked at him steadily, a long look that remembered, that made him remember.

"There isn't time," she said. "They'll begin _firing_ in another minute."

"d.a.m.n you." But he had turned, slinking round the corner of the hood to the engine. While he cranked it up she thought of the kit that one of the men had left there in the yard. She made a dash and fetched it, and as she threw it on the floor the car started. She s.n.a.t.c.hed at the rope and swung herself up on to the step. The dying man lay behind her, straight and stiff; his feet in their heavy boots stuck out close under her hand.

The four men nodded and grinned at her. They protected her. They understood.

If only she could get him into a clean bed. If only she had had time to take his boots off. It would be all right if only she could bring him in alive.

He was still alive when they got into Ghent.

She had forgotten John and it was not until they came to take out the stretcher that she was again aware of him. They had drawn up before the steps of the hospital; he had got down and was leaning sideways, staring under the stretcher.

"What is it?"

"You can see what it is. Blood."

From the hole in the man's head, through the soaked bandages, it still dripped, dripped with a light sound; it had made a glairy pool on the floor of the ambulance.

"Don't look at it," she said. "It'll make you sick. You know you can't stand it."

"Oh. I can't _stand_ it, can't I?"

He straightened himself. He threw back his head; his upper lip lifted, stretched tight and thin above the clean white teeth. His eyes looked down at her, narrowed, bright slits under dropped lids.

"John--I want to get him in before he dies."

"All right. Get in under there. Take his head."

"Hadn't I better take his feet?"

"You'd better take what you're told to."

She stiffened to the weight, heaved up her shoulder. Two men came running down the steps to help her as John pulled.

"They'll be glad," he said, "to see him."

She was in the yard of the hospital, swabbing out the car, when John came to her.

The back and side of the hospital, the long barracks of the annex and the wall at the bottom enclosed a waste place of ochreish clay. A long wooden shed, straw-white and new, was built out under the red brick of the annex. She thought it was a garage. John came out of the door of the shed. He beckoned to her as he came.

"Come here," he said. "I want to show you something."

They went close together, John gripping her arm, in the old way, to steer her. As they came to the long wall of the shed his eyes slewed round and looked at her out of their corners. She had seen that sidelong, attentive look once before, when she was a little girl, in the eyes of a schoolboy who had taken her away and told her something horrid. The door of the shed stood ajar. John half led, half pushed her in.

"Look there--" he said.

The dead men were laid out in a row, on their backs; greyish-white, sallow-white faces upturned; bodies straight and stiff on a thin litter of straw. Pale grey light hovered, filtered through dust.

It came from some clearer place of gla.s.s beyond that might have been a carpenter's shop, part.i.tioned off. She couldn't see what was going on there. She didn't see anything but the dead bodies, the dead faces, and John's living face.

He leaned against the wall; his head was thrown back, his eyes moved glistening under the calm lids; the corners of his mouth and the wings of his nostrils were lifted as he laughed: a soft, thin laugh breathed out between the edges of his teeth. He pointed.

"There's your man. Shows how much they wanted him, doesn't it?"

He lay there, the last comer, in his uniform and b.l.o.o.d.y bandages, his stiff, peaked mouth open, his legs stretched apart as they had sprung in his last agony.

"Oh, John--"

She cried out in her fright and put her hands over her eyes. She had always been afraid of the dead bodies. She didn't want to know where they put them, and n.o.body told her.

John gripped her wrists so that he hurt her and dragged down her hands.

He looked into her eyes, still laughing.

"I thought you weren't afraid of anything," he said.

"I'm not afraid when we're out there. I'm only afraid of _seeing_ them.

You know I am."

She turned, but he had put himself between her and the door. She wrenched at the latch, sobbing.

"How could you be so _cruel?_ What did you do it for? What did you _do_ it for?"

"I wanted you to see what they've done with him. There's his clean bed.

They haven't even taken his boots off."

"You brute. You _utter_ brute!"

A steely sound like a dropped hammer came from behind the gla.s.s part.i.tion; then the sliding of a latch. John opened the door a little way and she slipped out past him.

"_Next time_," he said, "perhaps you'll do as you're told."

She wanted to get away by herself. Not into her own room, where Gwinnie, who had been unloading ambulance trains half the night, now rested. The McClane Corps was crowding into the messroom for tea. She pa.s.sed through without looking at any of them and out to the balcony, closing the French window behind her. She could hide there beyond the window where the wall was blank.

She leaned back, flattening herself against the wall....

Something would have to be done. They couldn't go on like this.... Her mind went to and fro, quickly, with short jerky movements, distressed; it had to do so much thinking in so short a time.

She would always have to reckon with John's fear. And John's fear was not what she had thought it, a sad, helpless, fatal thing, sad because it knew itself doom-like and helpless. It was cruel, with a sort of mental violence in it, worse than the cruel animal fear of the men in the plantation. She could see that his cowardice had something to do with his cruelty and that his cruelty was somehow linked up with his cowardice; but she couldn't for the life of her imagine the secret of the bond. She only felt that it would be something secret and horrible; something that she would rather not know about.

And she knew that since yesterday he had left off caring for her. His love had died a sudden, cruel and violent death. His cowardice had done that too.... And he had left off caring for the wounded. It was almost as if he hated them, because they lay so still, keeping him back, keeping him out under the fire.

Queer, but all those other cowardly things that he had done had seemed to her unreal even when she had seen him doing them; and afterwards when she thought about them they were unreal, as if they hadn't happened, as if she had just imagined them. Incredible, and yet the sort of thing you _could_ imagine if you tried. But that last devilish thing he did, it had a hard, absolute reality. Just because it was inconceivable, because you couldn't have imagined it, you couldn't doubt that it had happened.