The Romantic Part 8

"You can't, if you feel like that about it."

"You say you feel like that about it yourself."

"That's because I've been through it."

"Do you suppose," he said, "I haven't?"

BOOK TWO

JOHN RODEN CONWAY

VI

It was an hour since they had left Newhaven.

The boat went steadily, inflexibly, without agitation, cutting the small, crisp waves with a sound like the flowing of stiff silk. For a moment, after the excited rus.h.i.+ng and hooting of the ambulance car, there had been something not quite real about this motion, till suddenly you caught the rhythm, the immense throb and tremor of the engines.

Then she knew.

She was going out, with John and Gwinnie Denning and a man called Sutton, Dr. Sutton, to Belgium, to the War. She wondered whether any of them really knew what it would be like when they got there.--She was vague, herself. She thought of the war mostly in two pictures: one very distant, hanging in the air to her right, colourless as an ill.u.s.tration in the papers, grey figures tumbled in a grey field, white puff-bursts of shrapnel in a grey sky: and one very near; long lines of stretchers, wounded men and dead men on stretchers, pa.s.sing and pa.s.sing before her.

She saw herself and John carrying a stretcher, John at the head and her at the foot and Gwinnie and Dr. Sutton with another stretcher.

Nothing for her and John and Gwinnie but field work; the farm had spoiled them incurably for life indoors. But it had hardened their muscles and their nerves, it had fitted them for the things they would have to do.

The things they would have to see. There would be blood; she knew there would be blood; but she didn't see it; she saw white, very white bandages, and greyish white, sallow-white faces that had no features that she knew. She hadn't really thought so very much about the war; there had been too many other things to think about. Their seven weeks' training at Coventry, the long days in Roden and Conway's motor works, the long evenings in the ambulance cla.s.ses; field practice in the meadow that John's father had lent to the Red Cross; runs along the Warwicks.h.i.+re roads with John sitting beside her, teaching her to steer and handle the heavy ambulance car. An endless preparation.

And under it all, like a pa.s.sion, like a hidden illness, their impatience, their intolerable longing to be out there.

If there had been nothing else to think about there was John. Always John. Not that you could think about him without thinking about the war; he was so thoroughly mixed up with it; you couldn't conceive him as left out of it or as leaving himself out. It had been an obsession with him, to get into it, to get into it at once, without waiting. That was why there was only four of them. He wouldn't wait for more volunteers. They could get all the volunteers they wanted afterwards; and all the cars, his father would send out any number. She suspected John of not really wanting the volunteers, of not even wanting Gwinnie and Dr. Sutton. She could see he would have liked to have gone with her alone. Queer, that so long as she had thought he would be going without her, she had been afraid; she had felt certain he would be killed or die of wounds. The one unbearable thing was that John should die. But after it had been settled that she was to go with him as his chauffeur she hadn't been afraid any more. It was as if she knew that she would keep him safe. Or perhaps all the time she had been afraid of something else. Of separation. She had had visions of John without her in another country; they were coloured, vaguely, with the horror of her dreams. It had been just that. Anyhow, she hadn't thought any more about John's dying.

It was the old man, his father, who had made her think of it now.

She could see him, the grey, kind, silent man, at the last minute, standing on the quay and looking at John with a queer, tight look as though he were sorry about something--oh, but unbearably sorry about something he'd thought or said or done. He was keeping it all in, it was a thing he couldn't speak about, but you could see it made him think John wasn't coming back again.

He had got it into his head that she was going out because of John.

She remembered, before that, his kind, funny look at her when he said to John, "Mind you take care of her," and John's "No fear," and her own "That's not what he's going out for." She had a slight pang when she thought of John's father. He had been good to Gwinnie and to her at Coventry.

But as for going out because of John, whether he went or not she would have had to go, so keen that she hated those seven weeks at Coventry, although John had been there.

With every thud of the engines her impatience was appeased.

And all the time she could hear Gwinnie's light, cool voice explaining to Dr. Sutton that the British Red Cross wouldn't look at them and their field ambulance, but the Belgians, poor things, you know, weren't in a position to refuse. They would have taken almost anything.

Her mind turned to them: to Gwinnie, dressed in their uniform, khaki tunic and breeches and puttees, her fawn-coloured overcoat belted close round her to hide her knees. Gwinnie looked stolid and good, with her face, the face of an innocent, intelligent routing animal, stuck out between the close wings of her motor cap and the turned-up collar of her coat. She would go through it all right. Gwinnie was a little plodder.

She would plod through the war as she had plodded through her training, without any fear of tests.

And Dr. Sutton. From time to time she caught him looking at her across the deck. When Gwinnie's talk dropped he made no effort to revive it, but stood brooding; a square, thick-set man. His head leaned forward a little from his heavy shoulders in a perpetual short-sighted endeavour to look closer; you could see his eyes, large and clear under the watery wash of his gla.s.ses. His features, slightly flattened, were laid quietly back on his composed, candid face; the dab of docked moustache rising up in it like a strange note of wonder, of surprise.

There, he was looking at her again. But whether he looked or listened, or stood brooding, his face kept still all the time, still and sad. His mouth hardly moved as he spoke to Gwinnie.

She turned from him to the contemplation of their fellow pa.s.sengers. The two Belgian boy scouts in capes and tilted caps with ta.s.sels bobbing over their foreheads; they tramped the decks, seizing attention by their gay, excited gestures. You could see that they were happy.

The group, close by her in the stern, establis.h.i.+ng itself there apart, with an air of righteous possession: five, six, seven men, three young, four middle-aged, rather shy and awkward, on its fringe. In its centre two women in slender tailor-made suits and motor veils, looking like bored uninterested travellers used to the adventure.

They were talking to a little man in shabby tweeds and an olive-green velvet hat too small for his head. His smooth, innocent pink face carried its moustache like an accident, a mistake. Once, when he turned, she met the arched stare of small china-blue eyes; it pa.s.sed over her without seeing, cold, dreamy, indifferent.

She glanced again at his women. The tall one drew you every time by her raking eyes, her handsome, arrogant face, the gesture of her small head, alert and at the same time set, the predatory poise of an enormous bird.

But the other one was--rather charming. Her features had a curious, sweet bluntness; her eyes were decorations, deep-set blue in the flushed gold of her sunburn. The little man straddled as he talked to them, bobbing forward now and then, with a queer jerking movement from his hips.

She wondered what they were and decided that they were part of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, bound for Ostend.

All those people had the look that John had, of having found what they had wanted, of being satisfied, appeased. Even Sutton had it, lying on the top of his sadness, like a light. They felt precisely as she was feeling--all those people.

And through her wonder she remained aware of John Conway as he walked the deck, pa.s.sing and pa.s.sing in front of her.

She got up and walked with him.

The two women stared at them as they pa.s.sed. One, the tall one, whispered something to the other.

"John--do my knees show awfully as I walk?"

"No. Of course they don't. Gwinnie's do. She doesn't know what to do with them."

He looked down at her and smiled.

"I like you. I like you in that cap. You look as if you were sailing fast against a head wind, as if you could cut through anything."

Their turn brought them again under the women's eyes. He took her arm and drew her aside to the rail of the boat's stern. They stood there, watching the wake boiling and breaking and thinning, a white lace of froth on the gla.s.sy green. Sutton pa.s.sed them.

"What's the matter with him?" she said.

"The War. He's got it on his mind. It's no use taking it like that, Jeanne, as one consummate tragedy ... How are _you_ feeling about it?"

"I don't think I'm feeling anything--except wanting to get there. And wanting--wanting frightfully--to help."

"Unless you can go into it as if it was some tremendous, happy adventure--That's the only way to take it. I shouldn't be any good if I didn't feel it was the most _romantic_ thing that ever happened to me.... To have let everything go, to know that nothing matters, that it doesn't matter if you're killed, or mutilated ... Of course I want to help, but that would be nothing without the gamble. The danger."

He stopped suddenly in his turning and held her with his s.h.i.+ning, excited eyes.

"War's the most romantic thing that ever happened ... False romance, my father calls it. Jolly little romance about _him_. He'll simply make pots of money out of the war, selling motors to the Government."

"It's rather--romantic of him to give us those two ambulances, and pay for us."