The Romantic Part 9

"_Is_ it? Think of the kudos he gets out of it, and the advertis.e.m.e.nt for Roden and Conway, the stinking paragraphs he'll put in the papers about himself: 'His second son, Mr. John Roden Conway, is taking out two Roden field ambulance cars which he will drive himself--'Mr. John Roden Conway and his field ambulance car. A Roden, 30 horse power.' He makes me sick."

She saw again, with a renewal of her pang, the old man, the poor, kind man. Perhaps he wouldn't put the paragraphs in the papers.

"False romance. He lied. There's no such thing as false romance. Romance is a state of mind. A state of mind can't be false or true. It simply exists. It hasn't any relation to reality. It _is_ reality, the most real part of us. When it's dead we're dead."

"Yes."

But it was funny to _talk_ about it. About romance and danger. It made her hot and shy. She supposed that was because she couldn't take things in. Her fatheadedness. It was easy not to say things if you didn't feel them. The more John felt them the more he had to say them. Besides, he never said them to anybody but her. It was really saying them to himself, a quiet, secret thinking.

He stood close, close in front of her, tall and strong and handsome in his tunic, knee breeches and puttees. She could feel the vibration of his intense, ardent life, of his excitement. And suddenly, before his young manhood, she had it again, the old feeling, shooting up and running over her, swamping her brain. She wondered with a sort of terror whether he would see it in her face, whether if she spoke he would hear it thickening her throat. He would loathe her if he knew. She would loathe herself if she thought she was going into the war because of that, because of him. Women did. She remembered Gibson Herbert. Glasgow.... But this was different. The sea was in it, magic was in it and romance. And if she had to choose between John and her wounded it should not be John.

She had sworn that before they started. Standing there close beside him she swore again, secretly to herself, that it should not be John.

John glanced at Sutton as he pa.s.sed them.

"I'd give my soul to be a surgeon," he said. "That's what I wanted."

"You wanted to be a soldier."

"It would have been the next best thing.... Did you notice in the lists the number of Army Medical men killed and missing? Out of all proportion.

That means that they're as much exposed as the combatants. More, really....

"... Jeanne--do you realise that if we've any luck, any luck at all, we shall take the same risks?"

"It's all very well for us. If it was only being killed--But there's killing."

"Of course there's killing. If a man's willing to be killed he's jolly well earned his right to kill. It's the same for the other johnnie. If your life doesn't matter a hang, his doesn't either. He's got his feeling. He's got his romance. If he hasn't--"

"Yes--if he hasn't?"

"He's better dead."

"Oh no; he might simply go slogging on without feeling anything, from a sense of duty. That would be beautiful; it would be _the_ most beautiful thing."

"There you are, then. His duty's his romance. You can't get away from it."

"No."

But she thought: Supposing he went, loathing it, s.h.i.+vering, sick?

Frightened. Well, of course it would be there too, simply because he _went_; only you would feel it, not he.

Supposing he didn't go, supposing he stuck, and had to be pushed on, by bayonets, from behind? It didn't bear thinking of.

John hadn't thought of it. He wouldn't. He couldn't see that some people were like that.

"I don't envy," he said, "the chaps who come out to soft jobs in this war."

They had found the little man in tweeds asleep behind the engine house, his chin sunk on his chest, his hands folded on his stomach. He had taken off his green velvet hat, and a crest of greyish hair rose up from his bald forehead, light and fine.

The sun was setting now. The foam of the wake had the pink tinge of red wine spilt on a white cloth; a highway of gold and rose, edged with purple, went straight from it to the sun.

After the sunset, land, the sunk lines of the Flemish coast.

There was a stir among the pa.s.sengers; they plunged into the cabins and presently returned, carrying things. The groups sorted themselves, the Commission people standing apart with their air of arrogance and distinction. The little man in tweeds had waked up from his sleep behind the engine house, and strolled with a sort of dreamy swagger to his place at their head. Everybody moved over to the starboard side.

They stood there in silence watching the white walls and domes and towers of Ostend. Charlotte and Conway had moved close to each other. She looked up into his face, searching his thoughts there. Suddenly from somewhere in the bows a song spurted and dropped and spurted again and shot up in the stillness, slender and clear, like a rod oft white water. The Belgian boys were singing the Ma.r.s.eillaise. On the deck their feet beat out the thud of the march.

Charlotte looked away.

VII

"Nothing," Charlotte said, "is going to be worse than this."

It seemed to her that they had waited hours in the huge grey hall of the Hotel-Hospital, she and Sutton and Gwinnie, while John talked to the President of the Red Cross in his bureau. Everybody looked at them: the door-keeper, the lift orderly; the ward men and nurses hurrying past; wide stares and sharp glances falling on her and Gwinnie, slanting downward to their breeches and puttees, then darting upwards to their English faces.

Sutton moved, putting his broad body between them and the batteries of amused and interested eyes.

They stood close together at the foot of the staircase. Above them the gigantic Flora leaned forward, holding out her flowers to preoccupied people who wouldn't look at her; she smiled foolishly; too stupid to know that the Flandria was no longer an hotel but a military hospital.

John came out of the President's bureau. He looked disgusted and depressed.

"They can put us up," he said; "but I've got to break it to you that we're not the only Field Ambulance in Ghent."

Charlotte said, "Oh, well, we'd no business to suppose we were."

"We've got to share our quarters with the other one.... It calls itself the McClane Corps."

"Shall we have to sleep with it?" Sutton said.

"We shall have to have it in our messroom. I believe it's up there now."

"Well, that won't hurt us."

"What'll hurt us is this. It'll be sent out before we are. McClane was here hours ago. He's been to Head Quarters."

Sutton's gloom deepened. "How do you know?"

"President says so."

They went, following the matron, up the grey, tessellated stairs; at each landing the long, grey corridors were tunnels for the pa.s.sage of strange smells, ether and iodine and carbolic and the faint odour of drains, seeking their outlet at the well of the staircase.

On the third floor, at the turn of the corridor, a small vestibule between two gla.s.s doors led to a room flooded with a blond light from the south. Beyond the gla.s.s doors, their figures softened by the deep, doubled s.h.i.+mmer of the panes, they saw the little man in shabby tweeds, the two women, and the seven other men. This, Madame explained, was Dr.

Donald McClane's Field Ambulance Corps. You could see it had thought it was the only one. As they entered they met the swoop of two beautiful, indignant eyes, a slow turning and abrupt stiffening of shoulders; the movement of the group was palpable, a tremor of hostility and resentment.