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 rushing 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 illustration 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, passing and passing 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 classes; field practice in the meadow that John's father had lent to the Red Cross; runs along the Warwickshire 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 passion, 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 glasses. 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 passengers. The two Belgian boy scouts in capes and tilted caps with tassels 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, establishing 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 passed 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 theCommission 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, passing and passing in front of her.
She got up and walked with him.
The two women stared at them as they passed. 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 glassy green. Sutton passed 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 areyoufeeling 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 mostromanticthing 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 shining, excited eyes.
"War's the most romantic thing that ever happened … False romance, my father calls it. Jolly little romance abouthim. 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."
"Isit? Think of the kudos he gets out of it, and the advertisement 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. Itisreality, the most real part of us. When it's dead we're dead."
"Yes."
But it was funny totalkabout 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 passed 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 bethemost 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, shivering, sick? Frightened. Well, of course it would be there too, simply because hewent; 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 passengers; 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 Marseillaise. On the deck their feet beat out the thud of the march.
Charlotte looked away.
"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 passage 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 glass doors led to a room flooded with a blond light from the south. Beyond the glass doors, their figures softened by the deep, doubled shimmer 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.
It lasted with no abatement while Madame, standing there in her gaunt Flemish graciousness, murmured names. "Mrs. Rankin—" Mrs. Rankin nodded insolently and turned away. "Miss Bartrum—" Miss Bartrum, the rather charming one, bowed, drawing the shadow of grave eyebrows over sweet eyes. "Dr. Donald McClane—" As he bowed the Commandant's stare arched up at them, then dropped, suddenly innocent, suddenly indifferent.
They looked around. Madame and her graciousness had gone. Nobody made a place for them at the two long tables set together in the middle of the room. The McClane Corps had spread itself over all the chairs and benches, in obstinate possession. They passed out through the open French windows on to the balcony.
It looked south over the railway towards the country where they thought the fighting must be. They could see the lines where the troop trains ran, going northwest and southeast, and the railway station and post office all in one long red-brick building that had a flat roof with a crenellated parapet. Grass grew on the roof. And beyond the black railway lines miles upon miles of flat open country, green fields, rows of poplars standing up in them very straight; little woods; here and there a low rise bristling and dark with trees. The fighting must be over there. Under the balcony the white street ran southeastward, and scouting cars and ammunition wagons and long lines of troops were all going that way.
While they talked they remained aware of the others. They could see McClane rubbing his hands; they heard his brief laugh that had no amusement in it, and his voice saying, "Anyhow, we've got in first."
When they came back into the room they found the tables drawn apart with a wide space between. The Belgian orderlies were removing plates and cups from one to the other, establishing under the Commandant's directions a separate mess. By tea-time two chauffeurs had added themselves to the McClane Corps.
Twelve to four. And they would have to live together nobody knew how long: as long as the war lasted.
* * * * *
That evening, in the bedroom that John shared with Sutton, they sat on two beds, discussing their prospects. Gwinnie was voluble.
"They've driven us out of our messroom with their beastliness. We shall have to sit in our bedrooms all the time."
"We'd better let the office know we're here," said Sutton, "in case we're sent for."
"Anyhow," said Charlotte, "I'mnot going to bed."
John smiled. A struggling, dejected smile.
"My dear child, I've told you they're not going to send us out first."
"I don't know—" said Gwinnie.
"Idoknow. We shall be lucky if we get a look in when McClane's cars break down."
"That's it. Have you seen their cars? I overhauled them this morning, in the yard. They're nothing but old lorries, converted. And one of 'em's got solid tyres."
"Well?"
"Well—You wait."
They waited. Even the McClane Corps had to wait.
* * * * *
"I don't care," said Charlotte, "how beastly they are to me, provided they leave John alone."
"What can they do?" he said. "They don't matter."
"There's such a lot of them," said Gwinnie. "It's when they're all together they're so poisonous."
"It's when they'reseparate," Charlotte said. "I think Mrs. Rankindoesthings. And there's McClane swearing he'll get us out of Belgium. But he won't!"
She didn't care. She had got used to it as she had got used to the messroom and its furnishings, the basket chairs and backless benches, the two long tables covered with white marbled American leather, the photographs of the King and Queen of the Belgians above the chimney piece. The atmosphere of hostility was thick and penetrating, something that you breathed in with the smells of ether and iodine and disinfectant, that hung about the grey, leeking corridors and floated in the blond light of the room. She could feel a secret threat in it, as if at any minute it might work up to some pitch still more malignant, some supreme disaster. There were moments when she wondered whether McClane had prejudiced the authorities against them. At first she had regarded the little man as negligible; it was the women who had fascinated her, as if they had or might come to have for her some profound importance and significance. She didn't like McClane. He straddled too much. But you couldn't go on ignoring him. His dreamy, innocent full face with its arching eyes was a mask, the mask of dangerous, inimical intentions; his profile was rough cut, brutal, energetic, you guessed the upper lip thin and hard under the hanging moustache; the lower one stuck out like a sucker. That was his real face. It showed an adhesive, exhausting will that squeezed and sucked till it had got what it wanted out of people. He could work things. So could Mrs. Rankin. She had dined with the Colonel.
Charlotte didn't care. Shelikedthat beastliness, that hostility of theirs. It was something you could put your back against; it braced her to defiance. It brought her closer to John, to John and Gwinnie, and shut them in together more securely. Sutton she was not quite so sure about. Through all their depression he seemed to stand apart somehow by himself in a profounder discontent. "There are only four of us," he said; "we can't call ourselves a corps." You could see the way his mind was working.
Then suddenly the atmosphere lifted at one point. Mrs. Rankin changed her attitude to John. You could see her beautiful hawk's eyes pursuing him about the room. When she found him in the corridors or on the stairs she stopped him and chattered; under her breath because of the hushed wards.
He told Charlotte about it.
"That Mrs. Rankin seems inclined to be a bit too friendly."
"I haven't noticed it."
"Not with you. With Sutton and—and me."
"Well—"
"Well, I can't answer for Sutton, but I don't like it. That isn't what we're out here for."
They were going into the messroom together towards dinner time. Mrs.Rankin and Alice Bartrum were there alone, seated at their tables, ready.Mrs. Rankin called out in her stressed, vibrating voice across the room:
"Mr.Conway, you people ought to come in with us."
"Why?"
"Becausethere are only four of you and we're twelve. Sixteen's the proper number for a unit. Alice, didn't I say, the minute I saw Mr. Conway with that car of his, didn't Isaywe ought to have him?"
"You did."
"Thanks. I'd rather take my orders from the Colonel."
"AndI'drather takeminefrom you than from McClane. Fancy coming out at the head of a Field Ambulance looking like that. Tell you what, Mr. Conway, if you'll join up with us I'll get the Colonel to make you our commandant."
Alice Bartrum opened her shadowed eyes. "Trixie—youcan't."
"Can't I? I can make the old boy do anything I like."
John stiffened. "You can't make me do anything you like, Mrs. Rankin.You'd much better stick to McClane."
"What do any of us know about McClane?"
"What do you know about me?"
You could see how he hated her.
"I know you mean business."
"Doesn't he?"
"Don't ask me what hemeans."
She shrugged her shoulders violently. "Come over here and sit by me. I want to talk to you. Seriously."
She had shifted her seat and made a place for him beside her on the bench. Her flushed, handsome face covered him with its smile. You could see she was used to being obeyed when she smiled like that; when she sent that light out of her eyes men did what she wanted. All her life the men she knew had obeyed her, all except McClane. She didn't know John.
He raised his head and looked at her with cool, concentrated dislike.
"I'd rather stay where I am if you don't mind. I want to talk toMiss Redhead."
"Oh—" Mrs. Rankin's flush went out like a blown flame. Her lips made one pale, tight thread above the set square of her chin. All her light was in her eyes. They stared before her at the glass door where McClane was entering.
He came swaggering and slipped into his place between her and Alice Bartrum with his air of not seeing Mrs. Rankin, of not seeing Charlotte and John, of not seeing anything he didn't want to see. Presently he bobbed round in his seat so as to see Sutton, and began talking to him excitedly.
At the end of it Charlotte and Sutton found themselves alone, smiling into each other's faces.
"Do you like him?" she said.
"I'm not sure. All the same that isn't a bad idea of Mrs. Rankin's."
It was Sutton who tried to work it the next morning, sounding McClane.
Charlotte was in the space between the glass doors, arranging their stores in their own cupboard. McClane's stores had overflowed into it on the lower shelves. She could hear the two men talking in the room, Sutton's low, persuasive voice; she couldn't hear what he was saying.
Suddenly McClane brought his fist down on the table.
"I'll take you. And I'll take your women. And I'll take your ambulances.I could do with two more ambulances. But I won't take Conway."
"You can't tell him that."
"Can't I!"
"What can you say?"
"I can say—"
She pushed open the glass door and went in. McClane was whispering furtively. She saw Sutton stop him with a look. They turned to her and Sutton spoke.
"Come in, Miss Redhead. This concerns you. Dr. McClane wants you and MissDenning and me to join his corps."
"And how about Mr. Conway?"
"Well—" McClane was trying to look innocent. "Mr. Conway's just the difficulty. There can't be two commandants in one corps and he says he won't take orders from me."
(Mrs. Rankin must have talked about it, then.)
"Is that what you told Dr. Sutton?"
"Yes."
His cold, innocent blue eyes supported him. He was lying; she knew he was lying; that was not what he had said when he had whispered.
"You don't suppose," she said, "I should leave Mr. Conway? And if I stick to him Gwinnie'll stick."
"And Dr. Sutton?"
"He can please himself."
"If Miss Redhead stays I shall stay."
"John will let you off like a shot, if you don't want to."
She turned to go and McClane called after her, "My offer remains open to you three."
Through the glass door she heard Sutton saying, "If you're right,McClane, I can't very well leave her with him, can I?"
Sutton was stupid. He didn't understand. Lying on her bed that nightCharlotte made it out.
"Gwinnie—you know why McClane won't have John?"
"I suppose because Mrs. Rankin's keen on him."
"McClane isn't keen on Mrs. Rankin…. Can't you see he's trying to hoof John out of Belgium, because he wants all the glory to himself? We wouldn't do that to one of them, even if we were mean enough not to want them in it."
"He wanted Sutton."
"Oh, Sutton—He wasn't afraid ofhim…. When you think of the war—and think of people being like that. Jealous. Hating each other—"
* * * * *
You mightn't like Mrs. Rankin, Mrs. Rankin and McClane; but you couldn't say they weren't splendid.
Five days had passed. On the third day the McClane Corps had been sent out. (Mrs. Rankin had not dined with the Colonel for nothing.)
It went again and again. By the fifth day they knew that it had distinguished itself at Alost and Termonde and Quatrecht. The names sounded in their brains like a song with an exciting, maddening refrain. October stretched before them, golden and blank, a volume of tense, vibrating time.
Nothing for it but to wait and wait. The summons might come any minute. Charlotte and Gwinnie had begun by sitting on their drivers' seats in the ambulances standing in the yard, ready to start the very instant it came. Their orders were to hold themselves in readiness. They held themselves in readiness and saw McClane's cars swing out from the rubbered sweep in front of the Hospital three and four times a day. They stood on their balcony and watched them rush along the road that led to the battlefields southeast of the city. The sight of the flat Flemish land and the sadness of lovely days oppressed them. She felt that it must be partly that. The incredible loveliness of the days. They sat brooding over the map of Belgium, marking down the names of the places, Alost, Termonde and Quatrecht, that McClane had gone to, that he would talk about on his return, when an awful interest would impel them to listen. He and Mrs. Rankin would come in about tea-time, swaggering and excited, telling everybody that they had been in the line of fire; and Alice Bartrum would move about the room, quiet and sweet, cutting bread and butter and pretending to be unconcerned in the narration. And in the evening, after dinner, the discussion went on and on in John's bedroom. He raged against his infernal luck. If they thought he was going to take it lying down—
"McClane can keep me out of my messroom, but he can't keep me out of my job. There's room in 'the line of fire' for both of us."
"How are you going to get into it?" said Sutton.
"Same way as McClane. If he can go to Head Quarters, so can I."
"I wouldn't," Sutton said. "It might give a bad impression. Our turn'll come before long."
Gwinnie laughed. "It won't—unless Charlotte dines with the Colonel."
"It certainlymayn't," said Charlotte. "They may commandeer our cars and give them to McClane."
"They can't," said Gwinnie. "We're volunteers."
"They can do anything they choose. Military necessity."
Gwinnie was thoughtful.
"John," she said, "can I have one of the cars to-morrow afternoon?"
"What for?"
"Never mind. Can I?"
"You can have both the damned things if you like; they're no good to me."
The next afternoon they looked on while Gwinnie, who wore a look of great wisdom and mystery, slipped her car out of the yard into a side street and headed for the town. She came back at tea-time, bright-eyed and faintly flushed.
"You'll find we shall be sent out to-morrow."
"Oh, shall we!" John said.
"Yes. I've worked it for you."
"You?"
"Me. They've seen my car."
"Who have?"
"The whole lot of them. General Staff. First of all I paraded it all round the blessed town. Then I turned into the Place d'Armes. I kept it standing two solid hours outside the Hotel de la Poste where the blooming brass hats all hang out. In five minutes it collected a small crowd. First it was only refugees and war correspondents. Then the Colonel came out and stuck his head in at the back. He got quite excited when he saw we could take five stretcher cases.
"I showed him our tyres and the electric light, and I ran the stretchers in and out for him. He'd never seen them with wheels before…. He said it was 'magnifique'… The old bird wanted to take me into the hotel and stand me tea."
"Didn't you let him?"
"No. I said I had to stay with my car. And I took jolly good care to let him know it hadn't been out yet."
"Whatever made you think of it?"
"I don't know. It just sort of came to me."
Next afternoon John had orders to go to Berlaere to fetch wounded.
At the turn of the road they heard the guns: a solemn Boom—Boom coming up out of hushed spaces; they saw white puffs of smoke rising in the blue sky. The French guns somewhere back of them. The German guns in front southwards beyond the river.
Charlotte looked at John; he was brilliantly happy. They smiled at each other as if they said "Nowit's beginning."
Outside the village of Berlaere they were held up by two sentries with rifles. (Thrilling, that.) Their Belgian guide leaned out and whispered the password; John showed their passports and they slipped through.
Where the road turned on their left into the street they saw a group of soldiers standing at the door of a house. Three of them, a Belgian lieutenant and two non-commissioned officers, advanced hurriedly and stopped the car. The lieutenant forbade them to go on.
"But," John said, "we've got orders to go on."
A shrug intimated that their orders were not the lieutenant's affair.They couldn't go on.
"But wemustgo on. We've got to fetch some wounded."
"There aren't any wounded," said the lieutenant.
Charlotte had an inspiration. "You tell us that tale every time," she said, "and there are always wounded."
The Belgian guide and the lieutenant exchanged glances.
"I've told you there aren't any," the lieutenant said. "You must go back."
"Here—You explain."
But instead of explaining the little Belgian backed up the lieutenant by a refusal on his own part to go on.
"He can please himself.We'regoing on."
"You don't imagine," Charlotte said, "by any chance that we'reafraid?"
The lieutenant smiled, a smile that lifted his ferocious, upturned moustache: first sign that he was yielding. He looked at the sergeant and the corporal, and they nodded.
John had his foot on the clutch. "We're due," he said, "at the dressing station by three o'clock."
She thought: He's magnificent. She could see that the lieutenant and the soldiers thought he was magnificent. Supposing she had gone out with some meek fool who would have gone back when they told him!
The lieutenant skipped aside before the advancing car. "You can go," he said, "to the dressing-station."
"They always do that as a matter of form—sort of warning us that it's our own risk. They won't be responsible."
She didn't answer. She was thinking that when they turned John's driving place would be towards the German guns.
"I wish you'd let me drive. You know I like driving."
"Not this time."
At the dressing-station, a deserted store, they found a Belgian Army Medical officer engaged with a tired and flushed and dirty soldier. He was bandaging his left hand which had made a trail of blood splashes from the street to the counter. The right hand hung straight down from a nick in the dropped wrist where a tendon had been severed. He told them that they had grasped the situation. Seven men waited there for transport.
The best thing—perhaps—He looked doubtfully at Charlotte—would be for them to take these men back at once. (The tired soldier murmured something: a protest or an entreaty.) Though they were not exactly urgent cases. They could wait.
Charlotte suspected a serious reservation. "You mean you have others more urgent?"
The soldier got in his word. "Much more." His lips and eyes moved excitedly in the flush and grime.
"Well yes," the doctor admitted that they had. Not in the village, but in a hamlet about a mile outside of it. An outpost. This man and three others had been holding it with two machine guns. He had had a finger shot away and his wrist cut open by a shell-burst; the other three were left there, badly wounded.
"All right, we'll go and fetch them."
"Monsieur, the place is being shelled. You have no orders."
"We've no orders not to."
The doctor spread out helpless palms, palms that disclaimed responsibility.
"If you go, you go at your own risk. I will not send you."
"That's all right."
"Oh well—But certainly Mademoiselle must be left behind."
"Mademoiselle is much too useful."
Frantic gestures of eyebrows and palms.
"You must not stay there more than three minutes.Three minutes."
He turned to the cut tendon with an air of integrity, his conscience appeased by laying down this time limit.
John released the clutch, and the soldier shouted out something, they couldn't make out what, that ended with "mitrailleuses."
As they ran down the street the solemn Boom—Boom came right and left; they were now straight between the two batteries.
"Are you all right, Sharlie?"
"Rather."
The little Belgian by her side muttered, protesting.
"We're not really in any danger. It's all going on over our heads."
"Do you suppose," she said, "they'll get our range?"
"Rather not. Why should they? They've got their range and they'll stick to it."
The firing on their right ceased.
"They're quiet enough now," she said.
The little Belgian informed her that if they were quiet so much the worse. They were finding their range.
She thought: We were safe enough before, but—
"Supposing," she said, "they alter their range?"
"They won't alter it just for the fun of killing us. They haven't spotted the batteries yet. It's the batteries they're trying for, not the street."
But the little Belgian went on protesting.
"What's the matter with him?"
"He's getting a bit jumpy," she said, "that's all."
"Tell him to buck up. Tell him it's all right."
She translated. The little Belgian shook his head, mournfully persistent."Monsieur," he said, "didn't know."
"Oh yes, he does know."
It was absurd of the little man to suppose you didn't know, when the noise of the French guns told them how near they were to the enemy's target.
She tried not to listen to him. His mutterings broke up the queer stillness that held her after she had heard the guns. It was only by keeping still that you felt, wave by wave, the rising thrill of the adventure. Only by keeping still she was aware of what was passing in John's mind. He knew. He knew. They were one in the almost palpable excitement that they shared; locked close, closer than their bodies could have joined them, in the strange and poignant ecstasy of danger.
There was the sound of an explosion somewhere in front of them beyond the houses.
"Did you hear that, Mademoiselle?"
"I did."
"Miles away," said John.
She knew it wasn't. She thought: He doesn't want me to know. He thinksI'll be frightened. I mustn't tell him.
But the Belgian had none of John's scruples. The shell was near, he said; very near. It had fallen in the place they were going to.
"But that's the place where the wounded men are."
He admitted that it was the place where the wounded men were.
They were out of the village now. Their road ran through flat open country, a causeway raised a little above the level of the fields. No cover anywhere from the fire if it came. The Belgian had begun again.
"What's that he's saying now?"
"He says we shall give away the position of the road."
"It's the one they told us to take. We've got to go on it. He's in a beastly funk. That's what's the matter with him."
The Belgian shrugged his shoulders as much as to say he had done his duty and things might now take their course, and they were mistaken if for one minute they supposed he was afraid. But they had not gone fifty yards before he begged to be put down. He said it was absolutely necessary that he should go back to the village and collect the wounded there and have them ready for the ambulance on its return.
They let him go. Charlotte looked round the corner of the hood and saw him running with brief, jerky strides.
"He's got a nerve," said John, "to be able to do it."
"What excuse do you think he'll make?"
"Oh, he'll say we sent him."
The straight dyke of the road went on and on. Seen from the sunk German lines the heavy ambulance car would look like a house on wheels running along a wall. She thought again of John on his exposed seat. If only he had let her drive—But that was absurd. Of course he wouldn't let her. If you were to keep on thinking of the things that might happen to John—Meanwhile nothing could take from them the delight of this dangerous run across the open. She had to remind herself that the adventure, the romance of it was not what mattered most; it was not the real thing, the thing they had gone out for.
When they came to the wounded, when they came to the wounded, then it would begin.
The hamlet began to show now; it sat on one side of the road, low and alone in the flat land, an open field in front of it, and at the bottom of the field the river and a line of willows, and behind the willows the Germans, hidden. White smoke curled among the branches. You could see it was an outpost, one of the points at which the Germans, if they broke through, would come into the village. They supposed that the house where the wounded men were would be the last of the short row.
Here on their right there were no houses, only the long, high flank of a barn. The parts that had been built out into the field were shelled away, but the outer wall by the roadside still held. It was all that stood between them and the German guns. They drew up the car under its shelter and got down.
They could see all the houses of the hamlet at once on their left; whitewashed walls; slender grey doors and shutters. The three that looked out on to the barn were untouched. A few yards ahead a small, empty wine-shop faced the open field; its doorstep and the path in front of its windows glittered with glass dust, with spikes and splinters, and heaped shale of glass that slid and cracked under your feet. Beyond it, a house with its door and all its windows and the front slope of its roof blown in. A broken shutter sagged from the wall. Then the shell of the last house; it pricked up one plastered gable, white and hard against the blue.
They found the men in the last house but one, the house with the broken shutter. They went, carrying their stretchers and the haversack of dressings, under the slanted lintel into the room. The air in there was hot and stifling and thickened with a grey powdery swarm. Their feet sank through a layer of pinkish, greyish dust.
The three wounded men lay stretched out on this floor, among brickbats and broken panes and slabs of dropped plaster. A thin grey powder had settled on them all. And by the side of each man the dust was stiffened into a red cake with a glairy pool in the middle of it, fed from the raw wound; and where two men lay together their pools had joined and overflowed in a thin red stream.
John put down his stretcher and stood still. His face was very white, and his upper lip showed in-drawn and dry, and tightened as though it were glued to his teeth.
"John, youaren'tgoing to faint or be sick or anything?"
"I'm all right."
He went forward, clenching his fists; moving in a curious drawn way, like a sleep walker.
They were kneeling in the dust now, looking for the wounds.
"We must do this chap with the arm first. He'll want a tourniquet."
He spoke in a husky whisper as if he were half asleep….
The wounded head stuck to the floor. They scraped round it, digging with their hands; it came up wearing a crust of powdered lime. A pad and a bandage. They couldn't do anything more for that … The third man, with the fractured shin-bone and the big flesh-wound in his thigh, must have splints and a dressing.
She wondered how John would set about his work. But his queer, hypnotised actions were effectual and clean.
Between them they had fixed the tourniquet.
Through all her preoccupation and the quick, dexterous movement of her hands she could feel her pity tightening her throat: pity that hurt like love, that was delicious and exquisite like love. Nothing mattered, nothing existed in her mind but the three wounded men. John didn't matter. John didn't exist. He was nothing but a pair of hands working quickly and dexterously with her own…. She looked up. John's mouth kept its hard, glued look; his eyes were feverish behind a glaze of water, and red-rimmed.
She thought: It's awful for him. He minds too much. It hurt her to see how he minded. After all, he did matter. Deep inside her he mattered more than the wounded men; he mattered more than anything on earth. Only there wasn't time, there wasn'ttimeto think of him.
She turned to the next man and caught sight of the two machine guns with their tilted muzzles standing in the corner of the room by the chimney. They must remember to bring away the guns.
John's hypnotic whisper came again. "You might get those splints,Charlotte."
As she crossed the road a shell fell in the open field beyond, and burst, throwing up a great splash and spray of brown earth. She stiffened herself in an abrupt gesture of defiance. Her mind retorted: "You've missed, that time. You needn't think I'm going to put myself out foryou." To show that she wasn't putting herself out (in case they should be looking) she strolled with dignity to her car, selected carefully the kind of splint she needed, and returned. She thought: Oh well—supposing theydohit. We must get those men out before another comes.
John looked up as she came to him. His face glistened with pinheads of sweat; he panted in the choking air.
"Where did that shell burst?"
"Miles away."
"Are you certain?"
"Rather."
She lied. Why not? John had been lying all the time. Lying was part of their defiance, a denial that the enemy's effort had succeeded. Nothing mattered but the fixing of the splints and the carrying of the men….
John was cranking up the engine when she turned back into the house.
"Isay, what are you doing?"
"Going for the guns."
There was, she noticed, a certain longish interval between shells. John and the wounded men would be safe from shrapnel under the shelter of the wall. She brought out the first gun and stowed it at the back of the car. Then she went in for the other. It stood on the seat between them with its muzzle pointing down the road. Charlotte put her arm round it to steady it.
On the way back to the dressing-station she sat silent, thinking of the three wounded men in there, behind, rocked and shaken by the jolting of the car on the uneven causeway. John was silent, too, absorbed by his steering.
But as they ran into Ghent the romance of it, the romance of it, came back to her. It wasn't over yet. They would have to go out again for the wounded they had had to leave behind at Berlaere.
"John—John—It's like nothing else on earth."
"I told you it would be."
Slowly realization came to her. They had brought in their wounded under the enemy's fire. And they had saved the guns.
* * * * *
"Do you mind," John said, "if Sutton goes instead of me He hasn't been out yet?"
"N-no. Not if I can go too."
"Do you want to?"
"Awfully."
She had drawn up the ambulance in the Square before the Hospital and sat in her driver's seat, waiting. Sutton came to her there. When he saw her he stood still.
"Yougoing?"
"Rather. Do you mind?"
Sutton didn't answer. All the way out to Berlaere he sat stolid and silent, not looking at anything they passed and taking no more notice of the firing than if he hadn't heard it. As the car swung into Berlaere she was aware of his voice, low under the noise of the engine.
"What did you say?"
"Conway told me it was you who saved the guns."
Suddenly she was humbled.
"It was the men who saved them. We just brought them away."
"Conway told me what you did," he said quietly.
Going out with Sutton was a quiet affair.
"You know," he said presently, "it was against the Hague Convention."
"Good heavens, so it was! I never thought of it."
"You must think of it. You gave the Germans the right to fire on all our ambulances…. You see, this isn't just a romantic adventure; it's a disagreeable, necessary, rather dangerous job."
"I didn't do it for swank. I knew the guns were wanted, and I couldn't bear to leave them."
"I know, it would have been splendid if you'd been a combatant. But," he said sadly, "this is a field ambulance, not an armoured car."
She was glad they had been sent out with the McClane Corps to Melle. She wanted McClane to see the stuff that John was made of. She knew what had been going on in the commandant's mind. He had been trying to persuade himself that John was no good, because, from the minute he had seen him with his ambulance on the wharf at Ostend, from the minute he had known his destination, he had been jealous of him and afraid. Why, he must have raced them all the way from Ostend, to get in first. Afraid and jealous, afraid of John's youth with its secret of triumph and of courage; jealous of John's face and body that men and women turned back to look at as they passed; even the soldiers going up to the battlefields, going up to wounds and death, turned to look at this creature of superb and brilliant life. Even on the boat he must have had a dreadful wonder whether John was bound for Ghent; he must have known from the beginning that wherever Conway placed himself he would stand out and make other men look small and insignificant. If he wasn't jealous and afraid of Sutton she supposed it was because John had had that rather diminishing effect on poor Billy.
If Billy Sutton distinguished himself that would open McClane's eyes a little wider, too.
She wondered why Billy kept on saying that McClane was a great psychologist. If it was true that would be very awful for McClane; he would see everything going on inside people, then, all the things he didn't want to see; he wouldn't miss anything, and he would know all the time what John was like. The little man was wilfully shutting his eyes because he was so mean that he couldn't bear to see John as he really was. Now he would have to see.
The thought of McClane's illumination consoled her for her own inferior place in the adventure. This time the chauffeurs would have to stay at the end of the village with their cars. The three were drawn up at the street side, close under the house walls, McClane's first. Then Sutton's, with Gwinnie. Then hers; behind it the short straight road where the firing would come down.
John stood in the roadway waiting for the others. He had his hand beside her hand, grasping the arm of the driver's seat.
"I wish you could take me with you," she said.
"Can't. The orders are, all chauffeurs to stand by the cars."
… His eyebrows knotted and twitched in sudden anxiety.
"You know, Sharlie, you'll be fired on."
"I know. I don't mind, John, I don't really. I shall be all right."
"Yes. You'll be all right." But by the way he kept on glancing up and down the road she could see he was uneasy. "If you could have stood in front of those cars.You'rein the most dangerous place here."
"Somebody's got to be in it."
He looked at her and smiled. "Jeanne," he said, "in her armour."
"Rot."
And they were silent.
"I say, John—my cardoescover Gwinnie's a bit, doesn't it?"
"Yes," he said abruptly.
"That'sall right. You must go now. They're coming for the stretchers."
His face quivered. He thrust out his hand quickly, and as she took it she thought: He thinks he isn't coming back. She was aware of Mrs. Rankin and two of the McClane men with stretchers, passing; she could see Mrs. Rankin looking at them as she came on, smiling over her shoulder, drawing the men's attention to their leave-taking.
She thought:Theydon't shake hands when they're going out. They don't think whether they're coming back or not…. They don't think at all. But then, none of them were lovers as she and John were lovers.
"John, you'd better go and carry Mrs. Rankin's stretcher for her."
He went.
She watched them as they walked together up the short straight road to the battlefield at the top. Sutton followed with Alice Bartrum; then the McClane men; they nodded to her and smiled. Then McClane, late, running, trying to overtake John and Mrs. Rankin, to get to the head of his unit. Perhaps he was afraid that John, in his khaki, would be mistaken for the commandant.
How childish he was with his fear and jealousy. Childish. She thought of his petulant refusal to let John come in with them. As if he could really keep him out. When it came to action theywereone corps; they couldn't very well be divided, since McClane had more men than stretchers and John had more stretchers than men. They would all be infinitely happier, working together like that, instead of standing stupidly apart, glaring and hating.
Yet she knew what McClane and Mrs. Rankin had been playing for. McClane, if he could, would have taken their fine Roden cars from them; he would have taken Sutton. She knew that Mrs. Rankin would have taken John from her, Charlotte Redhead, if she could.
And when she thought of the beautiful, arrogant woman, marching up to the battlefield with John, she wondered whether, after all, she didn't hate her…. No. No. It was horrible to hate a woman who at any minute might be killed. They said McClane didn't look after his women. He didn't care how they exposed themselves to the firing; he took them into unnecessary danger. He didn't care. He was utterly cold, utterly indifferent to everybody and everything except his work of getting in the wounded…. Well, perhaps, if he had been decent to John, she wouldn't have believed a word of it, and anyhow they hadn't come out there to be protected.
She had a vision of John and McClane carrying Mrs. Rankin between them on a stretcher. That was what would happen if you hated. Hate could kill.
Then John and she were safe. They were lovers. Lovers. Neither of them had ever said a word, but they owned the wonderful, immaterial fact in secret to each other; the thought of it moved in secret behind all their other thoughts. From the moment, just passed, when they held each other's hands she knew that John loved her, not in a dream, not in coldness, but with a queer unearthly ardour. He had her in his incredible, immaterial way, a way that none of them would understand.
From the Barrow Hill Farm time? Or from yesterday? She didn't know. Perhaps it had gone on all the time; but it would be only since yesterday that he really knew it.
A line of soldiers marched by, going up to the battlefield. They looked at her and smiled, a flashing of bright eyes and teeth all down the line. When they had passed the street was deserted.
… That rattle on the stones was the firing. It had come at last. She saw Gwinnie looking back round the corner of the hood to see what it was like. She called to her, "Don't stick your head out, you silly cuckoo. You'll be hit." She said to herself, If I think about it I shall feel quite jumpy. It was one thing to go tearing along between two booming batteries, in excitement, with an end in view, and quite another thing to sit tight and still on a motionless car, to be fired on. A bit trying to the nerves, she thought, if it went on long. She was glad that her car stood next to the line of fire, sheltering Gwinnie's, and she wondered how John was getting on up there.
The hands of the ambulance clock pointed to half-past three. They had been waiting forty minutes, then. She got down to see if any of the stretcher bearers were in sight.
* * * * *
They were coming back. Straggling, lurching forms. White bandages. The wounded who could walk came first. Then the stretchers.
Alice Bartrum stopped as she passed Charlotte. The red had gone from her sunburn, but her face was undisturbed.
"You've got to wait here," she said, "for Mr. Conway and Sutty. And Trixie and Mac. They mayn't be back for ages. They've gone miles up the field."
She waited.
The front cars had been loaded, had driven off and returned three times.It was six o'clock before John appeared with Mrs. Rankin.
She heard Mrs. Rankin calling sharply to her to get down and give a hand with the stretcher.
John and Mrs. Rankin were disputing.
"Can'tyou shove it in at the bottom?" he was saying.
"No.The first casesmustgo on top."
Her mouth snapped like a clamp. Her eyes were blazing. She was struggling with the head of the stretcher while John heaved at the foot. He staggered as he moved, and his face was sallow-white and drawn and glistening. When Charlotte took the shafts from him they were slippery with his sweat.
"Is he hurt?" she whispered.
"Very badly hurt," said Mrs. Rankin.
"John, I mean."
Mrs. Rankin snorted. "You'd better ask him."
John was slouching round to the front of the car, anxious to get out of the sight and sound of her. He went with an uneven dropping movement of one hip. Charlotte followed him.
"Get into your seat, Sharlie. We've got to wait for Billy and McClane."
He dragged himself awkwardly into the place beside her.
"John," she said, "are you hurt?"
"No. But I think I've strained something. That's why I couldn't lift that damned stretcher."
* * * * *
The windows stood wide open to the sweet, sharp air. She heard Mrs. Rankin and Sutton talking on the balcony. In that dreadful messroom you heard everything.
"What do you suppose it was then?" Mrs. Rankin said.
And Sutton, "Oh, I don't know. Something upset him."
"If he's going to be upsetlike thatevery time he'd better go home."
They were talking—she knew they were talking about John.
"Hallo, Charlotte, we haven't left you much tea."
"It doesn't matter."
Her hunger left her suddenly. She stared with disgust at the remains of the tea the McClane Corps had eaten.
Sutton went on. "He hasn't been sleeping properly. I've made him go to bed."
"If you can keep him in bed for the duration of the war—"
"Are you talking about John?"
"We are."
"I don't know what you're driving at; but I suppose he was sick on that beastly battlefield. It's all very well for you two; you're a trained nurse and Billy's a surgeon…. You aren't taken that way when you see blood."