Patrol

by MacDonald, Philip;

  Hale flung himself forward. He sat and took the Jew’s head on his knee. He poured water on the grey face, with its closed eyes. He flicked at the now flaccid cheeks… He worked hard and well. He had seconded men before this.

  His efforts were unrewarded by even so much as a flicker of the closed eyelids. He massaged the muscles of the stomach and succeeded in making the breathing more regular. But it remained stertorous. The Sergeant had his eyes fixed on his watch. Over half of the minute now had passed. Hale tried his last card: he jerked more water over the unheeding head, then lifted it and bent his own to meet it.

  He took the lobe of Abelson’s right ear between his teeth and bit hard… an old trick of the good second… but the pain passed Abelson by… His body still was utterly limp… in it there was no movement nor shadow of movement.

  “Time!” The Sergeant closed his watch with a snap. He walked across and stood by Hale, looking down at the Jew. “He is out!” he said. Hale nodded… Together they carried the limp body back and into the shade of the trees. “Good job it’s over,” said the Sergeant. “Another five minutes and I’d ’ve had to stop it… The sun ’d’ve been right up and coming slick down on ’em.”

  In the clearing, Cook, a full bucket at his feet, was bathing the sweat from his body and the blood and dust from his face. Morelli, ecstatic, hovered round him, glancing up every now and then at the sun, just appearing over the top of the fringe of palms. He said anxiously:

  “Come on, Cookie. You’ll get a Doolally in a minute. Put y’r shirt an’ spine-pad an’ cadie on, f’r Chrisake! Or come in the shade… Feelin’ O.K.?”

  Cook brushed the water with both hands from his hair. “Ar!” he said.

  XII

  The Sergeant walked among the palms. “Sanders!” he called; and again: “Sanders!” He walked on, more quickly now. His eyes roved from side to side.

  He came to a sudden halt. He peered, blinked, and looked again. Relief smoothed the sharper lines momentarily from his face. There was Sanders; he knelt beside the trunk of a palm. A low gabble came to the Sergeant’s ears. Closer, he could hear the words, spoken in a voice low and controlled, but yet strangely giving the impression of a shout. He halted, walked on, halted again… He was so close now that another step would have taken him on top of the praying man. The sharp lines came back into his face. He tilted his topee forward over his eyes and rubbed meditatively at the back of his head.

  “… O Lord of Mercy!” said the voice of Sanders. “Hear this thy abased and humble Servant! … I supplicate Thee, O Lord! Grant that a single gem from the Crown of Thy Grace may fall upon this spot and cast its Light into the Souls of these Men gathered here upon it… may soften and cleanse and beautify Them… may plant in Their Evil hearts the Seed of that Divine plant which shall lead them to Thee, even in this hour when Death is hard upon Them…”

  The Sergeant turned. He walked slowly away, still rubbing, meditative, with his palm at the back of his head. The voice grew faint in his ears… fainter… died away.

  He came out into the clearing. In the shade beyond its farther edge sat Cook and Morelli and Hale. Ten yards to their right, alone, sat Abelson. He had been recovered now, after that ten minutes of unconsciousness, for half an hour. He sat huddled, his knees drawn up and round them his arms. He gazed with blank dark eyes from a face of misery.

  The Sergeant walked across the clearing and past him and on to where sat the three. He said:

  “Morelli, there’s no one with Corporal Bell. I’ve just left him. Cut along and into the hut for a bit. You all right, Cook?”

  “Ar,” said Cook, and nodded.

  “Hale,” said the Sergeant, “rummage up a bit of paper. Cut it into six strips, five short, one long.”

  Hale got to his feet. “This the dror?” he asked. “Wot O!” He walked off across the clearing and bent over the haversack of the dead Pearson.

  The Sergeant went to Abelson and stood looking down at him. “You all right?” he said.

  The Jew growled something in his throat. He looked down, so that the brim of his topee hid his face.

  “Sure?” asked the Sergeant.

  Abelson’s helmet still hid the face beneath it. “’Course I’m all right!” he said. His voice was an octave higher than its usual pitch: it trembled and was choked like that of a child trying under stress to be grown-up.

  “Think I’ve never been hit before?” he said. “Goddle-mighty! that’s my job… that an’ hittin’ the other feller. Take a sight more than two raps from that slab-sided — to reely hurt me…” He jerked his head in Cook’s direction. “— him!” he said, and choked. “— his bloody soul, the Gentile’s bahstud!”… He abandoned pretence and openly laid his head upon the arms that now he had crossed upon his drawn-up knees.

  The Sergeant looked down at him. He said, after a pause:

  “Pull yourself together, Abelson. This won’t do! Forget it!”

  “Forget it!” The Jew’s voice cracked on its high note. “Forget it!” He raised his head, tilting it to look up into the Sergeant’s face. His eyes, wide and dark, glittered bright with unshed tears. “I’ll never fight again!” he said. “’F I get back, I’ll be a… a waiter or a fishmonger’s office boy… or a pimp… Thassall I’m fit for… Getting put out by a soor’s choot that never did anythin’ ’cept rough-house cabin-boys…”

  “Should’ve thought,” said the Sergeant, “you’d take a hiding better than this. What about the time Kid Walker put you out at Premierland? Seventh round.”

  “Well, what about it?” Abelson’s tone was fierce, the voice lower now but throaty as he swallowed at that lump which seemed to choke him. “Did I mind that? Did I Hell! That was a scrap… An’ Hookey Walker’s the best ever … or was then; he wasn’t boozing in them days… Honour to be put out by Hookey… An’ you gotter remember he was twenty-five then an’ I was sixteen… Yessir, s-i-x-teen, that was me… But, anyway, that was a scrap, an’ I was beat ’cos he was better’n me… See? … It was a fight; not a bleedin’ ketch-as-ketch-can huggin’-party with a lot o’ all-me-eye rules made up on the spot… Get me? … Oh, I know… Yeh says yeh wanted to make it fair!” … He scrambled suddenly to his feet and stood facing the Sergeant. The dark eyes blazed brighter, the face was distorted, the lips drawn back rigid from the white teeth in an effort to keep them from trembling.

  “Fair!” he said. “An’ I got beat by a bloody great oaf like that! … I’ll never fight again… It’s not… it’s not…” He turned sharply on his heel and walked away.

  “Abelson!” called the Sergeant. “Over to the hut, right away.” His voice was now the impersonal trumpet of authority.

  “Cook!” he called. “Hale! Over to the hut.” He turned and led the way. They struggled after him, rifles in the crooks of their arms.

  The sun now bore down full into the clearing. Its heat smote them like a physical blow. Hale gasped a little. “Like bein’ a sossidge in ’ell!” he said. “On’y wants a fork through y’r guts an’ there y’are!”

  “Ar!” said Cook. He puffed out his lips and worked his face in strange grimaces. The salt sweat which broke out on a man’s every movement was stinging the cuts and bruises left by the fists of Abelson.

  They came to the trees again and the sun did not strike them unprotected. Hale dug his elbow into the ribs of Cook beside him.

  “Dekko!” He pointed ahead to where Abelson, alone, was nearing the hut. He walked strangely, with a curiously stiff back and rigid inclination of the head. Hale gave his cackle. “Neck’s like a poker! ’Twasn’t arf a snorter you give ’im, Matlow.” He laughed again. “Pore old Isaacstein: walkin’ like a ruddy nymp’ wiv ’Ousemaid’s Shoulder.”

  They came to the hut and stood about its doorway, leaning on their rifles. Above them, on the roof, stood MacKay.

  “Matlow,” he said, “yon waur a rare wallopin’ ye gied the Levite. Ah couldna keep lookin’, y’understan’, but Ah neglekit ma duty every ither once an’ a while… Ah seen t
hose bonny, bonny slaps…”

  The Sergeant came out of the hut’s dark mouth. “That’ll do, MacKay!” he said. “Hale, got those slips?”

  The Cockney put his hand to his breeches pocket and brought forth six neatly-torn pieces of pink notepaper. “Pearson’s,” he explained. “’E ’ad a ruddy stationer’s stock o’ coggage in ’is ’aversack… Always writin’ to ’is Mar, ’e was, pore little squit…”

  The Sergeant took the paper. “Get round,” he said. “Come on, Abelson… Now: you can all see these? … I’m goin’ to fold ’em, so!” He doubled up each strip into a compact little wad, differing not at all from its fellows. He dropped them one by one into Bell’s green-lined topee, which hung by its chin-strap over his arm. “We’ll draw now… You know what it’s for… The man that gets the long strip chooses his own half-section… I’ll shake ’em up, so… Anyone any objections ’bout the way this is being done? … No… Right. Hale, you hold the topee … We’ll draw alphabetically, me last…” He lifted his voice: “MacKay, let Cook draw for you, in your turn?”

  “Ay!” came down from the roof.

  “Right.” He turned his head, to see Morelli emerging from the door behind him. “There you are… Hear that? Agree?”

  Morelli nodded. Hale took the helmet between his hands; cautiously, as a man might hold a bowl of treasured glass. They looked, all of them, at this helmet. There was an utter silence…

  “Abelson!” The Sergeant’s voice cut into the stillness.

  The Jew came forward. He walked slowly, his head held still at that stiff and awkward angle. He stood a moment, looking up from the ground on which his eyes had been fixed. He seemed about to speak; but did not. He put his hand down into that helmet and brought from it one of the little pink wads.

  “Keep it like that,” said the Sergeant. “Cook!” Cook dipped. “Now yourself, Hale. That’s right… Now Cook for MacKay’s, and keep those two distinct… Morelli …” He came close himself now and took between his fingers the last little lump of paper. “Right away,” he said. “Unroll ’em.”

  There was silence again, broken by a little, concerted rustling which rattled on their ears loud as machine-gun fire…

  “Ar!” came the voice of Cook. He held up the long strip.

  “Your own?” said the Sergeant.

  Cook nodded solemnly.

  “Up to you now, Cook.” The Sergant came forward to face him. “Choose your sidekicker.”

  “Who wud it be but ma’sel’?” MacKay’s voice came down, urgent, to their ears.

  “Ar!” Cook look up, a great grin split suddenly his square, battered face; as suddenly went.

  “Ah told ye!” came the voice from above them again. “Ah told ye, Sergeant. What use was there in yon pheenanderin’? Ah said Ah’d be goin’, an’ there ut is!”

  The Sergeant looked up at him. “You’d better come down off your perch then.” He turned to the men about him and stood a moment scanning their faces. They were blank, these faces. Unreadable. “Hale,” he said.

  “Sawgint?”

  “Relieve MacKay. And keep those eyes of yours peeled… Yell if there’s anything. Morelli’ll take over in an hour. We’ll have reliefs on this job… Through the day… Nights ’ll be as before. Won’t do to be up there at night: wouldn’t see as much as on the level. Not with those shadows.”

  There was a scrambling rush, and MacKay stood with them, “Up wi’ ye, London,” he said, and made a back. Hale, like a thick, tall monkey, scrambled and clawed his way and presently stood upon the roof, glasses at his eyes.

  “An’ now,” said MacKay, “you an’ me, we’ll be needin’ to haver, Serrgeant.” He smiled and was jigging on his feet. He pushed back his topee and wiped with a damp forearm at the sweat glistening upon his lined face and running down his forehead from the roots of the silver hair. “It’s hotter’n Satan ’ud believe, up yon!” he said.

  XIII

  The sun rose high, higher. It blazed down, its molten stream pouring vertically upon the desert and upon this island in the desert’s barrenness… It waned, sliding slowly and cruelly down its slope, fighting every inch to retain its majesty… It dipped, blazed out awhile in strange and wild and poignant colours… It went.

  The moon bathed the world, pouring a quiet and silver balm over the tortured surface of the waste, which now began to throw upward, as a fevered man will heave at his blankets, the heat which for those endless-seeming hours had been bearing down upon and into it.

  The trees of the oasis again were black cardboard against a silver lime. The little spring, whose noise by day seemed strangely to be hushed, again made its plashing heard, sounding coolly in the ears of the men who stood about it.

  They were five: the Sergeant, Cook, MacKay, Hale, and Morelli. Pacing a beat extending over the western side of the oasis was Abelson; he carried his rifle at the slope; his eyes searched, dark and restless, the gleaming sand upon which nothing moved for so far as the eye could reach. In the hut, where the heat of all the days seemed prisoned, Sanders sat by the side of the wounded Corporal.

  There was a silence by the spring. The group stood, the men shifting uneasily upon their feet. The Sergeant fumbled at the watch upon his wrist. Cook, unmoved, settled more easily about him his strange equipment: a bandolier of ammunition, two low-hung and bulging haversacks, in them three days’ supply of meat and biscuit; one of the water-sacks that had used to go upon the pack-horse strapped (infantry-packwise and about a third part full) across his back. MacKay, beside him, changed and re-changed the slack of the slings on the two rifles which he was to carry: over his left shoulder, in addition to his bandolier, was the band of a haversack which held a thick, pressed-together mass of dates plucked that afternoon; over his right the bands of two laden water-bottles. In his right hip-pocket was the map, neatly folded.

  The silence continued. An uneasy, loud silence.

  MacKay broke it. He gave a last decisive hitch at the rifle slings; looked down and about himself at his equipment; patted his left breeches-pocket to ensure that the compass was there. He turned to Cook behind him. “Are ye ready, Matlow?” he said. His words shattered the silence as if a voice were something new and strange and rather terrible.

  “Ar!” said Cook.

  MacKay said, half-interrogatively: “We’ll be makin’ a start then, Serrgeant.”

  “Er… right!” The Sergeant was still, but his voice was that of a man who suddenly has shaken his shoulders to ease them of a strain which he knows will not be eased. He stepped forward and held out his hand. He said:

  “So long, Jock. Good luck.”

  The hands of the venturers were shaken by everyone. MacKay became voluble. He answered, with slow and rather heavy and very Scottish facetiousness the variations of the Sergeant’s “So long: good luck” that were pressed upon him. Cook was silent, merely nodding his great head, with its bruised face, and smiling.

  The Sergeant became again Authority. “Hale! Morelli! Join Abelson on the other side there. Tell him to stop patrollin’. Get right at the edge of the trees, the three of you; lie down ’bout ten yards apart, and watch. I’m stayin’ this side for a bit. Jildi now!”

  They went, trotting, their rifles horizontal in their right hands, their bandoliers swinging and jolting across their shoulders. They disappeared among the black-latticed shadows of the trees.

  The Sergeant, between MacKay and Cook, walked through the trees upon the eastern side and so to the top of the slope leading down on that side to the sand of the desert. He said:

  “Got everything? Map, compass, grub, ammunition, pawny? And that paper with the route we calculated?”

  MacKay nodded. “Matlow!” he said, “here we go! Guid nicht to ye, Serrgeant. We’ull be sendin’ along for ye shortly: four-five days. Maybe sinner.”

  The Sergeant smiled. He said; “We’ll look out for you.”

  He stood, rifle in hand, watching the two as they scrambled down the shadowed slope and so on to the silver, black-blotc
hed floor of the desert. They trudged stolidly on, their khaki helmets shining in the moonlight like pantomime armour. They had gone perhaps four hundred yards when the slighter figure, MacKay, turned in his walk and waved an arm. The Sergeant came down from out the trees and waved response. The figure turned to tramp ahead by the side of its companion.

  MacKay turned in his walk and waved an arm.

  The Sergeant climbed the slope again and stood leaning against the trunk of the outermost palm. His eyes roved to this side and that, covering the great flat, infinite half-circle before him; coming back, every half-minute or so, to the two toiling figures.

  They grew smaller, these figures. At first they remained sharp, clear-cut, black against the sheet of silver beneath their feet; merely, to the Sergeant’s eye, growing shorter and shorter. Then, with a very gradual transition, the sharpness went; for a time the figures, now tiny, retained their size, while the clean-cut edges thickened and blurred and misted…

  Then he could only see one speck… Right away, far in the distance, a black speck, occasionally seeming to split into two, which receded and receded.

  Then he could see nothing… nothing but the gleaming sand, with every here and there those dark, leprous blotches of unreasonable shadow.

  His eyes, weary of straining, began to play him false. A blurry mist came over them, and a film of fatigue. He rubbed at them; then turned away and walked back through the trees to the edge of the clearing. He cupped his hands about his mouth and called, on a low, deep note:

  “Mor-elli!”

  A low hail came back to his ears; and, after a moment, to his eyes Morelli’s square, short figure which ran towards him.

  The Sergeant held up a hand. “Asti, asti!” he said.

  Morelli came up panting. “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “Take it easy, man.” The Sergeant smiled. “I want you this side; that’s all. Nothing over there?”

  Morelli pulled a wry mouth. “Fanny Adams! ’cept sand… Wish for Chrisake somep’n would bob up… Better ’n this wait, wait, and wait… Get’s on a guy’s nerves.”