The Sergeant came. He put his rifle in the corner and threw down his helmet. He sat cross-legged, upon his blankets. He said:
“Just a minute, Sanders! You awake, Morelli?” They turned their faces towards him. “Want to tell you,” he said: “there’s one tin o’ beef left. And ten biscuits. We’ve got to start livin’ on dates. Quarter of the bully for each man to-night, and half a biscuit… and dates. To-morrow biscuit an’ dates… Day after, dates an’ biscuit… Then dates, boos. Thought I’d let you know.” He uncoiled his legs and lay down, propping himself upon an elbow. “Tobacco,” he said. “What about it? Been thinkin’. Rather rely on your own stock, or pool it all with me an’ I’ll ration it?”
“There’d be only three in that,” Morelli said. He jerked a thumb towards Sanders’ corner. “He don’t indulge… do yer, Padre? … You, I mean, Sanders!”
“Did you want me?” Sanders lifted pale glowing eyes in mild interrogation.
Morelli fell back upon his blankets. “Oh no!” he said. “But you do not, I think, indulge in the disreptable vice of the noxious weed Nickertina?”
“No,” said Sanders, “I do not smoke.” His tone was aloof and absent. His eyes, before these few words had left his mouth, were strayed back to the small, muddy print of his Bible.
“Gawd A’mighty!” Morelli said. “Thank you, Bishop! Nor you don’t drink, I s’pose. Nor never have a woman… Yore too bloody pure to be true, that’s what, your Holiness… Sit there, all the — time… Read, read, read… Pray, pray, pray… Read, pray, read! Pickin’ out the juicy bits, I’ll bet… an’ from what I can remember, which ain’t much, there’s more’n a few o’ them… Sarge! betcha ten rupees he gets all shivery ev’ry time he finds ‘harlot.’ Ur…”
The Sergeant sat up. “Chubbarow, Morelli,” he said. “Leave the man alone.” His voice was not tired now: it cut across the stagnant, fiery air like a whip-lash. “What’s come over you? Not like you. Shut up!”
A dark, slow flush deepened the tan of Morelli’s square, blunt face. “Sorry!” he mumbled. “Sorry, Sergeant… Bit jumpy like, I am… You was talkin’ about baccy. I got four blood-spitters an’ ’bout a half-ounce o’ twist… The Yid’s got ’bout thirteen-fourteen fags.”
“We’re about square, then.” The Sergeant lay down again, hands locked behind his neck. “No good rationing… I’m goin’ to sleep.”
While Sanders read his Bible and Morelli lay panting and scowling up at the roof above them, he slept, for half an hour. He woke upon the tick of that half-hour. He left the hut and called down Abelson and took his place upon the roof. Nothing, said the Jew, had happened or moved or smelt; there was… just — sand.
Abelson entered the hut. He flung down his topee with a crash. He tore off his shirt. He collapsed upon his blankets and was silent for perhaps ten minutes, while Morelli scowled up at the roof and Sanders read his Bible.
He sat up suddenly, after those few minutes. His dark and sullen face was bright with the sweat upon it. His full red mouth was twisted into its snarling grin. Every now and then his hand crept up to the side of his neck and massaged it with tender fingers. He said:
“Nice cheery lot o’ bahstuds!”
Morelli lay, still scowling up. Sanders, his lips moving in their ceaseless, soundless mumble, read on. Abelson surveyed them.
“I don’t think!” he said. Then: “Wake up! Wake up! you dung-headed soors! God stiffen me, you’ll drive me up the — pole. Lyin’ about there!”
Morelli said, his eyes still frowning at the roof, “Put a bag in it! Make more row’n a Band of Hope outin’.”
“—!” said Abelson. He got to his feet and crossed to where Sanders lay, and knelt beside him. “What you readin’, Soapy?” he said. He put out a hand and twitched the book away.
“Leave ’im alone!” Morelli said.
The Jew laughed. “Not goin’ to hurt the silly bleeder! What’s this? Holy Bible. Holy —! … Aah! Would you, then! Naughty naughty!” He thrust out an arm and pinned the writhing Sanders to his blankets. “Stay still, teddimachoot!” he said, and laughed.
Sanders under that heavy arm, grew suddenly still as death. But his body was rigid, every muscle in it tense.
“Leave the guy alone!” Morelli said from his blankets. But he spoke wearily, like an old man to children, automatically sounding reproof with no hope of having obedience paid to his orders and neither the intention nor the means of enforcing them.
“Oh, chubbarow!” Abelson’s tone was contemptuous. He suddenly swung a leg across Sanders’ body and sat, heavily, upon the thin and narrow back. He took the Bible in both hands and opened it at random. With every movement the sweat broke out upon his white torso, so that it glistened, gleaming, in the dull, quiet light of the hut. He began to read, in a high, nasal, giggling whine:
“‘Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jez-jezeebel, which calleth herself a prophetess to teach and seduce my servants to commit fornication and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. And I gave her space to repent of her fornication, and she repented not. Behold I will cast her into a bed…’”
Morelli sat up; rose to his knees; stood. He suddenly shouted: “Close that stinkin’ mouth o’ yours, you sod of a bleedin’ Kosher!”
In a bound Abelson too was on his feet. Then, behind him, Sanders.
The Jew stood facing Morelli. He whispered with a hissing sound that seemed louder than a cry: “What did yeh say! … Just say it again… I wanta make sure…”
On the heels of his words came words from Sanders behind him; a high-pitched cry, hysteric:
“You should have read on! What does it say! ‘I will give unto every one of you according to your works.’”
They ignored him. For them, at that moment, Sanders did not exist. Morelli, his naked chest shaken with those stuttering gasps which tell of nerves stretched to breaking-point, came nearer. He shouted, across the high wild tones of Sanders:
“I said: ‘Chubbarow, you udder-faced — of a bloody Kosher!’ D’yer hear now? You stinkin’ Jew!” He came closer still, so that now he stood within a foot of Abelson and was forced to look up into the dark, scowling face above him.
“Right!” said Abelson. He took a step back. His hands dropped to his belt and drew it tighter about him. “Right, Mr. Houdini-or-whatever-yer-Dago-name-may-be! I’ll shove them words back down y’r bleeding throat along with all them pretty teeth. Yeh…”
Sanders’ voice again. “‘… unto every one of you according to your works…’”
Then silence. Abelson stepped back farther. His hands became fists, his arms inexorable pistons, the oil upon them glistening as gently they slithered in and out. His scowl gave way to the fighting snarl, half contemptuous leer.
Morelli stood thick and short and square. Strong but hopeless. His hands, too, became fists, but awkward lumps, with the arms above them just arms. He shook with rage. He shouted:
“Come on, then!”
Abelson’s feet became light and dancing feet. He moved nearer…
There was a rushing, sliding rumble above their heads and the sound of a fall. The Sergeant came in upon them like a savage gale. He caught Morelli by a shoulder, with fingers which cut into the flesh, and sent him reeling, to come with a thud against the wall and slide down in an unbalanced heap to the floor. He put the flat of his hands against the naked breast of Abelson and thrust him, all his weight behind the thrust, to fall headlong upon Sanders’ blankets. He caught Sanders by the neck-band of his sodden shirt and swung him round and sent him crashing down upon the sprawling body of the Jew.
He stood in the centre and glared round upon them. His helmet was pushed back from his forehead. His face, dark with tan and black with the anger upon it, seemed to jut out from beneath the helmet’s brim like a beast from the opening to its lair. He crouched a little, his shoulders thrust forward, his arms bent, the hands upon them open, with crooked fingers.
The Sergeant came in upon t
hem like a savage gale.
“You festering swine!” he said. “You blasted pack of Sunday School soldiers! Squabblin’ an’ blindin’ an’ prayin’ an’ trying to start y’r damn-fool little scraps! What the flaring hell d’you think you are? And, by God, what d’you take me for! Just because I let Cook give Abelson a tanning for everyone’s sake, d’you think I’m goin’ to put up with this sort o’ thing. By God! you’re meant to be soldiers. And I’ll make you soldiers, you bloody fools! … Morelli! get on your shirt an’ kit an’ get up on that roof. Quick! An’ stay there till you’re relieved. Sanders! give him a back up. An’ get out yourself among the trees and watch too! Move, will you! Drop that damn’ book! Abelson! get up! Get on y’r kit an’ go out, now, and start bangin’ down some dates. An go on until I tell you to stop.”
Abelson, his dark eyes smouldering, got slowly to his feet. Morelli, quietly docile, scrambled into his shirt. Sanders lay where Abelson’s rising had thrust him.
The Sergeant kept his position; tense, ready, it seemed, to spring. His eyes swung round to the sprawling Sanders.
“Quick, you!” he said. His gaze came back to Abelson, whose fists once again were working, whose lips, saliva white at their twisted corners were saying:
“Knock us about, would yeh? …”
The Sergeant’s body straightened. He laughed. A strange, fierce sound. He said:
“You’re not just a fool, my lad. You’re silly, that’s what … What you goin’ to do, d’you think? Hit me? … You fool kid! You an’ your twopenny-ha’penny scrapping! If we were out o’ this, I’d take you on… rough-house, mark you… I’d let you know what a men’s scrap is! I was rough-housin’ my way about the world, Abelson, before your mother ’d finished sucklin’ you… But that’s enough… Do as I’ve told you, now!” His hand flashed to his pocket and came away with the subaltern’s automatic, wicked and squat and blue, in his fingers. “I’m in charge here,” he said. His eyes met the eyes of the Jew, which dropped. “Jildi!” he said…
They went, with speed and in silence, to their allotted tasks. The Sergeant, alone, thrust the pistol into his pocket. He sat, cross-legged, upon Morelli’s blankets.
He threw down his helmet and wiped with sticky arm at his streaming forehead. He took out his case and from it a cigarette.
He sat, placidly smoking. As he smoked, a slow, quiet smile twisted his mouth. He began to blow rings, one through another. The smoke wreathed itself in a blue haze about his head.
XVI
Sanders came out of the hut into the moonlight which filtered through the palms. Behind him, inside, Morelli slept quiet and Abelson with much tossing and moaning and hard, raucous breathing.
Sanders, after a moment’s pause, turned and trudged off through the trees. The helmet, the bandolier, the rifle—all, in fact, of his military trappings, seemed upon him utterly incongruous.
He plunged in among the trees of the western side, and came presently upon a man who lay, rifle before him, gazing out over the desert. He looked down at the man. He said: “It’s time, Sergeant.”
The Sergeant looked at his watch, then rose to his feet, hooking his rifle by its sling to his shoulder. “Quite right,” he said. “That hour an’ a half soon goes… Keep your eyes peeled, now, Sanders. There’s been nothing yet. I’ll see Morelli relieves you at the proper time.” He turned to go, but was stopped by an urgent voice and a hand laid upon his arm.
“Sergeant!” said Sanders, in a voice hoarse and many tones lower than its habit. “Sergeant! Is it four days since MacKay left us? And Cook?”
The Sergeant nodded. “That’s what I make it… No; it’s three. Four to-morrow night. Why?”
“I was wondering…” Sanders began. The voice was now so low that the Sergeant was forced to bend his head to catch it. “I thought… I mean, if they have been… successful… If they have… got through, should not they be… be here soon, with us… bringing people to fetch us? Do you think so, Sergeant… Do you?” His hand upon the Sergeant’s arm had tightened its grip; the long fingers seemed to possess a strength quite disproportionate.
The Sergeant shook free his arm. He looked down at the man’s averted face, half irradiated by a splash of moonlight, half obscured by the black shadow of the helmet-brim. He said:
“Couldn’t say. No, I don’t think they could ’ve done more yet than join up with some of our folk… That means another day or so for any troops to get back along here.”
Sanders turned his head so that now his whole face seemed, in the light, to leap into being. “It was only…” he said, whispering, “only that I had a dream… Last night… I did not sleep well… less, I think, than an hour… But I dreamed that they had come back… That is all I knew before I waked; that they had returned…” Here his gaunt, strained face with its wild look and burning eyes was distorted by a sudden smile, so unexpected as to come with the shock of a blow. “So you see,” he said, “that all will be well.” There came from his long, lean throat a sound which passed for laughter.
The Sergeant said curtly:
“Dessay! Now get on with y’r job.” He turned on his heel and walked away among the trees. He halted once and stepped behind a tree and peered back in the direction from whence he had come. His eyes, straining, could just make out the form of Sanders, lying where he himself had lain, with head lifted the better so see out over the wastes of gleaming sand.
After that reassuring glance, he went on his way towards the hut. He bore in his mind the picture of that sudden, rather dreadful smile, and in his ears that lifeless laugh, more distressing in its travesty of coyness than in its hint of incipient insanity. He walked with head bent in thought. He knew, by the time he reached the hut, that this night must be the last on which, for even an hour, Sanders should be the guard. To-night would do; but not again… He entered the hut and found his blankets and cast himself quietly down upon them. He pondered over this small new difficulty… There would be only three of ’em for guards now… Sanders would idle about, praying, getting madder and madder… He’d have to be found jobs… But what jobs? … The little hitch swelled and swelled in his mind until it seemed a problem which filled the world and bore down upon him intolerably…
He sat up abruptly. He cursed himself in silence. “Shut up, you!” he thought… “You’re as bad as he is!”… He bullied himself, at last, into an orderly frame of mind and sank back upon the blankets again and closed his eyes.
Despite the choking gasps and snores of the restless Abelson which vilely assaulted the darkness, he felt himself, at last, drifting towards peace… his body and mind were wrapped in that soft, delicious cloak which is the first wave of sleep.
Then, with a brutal suddenness, this cloak was torn from him. There was a movement in the dark, a rustling. Then Morelli’s voice, saying, with that thick clarity common to the voices of men who speak while asleep:
“Ten little Nigger Boys!” Silence. Then: “That’s it! Ten! An’ then they was None!” Another silence. Then a low, thick chuckling.
Abelson waked. There was more rustling as he too sat up. “What the hell?” he said savagely. “Shert up, you!”
“And you!” The Sergeant’s voice went wearily through the darkness.
Morelli, still sleeping, mumbled inarticulately; fell silent; slumped back to lie again.
The hut grew quiet.
Out among the trees Sanders lay where the Sergeant had left him. But his eyes were not searching the desert. They were closed, tightly screwed-up like a child’s, behind the hands which covered his face. He was speaking, a broken breathless mumble. “… beseech Thee, O Lord, to deliver this, the humblest of Thy mighty host of servants, from the thing which weighs him down…
“O God! Help me! Christ! Lift from me this shrouding thing! Jesus, Thou didst not fear when they cried out from the body of the hall: ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!’ Thou didst not fear when they led Thee out from there and put the Cross upon Thy back; Thou didst not fear even when the moment of Thine
agony had come…
“O Lamb of God! O Saviour! O Lion of the Tribe of Judah! Pity me, for I am afraid! Hear me, hear me! I am afraid, afraid, afraid!”
The mumble rose to a muffled cry.
“… afraid! Is this my punishment? Jesu! I implore Thee… if I may not be granted peace from this hell of fear, send me Sleep. Dear God, send me Sleep! …”
The voice died away. The man lay, trembling, his hands yet pressed tightly to his face.
He whispered in his throat: “Hear me! Hear me! Jesus whom I adore!”
There came, it seemed to him, a sweet and gentle answer to his prayer. For a great aching peace stole through him, so that his taut and trembling body relaxed into ecstatic softness… No more were there reeling through his head those voiceless, nameless fears which had beset him: no more did the trees about him shelter vague, disastrous forms unseen and unheard but felt with every cringing nerve: no more was the silence filled with rustlings and whispers and scheming, guttural, loathsome voices which spoke in strange uncouth tongue of how pain and death should come to him… pain, pain, and pain before that death.
No more did pictures rise behind his eyelids of these others; of Pearson and Brown, of Hale, of the Corporal as he had lain dead, with the moonlight on his face, across the threshold of the hut, the blood from his opened wound spreading dark over the silvered earth. At last and after many days, fear had left him. He was pure and cool and free. He was light, light. And now would follow, when the next man had come to take his place, long, unhurried, swelling Sleep…
The hands fell limp away from his face. They lay before him, pale in the filtered moonlight. He gazed at them. His eyelids closed. His head fell forward upon those hands and the rifle-barrel beside them. He slept.
Patrol Page 11
