by H. E. Bates
‘You are taking great risks for me,’ he said.
‘Some time we will talk of it,’ she said. ‘But not now.’
‘Sit down by the bed,’ he said.
‘I should sit by the window,’ she said. ‘I can see the road as far up as the bridge from there.’
‘Sit down. For a moment,’ he said.
She sat down and he turned his face in the bed to look at her. The slight movement made him aware of his arm. It was like a huge flaming weight hanging from his shoulder. Through the increase in his consciousness there crept up, now, the increase of pain.
And now also the impact of pain made him remember things.
‘The others!’ he said. ‘The two sergeants. Are they all right?’
‘They want to talk to you. Do you feel strong enough?’
‘Soon,’ he said.
‘It is possible they will go soon,’ she said.
They’ll have to wait for me, he thought. That means a day or two. At least a day or two. The thought of the doctor was comforting now. He had a spasm of very simple faith about the doctor. He had an idea that he was a very good doctor. He would know what to do. It would be all right.
He looked at the girl and smiled. He loved her suddenly because she was there and did what he asked. It was a lovingness without excitement. It did not seem to him to belong to the moment by the river, when he had kissed her first. It was created out of a new situation and was very gentle. There was no passion in him any longer.
‘Will you speak to the sergeants?’ she said.
‘If I must,’ he said. ‘Could I drink something first?’
She got up and came round to the other side of the bed. On the table were two glass jugs and a tumbler, covered over with a cloth. In the smaller of the jugs the liquid was a soft light green. She began to pour it out into the glass.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘The juice of grapes.’ She held up the glass. ‘We crushed the grapes for you.’
He could have cried as he heard it. All the complication and love and helplessness inside himself started up and struck with two points of pain behind his eyes. He tried to move and get up. He felt chained down to the bed. It was only when the girl set down the glass on the table and then put both arms round him and he pressed his good hand on the bed that he could get the leverage to pull himself half upright.
All the time he felt his arm dragging him down. When she gave him the tumbler he drank the grape-juice in slow regular sips. It was partly sweet and very cool. Once he did not drink but let his lips stay in the glass, so that the coolness bathed them, and finally, when he lay down again, he let the wetness remain on the cracked dry skin.
‘Better,’ he said. Apart from the fact that he could feel his heart thundering as if he had been running wildly upstairs it seemed very wonderful.
‘Lie still,’ she said.
He watched her put the glass back on the table, following her with his eyes but not moving his head. To set the glass down she picked up the cloth. And now, under the cloth, he could see the thermometer.
He did not say anything. She smiled again and put the cloth over the jug and the glasses. ‘If you feel all right,’ she said, ‘I can go for the sergeants now.’ Her eyes seemed a little brighter. ‘You didn’t tell me their names.’
‘Sergeant O’Connor,’ he said. ‘And Sergeant Sanders.’
‘I still don’t understand your name,’ she said.
‘My name is John Franklin,’ he said. ‘I told you.’
‘John.’ It sounded strange and unintimate to him. No one except his mother ever called him John. ‘John,’ she said. She pronounced it rather in the French way.
‘They call me Frankie,’ he said.
‘Your name is John,’ she said, ‘and they call you Frankie.’
‘It is the diminutive of Franklin,’ he said. ‘I told you.’ He knew she didn’t grasp it.
‘Frankie,’ she said. ‘John.’
He knew that she still didn’t quite understand, and then he knew also why she didn’t understand. It was because she was terribly tired. He knew now why her eyes were not bright. She hadn’t slept. And in the moment of realizing it he felt sorry for her and put his good hand over the coverlet and she touched it, in a little gesture of tired and tender acknowledgement, as she went across the room.
Just before she went out he remembered something.
‘My revolver,’ he said. ‘It was round my waist. What happened to it when they undressed me?’
‘I think the sergeants have it.’
‘Would you tell them to bring it? Please.’
‘You don’t need it here.’
‘Oh! yes,’ he said. ‘This is the sort of situation I brought it for.’
She smiled back and went out of the room. After she had gone and while he waited for O’Connor and Sandy to come he worked himself up in bed on his good elbow and reached for the thermometer. I’d better face it, he thought. He put the thermometer into his mouth and held it under his tongue. As he waited he looked out of the window and saw the burning heat of the day, all the late summer heat of mid-France, blue and hard, lying cloudless above the yellow plain of the river. Then he looked at the room. It reminded him, with the faded striped wallpaper and the heavy furniture and its partly sanctified smell, of little hotel rooms on the coast of Brittany. It, too, gave him a feeling of having been there before. I feel I had to come here, he thought, and that this bloody arm had to be, and the river, and the girl. His mind could not deal with its thoughts, and he felt himself grow muddled, half-dreaming, and then forgetting the thermometer. Then all of a sudden he remembered it and took it out of his mouth.
He leaned back and tilted it against the light. He saw the mercury darken and then flash like a needle. The reading was just under a hundred and four.
‘God,’ he thought. ‘Now I know.’
He put the thermometer back on the table and lay quickly down. He felt very sick and shaky. How did this happen? he thought. How did I get into this state so quickly? A hundred and four! It must mean that I’ve been worse than that. I’ve been a hell of a lot of trouble to them all. I’ll be a hell of a lot of trouble yet.
His thoughts had no real coherence again and he let them go. He shut his eyes for a moment, and then was glad to hear O’Connor and Sandy and Françoise coming upstairs. He opened his eyes as they came into the room. The girl looked very lovely and clear and dark beside the two men, O’Connor tough and mousy, Sandy bald and fair, in their makeshift French shirts and trousers.
The two men came and stood a little away from the bed: as if, he thought rather crazily, I’m somebody having a baby in a hospital.
‘You’re a nice one,’ O’Connor said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I got you all into this mess from the first.’
‘Oh! yes,’ O’Connor said. ‘I saw you climb out of the kite and break the bloody airscrew with your hands.’
‘How do you feel?’ Sandy said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know quite what day it is.’
The girl, hearing the conversation in English, was standing away at the window.
‘Do you feel well enough to hear something?’ O’Connor said.
‘You’re going,’ Franklin said. ‘I know.’
‘That’s the point,’ O’Connor said. ‘We’re not going.’
‘Don’t talk cock!’ he said. His anger was only a husk remaining from his earlier emotion. ‘If the arrangements are for you to go, you go.’
‘Let’s talk sense,’ O’Connor said. ‘You’ve been bloody ill. How can we go?’
‘It would look bad on us if we went,’ Sandy said, ‘and for some reason they found you here and you never got back.’
‘That’s just supposition.’ Oh, hell! he thought, why must they argue?
‘It’s a supposition that stinks,’ O’Connor said. ‘We’re not leaving you.’
He did not answer immediately. All his arguments were ready:
he was too weak and stupefied to marshal them at once. Already, too, the talking had weakened him, so that the whole of his body, with the exception of his arm, felt stripped bare of strength, even the veins empty. Only the arm was fully and fiercely alive with its tight and bloated pain.
At last he said what he had to say. ‘Every day you stop here means added risk for these people. One man is one risk. Five men is five times the risk. Every time we can lessen it it’s a good thing. If the papers are ready you go. That’s all.’
‘Look, Skip,’ O’Connor said.
‘You go,’ he said, ‘and you go as soon as you can.’
‘You’re bloody stubborn.’
‘I know I’m bloody stubborn,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I’ll be all right. Anyway, it’s easier alone.’
‘Can we wait till the doctor has been to-day?’ Sandy said.
‘You can wait,’ he said, ‘but it will make no difference at all.’
He lay flat in the pillows, looking at the two men who had been on so many trips with him and who had always trusted him yet never said they trusted him, and for whom he in turn had great trust and admiration and affection and yet similarly never spoke of it. His terms of dealing with them had always been service terms: the odd, boyish, sometimes silly service language that came out of their exclusive world, for nobody else to understand. Behind this language, you could take refuge from the fear and reality of the business. They were rarely outspoken. Now the three of them, O’Connor, Sandy and himself, had been more outspoken with each other in these few days in France than ever before. It struck him as an ironic possibility that they were really getting to know each other.
‘Did you bring my revolver?’ he said.
‘Yes, I got it,’ O’Connor said. He took the revolver out of the inside of his shirt and laid it on the bed. ‘She’s not loaded.’ He took twenty rounds of ammunition from his pocket and dribbled it on the bed, too.
‘Thanks,’ Franklin said. ‘You never know.’ It all seemed a little strained and O’Connor and Sandy looked very miserable.
‘Look, let’s get this cleared up,’ he said
The two men did not speak.
‘I can do it alone. If I’d been a fighter boy there’d have been no question of doing it otherwise.’
‘You’re not a fighter boy,’ O’Connor said. ‘You’re part of us. We’re a unit. We always have been.’
‘Oh! wrap up,’ he said. He felt very tired and he could feel the coherence of his thoughts slipping away again. ‘You’re going, and that’s that.’
‘Is that final?’ O’Connor said.
‘It’s final,’ he said. He grinned good-naturedly at them, bearing no ill-will but rather amused, under his thick-headedness and pain, at their awkward misery.
‘O.K.,’ O’Connor said. ‘You’re the boss. But we go under bloody protest, I tell you.’
‘Good old Connie,’ he said.
‘You’d better get some rest,’ Sandy said.
‘Yes,’ Franklin said. ‘Come and see me again before you go.’
They went out together. They looked very miserable. The interview was over; he felt like a business man who has withheld an order. He closed his eyes. The strain of talking instantly began to make itself felt, so that he seemed doubly weak and buoyant on the bed. An awful wave of sickness flew over him and he felt as if he would float away.
He wondered all the time why the girl did not come to the bed. He wanted her very much. I was rather good with the boys, he thought. I had all the arguments. I could translate for her what I said. He lay listening for her footsteps to come across the room, knowing all the time that she was there, by the window, watching the plain, and because he was so sure not even looking up. Once he stretched out his arm across the bed and said ‘Françoise,’ but she did not answer. His feeling for her was as clear as the square blue light of afternoon sun through the window. It was as serene and permanent as the sunlight. Beside it all the rest of him now seemed sick and tangled and hollow.
He came to himself about four hours later without having any idea of what time it was. But now the light lace curtains had been drawn over the open window, and from the plain a light wind had sprung up and was blowing the curtains irregularly to and fro. Once again he had the feeling that he had slept for a few moments, that the girl was still there, and that he was still waiting for her to come.
When he at last looked up she was not there, and his revolver was not on the bed. But he had the feeling of a presence in the room, and he saw the old woman, after a moment or two, walk across his line of vision and go out without a word.
He was confronted almost immediately, it seemed, by a question. For a second he could not remember the voice.
‘What is this I hear?’
He looked up. Far away, very far away, a little out of focus, stood the doctor.
Franklin did not speak. You know how I feel, he thought. You don’t expect me to speak. You’ve come for the fishing. I must ask you about it.
‘Can you hear me?’ the doctor said. ‘Are you still sleepy?’
Hellish, Franklin thought. He tried to smile. He felt the smile crack his dry lips as they expanded. The light wind, blowing the curtains, blew the vague image of the doctor nearer, swaying it greyly in and out of focus.
The doctor went on speaking. Franklin realized that what he was saying was of immense importance, but he did not care. For some moments his mind did not respond in French, then it cleared and he grasped that the doctor was talking about a hospital.
‘Hospital?’ he said.
‘I have to tell you that at this time the record of French hospitals is not good.’
‘Hospital?’
‘For such an arm as yours there is no course but hospital.’
Franklin did not speak. Why can’t you stand still? he thought. Please stand still. Now what? What hospital?
‘You yourself have to make the choice of course.’
Franklin struggled into a moment of coherent response.
‘Between what?’
‘Between going to the hospital as a prisoner and remaining here.’
There’s only one answer to that, he thought. Why trouble to put it like that?
‘For hiding an escaping airman the complications would be very serious?’ he said.
‘As you know.’
‘No complications,’ he said. ‘Please. I want to stay here.’
It seemed a long time before the doctor spoke again.
‘There is the other side of the picture,’ he said at last.
‘Yes?’
He saw the face of the doctor blown slowly forward into focus, out again, and then once more in towards him, this time to remain, grey and fixed and living.
‘You must be fully aware of what it means to remain here.’
I am aware, he thought. No one is more aware. I know what it means for you.
‘I find it difficult to tell you,’ the doctor said.
‘I am fully aware,’ he said. ‘There is no need.’
‘It is not quite that,’ the doctor said.
He retreated again, blown out of focus, and then came back. to be fairly steadfast once more.
‘No,’ he said. ‘This is what you must understand.’ The voice was kindly, distant, almost a whisper. ‘If you remain here it will be necessary to take off the arm.’
The words hit him and then were swept far away, part of all the bad dreams of his sickness, as if blown on a wind of terror. This terror was a single violent emotion that came burning out of all his flying life. It was the biggest horror he had ever known. Jesus, he thought; please! Jesus! The terror seemed to career furiously round the whole world, like a terrific living comet of protest, and then complete its crazy circumnavigation in his face. It broke its motion against his eyes and became instantly a single and more terrible thought. ‘I’ll never fly again, I’ll never fly again. Jesus, I’ll never fly again, I’ll never fly again! I’ll never fly again!’
‘You would
like a few moments alone?’ the doctor said.
‘No.’
What can I do? he thought. If this is it, this is it. There’s nothing for it now.
‘The complications for you remain,’ he said to the doctor.
‘We will take care of that. A few more complications in France will hardly be noticed.’
‘Be frank with me,’ he said.
Franklin held the grey kindly face in focus, as he might have held the sight of a gun.
‘I will be frank,’ the doctor said. ‘If you go to hospital they will take off the arm. There is no choice. If the operation is done now I have complete confidence. I will bring my brother from the hospital itself. He is a surgeon. Very competent. He needs some fishing, too.’
‘When will you do it?’
‘I hope to-night. There is no need to worry.’
Franklin, not answering at once, suddenly remembered Sandy and O’Connor.
‘What time to-night?’
‘It will probably be late. I have to get word to my brother. He has to get here. Don’t worry.’
‘I am not worrying for myself,’ Franklin said.
‘Don’t worry for us, either.
‘It is the other two,’ Franklin said. ‘They are going to-night. I don’t want them to know.’
‘It will be all right,’ the doctor said.
Franklin saw him recede for the final time out of focus. He felt very tired. He tried to say something to the doctor, but the words never came and, in any case, he thought, he isn’t there to listen. There was nothing there at all now except the lightly blowing curtains moving in the wind coming up from the sunny evening plain, far away on the edge of the world. He wanted the girl very badly to be near him because he knew now, for a small moment of relief in a long obscure dream, that she had not really been there all the afternoon.
Her absence flung him down into a final moment of despair.
‘I’ll never fly again,’ was all he could think now. ‘Jesus! I’ll never fly any more.’
CHAPTER 10
AFTER she had watched the two English sergeants disappear down the track that wound along the ridge above the vineyard, their striped shirts too blue and dangerous in the parallel bars of oak-shade and late sunlight that cut the track below the young trees, the girl took a few paces down the slope towards the house and then suddenly lay down in the rough grass, burnt brittle by summer on the unshaded part of the slope above the vines. She lay face downwards, her mouth open a little, panting. The heat of the day that had seemed to come down through glass now seemed to reflect back from the earth in a breath of solid dust. She shut her mouth and, putting her hands under her face, let her breath come in heavy gasps that sucked the flesh of her brown wrists. She was lying roughly in the place where Franklin had first stopped to look down at the mill below the vines, and now as she looked downwards and slantwise across her flattened hands she could see the same empty and silent valley, with the mill white between the orchard grass and the corn beyond. She looked down and waited, as he had done, for something to happen. All the time she could feel her heart pounding against the warm earth and the echo of it beating back against her chest. And all the time as she lay there, thinking of the blue and dangerous shirts of the two men who had gone, and of what was going to happen in the house below, and watching for something to happen that never did happen, she told herself that she was not afraid. Not very afraid.
