by H. E. Bates
She lay there for about twenty minutes, twice turning round on her back to watch the track between the oaks as if she half expected to see the two sergeants coming back, and once very startled by a voice shouting in the fields below. It was only a woman calling a cow somewhere beyond the river, but the sound in the dead calm air seemed to hit her heart, so that she held her hands against it, pressing down the frightened pain. She felt now as Franklin had done, but without knowing it: young and tense on the edge of danger, her finger on the thread that held the world together, and not knowing if or how soon the thread would break. She lay there for a few minutes after the voice had called, still feeling the breath of the hot earth like solid dust against her face, and then suddenly she got up and went down the path, her face firm and calm, as if she had at last made up her mind.
There was no one in the kitchen of the house when she got there, and she did not call. The little air that stirred down by the water had in it the smell of corn. She stood in the kitchen and listened, her head up, but there was no sound from upstairs. A black hat was lying on the table, and there was another, brown-grey, on the chair by the door. She knew then that the two doctors had come back. She picked up the hats and hung them on the peg on the kitchen door. Her brown feet were flat in their heel-less rubber sandals, so that when she moved she seemed to skim about the floor of the kitchen. The silence was quite strange; it was very living. It seemed to her like the silence before a baby is born. It held the house in a stretched light web that she broke for a moment by opening the cupboard under the big wooden dresser. From the cupboard she fetched down a canvas bag and two sections of a heavy bamboo fishing pole. She carried the bag and the pole in her right hand, and as she skimmed out of the kitchen the web of silence closed in on the house behind her, fine and complete again.
Beyond the mill, on the north side, under the wet stones where the sun never reached, there were always small striped worms, almost like small carmine watch-springs coiled in the clay. She spent five minutes getting enough worms to fill the tobacco-tin she carried in the bag. Then she went down to the river edge to where a boat, broad and shallow, lay tied up to the jetty chain-locked to an iron ring in the stone. As she got into the boat and unlocked the chain, and then took one of the heavy oars and pushed away from the jetty, she thought once again, but almost for the last time, of the two sergeants. Her fear about them had become a memory. She looked up the slope and thought of the bright blue shirts, and then mentally crossed herself, thinking quite simply, ‘I forgot to give them a blessing. Perhaps that’s why I was frightened.’ She stood up in the boat and pushed the oar hard against the stone, her brown arms tightened, and felt the boat curve away on the stream with its moving buoyancy. ‘The Blessing of God on you now, wherever you are,’ she thought. ‘And a little luck, too.’
The boat was very heavy and sluggish against the stream, and as she pulled it against the sun she felt the heat burning the back of her neck and shoulders as it came flat from the west across the water. She pulled hard for about two minutes, beyond the orchard where Franklin had first kissed her, and where the apples, from a distance, now looked like glowing russet berries in the sun. On the right bank, as she rowed, big willow trees leaned with flat branches down to the middle surface of the stream, with stretches of water-lilies, flowerless now, in the open spaces between. The water was very clear, too clear she thought, in the stiller pools between the lilies, and over it all was the smell of water, warm and thick like the distant smell of the sea after the heat of the day.
She rowed a little farther, until she could no longer see the mill beyond the big bend of the stream, and then tied up the boat on the right bank, under a line of willows. Two hundred yards upstream was an iron bridge built into concrete supports, in a single span on which, in the early days of the occupation, a sentry had waited to halt the farm traffic that never came. Now the Germans had taken him away.
She tied the boat up to the branch of a willow and began to fit together the two sections of the rod. The whole rod was about fourteen feet long. She threaded about thirty feet of line through the rings and then tied it, without a reel, to the thicker end. She had made a float from a goose-quill, and she fixed that, with a rather large hook, to the free end of the line. She nicked a worm on the end of the hook and then swung the line, in a low cast, across the stream. When the float stood straight the flow of the stream took it away to the full curve of the line so that it circled down beyond the bows of the boat and back again until it rested just clear of a ring of lily leaves. The girl tightened the line and rested the rod in a rowlock of the boat.
The sun had fallen quite rapidly in the time it had taken her to row up the river, and now the light was falling so that the roots of the willow, now in shadow, were losing their look of scarlet hair. They flowed with the motion of the stream like tawny strands of seaweed, darkening every time the girl looked into the depth of the stream.
She sat there for a long time watching the willow-roots and the float and the sun moving away from the water before the fish began to rise downstream beyond the lilies. She sat quite silent, only once moving to take off her sandals and rest her sun-striped feet on the edge of the boat. The blankness of the sunless water seemed to create, in turn, a blankness across her eyes. She could not feel her heart. The water seemed to have made it tranquil, too.
When the fish began to rise, ringing the water and even flopping out of it, she moved to the bows of the boat and cast the line farther downstream. In another hour it would be dark. She tried not to think about Franklin. She was not quite sure what was going to happen back in the house. She knew quite well, with two doctors, that the situation was now very serious. She knew quite well how dangerous it was. But she had no thought to bring to it, as if she knew quite well that thought alone could not change it, any more than thought could help her to catch fish. At the back of her mind there was instead a continuous and unsteady flow of prayer. It was continuous because it was made up of her own patience and faith, and unsteady because its words were nothing but emotions. There were no words that could possibly have the strength of her emotions. Her emotions rose out of her body and became transposed into terms of natural prayer before she could guide or stop them.
The tension of her face that was fixed but tranquil broke when the float went down. She saw it disappear below the lily-pads with eyes that did not seem to be conscious of looking. She struck light but firm, and felt the fish draw the line from her fingers like the gut of a catapult. When she pulled it in it was a perch of about a pound. She laid it on the bottom of the boat and pressed it with her bare knee, covering the back spines, while she took the hook out of its mouth. The hook was really too long and had bitten deeply in, and when she had it free there was a little blood on her hands.
The fish flopped about in the bottom of the boat as she baited the hook and threw it in again. The sun was almost down. She put one of her sandals on the fish and then her foot on the sandal to keep it quiet. The perch would bite fast now. She would be able to go back and tell the two doctors of the new good place. The perch, too, would be good after the eels which Pierre caught in the trap below the mill, and which had begun to sicken her now after months and months of the occupation. She sat immovable, her dark eyes on the float. When it jigged and went down again her eyes did not flicker. She pulled in the line and unhooked the fish, a perch a little larger than the first, the hook coming free of its own accord, so that there was no blood on her hands. Her heart was beating a little faster now because of the excitement of the fish, but her eyes still did not move. They had all the steadfast and wonderful assurance, if anything a little brighter, that Franklin had first seen in the morning sun.
The twilight seemed to come down very rapidly with the next three fish. The doctors will eat two each, she thought. I must have ten. The goose-quill was white, almost luminous, in the oil-green water, and the little wind that stirred the lily leaves had in it the first coolness of the entire day. She would not see mu
ch longer now. She waited, watching the float with her dark bright eyes. She waited for about ten minutes, but nothing happened, and finally she shut her eyes and immediately, as it had always done when she was a child, prayer involuntarily slid through her mind: just one more, Holy Mother, just one, not a very big one but big enough, Holy Mother, please. Only about half a pound. Just one more, please. Just one. She opened her eyes and looked at the float. Nothing had happened. She shut them again. If I have faith can there be one? I have faith. I have great faith. Let there be just one more. My faith is eternal.
She kept her eyes closed for about a minute longer, and then slowly opened them. Her heart came thumping up into her throat as she saw the float no longer there, and she forgot all about her faith and began to pull in the line. It seemed very heavy and the fish made big swirls in the water, breaking the surface at last. She held the line very tight and swung the fish into the boat. Its spines pricked up like a hedgehog, but she held them down with her knee and then began to take the hook out of its mouth. The bait had been gorged and the hook was far down. The fish was about two pounds, and in her excitement she was clumsy and pulled too hard on the hook, so that it came away bloody, tearing the lip, the blood running over her hands. And in that moment, as the hook tore the flesh of the fish and the blood spewed scarlet on her brown hands, in the twilight, she knew for the first time what they were going to do to Franklin.
She felt very weak and sick as she began to row slowly back downstream. The fish flopped about in the bottom of the boat and she did not trouble to put on her shoes. She rowed with her eyes on the water. They were troubled with new light. It was the first time since Franklin had walked down through the orchard that morning that she had felt anything like terror. She had never been really afraid: only excited. Only very, very excited so that her excitement was itself an exultation that could not help, in turn, giving her that air of sublime assurance that was sometimes, to Franklin, quite unreal. She had always felt very much as if anything that had happened had been bound to happen. She had always wanted it to happen. She did not understand much about the war, at least about the intricacies of war, but what she understood Was very clear and simple. She understood that the war was not finished. She understood that the war could be carried on in France, without arms, and that, by the Grace of God, it must be carried on. She was very young, but the war had a way of making her feel very old, and sometimes she felt that Franklin had come by the Grace of God, too.
She felt very old, her sickness cold and sour, as she pulled the heavy boat downstream. It was almost dark now, and the little light on the water was splintered by the boat like delicate glass. As she rowed by the orchard she remembered the moment there with Franklin, under the apple trees. It was a very wonderful moment, and it, too, had seemed inevitable. She had known that it had to happen. And now as she remembered it she was struck by the terror that it would never happen again. It was no longer a simple affair of hiding and escape. There were many people in it now, and soon someone would say too much. Franklin would be taken and in turn, she thought in terror, they will take us out and shoot us. They will take me out and shoot me too, and what happened under the apple trees will not even be a memory.
She tried to calm herself as she walked up from the river to the house, carrying the fish with one hand in a basket-bag. She carried her shoes and the rod in the other. But she could not even feel calm as she stood still by the door outside the house and listened. There was nothing to hear except the sound of her own heart and the noise of the mill-water rushing away in the silence.
After listening for a moment or two she opened the kitchen door and went in. The lamp was burning on the table and the old woman was laying knives and forks on the cloth. The girl did not speak, but her eyes flickered a little, for the first time, as she came into the light of the lamp. The doctor from the town, whom she knew better than the doctor from the hospital, was drying his arms on a towel. His face looked grey and tired, and he did not speak. She went past him and slid the fish into the sink.
Before she could turn on the tap to wash the fish the doctor from the hospital came downstairs and into the kitchen. He walked straight over to the sink where the girl stood. He was carrying something in a towel. The towel looked like a red and white flag.
‘Good fish,’ he said.
She looked up and was too startled to answer. He too looked grey and tired. His collar was undone and the black tie had been loosened and pulled down. He put the bundle in a chair.
Her terror became wild and fresh as she saw his hands stretch out towards the tap. It spurted with a great ice-cold jet across her mind as the tap itself was turned and loosened the water. She saw the hands and then the arms, up to elbows, wet and bright with moist splashes of blood, and then the tap itself bloody as the hands were taken away and finally the water itself turning from purity to broken scarlet as the hands were held there. She watched it all for about half a minute without moving, her eyes never flickering, until the blood and her terror were one as completely as the water and her terror had been.
She put her hands on the edge of the sink at last and clung to it as if she were faintly clinging to the edge of the world.
In the room behind her she vaguely heard the old woman pushing back the bolt of the door. There was no other sound except the sound of running water, and nothing to be seen now, in her eyes, except the blood of the fish and the blood of Franklin mingling and swirling away in the sink together.
CHAPTER 11
FRANKLIN reached up with his fingers to the edge of consciousness holding on to it by the tips of them. It was his first coherent movement, fully realized. Far back, a lifetime away, perhaps in another life, he was aware that consciousness had reached down to him. It had come in the form of a bowl, cool and hard and held by someone without a word against his throat. He had been very sick into it several times.
His movement now was different. It was positive. He reached up with one hand, holding on to the ledge between darkness and light, waited for a moment before reaching up with the other. Then after a moment or two the horizon of light lowered and became steady. He was looking over the top.
The reality of everything was now heightened by the fact that everything was cut in half. He was lying flat on his back, so stiff that it seemed he might be strapped down, and he could see only the upper half of a chair, a chest of drawers, a window, the wounded upper half of the crucified Christ on the wall, and finally the upper half of the old woman, black and white and immobile, against the blue upper half of summer sky.
He pulled himself fully into consciousness and then became aware, at once, that he had never moved. He lay very still. To be still but also to be aware, to be aware but also to be alive, seemed suddenly miraculous.
He lay looking for some time at the sky. It was vastly blue and very distant. It fixed for him, for the first time, his sense of place. With such blueness, without cloud, he knew that he could never be in England. Through this realization, and through the clear hot blueness of the day, he finally became fully awake.
He became immediately aware of the tightness of his stomach. He needed the bed-bottle. In hospital, he understood, such desires were as natural as requests for tooth-brushes. Now he was faced with the necessity of translating it into another language. He lay thinking for some moments how the French were a people of good sense in fundamental things, but how also, in his French, there was no word for what he wanted to do. Then he knew, too, that it did not matter. He knew that nothing mattered: except perhaps the steadiness and beauty of the blue daylight beyond the window. As long as this light did not recede he knew that his life had been recaptured.
‘Madame,’ he said. He did not move as he spoke.
The old woman moved at once, as if she knew quite well he was conscious, and even as if she knew what he wanted.
‘M’sieu,’ she said. He watched her come fully, entire, over the edge of his vision. She stood by the bed with the sick-bowl in her hands.
‘No,’ he said.
‘You want something?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it? You don’t want to eat, do you?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to eat.’ He searched his mind for the word, but could not find it. He knew one word, but it was, he felt, slightly lacking, even in French, in delicacy. He decided to try bottle.
‘The bottle?’ she said. Her face lifted itself slightly, unconcerned, earthy, too immensely old he thought to worry about the delicacy of life any longer. She moved away, and then, almost at once, came back. It appeared that the bottle had been standing ready.
