Fair Stood the Wind for France

by H. E. Bates

  ‘I would rather drink. If there is anything,’ he said. The golden afternoon over the river was wonderfully quiet. No wind came across the water, as it would do in England, to beat off the sun. Even the deep shade was warm and undisturbed.

  She said, ‘There is milk to drink,’ and he realized then that she had come prepared to stay for a long time. He wondered, as she uncorked the wine-bottle of milk, what was going on back in the house. Whatever it was would affect them both. She took the handkerchief away from his head and, putting her hand under his neck, lifted him up. The idea of his walking through France, one-handed as it were, suddenly seemed painfully ridiculous. He partly sat up and the only problem in his life became whether he should use his one arm to prop himself up or to hold the bottle. He finally propped himself up and she held the bottle to his mouth. In the moment of throwing back his head to drink his gaze swung out of the shade into the sunlight of the river, and he saw the German, his bayonet like a pin against the blue sky, standing on the bridge.

  Then again, after he had drunk the milk, which was just warm, he wondered about the house. He had forgotten, too, to ask her about the elderberries. ‘Will you fish?’ he said.

  ‘Towards evening. Yes.’

  Evening? He did not say anything. Something told him that things were going to be very serious before night. And suddenly he stopped worrying about himself, his arm, his escape, and the pin-like bayonet pricking the sky above the bridge. He could think only about the house and the three people there. If they took anybody out of it, he thought, it could not possibly be the woman, crusted over with brittle scabs of one war experience after another. There could be no satisfaction in shooting the very old. It could mean only the father and Pierre, and it could only be, he reasoned, because of him.

  Thinking this, he was sick with humiliation. The girl sat eating an apple, watching the bridge, her teeth bright as the apple flesh against her dark brown face.

  ‘You think it will be all right,’ he said, ‘at the house?’

  ‘Yes.’ She spoke with readiness, simply, swallowing a piece of apple. He was aware of some enormous conviction in her. ‘Yes, I have faith it will be all right. I have prayed very hard it will be.’

  He did not speak. It was hardly the time, he thought, to argue about the efficacy of prayer. She, at any rate, was concerned with the apple.

  ‘I have told you that before,’ she said, ‘haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In the church.’

  ‘You have faith yourself?’ she said.

  ‘Sometimes. Not always.’

  ‘You should have faith,’ she said. ‘When I fish I have great faith and the fish answer my prayers.’

  ‘The fish answer your prayers?’ He smiled at her as she took another bite into the apple.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Her eyes were wide and black, and he looked down into their shining and lovely belief. ‘Yes. The fish are God’s, and so God answers the prayer through the fish. That’s simple enough,’ she said, turning the apple over.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, knowing there was no answer in the world to that. ‘That’s simple enough.’

  She took her last bite of the apple, put the bottle of milk into the bottom of the boat, and then with both hands free held him against her. It was very hard to speak about love, he thought, in another language. He did not even know if it was right to talk to her about love. He wanted the love for her to remain restrained and yet expanding; to be physical, because he felt it in his body as sharp as the pain of his arm, but to be living and growing out of whatever happened. For the first time since the war the inside of himself grew suddenly quiet. What she said about faith smoothed away all complications. The turmoil set up by flying, perhaps by too much flying, was something whirled madly in a flare. Now he felt it settling, calming, growing clear and pure. He lay with his good arm against one of hers. It was brown and gave off all the smooth clear warmth of the summer. He ran his hand down the arm to the finger-tips and then back and ran it down again. What he felt for her was just so simple, now, and uncomplicated. With flying you became complicated without thinking of it, fear complicated with action, action with relief, relief with pain, pain with the inner silence that no one ever penetrated. At first you did not sleep at night. Your eyes were held open, pinned back by the strain of darkness, the pupils hammered by the bright memory of savage stars. All the brilliant recurrent violence of the trip was re-experienced, like a film run backwards. If time lessened the effect of this it seemed only to increase the inability to talk of it to another soul.

  Yet if she ever asks me about flying, he thought, I know that I can tell her. He kissed her lightly on the face. She moved her face and kissed him back, as she had done in the orchard, warm and seriously tender. As she did so the slightest breeze stirred across the river and melted in, cool and ruffling, under the shadow of the tree. It parted for a moment the light leaves of the willow, so that the sun flashed down, quick and sharp, in a speck of metallic light.

  It was as if the bayonet on the bridge had flashed down on them across the water. But he shut his eyes and did not care.

  CHAPTER 13

  LOOKING up from the boat he saw Pierre lying flat on the jetty in the same attitude as he had left him in the afternoon, and above him the old woman standing very still in the twilight, and he knew because there was no one with them that something was very wrong. He was still roped to the plank, but now, because it was almost dark, no longer under the tarpaulin. The girl rowed in close to the jetty. As the boat hit the wooden piles and jarred back, Pierre reached out, grasped it, and held it still. The girl helped him off the plank, and he managed to stand upright. His fear was that he would fall down, and he determined not to fall down. He was tired and stiff with lying down, and his arm seemed to ache down to the finger-tips that no longer existed. But he was aware that something else had happened beside which all this and himself were little things. This feeling strengthened his determination not to fall down. Very carefully he put one foot on a cross-piece of the jetty, and then Pierre held his right hand and pulled him up. His anxiety not to fall down became an angry fear. ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Let me walk. Let me walk. Let me walk.’

  As they let him walk to the house, Pierre and the girl each side of him, the twilight vibrating each time his feet struck the ground, he clenched his teeth in the renewed effort not to fall down. The house seemed many miles away. It receded and came back and would not remain still. Finally he reached out and tried, with an immense effort, to grasp it in his one hand. To his astonishment he discovered he was holding the door-post. He stood still for a moment, breathing very hard, and then, grasping the smooth friendly wood, swung himself heavily into the kitchen.

  A moment later he fell down. He got to his feet with terrified haste, like a boxer who wants to show that he is still fighting.

  He was aware after that of sitting in a chair. He was trembling and exhausted, and was drinking a small glass of cognac. The bottle of cognac was on the table and the lamp was burning above it, the flame low beneath the opaque white chimney. Between himself and the light, and sometimes beyond it, he saw the girl and Pierre and the old woman moving. Their faces vibrated as if someone were shaking the light, and it seemed as if they were all talking together.

  He discovered after a time that they were not talking together. It was Pierre and the old woman talking, telling the girl what had happened. The girl, for a long time, was silent. He took another drink of the cognac. As the heat of it bit his mouth he felt less tired, and the faces, as he looked at them, no longer vibrated. The face of the girl at least had become dead still, white as the glass of the lamp, the dark eyes steady in the upward glare.

  He gathered at last where the father had gone. The voluble excited voices were like fussy flames. He saw the old woman lift her hands in a gesture partly of despair, partly of futility. She had in her hands a big carving knife which she swung down on the table. To his surprise Franklin saw her begin to slice onions.
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  ‘There was no need to go! No need! They were here five minutes. They didn’t even look at the house. They didn’t even come in.’

  She slashed the onions into white raw shreds. The strong odour of onion was naked against the warm smell of the cognac.

  ‘It was only when Chausson came over from the farm with the news of the doctor,’ Pierre said.

  ‘The doctor?’ the girl said.

  ‘That was afterwards, afterwards,’ the old woman said. ‘We were going to give you the signal. It was about half-past five. And then Chausson came over to say they had taken the doctor.’

  The girl still did not move. Franklin watched her standing in the lamplight, white as the glare.

  ‘And how many more?’

  ‘Chausson says fifty. Fifty! Chausson says one German was killed. Only one.’

  ‘It was all right until Chausson came over,’ Pierre said. ‘But then nothing would stop him. He had to go and find out what had happened.’

  ’I say there was no need! No need!’ the old woman said.

  ‘You know he wouldn’t rest,’ Pierre said. ‘How could he rest?’

  ‘Rest!’ she said. ‘Rest! Do any of us rest?’

  The knife came down again on the onions, slicing the white flesh under the white lamplight.

  ‘He should be back, I tell you!’ the old woman said. ‘He should be back!’

  ‘I am not worried,’ the girl said. ‘I am relieved they did not take him. I am not worried.’

  ‘Chausson was going to drive in with the cart,’ Pierre said. ‘That takes an hour. Then there‘s an hour to get back. If you count two hours then it‘s only just time.’

  ‘Ah! You talk! You talk! ’ the old woman said.

  Franklin put the empty cognac glass on the table. The conversation had reached a point of fretful futility. He felt his own thoughts, by contrast, clearing and coming back. He reflected that if they shot the doctor there would be no one to look at his arm. It was a selfish thought, and he was glad when the girl. seeing the empty glass, moved round the table to fill it up.

  He saw her reach for the bottle and pour out a little more cognac. Suddenly all the confusion of the day receded and the raw fact of what had happened remained clear and bare before his face. If they shot the doctor it could only be because of him.

  ‘How do you feel?’ the girl said.

  Far away on the other side of the big kitchen the old woman was beginning to fry the onions. He felt slightly sick.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘But the doctor? The doctor? Is it because of me they have taken him?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why? How do you know?’ he said.

  ‘He is a prominent man. As a doctor everyone knows him. It is better to make an example of someone well known. It affects more people.’

  ‘Are you afraid for your father?’ he said.

  No. He will come back.’

  ‘I am sorry about it,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be sorry.’

  ‘If you think it safer for me to go back into the mill I will go,’ he said. ‘I shall be all right.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You need food now. We will talk about moving afterwards.’

  She began to lay knives and forks on the bare wooden table, and then glasses and bread and the wooden pots for salt and pepper. He lay back in the chair, exhausted and hungry to a point of sickness, and watched her. Once she turned and smiled and there was no sign in her face that her calmness was anything but true. It was very true and real, and to him, as he sat there listening beyond the silence of the room in case the silence of the night outside should be broken now, blessedly comforting. He sat there for about ten minutes watching her while the old woman cooked the food and Pierre sat silent by the table, running the edge of a finger-nail round the rim of another. As Franklin sat watching him he realized, for the first time, that he would never cut the nails of his own right hand again; the realization amused rather than bitter as he remembered how, when a child, the right hand had always been the more difficult problem of the two.

  Five minutes later, when the old woman brought the supper to the table, a dish of fried green beans and potatoes with the onions now brown among them, Franklin drew his chair up to the table, the girl opposite him, with Pierre on his left and the old woman on his right hand side. It was his first meal with them since the first morning. He picked up his fork and held it in his right hand. Eating would never be the same again. He wondered how the devil, when the occasion arose, he would cut his meat. But the occasion did not arise now, since there was no meat to cut. As the old woman filled his plate with beans and potatoes, in which there was also a little chopped tomato, he saw before him long years of eating with one hand, perhaps even with a spoon, like a baby.

  All through the meal the three people did not look at him much, as if they were very aware of all this and did not want to embarrass him. Then he realized that it was not wholly because of this, but because they were listening. He saw their eyes occasionally uplifted and stilled as when people let their eyes follow the track of a fragmentary sound. Yet even when they did not seem to be listening they did not look at him. Then he became aware of how he was dressed: his trousers hastily put on in the moment of getting him out of the house, his torn service shirt loosely bulging over the great wad of bandage across his chest and arm. This suddenly embarrassed him. ‘I would like my coat,’ he said. ‘I am cold.’

  ‘Have mine,’ Pierre said. He stood up and took it off and put it across Franklin’s shoulders before he could protest.

  ‘Thank you,’ Franklin said. ‘Thank you.’ He felt humble and more embarrassed still.

  ‘Now you look like Pierre,’ the girl said. She looked up from her food, the black eyes amused and light in the low lamplight. ‘A bit like Pierre.’

  ‘God help the boy,’ the old woman said. She ate her food with a spoon, sucking it in, her mouth low over the plate. ‘God help him if he looks even a bit like Pierre.’

  ‘I am honoured to look like Pierre,’ Franklin said. ‘It’s better than looking like nothing.’

  ‘You will look like nothing if you don’t rest,’ the girl said.

  ‘You should be in bed,’ the old woman said. ‘With that arm you should be tied to the bed. If you were a son of mine you’d go as soon as you’d cleared your plate. And I would tie you to the bed.’

  He smiled. The old woman sucked in her food, washing every other mouthful down with a little of the red wine that had been watered down. Then for some time neither she nor the girl nor Pierre spoke again, and he knew by the track of their eyes that they were listening once more for the possible sound of someone coming outside. Sometimes the eyes of the girl paused as they swung slowly upward in this track of listening, and he would meet them with his own, across the light of the lamp, and hold them, full of wonder. Then she would smile a little and look upward beyond the lamp, and he in turn would look down at his food and with his fork begin chasing the scraps of fine vegetable about the plate, wondering sometimes if food would ever again be worth the trouble of eating.

  Suddenly he saw again the extreme fantastic stupidity of the situation. To sit there in the house, eating, with a curfew on the district and the Germans not out of the house more than an hour or two, and he himself ready to be caught like an idiot, too weak to run, and without a revolver to fire a shot. He now determined at least that he should have the gun.

  ‘My revolver,’ he said to the girl. ‘I think it would be better if I had it now.’

  ‘There will be no occasion to shoot,’ the girl said. ‘They won’t come again.’

  ‘It is just for moral protection,’ he said.

  ‘A revolver is no good for anything else,’ Pierre said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘A shot-gun is much better. I have a shot-gun. Don’t worry about the revolver. It is purely a weapon for close quarters.’

  ‘It is also a weapon for one hand,’ Franklin said. ‘Remember that.’r />
  ‘It is also a weapon useful for hitting haystacks,’ Pierre said. ‘Have you ever fired one?’

  ‘At practice.’

  ‘Ah! At practice, at practice!’ The words mocked a little. ‘I know. Yes. At practice. But practice and the reality are not quite the same. I went all through the last war, nearly five years, and never did I see a man hit by a revolver. I saw men hit by practically every other weapon one can name. Including the catapult.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Franklin said.

  ‘The revolver is purely a fancy weapon,’ Pierre said. ‘If you want to blow a man’s guts out hit him with a shot-gun.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I should feel better with it’ Franklin said.

  ‘How, better?’

  Franklin did not answer. He did not know at all how much better he would feel. The girl, during this conversation, had gone out of the room, and now, as he sat there, wondering, she came back. She had the revolver in her hands. She laid it quietly on the bare wooden table by his plate. It shone, newly cleaned, in the lamplight, and all four of them gazed at it as it lay there.

  Franklin did not know how much better he felt for seeing it there. Looking at it, he remembered a gunner named Watson, once of his squadron, but now dead. Watson, a man of forty who had come to England from Arkansas because he believed in personal warfare, had offered to teach him to shoot. Watson was an excellent shot, and kept ten revolvers, some very large, some quite small with handles of mother-of-pearl, locked in his bedroom at the Mess. Watson’s belief in the power of the revolver was so great that on operational trips he took four of these revolvers with him. In the event of being shot down Watson was well equipped to go on killing people right and left. This idea, together with the fanatical belief in revolvers generally, had not saved Watson from being blown to hell in the ordinary way.

  ‘I have cleaned it every day,’ the girl said, looking at him.

  Franklin looked at the revolver and saw it suddenly as a pathetic and useless thing. He saw his own belief in it as pathetic. He had become so used to handling a weapon as big as a house, and carrying enough power to wipe out a small town, that he had forgotten there are other sorts of power. He looked at the three people sitting in the lamplight waiting for a sound. He saw them, the three generations of one nation, as part of a defenceless people, as part of the little people possessing an immeasurable power that could not be broken. He saw them suddenly as little people who had lain on the ground and had their faces trampled on but whose power was still unbroken. He knew it clearly now as a more wonderful, more enduring and more inspiring power than he had ever believed possible: the power of their own hearts.