Fair Stood the Wind for France

by H. E. Bates

  ‘You are the only ones who count,’ he said. ‘You.’

  ‘The English?’

  ‘No, not necessarily the English. Simply you. The young.’

  ‘You think we shall be any better than the old?’ Franklin said,

  ‘It does not seem to me you could possibly be worse.’

  He stood for another moment without moving and then smiled and began to button up his coat. Suddenly he held out his hand.

  ‘Good-bye.’

  He spoke in English. The familiarity of the word to Franklin was very touching. He took the hand and shook it very firmly. ‘Good-bye,’ he said, in English, too.

  ‘Good-bye,’ the doctor said. ‘I am only sorry it was I who had to take off the arm.’

  ‘I am glad,’ Franklin said. ‘I would have given my right arm for all you have done for me.’

  The doctor did not speak, and Franklin saw the tears spread to his eyes and glisten there without falling, like dew. It was very painful to speak, and it was some moments before Franklin asked him if he would come again.

  ‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘The curfew is difficult and the arm is wonderful. It does not need me now.’

  ‘Not even for the fishing?’ Franklin said. ‘I would be glad to see you again.’

  The doctor smiled. ‘I am going to do a little fishing now,’ he said. ‘Françoise is going to row me up the river.’

  ‘She is a wonderful girl for rowing up the river,‘ Franklin said.

  ‘She rows up every morning,’ the doctor said. ‘Yesterday she rowed beyond the bridge. She is getting to know the sentry there.’

  ‘It is very mysterious,’ Franklin said. He was about to make some joke about Françoise and the sentry, but checked himself in time.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘She is a girl who has reasons for the things she does.’ He looked at Franklin with eyes not entirely sad now, but still shining with unfallen tears, and smiled for the last time. ‘Yes, she is a girl who has reasons.’

  The doctor walked straight to the door and opened it and went out without another word, the abruptness more like shyness than the result of any conscious resolution, and Franklin walked slowly over to the window. He stood there for some minutes looking down at the plain and the river below. He felt glad about the arm. He was getting stronger every day now, and he determined to increase the exercises, doubling them if necessary, day by day. Down below, the river was dead smooth and thinly skimmed with a transparent skin of dusty scum after the heat of the day. He watched a straw or two, fresh and yellow, perhaps from some late harvest field upstream, float slowly down on the steady current, sailing smoothly southwards. He watched them for some moments until at last he saw the surface of the stream broken by the waves made by the boat coming upstream. He saw the waves ripple and beat against the reeds, flapping them as if a wind had sprung up, before the boat appeared between the trees. Then he saw the boat, wide and flat and very heavy looking, but travelling surprisingly fast, going past the house upstream, with the girl using both oars and the doctor sitting rather upright in the stern, holding the heavy wooden tiller with one hand.

  Franklin watched the boat slip past. He saw the fishing rods lying in the bottom of it, and the heavy tarpaulin, rolled up now, under which he had hidden. The girl was rowing strongly. She was dressed in the short green skirt and the thin white blouse in which he had seen her before. The motion of rowing drew her skirt above her bare brown knees, and the blouse tight across the smooth breasts. She rowed with calm, long strokes, sitting very upright, her face held well up, so that she seemed to be looking just above the horizontal line, past the doctor’s head, past the top branches of the hanging willows, towards the hills in the north. As she rowed past, in sight for about thirty seconds before the boat disappeared beyond the orchard, he wondered why she was staring so intently, and what she was thinking, and he wondered also, remembering the doctor’s words, why she was rowing so strongly and seriously, as if she were just beginning a long journey.

  CHAPTER 15

  ON the tenth day after the operation Franklin walked out of the house for the first time. In the dusk of evening it was safe to come down and walk, for about ten minutes, up and down the roadway between the mill and the house, and as far up the slope as the first apple trees. The girl walked with him and took his right arm. The sensation of walking on dry earth was so different from walking in the bedroom that his body seemed to vibrate at every step. His empty sleeve, tucked into his jacket pocket, felt strange, too. But the strangest moment was when he stooped down in the orchard to pick up an apple and, without thinking of the balance of his arm, almost fell down. It gave him an odd sensation of being struck a violent blow on his left side, so that his body swivelled round.

  After that he walked out every night. It was now late September, and each time the dusk seemed to come a little earlier and he was able to walk a little farther. There was no break in the weather, and in the orchard, after the hot days, the dusk was smoky orange through the trees, and he could feel the sweat on the apples as he picked them up out of the grass, greasy and scented and sweet with full ripeness. There were many trees of pears, too, big and golden now, bending the long pear branches down so that they swung like ropes of solid yellow bells, and invisible in the grass so that he and the girl trampled them underfoot. He would pick them up and eat them idly as he walked, thinking of orchards in Worcestershire where the pears had been ripe, too, in the late September weather, and he had eaten them often with their summery, juicy sweetness running down his chin. Now, though the taste of pears was the same, and all the odour of late summer just the same, England seemed far away. All his life there had gone, with the complication of flying, all the life governed by the great dark hangars, the black Wellingtons, the wide grey strips of tarmac, and the friendly grass beyond them smoothed down like combed silk in the winds that blew in across the drome from the sea. It was cut off from him by the nightmare of the operation, so that he saw it through mists of remembered sickness. It was a life sometimes without faces. He could not remember what people looked like. Sometimes even when he thought of Taylor and Goddy and O’Connor and Sandy he could not remember their faces, and then suddenly, in an unexpected moment, he could remember Sandy’s bald ginger head and the effect would startle him into the pain of a simple fact: that something must happen soon and that soon, however one part of him hated it, however complicated and painful it seemed, he would have to go.

  On the seventeenth night after the operation he walked up through the orchard to the farthest corner of it, where it joined the vineyard on the slope above the river. It was a distance of about two hundred and eighty yards. Now he could walk it quite well. He could even walk it above normal pace, up the slope, without being tired. He had got used, too, to the feeling of being unbalanced, and now he walked with a short and rather jerky swing of his right arm, like a crab, as if for support he had to clutch and hold the air. His left arm had begun to pain him much more in the night now, and he did not sleep much, his eyes pinned back by the sharp stars as he looked at the sky. But it was a good pain; he could feel it grasping the broken sinews of the arm and pulling the tissues with a clean deep ache together; it was a living pain, itching and with its dull violence keeping him awake.

  He did not realize how fast he walked until he reached the top of the orchard and leaned against the fence there. The girl leaned there, too, smiling and panting a little at the same time.

  ‘You make me run,’ she said.

  ‘Run?’ He was astonished at his own progress. ‘Did I walk fast?’

  ‘Very fast.’ She smiled again. ‘It comes of practising a great deal. We hear you walking in the bedroom.’

  ‘Oh no ! I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘There is no need to be sorry. We hear you walking up and down, up and down. It’s a good sound. Now you can really walk. Quite fast.’

  She stopped smiling and looked at hi
m, leaning back on the fence, her arms crooked back, horizontally. In the dusk she seemed very serious, her eyes very black and still but looking slightly oblique, a little past him.

  ‘Soon you will need to walk,’ she said.

  ‘Soon?’

  He spoke without thinking. He knew quite well now what she meant. He felt the dusk about him still and deep, and he breathed in the heavy smell of it, cool but heavily fragrant still with sun and leaves and the winey juice of fruit fallen and crushed in the grass. He knew quite well, with a feeling of apprehension in which there was misery and excitement, that something had happened.

  ‘My father has gone to arrange the pass for you,’ she said.

  ‘To-day?’

  ‘He will be back to-night,’ she said.

  Oh God! he thought. He felt the ripeness of the world split by the pain of his own reluctance. He did not want to go, he thought, he did not want to go. After all this, after the planning and the waiting and all his intense scheme of recuperation he did not want it. He felt the misery of departure come out of the future and felt the foretaste of it, sick and bitter in his mind. He did not want the agony and the loneliness and the complications of being without her.

  ‘When?’ he said. ‘When must I go?’

  He took hold of her with his right arm, holding her at the waist, pulling her body forward until the shape of it was clear and firm against him.

  ‘To-morrow,’ she said. ‘Perhaps to-morrow.’

  It was very sudden. ‘To-morrow?’ he said.

  ‘Or the next day,’ she said. ‘My father will know.’ She lifted her face and looked at him, very serious and tender. ‘You will be glad to get back in England.’

  He did not know whether it was a question from her or not; he only knew that he would not be glad. He did not know what to say to her now, and she said:

  ‘What will you do when you are in England again?’

  ‘Fly,’ he said. He spoke without thinking. The decision to fly, determined by the fears that he would never do so again, must have lain already made in his mind. He seemed to pick it out unconsciously. And having expressed it, he knew that some how, some day, he had to fly again, that it was an essential part of his life, without which living was not complete.

  ‘But the arm?’ she said.

  ‘Men have ridden bicycles with one arm,’ he said. ‘If there is something you want to do very much you will do it.’

  ‘Will you fly the bombers again?’ she said.

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Over here?’ She lifted her head a fraction higher, and he saw the faintest gleam of light flash in the dark pupils. He understood what it meant and could not bear it and held her suddenly very close to him. He understood now what it would mean to fly over France again: how the infinite darkness or the moonlight with its Alpine distances of crumpled cloth would have for him the complication of additional fears. He saw the irony of flying over France, twice a night, perhaps twice a week, for all the months and perhaps all the years of the rest of the war, and how in the moonlight he would look down and see the glassy line of the rivers, thinking always of this river, and how she herself would look up at every sound of aircraft in the night, wondering if it might be himself flying above her. If we send five thousand bombers across France, every night of the year, he thought, nothing could change her wonder. If I go to-morrow, he thought, nothing can alter that one fact. Once I am gone we are a million miles apart. The war splits us apart with infinity.

  There was only one thing to do. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen. Please do something for me.’

  ‘I will do anything for you,’ she said. As she spoke he felt the inside of himself crying, dry and bitter. ‘I will do anything.’

  ‘Then do this,’ he said. ‘Before I go tell me the name of the river, the name of the town, and your father’s name. So that I shall know and can come back. Will you do that for me? Please.’

  ‘Yes. I will.’

  She spoke very quietly, but the words had for him all the depth and solidity of the earth. They had an everlasting permanence that nothing could shake. He could carry them beyond this moment, and beyond any moment of doubt that the future might hold, and take comfort from them.

  ’And will you tell me where you live?’ she said. ‘So that when the war is over I can write to you.’

  ’Yes,’ he said.

  Suddenly she held him with great desperation, crying bitterly to him. ‘Don’t fly again. Don’t fly. I don’t want you to fly again.’

  ’It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I shall be all right.’

  Jesus, she knows, he thought. He stood stupidly staring across the darkening orchard, through the narrow avenues of trees. The pain of all the things which had troubled him as a pilot and of which he had never spoken to a soul now seemed to stand simply before him. All of his flying life had been in a sense screened round by fear. It had been carefully screened from his mother, from Diana, from his friends; it was screened from them by his behaviour, his language, by all the expressions on his face. It was screened even more securely from himself by his own emotions. Yet underneath it all, underneath the pretence which many continuous operations sometimes made very brittle, he had a curious and infinite belief in his own immortality. Other pilots could go and not come back, but never himself. It had not ever seemed possible for him to die. Now, because of his arm, because of the night of confused and bare terror in the bedroom, when pain had ripped the superficial skin from every emotion, it was possible to think of death. Yet he knew, all the same, yet without any reason that he could name, that he still would not die. He had simply become, through pain and the loss of his arm, a more conscious person. Because of the girl part of himself had come from behind the screen. But behind it all, still, very deep and infinitely secure, lay that absurd and untouchable belief in his own immortality.

  She roused him from these few seconds of thinking by saying suddenly: ‘We shouldn’t talk of things that may not happen. It is time to be sensible. My father will be back with the pass for you.’

  ’Yes, it’s time to be sensible,’ he said.

  It was awkward to hold her with his one arm, and now he turned her body slightly so that his arm was across her breast. He began to kiss her, and while he was kissing her he touched first one breast and then the other, holding them with tenderness. It seemed to him that this was, perhaps, not the first but the last moment between them. He pulled the blouse gently away from her shoulders. She moved herself so that first one arm and then the other came clear, and until he could feel all the upper part of her shoulders naked and smooth in his hand. Then she turned a little and pressed herself very closely, half sideways, against him, so that her bare shoulder pressed against the stub of his severed arm, until the pain of it shot up through his body and broke at his lips in a little gasp, making him break away.

  ‘This is not sensible,’ she said.

  ’You said you would do anything for me,’ he said. Down beyond the dark avenues of the orchard there was no longer any light from the sun. His tenderness for her as he touched her breasts was as infinite as the darkness stretching out beyond the plain.

  ’Yes, I will do anything,’ she said.

  Françoise’s father went into the room behind the kitchen and lay down on the sofa in the darkness. He lay there flat and motionless, staring upwards. He had eaten nothing since early morning, but he did not feel at all hungry now. His stomach felt as if it had become pushed up into his chest and slowly now the sour weariness of it was oozing up into his throat and mouth. Now and then he tried to swallow the sickness back again, curling his tongue over his dry lips, but each time his throat seemed to close, forming a trap that held the sickness up. He lay there for about ten minutes, pressing his hands on his stomach, too tired to shut his eyes, until he heard the voices of Franklin and the girl.

  He lay there for about another five minutes, not moving, until Franklin opened the door and came in.

  ’I am lying down,’ he said. ‘Ple
ase forgive me.’

  The door remained open an inch or two as Franklin crossed the room, following the sound of the voice. The light pouring through it was thrown in a long yellow stick across the round mahogany table on to the wall and the sofa beyond, and he walked round the table until he could see the light crossing the hands that lay clasped on the stomach. For a few moments longer he could not see the face.

  They said you wanted to talk to me,’ Franklin said.

  ‘Yes, I have something for you.’ The hands moved a little higher, towards the chest. ‘I have the papers.’

  ‘I am most grateful,’ Franklin said. ‘It has been a great trouble for you.’

  ‘A little trouble. One expects that’

  Franklin, seeing better now in the darkness, looked at the face. The lines in the cheeks, normally deep, were now like dark cracks in the faintly visible flesh. The eyes were not yet visible at all.

  ‘You are very tired,’ Franklin said. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. It is not altogether that.’

  ‘Should we discuss it in the morning?’ Franklin said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It is better now.’

  Franklin saw the hands move and unclasp themselves. He saw the white gleam of a square of paper.

  ‘I have the papers here. I thought it better to explain it to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Franklin said. Beyond the kindness of the voice he detected an odd note of reservation, almost despair. It seemed very strange to him also to be talking in the dark.

  ‘The papers will cover all normal emergencies,’ the father said. ‘The question of your arm is covered. You are the victim of industrial accident. It is quite simple. You are travelling to Marseilles for treatment in hospital there. The necessary papers are there, signed by our friend the doctor.‘