Fair Stood the Wind for France

by H. E. Bates

  ‘I see,’ Franklin said.

  ‘To-morrow night Pierre will hand you over to friends of ours. I am not certain where they will take you. They have their arrangements. It should not be complicated.’

  ‘Yes,’ Franklin said.

  ‘In two days you should be in Marseilles.’

  Franklin did not say anything. He could see the eyes more clearly now. The door had swung open a little, throwing a broader bar of light. In this the eyes had a curiously dead appearance, the lids stiffly curled back, the dark pupils fixed, staring upward.

  ‘Now, as to money.’

  ‘I have money,’ Franklin said.

  ‘Good. Then clothes. We have clothes for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is there anything else you need? It will be better not to take your maps. If anything should happen it might be very awkward.’

  ‘I see. I need the revolver,’ Franklin said.

  ‘You could take it, but it is not essential.’

  ‘I had better take it.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Franklin wondered where the revolver was, but he did not say anything. He did not want to express, once again, his distrust about it.

  ‘I have it,’ the father said. ‘I will bring it up to you. It would be better if you had everything ready to-night.’

  He held up the papers to Franklin.

  ‘In a little while I will bring up the clothes and the revolver,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’ Franklin bent down to take the papers. ‘There are some things for which there are not thanks enough,’ he said. He took one of the hands and held it in the darkness. Its dry coldness and the limpness of the fingers shocked him. ‘I am truly and infinitely grateful.’

  ‘There are some things for which no thanks are necessary,’ the father said. ‘It is our privilege to have done anything for you.’

  ‘Thank you all the same,’ Franklin said. ‘I shall never forget.’

  ‘We too shall never forget.’

  The hand slipped away from Franklin’s, hanging for a moment in the air, as if too tired to drop.

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

  ‘Not altogether tired.’ The voice was the voice of someone who has been shocked into impotence; the words were mere husks of speech, without any spirit at all. ‘To-day I have been to see the family of the doctor.’

  Franklin could not speak. Each time he thought of the doctor, of the grey kindly face without illusions, he felt helplessly furious. The bastards, he thought. The bastards. What have they done now? He did not know what to say.

  He said at last, the anger warm in his voice: ‘It is a sad and terrible thing.’ He tried to put into the words some of the viciousness he felt.

  ‘Yes. Unhappily it is not all.’

  The defeat in the voice was very clear now; it had the same dead prostration as the body lying there in the dark.

  ‘There have not been more shootings?’ Franklin said.

  ‘No. No more shootings. More suffering, that’s all.’

  Franklin did not speak.

  ‘To-day I went to see the doctor’s sister,’ he said. ‘I have known them all since I was a boy. They used to come here and row boats on the river with us. Every summer. The two doctors and the sister. She was so nice. So charming.’ The voice, though very slow, gathered up a little strength. ‘I was very fond of her. There was a time when I thought she might marry me. Many years ago. But you know how it happens.’

  ‘I know,’ Franklin said.

  ‘Possibly it was better to be fond of her as a friend.’ He went on talking with a little more strength, slightly faster, telling Franklin of summers before the war, when the two doctors and the sister would come to the mill, and perhaps the doctor’s son and Françoise and Françoise’s brother, and how in the evenings after the heat of the day they would take boats and row far up the river, fishing and picnicking and perhaps swimming in the cooler backwaters, under the willow trees. As he talked he mentioned, for the first time, Françoise’s mother, who had died five or six years before the war, and Franklin saw the situation as it must have been, with the wife dead and the doctor’s sister coming on Sunday and the father turning over in his mind the idea of marrying again, and perhaps neither rejecting it nor accepting it, but letting it slide on, partly troubled, partly with pleasure, Sunday after Sunday, without decision, until the war or some other circumstance decided it all instead.

  ‘She was younger than both the brothers. Younger than myself. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps she felt that it was not right to marry an older man.’ Franklin saw the truth now; how the decision had been for the woman to make and how, for some reason, she had never made it. The explanation came in a moment. ‘I think she was too devoted to the brothers. You know how there are women who are like that. In a way they get married to their brothers and do not want another man.’

  ‘Yes,’ Franklin said. ‘I know.’

  ‘I do not know quite why I am telling you this.’

  ‘You were going to tell me what had happened.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. That was it.’ He stopped talking for about a minute, the face quite still in the darkness. In the silence Franklin could hear the rush of the mill-race outside. ‘I used to take her something nice when I went into the town,’ he went on. ‘A little butter or something. Perhaps a chicken. To-day I went to see her, and I had a small chicken. But she was not there. They had taken her away.’

  ‘Away?’ Franklin said. The bastards, he thought, the bastards I but it was not that. The voice said very quietly:

  ‘Ever since they shot the doctor she has not been the same. She has been going out of her mind.’

  Franklin stood looking indecisively at the bar of light cutting into two black halves the motionless body on the couch. He knew now the meaning of its prostration. He did not say anything. The voice coming up from the couch seemed very distant and small and lonely.

  ‘I feel as if I am quite lost,’ it said.

  Franklin stood for a moment or two not saying anything and not knowing what to say. It seemed better to go, he thought at last, and he moved away from the couch towards the middle of the room. He saw the face slightly turn as he did so, the light falling more fully across it, so that the eyes became clear and awake for the first time.

  ‘Tell them I am not coming in to supper. I would rather lie here for a while. I shall feel better.’

  ‘Would you like a drink? ’ Franklin said.

  ‘No. You are very kind. No thank you.’

  Franklin moved across the room and opened the door. As he did so he looked back. In the broad strong bar of light the white face turned to watch him, its tears shining and slowly falling, without a sound, as if the eyes had come alive at last and the voice were dead.

  In the kitchen he ate supper with Françoise, the old woman, and Pierre, the bread dry in his throat, so that he found it hard to swallow. Every now and then he looked up and across the table, past the lamp, at the girl. Her eyes were very clear but full of a sort of indecisive wonder, and he was slightly oppressed by a feeling that everything was not right. From the girl he would look to the old woman, slopping her bread in her soup and then sucking it in wetly with her old heavy lips, and she, too, in turn would look up and regard him with oblique steadiness for a few seconds, as if she knew all that had been going on. He did not say anything about the father, but all through the meal he wanted to say something about himself: to express simply, but very deeply, his gratitude about what had happened, but whenever he tried to speak he looked up and saw the eyes of the three people listening, as it were for a sound from the other room, just as once before he had seen them listening for a sound outside.

  When supper was over the girl came with him to the foot of the stairs to say good night. As he held her there, touching her tenderly with his hand again, it seemed like the hardest moment of his life: the moment when all that he felt for her, new and intimate, had to be frustrated
. He knew now that leaving her would be the hardest thing he had ever known. He kissed her once or twice in the darkness, the kiss full of long and painful warmth, his sense of frustration growing as the agony for her grew, until he knew that she, too, could feel it and could bear it no longer.

  ‘I should go now,’ she said.

  ‘All right.’ He knew, under his frustration, that there was no sense in stopping her. ‘Did you mind what happened to-night?’

  ‘No. I wanted it to happen.’

  ‘I am going to-morrow,’ he said. ‘You know that?’

  ‘Yes. I am glad it happened.’

  ‘There is only to-night then,’ he said. ‘Would you come to see me again?’

  ‘If you go now I will try to come to see you. It may not be easy.’ She stood away from him. He heard the old woman washing the dishes in the kitchen, but no other sound. ‘Do you want me – however late it is? ‘

  ‘However late,’ he said.

  In another moment she went away without speaking, and he went slowly upstairs and into his room and lay on the bed. He did not undress, but lay quite motionless, looking through the window at the summer stars. He had come to the moment he dreaded. He felt like a man who has gone into strict training for the simple purpose, finally, of jumping off a building. I should have torn the bandages off my arm every day, he thought. It would have kept me here. It would have been less painful, too.

  Lying there, thinking, he slowly took off his collar and tie, and then his shoes. The night was warm and the stairs were very soft, and he watched a planet going down across the plain, westward, like a trembling orange flower. He watched it for a long time before he heard the sound of feet on the stairs. He raised himself on his elbow and waited. The footsteps came up to his door and after a moment the door opened.

  ‘Are you asleep?’

  It was the father. ‘No. I am not asleep,’ Franklin said. His heart was beating heavily.

  ‘I have brought the clothes and the revolver,’ the father said. ‘I will put them on the chair. Don’t get up.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Franklin said.

  ‘The revolver is in the pocket of the jacket,’ the voice seemed firmer and calmer now. ‘And the cartridges. You will find them in the morning.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Franklin said. He lay propped on his elbow and watched the dark figure move across the starry window, putting the pile of clothes on the chair. He waited for it to move back again, and then said good night.

  ‘Good night,’ the father said.

  He shut the door very quietly, and Franklin lay back in the bed and waited.

  He lay there for another hour, waiting for the girl. Once or twice he raised himself up on his elbow again, listening, but there was never any sound except the noise of the mill-race, so steady and continuous that he heard it only when he listened consciously. At all other times it was part of the silence, warm and drowsy everywhere in the house and all across the plain. Finally he shut his eyes and lay half asleep, not listening, his thoughts streaming away in ribbons of bright confused pictures, until the ribbons snapped and he was fully awake again.

  It was very late then, and he got off the bed at last and began to undress. He hung his jacket on the back of the chair by the window and then picked up, in a moment of curiosity, the jacket the father had brought. Lifting it up, he was surprised by its lightness. He took it over to the bed and spread it out, feeling in the pockets. The ammunition was in the left-hand pocket, but there was no revolver. He turned the coat over to feel in the inside pocket, but there was nothing there. He went over to the window and picked up the trousers, but they were very light, too. He dropped them on the floor and ran his hand across the chair seat in the darkness. He knew suddenly that the revolver had never been there at all.

  He stood for a few moments longer by the window, wondering what to do. Then he opened the door of the bedroom and, in his stockinged feet, went downstairs.

  When he got to the kitchen the lamp was still burning on the table, but the room was empty. He stood for a moment and looked about him. A single plate and knife and fork had been left on the table, and with them a glass, a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. He stood for about half a minute longer and then went across the kitchen and opened the door of the other room.

  As he opened the door he saw the broad bright bar of light fall across the room. It fell across the table and the sofa and the wall beyond. Franklin walked round the table and then, in the full lamplight, saw the father lying on the sofa. His face was turned away from the light and was partially buried in a cushion, as if he had fallen asleep in the attitude of a child crying itself to sleep in the pillow. Franklin stood for a moment and looked down, wondering if to disturb him. Then he bent down and touched the cushion with his hand.

  In that moment he saw that the cushion, the revolver and the head were one: a mass of brilliant and bloody confusion falling out of his own shadow into the bar of light.

  CHAPTER 16

  FIVE days later Franklin stood alone in the room above the mill, by the small window where he had once clung sickly to watch Goddy and Taylor disappear beyond the vines. He stood watching the rain beating on the road below and on the little funeral party, made up of one coach and a hearse, followed by the dog, just leaving the house. He watched the rain beating on the black roof of the coaches and on the priest’s hat and on the bare heads of Pierre and the father’s brother and on the black dresses of the old woman and Françoise. It fell slantwise, driven in on a westerly wind. The wind was squally and seemed at last to screw up the funeral party like a scrap or two of black paper and blow it up the wet road behind the house, until it disappeared. The dog followed behind, shaking itself in the rain.

  When it had gone he stood watching the rain. He was a man who had trained himself to jump off a precipice; now the precipice had gone. His gun, which had destroyed it, had gone too. He did not know what had happened to it, and at first the idea of an English revolver in a French court had scared him very much. He had reflected, too, on the uselessness and stupid irony of that gun: how he had taken it on nearly forty trips, over Germany and France and Italy, and how he had never fired it, and how, at last, it had blown a good, decent, broken Frenchman out of the world. He was bitterly glad he would never see it again. He remembered the only time he had ever fired it. It was on the short range at the station, on a dull March day. He fired six shots and cut two small ineffectual-looking holes on the target, one at four o’clock and one at seven. He was rather ashamed and determined to do better at the second shoot, but it came on heavily to rain and the shoot was cancelled, and he stood with the rest of the two flights of his squadron under a corrugated iron shed and watched the rain, driven also on a westerly wind, blowing cold and fast against the little black and white targets at the end of the range. It was then that Watson, the American, had offered to teach him to shoot. He was sorry afterwards he had not learned, but now he was glad. He had revised his opinion about the effectiveness of the revolver as a weapon. It had the power to shake a world.

  It had shaken the world of the old woman, Pierre and Françoise to pieces. He stood thoughtfully watching the rain driving across the plain below. It reminded him, every moment, more and more of England. After weeks of sun, of the long, bald days of glittering heat, the rain seemed almost unendurably soft and friendly. And he knew as he watched it blowing steadily down, washing the dust from the summer grass, from the apple leaves and the late fruit still on the boughs, washing the summer scum from the river and the reeds, what it meant to the English as a people. The rain woke in him, as nothing else had woken in him, all his feeling for England. It woke in him the misery of an exile and the longing to be home. It was a longing deeper, at that moment, than his feelings for the girl; deeper than the mere desire for escape; deeper than the war, the things the war had done, and the desire for the war to be over. As he stood there all the memory of rain in England washed down through his blood and steadily increased the ache of homesickness until he
was suddenly and utterly tired of the mill, the house, the river, and the flat French plain, tired of the smell of France, of speaking and thinking another language and, above all, of the complications. He felt all the Englishness of himself washed bare to the surface, clean and clear and simple as the rain.

  He opened the window an inch or two and looked out, hearing the rain. The sound of it, like the smell and motion of the wind, was very cool. He put his hand on the window-ledge and the rain blew down on it, wetting his fingers. The land was grey across the plain, so that in the farthest distance the fields became nothing but indefinable lines of vapour, like low cloud.

  He stood there looking at the landscape, all neutral under the rain, and thought of his position. In the empty mill, under the low cloud, watching the sky filled with rain, he felt very alone. It suddenly seemed to him that he had never known the family. They were part of the illusions of a summer dream. The rain had washed them away, with the wet black horses, the shining black hearse, and the black wet priest, up the muddy road, as it would wash away, soon, the leaves of summer. They seemed less and less real as he thought of them. Even the sight of the revolver, which seemed to have blown out of the cushion a mass of tangled scarlet stuffing, seemed unreal also; and with it went the unreality of the screams of the old woman, yelling to God to bring back her son, and the calm white face of the girl.

  After the father had shot himself they had hidden him again in the mill. The unreality of four days slipped away, too. The rain neutralized with its cool sound and its grey beauty the horror of the blood in the lamplight, the misery of not being able to sleep at night, the worry about the revolver, his agony for the girl. It washed away the blood that he felt was on his mind. It cooled and calmed him until finally he stood there considering what seemed to him the most natural idea in the world – of how he would get away, alone, that day.

  He shut the window and stood with his back to it, thinking calmly. All his belongings were on the floor, tied in readiness in a paper bundle. He was wearing his service shirt and tie, and the black coat and grey trousers given him by the family. He took off the collar and tie and put them in his jacket pocket, and then, in place of them, knotted his handkerchief round his neck. In his pocket he still had the papers given him by the father. Now all he needed was a little food, which he could get in the house and, he thought, a little luck before nightfall. With a little luck, under cover of rain, he could make ten miles before darkness. He would walk south – westward and trust to luck. So far his luck had been good; very good, perhaps too good. It had seemed to run like the weather: in a long bright spell, all in his favour. Even the arm in a way had been lucky. Now that the weather had broken he had a superstitious feeling that his luck might break, too. He stood with his small bundle of things under his arm. I have to go some time, he thought. The rain beat against the window and the roof, and there was no other sound. He felt suddenly that he could not bear the pain of farewell. It would be better to go now, alone, while the reality of the faces in the house were dissolved. He took a last look round the room where he had first slept with O’Connor and Sandy and the two boys. Not since that time had there been a moment when the faces seemed to have less power to affect him than now.