by H. E. Bates
The line of trucks began to move forward, the couplings swinging loose, then tightening, then loosening and tightening again. Something made him look up and down the quay. There was no one in sight. He was aware suddenly of being pulled forward into a movement that he had not made. He looked quickly up and down the quay again, and then, seeing it still empty, ran over to the trucks. They were moving in irregular leaps forward, the couplings tightening and loosening as the engine pulled forward far down the quay. And he knew that as he walked beside them all he had to do was to step on a brake-handle, pull himself up the side of the truck, and get inside. He did not know at all why he should be thinking like this. The unexpectedness of the moment, of a new chance of escape suddenly opening up before him, seemed to fascinate him remorselessly. He remembered afterwards working out, for a second or two, as the trucks began to move slightly faster, how he would put his foot on the brake-handle and how quick he would have to be to lever himself up. He remembered seeing the silken steel edge of the truck-wheel shining below the brake-handle: seeing only the two things together in the entire world, all the rest shut out. His life seemed suddenly to depend on those two pieces of steel. He actually grasped the brake-handle with his one hand and began to run beside the faster-moving truck, not knowing why he was doing it, but seeing only the brilliant steel rim of the wheel running away from him and his hand on the brake-lever to test it finally before he leapt.
He felt his body tauten for the leap and then, in the split second before its tension, like the tension of a catapult, shot him upwards, something again made him look up the quay. And in that instant his mind acted, letting the brake-handle go. His fingers did not for a moment release their grasp. Only his body stopped quite dead, in the act of surprise, while his hand remained grasping the lever, as if he actually wanted to hold back the train. In this second he felt the speed of the train wrench at the socket of his arm with awful sickness before he let go.
The shock of this violent pull at his arm seemed to wake him up. He stood for about ten seconds on the quay beside the moving train, quite still and clear in mind and conscious of what he was doing.
The gendarme about a hundred yards down the track also stood quite still, watching him. Franklin had caught sight of him in the moment before he prepared to leap on the truck. Now for a few seconds they stood watching each other. The gendarme had a rifle. It was slung diagonally across his back. His feet were apart and Franklin could see the wind flapping the legs of his trousers.
Franklin began to walk on, in a diagonal line across the quay, away from the train. It seemed better to move forward rather than back. He had the impression that if he once turned back he would begin to run and that, moreover, if he began to run, the gendarme would shoot him. He did not want to be shot. As he came away from the shelter of the trucks he felt the wind flap the empty sleeve of his coat. And now as he looked at the gendarme he had the impression also that he was looking not particularly at Franklin, but at the empty sleeve.
All the time Franklin walked across the quay the gendarme did not move. Between the gendarme and the edge of the quay, up which the railway trucks were now going smoothly forward, there were ten or fifteen yards through which Franklin had to pass. There was still no one else in sight, and now Franklin knew why there was no one else in sight. He knew suddenly that many other people beside himself must have come along that quay in search of a train. If you could hide in a train you could, with a little luck or a little patience or both, hide in a ship. It was clear that the gendarme did not carry a rifle to keep himself warm.
He walked the last fifteen or twenty yards before he reached the gendarme with a stiffness of a marionette. There was something menacingly comic about the stiffness of the gendarme, too. He stood as if waiting also to be pulled into life by invisible strings. But when he finally came to life it was smoothly, with very quiet precision, so that before Franklin was aware of it the gap through which he could pass was closed.
‘One moment.’ The voice was very abrupt, and the gendarme did not do anything with the rifle. He lifted the first two fingers of his right hand in a small correct gesture that was also hostile. ‘Your papers.’
Franklin stopped. He did not say anything. He was trying very hard to think. It seemed to him quite certain that once the papers got out of his hands he would never see them again. Whether they were correct papers or not seemed now to make no difference. He put his hand on his chest, first one side and then the other, as if feeling for the papers, trying at the same time to think what he should do. All the time the gendarme was looking down at his empty sleeve.
Franklin put his hand into the inside of his jacket. It struck him that it might be better to pretend he had no papers at all.
‘What were you doing on the truck?’
‘The truck?’
‘You were going to get into the truck.’
‘Truck?’
‘All right, all right.’ The gendarme made a pretence of playing irritated piano scales with one hand. ‘The papers. Come on, come on.’
Franklin put his hand inside his jacket, on the left-hand side. His papers were there. He felt them with the tips of his fingers. He pulled his hand out and tried to feel in his outer jacket pocket. It was quite difficult. The gendarme stood watching, silent, lips pressed together, and in this moment the silence of the whole darkening afternoon seemed to compress itself. It seemed to hold them both together. For a second or two there was nothing at all to be heard. The trucks had come to a standstill down the quay; the rain was small and quiet in a sudden spell of calm. The gendarme silently flipped his fingers like a man asking for a card in a game, and Franklin put his hand in his right-hand pocket. His mind seemed to flounder with extraordinary stupidity while the silence compressed itself still further until it seemed almost as if he could feel it pressing down through his body, holding his frightened feet on the quay.
This impression that his feet were frightened did not seem fantastic. The feeling of the whole body was concentrated there. It was a cold and tingling and very intense sensation. He recognized it as a desire to run.
Still feeling for his papers, not really thinking, he pressed his feet hard on the quay. He suddenly had the most violent difficulty not to run. He had to hold himself down. With his mind he did not want to run. If he ran the gendarme would shoot him. And for a moment it was rather like a dream: he was trying to run and yet could not. In spite of the most violent desire to run his feet did not move.
The gendarme was suddenly very angry. He made a violent shrug with his shoulders that brought the rifle forward, within reach of one hand. It looked for a moment as if he were about to unsling it. At the same time he seemed about to say something. And to Franklin, stupid and helpless, even his pretence of fumbling for his papers not very good, the moment was ominous. It seemed like the moment of arrested silence before the shooting begins.
To his astonishment the sound of shooting came rattling through the silence a moment later from far down the quay. He mistook it for a moment for the noise of shunting railway trucks. Then in the second before he saw the gendarme’s head abruptly whipped round he knew that the sound was lower pitched. It had with it a kind of singing whine. Between the sounds also there was a longer interval of silence that could only have been made by the firing of a rifle. In one of these intervals there began the shrill of a whistle, continuous and desperate, as if blown in panic.
The eyes of the gendarme were white with violent surprise. He looked at Franklin extraordinarily like a small child as he put his whistle to his own mouth. He held it for a moment like a piece of silver sugar-rock between his pursed lips, his cheeks inflated in the comic moment before blowing.
In that moment Franklin lifted his good arm. He did not think at all. All the irritant sensation seemed to leap up out of his feet into this arm. Not for any other moment since coming down in the marsh, with the moonlight bursting with bloody and glassy splinters into his face, had he felt anything happen to him with
such explosive violence. He hit the whistle with great force with the flattened palm of his hand. As it caught the sound of whistling and choked it he felt the whistle itself hit the bone at the back of the gendarme’s mouth. It was as if it were a nail driven deep into a cup of jelly.
He saw the gendarme fall backwards in the second before he himself began running. He saw the blood spurt scarlet against the silver whistle. He remembered shutting his own mouth very hard and throwing up his head and leaping forward. He had about sixty or seventy yards to cover before he reached the building on the corner of the quay. Without thinking he ran in series of short diagonal bursts, from side to side. It seemed very foolish. The sideways swing of his running, together with the lopsidedness from his one arm, gave him a motion extraordinarily crab-like. With his one arm he seemed to claw at the air and pull it frantically towards him.
He expected any moment the sound of shooting. Yet when it came, in short bursts as before, intermittent and erratic, he felt as if it shot his own heart with surprise. He had almost reached the corner. In a moment of astonished terror he felt it was the gendarme shooting at him and then, far down the quay, beyond the railway trucks now moving gently backwards, he heard the whine of the shot, low and then high, in the wind.
He was round the corner a moment later. He was still running very fast. He was aware of nothing except a short open space between himself and another and stationary line of railway trucks. He went straight under the trucks, rolling clear under the far side. He felt the stump of his amputated arm hit the steel cradle on a sleeper as he fell, and the brutal shock of it made him stagger. His balance, with one arm, was for a moment or two so upset that he spun round, catching wildly at the air with his good hand. In this moment he saw his world. It revolved with intense reality: the line of trucks, a warehouse, another space, another warehouse. There was no sign of the gendarme, no sound of shooting. In that second he spun his body straight again and ran madly for the space between the warehouses.
Round the corner of the warehouse he saw the world open up into new avenues of trucks, with stacks of coal, more warehouses and, far away, the motionless loading gear of the dock-side black against the windy sky. He rolled under another line of trucks and heard the shooting again, staccato and then whining, over on his left hand. It seemed a little nearer. As he went under a second line of trucks, stooping this time, his mouth eating at the air for breath, he felt suddenly a little sick from the shock of hitting the stump of his arm. He leaned against the buffers of the truck, half hidden, while he looked before him. It was still raining, and now he noticed it for the first time on his face. Then as he wiped his hand across his forehead he knew that it was not rain alone, but rain and sweat, in fine cold drops, together.
He remained there, hidden by the buffers of the truck, for about thirty seconds. It seemed like an enormously long vacuum of time. Nothing seemed to be happening behind him. But before him, now, the firing seemed to be sweeping across the yards. The staccato, singing sound of shots swung clear down the wind. He began to walk cautiously up the side of the trucks, the air sweet and painful as he took it through his open mouth in heavy gasps. Suddenly he was comforted by the gloom of the sky. In half an hour it would be too dark for shooting, and in about an hour too dark for a man to be seen. His breath began to come back as he walked along the trucks, and with it his thoughts and his steadiness. It was only when the firing broke out afresh, suddenly, quite near and almost dead ahead, that he was startled again.
And then, for the first time, he realized what was happening. It struck him suddenly that they were shooting at someone else. He did not quite know why he had missed this simple fact. It made him for a moment more nervous than if they had been shooting at him. The violence of the moment when he had jammed the whistle into the gendarme’s mouth had splintered completely the clearness of his perceptions. He suddenly grasped that he was running from one danger into another. Without thinking he turned to go back. I’m in a bloody mess, he thought, a bloody mess, an awful bloody mess. I’ve got to get back. Somehow, I’ve got to get out of this, I’ve got to get back. He looked quickly back between the trucks. In a few seconds of turning his head the firing broke out again, about a hundred and fifty yards ahead. The nearness of it made him turn back his head. In that moment he saw a man running desperately towards him down the long alley between the trucks.
For a second it was almost like watching the reflection of himself. The man wore a blue striped shirt and black trousers and no coat. He threw himself under the trucks about fifty yards from where Franklin stood. It was just as Franklin had thrown himself. In the second before diving under the trucks, too, Franklin saw the head of the man thrown back with abrupt surprise as if someone had hit it. The face was very thin and white. It had the look of a face that had been running in desperation for a long time.
Franklin lay on his belly between the wheels of the trucks. He could look up the tunnel made by the wheels and see, about fifty yards away, the other man lying there, too. His face was pressed down against the chips between the sleepers, his arms folded over his head, to hide and protect it. He lay very still. The shooting did not begin again, but for a few moments, over to the right of the trucks, there were voices. They seemed to be joined by a voice behind him: the voice of the other gendarme shouting, giving new directions. As the two lots of voices converged, growing confused, somewhere about fifty yards away, Franklin pulled himself slowly along on his belly, grasping the edges of successive sleepers with his hand, then moving forward. He could smell the oil of the sleepers and the grease-boxes of the truck wheels, and with it the smell of coal and coal-smoke and the fresh wind. He pulled himself forward slowly, stopping at intervals to listen, hearing the voices converge and move over beyond the trucks. As he moved on he kept his eyes on the other figure lying between the wheels. It had not moved at all. From the broken and flattened attitude of the head, held down on the sleepers by the hands, it might have been crying with exhaustion and fear. It looked as if it had given up. There was no more shooting now, and the voices seemed to be arguing rather than shouting, and were farther away. Franklin pulled himself steadily along the sleepers, tired too, his body chilled where the wind blew in against the sweat of it, until he was about ten yards away. Then he spoke, calling in a whisper.
‘All right?’ He spoke in French. ‘Are you all right?’
There was no answer; the hands did not move from the head.
‘I think it’s all right now. Did they hit you?’
Lying so flat, between the wheels, Franklin could feel the darkness of the afternoon slowly thickening. If they could wait for a few minutes longer they would never be seen; only a few moments, he thought, only a little longer.
‘Did they hit you?’
As he pulled himself a little nearer, waited for a few moments and then crawled forward again, he saw the hands over the head clasped together, but spread out, the ten fingers forming a net, as if to protect it.
‘It’s all right,’ Franklin said. ‘They were after me, too. It’s all right now.’
He was within touching distance of the man now, the breadth of two sleepers separating them. The man did not move or speak. On the back of one of his hands Franklin could see now where the flesh had been sliced across by something, perhaps a shot, but so close to the bone that there was scarcely any blood. The fact that there was no blood struck him for a moment with terror. He pulled himself another inch or two and touched the hands. They gave a start and fell away from the head almost automatically. Without them the head itself rolled over on the sleepers and the man spoke, with a kind of scared and exhausted anger, for the first time.
‘The bastards!’ he said. ‘The bastards 1 Who are you?’
The words in English were more startling than the first firing of the shots had been. They struck Franklin with an amazing violence even greater than the moment when he had smashed the whistle into the gendarme’s mouth. He spread his hand across the tired face and wiped back the we
t hair. The voice hit him with such pain and joy that his own was almost crying in answer.
‘O’Connor!’ he said. ‘For Christ’s sake. Connie! Connie! O’Connor! O’Connor!’
He was kneeling now, and the face of O’Connor, old and tired, was looking up with slightly open mouth, the lips too startled and weak to come together.
‘Skip,’ he said. ‘Skip. Oh Jesus! ‘
As Franklin knelt above him, the silence complete again without even the distant shouting of voices, and only the sound of rain beating gently on the tarpaulins covering the trucks, O’Connor looked up and saw the loose sleeve of Franklin’s coat. He stared at it for a full minute, not speaking, his thin face white against the oil-dark sleeper in the increasing darkness under the trucks, before he began crying and talking quietly at the same time.
‘Jesus, Skip, what have they done? What have they done?’ he said, and the words were so old with anguish and defeat that Franklin could only lie down on the wet sleepers himself, by the side of O’Connor, with nothing to say in answer.
CHAPTER 21
SOMETIMES as Franklin looked down at O’Connor, prostrate on the bed in the room of the hotel, the brandy still wet on the grey lips that were too tired to accept it, he could see the lines of a dead face. He recalled the moments when he had crawled under the trucks, pulling himself slowly along the sleepers, towards a man who did not move, and how even after the moment of recognition O’Connor had still lain there, staring upwards, eyes dark with fear and hunger and great weariness as they shone from the thin face, very white in the gloom of the afternoon. He recalled the journey back through the dark streets of Marseilles, and how it had seemed a very long way because O’Connor sometimes could not go on without rest, and how he would rest, suddenly, without warning, against the wall of a house, flattening himself back against it, and how Franklin would wait for him and hear the agony of dry breath sucked through his mouth, in quick crying gasps like broken words, as if he were trying to speak and breathe at the same time.
