The Charioteer: A Novel

16

HE ARRIVED BACK IN the ward just before the night staff came on. The Staff Nurse said, “Oh, there you are, Odell; I suppose you know Sister’s absolutely livid with you?”

“Yes, I was afraid of that.”

“If you told that child to eat your dinner as well as his own and say you were there, I don’t think much of it. When she taxed him with it he got nervous and brought the whole lot up again.”

“No, really I didn’t. Is he all right?”

“Not much thanks to you. Get to bed now for goodness’ sake, if you don’t want me to tell her you cut your treatment as well. Lucky for you it’s her half day. All I can say is, I hope it was worth it.”

Mervyn, flattered by Laurie’s concern, waved it away. “It’s all right, it was a bit of a waste, but I ate some sweets when I got hungry again, and there was a super pie for supper, I had some more. Did you fix everything okay?”

“Yes, thanks. We’d better stop talking or Nurse won’t like it.”

“Go on, we’ve got six minutes yet. I say, Spud, you know what? I had a visitor this evening. I bet you sixpence, come on, I bet you a hundred thousand pounds you don’t guess who I had.”

“I can’t think,” said Laurie, coming near to a literal truth just then. “Someone from school?”

“Go on, you’re soppy, they come Sundays. Come on, guess. I bet you never do guess. Shall I tell you? Do you give up? Okay, then you owe me a hundred thousand pounds, see? It was Mr. Lanyon. He came right into the ward and said is Sister off duty, so then he asked Nurse if he could see me, and she said, well, don’t stay long, only she was busy, see, so he stayed for ages, he told me all about Morse, and he showed me how you sail a dhow, he drew me one, and he gave me my soap and flannel to wash, he stayed right up till they came to make the bed. I bet you’d never have guessed, would you? Would you, Spud? You’d never have guessed if you weren’t there he’d come just to see me?”

“No,” said Laurie. “Was that all you talked about?”

“Coo, no. We talked for ages.” The first bright shine of elation had gone from his voice, and there was half a question in it.

“What about?”

Already the old sharp look was coming back into Mervyn’s face; no clear suspicion, only the knowledge that he was being given at best half a truth. “Only what I was going to do when I leave school, and he asked about you, he asked where you were. So I said I didn’t know, you had to see about something on business.” He gave the sharp look again, this time a request for approval. Laurie realized that this was some kind of stock answer he had been taught to make at home, perhaps when creditors called. No doubt at the time he had simply told all he knew; this canniness was retrospective. Laurie could feel in himself all the wheels running down in a slack hopeless sense of universal defeat. “I’m glad you had a nice talk.”

“Yes, I thought he was super.” Laurie sensed, in the pause, a forlorn hope of having everything made right again.

“He tells some good stories, doesn’t he? I ought to have left a message for him, but I forgot.”

“He said he’d come back tomorrow.” A cautious relief quickened in Mervyn’s voice. “I say, Spud, did you know, it’s Sister’s day off tomorrow? Mr. Lanyon didn’t know it was, so when I told him, he said he might come and see me again, just for a minute.”

“That would be fine. But sometimes he gets orders at short notice. So if you don’t see him, don’t be upset.”

The night nurses were coming in; now there was no need to talk any more. But though the raid that night was a light one and soon over, he was awake till three, with the tight spinning wakefulness of mental exhaustion. Soon after five the lights went on and the day’s work began.

The long featureless desert of the morning passed. After dinner he dozed fitfully for about an hour, till it was time to go for his treatment and make his apologies to Miss Haliburton. After that there was nothing to do but think.

At five Laurie slipped out of the ward quietly, and waited at the head of the stairs. In the ward at the bottom someone had just died and the widow was led away crying. For a little while the flagged stone well was empty; then two housemen paused there to exchange a bit of hospital scandal and laugh; a long wait, then a very young nurse hurried away on an errand, rolling down her sleeves and pushing the hair out of her eyes. The next footsteps were Ralph’s.

The landing was too near the ward; Laurie went down, and they met on the bend of the stairs. With a kind of horror, he saw that Ralph looked exactly the same. Even now that one knew, there seemed nothing behind his smile but a certain alertness and anxiety, there was nothing to see.

He said, “Hello, Spud. What happened yesterday? If you left a message for me I never got it.” Laurie didn’t answer; he thought his face would be answer enough. Ralph looked at him again and said, “What’s been going on, for God’s sake? You look terrible. What’s the trouble, Spud, tell me about it.”

“I’ve been to see Andrew,” Laurie said, and waited.

Ralph waited too. His face betrayed nothing. If one hadn’t known, it would have seemed to show mere bewilderment passing into concern.

Laurie said, “Do you still want to know what the trouble is?”

With an anxious-sounding irritability Ralph said, “Yes, of course I do.”

Laurie remained silent; but this time it was because he had been left without words. Ralph’s fair brows came down in a straight line. He hadn’t even dropped his eyes. He said, slowly, “I suppose you mean he’s found out.”

Still Laurie stared, unbelieving. It had really seemed to him, till this moment, that he was ready for anything, that not a single illusion about Ralph was left. But he had taken for granted courage in a corner; he had imagined Ralph standing up to this as he had when Mr. Straike had asked him his name.

At first it had seemed not to matter what one said, the thing had been to get it over; but now he felt anger rising in him, pent, aching anger from hidden places, the blind undischarged poison of guilt and conflict and suppressed resistance. He said, “You should know.”

“I don’t understand. Why?”

After a short pause Laurie said, “Christ!”

“Now look, Spud,” said Ralph, suddenly crisp, “this isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“I’ve got some good news for you,” said Laurie bitterly. “He’s gone up to London. You did better than you expected there. He’s gone to work in the worst-bombed place he can find, he thinks he ought to because he hit you. I’m glad you had a good laugh about it. Are you satisfied now?”

“Hit me?” said Ralph, staring. “Hit me?”

Laurie felt physically sick. He knew that this would have seemed to him really the voice of an innocent person, if any other explanation were possible, if his informant had been anybody in the world but one. His memories grimaced at him. He said, “Oh, don’t be so cheap.”

Ralph stood with his back to the iron banister, his right hand gripping the rails. His eyes seemed to have become darker because of the changed color of his face. He said, presently, speaking slowly and carefully, “Look, Spud, I’m sorry to say this, I know you’re fond of him; but if that’s what he says, he’s putting something over on you.”

It had only wanted that. Laurie thought of Andrew on his knees scrubbing the filthy floor, of Willis making for the bucket, of Mr. Straike, of the whole terrible vulnerability of goodness in the world.

“Excuse me.” Two theater porters, with a stretcher and a nurse, had come up below them. They drew back, mechanically, to opposite sides. The senior porter said over his shoulder, “These stairs is supposed to be kept clear.”

The interruption had sharpened Laurie’s anger, and the pause had given him time.

“Are you asking me now to take your word against his? You must have forgotten what people who speak the truth are like. I know what you are, I’ve only been pretending to myself; as far as I’m concerned, this serves me right. When you wanted me to live with you and go on seeing him as if nothing had happened, I really knew then. You could be trusted once, you knew what it was all about, you had it in you; but it’s gone now, you’ve no feeling for it any more, you’re all blunt at the edges. Won’t you ever realize why it is when you try to run other people’s lives you can’t do anything but harm? God, must you go on putting yourself in charge and smashing everything you don’t understand? Like a drunk trying to mend a watch.” He paused for breath. Ralph stood against the rail in silence. His face had a dead, fixed, stupid look. Laurie had a feeling of total devastation in which all objectives had been destroyed. He said grayly, “I suppose you can’t help it by now. Too many Bunnies in your life.”

At first Ralph hardly seemed to know he had finished speaking; he stood there, his face curiously stretched and sharpened over the bones, looking half at Laurie and half through him, as people look through a passing stranger when deep in thought. When he spoke it was almost a soliloquy. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, very likely.”

Laurie said, “You’d better go, they want the stairway kept clear.”

A nurse from the ward above came hurrying down the stairs, glanced at Ralph with a flicker of interest, then, touched with discomfort, bustled past them without looking around.

Ralph said, “Yes, I’ll be going.” He had already moved down a stair, when he paused and looked upward. “Just a moment. When did this happen? This boy, I mean, which day did we meet?”

“How can you talk about it? It was only for you I promised not to see him. And the day I came to tell you, you knew what you’d just done, and you … you—”

“Sunday, then, was it?” He paused. “Not that it matters, really, after all. All right, Spud, goodbye, then. I’m sorry; I hope it works out for you sometime. I won’t come back. I see now there’s a lot of truth in what you’ve been saying.”

Laurie watched the flat white top of his cap as he went down the stairs, slowly at first and then more quickly, moving like a sailor without looking down, his hand—the one in the glove—just touching the rail. He turned the corner at the bottom, and was gone. Laurie waited a little, then went out himself into the street. If he returned to the ward, Mervyn would be sure to ask if Mr. Lanyon was coming.

It was too cold to walk, and he was too tired. In the first cinema he came to, he sat through the meaningless noise of a gangster film. As time passed, and he began to think, he became occupied with the growing strangeness of finding himself so free. As little as three weeks ago, his life had been full of strings: a home, three people he had been tied to. Now he was as free as air, he could go anywhere, it made no difference to anybody.

The film had changed and there was a shot of a girl running with a dog. In the distance she looked like Nurse Adrian, of whom he hadn’t thought for days. Now that his life was so uncomplicated, he supposed he might write to her sometime. The thought made a faint tinge of color on the aseptic blankness of freedom. They would reread, as others did, their letters before posting them, measuring carefully their signals of interest and liking, not replying too quickly for fear of seeming to force the pace. Passingly he wondered whether Miss Haliburton had sold the bull-terrier pup yet. At a second meeting, it had seemed to remember him, and its ears were warm.

He left before the end of the film and had something at a snack bar, then went back to the hospital. He had annoyed them sufficiently, he mustn’t be late tonight. As he went up the main corridor he thought that he had been living in an enclosed and tiny personal world. These were the real people: this porter propped on an idle trolley having a quick cigarette, this stout, anxious woman hurrying to someone sick enough to be visited out of hours, these two doctors amicably disagreeing as they strode along to the theater; the little knot of nurses coming back from the first supper shift, crying, “Oh, no, she didn’t? My dear, what did you do?”

These were the people for whom, after all, he had been fighting. They were the people for whom Andrew was fighting too. He would be one of them from now on.

As he made for his bed, he saw with relief that Mervyn was already asleep.

“Oh, thank goodness, Odell, there you are at last.”

He looked around from his open locker, his dressing-gown in his hand. What had he done now? He had got back in good time. It was Sister’s day off. He had been so anxious to avoid trouble tonight, and get some sleep.

“Mr. Deacon’s been practically living here all evening, trying to get hold of you. I told him you were never back till after eight. I should think if he’s rung once he’s rung four times. I’d better tell him you’re here.”

“I’m sorry, Nurse. I didn’t know I had to see anyone.” He had never heard of Mr. Deacon. This must be some final check before his discharge. It was sure to happen somewhere outside the ward; there seemed no point in undressing. In a few minutes the nurse came back. “Mr. Deacon wants to see you in the doctors’ room. Do you know where it is?”

“Yes, thank you.” It opened off the landing just outside; sometimes he had seen through the open door an examination couch, a desk, and steel files. The housemaster’s study, he thought. He was going on the carpet for having absconded yesterday. It only remained to hope that Mr. Deacon was a civilian. He knocked at the door, which was ajar, and went in.

Mr. Deacon wasn’t sitting at the mahogany desk, but on it, his hands behind him gripping the edge. He straightened up as Laurie came in and said, “God, you would choose tonight to go and lose yourself. I’ve been looking for you since before six.” Laurie realized that he had never till now been told Alec’s second name.

“What did you want me for?” He would have felt more resentment, except that he noticed Alec looked quite ill. He had the kind of skin which with sickness or strain goes a bruised color around the eyes; his eyelids looked like brown crepe, and his ordinarily pale face had a waxy undertinge.

“Where’s Ralph?” he asked. “Did you see him again?”

“Again?” said Laurie. His slowness was self-protective. He had thought that this empty place was all deadened and dull, as one can think with a raw burn till someone takes the dressing off.

With an edgy, fine-drawn impatience Alec said, “After he went at five, did you go after him? When I rang him up, when he took the receiver off, were you with him then?”

“No,” Laurie said.

“You had a row, didn’t you?”

“I’m sorry, Alec. If you don’t mind I’ll go back to bed. I thought a doctor wanted me. I’m sorry. Good night.”

“Now look,” said Alec in a hard casualty-officer’s voice, “there’s no time for all that now. This is serious. Did you have a row with Ralph over one of the orderly boys at the E.M.S. hospital?”

Laurie found that all the anger in him had gone flat and sour: he could feel nothing but a dull swallow of sickness, even at this. He thought again that Alec looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. London had been full of such faces. But now suddenly his dimmed perceptions partly cleared: a vague, premonitory apprehension stirred in him. He said, “That’s nothing to do with you.”

“Make up your mind about that later. Just listen now. If you’ve been told that Ralph went to see the boy and had some kind of scene with him, it isn’t true. That’s all.”

“It must be true.” It disturbed him that Alec’s voice hadn’t been that of a bland peacemaker, but brittle with the exasperation of a tired man. “It must be true, Andrew told me himself.”

“Oh, it’s not the boy’s fault. He’s only young, isn’t he? If someone called claiming to be Ralph, why should he doubt it? Only it wasn’t Ralph, you see. It was Bunny.”

“Bunny?” His entrails shrank, heavy and cold. Of course, he thought, of course. The food he had eaten half an hour before lay hard in his stomach, like a meal of wood. “But how could it be Bunny? Why?”

“Oh, use your intelligence, if you ever do use it. Does it sound the sort of thing Ralph would do?”

“But he was always saying—” Although he could sense above him an annihilating weight of remorse ready to fall, he couldn’t feel it yet, it was pushed out by the grotesque, obscene image of Andrew and Bunny together. “I found it hard to picture you and him as great friends. When he told me it was much more than that—”

His hand reached to his pocket as if to touch the letter might alter his almost verbal recollection of it. “It is like something from another world, but it has touched you, and the touch is real.”

“Well?” said Alec impatiently. “Now it starts to add up, I suppose.”

“But … but he didn’t know Andrew even existed. I didn’t tell Ralph about it till after that. If he knew, then Ralph must have been seeing him all the time. No one else could have told him. That’s nearly—” He stopped, recognizing for what they were the bitter lees of jealousy.

“I can guess how he found out. Sit down, can’t you; don’t stand there passing out on your feet, I’ve got no time to cope with it.”

“I’m not,” said Laurie angrily; but he let Alec push him into the patient’s chair. It was true that he was feeling sick. Alec sat back on the desk, watching his face irritably.

“I know just what he did, the little sod.” He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one in a jerky mechanical way without offering them, and drew on it hungrily. “I know, because I’ve carried the can for him before now. Either he’s been reading your letters, if you’ve written Ralph any, or he’s been at his diary again. I know he reads it because once Bim came out with something at a party, and from the way Ralph looked at me, I knew straight away I was the only person he’d ever told. It would have been just my word against Bunny’s, and I can’t bear these fracas, they make me ill.”

Laurie said slowly, “I know when that happened. I was there.”

“Oh, God, yes, so you were; of course that was why Ralph was so angry about it. He ought to have left his papers with me, like he did while he was at sea; he trusted me in those days, even after we’d split. The bits he used to show me were just travel stuff, but he always hovered rather, ready to grab it back again, so I assumed he’d committed his soul to it here and there. He’d have lost one lot with his ship, I suppose; but if he began another in hospital, God knows what he put in that.” His dark bruised-looking eyes, set in creases of fatigue, stared at Laurie with dislike. He was smoking feverishly, burning the cigarette down one side. “Of course, living in the same house with Bunny, he must have locked things up. I suppose he didn’t think to put a Yale on.”

It was like getting an anonymous letter, Andrew had said. As a comment on Ralph it might have sounded a little shrill, if the context had not seemed to explain everything. There are drawings which when inverted reveal the features of a new and different face. In a dead voice, its protest mechanical, Laurie said, “How do you know all this?”

“Oh, in the usual way. Toto Phelps and Bunny have been honeymooning for two full weeks now; anyone could have told him Toto’s one to get very nasty if he’s two-timed, but all these wide boys get swelled head. The crash came yesterday, and Toto couldn’t wait to plant the story where it could do most good. He’s scared stiff of Ralph, so he came to me.”

Laurie sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands pressed to his forehead. Alec twitched out the cigarettes again and lit another from the bent stub of the first which he trod into the rug. “I didn’t believe it myself at first. I said to Toto, ‘Don’t give me that, Bunny’s too crude for that Cinquecento stuff.’ But Toto says it was more or less handed him on a plate. I gather the final break with Ralph was fairly acrimonious, Ralph wouldn’t enlarge on that very much to you, I expect, and he didn’t change digs for a week afterwards. Bunny found out all he could in the meantime; well, of course, being Bunny, his first thought was that the thing between you and the orderly boy mightn’t be quite what you’d made it look to Ralph. So he went down just in the hope of finding some silly little piece whom he could charm into spilling the beans. Instead of which—well, I’ve met a few Quakers, I can imagine. And then the moment he introduced himself as a friend of yours, the boy said, ‘You must be Ralph Lanyon’: the uniform, of course. Well, improvisation is Bunny’s middle name. You must have noticed it.”

“Yes,” said Laurie emptily. “Yes, I know.”

“After all, there was nothing to give him away definitely except the hand, and Bunny’s always got his hands in his pockets; they were there at the start of the conversation and he remembered not to take out the left one. He must have remembered even when he was hit in the face. If he had any application, he could probably learn to be quite dangerous.”

“He was as good as he needed to be,” said Laurie bitterly.

“What happened?” asked Alec, as if he didn’t expect an answer. “Well, you could have known a couple of hours ago if you’d stayed put. I saw Toto last night; I was going to have told you this morning. But Sandy had one of his bad turns, climbing the walls and threatening what he’d do to himself, and I’ve been frightened to leave him, to tell you the truth. I had to ring up Dallow to do my jobs for me, and Christ, what I found when I got back.” He got up from the table with a nervous jerk; but the room was tiny and there was nowhere to walk to.

“Is Sandy all right?” said Laurie, though he didn’t care.

“Oh, yes,” said Alec in his flat edgy voice. “I suppose so … I’ve lived my own life to some extent. One can’t tell him everything, you know what he is. I’ve let Bunny get away with little things before now, because of the trouble he could make if he wanted to. Then this blew up, and I thought, No, there’s no two ways here, if I pass this it’s blackmail. So I did what I always say one should, I told Sandy everything Bunny could have told him. When I got back eventually, after about two hours’ sleep, I found one of Harrison’s gastrectomies leaking, and they’d buzzed for me three times.” He had displaced a pile of report forms on the desk; mechanically he began to straighten them. “I’m due to take my finals next summer. I don’t know how I can go on like this.”

Laurie had been thinking that Alec always seemed to save his confidences for occasions when one was incapable of taking them in. He said, “You’ll be all right, because you’re more a doctor than you’re a queer.”

Alec pushed the forms together and stood up. “You know,” he said slowly, “that’s the first sensible remark anyone’s made to me all day. Let’s hope you’re right. How could you be such a bloody fool about Ralph? Didn’t it even strike you he hadn’t a mark on him after this alleged brawl? Bunny’s been going around with a split lip for nearly a week, from walking into a lamp-standard in the blackout, he said. You don’t seem to have given the orderly boy credit for much élan. And why should he hit Ralph, anyway? Even if Ralph did put it to him, he’d never put it like that.”

“No,” said Laurie. Another bit of the letter had come back to him.

“He denied it at first,” he said. “And then, in the end, he seemed not to be denying it.”

“I suppose he just thought what the hell. Or else—” Alec smoked in silence for some moments, more evenly now, his hands pushed down into the pockets of his white coat. “Ralph’s got a simple mind in some ways, but it follows through. Unlike so many of our fraternity, he’s no good at ducking out. It was his doing in this sense, that he was the link. He let in the jungle. About one queer in a thousand has the guts to accept that sort of responsibility, and he’s the odd one.” He fell silent again, then looked up suddenly. “Just how bad was this row between you?”

Laurie saw Alec summing up his face; there seemed no need to answer.

“Final?” Alec asked. His voice had sharpened.

Laurie got up. “Will it be all right for me to use this telephone? I don’t want to leave it till morning.”

“He won’t answer it. I told you, he took the receiver off the hooks as soon as the bell started. About six-thirty.” He looked at his watch. With abrupt decision he sat down at the desk, searched the paper-rack, and got out a form. “You’d better go around there. Yes, for God’s sake go around right away. I’ll give you a pass. Family affairs, married sister ill. I’ve no right to do this; never mind, you’re not supposed to know that, you’ll be covered anyway. Here you are.” He blotted the form swiftly and pushed it at Laurie. “I’ll see the Night Nurse. I can’t help what she thinks. Get on your way and don’t loiter. He’s not like Sandy, you know.”

Laurie took the form. He didn’t ask what Alec meant by this uncharacteristic statement of the obvious. He was tired now to the point when he had begun to live on his nerves. He felt he could go on forever, that he would never sleep again.

At the door he said, “I’m sorry you’ve had this trouble with Sandy because of me.”

“If it wasn’t you,” said Alec unemotionally, “it would be something else. And it wasn’t for you, really. Ralph would never let one do anything for him. It was what most of our rows were about.” His eyes met Laurie’s. Neither had moved, but they were like people at a station who see each other receding and getting small as each departs on his different journey. Alec said, “Walk out through the front door, not the lodge. And get a move on.”

In the street outside the hospital, a taxi was unloading its freight of relatives summoned to someone critically ill. Laurie hailed it and got in. The night was black, and bitterly cold.

The drive, from which he had expected a breathing space, seemed over in a moment. He stood on the doorstep, making up his mind to ring. The landlady’s radio was on. She was a talker, who had trapped him once or twice in the hall, and he dreaded its happening now. He tried the door; it was unlocked, and he came in quietly. She was rattling away to someone in her room, using the voice she kept for men. Helped by the banisters, he hoisted himself softly up the stairs.

Ralph’s door was open and the light was on. Laurie paused at the stair-head. Suddenly he wondered why he was forcing himself on Ralph at all. It seemed formal and meaningless, an expiation important only to himself. What he had done was done. He ought to see to his own punishment; it was clear, from what Alec had said about the telephone, that Ralph wanted nothing of it or of him. Thinking about Ralph as he looked again at the door, he knew suddenly before he reached it that the room was empty.

It looked vividly different, as familiar rooms do after a strong experience. Lying on the bed was a shirt, to Laurie’s eye quite clean, which Ralph must just have changed for a still cleaner one. He always used to hurry such things out of sight like guilty secrets; to have found it seemed one more offense against him. He must only have gone out for a few minutes, Laurie thought.

He walked in, across the room and around it; he was at the point of fatigue when delays are intolerable and one tries to abolish them by continuing to make the motions of effort. It was mainly under this taut compulsion to be doing something that, when he found two or three letters on the table stuck down ready for posting, he picked them up to read the envelopes. The top one was for him. For a moment he felt only the relief of his restlessness, that here was something he could be dealing with. By the time he began to have scruples, his finger was already under the flap, and he noticed that the edge was lifting. It had been closed so recently that the gum hadn’t quite set. For no good reason this made up his mind for him, and he peeled it open.

Ralph’s clear sloped writing was packed in neat sections on a big white sheet from some kind of naval memo-pad. Laurie stood staring at it for a second or two, vaguely aware as he stood by the table of a faint smell which had some incongruous association for him, belonging to some part of his life with which Ralph had had nothing to do. The thought vanished from his mind and he began to read.

Dear Spud,

I am sorry that there seems to be no way of writing to you more quickly than by the post, if one is to avoid people reading it I should have liked you to know sooner that you are not to blame for this in any way. It was Bunny who interviewed your friend, as I suspected, but that’s immaterial. It couldn’t have happened but for me, I saw that immediately, so that I have done what you thought in another way. I am telling you this to get it straight between us, because you are bound to find out sooner or later. The real reason I am getting out is that I can see no future for me at sea, and can’t fancy myself in a shore job. I have had something of the sort in mind ever since Dunkirk. I swear that is true.

I am sincerely sorry for the harm I have done to you and to this boy. You had the right idea in the first place, knowing yourself best, and I came along and bitched up your life in every way. I can see now that I was wrong even at school; I should either have gone the whole way, which in those days would probably have shocked you and put you against it all, or shut up about it altogether. When I found you remembered, I felt it must have been what I wanted to happen. One may as well face these things.

If it is any satisfaction to you, I paid a call on Bunny just now and he has been taken to sick bay, with concussion and broken ribs as well as I could judge. He came round in time to agree it was the blackout once again. I tripped him into admitting he had been at my private papers. I shouldn’t like you to think I had ever discussed you or your affairs with him. If you should see Alec, will you tell him I owe him an apology? He will know what I mean.

You mustn’t go on being upset about this, Spud. I have never had much time for people who do this kind of thing as a form of repartee, so if you want to do anything for me, try not to think of it in that way. The fact of the matter is that if I hadn’t met you again, and had gone on as I was, I might have drifted past the point where a step of this kind ought to be taken, and I would rather have it like this. You did what anyone would in the circumstances. So don’t worry. Just lately I have been happier than I ever had the right to expect, and as one goes round the world one sees that happiness is hard to come by and seldom lasts for long. Good luck to you, Spud. We always agreed that right, left, or center, it is still necessary to make out as a human being. I haven’t done it but you will. Goodbye.

Ralph

Laurie did not begin to think immediately. He was, though now he had forgotten this, very tired. He wondered stupidly for a few moments where Ralph meant to go, and remembered that if he went anywhere at an hour’s notice, it would be as a deserter. The picture of Ralph on the run had a disturbingly wrong shape. Laurie turned to the letter again; but, after all, he didn’t read it. He was not halfway through the first paragraph when he placed the little smell that hung about the table. It belonged to the training depot and the first months of war. As he bent down it got stronger; he saw the cleaning rag soaked in gun-oil at the bottom of the wastepaper basket.

No, he said stupidly; and while his mind was still inert with refusal, he heard the sound of the radio flow out through the opened door downstairs, and Ralph’s voice in the hall.

When one checks a fall one is sometimes aware of the whole complex process as if it were the result of thought. Laurie pushed the letter back into the envelope, licked the gum again, and with swift accuracy stuck it down. He put it on the table exactly where he had found it, resisting his impulse to hide it under the others; crossed the room, and stood leaning on the mantelshelf looking into the fire. Now he noticed that Ralph had been burning papers, and a book of some kind. A yellow flame was licking through a fissure in the black paper, like a tongue between thin lips.

Some final exchange was going on between Ralph and the landlady in the hall. He heard Ralph’s voice, on a note of conventional thanks and apology for giving trouble, moving toward the stairs as he made his escape. It sounded pleasant and easy. Laurie thought that if he had heard it when he first arrived, he would at once have said to himself, “Thank God, everything’s all right.”

He stood beside the hearth, his arm on the high, empty mantelshelf, waiting, and now Ralph was at the door. He had something in his hand, a little strip of postage stamps. Laurie remembered then that the letters on the table had had no stamps on them. Ralph stood quite still on the threshold for a couple of seconds, then came in and shut the door.

Laurie still didn’t know what to say, but now it didn’t matter. Instinct told him it was better to wait, not to make speeches. So he only said, “I had to come.”

As soon as Ralph was in the room Laurie saw his eyes flick over to the writing-table, where the letters stood beside the telephone. Reassurance seemed to bring him to a standstill. Then he said, abruptly, “Did you try to ring me up, about half-past six?”

“Yes,” said Laurie, “but I couldn’t get through.” He spoke with naturalness and conviction. Indeed, he scarcely knew that he was lying. He felt he was expressing something truer than the facts.

As he said it, he, too, turned to the writing-table. But he was looking at the telephone. Now he realized why he had not noticed it before. There had been nothing to notice. The receiver wasn’t off the hooks now. Some time after six-thirty, Ralph must have put it back.

Laurie was unaware, at the time, of doing much more than note this as a material fact. If he had rung later he could have got through; that was all. Ralph’s face was bruised on the left cheekbone; it looked rather drawn and sunken, as if he had been ill, but it was set now and gave very little away. What Laurie felt seemed to have its origin only in himself. He wanted it so. Knowledge was cruelty. The moment he had used it, he threw away the discovery he had made, that he had waited at the door of a house without defenses.

He had not thought of this. He had come to take his punishment and, his penance begun, to leave as he had come, alone. That was to have been the beginning. But that was in another country. “Something was wrong with the line,” he said.

Ralph didn’t move forward. His eyes were dragged down at the corners, as if with lack of sleep; he contracted them strainingly. Behind them, like an almost exhausted runner, his pride seemed to pause, to sway and balance. “What did you ring for?” he said. “I suppose you found out?”

Remorse, even the greatest, has the nature of a debt; if we could only clear the books, we feel that we should be free. But a deep compassion has the nature of love, which keeps no balance sheet; we are no longer our own. So in the presence of this helpless forgiveness, Laurie seemed to himself to be doing only what was nearest in the absence of time to think. There was something here to be done which no one else could do. All the rest would have to be thought about later. He looked Ralph straight in the eyes, believing what he said.

“Afterwards. Alec told me. But I should have come, anyway. I should have had to come back.”

Quietly, as night shuts down the uncertain prospect of the road ahead, the wheels sink to stillness in the dust of the halting place, and the reins drop from the driver’s loosened hands. Staying each his hunger on what pasture the place affords them, neither the white horse nor the black reproaches his fellow for drawing their master out of the way. They are far, both of them, from home, and lonely, and lengthened by their strife the way has been hard. Now their heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle; and when the voice of the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep.