The Charioteer: A Novel

4

LAURIE SIGNED HIS LETTER to his mother, and reread it. He used to write her rather good letters once, he remembered. “Major Ferguson went over the leg the other day. He says it will always be a bit stiff, and I shall have to wear a thick sole on my shoe or something.” She knew already about his discharge, so there had been little more to say. He went over her last letter again, looking for something that would give him another paragraph; but the best he could find was that the vicar still felt the loss of his wife very much, though it was a year now since her death. Desperate for material, Laurie added a short postscript in which he said he was sorry to hear this.

He sat staring at the letter on the writing-pad, and imagining it rewritten.

Darling Mother,

I have fallen in love. I now know something about myself which I have been suspecting for years, if I had had the honesty to admit it. I ought to be frightened and ashamed, but I am not. Since I can see no earthly hope for this attachment, I ought to be wretched, but I am not. I know now why I was born, why everything has happened to me ever; I know why I am lame, because it has brought me to the right place at the right time. I would go through it all again, if I had to, now that I know it was for this.

Oddly enough, what I feel most is relief, because I know now that what kept me fighting it so long was the fear that what I was looking for didn’t exist. Lanyon said it didn’t, and after meeting Charles’s set I thought he was probably right. If it hadn’t been for him I might have fallen for all that, and missed this. I wish I could thank him.

You may think I have been rather quick to decide I am in love …

He looked up from the page, and then back to it, in an absurd fear that something of all this might have become stamped on the paper. For the first time, now, the secret between them had shape and outline; it would be real when she sat by him at her next visit.

She had been very good to him since he had been wounded. He had wished for her sake he could have got his commission first. There had been hints, and he had already been recommended for sergeant when the great confusion descended; but she had never reminded him of his folly in throwing up the O.T.C., though she had been against it at the time. He had always felt that his best wasn’t good enough for her. Now there was this. But after all, however orthodox his sex life might have been, he knew they would never have discussed it; the mere thought would have shocked her to death.

His imagination wrote on:

… to decide I am in love. But he is a clear kind of person, about whom one has to think clearly.

He moved his hand across the letter, as if to brush away the invisible words, and sealed it up.

Suppers were finished; the loose ends of the day’s work were tied off. Laurie’s meditations returned, growing somber with night and weariness. He limped on and on through a darkening maze without a center.

“ ’S matter, Spud? Tired?”

“Bit. Sorry.”

“Get you some A.P.C.?”

“Later, I think. Thanks, Reg.”

The ward lights were turned off, leaving only the yellow pool by the Sister’s table, and the glow of the radio dial. The star program of the week was on: a cinema organist, who played request numbers for the Forces, chosen by their people at home. Laurie was tired, and his stomach for this kind of thing was queasy at the best. He got down into the bedclothes, and tried to sleep. The Sister gave the report, added her afterthoughts, and went off duty. Nurse Sims, the Night Nurse, stepped forward with decision to the radio table.

“Have a heart, Nurse,” said someone as usual. “Suppose there was a request for one of us?”

“The B.B.C. always sends a—”

“… And now,” said the radio, its inhuman geniality becoming tinged with a manly pathos, “I have a rather special message for Lance-Corporal Reginald Barker, who is a patient at …” Not so much the name, as the ward’s electrified hush, roused Laurie from his apathy. Beside him Reg, who had just got into bed and had been reaching down for something in his locker, lay frozen in that position by shock. Among all this Laurie had missed a phrase or two. “… to forgive and forget. And she hopes that this lovely melody will recall happy honeymoon days, and bring you both together again. So here it is, for Lance-Corporal Reginald Barker—‘Souvenirs’!”

The organist did Reg proud. He used the vox humana in the first half, and the vox angelica in the second. It was like sugar with warm treacle sauce.

Laurie crawled down into the bed. No one could very well suppose him to be sleeping, but there seemed nothing else one could do for Reg. In the Dark Ages, he thought, they only cropped your ears, or branded you in the forehead, or stood you in the pillory. They hadn’t the resources of civilization.

All activity in the ward had ceased. The man on the other side of Charlot was trying to explain the situation to him in five well-chosen words helped out with mime. At the bottom end of the ward a young man with a passable tenor had begun to croon expressively (filling the merciful gaps in Laurie’s memory) the words of the song.

The first essential, Laurie thought, would be to see that Reg didn’t put his razor under his pillow and cut his throat during the night. He peeped out cautiously from under the blanket, but Reg’s head, as he had expected, was turned the other way.

I count them all apart,

And when the tear-drops start,

I find a broken heart among my souvenirs.

It was over. A low buzz of comment quivered through the ward. Nurse Sims stared at the radio, lastingly defeated; she would never be able to turn off a request program again. Laurie turned on his side, the side facing Reg. One could take delicacy too far; it didn’t help to make a man feel like a leper.

Reg turned round. It surprised Laurie vaguely that he didn’t attempt to hide his face. His lower lip was trembling. Tears welled from under his sandy lashes.

“I’ll send her a wire tomorrow, first thing. I never knew she felt like that.”

He fumbled for his dressing-gown, hitching it blindly over his splinted shoulder. While Laurie was still searching for a reply he had gone down the ward. In his wake the buzz rose to an eager, satisfied muttering. If one could have turned all the lights on suddenly, Laurie thought, there would have been applause.

He lay back on the pillow, the only one not running over with gossip and sensation, the odd man out.

The clink and rattle of mugs on a trolley sounded beside him. The nurse usually came around at this hour, putting water on the lockers for the night. He turned over.

“Please, Nurse …” His voice stopped. It was Andrew with the trolley.

The forms, the shadows, the colors in the ward magically regrouped and changed. The pool of light on the Sister’s table had for the first time mystery beyond its rim.

Andrew pushed the trolley up quietly. He was wearing old, white tennis shoes. The light shining sideways on his hair made it look fairer and brighter than in the day. Shadow made the structure of his face emphatic, the eyes deeper-set, the mouth firmer. He looked more resolute, and at the same time younger. When he smiled, as he did immediately he saw who it was that had spoken, it seemed to Laurie almost frighteningly dramatic and beautiful.

Whispering as everyone did after lights-out, he said, “Now I know where to find you. Did you think I was going to leave you out?” He came with a mug and stood it on the locker, pausing, his fingers around the handle.

“What are you doing here, so late?”

“I’ve just gone on night duty. General orderly.”

“But have you had any sleep?”

“Oh, one hardly would the first day.” He lingered, with a curious lack of awkwardness, like a well-mannered child who assumes that, if unwanted at present, he will be dismissed without ill-feeling. Laurie at once found his mind a helpless blank.

“What about the man next you?” Andrew said. “He’d like some water, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, please.” In a moment he would be gone; Laurie saw “Good night” forming already on his face.

“That’s Reg Barker’s bed, we came off the beach together. Have you heard what happened tonight?”

“No.” Andrew came back easily. There was a kind of trust behind the surface attention in his face. Laurie saw suddenly that it wasn’t the too-easy trust of people to whom everything has always been kind. Thankful that whispering would hide anything odd in his voice, he told the story.

Andrew said, his eyes looking grave under their shadowy lids, “Well, if he loves her.”

“After that?” Like someone touching the edge of a sleeve by stealth, he said, “Could you?”

“I expect, you know,” said Andrew, “he only had room for just the one thing.”

It was the morning of visiting day. Walking patients sat on the edges of their beds, polishing their brass. Supplies of hospital blue had not even yet caught up with the sudden Dunkirk demand upon a stricken commissariat. Many of them had arrived in rags, some half naked, or draped in the wayside gifts of shocked civilians; and few of them had not retained from this experience some traces of a savage, primitive humiliation. Even now those who got up were often dressed partly in items of uniform taken from the dead, and Laurie had asked nobody where his trousers came from.

Matron had just arrived, and done a round. She came poking into the ward, her petticoat showing slightly, defensively frigid; she had been promoted beyond her dreams and it had been a Nessus’ shirt to her. Homesick for her little country nursing home, she peered down the line of beds, noting with dismay how many men were up and at large, rough men with rude, cruel laughter, who wrote things on walls, who talked about women, who got V.D. (but then one was able to transfer them elsewhere). She was wretched, but her career was booming.

“Sour-faced old bag,” said Reg as she disappeared.

“I suppose …” began Laurie vaguely; but the feeling of pathos he had just experienced, meeting her slightly bulging, frightened eye, defied communication. He applied himself to the job of darning Reg’s socks. “God, Reg, I can get my fist through this one. It’ll be the most awful cobble. Why the hell don’t you let me do them when they start to go?”

“Here, you leave it, I’ll wear odd ones.”

“No, I can get it together.” He had invented a kind of blanket-stitch for this purpose. “When’s she coming? First bus?”

“That’s right.” There was a tacit understanding between them that the recent breach should be admitted, but not discussed. “Your mum coming ’sarternoon?”

“That’s right,” said Laurie, trying to sound flat and unexcited.

He had been allowed to dress today, for the first time since the operation. He was getting about briskly now; the stage of transition between crutch and stick had been reached. They had measured him already for a surgical boot.

Presently he slipped out of the ward, and into the square between the huts. He stood on the dirty grass enclosed by the asphalt, sown with coarse weeds and empty cigarette-cartons; the sky shone with the warm, yet delicate and tender blue of early autumn, a huge cumulus towering in it. At this hour, toward midday, it was almost certain that Andrew would have gone to bed. There was just the faint possibility which had become the mainspring of Laurie’s morning. In the afternoon, when the whole of the night staff was sleeping, the tension relaxed; this, if Laurie would have admitted it to himself, was usually the happiest time of his day.

The usual people were coming and going in the square. Watching the traffic, Laurie got little pointers to the degree of acceptance the c.o.s had achieved. A sergeant from another ward, a lonely schoolmaster whom his wound had balked of promotion, was frankly and enjoyably chatting with the bearded Dave. A nurse stopped one of the others, to discuss briefly but amicably some current job. A private from Ward A, whom Laurie didn’t know, observing this conversation spat noisily in the grass. Another soldier offered him a rather awkward “Good morning.”

Reg was back in the ward, supervising Derek’s preparations for lunch. Derek, the little man with the licked-down mustache, had become Reg’s protégé. Willis had soon found Dave and Andrew unrewarding subjects; but this shy and earnest little creature was the ideal victim. Laurie had interfered now and again; but Reg, pricked by the memory of snobberies in his home neighborhood, had found Derek’s refinement as irritating as his name, and decided that a bit of toughening-up wouldn’t hurt him. This attitude had changed mysteriously on a day when Reg’s arm was replastered, and Derek had the tricky and painful job of cutting the old plaster off. This was done in the privacy of the bathroom, and Reg had never volunteered any information about it, except once to say to Laurie that, in his opinion, Derek’s growth had been stunted by always taking other people’s troubles too much to heart.

Thinking about these things in a general way, Laurie became aware of a thin, tinny warble, the hospital’s Imminent Danger siren. There had been no big daylight raids hereabouts, so, though officially everyone out of doors was supposed to take cover, in fact a few extra people came out to scan the sky.

Presently there was the deep contrapuntal hum of many engines together, and in the broad square of sky between the roofs the dogfight appeared: small black plane after small black plane, weaving and circling. At that distance the motion looked joyful, like a dance of gnats. Then in the fresh sky one of the Spitfires turned away out of the battle. It glided for a while, then seemed to slip sideways. Something broke off from it; it fell over and over, like a toy thrown by a child from a high window, and disappeared behind the roofs. Nobody spoke. One of the nurses, who had an Irish face, made the sign of the cross.

But the Messerschmitt which had shot down the Spitfire had been engaged at once by another. Suddenly the German plane leaked a dribble of smoke, there was a silent flash, then as the sound overtook it, the explosion. A scatter of black shards fell at leisure. The battle passed out of sight, the planes catching the sun in silvery flashes as they turned, pretty and brisk as minnows in the high clear air.

A little mounting cheer ran around the group in the square. The Irish nurse, waving at the voided sky, looked as if someone had given her a present. Laurie was cheering too, his pent-up emotions escaping thankfully in the general release. Then on the outskirts of the group he saw Dave. At first his face seemed almost expressionless, till one looked at his eyes.

“Here,” said Reg in the ward, “whassup with you, Spud? You look properly cheesed. Have done for days. Trouble at home?”

“No. Oh, I don’t know, Reg. One thing and another.”

“Leg’s been a long time. Playing up and that. Bound to lose patience, stands to reason.” He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.

“It’ll never be up to much: I heard Ferguson say so.”

“Ah,” said Reg. He had evidently tried to strike a note of surprise, but without much success. He rubbed the back of his head. Laurie realized that Reg had been anticipating this moment, trying to prepare consolation in advance, worrying about it. “Well, Spud, what our mum used to say, you never know if them things is meant. What I mean, say that one missed you. Advance ten paces, stop another one; might have been your head. See, you never know.”

“No,” said Laurie. “That’s right. You never know.”

“Cheeses you off, though. You know, Spud, what I reckon, do you more good than anything? Start to go steady. Meeting all the girls you must have, college and all, bound to have one marked down, don’t tell me. Eh?”

Laurie bent quickly to hunt for something in his locker. “Well—sort of, I suppose.”

“Ah. Well, Spud, only way to look at it, if she loves you, won’t make no difference. If not, better off without her. Can’t get away from that, can you?”

“No. That’s right—I’ve never said anything to her, matter of fact. I don’t think it would work. I’m going to forget all about it.”

“Ah. One thing you got to remember: let it run on too long and it’s got you, see? That’s where the trouble starts. Well, it’s nice your mum coming up today. Takes you out of yourself. Getting the news from home, and that.”

“Yes. I’ve been bloody awful company lately, Reg. I’m sorry.”

“Ah, nark it. Here, you get used to that stick soon as you can, we can pop over on the bus to the pictures.”

Laurie found himself counting the hours till his mother arrived. He thought of her coming with inexpressible comfort although, if challenged, he could not have told anyone what he trusted in. She loved him; but she was apt to offer or withhold her love in a system of rewards and punishments, as she had during his childhood. He scarcely concealed from himself the fact that what she called looking on the bright side was what he would have called wishful thinking in anyone else. But among his own uncertainties, all these settled attitudes of hers gave him a sense of stability and rest. In the deep places below his thinking, she had kept the old power to make Providence seem a projection of herself; if she approved, it too would approve and reward him. Now he had committed himself to courses which only lunacy could have supposed her to sanction; yet instinctively he still transposed into this different medium the basic lessons he had learned at her knee: own up to what you do, never break your word, never hurt anyone’s feelings unless there is something or somebody to be defended; always kick a banana-skin off the pavement, someone might slip on it and fall.

Even now, as he waited for her at the outer gate, he dreamed of a land of undefined, tacit understanding, misty at the edges, like an old-fashioned photograph.

She always picked him up in the car that brought her; they drove back to the nearest small town, had tea, and talked till it was time for her to catch her train. Waiting in the usual place, he saw the old blue-and-gray bus arrive, the visitors struggle up with their parcels. In the gangway Madge Barker moved slowly along, wedged in the crowd; impatient it seemed for reunion, she began making arch little signals to Reg through the window. But after all, Laurie never knew how Reg received his prodigal; for, just behind her, his mother was standing on the step of the bus.

Laurie limped forward to meet her. He was using a stick for the first time out of doors; the shortening of the leg, without the crutch to swing on, now made itself felt with brutal insistence. She would know, this time, that it wasn’t going to alter.

She hadn’t noticed him yet, however. A fellow passenger, a clergyman, was helping her down, and she was thanking him. She had on a travelling coat of soft gray wool, which made her look a little plump, and a new little pale blue hat. Her auburn hair, fading while Laurie’s had darkened, was turning sandy-and-silver; but it would be exquisite when it was white, silky and pure. The hat was younger than those she usually wore, but it suited her.

“Well, my dear.” She kissed him, smelling of fresh face powder and eau de cologne. She always gave him the illusion that he was tall, from the way she put her hands up to his shoulders. “How nice this is, dear, to see you really walking again, and so much better than last time.”

For a moment he was hurt, as sometimes before when she had retreated into optimism leaving him to face reality alone; but he had worked through all that long ago. “Yes,” he said. “What happened, couldn’t you get a car?”

She had made a little warning face. Then he saw that the clergyman who had handed her off the bus was standing almost at her elbow. He was carrying something. It was Laurie’s portable gramophone, which he had asked her to send by train.

Somewhat to his surprise, the clergyman returned his glance promptly with a smile. It was the kind which insists on the adjectives “frank” and “manly,” even from those by whom they are not much employed. He was big-boned and tall, over six feet; the gramophone dangled like a light parcel from his big red hand.

Mrs. Odell turned from one to the other of them; Laurie saw her go a little pink before she smiled.

“Laurie, dear, you did meet Mr. Straike, didn’t you, just before the war?” Laurie remembered that if he had been to church he would have been greeted in the porch after the service. Mr. Straike was smiling in what Laurie felt to be a professionally tactful way.

“I don’t think we’ve actually met to speak, have we, sir?” He was full of the bewildered courtesy one extends, as compensation, to people for whom one is wholly unable to account.

Mr. Straike held out his hand in a big, sincere gesture; Laurie, balancing awkwardly, had to change his stick to his other side in order to respond.

“I’ve heard so much about you that, like your mother, I felt the introduction to be almost superfluous.” He turned the frank smile on Mrs. Odell.

Planning instant escape, Laurie remembered with helpless embarrassment the gramophone. By no possible effort could he manage it himself. Unless he were to watch his mother carrying it, this inexplicable person would have to walk up to the hospital with them.

“Which of the men have you come to see?”

“Only this one.” The difference of height seemed to give Mr. Straike’s smile an avuncular quality. A five-shilling tip would hardly have taken Laurie by surprise. He felt faintly sick; but nothing would happen, he was getting stronger every day.

Mrs. Odell spoke quickly, as if to forestall awkwardness even before it had time to exist in her own mind. “Wasn’t it good of Mr. Straike? I was telling him the other day how worried I was in case the railway people broke your gramophone, you know with all these temporary porters, and he insisted on coming all this way with me to help carry it.”

She smiled at him. It was a special smile, which had been Laurie’s exclusive property ever since he could remember. To see it used, so easily and as if already by habit, upon a stranger, gave him the emotional counterpart of a violent kick in the stomach. At almost the same moment a trailing end of the smile rested on him, in a delicately admonishing way. A scrap of her last letter came back to him. One must be nice to this man, he had been recently bereaved. A new, dreadful thought ran through Laurie like cold steel. He felt that he must get away, if only for seconds, to collect himself. But common good manners, and his lame leg which made an elaborate business of everything he did, held him to the spot like a ball-and-chain. He looked at Mr. Straike, to whom it seemed his feelings must by now have been delivered in stark nakedness: but Mr. Straike was looking manly, modest, and deprecating, and murmuring something about its being a privilege.

“It’s very good of you,” said Laurie, speaking his lines like a well-trained actor in an air raid. “You really shouldn’t have; a battered old thing like that could have taken another kick or two. Shall we go up to the ward, then you can get rid of it?”

His mother, he now noticed, had a record album under her arm. It raised his spirits; his imagination in a brief idyllic flight listened to Mozart with Andrew in the woods. He took it from her and saw at once that it wasn’t the one he had asked for, or even one of his own at all.

His mother said, with a defensiveness which made her sound faintly reproachful, “We didn’t bring any of your classical records, dear, they’d be sure to get scratched in a place like this; and besides, Mr. Straike said he felt certain they wouldn’t be popular with the men. And he was a chaplain in the last war, so he does know.”

Mr. Straike acknowledged this with a short modest laugh. “Something they can sing.” He spoke like a kindly uncle explaining his small nephews. “You can’t go wrong with a good chorus. Your mother and I brought ourselves up to date and made a little expedition in search of the latest.”

Laurie could see that he ought to look into the album. Managing his stick with difficulty, he succeeded in doing so. The records were, indeed, the latest song-hits. There wasn’t one of them that the Forces’ Radio hadn’t been plugging three times a day for the last month. “That’s marvellous,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

“They’re your mother’s choice,” said Mr. Straike, gallantly surrendering the credit. “I think you’ll find they make the party go better than Mozart. After all, these lads leave school at fifteen, one must temper the wind to the shorn lamb, ha-ha.”

“They want to be taken out of themselves,” said his mother, gently making everything clear.

Laurie said yes, they did, of course. The pause that followed was broken by Reg greeting Mrs. Odell as he passed with Madge on his arm.

“That’s the man I told you about, whose eyesight Laurie saved.” Once she had taken to herself an impression of this kind, no subsequent explanations ever shifted it. Laurie had long given this one up. “Is that girl his ‘young lady,’ dear? Do try and warn him not to marry her. Oh, is she? Oh, I see. Well, girls of that class are often so unfair to themselves. I expect under all that make-up she’s really quite a nice little thing.”

Laurie found a glance being shot at him from the corner of Mr. Straike’s eye. He gathered from it that his mother was a pure, generous woman, while he and Mr. Straike were men of the world making their own little reservations. As soon as he had looked away from this glance without response, Laurie knew that a line had been crossed. Some events are crucial from their very slightness; because circumstances have used no force on them, they are unequivocally what they are, test-tube reactions of personality. Between Laurie and Mr. Straike there began to weave the first fine filaments of a dislike mutually known.

As they walked up the path to the wards, Mr. Straike kept them entertained with a humorous account of how they used to detect malingerers in the base hospitals of Flanders in 1916.

The patients’ tea was being served as they arrived. Lacking transport there was nowhere else to go but here. Laurie guessed by now that his mother had foreseen Mr. Straike’s chivalrous insistence on paying the car fare, which ordinarily she and Laurie would have shared together. (He wouldn’t consider it really necessary, either, and through all his protestations this would somehow appear.) Now, the trolley arriving, both the others insisted that Laurie should not miss his tea. He assured them he wasn’t hungry, knowing the inflexible rule against treating visitors; there was no getting around it, since there were only just enough cups for the patients themselves.

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Straike bluffly. “You take everything that’s going, my boy, it’s the only way in the army, I know, ha-ha. Just have a word with the nurse, and tell her to rustle up a cup for your mother too. Tell her she’s come a long way. She’ll understand.”

Laboriously, Laurie explained about the crockery. Mrs. Odell looked understanding, Mr. Straike surprised and reserved. Laurie felt forced to add that half these people had come from the other side of England, and it would cause hurt feelings if exceptions were made. Everyone agreed to this, leaving Laurie with a damp sense of ineffectuality. He offered his mother a drink from his own cup, the accepted practice, and collected it from her, firmly, before she could suggest passing it on. Embarrassment, damp and penetrating as a mountain mist, settled upon the party.

Laurie had always known in his inmost heart that there were times when, if his mother couldn’t have her cake and eat it, she would convince herself that someone else must be to blame. A bitter conviction told him that this time it wouldn’t be Mr. Straike.

Conversation, however, had to go on. Mrs. Odell had brought as usual the local gossip for Laurie’s amusement. She enjoyed being very slightly shocked by his comments and making womanly, reproving little exclamations. Laurie found Mr. Straike’s reaction to this as exactly predictable as if they had known one another for years; so he listened with Sunday-school brightness, saying, “No, really?” from time to time. The footnotes were provided by Mr. Straike. It seemed to Laurie, who was admittedly prejudiced, that their manly humor was not of the kind that is inspired by good nature.

For the first time, the clock’s approach to his mother’s hour of departure was a signal of relief. At the last moment Mr. Straike withdrew, as he put it, to “explore the place.” Laurie had almost risen to show him the way, but suddenly saw in his face a conscious tact. Laurie and his mother were being left alone to exchange their little confidences. Their awareness of this, combined with feelings, for which there would be no time to find words, of mutual reproach and remorse, made this the most clammily tongue-tied interval of all.

Laurie watched his mother gathering her umbrella, her bag and gloves. In the perky blue hat, with its soft feather curling into the soft hair, and the fluffy coat, she looked like a plump ruffled bird, dainty, timid, a little foolish, full of confused tenderness and of instinctive wisdom from which, too easily, she could be fluttered and scared away. His throat tightened; he wanted to take her away and cherish her as if she were about to die. But the bus was due in a few minutes, and now they were all walking out toward it.

Just as they were leaving, the tea trolley came back for the used crockery. This time, little Derek was pushing it instead of the nurse. Mr. Straike’s nose went up, like a pointer’s.

“Who,” he asked in a loud aside, “are all these healthy-looking young men in mufti I keep seeing about the place?”

A wave of rage, the piled flood of the afternoon, broke in Laurie’s head. He did not trust himself to reply.

“Medically exempt?” asked Mr. Straike. Derek had been passing at the time, and must have heard.

With the cold ingenuity of repressed violence, Laurie gave a prudishly reproving shake of the head. “Male nurses,” he hissed. Mr. Straike said “Urhm.” Laurie indicated his mother with a glance, and pointedly dropped his voice. “Can’t very well discuss it here. Some things”—he paused, with heavy-handed delicacy—“women can’t be asked to do.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Straike. “Urhm, quite.” He ran a finger round the inside of his collar. Laurie found himself indulging an absurd self-righteousness, just as if it had been true.

They walked with the crowd down the iron-roofed cement path. Laurie felt his hatred and anger like a sickness. He no longer wanted to justify or fulfill them, only to clean them out of him and be quiet. He looked at Mr. Straike, who was gazing straight before him, grave, judicial; he had a digestive look, as if he were assimilating something, adapting it to his metabolism, settling it in.

“Well, dear, aren’t you going to say goodbye to me?”

Laurie saw that the bus had arrived, and people were streaming into it. His mother had come up to him, and had had to touch his arm before he had seen her. He met, defenseless, the reproach in her eyes.

Back in the ward, Neames and another man were playing chess on a locker. Laurie stood and watched the game till he realized he could not retrace it by a single move. His knee had got worse; little Derek, who always knew without being told when someone was in pain, got him a dose of A.P.C. He turned down his bedcover, sat on the bed, and tried to read. If one ceased the pretense of doing something, one became at once conspicuous, a man thinking, naked to public speculation.

“Well, Spud, how’s life?”

“Oh,” said Laurie, “hello, Reg.” For a moment, too full of himself, he expected to be asked what was up; then he remembered. “How was it? All right?”

“You said it.” Reg was, he could see now, very much moved. His face was pink, his eyes bright; he fidgeted with the things on Laurie’s locker, moving them unseeingly here and there. “Sometime, Spud, I’ll tell you a bit; mean to say, you’d be the first. How it is, I dunno, talk about a thing and the feeling of it goes off, gets more ordinary like. Haven’t felt like that for, oh, going on seven years. Well, just take a turn round the block. See you later.”

The flowers had been arranged in jam-pots, the cakes and sweets crammed into lockers, the locker-tops wiped over; the disorderly invasion of the visitors left no material trace. The evening dressings had started; but Laurie’s was done only in the morning now; it was nearly healed. The A.P.C. had helped the pain. If he changed the stick for the crutch, which they had left with him for a few days longer, he could escape for a little while. He even knew of somewhere to go.

Once out of the gate, he turned off the main road into a lane. A short way down was a rose hedge, with a little white gate. Inside the gate was an old brick path, bordered with lavender. A few late bush roses, yellow and red, were crisped with frost at the tips; but they looked rich, and faintly translucent, in the pale-gold light of the September sun. As Laurie approached the green latticed porch of the cottage, the door opened, and a little birdlike old woman peered out. She had on a brown stuff dress with a high lace neckband in the fashion of thirty years before; her wide black straw hat was trimmed with cherries made of glazed papier mâché. Laurie said, “Good evening, Mrs. Chivers.”

“Evening, sonny. I always know your step. Have you come to sit in the garden, then?”

“If you’re sure you don’t mind.”

“All of our boys are welcome any time. That’s what I told the officer, right at the beginning.” Laurie had never been able to identify the officer, and was even doubtful about the war. “There’s one or two nice Victorias ripe on the trees. You know the eating apples. Don’t you go taking the cookers, now, they’ll gripe you.”

“No, I won’t. Thanks so much.”

“You eat all you can pick, sonny. Fruit’s good for the blood. Back in the trenches, you won’t get it fresh, I know that. If the good Lord had meant us to take our food out of tins, that’s how we’d find it growing. The Creator knows best. Wait a minute.”

She popped back into the shadowy parlor, like a bird into a nesting-box, the cherries on her hat clicking dryly together. “Here you are, sonny,” she said returning. “And when you’ve read it, pass it on to one of the other lads.”

He thanked her, and took the tract. He had had this one before, though she had several varieties. They were all of a lurid evangelical kind, trumpeting Doomsday and exhorting him to wash his sins in blood. Laurie had seen, felt, and smelt enough blood to last him some time, but the paper and print had a fragrance of age about them. He was the richer for her zeal; it had caused his comrades to shun the old lady, as in the fourteenth century they might have shunned the local witch. No one came but Laurie, and it was his only sanctuary. He always missed it badly over operation times. Mrs. Chivers, however, had never noticed his absences.

The orchard ran beside the house, and continued behind it. He paused to knock down an apple with his crutch from his favorite tree, and picked his way carefully through the long pale grass, in which early windfalls were already treacherous to the foot.

Beyond the oldest of the apple trees, too gnarled to bear, the bank grew lush; the stream ran over a gravelly shallow, then tinkled down a foot-deep fall of stone. On the far side of the stream was a row of beeches. Already the breeze, passing under them, raised a whisper from the first crispings of the autumn fall.

Laurie lowered himself down gingerly by a branch. There would be sun, still, for the best part of an hour. He loosened his battle-blouse and felt the gentle warmth on his face and throat. The jagging of worry was smoothed in him; his unhappiness became dark and still. Tomorrow and next week kept their distance, dimmed by the huge presence of time, love, and death. He felt that kind of false resignation which can deceive us when we contemplate trouble at a moment of not actually experiencing it. This tranquil solitude seemed to him like loneliness made reconcilable by an act of will.

A foot rustled in the beech-mast across the stream. He didn’t want his peace disturbed; he sank deeper in the grass and pretended to doze. A voice said, “Why, Laurie. Hello.”

Laurie said, “Hello. Come over and talk to me.” He felt, evident as the sunlight, a great shining inevitability, and the certainty that something so necessary must be right.

Andrew took off his socks and shoes, and paddled across. Sitting beside Laurie, he worked his bare feet into the grass, to get off the mud. Now he was here, Laurie could think of nothing to say. Andrew on the other hand seemed to have gained assurance. As he stretched against the grass, his eyes, narrowed against the bright sky, reflecting its light clear blue, he looked at home in the place, freer, more sharply defined. “You have found yourself a private Eden, haven’t you?”

“It isn’t private,” Laurie said. “Everyone’s invited; but only the serpent comes.” He produced Mrs. Chivers’ tract.

Andrew rolled over on his elbows, skimmed the first page, and remarked, “I always think one of the world’s most awkward questions is ‘Are you saved?’ One’s more or less forced to sound either un-co-operative and defeatist, or complacent beyond belief.”

“I think I said one can only hope for the best; but she seemed to think it rather evasive.”

“Well, what else could one say? I should like to take my shirt off; would it upset her?”

He rolled it into a bundle and put it behind his head. His body was slim, but more solid and compact than one would have thought, and very brown, with the tan deepest across the backs of the arms and shoulders, as it is with laborers who bend to their work. His hands, which were structurally long and fine, were cracked and calloused, and etched with dirt which had gone in too deep to wash away.

Laurie, who had been some time silent, looked up from the tract he had seemed to be reading. “I suppose the polite comeback would be ‘No, but I should like you to save me.’ ” He flipped the paper over quickly. “Do you believe in hell?”

Andrew, who was holding a frond of fern against the sky, said, “Well, I should think your opinion would be the one worth having.”

At twenty-three, one is not frightened off a conversation merely by the fear of its becoming intense. But intensity can be a powerful solvent of thin and brittle protective surfaces, and at twenty-three one is well aware of this. Laurie looked around at the pale gentle sunshine, the ripe fruit mildly awaiting its passive destiny, sleeping around the life in the core.

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I’m just a do-it-yourself amateur. Boys! Get this smashing outfit and make your own hell. Complete with tools and easy instructions. Not a toy, but a real working model which will take in your friends and last for years. Or isn’t that what you meant?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. I’m taking advantage of you, you see, because you give me the chance. What’s the joke?”

“Nothing. It’s the sun in my eyes. Go on.”

“Oh, it’s just that you could tell me so much I ought to know; but I don’t know if you want to think about it any more.”

“No, it’s all right.” Laurie pulled a long tassel of field grass and slid the smooth seeds off the stem. “Carry on, what is it?”

“Well, for instance—when it started, did you have any doubt about what you’d do?”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, of course, I thought the whole thing was a bloody muckup and ought to have been prevented. But then it just seemed something that had happened to one, like getting caught in the rain.” Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different. “Probably,” he said, striving for honesty, “I didn’t think too much in case it got awkward. I can’t remember now. Of course, one had other sorts of doubt. What would become of one, not just that sort of thing”—he jerked a quick thumb at the crutch half buried in the grass—“but what one would turn into, how one would make out. You know.”

“Yes, of course. Has it been like you thought?”

“No, not really. Months of boredom, followed by a sort of nightmare version of one of those ghastly picnics where all the arrangements break down. One thing, it shakes you out of that sort of basic snobbery which makes you proud of not being a snob. On the other hand it doesn’t alter your own tastes, I mean things like music, and however you look at it the people round you don’t share them, and when you feel less superior it seems you feel more lonely. Except in action, of course, which is what one’s there for but for me it didn’t last very long.”

“You’ve got a sense of proportion out of it, though you didn’t say that.”

“It’s a very limited one, I assure you.”

Suddenly Andrew sat up, and clasped his bare arms around his knees. His face had hardened with some inward resolution. He was looking straight before him; his profile, firm, intent, and for a moment absolutely still, had a clear austerity imposed on a latent sweetness, which seemed to Laurie unbearably beautiful. As he looked away Andrew turned around. “We can’t go on like this, can we?”

“Meaning?” said Laurie. His heart gave a racing start that almost choked him. The sky, the water, the fine leaves through which the late sun was shining, had the supernal brightness which precedes a miracle.

“You know what I mean. What about your question? Am I afraid to fight? After all, you’ve got a right to know.”

Laurie couldn’t speak for a few seconds. The lift and the drop had been too much. Then he remembered how silence might be taken. “Good God, what bull, I’ve never thought of it. Anyway, if you were you wouldn’t bring it up.”

“Why not? It would still be just as important. Actually, of course, the answer is I don’t know. It’s not a thing you can know in theory. I wish I did know for certain, naturally one would rather have it proved. But that only matters to me. I mean, the lightness of a thing isn’t determined by the amount of courage it takes. It must have taken a lot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, for instance.”

“Fair enough. I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money.”

“Well, about six months before the war started I went off walking for a week to think about all this. It was rather a shock to the Friends that I could have doubts, but they were wonderful about it, especially Dave. I thought all around it. I thought there might conceivably even be some circumstances when I felt it was right to kill. If I knew whom I was killing and the circumstances and the nature of the responsibility. What I finally stuck at was surrendering my moral choice to men I’d never met, about whose moral standards I knew nothing whatever.”

“Yes, I know; but in Napoleon’s day if you wanted to cross the Channel in the middle of the war and talk sensibly to the enemy there was almost nothing to stop you. Even in 1914 they had the Christmas Truce and it very nearly worked. Nowadays we’re all sealed off in airtight cans and there’s nothing between war and surrender. You can’t convert a propaganda machine.”

“ ‘Machine’ is journalese.” Often in his concentration he made statements whose brusqueness he didn’t notice. “Inexact terms like that are part of the war psychosis. People are never machines, even when they want to be. You have to start somewhere.”

“Only an awful lot of innocent people are going to suffer meanwhile.”

“I know,” said Andrew. “That’s the whole crux, of course.” His blue eyes stared at the moving water. “One could say, which is true, that war’s such a boomerang it’s impossible to guarantee anyone’s protection in the long run. We went into this to protect Poland, and look what’s happening to the Poles now. But that would really be side-stepping the issue. It’s a very terrible responsibility, or it would be if one had to take it without help.”

“Whose help did you ask, then?” asked Laurie rather coldly. He had not been pleased by the introduction of Dave’s name a few minutes before, and jealousy made him stupid. Andrew’s meaning broke on him, devastatingly, a second too late.

“Sorry,” he said with difficulty. “I really am a clod. Have you been a Quaker—a Friend I mean—all your life?”

“I’m not a very good one; please don’t judge the Society by me.”

“Your people don’t belong, then?”

“No, they’ve always been soldiers.”

“God! This must have been difficult for you.”

“Not compared with a lot of others. I’ll tell you about my father sometime; but now I’d rather talk about you.”

Laurie sat for a few moments collecting his thoughts. Presently he said, “I never can put these things very well. But I suppose, though it sounds cockeyed, I don’t fancy the idea of a State where your lot would all be rotting in concentration camps. I know you’d be ready to go there and I suppose that ought to alter my feeling, but it doesn’t, so there you are.”

“It should,” said Andrew. His face had stiffened and the light in it was gone. Now he looked just a stubborn boy with good bones and a brown skin.

Laurie took the point. He saw how it is possible to idealize people for one’s own delight, while treading on their human weaknesses like dirt. “Look,” he said, “get this straight. I’m not trying to put you under an obligation to the army for defending you, I’m not so bloody unfair. You haven’t asked to be defended, you don’t want to be, and I suppose it makes me your enemy, in a way, as much as Hitler is. I’m only trying to explain how some of our lot think.”

“Nothing could make us enemies,” said Andrew in a rush. Laurie didn’t look around, in case his happiness showed in his eyes. Andrew said with sudden awkwardness, “I’m sorry to be so adolescent. It was what you thought, of course. Sometimes one can get one’s mind straight but one’s feelings take longer.”

“You’re telling me,” said Laurie smiling. But he mustn’t indulge this private humor, he thought, it was far too dangerous. He said briskly, “I thought you wanted to ask me about the army, or something.”

Andrew paused hesitantly, trailing a foot in the stream. Laurie watched with a moment’s sharp envy his relaxed body unconscious of its own ease. The knee had started a cramp, from the evening chill and lying in one position; he moved it stiffly and carefully when Andrew wasn’t looking. “I can guess what you want to ask anyway. Have I killed anyone and how did it feel? Well, my answer’s as good as yours. I don’t know. Any half of us will tell you the same. Our lot fired, and some of their lot died, that’s all. It encourages loose thinking, like you say. Funny thing, though, when you think, all those murder trials before the war, people coming for miles to stare at a man merely because he’d killed just one human being. And then overnight, snap, homicides are much commoner than bank clerks, they sit around in pubs talking boring shop about it. ‘Oh, by the way, Laurie, how many men have you killed, approximately?’ ‘Honestly, my dear, I was so rushed, you know, I couldn’t stop to look, a couple perhaps.’ Have an apple.”

They bit into the glossy winesaps; on the sunny side of the fruit, the clear crimson had run below the skin and streaked the crisp, white flesh.

“You see,” said Laurie presently, “it’s all a muddle, nothing clear-cut.”

Andrew didn’t answer. As soon as Laurie turned he looked away, not furtively but rather shyly. During his last term at school, when it had seemed to be a fairly generally held view that he hadn’t made too bad a job of the House, Laurie had sometimes caught the tail-end of looks like that. But this time it seemed too much that it should be true, and he dared not believe in it. He put his head back in the grass, watching its fine stalks laced against the sky. The world was full of a golden undemanding stillness. Even the wretchedness of the afternoon now seemed only the gate that had brought him to this place. But this reminded him to look at his watch; it was time to go.

Andrew got up first and held out his arm smiling, managing to make it seem a light-hearted gesture like that of children who pull each other up from the ground for fun. Laurie had observed sometimes in the ward how his tact would conquer his diffidence. His grip was firm and his rough hand had a kindly warmth in it. He had remembered to have the crutch ready in the other hand before he pulled.

As they walked back through the orchard the grass was deep green in the twilight; but across the stream the tops of the beeches, catching the last sun, burned a deep copper against a cloudless aquamarine sky.

“My gramophone’s come,” said Laurie. “But—” He stopped, because the door of the cottage had opened, disclosing a square of dusky lamplight against which Mrs. Chivers stood sharply black and animated, like a figure in an early bioscope. She still had her hat on.

“Hello, Mrs. Chivers,” said Laurie. “We’re just going. Thank you so much. This is a friend of mine, Andrew Raynes.”

Mrs. Chivers came nearer. As she left the lamplit door she grew three-dimensional again. Her little face, yellow and creased with wrinkles as if the skin had been wrung out and hung over the bone, peered up at them, bright-eyed.

“Young man,” she said, “why aren’t you in khaki?”

Laurie gazed at her blankly; it was as if one of the ripe apples had proved, as one bit it, to contain a bee. Andrew said seriously, “I’m a pacifist, Mrs. Chivers, I belong to the Friends.”

Mrs. Chivers looked up under her hat, rattling the cherries; she stood no more than five feet, and had to tilt the brim to see them. “Take shame to yourself. I’ve heard of that. Friends, indeed. A big strong lad as you be, I wonder you can look your friends in the face. It’s all foretold in the blessed Scriptures, Battle of Armageddon, that’s what our lads are fighting. Conscientious, I never heard such stuff.”

“Mrs. Chivers,” said Laurie when he could get it in endways, “Andrew’s a friend of mine. He’s doing war work, you know. He’s all right.”

Ignoring him, she thrust her head out at Andrew, like a furious little wren. “And mark my words, young man, if you come here talking your wicked nonsense to this dear wounded boy of mine, and trying to make him run away from the war, I’ll write to Lord Kitchener myself about you. He’ll know what to do.”

“I won’t hurt him,” said Andrew gently. “I promise you that.”

“I should think not indeed. Get away with you out of my garden, it’s no place for the likes of you. Now, sonny, that’s enough, I’m ashamed of you speaking up for him, and you in the King’s uniform. Run away home, the pair of you. I’ve no patience.”

The orchard smelt of September and early dew; the grass in the deep light was now the color of emerald. A blackbird, the last awake, was meditating aloud in a round, sweet whistle. Everything had the colors of farewell.

Andrew was walking ahead, but when he noticed Laurie’s awkward haste behind him he waited, surrendering his breathing space: Laurie reflected that being a cripple involves special kinds of social finesse, which only come gradually. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said.

“No, I ought to have thought, it’s being with you that makes me forget. I shouldn’t have come in and spoilt all this for you.”

“She’ll have forgotten by tomorrow.” They had come to the tall yews by the gate; it was very old, and flakes of paint and rust came away as he touched it. He had said the sensible thing and it would be wise to leave it there. The huge bulk of the yew trees was like dark-veined malachite against the bronze-gold sky. He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him. He smiled at Andrew in the shadow of the yews.

“They looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld

Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,

Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate

With dreadful Faces throng’d and fiery Arms …”

Andrew put his hands on the top of the gate and swung it open. His face had a solemn improvising look. He said,

“… They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.”

Laurie went through the gate, out into the lane. Two great horses, ringing with idle brass, were being led home, their coats steaming in the cool. He felt absolute, filled; he could have died then content, empty-handed and free. All gifts he had ever wished for seemed only traps, now, to dim him and make him less. This, he thought with perfect certainty, this after all is to be young, it is for this. Now we have the strength to make our memories, out of hard stuff, out of steel and crystal.

The steam of the horses, a good strong russet smell, hung on the air. Sailing in a deep inlet of sky off the black coast of an elm tree, the first star appeared, flickering like a riding-light in a fresh wind. Andrew walked beside him silently.

An eddy of air in the quiet lane brought back like an echo the stamp and jingle of the horses, a shake of the bridle and a snort.

… Let us say, then, that the soul resembles the joined powers of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the horses and drivers of the gods are of equal temper and breed, but with men it is otherwise. …

For the first time in months, he had remembered the dirty little parcel done up in newspaper at the back of his locker. It had contained the things saved from his pockets after Dunkirk, when the clothes had been cut away. A pocket-knife; a pipe he had been trying to get used to; a lighter; and the book Lanyon had given him seven years ago, with a brown patch of blood across the cover, and the edges of the pages stuck at the top. At different times he had tried the knife, the pipe, and the lighter, found them ruined, and thrown them away. The book had looked done for, too; but it was still there.