The Romantic

by May Sinclair

XV

That light sound he made had ended it.

She remembered it afterwards, not as a thing that hurt her, but as an unpleasant incident of the day, like the rudeness of a stranger, and yet not to be forgotten. It had the importance of extreme finality; his answer to everything, unanswerable.

She didn't care. She had ended it herself and with so clean a cut that she could afford to let him have that inarticulate last word. She had left him nothing to do but keep up his pretence that there had never been so much as a beginning. He gave no sign of anything having been between them, unless his attitude to Sutton was a sign.

It showed the next day, the terrible Sunday that was ending everything. Yesterday he had given orders that Charlotte should drive Sutton while he drove by himself. To-day he had changed all that. Gwinnie was to drive Sutton and Charlotte was to go out alone. And he had offered himself to McClane. To McClane. That gave her the measure of his resentment. She could see that he coupled her with Sutton while he yet tried to keep them apart. He was not going to have more to do with either of them than he could help.

So that she had hardly seen or heard of him that day. And when the solid work began she found that she could turn him out of her mind as if he had never been there. The intolerable burden of him slipped from her; all morning she had a sense of cold clearness and lightness; and she judged that her deliverance was complete.

* * * * *

She had waited a long time with her car drawn up close under the house wall in the long street at Melle. McClane's car stood in front of her, waiting for John. He was up there on the battlefield, with Sutton and McClane. McClane had kept him off it all day; he had come to her when they started and told her not to worry. Conway would be all right. He would see that he didn't get into places where he—well, unsuitable places. He would keep him driving. But in the end one of the stretcher bearers had given in, and John had to take his turn.

He had been keen to go. Keen. She could see him swinging along up the road to the battlefield and McClane with him, running to keep up with his tall stride.

She had taken her turn too and she knew what it was like up there. Endless turnip fields; turnips thrown up as if they had been pulled, livid roots that rotted, and the wounded and the dead men lying out among them. You went stumbling; the turnips rolled and slipped under your feet. Seeing things.

Her mind looked the other way, frightened. She was tired out, finished; she could have gone to sleep now, sitting up there on the car. It would be disgraceful if she went to sleep….

She mustn't think about the battlefield. She couldn't think; she could only look on at things coming up in her mind. Hoeing turnips at Barrow Hill Farm. Supposing you found dead men lying out on the fields at Stow? You would mind that more; it would be more horrible…. She saw herself coming over the fields carrying a lamb that she had taken from its dead mother. Then she saw John coming up the field to their seat in the beech ring. That hurt her; she couldn't bear it; she mustn't think about that.

John was all right; he wasn't shirking. They had been away so long now that she knew they must have gone far down the battlefield, deep into it; the edges and all the nearer places had been gleaned. It would be dark before they came back.

It was getting dark now, and she was afraid that when the light went she would go to sleep. If only she wasn't so tired.

She was so drowsy that at first she didn't hear McClane speaking, she hadn't seen him come to the step of the car.

McClane's voice sounded soft and unnatural and a little mysterious.

"I'm afraid something's—happened."

"Who to?"

"We-ell—"

The muffled drawl irritated her. Why couldn't he speak out?

"Is John hurt?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Is he killed?"

"Well—I don't know that he can live. A German's put a bullet into him."

"Where is he?"

She jumped down off the car.

McClane laid his hand on her arm. "Don't. We shall bring him in—"

"He's dead then?"

"I think so—You'd better not go to him."

"Of course I'm going to him. Where is he?"

He steered her very quickly and carefully across the street, then led her with his arm in hers, pressing her back to the dark shelter of the houses. They heard the barking of machine guns from the battlefield at the top and the rattle of the bullets on the causeway. These sounds seemed to her to have no significance. As if they had existed only in some unique relation to John Conway, his death robbed them of vitality.

The door of the house opened a little way; they slipped into the long narrow room lighted by a few oil lamps at one end. At the other John's body lay on a stretcher set up on a trestle table, his feet turned outwards to the door, ready. The corners at this end were so dark that the body seemed to stretch across the whole width of the room. A soldier came forward with a lighted candle and gave it to McClane. And she saw John's face; the bridge of his nose, with its winged nostrils lifted. His head was tilted upwards at the chin; that gave it a noble look. His mouth was open, ever so slightly open … McClane shifted the light so that it fell on his forehead…. Black eyebrows curling up like little moustaches…. The half-dropped eyelids guarded the dead eyes.

She thought of how he used to dream. All his dream was in his dead face; his dead face was cold and beautiful like his dream.

As she looked at him her breast closed down on her heart as though it would never lift again; her breath shuddered there under her tightened throat. She could feel McClane's hand pressing heavily on her shoulder. She had no strength to shake it off; she was even glad of it. She felt small and weak and afraid; afraid, not of the beautiful thing that lay there, but of something terrible and secret that it hid, something that any minute she would have to know about.

"Where was he hit?"

"In the back."

She trembled and McClane's hand pressed closer. "The bullet passed clean through his heart. He didn't suffer."

"He was getting in Germans?"

"I don't—quite—know—" McClane measured his words out one by one, "what—he was doing. Sutton was with him. He knows."

"Where is Billy?"

"Over there. Do you want him?"

"Not yet."

A soldier brought a chair for her. She sat down with her back to the trestle table. At the lighted end of the room she saw Sutton stooping over a young Belgian captain, buttoning his tunic under the sling he had adjusted. The captain's face showed pure and handsome, like a girl's, like a young nun's, bound round and chin-wrapped in the white bandages. He sat on the floor in front of Sutton's table with his legs stretched out flat. His back was propped against the thigh of a Belgian soldier seated on an upturned barrel. Her hurt eyes saw them very plain and with detail in the light of Sutton's lamp.

That part of the room was full of soldiers. She noticed that they kept clear of the trestle table as they went in and out. Only one of them, the soldier who supported the young captain, kept on looking, raising his head and looking there as if he couldn't turn his eyes away. He faced her. His rifle stood steadied by his knees, the bayonet pointing up between his eyes.

She found herself thinking. It was Sutton's back that made her think. John must have been stooping over the German like that. John's wound was in his back. But if he was stooping it couldn't have come that way. The bullet would have gone through his chest…. Perhaps he had turned to pick up his stretcher. Billy was there. He would tell her how it had happened.

She thought: No. I've had enough. I shall give it up. I won't ask him. But she knew that she would ask him. Once started, having gone so far, flash by flash and step by step, she couldn't give it up; she would go on, even now, till her knowledge was complete. Then she was aware again of the soldier's eyes.

They were very large and bright and black in his smooth boy's face; he had a small innocent boy's mouth that seemed to move, restless and fascinated, like his eyes. Presently she saw that he was looking at her, that his eyes returned to her again and again, as if he were aware of some connection between her and the thing that fascinated him, as if he were somehow connected.

He was listening to her now as Sutton spoke to her.

"We must get him away quick."

"Yes. Do let's get him away."

Sutton shook his head. He was thinking of the wounded captain.

"We can't yet. I'll come back for him."

"Then I'll wait with him here."

"Oh no—I think—"

"I can't leave him."

"It isn't safe. The place may be taken."

"I won't leave him." Sutton hesitated. "I won't, Billy."

"McClane, she says she won't leave him."

"Then," McClane said, "we must take him now. We'll have to make room somehow."

(To make room for him—somehow.)

Sutton and the soldier carried the captain out and came back for John's body. The Belgian sprang forward with eager, subservient alacrity to put himself at the head of the stretcher, but Sutton thrust him aside.

The Belgian shrugged his shoulders and picked up his rifle with an air of exaggerated unconcern. Sutton and McClane carried out the stretcher.

Charlotte was following them when the soldier stopped her.

"Mademoiselle—"

He had propped his rifle against the trestles and stood there, groping in his pocket. A dirty handkerchief, dragged up by his fumbling, hung out by its corner. All along the sharp crease there was a slender smear of blood. He looked down at it and pushed it back out of her sight.

He had taken something out of his pocket.

"I will give you this. I found it on the battlefield."

He handed her a small leather pocketbook that was John's. It had her photograph in it and his, taken together.

* * * * *

They were putting him out of sight, under the hood of the ambulance, and she waited there when the war correspondent came up.

"Can you tell me the name of the volunteer who's been killed?"

"Conway. John Roden Conway."

"What? That man? The man who raced the Germans into Zele?"

"Yes," she said, "that man."

* * * * *

She was in John's room, packing, gathering together the things she would have to take to his father. Sutton came to her there.

They had orders to be ready for the retreat any time that night.

Billy had brought her John's wrist watch and cigarette case.

"Billy," she said, "that soldier gave me this."

She showed him the pocketbook.

"What soldier?"

"The one who was with the captain."

"He gave it you?"

"Yes. He said he found it on the battlefield. It must have dropped out of
John's pocket."

"It couldn't have dropped…. I wonder why he kept that."

"But he didn't keep it. He gave it to me."

"He was going to keep it, or he'd have handed it over to me with the other things."

"Does it matter?"

"Well—"

She thought: "Why can't he leave it alone? They had all his things, his poor things."

But Sutton was still thoughtful. "I wonder why he gave it you."

"I think he was sorry."

"Was he!"

"Sorry for me, I mean."

Sutton said nothing. He was absorbed in contemplating the photograph. They had been taken standing by the hurdle of the sheepfold, she with the young lamb in her arms and John looking down at her.

"That was taken at Barrow Hill Farm," she said, "where we were together. He looked just like that…. Oh, Billy, do you think the past's really past?… Isn't there some way he could go on being what he was?"

"I don't know, Sharlie, I don't know."

"Why couldn't he have stayed there! Then he'd always have been like that.
We should never have known."

"You're not going to be unhappy about him?"

"No. I think I'm glad. It's a sort of relief. I shan't ever have that awful feeling of wondering what he'll do next…. Billy—you were with him, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"Was he all right?"

"Would it make you happier to think that he was or to know that he wasn't?"

"Oh—just to know."

"Well, I'm afraid he wasn't, quite…. He paid for it, Sharlie. If he hadn't turned his back he wouldn't have been shot."

She nodded.

"What? You knew?"

"No. No. I wasn't sure."

She was possessed of this craving to know, to know everything. Short of that she would be still bound to him; she could never get free.

"Billy—what did happen, really? Did he leave the German?"

"The German?"

"Yes. Was that why he shot him?"

"The German didn't shoot him. He was too far gone, poor devil, to shoot anybody…. It was the Belgian captain that he left…. He was lying there, horribly wounded. His servant was with him; they were calling out to Conway—"

"Calling to him?"

"Yes. And he was going all right when some shrapnel fell—a regular shower bath, quite near, like it did with you and me. That scared him and he just turned and ran. The servant shouted to him to stop, and when he wouldn't he went after him and put a bullet through his back."

"That Belgian boy?"

"Yes. I couldn't do anything. I had the German. It was all over in a second…. When I got there I found the Belgian standing up over him, wiping his bayonet with his pockethandkerchief. He said his rifle went off by accident."

"Couldn't it? Rifles do."

"Bayonets don't…. I suppose I could get him court martialed if I tried.
But I shan't. After all, it was his captain. I don't blame him,
Charlotte."

"No…. It was really you and me, Billy. We brought him back to be killed."

"I don't know that we did bring him—that he wasn't coming by himself. He couldn't keep off it. Even if we did, you wouldn't be sorry for that, would you?"

"No. It was the best thing we could do for him."

But at night, lying awake in her bed, she cried. For then she remembered what he had been. On Barrow Hill, on their seat in the beech ring, through the Sunday evenings, when feeding time and milking time were done.

* * * * *

At four o'clock in the morning she was waked by Sutton, standing beside her bed. The orders had come through to evacuate the hospital. Three hours later the ambulances had joined the great retreat.