The Romantic Part 20

"Of course he hasn't. Billy would go to Antwerp like a shot if they'd let him. He feels just as we do about it. That's why he got up and went away."

"He'd go. But he wouldn't enjoy it."

"Oh, don't talk about 'enjoying.'"

"Sharlie, you don't mean to say that _you're_ not keen?"

"No. It's only that I don't care as much as I did about what you call the romance of it; and I do care more about the solid work. It seems to me that it doesn't matter who does it so long as it's done."

"I'd very much rather I did it than McClane. So would you."

"Yes. I would. But I'd be sorry if poor little Mac didn't get any of it.

And all the time I know it doesn't matter which of us it is. It doesn't matter whether we're in danger or out of danger, or whether we're in the big thing or a little one."

"Don't you want to be in the big thing?"

"Yes. I _want_. But I know my wanting doesn't matter. I don't matter.

None of us matters."

That was how she felt about it now that it had come to defeat, now that Antwerp was falling. Yesterday they, she and John, had been vivid ent.i.ties, intensely real, living and moving in the war as in a containing s.p.a.ce that was real enough, since it was there, but real like h.e.l.l or heaven or G.o.d, not to be grasped or felt in its reality; only the stretch of it that they covered was real, the roads round Ghent, the burning villages, the places where they served, Berlaere and Melle, Quatrecht and Zele; the wounded men. Yesterday her thoughts about John had mattered, her doubt and fear of him and her pain; her agony of desire that he should be, should be always, what she loved him for being; and her final certainty had been the one important, the one real thing. To-day she had difficulty in remembering all that, as if _they_ hadn't really been. To-day they were unimportant to themselves and to each other; small, not quite real existences, enveloped by an immense reality that closed in on them; alive; black, palpitating defeat. It made nothing of them, of their bodies nothing but the parts they worked with: feet and hands. Nothing mattered, nothing existed but the war, and the armies, the Belgian army, beaten.

Antwerp was falling. And afterwards it would be Ghent, and then Ostend.

And then there would be no more Belgium.

But John wouldn't hear of it. Ghent wouldn't fall.

"It won't fall because it isn't a fortified city," she objected. "But it'll surrender. It'll have to."

"It won't. If the Germans come anywhere near we shall drive them back."

"They _are_ near. They're all round in a ring with only a little narrow opening up _there_. And the ring's getting closer."

"It's easier to push back a narrow ring than a wide one."

"It's easier to break through a thin ring than a thick one, and who's going to push?"

"We are. The British. We'll come pouring in, hundreds of thousands of us, through that little narrow opening up there."

"If we only would--"

"Of course we shall. If I thought we wouldn't, if I thought we were going to let the Belgians down, if we _betrayed_ them--My G.o.d! I'd kill myself.... No. No, I wouldn't. That wouldn't hurt enough. I'd give up my d.a.m.ned country and be a naturalized Belgian. Why, they trust us. They _trust_ us to save Antwerp."

"If we don't, that wouldn't be betrayal."

"It would. The worst kind. It would be like betraying a wounded man; or a woman. Like me betraying you, Jeanne. You needn't look like that. It's so bad that it can't happen."

Through the enveloping sadness she felt a p.r.i.c.k of joy, seeing him so valiant, so unbeaten in his soul. It supported her certainty. His soul was so big that nothing could satisfy it but the big thing, the big dangerous thing. He wouldn't even believe that Antwerp was falling.

She knew. She knew. There was not the smallest doubt about it any more.

She saw it happen.

It happened in the village near Lokeren, the village whose name she couldn't remember. The Germans had taken Lokeren that morning; they were _in_ Lokeren. At any minute they might be in the village.

You had to pa.s.s through a little town to get to it. And there they had been told that they must not go on. And they had gone on. And in the village they were told that they must go back and they had not gone back.

They had been given five minutes to get in their wounded and they had been there three-quarters of an hour, she and John working together, and Trixie Rankin with McClane and two of his men.

Charlotte had been sorry for Sutton and Gwinnie and the rest of McClane's corps who had not come out with them to this new place, but had been sent back again to Melle where things had been so quiet all morning that they hadn't filled their ambulances, and half of them had hung about doing nothing. She had fretted at the stupidity which had sent them where they were not wanted. But here there were not enough hands for the stretchers, and Charlotte was wanted every second of the time. From the first minute you could see what you were in for.

The retreat.

And for an instant, in the blind rush and confusion of it, she had lost sight of John. She had turned the car round and left it with its nose pointing towards Ghent. Trixie Rankin and the McClane men were at the front cars taking out the stretchers; John and McClane were going up the road. She had got out her own stretcher and was following them when the battery came tearing down the road and cut them off. It tore headlong, swerving and careening with great rattling and cras.h.i.+ng noises. She could see the faces of the men, thrown back, swaying; there was no terror in them, only a sort of sullen anger and resentment.

She stood on the narrow sandy track beside the causeway to let it pa.s.s, and when a gap came in the train she dashed through to get to John. And John was not there. When all the artillery had pa.s.sed he was not there; only McClane, going on up the middle of the street by himself.

She ran after him and asked him what had happened to John. He turned, dreamy and deliberate, utterly unperturbed. John, he said, had gone on to look for a wounded man who was said to have been taken into one of those houses there, on the right, in the lane. She went down the lane with her stretcher and McClane waited for them at the top. The doors of the houses were open; Flemish women stood outside, looking up to the street. There was one house with a shut door, a tall green door; she thought that would be the one that John had gone into. She rapped and he opened the door and came striding out, holding his head high. He shut the door quietly and looked at her, an odd look, piercing and grave.

"Dead," he said.

And when McClane met them he said it again, "Dead."

The wounded were being brought down from Lokeren in trams that ran on to a siding behind a little fir plantation outside the village. At the wide top of the street a table of boards and trestles stood by the foot track, and the stretchers were laid on it as they came in, and the wounded had their first bandaging and dressings there. McClane took up his place by this table, and the stretcher bearers went backwards and forwards between the village and the plantation.

Beyond the plantation the flagged road stretched flat and grey, then bent in a deep curve, and on the wider sweep of the curve a row of tall, slender trees stood up like a screen.

It would be round the turn of the road under the trees that the Germans would come when they came. You couldn't lose this sense of them, coming on behind there, not yet seen, but behind, coming on, pursuing the retreat of the batteries. Every now and then they found themselves looking up towards the turn. The grey, bending sweep and the screen of tall trees had a fascination for them, a glamour; and above the movements of their hands and feet their minds watched, intent, excited, but without fear. There was no fear in the village. The women came out of their houses carrying cups of water for the men's thirst; they seemed to be concerned, not with the coming of the Germans, but with the bringing in of the wounded and the presence of the English ambulance in their street.

And the four stretcher bearers came and went, from house to house and between the village and the plantation, working, working steadily. Yet they were aware, all the time, of the pursuing terror, behind the turn of the road; they were held still in their intentness. Over all of them was a quiet, fixed serenity. McClane's body had lost its eager, bustling energy and was still; his face was grave, preoccupied and still; only Trixie Rankin went rus.h.i.+ng, and calling out to her quiet man in a fierce, dominating excitement.

And in John's face and in his alert body there was happiness, happiness that was almost ecstasy; it ran through and shone from him, firm and still, like a flame that couldn't go out. It penetrated her and made her happy and satisfied and sure of him. She had seen it leap up in him as he swung himself into the seat beside her when they started. He was restless, restless every day until they were sent out; he couldn't wait in peace before they had set off on the adventure, as if he were afraid that at the last minute something would happen to dash his chance from him. She couldn't find this pa.s.sionate uneasiness in herself; she waited with a stolid trust in the event; but she had something of his feeling.

After all, it was there, the romance, the fascination, the glamour; you couldn't deny it any more than you could deny the beating of the blood in your veins. It was their life.

They had been in the village three quarters of an hour. John and Charlotte waited while McClane at his table was putting the last bandage on the last wound. In another minute they would be gone. It was then that the Belgian Red Cross man came running to them. Had they taken a man with a wound in his back? A bad wound? As big as that? No? Then he was still here, and he had got to take him to the ambulance. No, he didn't know where he was. He might be in one of those houses where they took in the wounded, or he might be up there by the tramway in the plantation. Would they take a stretcher and find him? _He_ had to go back to the tramway.

The last tram was coming in from Lokeren. He ran back, fussy and a little frightened.

John shouted out, "Hold on, McClane, there's another tram coming," and set off up the street. They had taken all the men out of the houses; therefore the man with the bad wound must have been left somewhere by the plantation. They went there, carrying their stretcher, going, going up to the last minute, in delight, in the undying thrill of the danger.

The wounded man was not in the plantation. As they looked for him the tram from Lokeren slid in, Red Cross men on the steps, clinging. The doors were flung open and the wounded men came out, stumbling, falling, pus.h.i.+ng each other. Somebody cried, "No stretchers! d.a.m.ned bad management. With the Germans on our backs." A Red Cross man, with a puffed white face, stood staring at John and Charlotte, stupefied.

"Are they coming?" John said.

"Coming? They'll be here in ten minutes--five minutes." He snarled, a terrified animal.

He had caught sight of their stretcher and s.n.a.t.c.hed at it, thrusting out his face, the face of a terrified animal, open mouth, and round, palpitating eyes. He lifted his hand as though he would have struck at Charlotte, but John pushed him back. He was brutalized, made savage and cruel by terror; he had a l.u.s.t to hurt.

"You can't have our stretcher," Charlotte said.