He walked on, stronger but yet wavering feet… for his head would not quite make up its mind what it wanted them to do. He came out of the shadow of the trees and plunged down the steep little slope and staggered on to the level floor of the desert.
He walked on, stolid and lurching… He stopped and knelt upon one knee and gazed… That black and upright something seemed clearer now, and bigger. “’Ave a poop at ther —!” he said.
He raised rifle to shoulder; but the barrel waved in eccentric curves. He bit at his lip until the blood came and trickled down over his chin. He held his breath. The barrel steadied; remained firm. He took careful aim… The black, upright thing appeared to move, very slightly… it became two black and upright things… He concentrated upon one of these…
His finger took the first pull of the trigger…
Then two blows struck him… two shocks, almost simultaneous and so terrific that he went backwards as if jerked by a lariat thrown from the back of a horse at full speed.
His rifle discharged itself into the sky. Even as the world went up in a great sheet of flaming darkness inside his head, he was conscious of a faint “phut-phut” and knew that the blows had been bullets…
He lay curiously twisted; the rifle, caught in some way between his body and his crumpled arm, pointed up to the sky like a finger. From him, as he lay, a thin and sluggish stream of darkness violated the shining sand.
XIV
Three shots… a faint, double “phut” and a loud “crack” from close at hand…
The Sergeant, lying among the trees upon the eastern fringe, leapt to his feet and ran back and across the clearing. He came to the western side and threw himself flat and crawled until he was almost at the edge of the slope. He turned his head and softly called: “Hale!”
But before the word had properly left his lips his gaze had gone out over the desert, and he had seen. He rolled over upon his side and put a hand to his mouth. “Morelli!” he roared. “Abelson! Turn out! Turn out!” He twisted back again and brought the rifle to his shoulder. He could see nothing save sand and shadow and the crumpled body of Hale, the rifle beside pointing up into the sky.
But he fired. Three shots in the direction of that body and over it. They rang out with a noise which shattered the night. The sleeping men would hear them if they had not already heard his voice.
Abelson came, running, Morelli on his heels. “Get down!” said the Sergeant. “Crawl up level with me.” They came, wriggling like great insects. Each had rifle and bandolier. Both were helmetless. Morelli wore shirt and breeches and socks; Abelson was the same but barefooted. “Whassup?” he said, in a sibilant shout intended for a whisper. “God!” Morelli said: his eyes had fallen upon that huddled body. “Look! you choot!” Abelson saw, and was quiet.
A rushing of feet and Sanders, fully dressed, was with them and lay panting at Morelli’s side.
Then silence fell again about the four and the moon-drenched world.
“Can’t see a — thing!” came Morelli’s voice at last.
“Christ!” The Jew scrambled wildly to his feet.
“Down!” hissed the Sergeant. “Down, will you!” But Abelson still stood, his head bent forward, straining his eyes toward that limp mass which lay, black and huddled on the shining sand.
“He’s movin’!” he gasped. “There! Look, I tell yeh! He’s moved twice!” He flung out an arm, pointing with a hand which shook.
“Get down, damn you!” The Sergeant’s voice rasped across the soft and heavy air. “They shot him, now they’re waitin’ for someone to go out for him. What chance ’ve y’ got? Can’t lose any more men…”
His voice ceased suddenly. For Abelson had dropped his rifle with a clattering crash. He seemed to gather himself, crouching as if for the start of a race. The Sergeant jerked to his knees and flung out a clutching hand. His fingers grazed a bare ankle but no more. For Abelson was already sliding down the slope, half running, half falling. They saw the flash of white feet as he reached the level and began to run.
“Bloody fool!” Morelli growled.
“Insubordinate swine!” The Sergeant brought his rifle back to his shoulder. “Guts, though… Now watch, all of you… Watch like all hell! Over there, beyond Hale. ’F you see anything, fire and go on firing…”
They looked out, holding their breath as if this would put those extra yards into their sight. They were, though their eyes were out beyond, conscious all the while of the racing, crouching figure of Abelson, covering those hundred and fifty yards of loose, deep, shifting dust like a sullen streak… They knew when he reached his goal and dropped on his knees beside it and bent over it with fevered urgency…
A shout from Morelli: “There! There!”… A string of shots, splitting the night… the Sergeant kneeling now, rifle still at shoulder, peering… Morelli re-loading, saying: “— it! Out there… two fingers right of the square shadder two hundred past the guys. For Jesus’ sake shoot, you —s!”… More shots… a crescendo of emptying magazines, Morelli’s and the Sergeant’s… Stray, queerly vague-sounding shots from Sanders… The Jew, bending, straining out there, a black ape in the silver light, to get upon his shoulders the limp bundle… He does it; and rises, to bend again and somehow snatch and grasp the bundle’s fallen rifle… He comes labouring back, trotting clumsily on wavering feet, bowed beneath his burden…
Firing at that patch which Morelli had seen, or thought to see, as something more than shadow… Was it? … Two spurts… three… four… of sand about the feet of the Jew and his bundle… No sound, for the rifles cracking in their ears drown those others whose bullets had made the sand-spray… But they see them… Loading with oaths and speed… pulling triggers so fast as fingers will work; Morelli and the Sergeant… Slower, vaguer shots from Sanders… A hail of bullets… a screen of them, screaming out to that place where the shadow had seemed more than shadow…
There were no more spurts of sand. Abelson reached the slope, toiled up it with one last effort, and rolled among them. His burden fell from him and lay sprawled at the feet of Sanders while he himself doubled up and strove for breath with raucous, whistling gasps.
“Cease fire!” The Sergeant rose from his knee. “Morelli: keep watching.” He laid down his rifle and ran to the body of Hale. He knelt beside it and groped with his hand in the bosom of its shirt, bending his head, too, its ear to the mouth.
“I think,” he said. “Yes… Finish.”
Abelson, from the ground, gasped denial. “Not on yeh life! … Wasn’t out there… Spoke.”
There came a faint twitching in the body under the Sergeant’s hands. He bent his head again sharply. Through the darkness, striking his ear so faintly that it was as if a voice spoke inside his own head, came the words:
“Good ole Neb… Neb… Nebu’k’neezer! … Wot O! ther King o’ th’ Jews!” A pause. Then: “Good boy… pullin’ us aht o’ that… Got… to… go… sick now…” The voice went out like a snuffled candle. Silence. Then a choking, bubbling gasp. A rattling, yet liquid sound. The body, which had seemed to swell as the words had come from its head, went limp and utterly still.
The Sergeant got to his feet. “Gone now,” he said. He stood for a moment looking down, through the darkness at the shadow, at the darker mass at his feet. “Pity,” he said.
Abelson, his breath still coming in rasping gasps, came and stood at his elbow. “Wha’s that?” he said. He looked down at the body.
“Out,” said the Sergeant.
Abelson knelt and ran his hand under the shirt. He rose again. “— it!” he said. “— it!” He turned away.
“Get y’r rifle,” came the Sergeant’s voice after him. “You an’ Morelli keep watching. Mallam?” He turned. “Sanders!” he said. “Get back to the hut.” He walked away among the trees, making for the spring.
By it, propped against a tree, he found what he sought, two water-bottles. He filled them and turned back on the way he had come.
He stood over Morelli and
Abelson. “Pawney?” he said. A yard to his left lay the body of Hale, still and limp.
Morelli said, without taking his eyes from the desert, “Thank ’ee, Sarge.”
The Sergeant bent, but straightened suddenly and with a jerk. Among the trees, coming towards them, were running, stumbling, crazy footsteps. Sanders burst upon them. “Corporal…” he panted. “Corporal… Corporal’s… Corporal’s…”
The Sergeant put down the bottles. “Stay here,” he said to the men on the ground. “Sanders!” He picked up his rifle and went to the man and gripped the thin arm. His fingers sunk into the flesh. “What’s up?” he said. He drew the man back over the way he had come at that stumbling run.
“Corporal Bell…” panted Sanders. “He’s…” The Sergeant dropped the arm and began to run. He came out into the clearing and cut across its edge, towards the hut. He made at full speed for that doorway.
But he did not go through it. Across the threshold, outside, lay Bell. His legs were doubled beneath him, and by his head a rifle lay in the dust. He was clothed, fully, even to the topee. His bandolier was across his chest. He lay in a patch of moonlight, which gave the effect, incredibly realistic, of the pool made by a lime from the gallery.
The Sergeant halted. He stood, leaning on his rifle, looking down at the body. He had seen, it had been shown to him with a clarity utterly brutal… He knew that this was a dead man. Another dead man.
“My God!” he muttered.
Sanders came, and laid a hand upon his arm. He said:
“Sergeant, is he…”
The Sergeant nodded. “Poor devil… Must ’ve heard that firin’… through his fever ’n all… Got up… dressed… tried to come out. Couldn’t really ’ve known what he was at. Instinct. Then that wound tore open. Bled to death, if the cropper he came didn’t do the job outright.”
Sanders’ hand fell to his side. His knees seemed to give. He sank upon them and bowed his head upon his hands. He began to pray.
“O Father…” His voice cracked. Sobs tore at him, racked his thin body.
XV
Noon… the sun, for the third time since that day whose night had seen the death of Hale and then the Corporal, beat vertically down upon the oasis and its garrison… Save for Morelli, upright upon the roof of the hut, shading his eyes to look out over the desert, there was no sign of life.
Inside the hut, naked to the waist, the sweat from their bodies making dark, spreading patches upon the blankets folded beneath them, lay the Sergeant and Abelson. They had found that, oven though it was, so that a man seemed slowly and helplessly to roast within it, the hut was the place in which to find not indeed comfort but a lesser torture during those hours between eight and eight.
The Sergeant raised himself upon a brown and corded arm. He groped in his haversack and brought from it a piece of rag which had once been a handkerchief. He mopped with this; at his neck, which felt slimy to his touch as if it had been bathed in oil; at his chest, down which ran little rivulets as he moved; at his arms and back, on which, in unreachable spots, the sweat, as it will on backs when men recline in great heat, lay in cold and gruesome patches.
He threw the limp, drenched rag away to rest upon his haversack. He said:
“Where’s Sanders?” in a voice which was flat and stale and tired.
Abelson grunted. “Yeh knows as much as I do. I c’n guess, though…”
“H’m…” The Sergeant nodded. “Took his haversack, didn’t he? Can’t see it. What’s that for?” His voice was that of a man who talks for the sake of smashing silence. The Jew grunted again and closed his eyes, puffing his breath out audibly through his lips with every exhalation.
The Sergeant struggled into his shirt of khaki flannel, pulling viciously to get the damp stuff over his damper body. He buckled on his spine-pad and clapped upon his head his topee. From where it leaned in a corner he took his rifle, hitched it into the crook of his left arm, and stepped out through the doorway… from oven to furnace.
He looked up at Morelli. “All clear?” he said.
Morelli looked down at him. “As U!” he said. “What’s the budgi, Sarge? It’s like all hell up here!” He panted a little as he spoke. For an instant he seemed to sway as if falling, but recovered.
The Sergeant looked at his watch. “’Nother quarter ’f an hour. Stick it!” He turned back to doorway again. “Abelson!” he called, and received a grunt for answer. “Morelli’s hour’s nearly up. You go on in fifteen minutes. Better get ready.” He turned away and walked through the trees to the edge of the clearing and across it.
He came to the spring and stopped to drink from the palm of his hand and to lave face and neck. He passed on into the trees behind the spring: these were denser here than elsewhere and had more undergrowth and young trees about their feet.
Before he came within sight of Sanders, the man’s voice, on that high and piercing note, came to his ears.
“‘Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.’…”
The Sergeant brushed through the undergrowth and passed close between two trunks and saw. Sanders knelt beside a long narrow mound. His hands held close before his face a small book whose khaki cover bore a cross of red. The Sergeant’s footsteps roused him. He shut the little Bible and got to his feet and turned. Beneath the shading helmet his face was brown-grey with eyes which stared, blazing, out from under a harassed brow. The flesh of his face seemed to have fallen away so that only skin was left, and this so tightly stretched that the high, slanting cheek-bones looked as if they would at any moment push their way out from beneath it. He stood rigidly, awkwardly, in that unconscious travesty of attention. His hands, clenched at his sides, one holding the Bible, were trembling.
The Sergeant looked at him, then down at the mound which marked the grave of Bell and Hale. He remembered how, on that night three night ago, they had laboured over that grave, sweating in the moonlight. Two at a time they had worked, two digging, two, at the far side of the oasis, on guard. He and Sanders had actually finished the grave; it was they who had put in the bodies and piled down the earth and made the mound. He remembered how, at last, he had left Sanders there, praying. He saw that, since the day before, someone… Sanders… had made from palm leaves a large, rough cross which now stood, leaning drunkenly, at one end of the mound. He said, after this moment’s silence:
“How long you been here?”
The thin lips moved in that ravaged face. Their words were spoken so low that the Sergeant thrust forward his head to catch them. “Almost an hour, Sergeant.”
The Sergeant looked up at the sun, which streamed down on to the grave unhindered at this spot by palms which might break its force. “You better get inside,” he said curtly. “Quick. An’ don’t do this again. You’ve got your relief to do on the roof, an’ that’s enough sun for any man. Come here at night… if you must. Take my advice, you won’t… Look here, Sanders… whatever you were, or are goin’ to be, just get it into your head that now you’re a soldier. As a soldier you’ve got to do, while we’re here, what I think’s best… And what’s best now is to take y’r turns at guard an’ look out and take care of y’rself… See? That’s our job now, keeping as fit’s we can… in case of whatever’s comin’… Understand?”
“Yes,” said the pale lips, wet now with the beads of sweat which suddenly were rolling from the cheeks and forehead.
The Sergeant came closer. He put out a hand and rested it a moment on the thin shoulder. “Remember it, then,” he said. “You want to watch yourself, Sanders…” His voice changed; became curt again. “Now get back. Lie down. An’ try an’ sleep until your relief. You’ve got two hours. Abelson goes on now; then me; then you. Get along.”
Sanders went. The Sergeant stood and watched until the awkward, thin figure
was lost to sight among the trees. He scratched his head, then shook it. He said, half-aloud: “Go right off… any day… nearly is now… An’ that’s that… Who wouldn’t be a soldier; a dashin’ slashin’ cavalry soldier!” He turned from the grave and made his way slowly to the spring. He sat down, heavily, in the shade at the base of a palm. He brought out that leather case and counted the cigarettes inside it. There were twelve. He hesitated over these a moment; finally took one and lighted it and leaned back luxurious against the tree, tilting his helmet forward over his eyes. He thought. He had been thinking, in these ever-recurring circles, since that night… how long ago was it? … when Cook and MacKay had trudged off, walking and walking until they had walked themselves away. Four nights ago! That was it… seemed longer… No, by God! it was three only… the same night that Hale had died, and Bell… What a night? Thinking in circles, he’d been… Ever since then. Damn it! You couldn’t help thinking round and round… it was like a mouse in a cage, working one of those treadmills… There was no other way you could think… It was a circle… Oasis… Cook and MacKay and their search for aid… No knowledge of where they were or we are or the whole blasted British Army either… Stay or go… Can’t go… not enough grub left now except dates… don’t know where to go to… If go, might miss troops sent by Jock and Cook if they’d got anywhere… Not many Arabs holdin’ us up here; can’t be, or they’d ’ve been all over us… Wait, then… Watch… water, dates, live… Oasis… The circle complete.
The smoke from his cigarette curled lazily up into the burning, shimmering air. The sweat, where he leaned his back against the tree, grew cold and clammy. But he sat there. He smoked. His mind once more started upon its treadmill.
In the hut lay Sanders and Morelli, for now it was Abelson who stood upon the roof above them… Morelli was naked to the waist: he lay flat upon his back, his arms outflung; his broad, thick torso rose and fell in great jerks to his laboured breathing. Sanders was in shirt and breeches; he had cast off merely helmet, spine-pad, and bandolier. He lay upon his stomach, his hands propping his chin: open before him was the little Bible. There was silence save for the gasps of Morelli and the faint, faint mutter which rose, every now and then, from the grey lips that moved perpetually as the eyes above them read on through the Book of Revelation.
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