by H. E. Bates
‘I do not know how long it will be possible to stay,’ he said.
‘It will help if we can rest,’ Franklin said.
‘You aim to get to Spain?’
‘If possible.’
‘The situation is not easy,’ the man said. ‘There have been rumours about labour orders. All sorts of rumours. Farther north they have taken hostages. The situation is increasingly bad. Everywhere.’
‘I don’t want you to take risks for us,’ Franklin said.
‘In France everything is a risk now,’ the man said. ‘That is the way of it. It is what we have come to.’
‘I’m sorry. We know,’ Franklin said.
‘You will want to eat,’ the man said. ‘Perhaps you will go upstairs first. Have you the necessary things to shave with?’
‘My friend here has a razor,’ he said, pointing to O’Connor. ‘He is always the man of emergency.’
Then please go up. My daughter will take you.’
‘Thank you,’ Franklin said. ‘Thank you, indeed. Very much.’
The girl went out of the room the way the old woman had gone, and Franklin and the four sergeants followed her. She took them through the house and then up wooden, carpetless stairs to a first landing, and then up a second flight of narrower stairs to a room at the top. The room had a single window that looked down-river, across the valley. There was a single bed, with a bare straw mattress, and a china ewer and basin on a washstand in one corner, and a mirror on the wall.
The sergeants stood awkwardly in the room, tired and nervous with the strain of what had happened. Franklin stood back from the window and looked down at the mill and the yard below.
‘There’s a man down there,’ he said.
‘Only Pierre,’ she said.
‘Your brother?’
‘No. He would be helping my father in the mill if the mill were working.’
‘Will he know about us?’
‘He will know, and it will be all right.’
He did not say any more. The strain of things, of walking without food and sleep, of his wound and the loss of blood, of the final moments of wondering if the girl could be trusted, and now of relief, came rushing up through his body in a spasm of cold weakness, faint and stupid. He checked it and held it down. And in that moment he looked at the girl, alert and dark and supremely assured, in the doorway. Her black eyes had not flickered for a moment since he had first surprised her among the hens. But now there was a faint smile on her face, her lips not quite parted, and she looked like the calmest, surest person he had ever known.
CHAPTER 5
O’CONNOR was old in the game and carried a razor, shaving cream, toothbrush, soap, nail-scissors, and a revolver and twenty rounds. Using the razor in turn, the four sergeants and Franklin washed and shaved in the bedroom, taking about an hour. When they had finished Franklin went alone downstairs. He found the girl and the old woman waiting for him on the first landing.
‘We have finished,’ he said.
‘Now,’ the girl said, ‘there are only four of us. This is my grandmother. My father’s mother.’
‘Madame,’ he said. He bowed slightly. The old lady, who looked more than seventy, had a big silver crucifix on her chest. She looked eternal and old and scared, and did not say anything.
‘Then there’s Pierre and my father and myself.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘That’s all. Just the four of us,’ she said. ‘There is a bridge about two miles down the river, and if anybody else comes it will be that way. But if anybody comes it probably will not be any good. Somebody may come. If you see a man like my father, taller, rather like him, it will be my uncle. He may come.’
‘Yes.’
‘We are going to put you in the mill. You will have to be there all the time and not come out. My father and Pierre are getting it ready now. You can only come out at night, and then only one at a time.’
‘Yes.’
‘It is all right for you to come down now to eat.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Do you like eels?’
‘I never ate them.’
‘You will have to begin. It will probably be all eels until we can arrange otherwise. I am sorry about it, but they will be very good.’
‘We could eat anything,’ he said.
‘There will be eggs anyway this morning,’ she said.
He went upstairs and called the sergeants, and together they went down into the kitchen. The old woman had begun to boil the eggs over the fire, and there were plates of sliced bread on the table, small squares of butter, and round sections of fresh soft white cheese. There was a bowl of apples, and the girl, putting glasses on the table, asked what they would drink.
‘There is no coffee,’ she said. ‘There is milk. Or there is wine. Perhaps it is a little early for wine.’
‘I think milk,’ he said. ‘Perhaps some wine later. If we may?’
‘There is always milk and wine,’ she said. ‘We are lucky.’
‘We are very grateful,’ he said.
Through the open door, as he ate the breakfast of boiled eggs and cheese and bread and apples and drank the cold thick milk, he could look up the slope, beyond the fruit trees and the vines, to the crest of the hill over which he and the four sergeants had come. The sun was strong and white and slanted full on the vines. He could see how the heat of the day would gather on the hillside with the turning sun, full on the swelling grapes green on the low trained vines. As he looked at it, he felt that the world of the crashed Wellington, the trip above the Alps, his fatigue, the walking in the moonlight, and the swimming of the river were part of a confused and remote reality. Still farther beyond, real with the same sense of isolation, the world of the Mess, the Wellingtons lined up on the black perimeter and on the brown-green grass of the drome, all the functional reality of camouflaged station buildings and the lonely reality of the broad runway spreading away, empty and flat, before the nose of the plane, and then the final and absolute reality of operational darkness broken only by the red stars of light on the station; all of that part of his life now seemed to be pressed farther and farther away, beyond the curtain of a dream.
He must have dreamed a few seconds longer than he realized, and the voice of the girl startled him. She, too, had been watching the door.
‘I think it would be better now if you got into a safer place.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We want to do whatever you think best.’
She went out of the kitchen and stood outside, on the white stones of the yard, in the sun, looking up and down. As she stood there he told the four sergeants what she had said. One by one they got up from the table. The old woman stood away from the table, the smile of pleasure, touched with fear, fixed on her face, her eyes bright and uneasy, her arms folded below her breast. O’Connor, getting up from the table last, looked at her and grinned and said:
‘Merci beaucoup, madame, merci beaucoup.’
He grinned at Franklin, too.
‘My French is quite good!’
‘Monsieur is very welcome,’ the old woman said.
‘What’s she say?’
‘She says you are very welcome,’ Franklin said.
‘Bon ! ’ O’Connor said. ‘Bon ! Merci!’
The old woman smiled again, and as she smiled O’Connor remembered something. He put his hand in the pocket of his flying-jacket and took out a slab of chocolate. He walked to the end of the table where the old lady stood, and he held the chocolate out to her. ‘Perhaps you don’t get much chocolate, madame,’ he said. She did not move. She stood with eyes steadfastly fixed on O’Connor. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Please, madame. I don’t want it. I got plenty. Go on.’ She still did not move, and suddenly he pushed the chocolate forward and into her hands. She did not move even then. She held the chocolate loose in her bone-white hands, against her dress. Then suddenly she did move. She let her head fall suddenly down, her chin on her breast, crying bitterly as she tightened her hands.<
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‘Oh, blimey ! ’ O’Connor said. ‘Did I do wrong?’
‘You did all right,’ Franklin said.
‘Oh! I’m sorry,’ O’Connor said. ‘Madame, I’m sorry.’
‘No need to be sorry,’ Franklin said.
‘Did I say something she didn’t like?’
‘No, I think she likes it,’ Franklin said.
As they were speaking the girl came in from the yard. The old woman had moved at last and had begun to pack up the plates on the table. Her tears were wet on her face, and the girl saw them and Franklin explained. O’Connor looked very embarrassed and the girl smiled. ‘We had better go now,’ she said. She walked out into the sunshine again, the two youngest sergeants, then Sandy, then Franklin following her. As O’Connor followed Franklin he turned and looked back at the old woman, still packing the dishes with one hand and holding the chocolate with the other, the tears still wet on her face. ‘Au revoir. madame,’ he said, pronouncing it in the English way.
‘Au revoir, m’sieu,’ she said, and smiled.
The four sergeants and Franklin followed the girl across the yard and into the mill on the opposite side. At the foot of the wooden stairs inside Franklin waited for the four sergeants to go up. As he followed them he could smell he dry, ageless odour of the dust of corn and then, deep behind it, dead cold and slightly fusty, the smell of water. The flying-boots of the men were muffled on the planks of the stairs and the upstairs floor. At the head of the first stairs was a wide wooden floor, bare except for a flat pile of empty corn-sacks in one corner. The girl led them across it and then up a shorter flight of stairs into a smaller room beyond. She stood in the centre of the room and waited until Franklin had climbed the stairs and shut the door.
‘If you stay here it will be all right,’ she said. ‘But as long as you have your flying clothes you must stay here.’
‘Yes,’ Franklin said. ‘And if anything happens?’
‘If anything happens,’ she said, ‘you can go down here.’
The room was about fifteen feet square, with a second door opposite the first. The girl unbolted the door and showed Franklin another flight of steps going down inside.
‘You can go down to the bottom and then down below the wheel-shaft. There may be some water, but there is room for all of you.’
‘Is anything likely to happen?’ he said.
‘One can’t tell.’
‘But you would know? Probably?’
‘Very probably. But it is important you don’t go out. In daylight at least. And in the dark only singly.’
She stood alert and assured and upright among the five men, not nervous, as if she had thought it all out and the pre-conception of it all had long since become real and fixed in her mind. Franklin looked at the wide clear forehead under the black hair, and the smooth sun-sallow skin of her face and arms and neck, and wondered how old she was.
‘We shall try to bring your food up here,’ she said. ‘And we will try to get you better clothes. You will need other clothes when you leave.’
She had spoken all the time to Franklin, but as if in a general way, not looking straight at him. Now she looked clearly at him.
‘What about your arm?’ she said. ‘How bad is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Has it been dressed?’
‘It was dressed when it happened. But not since. I haven’t seen it yet.’
‘I think at least we should look at it here,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said. He knew that it was no use being silly about the arm. Sometimes when the pain came on it felt as if a lump of lead on a taut slow wire were being pulled slowly down the main artery of his arm, making it ache from the socket to the ball of his thumb. Occasionally when he stood still after sudden movement the lump of lead seemed to be jerked heavily into his forehead, to knock there with a sort of sullen sickness between his eyes. He knew that the arm might, if it got worse, complicate the whole business of escape for them all.
‘Perhaps it would be better if we looked at it at once,’ she said.
‘It is very kind,’ he said.
‘Do the others understand?’ she said. ‘About remaining here?’
‘I will make it clear,’ he said. He told the four sergeants what the girl had said. ‘You know what to do if anything happens,’ he said. ‘O’Connor is in charge.’
‘O.K.,’ O’Connor said.
The girl waited. They are quite clear?’ she said.
‘Quite clear,’ he said.
She went out of the room at once, and Franklin followed her down through the floors and stairs of the mill and across the yard, through the space of sun that was now like a hot bar between the two walls of shade. She went straight through the kitchen, calling to the old woman as she went, and then into the living-room beyond. There was a heavy mahogany round table in the centre of the room, with a brass lamp on it. She took the lamp off and set it in one of the chairs. Then she began to take off Franklin’s flying-jacket, slipping the good arm out of the sleeve and pulling the jacket slowly over his head. Immediately he felt the sudden pain swing up from his arm into his forehead, beating at his eyes. She seemed at once to know how he felt and said, ‘You had better sit down,’ and as he sat down, resting his injured arm on the smooth cold mahogany, the old woman came in with a big basin of hot water and a towel over her arm. She put the basin on the table and then locked the door.
‘Now,’ the girl said.
She unknotted the bandage and began to unroll it Blood had soaked through the bandage in a huge brown patch, darker as the successive folds of bandage came off, until it was almost black in the centre. He felt the bandage sticking and heard the slight crackle of it as the dried blood gave way. As he looked at his arm he saw how the bandage had bitten into the flesh, and how the rim had slightly swollen beyond the taut brown fringe. Then he knew what was coming: the folds of bandage that no longer pulled at each other, but pulled, deep and raw and harsh, at the live tissue of the wound below. He sat waiting for it. He saw the girl pick up the towel and soak it in hot water and begin to bathe the bandage free. He felt her pull the fold of bandage away, tautly and tenderly. The pain did not increase much, but he felt the bandage pulling against the flesh, as if it would pull the lips of the wound open. Then as he looked down at his arm he saw the blood clotted in a black lump in the centre of the bandage, and then, beyond the fringes of the bandage, the extreme fine edges of the wound. It looked about six inches long.
‘Did you lose much blood?’ the girl said.
‘I think quite a lot’
‘I’m afraid if I take the bandage off it will bleed again and I won’t be able to stop it’
‘It will probably be all right with a fresh bandage over the old.’
‘It could never be,’ she said. ‘A wound that size needs stitching.’
‘It will be all right,’ he said.
The girl did not answer. He knew that it was not all right; that what he said did not mean anything. He knew that the arm was bad and that it would be better not to be foolish about it. He thought again of the sergeants and how it must complicate the business of escaping.
‘It must be stitched,’ the girl said.
That’s a problem,’ he said.
‘It would not be possible for a doctor to come up here,’ she said.
‘Then what?’
‘We must take you to a doctor.’
She said it quite fearlessly, and he knew at once how dangerous it might be.
‘That means great risk for you,’ he said.
‘The whole thing is a risk,’ she said simply.
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ he said.
She looked at him with shining black eyes in which there was a sort of startled determination but no sort of fear at all, and there was nothing he could say.
‘It’s quite simple,’ she said. The arm needs a doctor, and there is a doctor in the town. So we must go down into the town. There’s nothing very difficult a
bout that.’
He did not speak.
‘If the arm gets very bad, you know what it will mean,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘It will mean hospital. It will mean you will have to give yourself up. The situation will be unpleasant for everybody.’
‘Then we had better go into the town.’
‘It is the obvious thing,’ she said.
The old woman had brought in a jam-jar of ointment. It looked like yellow lard. Now the girl took a lump of it in her fingers and spread it thickly along the line of the wound, slightly over the edge of the bandage. Then she took a towel and damped it and, from above and below the wound, washed away the blood that had run down the arm. Then she dried the arm with another corner of the towel and began to wind the bandage over the wound again, pressing down the ointment. As the pressure squeezed it out, she smeared it back over the new fold of bandage with her fingers.
‘You need some sleep,’ she said.
‘Yes. But don’t we go into the town to-day?’
‘Not to-day. I hope to-morrow. We have to arrange it’
‘It will be very difficult?’
‘I don’t think so. Once we have got the chicken it will not be difficult.’
‘The chicken?’
She smiled. ‘With a chicken you can do most things,’ she said. ‘With two chickens you can do anything.’
The smile remained on her face, luminous and beautifully clear and fearless, while she finished the bandaging of his arm. When it was done the old woman took away the bowl and the towel and the ointment, and for a few moments Franklin and the girl were alone in the room. She picked up his flying-jacket and put it over his shoulders, leaving the sleeves loose. Then she looked at him with fearlessly clear, calm, dark eyes and said, quite simply, ‘There is no need for you to be afraid.’