Fair Stood the Wind for France

by H. E. Bates

  Now on the bed he was breathing quietly, but the words were still not fully alive in the half-living face. It was the face of a man who had been beaten back wherever he went: the face of a man thrusting his face through the bars of a prison, first in one place and then another, only to have it beaten back, and then only to thrust it out again and have it beaten back again, until there was a last time when he lay down and could not get up and could bear it no longer.

  ‘I tried it all ways, Skip.’ The dark mouth hung open, trembled and seemed to try to bite at the words. ‘All ways. Swam rivers— Got – got – got—’

  ‘Don’t talk,’ Franklin said. The small room was full of the sound of O’Connor repeating the one word, dry and helpless, like a child with a fit of coughing. When the agony of it broke at last the short rush of new words was almost too low and tired to hear.

  ‘Got all my money pinched, Skip; took all my money.’

  He gave the most unaccountable smile of bitterness, screwing up the thin cheeks until they were double-creased with dark fissures on either side of the mouth. The O’Connor that had once thrashed his way buoyantly over every kind of trouble seemed to have died. Franklin held for a moment one of his thin wrists. The flesh above the upraised pebble of bone was ruckled and cold. He let the wrist go and unloosened O’Connor’s shirt at the chest, opening the shirt out so that he could feel the chest, cold as the wrists themselves. It was quite hollow under the hair between the outer frames of bone, holding for a second or two the few drops of brandy he poured down on it. As he put the bottle down by the bed and began to rub the brandy into the chest, moving his hand circularwise and slowly across the furrows of bone, O’Connor smiled again and said something about ‘Reminds me when I was a kid. Chest rubbed.’ Franklin rubbed the chest until his hand was dry, and then poured a little more brandy on it and rubbed again. When it was dry a second time he poured the brandy on the chest again, but this time flattened the palm of his hand in it and rubbed it first on one of O’Connor’s wrists and then the other. As he did so he saw another kind of smile come on O’Connor’s face. It fixed itself there, very quiet and in a way quite solemn; the smile of relief after pain. Soon he saw it grow under the motion of his hand. He saw it spread upwards through the face, spreading warm film across the eyes, until the smile there seemed liquid, living, and O’Connor let the lids close down as if he wanted to seal them against the overflowing joy.

  When he opened them again Franklin had finished rubbing his wrists. He got up and poured a little more brandy into his tooth-glass. He turned to see O’Connor sitting up. His hands were flat on his thin knees, and where the shot had ripped across the bone of one of them there was a mark as if a hot nail had been laid there and hammered in. It did not seem as if the wound had bled at all, as though the fleshless skin of O’Connor’s hands was also bloodless, and now, for the first time, O’Connor looked at it, the smile still fixed on his face, very solemn, very quiet, and gravely determined. He took the brandy from Franklin’s hand and drank it without speaking and without changing the expression on his face. He looked at his hand for a long time, as though he were fixing the gravity of it on his mind. Franklin, remembering how he had first seen it as he crawled under the trucks, and how, seeing it, had thought O’Connor dead, now saw the significance of this long stare. Another inch or so and O’Connor might have been dead there under the railway trucks, and himself as good as dead, too, lying with him. Even before O’Connor spoke he saw the small bloodless wound as the culmination and the symbol of all that O’Connor had suffered.

  ‘Some bastard will pay for this.’

  ‘Now don’t start talking cock.’ Franklin put into his voice the old ironic friendliness of their common world.

  ‘Some bloody Frenchie will pay for it, too.’ The words were coming quite easily now, released from their stuttering pain. ‘The sods have rooked and swindled me all down the country. Everywhere!’

  ‘Now steady.’

  ‘Steady? Oh Skip! Oh Skip!’ The bitterness of the thin face suddenly exploded in a way that seemed to Franklin unreal. The hands danced nervously on O’Connor’s knees: the big, ageless, comforting hands that had borne him across the river and that could have carried him like a baby, and that were now themselves dancing like the hands of a fretful child. ‘They pinched my papers, they pinched my wallet, they would have pinched my clothes if I’d let them. They even pinched the little food I had. The only thing they didn’t pinch was my revolver. Thank Christ I kept that. At least I got a chance to shoot one of the bastards in return.’

  ‘You’d better take it steady,’ Franklin said.

  O’Connor, not speaking, gasping for breath, sucking it down into his mouth in painful gulps again, stared with horrible fascination at Franklin’s empty sleeve.

  ‘Oh God!’ he said. ‘Oh God!’

  ‘Lie down.’

  ‘No,’ O’Connor said. ‘No. It’s only I can’t believe the arm. Even when I look at you I can’t believe it.’

  Franklin said abruptly, ‘What happened to the boys?’ He did not want to talk about the arm.

  ‘No idea, no idea,’ O’Connor said. ‘I suppose they made it. Taylor was very smart at the lingo. They’d get through.’ He looked up, newly troubled. ‘Come to that, how the hell did you get here? With that – that business and all?’ He nodded towards the arm.

  ‘The girl got me here,’ Franklin said. ‘We came down together.’

  ‘Girl?’

  ‘At the mill. You remember.’

  ‘Oh, the girl! ’ O’Connor said. His eyes were vague as if he were not very interested. Franklin decided not to talk about the father or the doctor. O’Connor screwed up his eyes. Suddenly he was interested. ‘What made the girl come with you?’

  ‘We’re going to be married,’ Franklin said.

  ‘Married?’ O’Connor looked vaguely and wildly round the room. ‘Am I barmy?’

  ‘No,’ Franklin said. He was laughing at the troubled face. ‘No. I said married.’

  ‘Well, I give up,’ O’Connor said. ‘I give up. You marrying a French girl.’

  ‘You can be best man,’ Franklin said. ‘If not here, then in Spain. If not Spain, then England.’

  ‘England,’ O’Connor said. He got up for the first time and took a few steps about the room. Halting, he looked back at Franklin, shaking his head. ‘I never thought I’d cry my bloody heart out to be back home,’ he said. ‘But that’s what I’ve been doing. Honest, Skip! Crying my bloody heart out.’

  He came back and sat on the bed. He looked at Franklin with incredible unsteadiness. It occurred to Franklin that he was very like a man who had reached the breaking point after many operations. He sat down on the bed. The time had come to talk of something practical.

  ‘We’d better get you out of here,’ he said. ‘Pierre’s sister keeps a shop round the corner. Get your kit ready and we’ll go round now.’

  ‘My kit?’ O’Connor said. ‘You’re making me laugh, Skip. My kit?’

  O‘Connor laid out on the bed two handkerchiefs, a thin piece of white soap, his revolver, and ten rounds.

  ‘That’s all I got,’ he said. The bloody issue.’

  ‘I seem to remember you carried a pantechnicon on ops,’ Franklin said.

  ‘I did,’ O’Connor said. ‘I did. I had it organized.’ The comedy of it seemed to strike him momentarily; a small wave of smiles slipped over his face. ‘Razor, soap, knife, chocolate, chisel, screwdriver, cards, darts, pliers, torch, revolver. Everything. Everything.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The sods pinched it I tell you, Skip! They pinched it. Wherever I went they pinched it. Look at my bloody face! ‘ He ran his hands angrily over the thin cheeks with their two-day beard. ‘Somebody pinched my razor.’ The eyes looked wildly up from the dark face.

  ‘I – I – I —’ he was stuttering again in his search for words.

  ‘Steady,’ Franklin said. It seemed perhaps it would be better to go. Outside, if they could get a
little air, perhaps a little food, O’Connor would feel better. He looked at the troubled face of O’Connor, grubby and tragic, the mouth wildly open, and remembered the rain. The rain itself would do him good.

  ‘If that’s all your things,’ he said, ‘we can go.’

  ‘It’s all. Thanks to the bloody Frenchies,’ O’Connor said. He wrapped the soap in the handkerchiefs and put them into his pocket. His revolver was very bright and clean. He held it in one hand, weighing the ammunition in the other. ‘At least I still got that.’ He gripped the handle very tightly, so that the bones of his hand were white.

  ‘Keep it out of sight,’ Franklin said. The clean blue steel of the revolver annoyed him.

  ‘You bet,’ O’Connor said. ‘No Frenchie is pinching this. This is the only sensible thing I got.’

  ‘It might not be so sensible either,’ Franklin said. ‘If they searched you at the frontier and found that it wouldn’t be so sensible.’

  ‘It would be a sensible thing to shoot a French bastard with,’ O’Connor said. ‘Which is what I will do before I’m much older. I got some scores to pay out.’

  ‘Good old Connie,’ Franklin said. His annoyance remained, but it seemed better to cover it up. It seemed probable that O’Connor’s desire to shoot Frenchmen was only temporary. It seemed better, therefore, not to condemn it now. It could only do O’Connor good to feel aggressive once again. He stood up and said, ‘Can you walk?’

  O’Connor put the ammunition and the revolver in his pocket. ‘I think I can,’ he said. He stood up unsteadily, smiled a little and nodded. ‘All right,’ he said, and suddenly Franklin felt deeply and wonderfully glad of the scruffy, tired, friendly face. the wonder of hearing an English voice, the wonder of a coincidence that was a miracle for them both. It seemed in that moment like the next best thing to regaining his arm. He put his arm on O’Connor’s shoulders and pressed his fingers against the bone. ‘Come on,’ he said.

  They walked down the bare stairs of the hotel and out into the street. It was still raining gently in the darkness, in fine cross sweeps sometimes twisted by wind. It felt very good and clean and cool on Franklin’s face.

  O’Connor turned up the collar of his jacket. Rain and darkness together seemed to restore something of himself.

  ‘I suppose I should congratulate you,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re right for each other. I see that now.’

  ‘You be nice to her,’ Franklin said. ‘I’ll brain you if you’re not. If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘That’s enough for me,’ O’Connor said. ‘Until you turned up my luck was out.’

  ‘So you see you owe it to her, too.’

  ‘That’s right,’ O’Connor said. ‘So I do.’

  They walked on up the street in the rain, and at intervals the rain, blowing through the cool night air, had in it a smell of the sea. It scattered for both of them the feeling of being trapped in a foreign city. It made the short experience of walking up the dark street something like the re-living of an old experience. It was as if they were back in England, in Cambridge, walking the dark street in search of a late taxi, after the pubs had closed, before going back to the station. Through the fresh rain came the memory of their old identity. They began to recapture the feeling of interdependence, the confidence that, because they were together, nothing could happen to them now.

  In the next street Franklin rang the bell of the greengrocery shop, and in a moment or two, through the glass door, he saw the crack of light from the living-room shine through the dark shop. It was Pierre’s sister who answered the door, and in another moment he and O’Connor were following her through into the room beyond. Franklin caught the friendly smell of earth and fruit in the darkness, and then he and O’Connor were standing blinking in the light of the room behind. Franklin looked from Françoise to Pierre’s sister, and from the woman to the husband. The woman was small, with very black hair parted in the middle, and wide black eyes with large pupils. The man was small, too, and very stocky, with dark brown skin. He wore an imitation brown leather jacket.

  Franklin saw the bright, almost violent surprise on the three faces.

  ‘My friend O’Connor,’ he said.

  All of them were smiling. O’Connor was smiling, too. He looked at the startled black eyes of the girl, calm and amazed.

  ‘He has had a bad time but he is all right now,’ Franklin said. ‘He has lost most of his things. His papers and everything. But he is all right now.’

  ‘We will get papers,’ the man said. ‘In Marseilles you can get most things if you know how.’

  ‘He needs a room, too,’ Franklin said.

  ‘We will manage it here,’ the woman said. ‘Somehow.’

  ‘You see?’ Franklin said to O’Connor. He spoke in English now. ‘They can arrange everything and it’s O.K.’

  O’Connor grinned and said ‘Merci, merci’, several times. Then he said ‘Merci beaucoup very much’, and everyone laughed. On the round table in the centre of the room there remained a few plates and glasses, dirty from supper. The woman began to pack them away, stopping at intervals with a glass or plate poised in the air to laugh with O’Connor.

  ‘He believes in miracles now,’ Franklin said. ‘Don’t you?’ He spoke in English to O’Connor. ‘I tell them you believe in miracles. Don’t you?’

  ‘By God I do!’ O’Connor said. ‘Oui! Oui!’ he said, grinning again. ‘Oui! Beaucoup, beaucoup.’

  ‘You see,’ the girl said.

  She stood smiling under the bright light, her face brown with sun, her eyes clearer and brighter than Franklin ever remembered them, he looked back at her and felt the clear brightness of her face magnify the happiness in his own.

  ‘You see what I always tell you,’ she said. ‘You need only have faith. With faith you can do anything.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Faith and a little luck,’ the woman said. Smiling, she packed the plates one on top of another.

  ‘Even only with faith,’ the girl said.

  ‘I used to talk like that when I was young,’ the woman said.

  The girl did not speak this time. Her wide eyes were fixed on Franklin. They seemed to hold him, shining under the bright light, with a great unbroken gaze of adoration. ‘All you need is faith,’ she said.

  O’Connor looked from Franklin to the girl.

  ‘What is she saying?’ he said.

  Franklin smiled.

  ‘Something about me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Franklin said. He felt in that moment that the little room with the four people, the bright light and the wonderful unshakable faith of the girl, contained almost all he wanted in the world. ‘She says you’re a very lucky man.’

  O’Connor grinned until his teeth were brilliant above the black and scruffy beard.

  ‘No trouble at all,’ he said. The common, solid, imperishable Englishness of the sergeant was slowly coming back, clear as the light in his eyes. ‘No trouble at all. Does she understand?’

  ‘She understands,’ Franklin said.

  All the time he could see O’Connor’s hand in his pocket, holding the revolver.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE wife of the concierge in the rue des Jardins did not know anything about an English padre in Marseilles, but she did not shut the door. Franklin, who had been walking all day and asking the same question, walked across the street, turned and looked back. The door was a heavy double one, in light brown wood, with four deep square panels and a large iron knob in the centre. He saw one hand of the woman grasping the door-post and the other the edge of the door, and the door just open enough to admit her keen pale face above them. She was watching him very closely. He wished he hadn’t turned to look back. Then as he went on down the street, remembering the day in the rue Richer when he had tried not to hurry, and trying in the same way not to hurry now, he turned involuntarily and looked back again. The woman was still standing there, very pale in the late aftern
oon air, her head leaning forward now, sharply and slightly askew, like a hen looking through the slat of a fence. He remembered then that it would be his arm, of course, that fascinated her. A man with one arm asking for an English padre in Marseilles: he remembered how she had stared at his empty sleeve. He remembered, too, seeing the wall telephone in the lobby behind her. Very simple to report him: perhaps one of those too simple things that she would never think of doing. He kept his face rigidly forward and walked steadily on down the street. He had been walking most of the day.

  He walked out of the rue des Jardins and into a wider street at the top. It had been a fortnight since he found O’Connor. He started to walk across the tramlines. On the second track a tram was approaching, and he waited for it to pass. A few dry brown leaves bounced up the lines in the wind. He had been trying for a fortnight to find a padre. As he waited he turned out of habit to look back. There was no one following him. There never was. But somehow, after a fortnight of going from place to place in search of the padre, of asking questions of strangers, of waiting for O’Connor’s papers, of lying awake at night and listening and wondering if footsteps on the stairs in the hotel were footsteps coming for him, he had got into the habit of thinking there would be. He had also suffered, wherever they went, from the Englishness of O’Connor. He hadn’t yet got used to the loud unsuspected voice of O’Connor suddenly speaking in English in a crowded street. O’Connor had regained much of his buoyant confidence and did not care. In Marseilles, too, there was an atmosphere of curious tension, the tension of rottenness, that Franklin did not like. The tram came down the track, quite fast, and swept past him. In the air, after it had gone, a shower of leaf fragments scattered and fell in the wind like the light debris of an explosion. He looked back for the last time and walked over.