Laurie said urgently, “Look, my dear, we’ve had all this in principle. Let’s be sensible when something concrete turns up. We knew this whole position before we’d even spoken to each other for the first time.”
“This isn’t the school debating society. This happened to you. Do you think I’ve got no imagination at all?” He was looking away.
“God, you have to take people for what they are, not for what you expect to get out of them. Why do you suppose I fell”—his tongue stiffened. What had possessed him?—“felt we’d get on together?”
“Laurie, you don’t look yourself this evening. Are you feeling all right?”
“Of course I am. Let’s go up to the beechwood.”
It was warm in Limbo, in the dry mast-filled hollow out of the wind; but it was a close fit for two, and when they had talked for a while and fallen silent, Laurie found himself remembering Ralph’s story about the sub-lieutenant. But that had been different. A kind of starter’s pistol went off in his head. It said, “Why?”
He knew that he had only asked the question because he had just found out the answer. Ralph’s had been a story in which no moral choice existed, only impossibility and a desire excluded by the facts of life. It was Andrew who was the difference.
At once there seemed never to have been a day when he hadn’t known this; he looked back with wonder at the times when he had waited, in so much doubt and uncertainty, for Andrew to make himself known. How should he confess what he himself had not discovered? All yesterday evening Laurie had been, consciously and subconsciously, using his eyes, and noticing little things; and now, when he looked at Andrew, it seemed written all over him.
After all, thought Laurie, it wasn’t so hard to understand. Too much had been put on the boy too young. The army traditions which, however repudiated, must still have roots in him; the uncompromising ethic he had accepted; the certainty, as war came nearer, of the coming choice which would violate half his nature either way: all this had been for him the anticipated responsibility of manhood. It had been enough: his whole organism had known the impossibility of accepting more. But escape, and unconscious escape most of all, is like a usurer; it heaps up the liability. Andrew’s present liability had become more than either half of his divided nature was made to bear. To make him aware of it, thought Laurie quite clearly, would scatter his whole capital of belief in himself. He must never know.
With the tail of his eye he saw Andrew look at him and, respecting his concentration, turn away. Andrew recognized thought as a human activity. He stretched contentedly in the dry beech-mast; almost absently, Laurie moved to settle him more comfortably. Andrew looked up at him. “Hello. How’ve you been keeping all this time?”
“Oh, well but busy, you know. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. About the only time you ever get to be alone is when you’re with me. I take it as a compliment.”
A faint blue mist, which the small morning hours would crystallize into frost, was furring already the dead leaves on the ground. When he got back to the ward Reg said, “That knee packed up, Spud?”
“Not too bad.”
“You want to watch it, sitting out these cold evenings. Get the rheumatics in it, that’s all you need. When do you go for this electric treatment?”
“Tuesday.”
“You better be getting the old alibi ready.”
“Oh, I shan’t want that again.”
Beds were tidied, lights put out; in a little spotlit circle at the desk, the Sister gave the Night Nurse the report. When the telephone rang she waited irritably till the day orderly came to the desk. “Oh, well, yes, I suppose so. But tell him he must ask his friend not to do it again, it’s very inconvenient.”
Laurie was out of bed already, reaching for his dressing-gown. Although he hadn’t expected it before tomorrow, still the anticipation had subtly colored, and faintly disturbed, the day.
“Hello, Spuddy. I thought I’d just make sure you hadn’t been put back on the danger list, or up for court-martial, or anything.”
“No, you fixed that. Everything’s fine.”
“Is it? Good.”
The empty wire crackled faintly. It hadn’t occurred to Laurie to have any conversation ready; one always imagined Ralph taking charge. Now, sensing at the other end a tentativeness at least equal to his own, he felt suddenly afraid of drying up. The thought of Ralph ringing off after a few perfunctory commonplaces came to him with a terrible sense of flatness, disappointment, and failure. He hadn’t anticipated any of this. However, in the end they talked for nearly ten minutes.
When he got back Reg said, “You look better, Spud. Coming in just now you looked properly cheesed.”
“Oh, it just wanted a bit of rest.”
Charlot turned his rough curly head on his fixed shoulders. “I think a nice girl ring for you, Spoddi, bit of all right, yes?” He grinned benevolently.
“Not this time, no such luck.” He was dismayed to feel that he had blushed violently. But the lights were dim and probably Reg had noticed nothing.
Nurse Sims turned off the radio, and everyone settled down for the night.
“Leg okay now?” whispered Reg.
“Yes, thanks, fine.”
“Your officer friend dating you up again?”
“We might have a drink or a meal or something next time I go up.”
“Odell, Barker. Lights are out, in case you didn’t know it.”
She was at the desk for some time, ruling lines in a book. By the time she went outside again he thought Reg was asleep.
“Spud.”
“Hello?”
“This officer now. No offense, Spud. But know him well at school? To know what he’s like, mean to say?”
“Oh, yes, I think so.”
“What I mean, you’d know if he’s on the level and that?”
“Good God, yes.”
“No offense, I hope, Spud?”
“Of course not. Takes a pal to do your worrying for you.” Over the time of Madge’s flight, Laurie had learned to talk this language almost without embarrassment, and was relieved to find it still came back to him.
“That’s right. How some might look at it, though, worrying’s one thing, noseying’s another. Got to think of that.” He sunk his voice till Laurie had to lean half out of bed to hear it. “Don’t mind me, Spud. Interfering with what I don’t know nothing about, sticking out my big neck and asking for it, you don’t have to tell me. See, Spud, how it is, you done plenty of worrying for me, and I reckon that didn’t always come easy, putting yourself in my place. If that don’t make sense, forget it. All I want to say—any trouble, any time, don’t make no difference if it’s not my kind of trouble, not to me it don’t, no more’n what it done to you. A pal’s a pal the same all the world over. Well, that’s the lot, least said soonest mended. Night, Spud.”
“Night, Reg. Thanks. God bless.”
He lay looking at the ceiling: a number of little things came back to him, starting with the girls in the blackout. He wondered whether Reg had done his own simple addition, or whether someone else, Neames for instance, had totted it up for him. In any case, this was it. It had caught him up. If he hadn’t expected it he had been a fool, and the sooner he got used to it now the better.
The soft rattle of the trolley, and the chink of crockery, sounded at the doors. He didn’t need to look. He heard the slight noises of things being shifted on the lockers to make room for the mugs. As the homely domestic sounds drew nearer, he thought that the ward was quieter than usual, that no one was saying much.
There had never been a time when he hadn’t thought of himself as one of this company the mischance of battle had brought together: one with a secret, as many others had of one sort or another; one with an oddity, but there were plenty of those. Lovell, who had owned a freak-booth that toured the fairs; Jansen, who was three parts colored; Willis; Charlot; Odell, who had started with the handicap of “talking posh.” Now in a cold solitude he imagined, everywhere in the shadows, men quietly watching, curious, or mocking, or repelled, according to their kind, but all thanking their Maker for the solidarity that didn’t include him. Then he remembered that it wouldn’t be he, lying down protected by the shadows and made cautious by self-knowledge, who would entertain them most, but Andrew in his unguarded innocence.