He was very tired now.
And this quiet around him—he had heard motor engines in the distance, but they had faded—this quiet all around him had a quality of its own which went with his fatigue. He had lost track of time under the carrier, and afterwards too, but the dusk was gathering and soon it would be dark; and once dummy4
it was dark he would be hopelessly lost—even more lost than he was now.
Was this even the right direction?
If it was the right direction, then the main road must be just ahead, but he seemed to have been walking for hours in an empty world.
He stopped and listened intently. Far beyond the immediate silence surrounding him there was a distant thunder, to the west and to the north, on his right hand and behind him.
Ahead of him there was only the faint sound of a child crying.
VI
'Good God Almighty!' said a familiar voice.
Harry Bastable reached for his revolver, which lay on the blanket alongside the white rabbit. Then the words inside the sound and the familiarity of the voice itself registered simultaneously in his brain and his memory, and his hand stopped half-way to the weapon.
He peered uncertainly from one side of the road to the other, trying as best he could to establish the direction from which the voice had come. But the early dawn mist, still faintly blue-tinged with the dark of the night, lay thick in the fields: it was as though it had swallowed the sound before he had had time to hear it properly.
Just as quickly as brain and memory had taken up the dummy4
information from his ears they now rejected it as being unlikely, if not downright false, and instinct took over again.
He reached forward with his free hand and grasped the revolver, letting slip the multi-coloured shawl which had draped over his shoulders to protect him from the morning's chill.
'Good God—it is!' came the voice again. 'Bastable!'
It came from half behind him, on his left. He swung himself and the revolver towards it, still only half-believing the repeated oral testimony.
'Willis?' His own voice sounded unnaturally loud—almost a shout.
A figure rose—loomed up—out of the roadside ditch fifteen yards behind him.
'Keep your voice down, man!'
'Willis?' this time he managed a whisper. 'Is it you?'
'The very same. And as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as you could hope for this fine May morning!'
Yes, that was Wimpy right enough. If it had been pitch-black and blowing a gale, that was Wimpy Willis—with no need to ask him who had won the Cup in '38. There was only one Wimpy Willis in the whole wide world, and this was undoubtedly it, thought Harry Bastable with an engulfing feeling of relief and gratitude.
The figure detached itself from the mist into rose-tinted reality.
dummy4
'Bloody marvellous—please don't point that thing at me, Harry, old boy—but bloody marvellous, all the same!' said Wimpy. 'Absolutely-bloody-brilliant!'
'Willis!' repeated Harry Bastable humbly.
Wimpy surveyed him, shaking his head admiringly. 'I wouldn't have thought it possible—I'm sorry, but I wouldn't, old boy. Not in a thousand years!'
He was obviously as grateful for finding Harry Bastable again as Harry Bastable was at meeting up with him, thought Bastable. And if he was also frankly surprised that a crass idiot like Harry Bastable could escape from the Germans, that was also fair enough. Because the crass— cowardly—
idiot had escaped more by luck than good management and initiative: that was true, even though the idiot was not about to admit it.
'I'd never have thought of it myself, either,' said Wimpy. 'Not in another thousand years, by God!'
'Wh—?' Bastable was suddenly aware that he had missed something in the exchange. At the same time he observed that if Wimpy was bright-eyed—and he was bright-eyed—he was something less than bushy-tailed. His face was filthy and his uniform a tattered, mud-stained ruin, with one arm of the blouse ripped open from wrist to shoulder.
Wimpy grinned at him. 'The shawl's damn good—I took you for an old Froggie peasant until I could practically see the whites of your eyes, I tell you.' He pointed at the great multi-dummy4
coloured thing where it lay at Bastable's feet.
Bastable stared at the shawl. Wimpy believed—Good God!—
Wimpy believed that he had disguised himself in it!
'In fact, I wasn't absolutely sure it was you even then —
because of that —' continued Wimpy, pointing at the perambulator. 'That pram is your bloody masterpiece!'
As if she had heard this observation, and objected to the way it was phrased, the baby promptly awoke, letting out a single cry, quavering but piercing.
Harry Bastable immediately started rocking the pram, in as near as he could get to the way he had seen Eastbourne's proud mothers and nannies do on Sunday morning along the sea-front. As he did this with one hand, he replaced the revolver at the baby's feet with the other and moved the white rabbit up to a more comforting position alongside its owner.
The baby stopped crying.
'Good God Almighty, man!' exclaimed Wimpy in a hollow voice. 'You've got a real baby in there!'
Bastable leaned over the pram and scowled encouragingly at the baby. He couldn't stand babies—he disliked small children in general—but babies were worse. Where small children could occasionally be placated or threatened, babies were irrational. But this—rocking and smiling—was what women did with crying babies, and it sometimes worked, he had observed.
dummy4
'It's a real baby!' repeated Wimpy.
'Of course it damn well is!' snarled Harry Bastable, trying to contort the scowl into a smile. 'What did you think I'd got in here?'
For once Wimpy appeared to be short of something to say.
The baby smiled at Harry Bastable.
Wimpy peered over the side of the pram, and the baby stopped smiling. Her face began to pucker up.
'Keep off!' ordered Bastable, recognizing the sign from bitter experience. 'You're frightening her. Keep away!' He smiled and rocked frantically.
The smile returned.
'Let's move,' said Bastable. 'She likes being wheeled along.'
That, after all, was what had first stopped the poor little mite crying the evening before—and had also calmed her hunger down this morning. 'The sooner we can get her to Colembert, the better. I can turn her over to someone there.'
Without waiting, he started to wheel the pram forward once more. Wimpy caught up with them quickly, and promptly draped the shawl over Bastable's shoulders.
'There you are, Mum,' he murmured. 'How d'you know it's a her?'
"Because I know the difference,' hissed Bastable, his temper slipping and all his old antipathy for Wimpy flooding back.
Oh . . .' Wimpy sounded chastened. 'Oh ... I see—you haven't dummy4
found it—her —just this morning, I mean?'
Bastable pushed in silence for a moment or two. There was no point in losing his temper, it was childish. And, more than that, it was ungrateful. And, most of all, it was stupid —
because he needed Wimpy. And doubly stupid ... to get angry with a chap for making a simple mistake—the mistake of thinking that he was a damn sight cleverer than he was.
Hah! In fact, Wimpy's mistake had been for once crediting him with more wits than he had—that was almost funny, if it hadn't been another truth at his expense.
'Yesterday evening,' he said. 'Late yesterday evening, just as it was beginning to get dark.'
Wimpy digested the answer. 'On the main road?' he said at length.