At that point he heard someone coming towards him. He thought it was the old waiter bringing his drink and did not trouble to look round. He preferred, face to face with so overwhelming a night, to keep his eyes on what fire was left on the horizon in the west.
Then a voice he recognized instantly said from immediately behind him: ‘Good evening!’
That he had had no premonition of her coming, always seemed to him proof of how deeply he had accepted the fact that he would never see her again.
Startled, he came to his feet and blurted out: ‘What on earth are you doing here? I thought you’d all gone.’
‘No,’ she answered calmly, not at all put out by his rough manner. ‘There are a few of the younger ones still left. There was not room for us all in the convoy this afternoon. We are due to leave in the morning – if it is not too late.’ She paused, trying to make out the expression on his face in the dim light, failed, and then asked, rather in the tone of the first request she had ever put to him: ‘Is it too late?’
He drew out a chair and offered her a seat beside him. It was, he told her, very late, dangerously late but perhaps not too late. Only she must make certain that she did not delay beyond the next day. If there were no cars or trucks or trains available he begged her to get on to the main road and start walking inland. The road was soon bound to be full of friendly military traffic who would not refuse her a lift. Everywhere the land forces were retreating inland and whatever happened elsewhere this one road was going to be kept safe for a while by men who he knew would fight. He did not know how vast the Japanese forces deployed against these men would be but, judging by the enemy’s past form, he thought it would take him twenty-four hours, if not two days, after the first contact to gather force enough to break through into the main road.
What soldiers were those of whom he was so certain they would fight? When last time they spoke he had not been confident at all that the Japanese advance would be resisted? She asked this, her voice younger than ever with inquiry.
He tried to study the look on her face but it was indistinct in the gathering dark beside him. He was aware only that its brilliant whiteness had been sombred until it glowed like a strange flower which unfolds only in the dark. Below that lotus white of her face there shivered a sheen of gold from the nugget at her throat and a shimmer of silver from the bracelet on her wrist as she raised her hand from time to time to finger her necklace.
He told her about the Australians a bare twenty minutes away by car and described how impressed he had been seeing them at work so calmly in the long light of evening.
‘How wonderful – and yet how terrible,’ she exclaimed. He felt rather than saw her stiffen in her chair as she gripped the rush-work arms tightly. ‘The thought of what is about to happen is almost more than I can bear. How then can they be so brave?’ She paused. The day had now gone utterly and lightning was beginning to flash at the windows. The sound of the night was brilliant, the fever of creation mounting high in the temples of the dark. She asked: ‘When do they expect the enemy?’
‘Knowing your appetite for the worst,’ Lawrence tried to answer lightly: ‘I must confess at once that the battle may even now be on. But I doubt it. For at this short distance we ought to hear the firing if it were at all prolonged and heavy. The Australians themselves believe their battle will come early tomorrow morning or at the latest tomorrow evening.’
Her response to this intelligence was indirect. She told Lawrence that the women she had been with ever since they were abruptly evacuated from Sumatra were always bewailing the fact that they had left their sons and husbands behind, bewailing the fact that they had children who might have to endure a Japanese occupation. She could only say truthfully that she envied them, thought them lucky to be so rounded and equipped for the disaster ahead. She wished she had a child and a husband to take his place with those tall Australians of whom he had told her. Even if her man were to be killed, even if she and her child were to suffer the misfortunes of the damned, it would give a point to all these ghastly circumstances that were coming down on them like a pack of wolves. Even as a child, she confided, she had never doubted that life, whatever her own fate, would prove itself worthwhile. Even in the despair and disintegration which followed the Nazi occupation of Holland from which she had escaped barely a year before she had never doubted that all in the end would be worth it for those who were given the privilege of being able to endure. Her belief in the unending continuity and flow of life from before and beyond any rhyme, reason, idea or temporary arrest of it, was so deep, Lawrence stressed to us, that it appeared to be not a form of belief so much as an irrefutable kind of knowledge built into the heart of that woman. Accordingly, she despised those women who because of the terrible world situation proclaimed that they would bear no more children to suffer as they had suffered. Life was a woman’s answer to the enemies of life, she said. Men like his Australians might have to fight death with death just as, she understood, in Australia they fought bush fires with fire. That was a man’s answer to the death about now and she respected it. But a woman could only answer death with more life. Yet could a man respect the answer from woman irrespective of the form wherein it was given, just as she respected and accepted the brutal necessity of the man’s? All this was uttered with the passion of a proud and pent-up spirit. Yet she did not wait for an answer to her question but put another directly to him, personally: ‘And you? What are you going to do when the battle down the road starts?’
‘Join them,’ he answered. ‘I’m just waiting here at the end of a telephone for news that it has begun and for direction as to where I can most effectively join in with the Australians. I am afraid my summons may come at any moment.’
‘I can’t bear the thought of you going out there to be killed,’ she exclaimed with an anguish that was illogical to Lawrence’s limited understanding seeing she had only so shortly beforehand expressed the ardent wish that she had had a man of her own to take part in the coming battle. ‘I just can’t bear it!’
She put her hands to her face as if about to cry, then quickly dropped them and suddenly stood up. ‘Please,’ she said taking Lawrence’s hand and pulling at it gently. ‘Please come with me, please.’
Her hand was trembling violently like that of a person in a fever. So stirred was he by her concern for him that he too stood up without a word. Taking her left hand in his he went with her out of the room. The journey from there through the hall, past the office wherein the proprietor still was slumped asleep with his flushed face on his arms, up the stairs and down the long corridor at the top of the landing, was not far. But so eventful, so full again had his feeling for life suddenly become, that it seemed to take a crowded hour. His whole being appeared to have become magnified and even the smallest perception of time and space, the most microscopic details of his surroundings, became more than life-size on the screen of his senses. Their footsteps on that empty staircase and along the night-lighted corridor rang out in challenge like the taps of a drum, and the night-sounds from without fell on his ears like the crescendo of an insect chorus. Her eyes, as she pushed open the swing doors of lattice-work with which all rooms were equipped, seemed great, dark and bright with vivid feeling under the corridor light. But inside her room the night was more profound than ever. He could just make out against the sheen at the open window the faint, creamy shape of a mosquito net suspended over a bed. Then a flash of lightning flew in and he saw one forlorn little suitcase on the luggage rack against the wall which presumably held all she possessed, and a nightdress hung over a chair. The lightning passed swiftly. It was blacker than before, the room a vast palace of darkness in which he was lost. He turned about, almost colliding with her as he did so.