“Medically exempt?” asked Mr. Straike. Derek had been passing at the time, and must have heard.
With the cold ingenuity of repressed violence, Laurie gave a prudishly reproving shake of the head. “Male nurses,” he hissed. Mr. Straike said “Urhm.” Laurie indicated his mother with a glance, and pointedly dropped his voice. “Can’t very well discuss it here. Some things”—he paused, with heavy-handed delicacy—“women can’t be asked to do.”
“Quite,” said Mr. Straike. “Urhm, quite.” He ran a finger round the inside of his collar. Laurie found himself indulging an absurd self-righteousness, just as if it had been true.
They walked with the crowd down the iron-roofed cement path. Laurie felt his hatred and anger like a sickness. He no longer wanted to justify or fulfill them, only to clean them out of him and be quiet. He looked at Mr. Straike, who was gazing straight before him, grave, judicial; he had a digestive look, as if he were assimilating something, adapting it to his metabolism, settling it in.
“Well, dear, aren’t you going to say goodbye to me?”
Laurie saw that the bus had arrived, and people were streaming into it. His mother had come up to him, and had had to touch his arm before he had seen her. He met, defenseless, the reproach in her eyes.
Back in the ward, Neames and another man were playing chess on a locker. Laurie stood and watched the game till he realized he could not retrace it by a single move. His knee had got worse; little Derek, who always knew without being told when someone was in pain, got him a dose of A.P.C. He turned down his bedcover, sat on the bed, and tried to read. If one ceased the pretense of doing something, one became at once conspicuous, a man thinking, naked to public speculation.
“Well, Spud, how’s life?”
“Oh,” said Laurie, “hello, Reg.” For a moment, too full of himself, he expected to be asked what was up; then he remembered. “How was it? All right?”
“You said it.” Reg was, he could see now, very much moved. His face was pink, his eyes bright; he fidgeted with the things on Laurie’s locker, moving them unseeingly here and there. “Sometime, Spud, I’ll tell you a bit; mean to say, you’d be the first. How it is, I dunno, talk about a thing and the feeling of it goes off, gets more ordinary like. Haven’t felt like that for, oh, going on seven years. Well, just take a turn round the block. See you later.”
The flowers had been arranged in jam-pots, the cakes and sweets crammed into lockers, the locker-tops wiped over; the disorderly invasion of the visitors left no material trace. The evening dressings had started; but Laurie’s was done only in the morning now; it was nearly healed. The A.P.C. had helped the pain. If he changed the stick for the crutch, which they had left with him for a few days longer, he could escape for a little while. He even knew of somewhere to go.
Once out of the gate, he turned off the main road into a lane. A short way down was a rose hedge, with a little white gate. Inside the gate was an old brick path, bordered with lavender. A few late bush roses, yellow and red, were crisped with frost at the tips; but they looked rich, and faintly translucent, in the pale-gold light of the September sun. As Laurie approached the green latticed porch of the cottage, the door opened, and a little birdlike old woman peered out. She had on a brown stuff dress with a high lace neckband in the fashion of thirty years before; her wide black straw hat was trimmed with cherries made of glazed papier mâché. Laurie said, “Good evening, Mrs. Chivers.”
“Evening, sonny. I always know your step. Have you come to sit in the garden, then?”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“All of our boys are welcome any time. That’s what I told the officer, right at the beginning.” Laurie had never been able to identify the officer, and was even doubtful about the war. “There’s one or two nice Victorias ripe on the trees. You know the eating apples. Don’t you go taking the cookers, now, they’ll gripe you.”
“No, I won’t. Thanks so much.”
“You eat all you can pick, sonny. Fruit’s good for the blood. Back in the trenches, you won’t get it fresh, I know that. If the good Lord had meant us to take our food out of tins, that’s how we’d find it growing. The Creator knows best. Wait a minute.”
She popped back into the shadowy parlor, like a bird into a nesting-box, the cherries on her hat clicking dryly together. “Here you are, sonny,” she said returning. “And when you’ve read it, pass it on to one of the other lads.”
He thanked her, and took the tract. He had had this one before, though she had several varieties. They were all of a lurid evangelical kind, trumpeting Doomsday and exhorting him to wash his sins in blood. Laurie had seen, felt, and smelt enough blood to last him some time, but the paper and print had a fragrance of age about them. He was the richer for her zeal; it had caused his comrades to shun the old lady, as in the fourteenth century they might have shunned the local witch. No one came but Laurie, and it was his only sanctuary. He always missed it badly over operation times. Mrs. Chivers, however, had never noticed his absences.
The orchard ran beside the house, and continued behind it. He paused to knock down an apple with his crutch from his favorite tree, and picked his way carefully through the long pale grass, in which early windfalls were already treacherous to the foot.
Beyond the oldest of the apple trees, too gnarled to bear, the bank grew lush; the stream ran over a gravelly shallow, then tinkled down a foot-deep fall of stone. On the far side of the stream was a row of beeches. Already the breeze, passing under them, raised a whisper from the first crispings of the autumn fall.
Laurie lowered himself down gingerly by a branch. There would be sun, still, for the best part of an hour. He loosened his battle-blouse and felt the gentle warmth on his face and throat. The jagging of worry was smoothed in him; his unhappiness became dark and still. Tomorrow and next week kept their distance, dimmed by the huge presence of time, love, and death. He felt that kind of false resignation which can deceive us when we contemplate trouble at a moment of not actually experiencing it. This tranquil solitude seemed to him like loneliness made reconcilable by an act of will.
A foot rustled in the beech-mast across the stream. He didn’t want his peace disturbed; he sank deeper in the grass and pretended to doze. A voice said, “Why, Laurie. Hello.”
Laurie said, “Hello. Come over and talk to me.” He felt, evident as the sunlight, a great shining inevitability, and the certainty that something so necessary must be right.
Andrew took off his socks and shoes, and paddled across. Sitting beside Laurie, he worked his bare feet into the grass, to get off the mud. Now he was here, Laurie could think of nothing to say. Andrew on the other hand seemed to have gained assurance. As he stretched against the grass, his eyes, narrowed against the bright sky, reflecting its light clear blue, he looked at home in the place, freer, more sharply defined. “You have found yourself a private Eden, haven’t you?”
“It isn’t private,” Laurie said. “Everyone’s invited; but only the serpent comes.” He produced Mrs. Chivers’ tract.
Andrew rolled over on his elbows, skimmed the first page, and remarked, “I always think one of the world’s most awkward questions is ‘Are you saved?’ One’s more or less forced to sound either un-co-operative and defeatist, or complacent beyond belief.”
“I think I said one can only hope for the best; but she seemed to think it rather evasive.”
“Well, what else could one say? I should like to take my shirt off; would it upset her?”
He rolled it into a bundle and put it behind his head. His body was slim, but more solid and compact than one would have thought, and very brown, with the tan deepest across the backs of the arms and shoulders, as it is with laborers who bend to their work. His hands, which were structurally long and fine, were cracked and calloused, and etched with dirt which had gone in too deep to wash away.