“He didn’t know any English at all when he first came. I suppose he got used to my voice.”
“I’d better just see if Nurse Sims wants to come.” He went out again, leaving the enamel bowl and the linen beside the bed. Laurie got out the soap from the locker and started to wash Charlot’s face and hands. He gave no trouble, except that once he tried to raise himself up and muttered with great urgency something about heading for shoal water. Laurie did not know even in English the expert reassurance; suddenly he imagined Ralph walking briskly in, speaking to Charlot in his officer’s voice and, when he had got him quiet, laying a hand on his forehead.
Andrew came back to say that Nurse Sims was doing a dressing behind screens, so they began work on Charlot together, changing his pajama jacket and the soiled bed-linen. From the far side of the bed Laurie could see, whenever he looked up, Andrew’s bent head ringed with soft light from the shaded lamp on the locker. It made a gold blur around the edges of his hair. It was as if, thought Laurie, one were idealizing in memory someone already lost.
Suddenly for the first time he felt the parting to come as implicit in them from the moment of their first meeting. He wanted to reject this: if he could talk to Andrew, he thought, it would be exorcised. But it wouldn’t be easy, or even decent now. While Andrew was taking the dirty things to the sluice Laurie looked down at the bed again, and listened to the clockwork breathing. During his months in hospital he had seen death’s approach several times. Just then, waking from a moment of stupor, Charlot plucked at his sleeve and spoke his name.
“Qu’est-ce que tu as, Charlot?” said Laurie helplessly. His emotions refracted from his own concerns focused in an intense point of compassion like the center of a burning-glass. Chariot’s almost animal state gave him the feeling one can have with a dying dog, that one is being trusted like God and is going to fail.
“Can you hear what he wants?” asked Andrew anxiously at the door.
“Not when you’re talking.” He had never snapped at Andrew in his life. “Sorry.” They bent to listen together; but this seemed to frighten Charlot, who tried to push them back with a waving arm. Laurie said, “There’s no point in our both hanging over him. It only puts him off.”
Andrew withdrew obediently and stood back against the wall. Laurie sat down by Charlot on the edge of the bed and took his hand. His speech had become more jerky and agitated, and was now quite incoherent; he seemed to be begging for something. Andrew tried him with the bed-bottle, but he pushed it away, and, turning toward Laurie, seemed to look for a few minutes straight into his face. Laurie leaned over him and stroked his coarse, curly hair. “Qu’est-ce que tu voudrais, dis-le moi, je t’écoute; look, it’s me.”
“Spoddi,” said Charlot thickly. Laurie felt his hand stir and tighten. His eyes had stopped wandering; Laurie could have sworn he knew whom he was talking to. Of his next few words it was possible to recognize several; Laurie heard the name of some French curé and the words péché mortel. His heart contracted. All other thoughts were swamped by the idea that Charlot had struggled to the surface for a moment, had looked into his face and made this appeal to him alone. He turned to Andrew and said, “He wants a priest.”
For a moment there was no answer, and Laurie realized that just then Andrew had been entirely away from him.
Sometimes when they were sitting quietly somewhere out of doors, Andrew would withdraw into himself, and Laurie, without any wish to interrupt him, used to sit silent, watching him with admiration and love. Now suddenly he felt alone and excluded. The sudden pain mixed itself with the pity he had been feeling for Charlot before. He felt urgent and desperate, without understanding the nature of what he felt.
Andrew said, “I’ll tell Nurse. We must ring for Father James.” He looked once more at Charlot and went quietly out of the room.
Charlot’s face had slackened and grown heavy; even his eyes did not move. When Laurie squeezed his hand he murmured something faintly. Andrew had said, while they were changing the sheet, that a brain specialist was coming out to look at him in the morning; he might have to go to Bridstow for an operation. With luck Father James would get there in time to see him first. But before long, even if he was still alive, he would have receded out of Father James’s reach. He had only asked, Laurie thought, for this one thing.
Just then Andrew came back into the room and said, “We can’t get through to the presbytery. I suppose the wire’s been bombed somewhere; they said try again in two hours.”
“That’s a long time.”
Andrew looked at him quickly. “Nurse is coming as soon as she’s got a minute.”
“It’s always later than one thinks.”
Andrew looked at his face, and after a second or two said slowly, “You’ve heard something, haven’t you? You’ve got your discharge, you’re going away.”
“Never mind all that now.” He did not know why he spoke so curtly. On the way, he had planned all kinds of gentle ways of breaking the news. He saw the startled grief on Andrew’s face, and, without letting it come clearly into his mind, felt a secret primitive satisfaction; insecurity wants always to make its mark. But his concern for Charlot, which was perfectly real, allowed him to lose sight of all this quickly.
“We’ll talk later on,” he said. “Look, Andrew, we must do something about this while it’s still some use. He’s forgotten who you are. If I tell him you’re a priest it will be all right.”
The unhappiness in Andrew’s face gave way to a blank, flat bewilderment. He looked at Laurie as if expecting him to say he hadn’t meant it. Laurie only waited impatiently. At last Andrew said, “But of course we can’t do that.”
Laurie knew that he had expected Andrew to say this. His desperation, compounded of more pressures than one, at once began turning to anger.
“Oh, God. What difference does it make? He can’t talk sense anyway. Just so he can go feeling it’s all right.”
“You know we can’t do it,” Andrew said. He stared at Laurie with a lost, exploring look.
Laurie had a reasonless but terrible feeling of having been discovered and condemned. He tried to push it away, but his mind still felt shocked, bleeding and raw. “But you don’t believe those church things matter. So long as what he feels is right. You’ve always said so. It isn’t much to do for him.”
Andrew said, as if he hardly knew now what words would be simple enough, “But it’s not what we believe. He’s a Catholic. You know what that means as well as I do.”
“It’s my responsibility,” Laurie said, “suppose anyone’s chalking it up.” He met defiantly Andrew’s straight gray eyes. “Not his. Or yours, if that’s how you feel.”
“It’s a responsibility neither of us has any right whatever to take.” Andrew’s face had set with decision; Laurie felt that it had hardened against him. “He’s a human being. When he was himself he chose this creed. Now he’s ill and doesn’t know the difference, we can’t possibly deceive him. Laurie, you must see that.” There was appeal in his face. Laurie felt he was being asked to deny not only this, but everything. With a sudden stab of nostalgia he thought, Ralph would have understood.
“You’re pretty hard, aren’t you?” he said.
Andrew had read in Laurie’s eyes the will to hurt, his altered face showed it. It showed too that he knew he was being punished partly for what he was and believed. He said, “That doesn’t mean anything. A thing’s right or it isn’t.”
“How simple,” Laurie said.
Their eyes met and Laurie felt for an instant that a knowledge had passed between them so fundamental that the special fact, which had seemed so significant all this time, was only a trivial detail of it, unnoticed as yet. Andrew said earnestly, but without the smallest wavering of decision, “Don’t you see, some things are too important to be tampered with for any reason at all.”