“You’ve done all the work,” Laurie said.
Ralph made a little movement of the head as if to shake it wouldn’t be worth the trouble, and went on looking at Laurie under his lashes, a long contented reminiscent look, not demanding an answer.
Because he had brought no spare white shirt he was working in an old flannel one of Laurie’s, with the neck open and sleeves rolled. Laurie had got into mufti too, partly for the sake of the few hours’ comfort and partly from vanity. He was surprised to discover how much he felt the difference. The fact was that their service conditioning had kept the rank-badges on their uniforms somewhere under the surface of their consciousness; it had echoed the old difference of age which, significant in the teens, can become almost meaningless in the twenties. Reflecting on this, Laurie supposed it was because that was what both of them had really wanted.
Lying there relaxed and dishevelled, with his cloudy unguarded smile, Ralph seemed to him suddenly for the first time as young as himself. Through the open shirt showed a spearhead of tan which, more than a year after he had last worn tropical whites, was still burned into his fair skin. Laurie thought again that he was built like the hero of a boy’s adventure story: strong-looking, but not with the set look of a man’s strength; the hollows over the collar-bones and in the pit of the throat had still the softened edges of youth. One could imagine him, Laurie thought, stripped to the waist in all the classic situations, fishing in lagoons or pinioned bravely defiant to a tree. He longed to give him something, to help him with something, to be depended on for a moment. Just then, without moving, Ralph said, “Are you thinking about me?”
“Yes,” said Laurie with affection. “I was thinking you look like Jack in The Coral Island. There was a picture of him sticking an oar in a shark’s mouth.”
Ralph appeared to wake up. “He’d be taking a chance if it was a fair-sized shark. It would probably bite it straight through. The teeth work like a double saw; I’ve seen a man’s leg taken off above the knee, snap, like that.”
As his mind had moved back to the memory his face had changed; he looked not like the boy in the frontispiece, but like a competent ship’s officer describing an unpleasant fatality, no more exotic than a street accident, which has put him in mind of a certain harbor, of this man or that. Laurie felt young and amateurish again. His own spell of action had been so brief, before the tide of retreat swept back his unit to the beach and the ships, that now, as if he had had some control over these events, he felt he had set out to prove himself, only to come to grief and be ignominiously rescued. Ralph was saying, “… but the deep-water channel at Mombasa’s the worst, they breed around there.”
He stretched again, lazy, easy, and confident. His left arm was flung out across the carpet and his mutilated hand, uncovered, lay as idly as he would have let it if it had been whole. Laurie had never seen him quite forget it before. When the glove was off he used often to maneuver it out of sight when he thought the movement wouldn’t be noticed; and when he didn’t, you could feel him preventing himself by an act of will. There was something trustful and touching in this undefended surrender of it; it gave Laurie, for the moment, what he felt to be the most solid happiness he had known among so much contradictory emotion.
Ralph meanwhile had sunk back into his reverie, resuming thoughts to which the sharks had been a pedestrian interruption. Now, as if suddenly he felt himself too highly charged with happiness to bear it in silence, he took a deep breath and said, “Spuddy!” making a statement of it, than which no more needs to be said.
“Hello, Ralph,” said Laurie, smiling back. But soon afterwards he moved away and found himself work among the litter that was left. He felt that overanxiety which hides an unconfessed resistance and sometimes brings about the thing it fears; watching Ralph working again, and using the hand with its taut one-finger grip, he felt for the first time that it could get on his nerves.
Ralph had found the fencing foil, now as always the awkward object left over till the end. He got to his feet with it in a pliant spring, balanced it for an instant to feel the length and weight, and flicked it in a quick pass. Laurie saw and remembered how his wrist and forearm looked like an extension of the steel. He glanced at the hacked guard, and suddenly said, “This must be the one you used in Hamlet, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I never thought you’d remember that.”
“You didn’t?”
“I was a rotten Laertes, anyway.”
Ralph smiled to himself. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say you were a good Laertes. You were a very nice Laertes, though. ‘It was never like this at Sandhurst, what have I done to get mixed up with this awful crowd?’ ”
“Was I really like that?”
“I suspected not. That was the secret of its charm.”
“You’re making half this up.”
“But you know,” said Ralph, dropping the foil, “there was one moment, just at the end, when you were dying. Quite suddenly it had something. I remember it still. I was sitting in the second row, or was it the third, anyway quite near. ‘Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet.’ I don’t know, it just seemed to get me. I knew then why I was such a bastard to you that time I came down to coach the duel, when Hugh was in the sicker.”
Impulsively Laurie said, “You wouldn’t like it, would you?” He picked up the foil by the blade and offered Ralph the hilt.
“Thank you, Spuddy. I should love it.” He received it with affection, but, instinctively, in a trained and expert grip. As the blade left Laurie’s hand, of a sudden it all smote him with a ruinous significance; he felt in his own gesture the ancient symbol of the surrendered sword. His nature had suffered a self-discovery, a swing off its old center of balance, stranger to him and less foreseen than he had allowed Ralph to know. For a moment an instinctive hostility must have shown in his eyes.
Ralph tossed the foil away, and said quickly, “Spud!”
“What’s up?” said Laurie smiling. “It’s all right.” He was glad that Ralph had read in his face only the passing envy of a cripple for a man who can fence.
Ralph said, “We’ve about finished here. I wish I could have seen this room with your things in it.”
Laurie started to tell him how it used to look; but in the middle he was overtaken by a longing to compensate Ralph for what he felt as a latent treachery, mixed with a simpler and more direct emotion. He said, “Sit in that chair for a moment, will you?”
Ralph dropped into it and said, “Well? What for?” Sliding along the floor to the place beside him, Laurie said, “Only because that’s where you always used to sit.”
After a pause Ralph said in a stilled listening voice, “Is that the truth?”
“Yes. But not the whole truth.” He threw his arm across Ralph’s knees.
For what seemed a long time, perhaps several minutes, they sat in silence. He could feel Ralph touching his hair with that intuitive pleasantness which, it seemed, couldn’t go wrong. The desire to be needed was basic in his make-up; it had developed in him a high degree of accomplishment and tact. He had, thought Laurie, the power good advertising is supposed to have of creating demands which had not been aware of themselves before. But when he spoke Laurie realized that all this had been absent and instinctive while his mind was elsewhere. “This room, the one I’ve moved to, I’ve only taken it for a month.”