The Charioteer (36 page)

Andrew was standing in the open doorway, looking out. Without any greeting he said quickly, “Oh, Laurie, good, it’s you. Will you stay with him for a minute and keep him as quiet as you can? I’ve got to get some clean things and I don’t like to leave him.”

Laurie said, “Yes, of course.” He had never seen Andrew like this before; but then he had never seen Andrew with any urgent responsibility on his hands. At any other time Laurie would have found it interesting. But he had longed to unburden his heart; this concentration of Andrew’s seemed to make common cause with the indifference of circumstance. Laurie walked into the side ward feeling the kind of resentment which, in people too fair to justify it, refuses to confess its own existence.

The injured man was lying with his head resting on a towel; Laurie realized that he had vomited on the sheet and pillow, and that was why Andrew needed clean things. Charlot’s eyes were open; he looked exhausted, yet painfully, mechanically alert. His eyes moved toward Laurie, but they were flickering, and it was impossible to know whether he recognized anyone or not. As Laurie looked down, all of a sudden he forgot his own troubles. Simple and unself-conscious as he was, still Charlot had turned like any other man his chosen face to his fellows; now, dreaming awake and revealing his dreams, he was more unprotected than in his sleep. One saw him naked in fear, or in need, and though the objects of these feelings were illusion, still it seemed not decent to spy on him. He had begun to talk again, but in so dull and blurred a way that probably even a speaker of his own patois would have made nothing of it. His thick chin, firm at other times, looked heavy and flaccid on the pillow, his mouth was half open, his lips crusted and dry.

Just then he lifted his arm gropingly, and fumbled at the wall as if he were searching for something to pull himself up on. Laurie settled him back.
“Eh bien, Charlot”
he said experimentally. “Hello, cock. Look, it’s Spud.”

Charlot grabbed clumsily at his wrist and muttered something excitedly, like a warning or appeal. Laurie said,
“Tranquillise-toi, mon vieux, regarde alors, tu es ici avec moi.”

The man on the bed opened wide his oxlike brown eyes and his fingers tightened. Weeks of inactivity had softened the calluses on his big hands, but their grip was still something to remember. Just then the door opened and he let go. Laurie rubbed his bruised hand. “Did he hurt you?” Andrew asked.

“No, it’s all right. I’ll help you fix the bed.”

“Would you really? Nurse Sims is sure to be busy.” He stood looking at Charlot, in his intentness oddly austere; then, as if fully aware of Laurie for the first time, “No, of course you mustn’t, you’re always in pain by this time of night.”

“No. They’ve fixed that.” Just as Andrew looked up, Charlot started to move about. He seemed suddenly terrified; his blunt hands dragged and scrabbled at his plaster jacket. Andrew said, “He’s forgotten what it is, he thinks he’s been tied up or something.
Du calme, Charlot, personne ne vous fera mal.”
But it was only when Laurie spoke that Charlot turned his head. Laurie loosened his hands from the plaster and he was quiet again. “You’re the only one he seems to recognize,” Andrew said.

“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.”

A land of
déjà entendu
twitched at Laurie’s mind; then he remembered Major Ferguson. The thought made him angrier and more injured; but he still felt himself to be moved only on Charlot’s behalf. Andrew was standing very straight. As on rare occasions before, his blood was showing in him; in his gray hospital-orderly’s coat he looked more like a soldier than Laurie did in his battle-dress. He was distinct and separate and far away, and strikingly good-looking.

“For God’s sake,” said Laurie, even now remembering not to raise his voice, “don’t stand there like St. Sebastian full of arrows, thinking of nothing but your own bloody principles. When you care about people you can’t always be so choosy. Go outside, then, and keep yourself clean. I’ll manage here. Charlot and I understand each other.”

What he had said came home to him only gradually, like the collapse of a wall which starts with a few loose bricks.

Andrew stood where he was. His face had a pinched look, as if he were cold. You could see the bone-structure of character showing, the shape of the winter tree.

“I’m sorry, Andrew. I lost my temper. I didn’t mean all that.”

“Whatever you meant,” said Andrew in a voice of ashes, “I’ve been given this job to do and I must do it. I can’t leave it just for a personal reason.”

For a moment, this putting him in his place seemed to Laurie the last affront. He felt he would say anything to revenge himself and only delayed to make the telling choice; but this was not true, he was losing time by putting aside one weapon after another as too base to use, shocked by what he had used already. During this interval he recovered part of his reason and saw Andrew freshly, as he stood.

With an increase of effort which left him with a drained, almost empty look, Andrew said, “I know you only wanted to help him; I realize that.”

“Andrew, I must have gone off my head. I can’t think how I—I’m sorry.”

There was an oxygen cylinder standing in the corner; it was the stiff, seized-up one that couldn’t be used, kept here out of the way. Andrew went over to it and picked up the spanner, turned it about in his hands for a moment, then suddenly fitted it to the cylinder head and gave it a violent wrench. The gas hissed like an angry snake; he wrenched the spanner back again and shut it off.

“That’s all right,” he said. He looked at his hands; there were deep crimson weals across his palms. “This thing works after all.” He hung the spanner back.

“Yes, does it?” Andrew’s face at the moment of attacking the cylinder had been something of a revelation. “Look, I was wrong about that.” He was only just starting to realize how wrong. It occurred to him too for the first time that Charlot’s mind might have been wandering back to some confession five or fifteen years old. “I’m sorry, Andrew.”

They were interrupted by a guttural sound from the bed. As they turned, Charlot, who had been quite quiet, began to have a kind of epileptic fit. They held his head away from the wall while he jerked like a huge, grotesque marionette; even the legs moved, which had not moved for so long. When it was over he sank into a deep, heavily relaxed unconsciousness; his face was dark, one side of his mouth sagged, his breathing was loud and very slow. They spoke to him, touched him, dug their fingers into his arms. He made no response at all.