The Hour of The Donkey (11 page)

It must have been young Mr Bastable’s look of frozen incredulity which recalled Mr Plumb to the original direction of his sermon.

‘What I mean, Henry, is that God in His Wisdom has so constituted the human being that he can speedily become accustomed to
anything
.’

The waitress was hovering with Mr Plumb’s lamb cutlets, but obviously didn’t know what to do with young Mr Bastable’s brown Windsor soup.

‘Now —‘ Mr Plumb ignored the waitress,’—the things I saw around Spanbroekmolen that morning, and when we went on up the ridge too, would make a—would make a butcher’s shop like a—like a—like a florist’s on a spring morning.’ He paused in triumphant appreciation of his own simile. ‘But I soon got used to it—and I had never seen a dead man before I went into the line. So eat up your soup before it gets cold, now.’

Harry Bastable turned Sergeant Hobday over. He wasn’t so very terrible, really—he might almost have been sleeping, except that his eyes were open. He was just very dusty and somehow taller, though quite surprisingly heavy and difficult to turn.

But he had no map with him.

Bastable looked around for Darkie, but couldn’t find any trace of him. So… while Sergeant Hobday had been thrown clear—though ‘clear’ wasn’t the right word to go with ‘dead’—Darkie must still be under the carrier.

With the map.

He went back to where Sergeant Hobday lay at the roadside, with the vague idea of closing those open eyes; and also because Sergeant Hobday hadn’t frightened him as much as he had expected, and returning to what he knew, and what wasn’t as awful as he had imagined, might somehow help the process of Mr Plumb’s advice and God’s infinite mercy and wisdom.

But when he got there he didn’t
see
the point of touching the Sergeant’s face (there would be other faces, plenty of them; and it wouldn’t make any difference to them, closing their eyes, they couldn’t see anything: or if they could—any golden bridges and silver rivers—they might just as well go on looking; and he had other things to do, anyway, than to go around closing eyes). He merely robbed Sergeant Hobday of his Webley revolver.

He did this in the first place because the Sergeant’s revolver would have a full cylinder, and he had fired two rounds—or at least two—from his own weapon.

The firer must count his rounds as he fires them, to ensure that he will know when to reload. Never advance with less than two or three rounds in the cylinder.

And because he somehow felt also that a Mendip regular’s revolver would be better than his own..

And also because his hands were shaking too much to reload.

And it was just as well, because when he examined his own revolver before abandoning it he found that its barrel was full of dirt, from when he had presumably jammed it into the ground at some time during his flight from the farm. As he poked instinctively with the nail of his index finger he thought of the earth in the garden in the house off the Meads—the earth which had got under his nails somehow as a boy, always just before meals, so that his father would send him from the table to scrub at them again. There was earth under his nails now— French dirt— and he would have given a million tons of it in exchange for one nail-full of good Eastbourne soil.

He threw his old revolver over the bank, into a tangle of grass and weeds. Better to let it lie there, rusting, than that some German should come and pick it up and have it.

Second-Lieutenant Greystock had had a map.

He looked up and down the road. There was not a sign of movement still, but it had changed all along its length. It was scuffed and dirty now, with broken banks and clods of earth where the German tanks had smashed across it. And there, fifty yards further on, was the tangled ruin of the other carrier.

He gritted his teeth and commenced to walk towards it, willing himself to put one foot before another against his innermost wishes, because he could remember that vivid flash of bright fire which had engulfed it.

This would be worse. But he needed that map …

And it was worse—it was unthinkably worse.

There was a thing in the driver’s seat… but it wasn’t a thing he could recognize as ever having been a man, it was just a torn and blackened object where the driver had been.

He found Second-Lieutenant Greystock because there was a single cloth-pip on its red backing on something else which was half-impaled in a small thorn-bush near the carrier—something with no legs and trailing threads of what looked like pink wool —

He never looked for the map, his legs started to run without being told to do so.

They ran until they had carried him over the brow of the rise, and down the dip on the other side. Then they simply stopped and sat him down at the roadside. He pulled up his knees under his chin and buried his face into them, and wept silently, rocking backwards and forwards, and wishing he could be sick because it must be like being ill—if you could be sick, once you had been sick you felt better. But he couldn’t be sick.

The dying and living-again hadn’t been completed under the carrier. There was a little more of both to be done, and he did it there, by himself at the roadside, alone.

Finally, he got up and continued up the road again, walking this time, and wiping his face, first with his hands and then with a handkerchief he remembered he had in his pocket.

He realized he was very thirsty, so he drank from his water-bottle.

He was aware of everything around him, and he had worked out approximately where he was without the aid of the map. There was a profound silence all along the road, not even any birdsong. But then there never did seem to be any birds in France, not as there were in England. All the same, he felt that he was carrying the silence with him, in a circle around him, as he went along. Beyond it, in the far distance, there was an almost permanent rumble-rumble going on somewhere, in one direction or another. There was even a very faint knock-knock-knocking which he fixed in the direction of Belléme. The Mendips were probably still fighting their last fight there, by-passed and surrounded, but game to the last, like the Regulars they were.

But he wasn’t going to Belléme, now. The homing pigeon had been winged, but only winged, and now it was going back to the loft for rest and refreshment before carrying its message abroad. That was the only thing it could think about, because that was how its mind was programmed. Besides, the pigeon didn’t matter, only the message mattered, and there were others who could carry it once they knew its contents.

He was very tired now.

And this quiet around him—he had heard motor engines in the distance, but they had faded—this quiet all around him had a quality of its own which went with his fatigue. He had lost track of time under the carrier, and afterwards too, but the dusk was gathering and soon it would be dark; and once it was dark he would be hopelessly lost—even more lost than he was now.

Was this even the right direction?

If it was the right direction, then the main road
must
be just ahead, but he seemed to have been walking for hours in an empty world.

He stopped and listened intently. Far beyond the immediate silence surrounding him there was a distant thunder, to the west and to the north, on his right hand and behind him.

Ahead of him there was only the faint sound of a child crying.

‘GOOD GOD
Almighty!’ said a familiar voice.

Harry Bastable reached for his revolver, which lay on the blanket alongside the white rabbit. Then the words inside the sound and the familiarity of the voice itself registered simultaneously in his brain and his memory, and his hand stopped half-way to the weapon.

He peered uncertainly from one side of the road to the other, trying as best he could to establish the direction from which the voice had come. But the early dawn mist, still faintly blue-tinged with the dark of the night, lay thick in the fields: it was as though it had swallowed the sound before he had had time to hear it properly.

Just as quickly as brain and memory had taken up the information from his ears they now rejected it as being unlikely, if not downright false, and instinct took over again. He reached forward with his free hand and grasped the revolver, letting slip the multi-coloured shawl which had draped over his shoulders to protect him from the morning’s chill.

‘Good God—it is!’ came the voice again. ‘Bastable!’

It came from half behind him, on his left. He swung himself and the revolver towards it, still only half-believing the repeated oral testimony.

‘Willis?’ His own voice sounded unnaturally loud—almost a shout.

A figure rose—loomed up—out of the roadside ditch fifteen yards behind him.

‘Keep your voice down, man!’

‘Willis?’ this time he managed a whisper. ‘Is it you?’

‘The very same. And as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as you could hope for this fine May morning!’

Yes, that was Wimpy right enough. If it had been pitch-black and blowing a gale, that was Wimpy Willis—with no need to ask him who had won the Cup in ‘38. There was only one Wimpy Willis in the whole wide world, and this was undoubtedly it, thought Harry Bastable with an engulfing feeling of relief and gratitude.

The figure detached itself from the mist into rose-tinted reality.

‘Bloody marvellous—please don’t point that thing at me, Harry, old boy—but bloody marvellous, all the same!’ said Wimpy. ‘Absolutely-bloody-brilliant!’

‘Willis!’ repeated Harry Bastable humbly.

Wimpy surveyed him, shaking his head admiringly. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible—I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t, old boy. Not in a thousand years!’

He was obviously as grateful for finding Harry Bastable again as Harry Bastable was at meeting up with him, thought Bastable. And if he was also frankly surprised that a crass idiot like Harry Bastable could escape from the Germans, that was also fair enough. Because the crass— cowardly—idiot had escaped more by luck than good management and initiative: that was true, even though the idiot was not about to admit it.

‘I’d never have thought of it myself, either,’ said Wimpy. ‘Not in another thousand years, by God!’

‘Wh—?’ Bastable was suddenly aware that he had missed something in the exchange. At the same time he observed that if Wimpy was bright-eyed—and he was bright-eyed—he was something less than bushy-tailed. His face was filthy and his uniform a tattered, mud-stained ruin, with one arm of the blouse ripped open from wrist to shoulder.

Wimpy grinned at him. ‘The shawl’s damn good—I took you for an old Froggie peasant until I could practically see the whites of your eyes, I tell you.’ He pointed at the great multi-coloured thing where it lay at Bastable’s feet.

Bastable stared at the shawl. Wimpy believed—Good God!—Wimpy believed that he had
disguised
himself in it!

‘In fact, I wasn’t absolutely sure it was you even then —because of
that —
‘ continued Wimpy, pointing at the perambulator. ‘That pram is your bloody masterpiece!’

As if she had heard this observation, and objected to the way it was phrased, the baby promptly awoke, letting out a single cry, quavering but piercing.

Harry Bastable immediately started rocking the pram, in as near as he could get to the way he had seen Eastbourne’s proud mothers and nannies do on Sunday morning along the sea-front. As he did this with one hand, he replaced the revolver at the baby’s feet with the other and moved the white rabbit up to a more comforting position alongside its owner.

The baby stopped crying.

‘Good God Almighty, man!’ exclaimed Wimpy in a hollow voice. ‘You’ve got a real baby in there!’

Bastable leaned over the pram and scowled encouragingly at the baby. He couldn’t stand babies—he disliked small children in general—but babies were worse. Where small children could occasionally be placated or threatened, babies were irrational. But this—rocking and smiling—was what women did with crying babies, and it sometimes worked, he had observed.

‘It’s a real baby!’ repeated Wimpy.

‘Of course it damn well is!’ snarled Harry Bastable, trying to contort the scowl into a smile. ‘What did you think I’d got in here?’

For once Wimpy appeared to be short of something to say.

The baby smiled at Harry Bastable.

Wimpy peered over the side of the pram, and the baby stopped smiling. Her face began to pucker up.

‘Keep off!’ ordered Bastable, recognizing the sign from bitter experience. ‘You’re frightening her. Keep away!’ He smiled and rocked frantically.

The smile returned.

‘Let’s move,’ said Bastable. ‘She likes being wheeled along.’

That, after all, was what had first stopped the poor little mite crying the evening before—and had also calmed her hunger down this morning. ‘The sooner we can get her to Colembert, the better. I can turn her over to someone there.’

Without waiting, he started to wheel the pram forward once more. Wimpy caught up with them quickly, and promptly draped the shawl over Bastable’s shoulders.

‘There you are, Mum,’ he murmured. ‘How d’you know it’s a her?’

‘Because I know the difference,’ hissed Bastable, his temper slipping and all his old antipathy for Wimpy flooding back.

Oh …’ Wimpy sounded chastened. ‘Oh … I see—you haven’t found it—her —just this morning, I mean?’

Bastable pushed in silence for a moment or two. There was no point in losing his temper, it was childish. And, more than that, it was ungrateful. And, most of all, it was
stupid
—because he needed Wimpy. And doubly stupid … to get angry with a chap for making a simple mistake—the mistake of thinking that he was a damn sight cleverer than he was.

Hah! In fact, Wimpy’s mistake had been for once crediting him with more wits than he had—that was almost funny, if it hadn’t been another truth at his expense.

‘Yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘Late yesterday evening, just as it was beginning to get dark.’

Wimpy digested the answer. ‘
On
the main road?’ he said at length.

Bastable nodded. ‘At the crossroads.’