Thunder On The Right (17 page)

Jennifer, bruised and sprawling on the cobbles, had a momentary and flashing vision--as if the eye of a camera had clicked open and shut—of the male musk ox, horns down, charging his enemy; charging danger, while his females stood protected at his back . . . but of course (she scrambled, confused and shaken, to her feet) it was not Stephen who was the enemy and Bussac the protector; it was the reverse.

Bussac had Gillian a prisoner in his beastly little cottage, and Stephen and she must get her away. Now.

Bussac, with a tearing grunt, had broken Stephen's hold, and the two men flung apart. They stood, glaring and breathing heavily, the space of air between them already quivering with the next attack. Bussac rushed—another bull-like rush— and Stephen side-stepped, but not neatly enough. The other's fist caught him above the heart, and then the two were locked again, in a horrible battle of straining muscles and grunting animal breaths.

Jennifer turned and ran for the cottage door.

But she had reckoned without the dogs. As she reached out an arm toward the door latch, the foremost of the two flung himself straight at her hand. She snatched it back with a cry of terror, and the dog's body crashed into the door. She whirled to face them, her heart thudding, her mouth dry with fear, and backed against the wall to meet the next attack. But it did not come. The dog which had fallen had recovered itself from its sprawl on the cobbles, and now crouched two paces away, snarling its hate over a hurt paw. The other wove restlessly back and forwards, just out of kicking distance. Jennifer stayed where she was, crucified by her fear against one of the open shutters that hung between the cottage window and the door. The bodies of the two men, locked together, lurched and swayed within a few feet of her. Helpless, she stood and watched, her breath caught in her throat with a dry sobbing, and she gripped her underlip between her teeth to stop herself screaming. . . .

In common with most civilized young women, Jennifer had never before seen men fighting hand to hand. Nor had she pictured such a fight as being in any way like this.

This was no clean, hard-hitting tussle between villain and gallant hero of the kind to which romance and the cinema have accustomed us; it was a thoroughly dirty and shocking business, a grunting, swaying, battering fight with no holds barred, and Jennifer sickened as she watched.

And Stephen seemed to be getting very much the worst of it. Both men were soaked with sweat; Bussac's shirt was black with it, and clung to his back, outlining the bulge and strain of the great muscles beneath. Stephen's face was streaked and greasy-looking, and there was an angry mark on his cheekbone. His mouth was open and ugly, and blood was running into it from the bruise on his cheek. The breath rasped, short and hard, in his throat, and, as Jennifer watched, appalled, there came from him a small sound, at once furious and desperate, as Bussac's grip shifted, and his knee came up in a blow that is against the rules in any language. Stephen twisted to avoid it, and the driving knee glanced along his thigh; at the same moment he thrust with a vicious and unskillful short-arm jab at the other man's throat. It missed, and cracked harmlessly enough on Bussac's collarbone. But the Frenchman, seeing it coming, had winced from it, and this movement, coupled with Stephen's own ungainly twist of the body, set the two staggering, locked as they were. Then Stephen trod in the blue treacherous slime of the spilled milk, and went down heavily, with Bussac on top of him. There were hands at his throat now, and he was tearing at them—dark hands with hairy backs.

Jennifer screamed. She turned her head away from where Stephen was being strangled in the pool of light, and screamed again. Behind her, in the dim little room beyond the blank glass, there was a slight movement. She strained her head around to look, and one of the dogs snarled softly . . . but she could see. She could see the other girl's face, white in the darkness behind the blank glass. The white face moved again, swam forward, was pressed against the window, the wide gray eyes staring out into the storm-purple afternoon. They lit on Jennifer, within a yard on the pane; on the brutes holding her at bay; on the ominously locked bodies beyond. . . .

"
Call off the dogs! For God's sake call off the dogs!"
Jennifer shouted it with all her strength toward that blind window.

The face wavered, and vanished. As if at the touch of a button, the shaft of light switched off, and with a rumble the storm pressed nearer.

Then the cottage door burst open and the girl ran out. The dogs backed and swerved in front of her, and her shout sent them., tails down, flying through the cottage door. She spared no glance for Jennifer. She flew across the cobbles as if she were winged, and fell upon Bussac, where he still straddled Stephen's fallen body.

Jennifer, with a sob that was a prayer, followed her.

The girl had grabbed one of Bussac's arms, and was tugging with all her strength to break his grip. Jennifer, with a force she had not known she possessed, laid hold of the other wrist with both hands, and put the whole weight of her body into the strain.

She was shouting she did not know what—some incoherence born of terror—and the girl she had called Gillian was shouting, too, to Bussac, in rapid, indistinguishable French that nevertheless, after what seemed an aeon of screaming time, got through to him through the red mists of murder.

The dark hands slackened, slipped—and Stephen, twisting like a fish beneath him, had broken the grip and rolled clear.

He wasn't dead. Stephen wasn't dead. Jennifer, who had gone in this last moment beyond fear, thrust Bussac away with all her force, and flung herself to help Stephen.

Bussac rose slowly, gulping for breath and shaking his head for all the world like an angry bull. He towered over Stephen who, sick and battered as he was, strove to push himself upright to meet the fresh attack. The red glare was still in the Frenchman's eyes, and if he had attacked again, the fight could have had only one result, but, just as he lurched forward, the girl who had been clinging to his arm gave a low cry, a curious little moaning sound that was no more than just audible, but which nevertheless stopped the man in mid-lunge as a shot stops a charging bison.

He swung around. She had dropped his arm as he moved forward, and stood now, paper-white, and swaying on her feet. One hand went gropingly to her head. She looked shockingly ill. Even as Bussac whirled with a quick, breathless
"Qu'as-tu?"

she swayed again, put out a hand blindly, and crumpled where she stood.

Bussac moved like lightning. He caught her before she struck the cobbles, swinging her up into his arrm as if she had weighed no more than a doll. Her head hung helplessly, her face ashen in the uncanny light. Then he spoke over his shoulder.

"Get out."

Stephen was, albeit unsteadily, on his feet. Jenny, ash-white herself, glanced desperately from him to the unconscious girl.

"Monsieur Bussac------"

"You heard me. Get out." He strode for the cottage door. The dogs lurked there in the shadow, red-eyed and uneasy. Jennifer started forward, to be checked by Stephen's hand on her arm. At her movement one of the brutes snarled viciously, bristling and crouching, then slunk back into the shadows as Bussac reached the door. He went in without a backward glance, and kicked the door shut behind him.

Jenny, starting forward instinctively once more as he disappeared from view, found herself yet again blocked by the uncompromising square of the cottage door.

Stephen's hand closed around her wrist, holding her. She said, unbelievingly, like a child, "But it was Gillian. It really was Gillian. I know it was... ."

Then futility, like the heavy air, seemed to press down and engulf her. She turned blindly, stupidly, and allowed his unsteady hand to urge her away; back across the cobbles, back down the track, back into the choking blackness of the pinewoods....

In the far distance, behind the towering immensities of cloud, came the sword-gleam of the first lightning.

The wood had been quiet before, but now, with the blanket of the storm sagging thickly onto the treetops, the silence was charged, heavy, ominous. The carpet of pine needles sucked at the feet, like a bog, drowning the footsteps; the progress of an army along this track, one felt, would make no more disturbance than a troop of ghosts, a current of air, a sigh. The very noise of breathing was a violation of this silence. . . .

His breathing sounded hoarse and painful. He limped beside her, his hand still on her arm, urging her on over the soft, clogging pine needles, away from danger, away from Gillian, away from that murderous devil.. ..

Jennifer hurrying dazedly, obedient to the pressure of Stephen's hand, checked against it, and half-turned as if in rebellion. Then she stumbled, and the ranked stems of the pines seemed to tilt and recede ... to surge forward again outlined in light ... to waver, and then right themselves, painfully. . ..

She was sitting with her back against a tree, where the pines thinned at the northern edge of the wood. Stephen sat beside her. She turned her head, with a long, trembling breath, and looked at him.

His head was bent, and he was fumbling ineptly in a pocket. He looked both grim and indescribably weary, and there was still a trace of the ugliness that had frightened her in the set of his mouth, marred as it was by the marks of dried blood. His hair was matted and damp on his forehead, and when he put up a hand to brush it back, she saw blood— Bussac's blood—under his nails.

"Have a cigarette, Jenny." She was shocked anew at bis voice. It was little more than a thick whisper. "No wine ... this time ... I'm afraid."

"Oh, Stephen. . . ." There seemed nothing that could be said. She took the cigarette, and saw with an awful pity how his hands shook. Not only exhausted, she thought; beaten. He—we, are beaten.

She looked away, downhill through the thinning pines to where the convent crouched under the dark sky, its whitewashed walls purple in the lurid storm light. As she watched, a distant flicker lit it to quivering life, and, seconds later, the thunder trundled itself closer over the mountaintops.

Thunder off. That, too, she thought to herself, but dully and without bitterness—that, too, had to round off the impossible little drama which was even now playing itself out. Her own part in it had been futile enough, and Stephen's—

yes, futile was the word there, too. What had he said to her, only yesterday? Don't cast me as the hero of your story, Jenny. But she had. She had run to him, had put the burden of her apprehension and fear into his hands, confident that he would not—could not— fail her. The story must have the right ending. The hero, the strong man, the elder brother. . . he would not let her down. But he had. He had.

She turned her head and met his eyes.

And in that moment something happened to her. She saw, beneath the chagrin and weariness of his eyes, that he knew what she had been thinking and with the knowledge came shame, and some instinct pricked into being by her pain for him, that in a breath withered the ineptitudes of innocence with which she had deceived herself.
Today put on perfection...
With her new adult's eyes she saw it all; that it was she who had done the betraying, the "letting-down," she who had allowed the queerness of the situation to build up in her a set of values as strange as they were worthless. Stephen's half-casual, half-jesting rejection of "heroics" went, in fact, very deep; he was the kind of highly civilized man who would loathe violence in all its ugly manifestations as he would loathe the plague. That was, in fact, how he would see it, as a plague, a creeping cancer of the modern world— and he would fight against accepting it. Clever, sensitive, gentle . . . and, however much the paper and celluloid supermen strutted in their invincible splendor, it was the men like Stephen, the thinking men—no more than
moyen sensuel
—who were the true constant.

He had said he was no storybook hero. It was true. And it was the measure of the magic of the place that she had been betrayed into accepting that as a confession of weakness. It was, she saw now, the reverse. A storybook hero had by definition no place in life; he battered his way through twenty victorious chapters, faded out on a lustful kiss, and was gone for good. But at the end of this story there was still a new chapter to open. England, Oxford, Cherry Close . . herself and Stephen. ... It came to Jennifer quite clearly and quietly just what the next chapters must contain.

But first she must give him back himself.
Today put on perfection.

She said, "Stephen, dear. Don't mind so much. Please." He did not answer, and she put out a hand and touched his, softly.

"Stephen."

He looked away. "I lost your game for you, Jenny."

She cried out at that. "Don't say that! It's not fair! I won't have you say that!"

"It's true."

She turned on him almost fiercely.

"It's not true! You lost nothing! If I'd done as you told me and stayed behind, it wouldn't have happened that way. And he's twice your weight, and you'd hurt your shoulder, and besides------"

"Besides?"

"You're lame," she said in a small voice.

The word dropped between them into a little silence. Then he heard a tiny sound, and at last looked at her. She was crying. The tears starred her lashes and spilled onto her cheeks. His heart twisted in his breast, but he did not move.

"Jenny. Oh, God, Jenny, don't. I'm sorry. Gillian------"

She said, "It's not Gillian. It's just that I—I can't bear you to be—hurt any more. Not for anything. Not—
you
."

He said shakenly, "Oh, my darling. . . ." And then she was in his arms and he was kissing her at last,, but gently, her tear-stained lashes, her mouth. . . . "My lovely Jenny. My love."

The pine trees stirred high above them, the dark boughs sighing with the faraway hollow soughing of the sea waves in a shell. Lightning stabbed nearer. A shower of hail raced up the slope and over the crested woods, its million tiny ghost-feet pattering and galloping overhead like a wave sweeping the shingle. As it ebbed into silence the lightning stabbed again: a flash, a crack, and then at one stride the storm was in the valley; the growl and roar of thunder rolled and re-echoed from the mountains on either hand, and the sword of the lightning stabbed down, and stabbed again, as if searching through the depths of the cringing woods for whatever sheltered there.