A little more than four hours but perhaps it should have been. The town was dark now, and the bistro they had started from, a clump of shadow detaching itself from a greater mass of shadow and itself breaking into separate shapes as the nine others surrounded the cart, the cart itself not stopping but going steadily on toward where the carriage in its black pall of bunting had vanished completely into the night. But it was there; the ones who had remained in town had even drawn the nails again so that all necessary was to lift off the top and drag the ground-sheeted bundle through the window and dump it in and set the nails again. ‘Drive them in,’ Picklock said. ‘Who cares about noise now? Where is the brandy?’
‘It’s all right,’ a voice said.
‘How many bottles did you open?’
‘One,’ a voice said.
‘Counting from where?’
‘Why should we lie when all you’ve got to do to prove it is to count the others?’ the voice said.
‘All right,’ Picklock said. ‘Get out of here now and shut the window.’ Then they were on the ground again. The stranger had never quitted his cart and this time surely the horse was going home. But they didn’t wait for that departure. They turned as one, already running, clotting and jostling a little at the carriage door, but plunging at last back into their lightless catafalque as into the womb itself. They were safe now. They had a body, and drink to take care of the night. There was tomorrow and Paris of course, but God could take care of that.
Carrying the gather of eggs in the loop of her apron, Marya, the elder sister, crossed the yard toward the house as though borne on a soft and tender cloud of white geese.
They surrounded and enclosed her as though with a tender and eager yearning; two of them, one on either side, kept absolute pace with her, pressed against her skirts, their long undulant necks laid flat against her moving flanks, their heads tilted upward, the hard yellow beaks open slightly like mouths, the hard insentient eyes filmed over as with a sort of ecstasy: right up to the stoop itself when she mounted it and opened the door and stepped quickly through and closed it, the geese swarming and jostling around and over and onto the stoop itself to press against the door’s blank wood, their necks extended and the heads fallen a little back as though on the brink of swoons, making with their hoarse harsh unmusical voices faint tender cries of anguish and bereavement and unassuageable grief.
This was the kitchen, already strong with the approaching mid-day’s soup. She didn’t even stop: putting the eggs away, lifting for a moment the lid of the simmering pot on the stove, then placed rapidly on the wooden table a bottle of wine, a glass, a soup bowl, a loaf, a napkin and spoon, then on through the house and out the front door giving onto the lane and the field beyond it where she could already see them — the horse and harrow and the man guiding them, the hired man they had had since the death of her sister’s husband four years ago, and the sister herself moving across the land’s panorama like a ritual, her hand and arm plunging into the sack slung from her shoulder, to emerge in that long sweep which is the second oldest of man’s immemorial gestures or acts, she — Marya — running now, skirting among the old craters picketed off by tiny stakes bearing scraps of red cloth where the rank and lifeless grass grew above the unexploded shells, already saying, crying in her bright serene and carrying voice: ‘Sister! Here is the young Englishman come for the medal. There are two of them, coming up the lane.’
‘A friend with him?’ the sister said.
‘Not a friend,’ Marya said. ‘This one is looking for a tree.’
‘A tree?’ the sister said.
‘Yes, Sister. Cant you see him?’
And, themselves in the lane now, they could see them both — two men obviously but, even at that distance, one of them moving not quite like a human being and, in time nearer, not like a human being at all beside the other’s tall and shambling gait, but at a slow and terrific lurch and heave like some kind of giant insect moving erect and seeming to possess no progress at all even before Marya said: ‘He’s on crutches:’ the single leg swinging metronome and indefatigable yet indomitable too between the rhythmic twin counterstrokes of the crutches; interminable yet indomitable too and indubitably coming nearer until they could see that the arm on that side was gone somewhere near the elbow also, and (quite near now) that what they looked at was not even a whole man since one half of his visible flesh was one furious saffron scar beginning at the ruined homburg hat and dividing his face exactly down the bridge of the nose, across the mouth and chin, to the collar of his shirt.
But this seemed to be only outside because the voice was strong and unpitying and the French he addressed them in was fluid and good and it was only the man with him who was sick — a tall thin cadaver of a man, whole to be sure and looking no less like a tramp, but with a sick insolent intolerable face beneath a filthy hat from the band of which there stood a long and raking feather which made him at least eight feet tall.
‘Madame Demont?’ the first man said.
‘Yes,’ Marya said with her bright and tender and unpitying smile.
The man with the crutches turned to his companion. ‘All right,’ he said in French. ‘This is them. Go ahead.’ But Marya had not waited for him, speaking to the man on crutches in French:
‘We were waiting for you. The soup is ready and you must be hungry after your walk from the station.’ Then she too turned to the other, speaking not in French now but in the old Balkan tongue of her childhood: ‘You too. You will need to eat for a little while longer too.’
‘What?’ the sister said suddenly and harshly, then to the man with the feather in the same mountain tongue: ‘You are Zsettlani?’
‘What?’ the man with the feather said in French harshly and loudly. ‘I speak French. I will take soup too. I can pay for it. See?’ he said, thrusting his hand into his pocket. ‘Look.’
‘We know you have money,’ Marya said in French. ‘Come into the house.’
And, in the kitchen now, they could see the rest of the first man: the saffron-colored scar not stopping at the hat’s line but dividing the skull too into one furious and seared rigidity, no eye, no ear on that side of it, the corner of the mouth seized into rigidity as if it was not even the same face which talked and presently would chew and swallow; the filthy shirt held together at the throat by the frayed and faded stripes of what they did not know was a British regimental tie; the stained and soiled dinner jacket from the left breast of which two medals hung from their gaudy ribbons; the battered and filthy tweed trousers one leg of which was doubled back and up and fastened below the thigh with a piece of wire, the Englishman propped on the crutches for a moment yet in the center of the kitchen, looking about the room with that alert calm unpitying eye while his companion stood just inside the door behind him with his ravaged insolent peaceless face, still wearing the hat whose feather now almost touched the ceiling, as though he were suspended from it.
‘So this is where he lived,’ the man with the crutches said.
‘Yes,’ Marthe said. ‘How did you know? How did you know where to find us?’
‘Now, Sister,’ Marya said. ‘How could he have come for the medal if he didn’t know where we were?’
‘The medal?’ the Englishman said.
‘Yes,’ Marya said. ‘But have your soup first. You are hungry.’
‘Thanks,’ the Englishman said. He jerked his head toward the man behind him. ‘He too? Is he invited too?’
‘Of course,’ Marya said. She took two of the bowls from the table and went to the stove, not offering to help him, nor could the sister, Marthe, have moved fast or quickly enough to help him as he swung the one leg over the wooden bench and propped the crutches beside him and was already uncorking the wine before the whole man at the door had even moved, Marya lifting the lid from the pot and half-turning to look back at the second man, saying in French this time: ‘Sit down. You can eat too. Nobody minds any more.’
‘Minds what?’ the man with
