“Why does Mr. Sartoris let it out?” I said. “Do you mean that Captain Spoomer objects to the dog eating kitchen refuse?”
But the sergeant was not listening. His head was craned around the door, and we watched Sartoris. He had emerged from the mess and he now approached the hangar at the end of the line, his air still alert, still purposeful. He entered the hangar. “That seems a rather childish business for a grown man,” I said.
The sergeant looked at me. Then he quit looking at me. “He wants to know if Captain Spoomer went to Amiens or not.”
After a while I said, “Oh. A young lady. Is that it?”
He didn’t look at me. “You might call her a young lady. I suppose they have young ladies in this country.”
I thought about that for a while. Sartoris emerged from the first hangar and entered the second one. “I wonder if there are any young ladies any more anywhere,” I said.
“Perhaps you are right, sir. War is hard on women.”
“What about this one?” I said. “Who is she?”
He told me. They ran an estaminet, a “bit of a pub” he called it — an old harridan of a woman, and the girl. A little place on a back street, where officers did not go. Perhaps that was why Sartoris and Spoomer created such a furore in that circle.
I gathered from the sergeant that the contest between the squadron commander and one of his greenest cubs was the object of general interest and the subject of the warmest conversation and even betting among the enlisted element of the whole sector of French and British troops. “Being officers and all,” he said.
“They frightened the soldiers off, did they?” I said. “Is that it?” The sergeant did not look at me. “Were there many soldiers to frighten off?”
“I suppose you know these young women,” the sergeant said. “This war and all.”
And that’s who the girl was. What the girl was. The sergeant said that the girl and the old woman were not even related. He told me how Sartoris bought her things — clothes, and jewelry; the sort of jewelry you might buy in Amiens, probably. Or maybe in a canteen, because Sartoris was not much more than twenty.
I saw some of the letters which he wrote to his great-aunt back home, letters that a third-form lad in Harrow could have written, perhaps bettered. It seemed that Spoomer did not make the girl any presents. “Maybe because he is a captain,” the sergeant said. “Or maybe because of them ribbons he dont have to.”
“Maybe so,” I said.
And that was the girl, the girl who, in the centime jewelry which Sartoris gave her, dispensed beer and wine to British and French privates in an Amiens back street, and because of whom Spoomer used his rank to betray Sartoris with her by keeping Sartoris at the aerodrome on special duties, locking up the dog to hide from Sartoris what he had done. And Sartoris taking what revenge he could by letting out the dog in order that it might grub in the refuse of plebeian food.
He entered the hangar in which the sergeant and I were: a tall lad with pale eyes in a face that could be either merry or surly, and quite humorless. He looked at me. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I said. The sergeant made to get up.
“Carry on,” Sartoris said. “I dont want anything.” He went on to the rear of the hangar. It was cluttered with petrol drums and empty packing cases and such. He was utterly without self-consciousness, utterly without shame of his childish business.
The dog was in one of the packing cases. It emerged, huge, of a napped, tawny color; Ffollansbye had told me that, save for Spoomer’s wing and his Mons Star and his D.S.O., he and the dog looked alike. It quitted the hangar without haste, giving me a brief, sidelong glance. We watched it go on and disappear around the corner of the men’s mess. Then Sartoris turned and went back to the officers’ mess and also disappeared.
Shortly afterward, the afternoon patrol came in. While the machines were coming up to the line, the squadron car turned onto the aerodrome and stopped at the officers’ mess and Spoomer got out. “Watch him,” the sergeant said. “He’ll try to do it like he wasn’t watching himself, noticing himself.”
He came along the hangars, big, hulking, in green golf stockings. He did not see me until he was turning into the hangar. He paused; it was almost imperceptible, then he entered, giving me a brief, sidelong glance. “How do,” he said in a high, fretful, level voice. The sergeant had risen. I had never seen Spoomer even glance toward the rear, toward the overturned packing case, yet he had stopped. “Sergeant,” he said.
“Sir,” the sergeant said.
“Sergeant,” Spoomer said. “Have those timers come up yet?”
“Yes, sir. They came up two weeks ago. They’re all in use now, sir.”
“Quite so. Quite so.” He turned; again he gave me a brief, sidelong glance, and went on down the hangar line, not fast. He disappeared. “Watch him, now,” the sergeant said. “He wont go over there until he thinks we have quit watching him.”
We watched. Then he came into sight again, crossing toward the men’s mess, walking briskly now. He disappeared beyond the corner. A moment later he emerged, dragging the huge, inert beast by the scruff of its neck. “You mustn’t eat that stuff,” he said. “That’s for soldiers.”
IV
I didn’t know at the time what happened next. Sartoris didn’t tell me until later, afterward. Perhaps up to that time he had not anything more than instinct and circumstantial evidence to tell him that he was being betrayed: evidence such as being given by Spoomer some duty not in his province at all and which would keep him on the aerodrome for the afternoon, then finding and freeing the hidden dog and watching it vanish up the Amiens road at its clumsy hand gallop.
But something happened. All I could learn at the time was, that one afternoon Sartoris found the dog and watched it depart for Amiens. Then he violated his orders, borrowed a motor bike and went to Amiens too.
Two hours later the dog returned and repaired to the kitchen door of the men’s mess, and a short time after that, Sartoris himself returned on a lorry (they were already evacuating Amiens) laden with household effects and driven by a French soldier in a peasant’s smock. The motor bike was on the lorry too, pretty well beyond repair. The soldier told how Sartoris had driven the bike full speed into a ditch, trying to run down the dog.
But nobody knew just what had happened, at the time. But I had imagined the scene, before he told me. I imagined him there, in that bit of a room full of French soldiers, and the old woman (she could read pips, no doubt; ribbons, anyway) barring him from the door to the living quarters.
I can imagine him, furious, baffled, inarticulate (he knew no French) standing head and shoulders above the French people whom he could not understand and that he believed were laughing at him.
“That was it,” he told me. “Laughing at me behind their faces, about a woman. Me knowing that he was up there, and them knowing I knew that if I busted in and dragged him out and bashed his head off, I’d not only be cashiered, I’d be clinked for life for having infringed the articles of alliance by invading foreign property without warrant or something.”
Then he returned to the aerodrome and met the dog on the road and tried to run it down. The dog came on home, and Spoomer returned, and he was just dragging it by the scruff of the neck from the refuse bin behind the men’s mess, when the afternoon patrol came in.
They had gone out six and come back five, and the leader jumped down from his machine before it had stopped rolling. He had a bloody rag about his right hand and he ran toward Spoomer stooped above the passive and stiff-legged dog. “By gad,” he said, “they have got Cambrai!”
Spoomer did not look up. “Who have?”
“Jerry has, by gad!”
“Well, by gad,” Spoomer said. “Come along, now. I have told you about that muck.”
A man like that is invulnerable. When Sartoris and I talked for the first time, I started to tell him that. But then I learned that Sartoris was invincible too. We talked, that first time. “I tried to get him to let me teach him to fly a Camel,” Sartoris said. “I will teach him for nothing. I will tear out the cockpit and rig the duals myself, for nothing.”
“Why?” I said. “What for?”
“Or anything. I will let him choose it. He can take an S.E. if he wants to, and I will take an Ak.W. or even a Fee and I will run him clean out of the sky in four minutes. I will run him so far into the ground he will have to stand on his head to swallow.”
We talked twice: that first time, and the last time. “Well, you did better than that,” I said the last time we talked.
He had hardly any teeth left then, and
