“What is it, Davy?” he said. “Can’t you say what it is?”
“It’s nothing.” I could taste sweat on my lips. “It isn’t anything. I won’t again. I swear I shan’t any more.”
He was looking at me. “You said you had to come back to town. And then I saw you on the river. You saw me and hid, Davy. Pulled up under the bank, in the shadow. There was a girl with you.” He watched me, his eyes bright and grave.
“Was there a moon?” I said.
“Yes. There was a moon.”
“Oh God, oh God,” I said. “I won’t again, George! You must find it. You must!”
“Ah, Davy,” he said. His face began to fade.
“I won’t! I won’t again!” I said. “George! George!”
A match flared; a face sprang out of the darkness above me. “Wake up,” it said. I lay staring at it, sweating. The match burned down, the face fell back into darkness, from which the voice came bodiless: “All right now?”
“Yes, thanks. Dreaming. Sorry I waked you.”
For the next few nights I didn’t dare let go into sleep again. But I was young, my body was getting strong again and I was out of doors all day; one night sleep overtook me unawares, and I waked next morning to find that I had eluded it, whatever it was.
I found a sort of peace. The days passed; I had learned the guns and the wireless and the maps, and most of all, to not observe what should not be observed. My thigh was almost reconciled to the new member, and, freed now of the outcast’s doings, I could give all my time to seeking George. But I did not find him; somewhere in the mazy corridor where the mother of dreams dwells I had lost them both.
So I did not remark him at first even when he stood beside me in the corridor just beyond the corner of which It waited. The sulphur reek was all about me; I felt horror and dread and something unspeakable: delight. I believe I felt what women in labor feel. And then George was there, looking steadily down at me. He had always sat beside my head, so we could talk, but now he stood beyond the foot of the bed, looking down at me and I knew that this was farewell.
“Don’t go, George!” I said. “I shan’t again. I shan’t any more, George!” But his steady, grave gaze faded slowly, implacable, sorrowful, but without reproach. “Go, then!” I said. My teeth felt dry against my lip like sandpaper. “Go, then!”
And that was the last of it. He never came back, nor the dream. I knew it would not, as a sick man who wakes with his body spent and peaceful and weak knows that the illness will not return. I knew it was gone; I knew that when I realized that I thought of it only with pity. Poor devil, I would think. Poor devil.
But it took George with it. Sometimes, when dark and isolation had robbed me of myself, I would think that perhaps in killing it he had lost his own life: the dead dying in order to slay the dead.
I sought him now and then in the corridors of sleep, but without success; I spent a week with his people in Devon, in a rambling house where his crooked ugly face and his round ruddy head and his belief that Marlowe was a better lyric poet than Shakespeare and Thomas Campion than either, and that breath was not a bauble given a man for his own pleasuring, eluded me behind every stick and stone. But I never saw him again.
III
The padre had driven up from Poperinghe in the dark, in the side car of a motorcycle. He sat beyond the table, talking of Jotham Rust, Everbe Corinthia’s brother and Simon’s son, whom I had seen three times in my life.
Yesterday I saw Jotham for the third and last time, arraigned before a court martial for desertion: the scarecrow of that once sturdy figure with its ruddy, capable face, who had pulled George out of the lock with a boat-hook that afternoon three years ago, charged now for his life, offering no extenuation nor explanation, expecting and asking no clemency.
“He does not want clemency,” the padre said. The padre was a fine, honest man, incumbent of a modest living in the Midlands somewhere, who had brought the kind and honest stupidity of his convictions into the last place on earth where there was room for them. “He does not want to live.” His face was musing and dejected, shocked and bewildered.
“There comes a time in the life of every man when the world turns its dark side to him and every man’s shadow is his mortal enemy. Then he must turn to God, or perish.
Yet he . . . I cannot seem . . .” His eyes held that burly bewilderment of oxen; above his stock his shaven chin dejected, but not vanquished yet. “And you say you know of no reason why he should have attacked you?”
“I never saw the man but twice before,” I said. “One time was night before last, the other was . . . two — three years ago, when I passed through his father’s lock in a skiff while I was at Oxford. He was there when his sister let us through. And if you hadn’t told me his sister’s name, I wouldn’t have remembered him then.”
He brooded. “The father is dead, too.”
“What? Dead? Old Simon dead?”
“Yes. He died shortly after the — the other. Rust says he left his father after the sister’s funeral, talking with the sexton in Abingdon churchyard, and a week later he was notified in London that his father was dead. He says the sexton told him his father had been giving directions about his own funeral.
The sexton said that every day Simon would come up to see him about it, made all the arrangements, and that the sexton joked him a little about it, because he was such a hale old chap, thinking that he was just off balance for the time with the freshness of his grief. And then, a week later, he was dead.”
“Old Simon dead,” I said. “Corinthia, then Simon, and now Jotham.” The candle flame stood steady and unwavering on the table.
“Was that her name?” he said. “Everbe Corinthia?” He sat in the lone chair, puzzlement, bewilderment in the very shape of his shadow on the wall behind him. The light fell on one side of his face, the major’s crown on that shoulder glinting dully. I rose from the cot, the harness of the leg creaking with explosive loudness, and leaned over his shoulder and took a cigarette from my magneto case tobacco-box, and fumbled a match in my single hand. He glanced up.
“Permit me,” he said. He took the box and struck a match. “You’re fortunate to have escaped with just that.” He indicated my sling.
“Yes, sir. If it hadn’t been for my leg, I’d have got the knife in my ribs instead of my arm.”
“Your leg?”
“I keep it propped on a chair beside the bed, so I can reach it easily. He stumbled over it and waked me. Otherwise he’d have stuck me like a pig.”
“Oh,” he said. He dropped the match and brooded again with his stubborn bewilderment. “And yet, his is not the face of an assassin in the dark. There is a forthrightness in it, a — a — what shall I say? a sense of social responsibility, integrity, that . . .
And you say that you — I beg your pardon; I do not doubt your word; it is only that — Yet the girl is indubitably dead; it was he who discovered her and was with her until she died and saw her buried. He heard the man laugh once, in the dark.”
“But you cannot slash a stranger’s arm simply because you heard a laugh in the dark, sir. The poor devil is crazy with his own misfortunes.”
“Perhaps so,” the padre said. “He told me that he has other proof, something incontrovertible; what, he would not tell me.”
“Then let him produce it. If I were in his place now . . .”
He brooded, his hands clasped on the table. “There is a justice in the natural course of events. . . . My dear sir, are you accusing Providence of a horrible and meaningless practical joke? No, no; to him who has sinned, that sin will come home to him. Otherwise . . . God is at least a gentleman. Forgive me: I am not — You understand how this comes home to me, in this unfortunate time when we already have so much to reproach ourselves with.
We are responsible for this.” He touched the small metal cross on his tunic, then he swept his arm in a circular gesture that shaped in the quiet room between us the still and sinister darkness in which the fine and resounding words men mouthed so glibly were the vampire’s teeth with which the vampire fed. “The voice of God waking His servants from the sloth into which they have sunk. . . .”
“What, padre?” I said. “Is the damn thing making a dissenter of you too?”
He
