It is one of those spurious, pale days like a sickly and premature child of spring while spring itself is still weeks away. In the thin sunlight buildings fade upward into misty pinks and golds. Women wear violets pinned to their furs, appearing to bloom themselves like flowers in the languorous, treacherous air.
It is the women who look twice at the man standing against the wall at a corner: a gaunt man with white hair, and moustaches twisted into frayed points, with a bleached and frayed regimental scarf in a celluloid collar, a once-good suit now threadbare yet apparently pressed within twenty-four hours, standing against the wall with closed eyes, a dilapidated hat held bottom-up before him.
He stood there for a long time, until someone touched his arm. It was a constable. “Move along, sir. Against orders.” In his hat were seven pennies and three halfpence. He bought a cake of soap and a little food.
Another anniversary came and passed; he stood again, his stick at his armpit, among the bright, silent uniforms, the quiet throng in either frank or stubborn cast-offs, with patient, bewildered faces. In his eyes now is not that hopeful resignation of a beggar, but rather that bitterness, that echo as of bitter and unheard laugher of a hunchback.
A meager fire burns on the sloping cobbles. In the fitful light the damp, fungus-grown wall of the embankment and the stone arch of the bridge loom. At the foot of the cobbled slope the invisible river clucks and gurgles with the tide.
Five figures lie about the fire, some with heads covered as though in slumber, others smoking and talking. One man sits upright, his back to the wall, his hands lying beside him; he is blind: he sleeps that way. He says that he is afraid to lie down.
“Cant you tell you are lying down, without seeing you are?” another says.
“Something might happen,” the blind man says.
“What? Do you think they would give you a shell, even if it would bring back your sight?”
“They’d give him the shell, all right,” a third said.
“Ow. Why dont they line us all up and put down a bloody barrage on us?”
“Was that how he lost his sight?” a fourth says. “A shell?”
“Ow. He was at Mons. A dispatch rider, on a motorbike. Tell them about it, mate.”
The blind man lifts his face a little. Otherwise he does not move. He speaks in a flat voice. “She had the bit of scar on her wrist. That was how I could tell. It was me put the scar on her wrist, you might say. We was working in the shop one day. I had picked up an old engine and we was fitting it onto a bike so we could—”
“What?” the fourth says. “What’s he talking about?”
“Shhhh,” the first says. “Not so loud. He’s talking about his girl. He had a bit of a bike shop on the Brighton Road and they were going to marry.” He speaks in a low tone, his voice just under the weary, monotonous voice of the blind man. “Had their picture taken and all the day he enlisted and got his uniform.
He had it with him for a while, until one day he lost it. He was fair wild. So at last we got a bit of a card about the same size of the picture. ‘Here’s your picture, mate,’ we says. ‘Hold onto it this time.’ So he’s still got the card. Likely he’ll show it to you before he’s done. So dont you let on.”
“No,” the other says. “I shant let on.”
The blind man talks. “ — got them at the hospital to write her a letter, and sure enough, here she come. I could tell her by the bit of scar on her wrist. Her voice sounded different, but then everything sounded different since. But I could tell by the scar. We would sit and hold hands, and I could touch the bit of scar inside her left wrist. In the cinema too. I would touch the scar and it would be like I—”
“The cinema?” the fourth says. “Him?”
“Yes,” the other says. “She would take him to the cinema the comedies, so he could hear them laughing.”
The blind man talks. “ — told me how the pictures hurt her eyes, and that she would leave me at the cinema and when it was over she would come and fetch me. So I said it was all right. And the next night it was again.
And I said it was all right. And the next night I told her I wouldn’t go either. I said we would stop at home, at the hospital. And then she didn’t say anything for a long while. I could hear her breathing. Then she said it was all right.
So after that we didn’t go to the cinema. We would just sit, holding hands, and me feeling the scar now and then. We couldn’t talk loud in the hospital, so we would whisper. But mostly we didn’t talk. We just held hands. And that was for eight nights. I counted.
Then it was the eighth night. We were sitting there, with the other hand in my hand, and me touching the scar now and then. Then on a sudden the hand jerked away. I could hear her standing up. ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘This cant go on any longer. You will have to know sometime,’ she says. And I says, ‘I dont want to know but one thing. What is your name?’ I says. She told me her name; one of the nurses. And she says—”
“What?” the fourth says. “What is this?”
“He told you,” the first said. “It was one of the nurses in the hospital. The girl had been buggering off with another fellow and left the nurse for him to hold her hand, thinking he was fooled.”
“But how did he know?” the fourth says.
“Listen,” the first says.
“— ‘and you knew all the time,’ she says, ‘since the first time?’ ‘It was the scar,’ I says. ‘You’ve got it on the wrong wrist. You’ve got it on your right wrist,’ I says. ‘And two nights ago, I lifted up the edge of it a bit. What is it,’ I says. ‘Courtplaster?’”
The blind man sits against the wall, his face lifted a little, his hands motionless beside him. “That’s how I knew, by the scar. Thinking they could fool me, when it was me put the scar on her, you might say—”
The prone figure farthest from the fire lifts its head. “Hup,” he says; “ere e comes.”
The others turn as one and look toward the entrance.
“Here who comes?” the blind man says. “Is it the bobbies?”
They do not answer. They watch the man who enters: a tall man with a stick. They cease to talk, save the blind man, watching the tall man come among them. “Here who comes, mates?” the blind man says. “Mates!”
The newcomer passes them, and the fire; he does not look at them. He goes on. “Watch, now,” the second says. The blind man is now leaning a little forward; his hands fumble at the ground beside him as though he were preparing to rise.
“Watch who?” he says. “What do you see?”
They do not answer. They are watching the newcomer covertly, attentively, as he disrobes and then, a white shadow, a ghostly gleam in the darkness, goes down to the water and washes himself, slapping his body hard with icy and filthy handfuls of river water.
He returns to the fire; they turn their faces quickly aside, save the blind man (he still sits forward, his arms propped beside him as though on the point of rising, his wan face turned toward the sound, the movement) and one other. “Yer stones is ot, sir,” this one says. “I’ve ad them right in the blaze.”
“Thanks,” the newcomer says. He still appears to be utterly oblivious of them, so they watch him again, quietly, as he spreads his sorry garments on one stone and takes a second stone from the fire and irons them. While he is dressing, the man who spoke to him goes down to the water and returns with the cake of soap which he had used. Still watching, they see the newcomer rub his fingers on the cake of soap and twist his moustaches into points.
“A bit more on the left one, sir,” the man holding the soap says. The newcomer soaps his fingers and twists his left moustache again, the other man watching him, his head bent and tilted a little back, in shape and attitude and dress like a caricatured scarecrow.
“Right, now?” the newcomer says.
“Right, sir,” the scarecrow says. He retreats into the darkness and returns without the cake of soap, and carrying instead the hat and the stick. The newcomer takes them. From his pocket he takes a coin and puts it into the scarecrow’s hand. The scarecrow touches his cap; the newcomer is gone.
They watch him, the tall shape, the erect back, the stick, until he disappears.
“What do you see, mates?” the blind man says. “Tell a man what you see.”
VII
Among the demobilized officers who
