It was nearly half an hour before Mark felt that he had tortured himself sufficiently.
‘So much for the sights,’ he said grimly. ‘Let’s go and have something to eat.’
The night was piercingly cold, the bed merely a board of wood. It was from a restless and unrefreshing sleep that Anthony was roused next morning.
‘Wake!’ Mark was shouting to him. ‘Wake!’
Anthony sat up, startled, and saw Mark, in the other wooden bed, propped on his elbow and looking across at him with angry eyes.
‘Time to get away,’ the harsh voice continued. ‘It’s after six.’
Suddenly remembering yesterday’s accident, ‘How’s the knee?’ Anthony asked.
‘Just the same.’
‘Did you sleep?’
‘No, of course not,’ Mark answered irritably. Then, looking away, ‘I can’t manage to get out of bed,’ he added. ‘The thing’s gone stiff on me.’
Anthony pulled on his boots and, having opened the door of the shed to admit the light, came and sat down on the edge of Mark’s bed.
‘We’d better put on a clean dressing,’ he said, and began to untie the bandage.
The lint had stuck to the raw flesh. Anthony pulled at it cautiously, then let go. ‘I’ll see if they can give me some warm water at the shop,’ he said.
Mark uttered a snort of laughter, and taking a corner of the lint between his thumb and forefinger, gave a violent jerk. The square of pink fabric came away in his hand.
‘Don’t!’ Anthony had cried out, wincing as though the pain were his. The other only smiled at him contemptuously. ‘You’ve made it bleed again,’ he added, in another tone, finding a medical justification for his outburst. But in point of fact, that trickle of fresh blood was not the thing that disturbed him most when he bent down to look at what Mark had uncovered. The whole knee was horribly swollen and almost black with bruises, and round the edges of the newly opened wound the flesh was yellow with pus.
‘You can’t possibly go with your knee in this state,’ he said.
‘That’s for me to decide,’ Mark answered, and added, after a moment, ‘After all, you did it the day before yesterday.’
The words implied a contemptuous disparagement. ‘If a poor creature like you can overcome pain, then surely I . . .’ That was what they meant to say. But the insult, Anthony realized, was unintended. It sprang from the depths of an arrogance that was almost child-like in its single-minded intensity. There was something touching and absurd about such ingenuousness. Besides, there was the poor fellow’s knee. This was not the time to resent insults.
‘I was practically well,’ he argued in a conciliatory tone. ‘You’ve got a leg that’s ready to go septic at any moment.’
Mark frowned. ‘Once I’m on my mule I shall be all right,’ he insisted. ‘It’s just a bit stiff and bruised; that’s all. Besides,’ he added, in a contradiction of what he had said before, ‘there’ll be a doctor at Miajutla. The quicker I get this thing into his hands, the better.’
‘You’ll make it ten times worse on the way. If you waited here a day or two . . .’
‘Don Jorge would think I was leaving him in the lurch.’
‘Damn Don Jorge! Send him a telegram.’
‘The line doesn’t go through this place. I asked.’
‘Send the mozo then.’
Mark shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t trust him.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’ll get drunk at the first opportunity.’
‘In other words, you don’t want to send him.’
‘Besides, it would be too late,’ Mark went on. ‘Don Jorge will be moving in a day or two.’
‘And do you imagine you’ll be able to move with him?’
‘I mean to be there,’ said Mark.
‘You can’t.’
‘I tell you, I mean to be there. I’m not going to let him down.’ His voice was cold and harsh with restrained anger. ‘And now help me up,’ he commanded.
‘I won’t.’
The two men looked at one another in silence. Then, making an effort to control himself, Mark shrugged his shoulders.
‘All right, then,’ he said, ‘I’ll call the mozo. And if you’re afraid of going on to Miajutla,’ he continued in a tone of savage contempt, ‘you can ride back to Tapatlan. I’ll go on by myself.’ Then, turning towards the open door, ‘Juan,’ he shouted. ‘Juan!’
Anthony surrendered. ‘Have it your own way. If you really want to be mad . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished. ‘But I take no responsibility.’
‘You weren’t asked to,’ Mark answered. Anthony got up and went to fetch the medicine-chest. He swabbed the wounds and applied the new dressing in silence; then, while he was trying to bandage, ‘Suppose we stopped quarrelling,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t that make things easier?’
For a few seconds Mark remained hostile and averted; then looked up and twisted his face into a reconciliatory smile of friendliness. ‘Peace,’ he said, nodding affirmatively. ‘We’ll make peace.’
But he had reckoned without the pain. It began, agonizingly, when he addressed himself to the task of getting out of bed. For it turned out to be impossible for him, even with Anthony’s assistance, to get out of bed without bending his wounded knee; and to bend it was torture. When at last he was on his feet beside the bed, he was pale and the expression on his face had hardened to a kind of ferocity.
‘All right?’ Anthony questioned.
Mark nodded, and, as though the other had become his worst enemy, limped out of the shed without giving him a glance.
The torture began again when the time came for mounting, and was renewed with every step the mule advanced. As on the previous day, Mark took the lead. At the head of the cavalcade, he proved his superiority and at the same time put himself out of range of inquisitive eyes. The air was still cold; but from time to time, Anthony noticed, he took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, as if he were sweating. Each time he put the handkerchief away again, he would give the mule a particularly savage dig with his one available spur.
The track descended, climbed again, descended through pine woods, descended, descended. An hour passed, two hours, three; the sun was high in the sky, it was oppressively hot. Three hours, three and a half; and now there were clearings in the woods, steep fields, the stubble of Indian corn, a group of huts, and an old woman carrying water, brown children silently playing in the dust. They were on the outskirts of another village.
‘What about stopping here for some food?’ Anthony called, and spurred his animal to a trot. ‘We might get some fresh eggs,’ he continued as he drew up with the other mule.
The face Mark turned towards him was as white as paper, and, as he parted his clenched teeth to speak, the lower jaw trembled uncontrollably. ‘I think we’d better push on,’ he began in an almost inaudible voice. ‘We’ve still got a long way . . .’ Then the lids fluttered over his eyes, his head dropped, his body seemed to collapse upon itself; he fell forward on to the neck of his mule, slid to one side, and would have pitched to the ground if Anthony had not caught him by the arm and held him up.
CHAPTER XLVIII
July 23rd 1914
ANTHONY HAD DOZED off again after being called, and was late for breakfast. As he entered the little living-room, Brian looked up with startled eyes and, as though guiltily, folded away the letter he had been reading into his pocket, but not before Anthony had recognized from across the room the unmistakable characteristics of Joan’s rather heavy and elaborately looped writing. Putting a specially casual note of cheeriness into his good-morning, he sat down and proceeded to busy himself elaborately, as though it were a complicated scientific process requiring the whole of his attention, with pouring out his coffee.
‘Should I tell him?’ he was wondering. ‘Yes, I ought to tell him. It ought to come from me, even though he does know it already. Bloody girl! Why couldn’t she keep her promise?’ He felt righteously indignant with Joan. Breaking her word! And what the devil had she told Brian? What would happen if his own story was different from hers? And anyhow, what a fool he would look, confessing now, when it was too late. She had robbed him of the opportunity, the very possibility, of telling Brian what had happened.
The woman had queered his pitch; and as his anger modulated into self-pity, he perceived himself as a man full of good intentions, maliciously prevented, at the eleventh hour, from putting them into practice. She had stopped his mouth just as he was about to speak the words that would have explained and made amends for everything; and by doing so, she had made his situation absolutely intolerable. How the devil did she expect him to behave towards Brian, now that Brian knew? He answered the question, so far, at any rate, as the next few minutes were concerned, by retiring behind the Manchester Guardian. Hidden, he pretended, while he ate his scrambled eggs, to be taking a passionate interest in all this stuff about Russia and Austria and Germany. But the silence, as it lengthened out, became at last intolerable.
‘This war business looks rather bad,’ he said at last, without lowering his barricade.
From the other end of the table Brian made a faint murmur of assent. Seconds passed. Then there was the noise of a chair being pushed back. Anthony sat there, a man so deeply preoccupied with the Russian mobilization that he wasn’t aware of what was going on in his immediate neighbourhood. It
