[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

when Pyle stopped. He was panting and a catch in his breath made him sound like a bull-
frog.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Couldn't leave you," Pyle said.
The first sensation was relief: the water and mud held my leg tenderly and firmly like a
bandage, but soon the cold set us chattering. 1. wondered whether it had passed midnight
yet: we might have six hours of this if the Viets didn't find us.
"Can you shift your weight a little," Pyle said, "just for a moment?" And my unreasoning
irritation came back- I had no excuse for it hut the pain. I hadn't asked to be saved, or to
have death so painfully postponed. I thought with nostalgia of my couch on the hard dry
ground. I stood like a crane on one leg trying to relieve Pyle of my weight, and when I
moved, the stalks of rice tickled and cut and crackled.
"You saved my life there," I said, and Pyle cleared his throat for the conventional
response, "so that I could die here. I prefer dry land."
"Better not talk," Pyle said as though to an invalid. "Got to save our strength."
"Who the hell asked you to save my life? I came east to be killed. It's like your damned
impertinence. . ."I staggered in the mnd and Pyle hoisted my arm around his shoulder.
"Ease it off,"* he said.
"You've been seeing war-films. We aren't a couple of marines and you can't win a war
medal."
"Sh-sh." Footsteps could be heard, coming down to the edge of the field: the bren up the
road stopped firing and there was no sound except the footsteps and the slight rustle of
the rice when we breathed. Then the footsteps halted: they only seemed the length of a
room away. I felt Pyle's hand on my good side pressing me slowly down; we sank
together into the mud very slowly so as to make the least disturbance of the rice. On one
knee, by straining my head
backwards, I could just keep my mouth out of the water. The pain came back to my leg
and I thought. If I faint here I drown'-1 had always hated and feared the thought of
drowning. Why can't one choose one's death? There was no sound now ^perhaps twenty
feet away they were waiting for a rustle, a cough, a sneeze-'Oh, God,* I thought, I'm
going to sneeze.' If only he had left me alone, I would have been responsible only for my
own life-not his-and he wanted to live. I pressed my free fingers against my upper lip in
that trick we learn when we are children playing at Hide and Seek, but the sneeze
lingered, waiting to burst, and silent in the darkness the others waited for the sneeze. It
was coming, coming, came. . .
But in the very second that my sneeze broke, the Viets opened with stens, drawing a line
of fire through the rice -it swallowed my sneeze with its sharp drilling like a machine
punching holes through steel. I took a breath and went under-so instinctively one avoids
the loved thing, coquetting with death, like a woman who demands to be raped by her
lover. The rice was lashed down over onr heads and the storm passed. We came up for air
at the same moment and heard the footsteps going away back towards the tower.
"We've made it,"* Pyle said, and even in my pain I wondered what we'd made: for me,
old age, an editor's chair, loneliness; and as for him, one knows now that he spoke
prematurely. Then in the cold we settled down to wait. Along the road to Tanyin a
bonfire burst into life: it burnt merrily like a celebration. "That's my car," I said.
Pyle said, "Its a shame, Thomas. I hate to see waste." "There must have been just enough
petrol in the tank to set it going. Are yon as cold as I am, Pyle?" "I couldn't be colder."
"Suppose we get out and lie flat on the road?" "Let's give them another half hour." "The
weight's on you."
"I can stick it, I'm young." He had meant the claim humorously, but it struck as cold as
the mud. I had intended to apologise for the way my pain had spoken, but now it spoke
again. "You're young all right. You can afford to wait, can't you?" "I don't get you,
Thomas."
We had spent what seemed to have been a week of nights together, but he could no more
understand me than he could understand French. I said, "You'd have done better to let me
be."
"I couldn't have faced Phuong," he said, and the name lay there like a banker's bid.* I
took it up.
"So it was for her," I said. What made my jealousy more absurd and humiliating was that
it had to be expressed in the lowest of whispers-it had no tone) and jealousy likes
histrionics. "You think these heroics will get her. How w^rong you are. If I were dead
you could have had her."
"I didn't mean that," Pyle said. "When you are in love you want to play the game, that's
all." That's true, I thought, but not as he innocently means it. To be in love is to see
yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image
of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour-the courageous act is no more than
playing a part to an audience of two. Perhaps I was no longer in love but I remembered.
"If it had been you, I'd hav^e left you," I said. "Oh no, you wouldn't, Thomas." He added
with unbearable complacency, "I know you better than you do yourself."
Angrily I tried to move away from him and take my own weight, but the pain came
roaring back like a train in
a tunnel and I leant more heavily against him, before I began to sink into the water. He
got both his arms round me and held me up, and then inch by inch he began to edge me to
the bank and the roadside. When he got me there he lowered me flat in the shallow mud
below the bank of the edge of the field, and when the pain retreated and I opened my eyes
and ceased to hold my breath, I could see only the elaborate cypher of the constellations-a
foreign cypher which I couldn't read: they were not the stars of home. His face wheeled
over me, blotting them out. "I'm going down the road, Thomas, to find a patrol."
"Don't be a fool," I said. "They'll shoot you before they know who you are. If the Viets
don't get you."
"It's the only chance. You can't lie in the water for six hours."
"Then lay me in the road."
"It's no good leaving you the sten?" he asked doubtfully.
"Of course it's not. If you are determined to be a hero, at least go slowly through the
rice." "The patrol would pass before I could signal it." "You don't speak French."
"I shall call out 'Je suis Frongcais.'* Don't worry, Thomas. I'll be very careful." Before I
could reply he was out of a whisper's range-he was moving as quietly as he knew how,
with frequent pauses. I could see him in the light of the burning car, but no shot came;
soon he passed beyond the flames and very soon the silence filled the footprints. Oh yes,
he was being careful as he had been careful boating down the river into Phat Diem, with
the caution of a hero in a boy's adventure-story, proud of his caution like a Scout's badge*
and quite unaware of the absurdity and the improbability of his adventure.
I lay and listened for the shots from the Viet or a Legion patrol) but none came-it would
probably take him an hour or even more before he reached a tower, if he ever reached it. I
turned my head enough to see what remained of our tower, a heap of mud and bamboo
and struts which seemed to sink lower as the flames of the car sank. There was peace [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]