Pastoral (13 page)

“He’s all right, sir,” Johnson told the Wing Commander.
“A bit too conscientious, if you know what I mean. But he’ll be all right.”

Dobbie visualised the keen eagerness of the young man. “I’ll give him Sergeant Entwhistle as navigator,” he said. “He’s very steady. And Murdoch as rear-gunner.”

Johnson said: “I don’t know Murdoch.”

“Chap with a face like a burglar—came in with the last lot from the Pool. A regular Commando type. He ought to be good.”

Johnson went away and found Drummond sitting in his bedroom, graph paper and pencil before him, working at a book of Weems’ upon condensed celestial navigation. He told him about his crew. “You erks get all the lucky breaks,” he said. “Entwhistle’s done about twenty raids; he knows the routine backwards. And Winco’s picked the toughest rear-gunner on the station for you. God, I wish I’d had a crowd like that for my first crew. We none of us knew arse from elbow when they pushed me off. Talk about going to sea in a sieve!”

He went off and played a round of very bad golf, confident that his apprentice was well launched upon his independence.

In R for Robert things were not so satisfactory. Corporal Leech, the wireless operator, had been taken roach-fishing by Gunnar Franck and Phillips, and to their delight had proved himself an apt pupil, keen and interested, and naturally skilful. On his first day he had caught a roach with Sergeant Phillips’ rod, and on the next day he had caught another with Gunnar Franck’s. He had then gone off to Oxford and bought himself a new roach-pole, and reel, and line, and floats, and tackle for the three remaining days of the coarse-fishing season.

The period after March 15th was irritating and troublesome for them. Fishing gear was taken down and packed away for three months, and they had nothing much to do with their spare time, which was considerable. Leech was a footballer, and that season was also at an end; he hung about the canteen bored and idle, and finally commenced a slap-and-tickle intrigue with one of the station cooks. Sergeant Phillips took to lying on his bed for most of his leisure time and reading thrillers; the balance he devoted to L.A.W. Elsie Smeed. There was little to do, in fact, at Hartley at that time of year except to play cards and make love. Gunnar Franck did neither, but took to going for long walks through the country lanes, browned off and thinking of Denmark and his lost life as a medical student.

Gervase met him one evening, travelling back from Oxford in the bus. The bus was nearly full; in the half-light she saw a seat by him and sat down in it. She liked Gunnar Franck; she liked him because he had lent her his rifle to shoot a pigeon with, and because he was a Dane and had given up his life’s career to escape to all the hazards of the R.A.F., and because by doing so he had become a lonely man. She smiled at him and said: “Good evening. Have you been to the pictures?”

He said: “I have been to the Regal, to see the movie with Bette Davis. Always I like a Bette Davis picture. To me a Bette Davis is good,
overordentligt.
”

Gervase said: “I like her, too.” They talked of films and film actresses while the bus got under way and rumbled out into the darkness of the country roads, dim-lit and crowded with R.A.F. and American soldiers. Presently she said: “Do you still go fishing?”

He shook his head. “It is now the season when they breed the little fish. It is not allowed to fish now, till the middle of June.”

She said: “That must be rather a blow—you’re all fishermen in Robert, aren’t you? What do you do instead?”

He was silent for a minute, long enough for her to look at him curiously. Then he said: “It is ver’ dull. I think I would like to go away now, to another station.”

She exclaimed: “But I thought you were so happy here!”

He said bitterly: “I think now perhaps it is time I have a change.”

“But why, Gunnar? Has anything happened?”

She was an officer and he was a sergeant, but she was a girl, and friendly, and very young. It was nearly dark in the bus. He said: “The Captain, he has been difficult to please. It must be ver’ difficult for an Englishman to have in the crew a foreigner. I think perhaps it is better that I ask if I may go to another station.”

She said: “But, Gunnar, Flight Lieutenant Marshall thinks the world of you. I know he does. You mustn’t think of anything like that. What’s the trouble?”

There was a pause, and then he said in a low tone so that she had to bend her head to catch his words: “He say I cross my sevens so he cannot read the numbers that I write, and I must write in English if I want to stay with him.”

She said: “Cross your sevens?”

“
Jo
. Always in Denmark when we write the number seven
we make a line across the tail, but in England you do not do that. And now he says that I must write in English.”

She said: “But that’s silly! It doesn’t matter a bit, does it, if you write a seven like that?”

“Nine months we have been together,” said the big young man a little sadly, “and over forty ops. And now he is angry because I write my sevens as we do at home.”

A lump of apprehension rose in the girl’s throat, and she said: “I thought you all got on so well together. Is this something new?”

Gunnar said: “It is the last week only. Always before he has been sympathetic; we were all very happy together. Now for a week everything has been wrong, and he finds fault with all that we do, and it is trouble all the time. It is not only me; it is Sergeant Phillips and Corporal Leech. They are quite fed up with him.”

The girl said: “I
am
sorry.” She relapsed into silence, worried over what she had unearthed. This was another side of Marshall that she had not seen before, this apparently unreasonable irritation with his crew. From what she had heard she felt that he had been unfair to them; certainly Gunnar Franck considered that he had been hardly used. She felt that Flight Lieutenant Marshall deserved a reprimand and she felt that she would have liked to give it to him herself, and that she could do so in a way that would improve matters. She felt, sincerely, that it was a very great pity that they were not upon speaking terms; she would have liked to tell Peter Marshall just where he got off.

It was perfectly true that Marshall was bad-tempered. He was sleeping very badly; that is to say, no more than six hours in each night, which seemed to him to be fantastically little. Most of the rest of the time that he spent in bed he spent in self-depreciation, thinking what an almighty fool he had made of himself with Gervase. He felt that he made himself ridiculous; each time they met he felt that she must be smiling inwardly at the memory of their last meeting in the wood, and he didn’t blame her. This happened to him three or four times every day. The recurring humiliation mingled strangely with his admiration, which was quite unchanged. He still noted every movement that she made, each characteristic gesture, each light in her hair.

If you take a large, hungry dog and tie it up, and feed it very little, and tease it with large lumps of meat just out of reach,
it will soon become very bad-tempered indeed. It will snap not only at you but at everybody else. You can make it good-tempered by giving it the meat, or you can make it good-tempered by taking away the temptation altogether, when the dog will adjust itself to its meagre diet. While you continue teasing it with the unattainable it will remain restless and bad-tempered. Scientists prove this sort of thing by practical experiment, and they say science is wonderful.

Sergeant Phillips was no scientist, but merely an observer of phenomena. He told Elsie Smeed about it in the darkness of the country lanes as he walked her back from the pictures, his arm comfortably about her waist. “Fed up, I am,” he said. “Real nasty he’s been lately.”

“Why, whatever about?” she asked.

He said: “We got a target, what we line the guns on after firing, see? This is what he said yesterday, an’ I don’t care to be spoken to like that. Great big white board.”

“I see them using it,” she said. “Big white board on legs with spots on it, what they put up behind the aeroplane.”

“That’s right,” he said. “You put the sight on the one in the middle and lines the barrels up on the other four, ’n there you are, see? Well, that’s the way they tell you to do it, but that’s for two hundred yards, ’n I like two of them to be splayed a little bit more for three hundred and two of them, the bottom two, pulled in a bit so’s they’re right for hundred and twenty, hundred and fifty, see?”

“I see,” the girl said. She didn’t see at all, but it was all very dull and didn’t seem to matter anyway. “What happened?”

“Well, I got them nicely fixed, ’n he comes down the fuselage and says he wants to see. So I gets out of the turret ’n he gets in, and then he says I’m not lined up. Well, I was lined up, but not the way it was on the target. So then he didn’t half start carrying on.”

“You don’t say!”

“Real nasty, he was,” said the sergeant. “Said if I didn’t want to obey orders ’n do it like it was on the target he’d chuck me out of the crew and get another gunner what’d do as he was told. I said it was the way I had them when I got the night-fighter over Rostock, ’an he asked if I had them like that when we got shot up at Hamburg, ’n I had to say it was. Then he got sort of sarcastic, so I told him the Armament Officer said I could have them my way if I wanted.”

“What did he say to that?”

“Said I could go and fly with the Armament Officer on the firing teacher, if I wanted to. It wasn’t so much what he said as the way he said it, if you take me.”

She breathed sympathetically: “Oh I
say!
What happened in the end?”

“We got them fixed like on the target,” the sergeant said. “He come and checked them over again after I finished, as if he didn’t trust me not to do it my way after all.” He sounded hurt and aggrieved. “So that’s the way we got ’em now.”

There was a short silence. “I don’t like ’em that way,” he said uneasily. “I don’t think it’s as good as the way I had them. It only gives you one chance, like.”

“I’d like to give him a piece of my mind,” the girl said decidedly. “What’s it got to do with ’im anyway? He ain’t the one that’s shooting.”

“He’s the Cap,” said Sergeant Phillips justly, “and what he says goes, if you take me. But he’s quite changed lately. What I mean is, we was all matey together up to not so long ago, but now it’s as if he was the officer and everybody else was so much dirt.”

“What’s happened, then, to make him go like that?”

“I dunno,” said the sergeant. “I can’t make it out.”

L.A.W. Smeed had a simple, elemental mind. To her, and at her age, there was only one explanation for the unusual. “Maybe he’s in love,” she said.

Sergeant Phillips considered this for a moment. Everybody at Hartley aerodrome was deeply interested in Love, except perhaps the Adjutant and Flight Officer Stevens, and one or two others more than twenty-five years old. For the majority of the Wing, Love was as essential a commodity as petrol, and much more interesting.

“With that Section Officer of yours?” he said. “The one you asked her name?”

“Might be,” the girl said. “I haven’t seen them about together, though, have you?”

“No,” said the sergeant thoughtfully. “It could be that, though. He wanted to know her name all right.”

“She’s been sort of pale and quiet the last day or two,” the girl said hopefully. “Think she shot him down?”

“If she did,” he said, “he’s got no call to take it out on us.”

In the darkness outside the gate into the station they exchanged expressions of mutual esteem, then broke away and walked in separately past the guard. There was a prejudice at
Hartley against walking past the guard arm-in-arm, even when returning from the pictures.

It was true enough that Gervase was not quite herself. Like Marshall, she had not foreseen that the clean break they had arranged would be impracticable. She saw him every day in the mess, and she was troubled to observe that he seemed moody and depressed. Previously, in her experience, Marshall had been the fount of new amusements; he had always seemed to have some new diversion for the ante-room, catching a fish or chasing a badger or shooting pigeons. It troubled her to see him sitting bored and listless with a newspaper.

It troubled her still more that he was watching her so closely. She was not angry with him; he was quite nice and unobtrusive over it, but whenever they were in the room together she knew that his eyes were on her. It made her feel as if all that they had settled in the wood was nugatory and worthless; nothing was changed between them, after all. She thought that by the line that she had taken she had extinguished the fire; it was now clear to her that she had merely smothered it, that it was still as much alive as ever, secretly. She felt as if she was sitting on a volcano, and it worried her.

She took to spending longer hours than usual upon her work, staying on after duty in the signals office. She did this partly from an instinct to avoid the ante-room so far as possible, partly for the diversion for her own mind that her work could give, and partly from a sense of duty. There were indications, clear to all the station, that their spell off operations was coming to an end; she was concerned that when raids started up again her operators should be all on the top line, that there should be no inefficiency in the radio service if a girl went sick and a reserve girl had to be pulled in. She sat on in her office after tea each evening thinking out contingencies, planning for troubles and emergencies that might arise.

She was sitting so one evening at the end of the slack period. It had been announced on the Tannoy at tea time that there would be no leave off the station until further notice; this meant, in effect, a warning for an operation the next night. She was sitting conning over the last details of her organisation for the tenth time, when there was a knock upon the office door. She raised her head, and said: “Come in.”

The door opened, and a very young Pilot Officer came into the room. She had seen him in the mess for some time, but did not know his name; he was small, and rather pale-faced, and
bright-eyed. She said “Good evening,” and sat looking up at him.