The Middle Parts of Fortune:
the girl
   (chapter10)
 (1930)

Context

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The morning wore on very slowly: parades should never be perfunctory, and these seemed to be merely devised to kill time in a back street.  The bayonet fighting was useful; and they were doing arms drill when Corporal Marshall, passing down the street, stopped and spoke to Sergeant Tozer.  It was about twenty past eleven.  Ten minutes later the sergeant called out Bourne, and told him to go down to the corporals' billets.  He found nobody in the house but the girl, who was in the kitchen; and told her that now he was at her service, if she wished to write her letter.  She hesitated, embarrassed for a moment, and made her decision.  He drew up a chair to the table, and bringing her pen, paper, and ink, she came and sat beside him.  He had his own fountain-pen, into which, after filling it with water, he had only to drop a pellet of ink; and then he started to translate her phrases into English, writing them so that she could copy them into her own script.  It was a somewhat mechanical business.  There was nothing determinate in his mind, there was only the proximity of this girl, and some aching sensibilities.  He saw the man's name again: Lance-Corporal Hemmings, written with his address at the top of the paper.  He might be anything, there were all sorts in the army; anyway he was in the line, and what were the odds against him ever coming back?  She kept his letter tucked away in there between her breasts.  What had he seen in her?  She was not even pretty; and yet Bourne himself had found his curiosity awakening almost as soon as he had seen her.  It had been no more, after all, than a casual interest, until she had brought in this unknown man, and it was he, curiously enough, who provided the focus for Bourne's own rather diffuse desires.  He seemed to see the other man caressing her, and the girl yielding, no, not reluctantly, but with that passive acquiescence characteristic of her; and then, imaginatively, his own desires became involved with those of the other man, even as a sense of antagonism increased in him.  She possessed herself of this other man so completely, and to Bourne he was only a shadow.  The fact that he was only a shadow made an enormous difference:  if he had been Corporal Greenstreet, or indeed anyone actually there, then his value, and the value of their several relations to each other, and to her, would have dropped perceptibly in the scale.
  These were not merely sentimental considerations: they corresponded to an actual reality which weighed in varying measure on all of them.  He was in the line, and within another few days Bourne himself would be in the line too.  Perhaps neither of them would ever come back>  Bourne could realize completely the other man's present misery; could see him living, breathing, moving in that state of semi-somnambulism, which to each of them equally was their only refuge from the desolation and hopelessness of that lunatic world.  In fact, the relation in which he stood to this unknown man was in some ways closer and more direct than that in which he stood to the girl beside him.  She knew nothing of their subterranean, furtive, twilight life, the limbo through which, with their obliterated humanity, they moved as so many unhouseled ghosts, or the aching hunger in those hands that reached, groping tentatively out of their emptiness to seek some hope or stay.
  Yesterday or tomorrow might hold it for them, for men hope for things remembered, for a past irrevocably lost.  Why did she talk to him of this other man?  He knew; he knew so much better than she did; he realized him now so completely in his own mind, that they might be one and the same man.  She spoke softly, without raising her voice: but the need she felt to make him understand, to find expression for her desire, gave it apparently an infinite flexibility; and from time to time he felt again on his sleeve the touch of that disturbing hand.  The dead words there on the paper before him, those graven and rigid symbols, could never again kindle with the movement and persuasion of her living voice.  They too' were the mere traces of something that had passed.  Some kind of warmth seemed to come from her, and flow over the surface of his skin with little pricklings of fire, and to lay hold of his veins, glowing there, until the lit blood rose and sang in his head.
  'Je t'aime, cheri!  Je t'aime eperdument!  Je n'aime que toi;' she almost chanted it; and suddenly his arm was round her shoulder, and his mouth was shut fast down there behind her ear, where the hair swept upwards from the firm white neck.  She collapsed astonishingly under his touch; neither towards him nor away from him; she seemed to go to nothing in her chair.  She pushed him away with her right hand, firmly, quickly.  He shifted, shifting his chair away, too, and then put up a hand to his brow.  He was sweating lightly.  The other hand went into his pocket.  He stood up, feeling criminal, and looked at her.
  'Vous m'aimez?'  There was a kind of rage in his suffocated voice, and she turned her face to him, looking at him with eyes in which was neither anger nor fear, but only the surprise of recognition.  It was as though she had not known him before, but now she remembered.  He sat again, turned sideways towards her; and put his hands over her hands lying clasped in front of her on the table.  They remained still, impassive.
  'Vous m'aimez?  C'est vrai?'
  There were light steps in the hall;  they heard someone heave a sigh of relief.  Oh, la! la!  And Madame came from the passage into the kitchen.  She put her basket on the dresser, and turned to them.
  'Bon jour, monsieur!' she said almost gaily.
  'Bon jour, madame!'
  She looked at the paper, pens, and ink on the table, and a smile of amused comprehension came into her eyes.  She lifted her hands and let them fall again with a gesture of despairing humour.
  'C'est fini, maintenant?'
  'Oui, madame,' said Bourne tranquilly; 'c'est fini.'
  He did not rise from his chair immediately: a point of some delicacy restrained him.