The Hour of the Donkey

'Keep off!' ordered Bastable, recognizing the sign from bitter experience. 'You're frightening her. Keep away!' He smiled and rocked frantically.

The smile returned.

'Let's move,' said Bastable. 'She likes being wheeled along.'

That, after all, was what had first stopped the poor little mite crying the evening before—and had also calmed her hunger down this morning. 'The sooner we can get her to Colembert, the better. I can turn her over to someone there.'

Without waiting, he started to wheel the pram forward once more. Wimpy caught up with them quickly, and promptly draped the shawl over Bastable's shoulders.

'There you are, Mum,' he murmured. 'How d'you know it's a her?'

'Because I know the difference,' hissed Bastable, his temper slipping and all his old antipathy for Wimpy flooding back.

Oh . . .' Wimpy sounded chastened. 'Oh ... I see—you haven't dummy4

found it—her —just this morning, I mean?'

Bastable pushed in silence for a moment or two. There was no point in losing his temper, it was childish. And, more than that, it was ungrateful. And, most of all, it was stupid —

because he needed Wimpy. And doubly stupid ... to get angry with a chap for making a simple mistake—the mistake of thinking that he was a damn sight cleverer than he was.

Hah! In fact, Wimpy's mistake had been for once crediting him with more wits than he had—that was almost funny, if it hadn't been another truth at his expense.

'Yesterday evening,' he said. 'Late yesterday evening, just as it was beginning to get dark.'

Wimpy digested the answer. 'On the main road?' he said at length.

Bastable nodded. 'At the crossroads.'

He didn't want to remember, but it wasn't something a man could easily look at, and once having seen forget at will—the pathetic bundles strewn over the road and along the ditches, some of which were not bundles at all, but the owners of the bundles; the smashed carts, with dead horses between the shafts; and the abandoned cars riddled with bullets, some of which had not been abandoned, because their owners were still in them . . .

And, in the midst of that desolation, the baby crying.

'It was bad, was it?' It wasn't just a question; Wimpy spoke gently, as though he understood what Bastable was seeing.

dummy4

The baby had been crying in its pram on the edge of the road, miraculously untouched with all the bodies around it—he hadn't even been able to make out which body belonged to her—which was her father, or her mother, or her aunt, or her little brother, or a passing stranger. There hadn't been any way of knowing—or any point in knowing, they were all the same now.

He turned to Wimpy in the same agony he had felt then, with all his priorities in ruins around him. 'I couldn't just leave her, don't you see?'

'Of course not, old man. You did absolutely the right thing—

absolutely the right thing,' Wimpy nodded at him decisively, as if to reassure him that that was a man's proper duty, as laid down by the book, when the choice was between a French baby girl and the British Expeditionary Force in France. 'Quite right!'

Yet it hadn't really been quite like that at all, thought Harry Bastable.

Of course, she might have died there, on the road last night, without him. Of thirst, or hunger, or whatever it was abandoned babies died from.

Except—the fragment of conversation between his mother and her friends surfaced again in his memory, like all the other bits of overheard and observed child-lore and baby-care that he had overheard and forgotten, but not forgotten, which had surfaced these last few hours: babies are very tough— otherwise they'd never survive all the frightful dummy4

things young mothers do to them, my dear The baby had been crying.

Any moment now there would be more Germans—armour, or those ubiquitous motor-cyclists, and motor- cycle-and sidecar troops who scorned roadblocks and obstacles.

But he couldn't leave her to go on crying at the roadside while he passed by. And, after what he had seen there, he hadn't another hundred yards in his legs anyway.

He had to go back to her.

Of course, she was just it then —just an insistent noise in the dead quiet of the evening at the crossroads, which he couldn't leave behind him, and which drove the thought of all sounds out of his head.

He had been very busy after that: she had needed him and he had needed her.

'Well, you do seem to have a way with babies, I'll say that,'

murmured Wimpy. 'Or is it with women in general?'

Bastable only grunted to that, neither denying nor admitting his expertise.

'Or this baby in particular,' said Wimpy.

Bastable looked down at the baby. Wimpy had got it right the third time, anyway.