The Hour of the Donkey

know your sort—I'll report you, I will!'

He had only been trying to comfort her. She had put her arms round his neck, and she had seemed to like him, and he had only been trying to comfort her—he hadn't known what else to do to stop her crying.

In Bastable's of Eastbourne it had been different, it had been easy:

'Miss Brown! Miss Gartland! Mrs Summers—see to this child, please — at once!'

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The little French girl's chest inflated with one long shuddering breath, and Harry Bastable didn't know what to do—was incapable of either words or action—to stop her from crying it out, to quench the sound before it burst forth from her.

Miss Brown, Miss Hartland, Mrs Summers—

'Sssh! Sssh, ma petite—nous-somme-der-amis— sssh!'

Wimpy had rolled off him like a sack of potatoes, as though half-stunned, as he collapsed on to the attic floor a moment before. But now, incredibly, Wimpy was on his hands and knees—or on one hand and two knees, the other hand lifted into a finger at his lips cautioning the frightened child into silence.

'Sssh!'

The child lifted her hands to her face—two small, grubby hands tipped with black finger-nails—and subsided noiselessly through them. Bastable looked quickly from her back to Wimpy, and back to her again, and back to Wimpy, torn apart by relief, and by contempt for himself— Sssh! was a universal round: why hadn't Sssh! come to his lips?—and admiration for Wimpy's astonishing resilience in adversity, which made time stand still when there was no time left.

'Clothes!' said Wimpy.

'What?'

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'Clothes, man—clothes!' Wimpy rummaged in one of the tin trunks. 'Clothes, by god!'

He was ignoring the child now: he was kneeling beside the trunk, holding up one garment after another, throwing this one aside, measuring that one against himself, feverishly, as though his life depended on outfitting himself.

'What?'

'Look in the other one—don't just lie there, old boy—find yourself some togs . . . Ah! Now that's more like it ... and that

— go on, man, for Christ's sake—look in the other one!'

Wimpy spread his arms, crucifying himself against a blue-striped shirt as he spoke, then throwing the shirt down in a growing pile beside him. 'Yes—? No . . . Ah—'

It was unreal—it was a nightmare. Bastable rose to his knees and swivelled to the second trunk. He knew what Wimpy was about, but he didn't want to do what Wimpy intended, yet there was nothing he could do to stop the blighter, he knew that too: the nightmare wasn't unreal, it was truly and irrevocably what was happening to him.

An overpowering smell of camphor assailed him.

Layers of tissue paper, crumpled and uncrumpled—

A feather boa—long cylinders, which he knew contained ostrich feathers: his mother had ostrich feathers in cylinders just like that— ostrich feathers— from grandmother's day.

Dresses ... he tore the tissue paper from them. White silk—

white, but with a touch of yellowing age: white silk and lace dummy4

fluffed up ... It was a wedding dress—a wedding dress—

The old woman lay in the road in her black coat with the fur collar, her thin legs in their black stockings—and the carpet slippers, the carpet slippers —

The camphor-smell sickened him, and he felt his throat contracting and rising, summoning up the undigested garlic sausage from his stomach.

The wedding dress between the tissue paper—the carpet slippers in the dusty road, beside the ridiculous hand-cart piled with bundles—and the sweat cold on his forehead, and the vile garlic in his mouth— nightmare!

'You've got the woman's trunk—there'll be nothing in there . . . Here—try this ... try these, Harry—go on, take them, man—' Wimpy thrust garments into his hands.

Bastable looked down at what he had been given: a jacket of some sort... or more like a tunic ... of coarse blue denim cloth, old and patched and faded to a pale indeterminate blue-grey, with trousers to match. He had seen French labourers, wearing clothes like these in Colembert; if they belonged to the old man downstairs—the old man lying dead in his parlour, in the ruin of his home, with his wife lying dead in the road outside—they must date from another age, another time, many years ago, before the old man had come up in the world to the dignity of this ugly little house; and yet, for some reason, the old woman hadn't thrown them away, but had washed them and ironed them, and stowed dummy4

them away in the old tin trunk in the attic—for some reason, for some reason, for some unfathomable reason —

He didn't want to put them on, but more than that he didn't want to take off the wreckage of his battledress: that would be to burn his boats finally, to cross the last frontier between Captain Bastable and a nameless fugitive.

'I say, Willis—look here . . . '