The captain and the sergeant mount as high as they dare, prodding at the earth while the earth shifts beneath them in long hushed sighs. At the foot of the precipice the men huddle, their faces lifted faint, white, and patient into the light. The captain sweeps the torch up and down the cliff.
There is nothing, no arm, no hand, in sight. The air is clearing slowly. “We’ll get on!” the captain says.
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant says.
In both directions the cavern fades into darkness, plumbless and profound, filled with the quiet skeletons sitting and leaning against the walls, their arms beside them.
“The cave-in threw us forward,” the captain says.
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“Speak out,” the captain says. “It’s but a bit of a cave. If men got into it, we can get out.”
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“If it threw us forward, the entrance will be yonder.”
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
The captain flashes the torch ahead. The men rise and huddle quietly behind him, the wounded man among them.
He whimpers. The cavern goes on, unrolling its glinted walls out of the darkness; the sitting shapes grin quietly into the light as they pass. The air grows heavier; soon they are trotting, gasping, then the air grows lighter and the torch sweeps up another slope of earth, closing the tunnel. The men halt and huddle. The captain mounts the slope. He snaps off the light and crawls slowly along the crest of the slide, where it joins the ceiling of the cavern, sniffing. The light flashes on again. “Two men with trenching tools,” he says.
Two men mount to him. He shows them the fissure through which air seeps in small, steady breaths. They begin to dig, furiously, hurling the dirt back. Presently they are relieved by two others; presently the fissure becomes a tunnel and four men can work at once. The air becomes fresher.
They burrow furiously, with whimpering cries like dogs.
The wounded man, hearing them perhaps, catching the excitement perhaps, begins to laugh again, meaningless and high. Then the man at the head of the tunnel bursts through.
Light rushes in around him like water; he burrows madly; in silhouette they see his wallowing buttocks lunge from sight and a burst of daylight surges in.
The others leave the wounded man and surge up the slope, fighting and snarling at the opening. The sergeant springs after them and beats them away from the opening with a trenching spade, cursing in his hoarse whisper.
“Let them go, Sergeant,” the captain says. The sergeant desists. He stands aside and watches the men scramble into the tunnel. Then he descends, and he and the captain help the wounded man up the slope. At the mouth of the tunnel the wounded man rebels.
“A’m no dead! A’m no dead!” he wails, struggling. By cajolery and force they thrust him, still wailing and struggling, into the tunnel, where he becomes docile again and scuttles through.
“Out with you, Sergeant,” the captain says.
“After you, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“Out wi ye, man!” the captain says. The sergeant enters the tunnel. The captain follows. He emerges onto the outer slope of the avalanche which had closed the cave, at the foot of which the fourteen men are kneeling in a group. On his hands and knees like a beast, the captain breathes, his breath making a hoarse sound. “Soon it will be summer,” he thinks, dragging the air into his lungs faster than he can empty them to respire again. “Soon it will be summer, and the long days.” At the foot of the slope the fourteen men kneel. The one in the center has a Bible in his hand, from which he is intoning monotonously. Above his voice the wounded man’s gibberish rises, meaningless and unemphatic and sustained.
Turnabout
I
THE AMERICAN, the older one wore no pink Bedfords.
His breeches were of plain whipcord, like the tunic. And the tunic had no long London-cut skirts, so that below the Sam Browne the tail of it stuck straight out like the tunic of a military policeman beneath his holster belt. And he wore simple puttees and the easy shoes of a man of middle age, instead of Savile Row boots, and the shoes and the puttees did not match in shade, and the ordnance belt did not match either of them, and the pilot’s wings on his breast were just wings. But the ribbon beneath them was a good ribbon, and the insigne on his shoulders were the twin bars of a captain.
He was not tall. His face was thin, a little aquiline; the eyes intelligent and a little tired. He was past twenty-five; looking at him, one thought, not Phi Beta Kappa exactly, but Skull and Bones perhaps, or possibly a Rhodes scholarship.
One of the men who faced him probably could not see him at all. He was being held on his feet by an American military policeman. He was quite drunk, and in contrast with the heavy-jawed policeman who held him erect on his long, slim, boneless legs, he looked like a masquerading girl.
He was possibly eighteen, tall, with a pink-and-white face and blue eyes, and a mouth like a girl’s mouth. He wore a pea-coat, buttoned awry and stained with recent mud, and upon his blond head, at that unmistakable and rakish swagger which no other people can ever approach or imitate, the cap of a Royal Naval Officer.
“What’s this, corporal?” the American captain said.
“What’s the trouble? He’s an Englishman. You’d better let their M. P.’s take care of him.”
“I know he is,” the policeman said. He spoke heavily, breathing heavily, in the voice of a man under physical strain; for all his girlish delicacy of limb, the English boy was heavier or more helpless than he looked. “Stand up!” the policeman said. “They’re officers!”
The English boy made an effort then. He pulled himself together, focusing his eyes. He swayed, throwing his arms about the policeman’s neck, and with the other hand he saluted, his hand flicking, fingers curled a little, to his right ear, already swaying again and catching himself again.
“Cheer-o, sir,” he said. “Name’s not Beatty, I hope.”
“No,” the captain said.
“Ah,” the English boy said. “Hoped not. My mistake. No offense, what?”
“No offense,” the captain said quietly. But he was looking at the policeman. The second American spoke. He was a lieutenant, also a pilot. But he was not twenty-five and he wore the pink breeches, the London boots, and his tunic might have been a British tunic save for the collar.
“It’s one of those navy eggs,” he said. “They pick them out of the gutters here all night long. You don’t come to town often enough.”
“Oh,” the captain said. “I’ve heard about them. I remember now.” He also remarked now that, though the street was a busy one it was just outside a popular cafe and there were many passers, soldier, civilian, women, yet none of them so much as paused, as though it were a familiar sight.
He was looking at the policeman. “Can’t you take him to his ship?”
“I thought of that before the captain did,” the policeman said. “He says he can’t go aboard his ship after dark because he puts the ship away at sundown.”
“Puts it away?”
“Stand up, sailor!” the policeman said savagely, jerking at his lax burden. “Maybe the captain can make sense out of it. Damned if I can. He says they keep the boat under the wharf. Run it under the wharf at night, and that they can’t get it out again until the tide goes out tomorrow.”
“Under the wharf? A boat? What is this?” He was now speaking to the lieutenant. “Do they operate some kind of aquatic motorcycles?”
“Something like that,” the lieutenant said. “You’ve seen them the boats. Launches, camouflaged and all.
