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That's one thing I like about McClane. He can't stand that sort of thing any more than I can." "How about Gwinnie and me?" "Gwinnie hangs her beastly legs about all over the place. So do you." John standing at the foot of the stairs, looking at the Antwerp men.
Gwinnie, coming late to bed, had turned on the electric light. And as she rolled over, turning her back to the light and to Gwinnie, her mind shifted. It saw suddenly the flame leaping in John's face. His delight in danger, that happiness he felt when he went out to meet it, happiness springing up bright and new every day; that was a real part of him. She couldn't doubt it. She knew.
She stood there a minute, pinning closer the crushed bosses of her hair. Then she turned. "What are you going to do with that walking-tour johnnie?" "John Conway? You couldn't do anything with him if you tried. He's miles beyond all that." "All what?" "The rotten things people do. The rotten things they think. You're safe with him, Gwinnie. Safe. Safe. You've only to look at him."
She wanted to get away by herself. Not into her own room, where Gwinnie, who had been unloading ambulance trains half the night, now rested. The McClane Corps was crowding into the messroom for tea. She passed through without looking at any of them and out to the balcony, closing the French window behind her. She could hide there beyond the window where the wall was blank.
Charlotte had been sorry for Sutton and Gwinnie and the rest of McClane's corps who had not come out with them to this new place, but had been sent back again to Melle where things had been so quiet all morning that they hadn't filled their ambulances, and half of them had hung about doing nothing. She had fretted at the stupidity which had sent them where they were not wanted.
It wasn't what you'd call a lady's tea-party." "Who wants a lady's tea-party? I ought to have gone in with the Mac Corps. Then I'd have had a chance." "Not this time. Mac draws the line somewhere.... Look here, Gwinnie, I wish you'd clear out a minute and let me talk to John." Gwinnie went, grumbling. For a moment silence came down between them.
She was going out, with John and Gwinnie Denning and a man called Sutton, Dr. Sutton, to Belgium, to the War. She wondered whether any of them really knew what it would be like when they got there. She was vague, herself.
Everybody looked at them: the door-keeper, the lift orderly; the ward men and nurses hurrying past; wide stares and sharp glances falling on her and Gwinnie, slanting downward to their breeches and puttees, then darting upwards to their English faces. Sutton moved, putting his broad body between them and the batteries of amused and interested eyes.
Charlotte and Gwinnie had begun by sitting on their drivers' seats in the ambulances standing in the yard, ready to start the very instant it came. Their orders were to hold themselves in readiness. They held themselves in readiness and saw McClane's cars swing out from the rubbered sweep in front of the Hospital three and four times a day.
As they ran down the field he still held, loosely, like a thing forgotten, her right hand. Through the long June night on her bed in the room under the gable the hot room that smelt of plaster and of the apples stored in the loft behind it she lay thinking. Gwinnie had turned her back, burrowing into her pillow with a final shrug of her hips. She was asleep now in her corner.
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