第18章 The Ledger and the Lie

The farmhouse stood a mile from Vallencourt on the railhead side, with a poplar at the gate and a light in the downstairs window, and from the ditch across the road Milly watched it for three hours and counted the men who went in. There were four by half past nine, and a fifth at ten, and each of them came alone, out of the dark, the way a man comes to a place he does not want to be seen entering. At ten the sergeant came. Milly knew him by his walk before she could see his face; she had watched that walk cross a dozen yards of mud in front of the school, and its owner moved the same way now, small and neat, with his hands folded out of the wind. Cradock went in and the door closed and the light behind the curtain changed as the inner door opened, and after that there was nothing to see for a long time but the poplar and the dark. Denbigh lay beside her in the ditch with his shoulder strapped and his eyes on the house. Hilda was with the ambulance a quarter of a mile back, out of sight, with Mabb in the cab and the engine warm. The plan, such as it was, belonged to Commandant Ashwell, and it was this: at eleven, if the captain came, Ashwell would come too, with Colonel Sandoe and two orderlies from the railhead, and the whole nest would be taken in one net. And if the captain did not come, Milly and Denbigh were to remember every man who left the house and every word they could hear through a window, and the net would be cast the next day over smaller fish. At a quarter to eleven a motor-car came down the road from the railhead with its lamps hooded, and stopped at the poplar, and a man in a greatcoat got out and stood for a moment in the light from the window, and even at that distance Milly knew the set of the shoulders and the way he looked at a thing before he owned it. Quarles. He went in, and the door closed, and the light changed again. "Now," Denbigh said. "Not yet," Milly said. "The Commandant said eleven." "The Commandant is not in the house." "No," Milly said. "But the captain is, and a captain in a room with a black book is worth more than a captain on a road with a revolver. We wait." They waited. And at five past eleven, from further up the road, came the sound of a second motor and then a third, and the lamps of them swept the poplar, and Denbigh let out his breath, and Milly was already out of the ditch and running for the gate. The inside of that farmhouse was the warmest room Milly had stood in since she had come to France. There was a fire and a rug and a table with a cloth, and on the table a black book with brass corners and a gold pen across it, and around it stood the six men who had come to buy their way out of the war, and behind it, on his feet, with his hands on the back of a chair, stood the staff captain from the railhead, and beside the door, with the papers in a folder, stood Cradock. Colonel Sandoe came in behind Milly with the orderlies and the Commandant, and for a moment nobody in the room spoke at all. It was Quarles who broke the silence, and he did it beautifully, because he was a man who had spent his whole war breaking silences beautifully. "Colonel Sandoe," he said. "You find us at a melancholy duty. A private enquiry into a suspicion of irregularities in the returns, which I was conducting myself, at the request of the division, and which I regret to say has produced exactly the sort of thing you see: a quartermaster sergeant who has been selling the effects of the dead, and six weak men who bought the last of his wares. The book on the table is my own record of the enquiry. The sergeant is under arrest." It was, Milly thought, almost perfect. It was the truth with one name changed. It gave the colonel a crime, a culprit, and a book, and it asked him to spend the credit of his rank on closing the matter where Quarles wished it closed. "There is a small difficulty with that account," Milly said. Quarles turned to look at her for the first time, and his face did not change, because his face did not need to change. "Miss Passmore," he said, and used her name the way he used everybody's name, like a coin he had found in the street. "Miss Passmore is the driver who has been keeping a private notebook, and who has, I am sorry to say, been the occasion of a great deal of foolish alarm in this district. A woman of good intentions and no judgment." "I am a woman of good intentions and an excellent memory," Milly said. "And I have a document of eight pages in the lining of my boot, Colonel, which will take a quarter of an hour to read, and which will tell you exactly what the sergeant was selling, to whom, at what price, and who signed for it. If the captain's book is an enquiry, then mine is evidence, and the difference between an enquiry and evidence is that only one of them has the signatures of dead men in it." Cradock moved then, and he moved fast for a man of his age, snatching the black book off the table and turning for the fire, because he was not a fool and had understood before anyone else in the room which of the two books it was worth burning. Denbigh had him before he reached the hearth, with his good arm across the sergeant's chest, and the two of them went down together and the book went out of Cradock's hand and slid across the flagstones and stopped against Milly's boot, and Milly picked it up and held it out to Colonel Sandoe with both hands before she had thought about whether she was entitled to. The colonel opened it. He read one page, and then another, and then he turned back and read the first page again, and his face, which had been the careful face of a man who had come to close a small matter, became the face of a man who has opened a door in a familiar house and found a stair where no stair should be. "Captain Quarles," he said, "who is Kedge?" Nobody had said the name in that room, and Milly watched the effect of it go round the six buyers like a draught under a door. Quarles did not answer. He had stopped using names like coins, because the colonel had just paid with one and found it false. "Kedge is an orderly-room clerk," Milly said, "who sold his own name to a grave and bought another man's, and who is standing in this room now, in the uniform of a battalion he has never served in, with a photograph in my pocket that has his face in the third row. His rank is private and his real name is not on any list in France, and the man whose name he is wearing died in my ambulance on the eleventh of August with the words *find Denbigh* on his lips." She nodded at Denbigh, who had got up off the floor with Cradock held by the orderlies and was standing there with his arm across his chest, and Denbigh looked at the thin calm man by the window and said, in a voice that had the whole of a lost friendship in it, "Hello, Barty." The thin man looked back at him without a flicker for a long moment, and then he did the one thing that no one, not even Milly, had expected: he sat down in the nearest chair, as though a long day had ended, and put his face in his hands, and stopped pretending. ---