'Cheape?' she called impatiently, but Cheape, with his ancient lumbago,
in his comfortable cottage would be the last man to profane the
sanctuary. 'Sheep,' she concluded, and threw in the fusee. The pyre went
up in a roar, and the immediate flame hastened night around her.
'How Wynn would have loved this!' she thought, stepping back from the
blaze.
By its light she saw, half hidden behind a laurel not five paces away, a
bareheaded man sitting very stiffly at the foot of one of the oaks. A
broken branch lay across his lap--one booted leg protruding from beneath
it. His head moved ceaselessly from side to side, but his body was as
still as the tree's trunk. He was dressed--she moved sideways to look
more closely--in a uniform something like Wynn's, with a flap buttoned
across the chest. For an instant, she had some idea that it might be
one of the young flying men she had met at the funeral. But their heads
were dark and glossy. This man's was as pale as a baby's, and so closely
cropped that she could see the disgusting pinky skin beneath. His
lips moved.
'What do you say?' Mary moved towards him and stooped.
'Laty! Laty! Laty!' he muttered, while his hands picked at the dead wet
leaves. There was no doubt as to his nationality. It made her so angry
that she strode back to the destructor, though it was still too hot to
use the poker there. Wynn's books seemed to be catching well. She looked
up at the oak behind the man; several of the light upper and two or
three rotten lower branches had broken and scattered their rubbish on
the shrubbery path. On the lowest fork a helmet with dependent strings,
showed like a bird's-nest in the light of a long-tongued flame.
Evidently this person had fallen through the tree. Wynn had told her
that it was quite possible for people to fall out of aeroplanes. Wynn
told her too, that trees were useful things to break an aviator's fall,
but in this case the aviator must have been broken or he would have
moved from his queer position. He seemed helpless except for his
horrible rolling head. On the other hand, she could see a pistol case at
his belt--and Mary loathed pistols. Months ago, after reading certain
Belgian reports together, she and Miss Fowler had had dealings with
one--a huge revolver with flat-nosed bullets, which latter, Wynn said,
were forbidden by the rules of war to be used against civilised
enemies. 'They're good enough for us,' Miss Fowler had replied. 'Show
Mary how it works.' And Wynn, laughing at the mere possibility of any
such need, had led the craven winking Mary into the Rector's disused
quarry, and had shown her how to fire the terrible machine. It lay now
in the top-left-hand drawer of her toilet-table--a memento not included
in the burning. Wynn would be pleased to see how she was not afraid.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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