Two hours later I still hadn’t found her, though she’d had only a few minutes’ start on me.
There were very few people on the roads, and hardly any cars. I couldn’t see any reason for such an acute shortage of cars. Eventually there might be a gasoline famine, but so far there were plenty of cars and plenty of gasoline, and I’d have expected the roads around Dover at least to be well trafficked.
Oh, I knew the paggets must be putting hundreds of cars out of action every day. But before they started their work of sabotage there had been five million mechanically propelled vehicles in Britain. Even if they’d put four of every five out of action, I still expected to see quite a few.
I didn’t know then how well organized pagget sabotage of motor vehicles was.
I hadn’t seen any paggets since I landed in England. I wasn’t surprised. They never showed any interest in a moving car — they could do little or nothing against it. Soon, no doubt, they would learn the technique of scattering broken glass or something similar across the roads; so far I’d never seen that in Europe, though it had been happening long ago in America.
The parats and pamice had appeared almost everywhere soon after they announced their existence in America. Clearly ships of all kinds had been used as breeding grounds, though there had been no reports of pagget activity on ships. As usual, they knew when to lie low.
It had only been much later that the pacats and padogs had appeared in any numbers in Europe — and even yet there were comparatively few padogs. Their breeding must have been very much slower and more careful than that of the rats and mice. Nevertheless, it was phenomenal. It couldn’t have been much more than three years since the first few isolated, escaped paggets in Europe began to breed. A few more, but not many, must have come over by ship since then.
The only way for the paggets to achieve their tremendous propagation must have been breeding the second generation to death. Here and there, in woods, marshes, and on small islands, they must have bred hugely from the half-pagget second generation, spreading in all directions as they bred.
• • •
At the moment I wasn’t much concerned about the paggets. I thought only of Ginette, cursing her for walking away like that, cursing myself for letting her, and realizing more and more clearly that I wanted her with me, or at least that I wanted it to be possible for the two of us to get in touch with each other if we ever regarded that as a good idea. My thoughts on that weren’t very clear. All I was really sure about was that I wanted to find Ginette.
I think now that part of my reason for wanting to find her was the fact that she was such a perfect anodyne for the loss of Gloria. I don’t mean that the minute Gloria was dead I could transfer all I had felt for Gloria to someone else. It wasn’t like that at all. You know how, when you have something on your mind and can’t shift it, you search around feverishly for something else to occupy your attention.
Well, in this case I’d found it without looking for it. With Ginette around I was safe, most of the time, from depression. That was clearest of all now that she was gone.
There was no urgency about finding her — except that the more time that passed in the search, the less likely it was to be successful.
I was on a minor road somewhere between Dover and Folkestone when a man stepped out from the side of the road, holding out his arms to stop me. He was perhaps the tallest man I had ever seen outside a freak show — nearer seven feet than six.
I didn’t have to stop, of course. I could have driven past him on the other side, or I could have made him jump for it, or I could have run over him. I stopped.
Something about me must have told him I was an American, even before I said a word. “Can I thumb a ride, buddy?” he inquired, with a strong English quasi-American accent. I noticed the unlit pipe clasped in his teeth, the bag by the side of the road, and the fact that his shirt was clean.
“Don’t you want to know where I’m going?” I asked.
“No.” Just that.
I liked the look of him. He had that slow, unworried look some big men have, as though there’s plenty of time and they can’t see any particular point in doing things faster than their neighbor, and with less consideration. I held the door open for him.
“My name’s Dave,” he said, folding himself into the seat beside me. His bag was a huge thing for an ordinary man to carry about, but it looked ridiculously small in his grasp. He reached over and dropped it in the back. He hadn’t taken his pipe out of his mouth yet, though he touched it every now and then, as if to reassure himself that it was still there.
He wasn’t heavy, just tall. He had long thin arms, long thin legs, and a long thin body. Nevertheless, the way he moved, the way he handled what must be a heavy bag, showed that his strength was commensurate with his height rather than with his thinness. He was youngish, but not very young — older than me. Thirty-five to forty, I guessed. And the first thing you noticed about him was how much he was prepared to take for granted, how much he didn’t need explained.
“Call me Don,” I said, hoping my reticence about my second name sounded as simple and matter-of-fact as his own. “I’m going north. But meantime I’m looking for a girl.”
“Aren’t we all,” Dave agreed.
I had started the car and moved off, but at that I shot an inquiring glance at him.
“Just generally,” he added pacifically.
“This is a particular one.”
“So I gathered.”
He didn’t say any more. Dave very seldom volunteered anything. He wasn’t really reticent — he told you anything you wanted to know, answered any direct question. He talked when the people he was with were talking, but he rarely started a conversation and even more rarely asked questions.
It might have been expected that when two men got together like that they’d have told each other about themselves and settled right away what they were going to do in the immediate future. Not us. Dave had heard I was looking for a girl. That was enough for him. If we found her, he would see what she was like. If we didn’t, it didn’t matter.
It got quite warm as the day wore on. It was one of those days when it was hot in the sun, but rather cold in the shade. In the big black car, which seemed designed to absorb as much heat as possible, it began to be uncomfortably warm. It was not, I decided, the best time of the year to be sleeping out — too warm by day, too cold by night.
I said as much to Dave.
“Too true,” he observed. “I slept in a ditch a couple of nights ago. Didn’t like it.”
I was to learn that Dave’s understatement was characteristic. Where some people would say “all” and the truth was “some,” Dave would say cautiously “a few.” He liked to crack his nuts before he gave them to you — and didn’t give them to you at all unless you asked for them.
We found Ginette about half an hour afterward, walking by the side of the road. I knew her from behind, though she was wearing a raincoat she hadn’t had when she left me. I remembered that she’d been trying to buy a coat in Boulogne.
I drew in ahead of her and waited for her to come level. She must have recognized the car at once. If she was at all surprised to see me, she got over it before she came up to us.
“Hallo,” she said without cordiality. “Who’s your friend?”
“Dave — Ginette,” I said. It seemed quite enough. I wasn’t sure whether I was glad or sorry that Dave was with me when I found her. On the one hand, his presence prevented all the wilder things I’d imagined might happen when I found Ginette, like my dragging her off by the hair, or like her throwing herself in my arms, breathing “Darling!” On the other hand, with him there it was easier for us to act naturally and not to lose our tempers again.
“Get in,” I added. “Then we’ll work out where we’re going.”
There was something strange about her. She might have failed to recover from her seasickness, though she had seemed all right when she left me. She might be furious at me for following her, or glad I had but determined not to admit it. I didn’t think she was angry, not this time.
Yet she said briefly: “I can manage quite well.”
“Don’t be a fool, Ginette,” I said without heat.
“I tell you I can look after myself,” she retorted, and though her voice was well enough controlled, I thought I caught a hint of hysteria back of it. “What do I have to do to make you leave me in peace?”
Through this Dave had just sat and looked. At that, however, he got out of the front seat of the car and folded himself into the back — and I was glad he was there, for there was a deep bass note of sanity about him, as if this was all very well, but obviously Ginette would come with us, after the histrionics were over.
She hesitated, and was lost. She climbed into the front seat, passing her valise to Dave in the back. Following Dave’s lead I said nothing, but went round the car to the driver’s seat. Since it was a French car, the drive was on the left. A British car would have had it on the right.
As I opened the door Ginette slumped in her seat.
I froze with my hand still on the door handle. She could hardly have fainted from hunger, and she hadn’t come far enough to be exhausted.
“What do you make of that?” I inquired.
Dave was getting out again. Not making anything of it so far, he said nothing. His pipe was still in his mouth.
I felt Ginette’s pulse. It was fast, but not too fast. She didn’t move when I touched her.
“Let’s get her out,” I said. “That can’t do any harm — she was walking along the road all right.”
“Considering the trouble you had to get her in,” said Dave mildly, “how about leaving her where she is?”
There was some sense in that, though I felt we should lay her flat and loosen her clothing — Gloria had fainted frequently, so I wasn’t without experience in this matter.
Ginette’s face was unmarked. Yet she had been pale even before she fainted. I looked at her hands. There were marks on them, nothing much — no red marks on her wrists to show she had struggled with anybody, or scratches to indicate she’d had trouble with paggets. I opened her coat. Her dress was undamaged, but there was a curious bulge at her shoulder. It was a button-through dress, which I could unfasten without moving her.
The bulge was a handkerchief, stained with blood. One corner was tucked under Ginette’s brassière; higher up, however, it stuck firmly to her, even when I brushed open the dress which had held it pressed against her.
Rather self-consciously, under Dave’s gaze, I fumbled behind Ginette, unfastened her bra, and peeled the handkerchief away. She wasn’t wearing her slip any more. There were irregular scratches, superficial but angry and quite extensive, all the way from her throat down over her breast. They had practically stopped bleeding, however, and the damage seemed hardly enough to make Ginette faint.
I could hardly help noticing, though it wasn’t the time and place for such considerations, that I had been right in thinking she could get by without falsies. Her breasts weren’t big but they were pert and very well formed.
Dave was pushing something into my hand. I looked down and saw it was a small bottle of iodine.
“Thanks,” I said. I painted it on with the little brush fixed to the stopper. Ginette gasped and almost sat up, then slumped back. Perhaps she had fainted again from the sting of the iodine.
“There must be something else,” I said aloud.
“You don’t think that’s enough?” Dave inquired. “Paggets did that.”
I nodded. “A padog. No, it isn’t enough. Not to put Ginette out like this. Not from what I know of her.”
When I eased the coat and frock off her shoulders I found the other thing. Her arm was heavily, neatly bandaged above the elbow with strips which I recognized as part of the dress which had been torn. I put my hand out to take off the bandages, and hesitated.
“Going to leave it?” Dave inquired.
“It looks decently done,” I said. “Though I expect she did it herself. And if we take it off, what can we do?”
Dave nodded.
Ginette came to again. She looked dazed for a moment, staring at me and then at Dave. Suddenly she realized she was practically stripped to the waist, flushed red, not with embarrassment but with anger that anyone should dare to do such a thing to her without her permission, and tried to sit up.
I held her back. “Take it easy, Ginette,” I said soothingly. “Is this all — these scratches and your right arm?”
She nodded, her lips tight with annoyance.
“All right,” I said, caught up her bra and reached behind her to fasten it.
“I can do that,” she exclaimed angrily.
“You can but you won’t,” I retorted, and fixed it carefully. “I suppose since we haven’t anything better, this handkerchief might as well go back as it was.”
“It might,” said Ginette resentfully. “And none the better for your interference.”
“Well, you might have been going to die for all we knew,” I said reasonably. “If you’d tell people these things, they wouldn’t have to find them out for themselves.”
“There was no call for you to …” Ginette began, and then realized abruptly that independence could be carried too far. That was Ginette’s saving grace. She generally realized when she was on the point of making herself ridiculous.
“There, that’s that. Now how about your arm? Did you clean it? Is it bad?”
“I can’t use it very well,” she admitted in her unusual, temporary mood of submissiveness.
“But you were still determined to go on alone?” I asked. Knowing that with Ginette the worst thing I could do would be to rub it in, I went on: “Will it be all right, do you think?”
She nodded. “I washed it at a stream,” she said.
We waited interrogatively, and presently she realized she could hardly refuse to tell us what had happened. From what she told us briefly, reluctantly, daring us to tell her she had been silly or careless, I formed my own conclusions about what had happened.
She had bought the raincoat in Dover — probably why I had missed her earlier was because she had turned back to do that after leaving me. When she set out on the road, she had walked far too fast, as if she meant to walk only for half an hour instead of all day.
Very soon, naturally, she had become hot and tired, the valise she carried had become an intolerable burden, and her feet swollen and sore — her shoes, as I’d noticed already, were anything but walking shoes. She stuck it, however, until she came to a small roadside stream. There she stopped and bathed her feet, and while she was at it, and since there was nobody about — she had seen nobody since leaving Dover — she had taken off her dress and slip to bathe her face and arms.
Well, I could have told her. Anyone who had had extensive experience of paggets could have told her. It was no surprise to me to hear that when she had dropped her gun, when she had her clothes over her head, when she was temporarily blind and defenseless — a padog from nowhere had jumped her.
Paggets followed people about far more often than they knew. If they remained careful and never left an opening, they never learned that there had been a pagget on their heels all the time. But if they weren’t careful all the time, if they made a mistake — they knew about it.
The padog which attacked Ginette had scratched her shoulder before she even saw it. By the time she had freed herself to attend to it, it was coming at her again and all she could do was throw out one arm to protect her throat. Its jaws snapped, and for a moment she thought it had bitten right through her arm.
She tried to kick it away, but she was barefoot and couldn’t hurt it. She was lucky, though. She managed to push it into the stream, and during the moment’s respite this gave her, she bent down and found her gun.
The padog had had some experience of guns, apparently. It was out of sight behind a bush before she could aim and fire. She hadn’t seen it again.
I knew Ginette wouldn’t thank me for it, but when she reached the end of her story I couldn’t help telling her she’d been very lucky indeed and couldn’t count on having the same kind of luck again.
She was annoyed at that, naturally. “I can look after myself,” she snapped. “This time it just happened — ”
“With the paggets, it always just happens,” I said. “They always catch you just at the one moment when you’re helpless against them — when you had your dress over your head, just for example. It always seems it was just bad luck they struck then. But the truth is, they’re watching all the time for that moment — ”
“I know,” she said impatiently. “Never mind. Where are you two going?”
I let the change of subject stand. “We don’t know yet,” I said. “Where are you going?”
She hesitated. Then, reluctantly, she said: “Cambridge.”
“Then this is a queer way to go,” I said brutally. “Cambridge is practically on my way. I’ll take you there.”
“But I don’t want you to — ”
“Ginette,” I said bluntly, “are you crazy? Do you want to reach Cambridge, or would you rather paggets got you on the way?”
She shuddered. “No,” she said feelingly, presumably answering the second part of the question, not the first. “All right, I’ll come with you.”
Dave, who had listened to all this patiently, got back into the car. He didn’t have to say “Let’s go, then.” Dave’s demeanor said a lot of things for him.
I let in the clutch. Alone an hour since, I had passed rapidly through the stage of two’s company and reached three’s a crowd. And I wasn’t sorry.