Leerie Part 19

The chief of the Surgical Staff looked at Sheila as she handed him the sutures he was reaching for. "They're the best we've had yet, eh? Not one with half a fighting chance, and just listen to the ones who are pulling through."

"They're Irish." There was a tinge of pride in the nurse's voice.

The chief smiled. "It's like flipping a coin to find out whether you're more Irish or American. Sometimes it's heads, sometimes it's tails. Which is it, honestly?"

"Honestly, both!" Sheila laughed softly. Then the door opened to admit the last of the stretchers, and she sobered for an instant until she saw the faces of the boys. She knew why they were smiling, and her eyes shone in the old luminous, Leerie fashion as she greeted them, each as if he had been an old friend.

"There's a welcome for you. Those lads you hear have gone through what you are going through, only a lot worse. Listen, and think of that as you go under. They'll be singing again in a moment." And as she slipped the ether cone over the face of the first, up from Ward 7-A in rollicking cadences came another chorus:

"Wi' me bundle on me shoulder, sure, there's not a man that's bolder-- I am leavin' dear old Ireland without warnin'.

For I've lately took the notion for to cross the briny ocean, An' I'm off for Philadelphia in the mornin'."

The smile on the face of the first boy spread to a grin under its covering of gauze. "I'm off for Philadelphia, too," he mumbled, thickly, and the eyes that looked into Sheila's for a few last nebulous seconds showed all the comfortable security of a child's.

They were hard at it for another hour, and while Sheila O'Leary's hands flew from sterilizer to ether cone, from handing instruments and holding forceps to tying sutures and packing wounds, her mind was busy with something that lay far beyond. To this girl, who had come across to do her bit, life had become a jumble of paradoxes. She had come to give, out of the bounty of her skill and her womanhood; instead she had received far more abundantly from the largess of universal brotherhood and sacrifice.

She had come to minister, and she had been ministered unto by every piece of human wreckage swept across the door-sill of the hospital. She had thought to dispense life, and to her ever-increasing wonder she had been given a life so boundless that it reached beyond all previous dreams of s.p.a.ce or time. She was learning what thousands had been learning since the war began, those who had thrown their fortunes into its crucible, and that is that if anything comes out at all, it comes out in the form of spirit and not of flesh.

Back in the old days at the sanitarium she had felt herself bound only to the problems and emergencies of war. It had never occurred to her then that in an incredibly short time she would be bothering about matters of adjustment afterward. With peace already on the horizon, she was troubled a hundredfold more than she had been when indefinite war was the promise for the future. From the beginning she had marveled at the buoyancy and optimism of the men who were focusing their lives within the limits of each day. Many of them never thought in terms of more than twenty-four hours; often it was less. They had learned the knack of intensive living.

World-old truths were flashed into their minds like spot-lights; friends were made and lost in a few hours; eternity was visioned and compa.s.sed in a minute. The last words Jerry Donoghue of Ward 7-A had said before he went west came back to Sheila with a curious persistence.

"When all's said and done, miss, it's been a grand life--Brave lads for comrades--a la.s.s who kept faith to the end--a good fight an' somethin'

good to fight for--Near five years of it--wi' perdition grinnin' ye in the face an' the Holy Mother walkin' at your back--Sure, I might ha' lived fifty year in Letterkenny an' never tasted life half so plentiful--or--so--sweet."

That was the strange part of it; they had all found life "plentiful an'

sweet"--nurses, surgeons, soldiers alike. They might be homesick, worn out with the business of fighting and patching up afterward, eternally aching in body and heart with the long stretches of horror and work with little sleep and less food, and yet not a handful out of every thousand of them would have chosen to quit if they could.

But when the quitting-time came, when war was over, what was going to happen then? Sheila wondered it about the boys who lay unconscious on their stretchers, packed in the room about her. She wondered it about the boys conscious in their cots below. Most of all she wondered it about Ward 7-A. It was going to hurt so many to have to look beyond the immediate day into a procession of numberless days stretching into years and years.

The sudden relaxing from big efforts to little ones, that would hurt, too, like the uncramping of over-strained muscles. And the being thrown back on oneself to think, to act, to feel for oneself again--what of that? It was like dismembering a gigantic machine and scattering the infinitesimal parts of it broadcast over the earth to function alone. Only many of the parts would be imperfect, and all would have souls to reckon with.

But of the puzzle of it one fact stood out grippingly vital to Sheila. No soul must be thrown out of the melting-pot back into the old accustomed order of life and be left to feel unfit or unnecessary. There must be a big, compelling place for every man who came home. Of all the tragedies of war, she could conceive no greater one than to have these men who had put no limit to the price they were willing to pay to make the world safe for democracy sent back useless, to mark time to eternity.

But who was going to keep this from happening? How were the thousands of mutiles to be made free of the burden of dependence and toleration? Who was going to guard them against atrophy of spirit? The nurse gathered up the last of the instruments and threw them in the sterilizer. As she took off her ap.r.o.n and wiped the beads of sweat from her face, her chief eyed her suspiciously.

"Get your coffee before you touch those dressings in 7-A. Understand? When did you have your clothes off last?" He growled like a good-natured but spent old dog.

The girl gave her uniform a disgusted look. "Pretty bad, isn't it? I put it on four--no, five days ago, but I've had my shoes off twice." She laid an impulsive hand on the chief's arm. "Promise about the coffee if you'll promise to do the dressings with me instead of Captain Griggs. He calls them the 'down-and-outers.' I can't quite stand for that."

"Well, what would you call 'em?"

"The invincibles," she declared. "Wouldn't you?"

But for all her promise, Sheila O'Leary did not get past the door of 7-A without putting in her head and calling out a "good morning." Whereupon twelve Irish tongues, dripping almost as many brogues, flung it back at her with a vengeance.

There were thirteen of them, all told, the remnants of a company of Royal Irish that had crossed the Scheldt with Haig. As Larry Shea had put it on the day of their arrival, they "made as grand leavin's as one could expect under the circ.u.mstances." The ambulances that had brought them, along with the additional seven who had gone west, had pivoted wrong at one of the crossroads, so that the American Military Hospital No. 10 had fallen heir to them instead of the B. H. T. It is recorded that even the chief showed consternation when he looked them over, and Larry, catching the look and being the only man conscious at the time, snorted indignantly:

"Well, sir, if ye think we're a mess, ye should have seen the Fritzies we left behind. Furninst them we're an ordther of perfectly decent lads." And Larry had crumpled up into a grinning unconsciousness.

It was Larry who led the singing; it was Larry now who, with an eye on the one silent figure in the ward and another on the nurse in the doorway, threw a wheedling remark to hold her with them a moment "by way of heartenment to Jamie." "Wait a bit, miss. Patsy MacLean was just askin'

were ye a good hand at layin' a ghost?"

Before Sheila could answer, Harrigan, an Irish-American orderly, stepped over the threshold and shook a fist at 7-A.

"Aw, cut it out. The way this bunch works Miss O'Leary makes me sick.

Don't cher know she hasn't been off duty for twenty-four hours? Let her go, can't cher?"

Johnnie O'Neil, from the far end of the room, smiled the smile of a cherub. "An' don't ye know, laddie, that it's always the saints in heaven that has the worst sinners on their hands? 'Tis jealous ye are, not being wicked enough to get a bit more of her attention yerself."

Sheila smiled impartially at them both, and with a parting promise of dressings to come she hurried off. Ward 7-A settled itself to wait for the worst and the best that the day had to offer. The room was a very small one, and the thirteen cots barely crowded into it, with s.p.a.ce at the foot for Jamie O'Hara's wheel-chair to go the length and turn. They had been kept together by Sheila's urgent plea that they should be given a ward to themselves instead of scattering them through the larger wards, and it is doubtful if in all the war a more quietly merciful act had been executed.

Not one of the thirteen but would have scorned to show any sign of dependence on the others, yet intuitively the girl had guessed what they would be able to give one another in the matter of spiritual succor. The way they continually hectored and teased, matched wits and good humor, as they had matched strength and daring in the old fighting-days before the hospital, was meat and drink to the souls struggling for dominance over mutilated bodies. United, they were men; separated--Sheila had often shuddered to think what pitiful, pain-tortured beings they might have been.

When she returned to the ward the chief was with her, and their combined arrival brought forth a prolonged, fortissimoed wail shammed forth in good Gaelic fashion. Larry's great hairy arm shot out, and a vindictive forefinger was wagged in the direction of the third cot.

"Ye'd best begin with Patsy MacLean this day. He hasn't been laid out first in a fortnight."

The others, taking the words from Larry's tongue, chorused, "Aye, begin wi' Patsy, the devil take him!"

"Why the devil? Wouldn't Fritzie do as well?" The chief smiled indulgently upon them all.

"'Tis a case for the devil, this time. Tell the colonel what you were putting over us last night," Michael Kenney, lance-corporal, growled through an undercurrent of chuckle.

Patrick MacLean, the color-sergeant, grinned as he reached out a welcoming hand to both surgeon and nurse. He was a prime favorite with them, as with his own lads. When pain wrestled for the upper hand, when things went wrong, moods turned black, or nights stretched interminably long and unendurable, Patsy could always turn the trick and produce something so absorbingly interesting or ridiculous that the pain and the long nights were forgotten. How well Sheila remembered that first time they had dressed his wounds! The muscles had stood out on his arms like whipcords; sweat poured down his face. He fainted twice, each time coming round to drawl out his story in that unforgetable Irish way:

"We were dthrivin' them afore us like sheep, all so tame an' sociable I was forgettin' where I was. Somehow the notion took me I was back on the moorlan' drivin' the flocks for my father, when a Fritzie overhead drops a bomb on our captain.... It spatters the mud in my eyes somethin' terrible, an' when I rubs them clean again the machine-guns were cacklin' all round us like a parcel o' hens layin' eggs; we'd stumbled on a nest of them.

Holy Pether, I was mad! I was for stickin' the colors in the muzzle o' one o' their b.l.o.o.d.y guns, an' I sings out as I rush 'em, 'Erin go bragh!' Then down I goes. Culmullen, there, comes staggerin' up. 'Take the colors,'

says I. 'I've got no legs to carry 'em on.' 'I can't,' says he; 'I've got no arms to shoulder 'em.'... A bit aftherwards I sees Jamie--he's second in command--come runnin' up wild, but his arms an' legs is still in pairs, so I shouts afore things go black, 'The colors, Jamie, ye take the colors.' 'Wish to G.o.d, Patsy, I could,' says he, 'but I can't see.'...

Faith, weren't we a healthy lot, miss? An' we the Royal Irish!" He had grinned then as he was grinning now.

Culmullen in the next cot, a schoolmaster from Ballygowan, raised his head. "Miss O'Leary, Patsy's the worst liar in Ulster. Ye might keep that in mind whenever he has anything to tell. If I had had the schooling of ye, I'd have thrashed the thruth into ye, ye rascal! Will ye kindly lean over and brush the hair out of my eyes, and if ye tickle my nose this time, I'll have Larry thrash ye for me the instant he's up."

The color-sergeant pulled himself over and gently brushed back the straggling hair. "Such a purty lad!" he murmured, sarcastically. "What's an arm or two so long's the Fritzies didn't ruin one o' them handsome features--nor shorten the length o' your tongue."

"What is it this time, Sergeant?" Sheila spoke coaxingly as she bent to the dressings.

"Well, ye know I've said from the beginnin' 'twas no ways natural havin'

them legs o' mine twistin' an' achin' same as if they were still hangin'

onto me. I leave it to both of yez. If they'd been anyways decent legs an'

considerate o' the kindness I've always shown them, wouldn't they have quit pestherin' me when they took Dutch leave?"

"Stop moralizin'," shouted Johnnie O'Neil, the piper from Antrim. "Get down to the p'int o' your tale."

"It hasn't any point: it's flat," growled the lance-corporal.

Unembarra.s.sed, Patsy MacLean went on: "I was a-thinkin' this all over again last night, a-listenin' to the ambulances comin' in, when a breath o' wind pushes the door open a bit, an' in walks, as natural as life, the ghost o' them two legs. 'Tis the gospel truth I'm tellin' ye. They walked a bit bowlegged, same as they always did, straight through the door an'

down the ward. An' the queer thing is they never stopped by Larry's cot or Casey Ryan's--the heathen!--but came right on to me."

"Faith, they wouldn't have had the nerve to stop. The leg Casey lost was as straight as a hazel wand, same as mine." Larry snorted contemptuously.

"The two of yez are jealous." Patsy lowered his voice to a mock whisper and confided to the chief and Sheila, "They know they'll have to be buyin'