The Old Blood Part 38

The sometime tempery and the sometime morbid Helen was always smiling these days; smiling from the depths of her fine eyes as well as with her lips. Her personality glowed with opportunity and grew with it.

Every day she worked so long and hard that when night came she fell asleep as soon as her head was on the pillow. This was good, too, as it prevented any fiends of melancholy from tugging at her heart.

It is not only surgery and medicines and leaving nature to do the rest, as the grey-haired specialists knew, which brings recovery; it is also the desire to live which surroundings may induce. There are perfectly good nurses with perfectly good smiles who do everything required of them, not to say that there are slack nurses and possibly nurses who flirt with young officers. Then, as in other walks of life, there is occasionally a person who has what one of the grey-haired specialists called the gift, when he spoke of Helen.

She had fancy, as we know, and she could put her fancy on paper with a quickness and sureness of stroke which had led M. Vailliant to think that she might do dry points. All the talent she had, all her heart, belonged to the wounded. She was comrade to Mr. Atkins, whether rosy-cheeked boys of the "Kitcheners" or a stoical old regular, who accepted fighting as his job, had no home, and refused to be a hero.

"At first I didn't think you was what you'd call a beauty!" said one, who got red after he had blurted out the fact.

"I'm not. You've good eyesight," she replied.

"But now I think you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen!" he added; and this statement was as honest as the first. It made Helen infinitely happy; for there was nothing that she so much desired in her inmost heart as to be good-looking.

She drew a long series of cartoons for that gallant who had been hung up in the barbed wire in the moonlight, played at bombs back and forth with the Germans around "Wipers," and been pulled out of mudholes and buried by sh.e.l.ls. The cartoons were her best card in the pack of her hospital cheer. One anecdote ill.u.s.trated called for another. Helen knew more about the life of the army in Flanders than the "bra.s.s hats,"

the staff and all the war correspondents. For these survivors of h.e.l.l did not want gloomy pictures. Reality was enough without adding to its horrors that of long faces. They liked something to make them smile even when death was at their elbow. They sent her cartoons home in their letters, or if they had no homes, put the sheets away with their treasures. One even cautioned his wife not to be jealous, because this jolly nurse drew cartoons for everybody; and he had the rank of major.

Helen kept on doing what she called real drawings, which were appearing the world around. Even the censors could not find any military secrets in them, particularly after she sent the chief censor a cartoon of her imaginary portrait of a censor in his most diabolical mood of evisceration. Some of the cartoons, too, got into print, bringing more requests from editors, which she could refuse now in view of the checks coming in for the real drawings. M. Vailliant, who had been wounded and was now convalescent, had gathered up some of the floating strands of his affairs and wrote his congratulations to Helen, hoping that she would not go to America after the war. Let America come to her in Paris.

"You are trying to swell my head," she wrote back; "and I do believe that it is a little larger. How can it help being!"

Nevertheless, that tugging at her heart would come at times. When she ought to be perfectly happy she was not, as she found whenever her work gave her a moment to search her inner self.

All this about Helen, when Henriette was just across the road with what the doctors and nurses in Helen's unit referred to as "Lady Truckleford's lot." Sometimes the doctors when they looked in that direction said something almost profane about volunteer organisations and people who had influence. Lady Truckleford flitted back and forth to London, where she was on a number of boards and lists of patronesses without knowing what they were all about unless she asked honourable secretaries, which was a bore, as the honourable secretaries could not be along when somebody gave you a poser. However, she did not allow such details to disturb her placidity for long.

If you were a young officer whose people were of some account and you were only slightly wounded, "Lady Truckleford's lot" was a most delightful lot to be with; and in addition you were certain of attention from real trained nurses who were also a part of the establishment. In charming company you could sit in the same sun and breathe the same air as the convalescents of the professional unit and look out to sea and watch the boats coming and going across the channel; and you could also make trips in automobiles to the neighbouring seaside resort, where once French and English people came in the holidays of peace before the world's game was war. Aside from Henriette among Lady Truckleford's lot was Lady Violet Dearing, characterised by doll-like beauty and a lisp. She was poor and dependent on her friends; and despite her lisp and her attractiveness she had had no luck in making any definite attachment though she was twenty-eight, which is a desperate age for doll-like beauties.

Occasionally Helen went to see Henriette; oftener, indeed, than Henriette came to see her sister. Once Helen made some cartoons for the young wounded officers at tea-time, who thought that they were "ripping." Lady Violet quite agreed with their view, but Henriette was cool to her sister when they parted. Helen made no more cartoons for Lady Truckleford's lot.

Gossip ran its rounds in this as in other communities. Lady Truckleford's lot knew that there was a young American by name of Sanford, who was Henriette's seventeenth cousin; and Lady Violet teased Henriette about the seventeenth cousin when she had been the object of too much attention from the young officers. If anybody who was somebody in the Truckleford world was wounded, the Truckleford lot soon knew it; and if he were interesting it was still possible, in those early days before the hideous old War Office became utterly inconsiderate of all the nicer human feelings, to have him transferred to "more congenial surroundings."

CHAPTER XXVIII

A SITTING CASE

"Yes," murmured the doctor at the casualty clearing station, after he had listened to Phil's heartbeats and examined an opening in a bandage of gauze and cotton. "Yes, another one of the miracles. They say that the Boches in such cases----"

He wiped his brow, his sentence unfinished, as Phil gave another involuntary cough to keep the trickling thing out of his lungs. The appeal of nature, struggling for self-preservation, brought the doctor back to the definite.

"No chance if he is left lying down!" he exclaimed. "We'll make a sitting case of it. Hold him up all the way."

They lifted the limp figure into the ambulance, where two other sitting cases were waiting for further pa.s.sengers.

"Now, you're off!"

The swift, kindly-springed ambulance sped on out of the zone of sh.e.l.l-fire along the hard roads between the avenues of poplars in the glorious sunshine.

Phil realised that some one was keeping him from slipping and that he would slip and keep on slipping to the very bottom of things if left to himself. Little hammers were beating on his brain. Their tat-tat kept him from any continuity of thought. As soon as he had an idea they crushed it while it was only fluttering in vagueness. Indeed, they moved about over his brain on the lookout to crush any conscious grasp of anything. He would outwit them; he would know what all this was about. Straining his eyelids open--they were as heavy as steel doors--there was only a black curtain in front of his eyes as the reward of the effort. This must mean--but the hammers would not let him find out what it meant. He tried to listen and there was a void beaten by noiseless hammers which were striking into pulp--his brain.

He was afraid of something; something ghastly indefinable.

Again he was slipping. He would just let himself slip. That was best.

When you slipped the hammer-blows became m.u.f.fled. They did not hurt so much; only when you slipped you had to cough to keep back the trickling thing. The strong arm of the hospital corps man straightened him up.

Apparently some one did not want him to slip. This must be the man who ran the hammers and wanted to keep them busy--those noiseless, merciless hammers in the black night.

"It's lucky just to get it in the leg," said one of the two sitting cases opposite, with a red spot on a white wrapping showing through his slit trousers' leg.

"Bang in the middle of the head's better than that," said the other, who had his arm in a sling.

"G.o.d, yes!"

Up and down hill the ambulance, its green curtains drawn on its secrets, ran smoothly on past the long trains of motor-trucks that fed the army, past well-muscled, comely, eager, whistling, and singing youth on the march, through villages and towns, through the orderly world of health and action to that quiet world where the nurses smiled, inside the long, low buildings connected by gravelled paths.

Phil knew that he had arrived because he had been lifted down from somewhere onto something, which was a signal for the hammers to do a snaredrum dance which made him unconscious for a moment. The hammers did not like him to be unconscious. Having beaten him out of consciousness, they beat him back to it with a different kind of tattoo. Then, he was being carried along in a sort of cradle.

"Keep his head up!" said the little ticket which came with all who were sent to the human repair shop.

"Very particular about that!" insisted the tired medical corps man, who had held Phil up for the whole journey.

Phil had only the sense of being laid on something soft, with his shoulders propped up against something still softer. Then they were taking off his clothes. These people were very kind, but they could not stop the hammers; nothing could. Perhaps they would let him slip down, down, down, on that downy pillow till the hammers stopped. He would tell them about the hammers; then they would understand why he wanted to slip. So he tried to speak, though he was uttering only a gurgle and he could not have heard his own voice if he had been articulate. The hammers were drowning his voice with their beat. They did not mean to let him slip. If he could not hear his own voice, how could he expect the kind people to hear it?

A young surgeon used his stethoscope; then waited on his superior, Dr.

Smythe, to come before attempting any redressing.

"An eighth of an inch more would have done it!" said Dr. Smythe, as they removed the bandages. "Why not the fraction? It would have been more merciful."

"The Boches, they say, in such cases----" began the young doctor.

"We can't---and won't!" was the reply of the senior.

Phil felt that the hot sponge had been removed. He could breathe more freely. More air in his lungs revived him. Shooting pains ran out in forked tongues from the hammer-beats, bringing an acute consciousness of why the sponge had been there. His hand went up involuntarily, quickly, on its mission of discovery. The doctors, realising his purpose, reached for it in common impulse, to save him from the truth, but too late. The sense he had left, that of touch as acute as ever, felt the moist and fractured horror. His arm hung a dead weight in the surgeons' grip as they laid it back by his side on the cot. His brain had been struck another stunning blow, such as it had received from the sh.e.l.l. It rebounded with wild consciousness as he tried to lift himself forward in delirious effort. But a strong hand was pressing his forehead; other strong hands were forcing him back into place. The hand on his forehead said to him: "It is useless; you cannot." And the hammers had it, there in that soundless, dumb, sightless world of torture.

Now he must pretend to yield; yes, he must keep one thing in mind.

They might hold his head up, but this would not prevent him from slipping. He would will that he should slip and keep on willing it till he reached the bottom of things. Yes, that had been done before and he could do it. They could not make him live under the hammers--live for such a monstrous future as he foresaw. Yes, just will it and it would not take long to die; no, not long--a few hours, perhaps. He was sure of this. Beat on, hammers, while you may; the harder, the sooner the end.

"It's a chance for Bricktop to make good," said Dr. Smythe. "We've heard so much of his wonders. Send for him."

Already word had pa.s.sed through the ward and even across the way to Lady Truckleford's lot that there was a terrible case at Number Four, gunner officer, named Sanford. It reached Henriette when she was at tea and Helen when she was at her quarters off duty and drawing. The young doctor who had gone for Bricktop met them coming in at the door and noted their startled, anxious faces.

Henriette leading, they came down the aisle. When Dr. Smythe, whose form hid Phil, drew aside and Henriette saw what lay against the white pillow she screamed and placed both hands over her eyes to hide the sight and turned away, reeling and shuddering.

"Let me go!" she cried, stumbling toward the door.

"The screen!" exclaimed Dr. Smythe.

Helen, too, had her hands over her eyes; she, too, was shuddering but not moving. She brought her hands down with a kind of wrench, stiffened her chin, and then stepped behind the screen.

"Cousin Phil!" she said, striving to keep her voice steady--and she saw that his glazed eyes were sightless.