V
Hamilton was sitting up in a wheelchair, watching Miss Meadows flutter about from one patient toanother—raising or lowering a bed, adjusting a pillow, injecting morphine, sponging a patient’s back, bringingwater—doing a hundred and one things. Hamilton admired her swiftskill—the sureness with which she did everything, the expertness with which her capable fingers patted the bedclothes into position, the gentle strength of her finely molded arm when she lifted a man in bed or helped him to his chair, the dexterity with which she snipped off gauze and linen and converted them into dressing pads and bandages. Above all, her cheerfulness.
At six each morning she would come into theward—in her familiar white sweater coat on the coolerdays—and take temperatures. She carried scores of thermometers in a glass, it seemed, and as she moved from bed to bed she would shake them down with a dexterous twist of her wrist. Sometimes, on especially cold days, when her fingers were numb, a thermometer would slip from her grasp and shatter on the floor. But in spite of cold, and no matter how little she had slept the night before, she invariably smiled.
Meadows had a word and a nickname for everyone. Hamilton was a “Colonel,” because of his first outburst against having a negro in his ward, his Southern accent and his rather aristocratic cast of features.
“In a few more days, you’ll have a regular goatee, and then youwilllook like a colonel,” she used to tease him when he was still lying on his back, unable to shave.
The patients were all her boys and she mothered them in a delightfully impartial manner.
One of the men she maternally called “Sleepyhead,” because he was always asleep when time came for taking temperatures. Another was “Caruso,” because he snored (she called it singing) in his sleep.
“That was a most beautiful aria you rendered last night,” teased Meadows, “it sounded like the Awakening of the Lion from Hagenbeck.”
Then, as every one in the ward laughed, and before Caruso could reply, she thrust a thermometer between his lips. Caruso pretended to be in a great rage and in pantomime drew a knife and threatened her with it.
“How’s the Great Lover?” she asked another, who had come out of the ether revealing certain startling chapters of his amatory experiences. “The Hearst papers have got a reporter planted under your bed, so you had better be careful of what you say in your sleep. They’re running the first chapter of your memoirs, An Ethereal Affinity, tonight.”
“You know I have only one love,” mocked back the Great Lover, stretching out his arms.
“I wonder who that can be,” said Meadows and popped a thermometer into his mouth.
“Great Scott, nurse, I’m burning up!” cried a patient. Meadows snatched the thermometer from his hand to find the mercury near the top of the column. It was an old trick, however. The patient had held the end of a cigarette to the bulb.
“My, oh my!” Meadows shook her head, so that the brown curls straggled out from beneath her cap. “We’ll have to cut out the nicotine. No more cigarettes from now on, and you’ll see how soon your temperature goes back to normal!”
“Not one cigarette, nursey?” pleaded the practical joker.
“Not a chocolatecigarette—unless you share it with me!”
For each there was some bit of badinage that made the dreary days of convalescence pass all the more quickly. Even with the more serious cases, the officers whose jaws had been replaced with pieces of metal strung together by wire, the officers who had been blinded, theamputations—Meadows joked.
Hamilton was making comparisons. He wonderedwhether the girl to whom he had become engaged just before he left for France could have stood the gaff as well. Physically they were remarkably alike. They could easily pass for cousins, even sisters. They were both little women and both had a girlish animation. Both were dark, with wavy brown hair and large brown eyes. Eyes of a wild doe, Hamilton used to say of Margaret. Meadows might have been an inch taller and correspondingly heavier. But the same domed forehead, refined nose, bowed lips.
Hamilton wondered whether Margaret, so graceful on the dance floor, so competent in the drawing room, or at the dinner table, would be equally at home in a hospital ward. Could she have rubbed a man’s back with alcohol, or placed a drain in a gaping wound as successfully as she pouredtea—do all these things with a smile? He wondered.
Meadows was approaching Hamilton’s wheelchair with a cup of steaming chocolate, and for a moment Hamilton had an acute longing to be back in the States, nearer Margaret.
“What’s the matter, Colonel, hasn’t she written?” the nurse smiled down upon him. “I’m quite sure I saw a letter for you in the office. Orderly’ll be up in a few minutes. Drink this chocolate. I made it myself.”
Hamilton took the cup and admitted that he was woefully homesick.
“Some day,” he gulped and blinked hard. “Jimminy, this stuff is hot!—some day I’d like to have you meet some one inGeorgia—Corinth. A girl Iknow—my—some one I know real well. She looks a great deal like you, too. Same complexion and same way of smiling. Might be sisters.”
“No,” laughed Miss Meadows, shaking her head, “I haven’t a relative south of South Bend, Indiana. It’s just a stage of convalescence. When they reach it, all my boys,” she gave an expressive wave of her white arm, “tell me I remind them of some one. So you’d better look out or you’ll be mistaking me for her and telling me things meant only for her shell-like ears. Oh, such things have happened before!”
Meadows shook her forefinger saucily at the colonel and whisked away. Hamilton swallowed a burning gulp of chocolate and felt more homesick than ever.
Meadows was right. Therewasa letter forHamilton—a letter which sent his heart thumping. It came in a square envelope, lined with colored tissue, addressed in large, round characters, in green ink and smelling faintly of musk. A dozen postmarks and forwarding addresses showed the course it had travelled. Hamilton had written Margaret that he would spend his leave in Paris, the last week in September, and she had addressed the letter in care of the American Club. When Hamilton failed to claim the missive, it had evidently been sent to headquarters. From there it had been forwarded to his regiment. The letter had followed the regiment from post to post, had finally caught up with it and been sent on to the field hospital. From there it had been sent to the American hospital on Rue de St. Jacques, Paris. Evidently Margaret was unaware that Hamilton had been wounded and had lain hovering between life and death for two months. Hamilton tore open the letter.
“Dearest Bobby boy,” it ran. “I know that some horrid censor will be snooping through this, so I can’t tell you how much I love you!
“I suppose you are in Paris now, enjoying your leave. Oh, how jealous I am of thosenotoriousFrench beauties! I hear that they bob their hair, wear skirts up to their knees and smoke cigarettes. How shocking! But you’ll always be true to your little Margaret, won’t you?
“You don’t know how much we at home suffer! I don’t mean by going without wheat or meat or heat on certain days or without lights at night; nor even our untiring work on drives and committees and meetings. I mean the gap you have made in our livesthat nothing can fill!
“Every one of us at home would giveanythinghe could to join you on the firing line. I know I would, if I were a man. In the meantime I am ‘doing my bit’ by knitting Red Cross sweaters and preparing gauze. I am attendinga class in hospitalization, so that I can help out in our local hospitals in case all the trained nurses are accepted for overseas duty.
“Papa is very proud of you. When he learned that you had been recommended for a captaincy, he said that he justknewthat you had it in you, because you came from one of the best Southern families. Father has so much responsibility now, keeping the niggers at work. He says that his overseers are working day and night to keep up the production of cotton. Cotton is used in the soldiers’ uniforms and in making gun-cotton, so father really feels as though he’s doing his bit in fighting the Hun.
“Cousin George says he wishes he were in your shoes, but the local draft board has ruled that his services in editing a newspaper are indispensable, and of more value to the country than shouldering a rifle.
“HowardPinkney—the man you were so jealousof—foolish boy!—still comes around and proposes regularly. But there’s no chance, is there, against my soldier boy? I hate these war profiteers, but papa says Howard is becoming a splendid business man and doing a real service to the nation by supplying the arsenals with walnut for rifle stocks. It seems that walnut is the best wood for that purpose, and at the beginning of the war Howard very thoughtfully managed to collect most of it in the South. He said that he would have liked to follow your example, but I suppose he is doing more by ‘carrying on’ right at home, seeing that the boys over there are supplied with rifle stocks.
“You see,everybody’s‘doing his bit,’ one way or another. I think it issplendid! It’s the only way that our Anglo-Saxon supremacy can be maintained. Even at our dances and receptions the note is patriotic. We invite all the officers from the camps near-by and do our best to make them feel as if they had not been forgotten. We always end up with theStar-Spangled Bannerand everyone stands up so straight and singsright from the heart!
“A few foreigners and radicals have given us some troubleby not subscribing their full quota of Liberty Bonds, and the committee of twenty-one has daubed their houses yellow. Some have even asked for higher wages, because the war has made prices go up so high. But they don’t realize their sacred duty to their country. There is talk about the negroes revolting. Some agitators have been at work amongst them. They’re demanding accountings and cash, or rather hinting at it. They wouldn’t dare demand it. It sounds like Bolshevism to dad! A Socialist came here tospeak—but the committee rode him out of town on a rail before he could get a meeting and spread disregard for Americanism and the Constitution.
“Dad and George and Howard say that the old Ku Klux Klan ought to be revived to teach the negroes their place and keep the agitators and other carpetbaggers from invading the South.
“But Imustn’tbore you any more with this. I simply wanted to let you know how the war was affecting the South. Perhaps by this time the war will be over. I just know when the Americans get upon the field of battle they will show the rest of the Allies a thing or two about fighting.”
Hamilton turned from his reading and looked out of the window. The trees had turned gaunt and bare, heralds of the approaching winter. People were hurrying to and fro. Carriages carrying notables were dashing down the boulevards. Officers in brilliant uniforms were moving about the streets. Paris, following its first intoxication of victory, was going about the complicated business of determining the conditions of peace. Wilson’s fourteen points were being adroitly broken. New conceptions of international relations, the League of Nations, the autonomy ofMontenegro—bizarre and pathetic national points ofview—were being molded to suit the nations of the world. Pompous international tailors were cutting up the economic fabric of Europe, woven in the loom of the centuries, and trying to form coats to clothe a confusion of political andsentimental ideas of nationalism. Experts were laying out the patterns. No two agreed exactly.
Hamilton resumed his perusal of the activities of Corinth during the last phase of the war, the town gossip, the state of health of numerous individuals. He crushed the letter and leaned back against his pillow. Thoughtless, chattering, charming Margaret! If he could only crush her alluring girlishness to him, and be aware of her pretty babbling, without listening to it; simply nodding from time to time and putting in a few words!
His chest was hurting him a little. He was growing weak. It was the first time he had sat up for more than half an hour. Meadows noticed him sink back in his chair, quickly summoned two orderlies and had him lifted back in bed, her capable hands patting the pillow into a comfortable shape, and tucking in the blankets in a twinkling.
“Don’t swallow this, like Little Nemo over there,” she said. “He eats everything I givehim—soup, thermometers, roast turkey, shavingsoap—everything—a regular ostrich. Now let’s take your hand. Something exciting in that letter? What’s the matter with your pulse, colonel? Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to her in ten days, good asnew—if I have to write my own prescriptions. Oh, it’s not so high for a man in love. Temperature normal.”
Meadows made a notation on his chart at the foot of the bed and then passed on to the next bed, and Hamilton had a sudden desire to seize her white hand and hold it.