The War Office must foresee everything; that men must be drilled before they know how to fight and that when they fight some will be wounded. There must be experts in salvage as well as in preparation; depots to mend broken parts in the immense, complicated machine.
On a hillside where they would miss none of the rare winter sunshine, the summer breezes, or the tonic of fresh spring air, rows of long, green barracks had risen. Gravelled paths connected them between stretches of transplanted sod and geranium beds. Women in nurses' uniforms, and surgeons twiddling stethoscopes, and hospital corps attendants bearing trays of food, went along the paths. Sometimes the surgeons stopped to talk about this or that case, in their professional jargon. Some were youngsters who had not yet begun practice; others of the old regular service had looked after the health of Mr. Thomas Atkins in India and out-of-the-way places, where flies and mosquitoes are busy in tropical heat with their wicked occupations; and still others were grey-haired, eminent specialists from London used to receive fees that gave the youngsters a giddy feeling, but now working for a lieutenant's pay. All the talent and skill of the medical and surgical world were at the service of this repair shop of damaged men.
Indoors the X-ray "sharp" was always busy locating bits of steel as black points on hazy photographs; still forms were wheeled into the operating-room so softly that it seemed as simple a business as slipping a paper into a drawer; the beds in the wards were in rows between a broad aisle, with screens moved here and there by the noiseless sleight-of-hand of nurses trained to their part no less than infantry in the use of the bayonet.
One of the nurse's duties is to smile. However tired she is she must smile, just as a soldier must salute and obey orders with alacrity. A smile in passing for the fellow with one eye showing through a swathe of bandages, for him with splinted legs held fast by weights, or the one dreamily convalescent, and particularly for the one quivering with pain. The man who awakes from a sweet sleep or the one who has been in a nightmare with a dozen machine-guns playing on him and bombs bursting all around, is greeted by a smile as he returns to the world of reality.
The nurse has life, strength, tenderness in her facile, confident attention to those who are without strength and dependent as children. She makes each patient feel that he is the only one in the world, which is the way that patients like to feel. All the nurses without exception seemed good-looking, even the plain ones when you looked into their kindly eyes as they turned toward you.
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 shells. The cartoons were her best card in the pack of her hospital cheer. One anecdote illustrated called for another. Helen knew more about the life of the army in Flanders than the "brass hats," the staff and all the war correspondents. For these survivors of hell 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."
"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 passengers.
"Now, you're off!"
The swift, kindly-springed ambulance sped on out of the zone of shell-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 muffled. 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.
"God, 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 shell. 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 passed 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.
"He is quite deaf from shell-shock, too!" said Dr. Smythe.
So this was Helen's cousin; therefore, Henriette's.
For a moment she was silent, with deep breaths, as if between impulses, before she dropped down beside the cot. Those hammers could not prevent Phil from knowing that a woman's hand was grasping his, a soft palm and slim fingers were pressing his tight, as if they would send a current of cheer through him. She could do that when he was so monstrous! If only the shell had finished him. With her other hand she was rolling up his sleeve; then she slipped her left hand in place of the right in his. Dr. Smythe and the nurse in attendance looked on in a spell of tragic curiosity.
Now Phil felt a finger moving on his arm. Sensitive little nerves—he had never known that there were such sensitive ones—followed the movement and carried the sense of their progress to the brain in spite of the hammers.
"I am trying to write so you will understand," she slowly traced the letters. "If you do, two pressures of the hand is yes."
"Yes," came the signal.
"He does!" said Helen, smiling up to Dr. Smythe in triumph.
"Ripping!" he said.
She repeated the message aloud, firmly, confidently, as she slowly wrote:
"I have good news. You will recover your hearing, speech, and sight completely. We have a miracle man here who will make you whole again, just the same that you were before except for a few little scars that will go away. You must just want to get well, in order to give the miracle man his chance and for the sake of your father and mother and those who love you." And after the last word she hesitated, then wrote the letter "H."
Each letter surging along those sensitive nerves, and letters slowly spelling words. She could look at the monstrous sight that he was, at that gaping wound, and ask this of him!Shewanted him to live! So be it. He would not try to slip. The miracle man should have his chance. It was between the hammers on one side and her and the miracle man on the other.
"Wonderful! I admire your courage in saying it!" Dr. Smythe remarked thickly.
"But it will and must come true!" said Helen sturdily, as she rose to her feet and looked straight into his eyes, her own aflame with resolution. "No one must even think the contrary."
Another person had overheard the message written on Phil's arm as he looked around the corner of the screen. Lean he was and angularly built. His hair was brick-red, his face freckled, his age about thirty-five, and he had a smiling turn to the corners of his mouth. He had come down the aisle with a noiseless step, as if propelled by inexhaustible nervous vitality, and he had the air of a man with distinctly eccentric qualities, who would never stop on a street corner to ask anybody to tell him how to do his work. No second glance would be required to see that he was American—"corn-fed and from Kansas," to use his own words.
"Well, picture girl, you seem to have put it up to me!" he said cheerily. "You've made a lot of promises in my name; but that's just the kind of talk that helps."
Bricktop examined the wound, while Helen studied his features; but she could tell nothing by them. She knew that there were cases which he refused to undertake, and nothing could change his mind. Too many "possible" cases came back from the front behind the green curtains for him to waste time on the "impossible."
"Remember he is an American!" she whispered.
"So? What part?"
"New England and the Southwest."
"That makes an all-round man. Not that gunner Sanford?"
"Yes."
"Peter Smithers—but this is a little world."
All the while his mind was on that wound: his talk an incidental byplay of his intense concentration. He began making quick, nervous little movements with his hands as if he were illustrating a mechanical process in pantomime. When he had first appeared at the hospital this habit was considered gallery play; but most of the doctors had learned to believe in him, though some were still sceptical, as was Smythe in a measure. Here was a test. When Bricktop looked up he met professional inquiry in Smythe's eye.
"Can you?"
"Now, if I said that I could," Bricktop replied, "and I didn't, all the stick-in-the-muds would say there was one on me. I'm going to try. It's amazing how bad it is and yet what there is to work with. But there's one thing—I don't know. Never had anything like it before. I can make him as good as he was—or it's a complete failure. I want him brought over to my place immediately. And you, picture girl, you are going to stand by and write cheerful messages on his arm?"
"Yes, always!" said Helen.
"As for his ears, eyes, and vocal chords—that is up to other sharps," said Bricktop.
Phil was lifted up again and placed on something not so soft as the bed and by the motion he comprehended that he was making another journey. It was to an entrance with the sign "Oral Surgery." As Bricktop said, "This means Yours Truly!" Here he was autocrat, this stranger from Kansas by way of New York. On the door of a room fitted out with dentist's accessories and many little drawers was painted "William Smith, D.D.S." He was always glad to tell people about himself, because, as he said, this saved them from wasting time in guessing and allowed him the start in the kind of information which was being passed around about him.
"Glad father and mother, who were sensible people, had a sense of harmony or something like that," he would say, "and didn't name me Decourcey or Charlemagne Smith. Good old name, Smith! Everybody knows how to spell it. Makes the inside of the city directory look companionable. But usually," he pointed to his hair, "I'm known as Bricktop. At school they called me Bill Bricktop; but I considered that too illiterate and undignified after I hung out my shingle. D.D.S.—I'm a dental surgeon; dental surgeon—surgeon, mind, and some other kinds of a surgeon, too. When I get time I'm going to do a book on jaws. 'Bricktop on Jaws'! Sounds like the personal memoirs of a henpecked husband, eh?"
Not only dentist, but surgeon! That was the fact that he kept beating into the British mind, which seemed to him somewhat opaque at times, when he was fighting to get the opportunity to do the work that he was now doing. He had an air of not caring for anybody, this William Smith, with his bright grey eye and smiling mouth, which frequently leads to professional success and even to average mortals being regarded as geniuses. In New York his reputation for delicate and original work brought him many rich patients, which he never allowed to interfere with his hospital experiments on jaws. He made enough money to take care of the little Smiths as they arrived, one, two, three, four, and all red-headed.
"I should have been rather disappointed if they hadn't been," he said. "There's something in the very fact of being a red-headed Smith that ought to give any kid a start in life."
When the war broke out and he read about the havoc wrought by bursting shells he set out for Europe, believing in himself and his mission to do more good in the world repairing fractured jaws than by making up the deficiencies of nature in the mouths of the rich; but because he believed in himself that was no reason why the War Office should believe in him.
The first permission that he had secured after arriving in England was to look around the hospitals for bad cases and then to go ahead with one which everybody had given up. When he transformed an officer condemned to wear a black cloth over his face for life into a presentable human being, he had a walking testimonial of his skill which gave him an entry into the big hospital in France. What an amazing lot of things he required: laboratories and X-ray apparatus and the more the authorities gave him, the more he wanted—this William Smith, D.D.S. When equipment was not forthcoming through the regular official channels, he went into his own pocket for the funds to buy it. His bank account depleted, he was relieved from a fit of depression by a draft from an angel in New York for twenty thousand dollars.
"Now, don't say that angels cannot draw drafts," he told Dr. Braisted, the great eye specialist from London, "or I'll think that the English have no sense of humour at all."
Braisted was as extremely British as Bricktop was American. Possibly this was why they got on so well together. Being a big man himself who had given up a practice of a hundred thousand dollars a year to save soldiers from blindness, Braisted could appreciate Bricktop's professional eagerness and altruism; and after a half-hour's talk with the American he understood that the American had a thorough groundwork of training, plus a gift. This made him one of Bricktop's early partisans. Another was Helen. There was no criticising William Smith, D.D.S. when she was about. She knew the subjects of his skill.
"You sit down and draw for them and they forget their jaws ache," he told her, as he nodded to the figures with faces and jaws swathed in bandages in the courtyard of his kingdom.
As soon as their wounds healed he had them again under the knife, for the next process in reconstruction. Those little contrivances fashioned in his laboratory which they had to wear caused intense pain; but they bore it with noble patience. Whenever he appeared their eyes followed him with a beautiful gratitude, a childlike confidence. He was changing them from monstrosities into whole men.
"Better pay than you get filling teeth for millionaires!" said Bricktop. "Stopping teeth, I should say; that's English."
It was a familiar thing for the men in the court to see stretchers wheeled into the operating-room. After this they watched for that red-headed man with the smiling mouth to walk across from his office, as another part of the regular routine of their existence, and their sympathy went out to the fellow on the stretcher as no one else's could.
The picture girl walking beside the stretcher this afternoon did not even look up at them, let alone send them a smile as usual. When Bricktop came across from the office she was waiting at the door of the operating-room, and they noted the appeal in her eyes as she spoke to him. Very observing those maimed men who could not speak, but still had their eyesight. Whoever was on that stretcher must mean a great deal to the picture girl. Afterward, while the operation was on, she came over to them and talked, but they felt that her mind was inside the operating-room and that she was suffering. That was the thing about her: she could feel how others suffered. It did them more good than her drawings.
After he was through with the preliminary probing and splicing and wiring, which he foresaw must be followed by many other sessions, Bricktop had what he called one of his "blow-outs."
"Fine business, war; so sensible, so logical, so considerate of everybody's feelings!" he stormed. "A man who had a robber baron for an ancestor and who likes to see his picture in the papers and wear a uniform and thinks that everything is his by divine right, when what he needs is a swift kick, wants some more glory! So he puts on his war-bonnet and starts the glorious old game, with improvements—sidewipes with jagged bits of steel that make a mess like this! Enough money fired away in one day to give everybody good teeth. Think of that—if everybody had decent teeth and well-shaped mouths! But they can't afford it. It's the killing season. The good old sport must be kept up!"
The nurses were familiar with the "blow-outs," which usually came with the reaction after a trying operation, when those skilful fingers had been so certain in their touch under an eye which was like the steel of the instruments that he used.
Phil had awakened to find that they had taken away the thing over his nose that had put him to sleep. And they had put back the sponge-like thing in his mouth; but he could breathe better than before. Then they were taking him on another journey and propping him up in bed again, in his world of silent night. He knew, instantly her hand touched his, that it was she again. She was writing:
"It went all right. The miracle man is pleased."
"Brave little liar!" thought Bricktop, whose pessimism with the first results had made his "blow-out" particularly bitter.
"I am writing to your father for you and telling him that you will be as good as ever," she continued. "The miracle man says that the pain will be bad, and if it is too bad, clap your hands and they will stop it. But he would rather not, if you can endure it."
Phil gave her hand two pressures to signify that he understood, and had a pressure in response before she withdrew her hand with a fluttering, nervous quickness. This return pressure helped. It was like comradeship in battle. He was not making the fight alone.
Next, they were doing something to his eyes, which were finally covered with a compress. The people out in that silent blackness were divided into classes: She and they. Then they were doing something to his ears. The eye and the ear experts said the same as Bricktop. Both would try; for all three were big men, who said just what they meant. Phil, guessing their purpose, waited for the message on his arm.
"It is all right," she wrote again. "They say you will see again and hear again as well as ever."
He believed her with the faith of those men in the court who followed Bricktop with their confident eyes. Soon the pain came; needlelike shoots of broken nerves that had been numbed by shock. A thousand needles sewing, pricking, leaping, burning, drowning the hammer-beats!
"But I'll stick it!" thought Phil.
The numbing horror of it—and to have come into her life—hers! Enveloping horror, the horror of war personified, drove Henriette out of the ward, on with mechanical steps toward a deserted part of the beach, where she could be alone and think before she faced Lady Truckleford's lot.
Her gospel of life had been a gospel of beauty: a delight in her own beauty as a source of power; a dislike of all things that were not comely; a choice of surroundings in the fashioning of a beautiful world, selected and detached in a charming egoism, where she was supreme. Phil had come from afar and played a knightly part; she had fitted him into that world. It was the end—the end of upward glances into his eyes; of profile turned in the certainty of holding his impelled, prolonged regard of admiration; of sauntering in woodland paths; of rhythmic swing in step across the fields; of fair afternoons with him posing and herself posing as she leisurely played with her brush—of the most delectable of all her experiences.
Those finely-chiselled features which she had painted, which had been the security of masculine strength in her fright as he carried her to the cover of the gully, their elation when she spoke of the woman who waited when the man went out to fight—and that monstrous fact against a pillow in the hospital!
War had made its test in kind. All the soft, pampered years were in reckoning for her, as the suffering years were for Helen. Her instinct was to fly to her quiet studio in Paris, as a child flies indoors to its mother from a storm dragon; but public opinion, personified to her distraction by Lady Truckleford's lot, would not permit this. Her friends knew that he was her cousin; and Lady Violet's teasing had been the reflection of general knowledge of the situation between the two. No one would more quickly appreciate than they in their own beautiful world that any conventional outcome would now be impossible, yet none readier to point the finger at heartlessness. They would expect devoted attention to him for a certain period in his ghastly misfortune.
Had she courage? Could she bear standing by his bedside and looking at his bandaged face? She must! Her part became clear. Her cousin and friend had been maimed; she pitied him; suffering should go with her grief for him in a way that would engage the sympathy of all. What were they saying at Lady Truckleford's at this minute? Their opinion had come to mean much to her. They knew only that she had put her hands to her eyes and screamed and staggered out of doors. Was not this the natural result of such a shock? And the next? It would be to inquire about him.
Starting back to the ward, a new horror presented itself on the way. All her life she might be known as the woman who was waiting for a man, who returned to her a blind, deaf wreck. He would exist, haunting her memory, invading her beautiful world with a mutilating hand. If only—she shuddered at the thought which easily became familiar in an era when the quick became the dead as a matter of course out where the guns were firing. Perhaps he was already gone. She gasped and halted as she found the possibility hastening her steps. The man for whom she had waited, though they had not really been engaged as she kept reminding herself, would have fallen in action and the slate would be clean.
She was at the door of the ward and heard her voice asking a nurse how he was.
"He's transferred to Dr. Smith. There's been an operation. I've not heard the result," replied the nurse coldly; for a woman finds it as easy to speak coldly to another woman who is beautiful as a man finds it difficult.
"And my sister?" asked Henrietta.
"She went across with the stretcher."
As Henriette made a turn in the path which brought her in sight of the Oral Surgery sign, Helen was passing under it and coming toward her. She was pale and faint with exhaustion from the strain which had ended with that final tax on her strength, as she put all she had into the message of optimism which she had written on Phil's arm. So near had she been to him, so bound up with him in thought and feeling, that coming suddenly face to face with Henriette affected her strangely. She had a tightening in her throat and Henriette a stifling constraint along with her suspense. After a silence, Helen was the first to speak.
"He stood the operation well," she said.
"And he will live—live?" Henriette asked, her breath catching on the words.
Helen remembered now how her sister had put her hands over her eyes and screamed. Afterwards she had not thought of Henriette, only of him. It had been too horrible for Henriette to bear. Henriette loved him and he loved her, and her eyes to Helen's revealed her suffering in the past two hours. Now she had come back as one in a dream, afraid to ask how he was.
"Yes, he will live, Henriette—oh, how awful it has been for you! His body is as good as ever. He will live and make the fight. He has promised—such a hard fight!"
"Then he had wished to die? He was going to, you mean, and—and——" Henriette wrenched out the words.
"Yes, and the doctor says that he would have died. It is all a matter of will-power. But we told him that he would get his sight and hearing back and except for some little scars will be the same as before."
"Will he?"
"He must! We must not allow him or ourselves to think anything else. Just must—must!"
"Yes!" Henriette breathed faintly.
"Will you go in and see him?"
"I——" Henriette hesitated. "No, not to-night!" she concluded.
The two sisters walked along the path in silence, which was a gripping silence for both. When they came to the parting of the ways to their quarters, Helen took Henriette's hand in hers.
"There is another reason why he wants to live. You asked him to," she said.
"I—I could not bear it—I went out. How could I? What do you mean?"
"The will was everything in the crisis, as I said. Often such cases—well—some one had to speak to him and tell him it would all come out right when it was so hard for him to breathe, or he would not have tried to breathe any more. So I wrote on his arm and asked him to live for—for the sake of those who loved him—and he could not see that it was I—and I signed it H!"
Henriette withdrew her hand from Helen's in a spasm which shook her frame. She opened her lips to speak, but would not trust her own tongue and whirling brain.
"Again you took my place!" she exclaimed, at last.
"It was for you—to give him hope to inspire him for the fight!" Helen replied, with passionate conviction.
"Yes—yes, I understand. I can't think! It's too horrible! Go on taking my place—you can—it's easier for you! Yes, go on! It unstrings me too much now to see him—yes, look after him, encourage him. Go on—only don't tell any one the ruse that you are playing!" she concluded, with a burst of emphatic coherency before she bolted along the path, murmuring to herself: "Yes, that is it—that is the way out!"
Over at Lady Truckleford's lot they had been thinking of little else but Henriette. How would she take it? The lot was gathered in the reception-room before going into dinner, and when Henriette entered all eyes were covertly or openly upon her. Lady Violet took the lead by springing up and kissing Henriette on the cheek.
"You poor dear!" breathed Lady Violet. "Of course we've heard, and we've all felt for you!"
Henriette, pale in her distress, had never seemed more beautiful to Captain Landor, who had had a bullet through the arm. Usually Henriette cut his meat for dinner; but to-night Lady Violet was assured of the privilege.
"I have just come from inquiring as to the result of the operation," said Henriette. "He is resting easily. As you know, he is really a distant cousin of Helen's and mine and we were all fond of one another. We had such good times together at Mervaux. It was so fine of him to stay and fight instead of going home. Then this! You can't imagine the shock of it!"
"Terrible!" gasped Lady Violet. "We all know what it means to you."
"And even more to Helen!" said Henriette. "Poor Helen! She was utterly devoted to him and he to her. She has stood by so bravely, insisting that he will get his sight and hearing back and that Bricktop will remake him as good as new. When I think of him as I last saw him and how Helen is suffering—it's too horrible!"
With a weary drooping of her lashes, she said that she was too tired to think of coming down to dinner and went to her room, where, after she had bathed her face and taken down her hair, her reflection in the mirror in its faultless outline was a reflection of something in her cosmos which could have no part with deformities of any kind, and her relief was infinite over the gate that Helen had providentially opened. She hastened to write to her mother, the letter a symbol of cutting a chain with the past:
"... I saw it—a monstrous wound of the jaw. He is deaf, blind, speechless. They say that he will live. I need not tell you what a day it has been for Helen and me! When I thought of his gallant conduct at Mervaux in refusing to leave Helen there alone, of our fun over the portrait and the cartoons, and all that he meant to his father and mother, the thought of what has happened to him was too horrible for words. I am glad that when he becameéprisI did not encourage him. Now I see that his real fondness was for Helen. He asks for her, wants her near him. She is a great comfort to him and her feeling for him is deeper than either of us realised. I hope you will give up your trip to Truckleford, travelling conditions are so abominable."
To which Madame Ribot consented, as she was no longer interested in Peter Smithers's visit.
Helen, after she had separated from her sister on the path, had thought little of what had passed between them. Her mind was too intensely objective. Anything to make Phil well! It did not matter how it was done or who did it. Upon her return to her room she gathered up her drawing materials, which seemed to belong to her in some other incarnation, and put them in a drawer. It was as if her life was Phil's; his wound hers. She wrote the promised letter to Truckleford, and then she prayed for Phil; and after she had prayed to the God above, she clenched her fists and murmured: "Will! Must!" in the face of all the hard little gods below who seem to get a good deal out of the hand of the God above.
Two white heads bent over the tombstones in the cemetery at Truckleford and talked genealogy; two white heads strolled on the lawn and had tilts in theology, or sat in the library and discussed English and American viewpoints. The vicar of Truckleford believed in a State church, while Dr. Sanford held that this meant mixing religion and politics, which was a bad business. Sanford of England, who had cheeks ruddy from the moist climate, brought his sentences to a close with a rising inflection; and Sanford of New England had a dry complexion, with sharp little wrinkles around his eyes, and brought his sentences to a close with a falling inflection. They seemed a trifle strange to each other at times, though they were speaking the same language; and either would have been highly complimented if you had told him that you recognised him for the Englishman or the American he was at once? They rambled from philosophy to politics, from scientific versus classical education to the future of humanity generally, rich in words and ideas if not in money.
Then, two other white heads pottered about the flower and kitchen gardens, both clicking their knitting needles industriously for soldiers the while. In England, roses were not often frost-killed or burned by the hot sun of summer, which brightened the sunflower and the goldenrod fringeing the roadsides with yellow in autumn at home. Two white heads discussed the servant problem in both countries; and England thought it pretty bad at home until she heard of the state of affairs in America. It was the particular care of the two English heads, plotting together in their nightly conferences, that the American cousins should feel at home when English facility in this respect, however insular and offish the islanders may seem abroad, requires no calculation.
The visit at last come true had the aspect of romance under the circumstances. It required a certain amount of courage for Dr. and Mrs. Sanford to cross the Atlantic in the midst of submarine activity quite in keeping with ancestral Pilgrim daring in crossing in the seventeenth century. From Jane came an occasional letter on the state of affairs in Longfield. "Things can't be right personally with you away," she wrote. "I am getting too fat and lazy for words. But things exteriorly, as Phil would say when he got hifalutin, are just the same. Garden doing fine except the cauliflowers, which look peaked; but they will pick up, Patrick says, as cauliflowers have a way of looking peaked and ragged before they get a start. No hyphenates and few potato bugs in Longfield this year. I put up thirty jars of currant jelly and it looks licking good. That is more than you can eat; but sure, unless you change your habits, it isn't more than you can give away. I expect you're putting your shoes outside your door every morning to be blacked, like the lords do. Well, when you come home you will find the blacking-brush in the same old place and that Jane has not changed. I am writing a letter to Phil himself. With best regards,
"Your truly, JANE."