Chapter XXI

Cheerfulness was the predominant note of the two long wards in No. 27 Palace Court. They were first floor rooms, formerly stately London drawing-rooms, leading into each other. One room had long, bulging windows looking over the short, broad street toward the high, red houses opposite, and the other large, straight windows which overlooked a small, open plot, a brown tank, and a tree. The room itself was divided by its small beds and enlarged by its shining, carpetless floor. A glass case by the door held beautifully polished sterilizing instruments. It was the only sign of the office of the place. A large center table was covered with well-arranged flowers. By each man’s bedside was a convenient locker with room for more flowers. There were no curtains, no pictures, nothing but the friendly monotony of whitewashed walls.

Charming printed-cotton counterpanes covered the small beds, and in the beds were the broken men. The nurses moved in and out, young, starched, and brimming over with their helpful activity. They were always there when they were wanted, and their stereotyped smiles and jokes were as unfailing as the cleanliness of the polished instruments; but the men were, nevertheless, alone, under the mask of their cheerfulness.

Visitors came in from outside; they brought the breath of the big, bustling world with them, and sometimes they brought its fatigue. They seldom knew how to talk to the patients. Either the sight of pain and helplessness reminded them of street accidents and doleful emergencies, which they promptly related, or they felt they must rouse their old friends to what was going on in their own full lives; so they poured out the wash of their easy cheerfulness across a sea of pain.

The tired and weakened minds of the patients gathered themselves together for the effort of attention. Very few visitors realized that in the presence of weakness personal strength should be used only to reinforce it along the lines of least resistance; and that those who are suffering pain are more vulnerable to accounts of pain than they can very well bear.

Anthony knew these points from memory. He knew how to slip a pillow under a tired head so as to give it the precise angle of fresh restfulness and in just the same way he had learned how to slip the subject a man wanted under his drifting mind. It was part of his treatment to spend hours in the hospital. It upset the nurses and curtailed their jokes, but after a time they got used to him. He was very silent, and came in and out like a shadow drawn by some instinct toward the men who needed him most.

Of the three types of cases in the little hospital, one was of those who were nearing the point where they would have to be pronounced hopeless. When this was reached, they would be moved to a big hospital for incurables, or, if they preferred it, they could be returned to their own homes.

The mind of science—all that it already knew, and all that its patient skill was fumbling toward—would be switched off them; there would be nothing more to be done. Whenever they saw a doctor in the wards their eyes grew into the question: “Has the time come? Are we finished?”

The doctor or the matron always told them as if a pleasant change lay before them, and the men wanted to be ready to take the joke in the right spirit. They knew that when that change came there would be no more changes.

Hilton Laurence never dealt with the hopeless cases. He left them to Anthony. They were not operatable, and he frankly confessed that he didn’t know what to say to them.

He could, he explained, tell a man he was going to die as well as any one, but he hadn’t the nerve to tell him he was going on dying. He left that to Anthony. Anthony accepted his patients in a different spirit; he sat with them every day, and when he was not with them, his mind was seldom off them. He was determined they should have a future. His mind twisted this way and that against the teeth of their cages.

Whatever was left of them Anthony found a use for. He never let one physically hopeless case leave No. 27 without something he could do before him. Each patient cost him sleepless nights and endless watchfulness; his own life became sucked up in their problems, but he grudged nothing that he gave. He knew that death was far less terrible and far less an enemy than despair.

The second set of cases were those for which there was some hope, but in which the symptoms had continued so long as to obscure it. The patients might win through to approximate recovery if the men themselves could grasp it or were not too tired to wish to grasp it.

These cases were the most difficult of all, because unless the will was arrested and brought into action, they would probably sink into the same class as the incurable. They had to be made to believe that they were getting better and at the same time stimulated to want it.

Their symptoms had already obtained a fascination for them; they longed to be left in the little effortless circle of their pain and weakness. Suffering was their world; it was no longer acute, and their strength had sunk below the line of any desire to escape it. They only wanted their condition to be acknowledged and to be left alone with it.

Anthony was endlessly patient with them. He found out what their old tastes had been before their symptoms blotted out their significance, and he worked down to them as a careful excavator works down to a buried marble. He was never in a hurry and he never struck too hard.

The third class of cases were the happy ones. An acute observer would have known them as he entered the wards. Their eyes were alive, and the look in their faces was resolute. They knew they were getting better and that they were contributing towards their own recovery. They often had to suffer intense pain, but beyond it was an horizon; they had not sunk below the level of personal fight.

Anthony found them a great help, because he set them in his mind as the models for the others. He learned from watching them what could be expected of the coöperative spirit, once you had found and roused it.

“Science can do a great deal,” Anthony observed to Hilton Laurence, “but if we get faith on top of it, it can do almost anything. The trouble is that scientific men aren’t taught to handle faith, and generally the faith-healing people are set against science; so we do our job about as well as a team of pulling horses.”

“The invisible isn’t our job,” said Hilton Laurence, impatiently, “and most people’s faith is nonsense.”

Anthony shook his head.

“I don’t think it is,” he said reflectively. “I think most people’s faith is courage; only we haven’t enough of it.”

Hilton Laurence looked suspiciously at his partner. He was sometimes afraid that Anthony was becoming a crank. Laurence was enough of a scientist to know that you must keep your eyes open for a new theory, but he wished to see a new theory produced on an old line. Cranks are people who want new lines. However, perhaps all Anthony needed was a holiday.

Hilton Laurence met Henry the next day by chance at a street corner.

“Your brother,” he said, “ought to go out more. Why don’t you take him to a music hall? Try ‘Yellow Slippers.’”

Henry had not seen Anthony for months. He had made several suggestions, but Anthony had always got out of them or asked Henry to meet him at hours and places that Henry thought unsuitable.

Henry urged “Yellow Slippers” over the telephone. Anthony replied that he would certainly dine with Henry, but he hated music halls.

Henry, however, convinced him that he must tolerate the revue because Anthony had, after all, tolerated nothing convivial for ages, and it was Henry’s idea of being with him. It didn’t occur to Henry as possible simply to dine with one’s brother and have the rest of the evening suspended in front of one.

“It’s not as if you played bridge,” he reminded Anthony, reproachfully.

They went to “Yellow Slippers,” and it was exactly what Anthony had thought it would be—one good song, several pretty dresses, boredom, noise, and very unanimating coarseness. Between the acts they walked up and down the promenade, and saw the over-dressed, over-painted, under-vitalized habitués. Henry knew who they all were, if they were at all well-known, but he was very careful not to do more than point them out to Anthony.

“We don’t want to get mixed up with any of them,” he explained. “At the same time, one can’t go about with one’s eyes shut.”

It reminded Anthony of a circus, but he didn’t say so—heat and dust and glare, and creatures held to be tame that ought to have been free to be wild. The wildness that he saw occasionally flicker up through the slow evening was not enough to tear down one of the bars.

The promenade was not, as it would once have been to Anthony, a boring or a disgusting sight. It shook him with pity. He knew now what these men and women wanted: they were seeking for the chief stimulant of life. The younger people had in their eager search the quality of freshness; they sought for this vivid stimulant with more uncertainty. Sex still had for them the survival of the unexpected. They looked for it in the wrong place, because out of this glare and noise, with its promiscuous expanse of professional charm, they could get only the least from their desires. They were throwing away quality for the sake of experience.

But for the older people there was a deeper pity, with a sharper penalty. They knew precisely what they wanted; there was no mystery to uplift and disguise desire for them, and no escape into the unexpected. What they had had many times and with zest they wanted to have again with a flickering satiety. They wanted it less, and yet they wanted it with a sharper edge of eagerness than the young. They knew that they had only a short time, and there was nothing else that they wanted to do with it. Anthony watched them without condemnation; he, too, shared their sense of frustration. Experience which had shut them in had shut him out; he saw no reason for any superiority. There was something in them which they had wasted until it had lost its significance, and there was something in himself which for lack of use had no longer any significance at all.

“There,” said Henry, with a note of explanatory patronage, “is quite a different type—a woman with style. I am very much mistaken if she is not a woman of the world. One notices these differences at once if one has the observer’s eye. I dare say she has no more virtue than a professional cocotte, but she knows how to carry her head. She’d pass anywhere for any one.”

Anthony turned his head to follow Henry’s eyes.

“All these types are alike to me,” he began; then he stopped abruptly, for the words were no longer true. The girl leaning over the balustrade was Kitty.

Whatever Kitty was there for, even if she didn’t particularly want it, was already in her hands. She had an air of complete detachment and immunity. As she turned her gaze slowly back to the promenade her eyes met Anthony’s. She still smiled indolently, but in her eyes there flashed a sudden signal of appeal.

She looked at Anthony for a moment as his worst patients looked at him when he came into the ward and their eyes searched him to read their hopeless fate.

Then as he hurried quickly toward her, she gave her old careless laugh.

“Hello, Tony,” she said. “You’re as unexpected as an archbishop. I should never have thought ‘Yellow Slippers’ was your kind of form. You must be going down in the world just as I’m climbing up!”

She made no introduction to the man beside her; there was of course a man beside her, a tall, weedy youth with a single eyeglass. Kitty turned her shoulder toward him, and said over it, “Go and get me a box of chocolates; you know the kind I like.” Then she waited till he had disappeared. Anthony noticed with a sharp pang of dismay that Kitty had changed. Her face and wrists were curiously thin, and there were hollows under her unquiet eyes; but her smile was the same, and she looked him up and down in a whimsical, unhurried friendliness.

“It’s awfully nice to see you,” she said, “once in a way, you know, after six months. Is that your brother Henry? He’s like you, only he’s much tidier—tidier in his nature, I mean, as well as in his lovely white waistcoat. He’ll burst with curiosity, trying to pretend he doesn’t want to hear what we’re saying. Why don’t you bring him over and introduce him to me? I couldn’t do him any harm, you know; I’m sure he takes far too much care of himself to run any risk. I suppose I’m a risk, aren’t I? I can’t say _you_ look particularly nice, Tony. Your eyes are cross, and your hair’s too long, and your dress-suit is shocking. It looks as if you wear it only once a year to dine with the lord mayor. I expect you keep it the rest of the time under a pile of medical dictionaries, don’t you? I do like a man to be smart.”

“I’m not going to waste time introducing you to Henry,” said Anthony, quickly, “but I’ve got to see you properly myself. Where are you staying? Here’s your confounded ass with the chocolates.”

“He has fifteen thousand pounds a year, so he tells me,” said Kitty; “so he can afford to be silly. You can’t, you know, Tony. I shouldn’t bother about my address if I were you.”

“You’ve got to tell me,” said Anthony, stubbornly. Kitty’s eyebrows went up. “I mean,” he entreated, “you might let me know, Kitty. This isn’t seeing you, if you were honest when you said you were glad.”

The young man reached them and looked haughtily at Anthony.

Kitty held out her hand for the chocolates.

“Yes,” she said reflectively, “these are the kind I eat, only I don’t feel like them now.”

She raised her eyes to Anthony.

“I’ve taken a flat with Peckham,” she said, “a horrid little hole; but I’ve let the farm. You can come and see me to-morrow if you like, at four o’clock—6 Trevor Road, Kensington. Fancy Kensington! It sounds like mothers’ meetings and socks for the poor, doesn’t it? But you won’t meet any mothers at Trevor Road. Good-by, Tony.”

Anthony turned reluctantly away from her. He was aware of Henry’s tact in the distance, strained almost to breaking-point by his curiosity, but Anthony brushed it ruthlessly aside. Henry’s tact meant nothing to him; he must get away now, get away at once before his self-control broke like glass. Anthony felt as breakable as glass, and as transparent, before Henry’s searching eyes. He realized suddenly that he had, after all, been thinking about Kitty for six months. He had never left a moment unemployed, but behind the employment, behind the fixity of his outer mind, had lain inexorably, almost unconsciously, the central thought of Kitty; and now that he had seen her face to face, his thinking was no longer unconscious. It pervaded the visible universe.

“I’ve got to get out,” he said brusquely to Henry.

“Oh, all right, all right,” said Henry, soothingly. “But for Heaven’s sake, old fellow, don’t _look_ as if you’d got to! The building is not on fire.”

“Isn’t it?” murmured Anthony, dryly, as he turned away. “I have a kind of impression that it is.”