Chapter II

"Good Lord!" Oldmeadow heard himself groaning.

Even as he took possession of his physical suffering he knew that there was satisfaction in suffering, at last, himself. Until now the worst part of war had been to see the sufferings of others. This was at last the real thing; but it was so mingled with acquiescence that it ceased to be the mere raw fact. "We're all together, now," he thought, and he felt himself, even as he groaned, lifted on a wave of beatitude.

Until now he had not, as a consciousness, known anything. There was a shape in his memory, a mere immense black blot shot with fiery lights. It must symbolize the moment when the shell struck him, bending, in the trench, over his watch and his calculations. And after that there were detached visions, the ceiling of a train where he had swung in a hammock bed, looking up; clean sheets, miraculously clean and the face of a black-browed nurse who reminded him of Trixie. The smell of chloroform was over everything. It bound everything together so that days might have passed since the black blot and since he lay here, again in clean sheets, the sweet, thick smell closing round him and a raging thirst in his throat. He knew that he had just been carried in from the operating room and he groaned again "Good Lord," feeling the pain snatch as if with fangs and claws at his thigh and belly, and muttered, "Water!"

Something sweet, but differently sweet from the smell, sharp, too, and insidious, touched his lips and opening them obediently, as a young bird opens its bill to the parent bird, he felt a swab passed round his parched mouth and saw the black-browed nurse. "Not water, yet, you know," she said. "This is lemon and glycerine and will help you wonderfully."

He wanted to ask something about Paris and the long-distance gun firing on it every day and he seemed to see it over the edge of the trench, far away on the horizon of No-man's-land, a tiny city flaming far into the sky. But other words bubbled up and he heard himself crying: "Mother! Mother!" and remembered, stopping himself with an act of will, that they all said that when they were dying. But as he closed his eyes he felt her very near and knew that it would be sweet to die and find her.

A long time must have passed. Was it days or only the time of daylight? It was night now and a shaded light shone from a recess behind him and thoughts, visions, memories raced through his mind. Nancy; Barney; he would never see them again, then: poor Lydia and civilization. "Civilization will see me out," he thought and he wondered if they had taken off the wings of the Flying Victory when they packed her.

A rhythm was beating in his brain. Music was it? Something of Bach's? It gathered words to itself and shaped itself sentence by sentence into something he had heard? or read? Ah, he was glad to have found it. "Under the orders of your devoted officers you will march against the enemy or fall where you stand, facing the foe. To those who die I say: You will not die: you will enter living into immortality, and God will receive you into his bosom." He seemed to listen to the words as he lay, quietly smiling. But it was music after all for, as he listened, they merged into the "St. Matthew Passion." He had heard it, of course, with Lydia, at the Temple. But Lydia did not really care very much for Bach. She might care more for "Litanei." She had sung it standing beside him with foolish white roses over her ears. How unlike Lydia to wear those roses. And was it Lydia who stood there? A mental perplexity mingled with the physical pain and spoiled his peace. It was not Lydia's, that white face in the coffin with wet ivy behind it. What suffering was this that beat upon his heart? The music had faded all away and he saw faces everywhere, dying faces; and blood and terrible mutilations. All the suffering of the war, worse, far worse than the mere claws and fangs that tore at him. Dying boys choked out their breaths in agonies of conscious loneliness, yearning for faces they would never see again. Oh, how many he had seen die like that! Intolerable to watch them. And could one do nothing? "Cigarettes. Give them cigarettes," he tried to tell somebody. "And marmalade for breakfast; and phonographs, and then they will enter living into immortality"--No: he did not mean that. What did he mean? He could catch at nothing now. Thoughts were tossed and tumbled like the rubbish of wreckage from an inundated town on the deep currents of his anguish. A current that raced and seethed and carried him away. He saw it. Its breathless speed was like the fever in his blood. If it went faster he would lose his breath. Church-bells ringing on the banks lost theirs as he sped past so swiftly and made a trail of whining sound.--Effie! Effie! It was poor little Effie, drowning. He saw her wild, small face, battling. Bubbles boiled up about his cry.

Suddenly the torrent was stilled. Without commotion, without tumult, it was stilled. There was a dam somewhere; it had stopped racing; he could get his breath. Still and slow; oh! it was delicious to feel that quiet hand on his forehead; his mother's hand, and to know that Effie was safe. He lay with closed eyes and saw a smooth waterfall sliding and curving with green grey depths into the lower currents of the stream. He remembered the stream well, now; one of his beloved French rivers; one of the smaller, sylvan rivers, too small for majesty; with silver poplars spaced against the sky on either bank and a small town, white and pink and pearly-grey, clear on the horizon. Tranquil sails were above him and the bells from the distant church-tower floated to him across the fields. Soundlessly, slowly, he felt himself borne into oblivion.

The black-browed nurse was tending him next morning. "You are better," she said, smiling at him. "You slept all night. No; it's a shame, but you mayn't have water yet." She put the lemon and glycerine to his lips. "The pain is easier, isn't it?"

He said it was. He felt that he must not stir an inch so as to keep it easier, but he could not have stirred had he wanted to, for he was all tightly swathed and bandaged. He remembered something he wanted specially to ask: "Paris? They haven't got it yet?"

"They'll never get it!" she smiled proudly. "Everything is going splendidly."

The English surgeon was such a nice fellow. He had spectacles on a square-tipped nose and a square, chubby face; yet his hair was nearly white. Oldmeadow remembered, as if of days before the flood, that his name was a distinguished one. Perhaps it was morphia they gave him, after his wound was dressed, or perhaps he fainted. The day passed in a hot and broken stupor and at night the tides of fever rose again and carried him away. But, again, before he had lost his breath, before he had quite gone down into delirium, the quiet hand came and sent him, under sails, to sleep.

Next day Oldmeadow knew, from the way the surgeon looked at him, that his case was grave. His face was grim as he bent over the dressing and he hurt horribly. They told him, when it was over, that he had been very brave, and, like a child, he was pleased that they should tell him so. But the pain was worse all day and the sense of the submerging fever imminent, and he lay with closed eyes and longed for the night that brought the hand. Hours, long hours passed before it came. Hours of sunlight when, behind his eyelids, he saw red, and hours of twilight when he saw mauve. Then, for a little while, it was a soft, dense grey he saw, like a bat's wing, and then the small light shone across his bed; he knew that the night had come, and felt, at last, the hand fall softly on his head.

He lay for some time feeling the desired peace flow into him and then, through its satisfaction, another desire pushed up into his consciousness and he remembered that, more than about Paris, he had wanted to speak to the nurse about what she did for him and thank her.

"It's you who make me sleep, isn't it," he said, lying with closed eyes under the soft yet insistent pressure. "I've never thanked you."

She did not reply. She did not want him to talk. But he still wanted to.

"I couldn't thank you last night," he said, "I can't keep hold of my thoughts. And when morning comes I seem to have forgotten everything about the night. You are the nurse who takes care of me in the daytime, too, aren't you?"

Again, for a moment, there was no reply; and then a voice came. "No; I am the night nurse. Go to sleep now."

It was a voice gentle, cold and soft, like snow. It was not an English voice and he had heard it before. Where had he heard it? Rooks were cawing and he saw a blue ribbon rolling, rolling out across a spring-tide landscape. This voice was not like a blue ribbon; it was like snow. Yet, when he turned his head under her hand, he looked round at Adrienne Toner.

The first feeling that came uppermost in the medley that filled him at the sight of her was one of amused vexation. It was as if he went back to his beginnings with her, back to the rooks and the blue ribbon. "At it again!" was what he said to himself, and what he said aloud, absurdly, was: "Oh, come, now!"

She did not lift her hand, but there was trouble on her face as she looked back at him. "I hoped you wouldn't see me, Mr. Oldmeadow," she said.

He was reminded of Bacchus and the laying on of hands; but a classical analogy, even more ridiculous, came to him with her words. "Like Cupid and Psyche," he said. "The other way round. It's I who mustn't look."

The trouble on her face became more marked and he saw that she imagined him to be delirious. He was not quite himself, certainly, or he would not have greeted Adrienne Toner thus, and he made an effort to be more decorous and rational as he said, "I'm very glad to see you again. Safe and sound: you know."

She had always had a singular little face, but it had never looked so singular as now, seen from below with shadows from the light behind cast so oddly over it. The end of her nose jutted from a blue shadow and her eyes lay in deep hollows of blue. All that he was sure of in her expression was the gravity with which she made up her mind to humour him. "We want you to be safe and sound, too. Please shut your eyes and go to sleep."

"All right; all right, Psyche," he murmured, and he knew it wasn't quite what he intended to say, yet in his flippancy he was taking refuge from something; from the flood of suffering that had broken over him the other night after he had seen that dead face with white roses over its ears. This queer face, half dissolved in blue and yellow, was not dead and the white coiffe came closely down about it. If he obeyed her he knew that she would keep the other faces away and he closed his eyes obediently and lay very still, seeing himself again as the good little boy being praised. This was Psyche; not Ariane. "Ariane ma soeur," he murmured. It was Ariane who had the white roses--or was it wet ivy? and after her face pressed all the other dying faces. "You'll keep them away, won't you?" he murmured, and he heard her say: "Yes; I'll keep them quite away," and, softly, a curtain of sleep fell before his eyes crossed by a thin drift of mythological figures.

"I thought it was you who sent me to sleep," he said to the English nurse next day. He could hardly, in the morning light, believe it was not a dream.

She smiled with an air of vicarious pride. "No indeed. I can't send people to sleep. It's our wonderful Mrs. Chadwick. She does a good deal more than put people to sleep. She cures people--oh, I wouldn't have believed it myself, till I saw it--who are at death's door. It's lucky for you and the others that we've got her here for a little while."

"Where's here?" he asked after a moment.

"Here's Boulogne. Didn't you know?"

"I thought I heard the sea sometimes. It's for cases too bad, then, to be taken home. Get her here from where?"

"From her hospital in the firing-line. Now that we're advancing at the front everything there is changed and she could come away for a little. Sir Kenneth's been begging her to come ever since he saw her. He knew she would work marvels here, too." The nice young nurse was exuberant in her darkness and rosiness with a Jewish streak of fervour in her lips and eyes. "It's a sort of rest for her," she added. "She's been badly wounded once. You can just see the scar, under her cap, on her forehead. And she nearly died of fever out in Salonika. She had a travelling ambulance there before she came to France."

"It must be very restful for her," Oldmeadow remarked with a touch of his grim mirth, "if she has to sit up putting all your bad cases to sleep. Why haven't I heard of her and her hospital?"

"It's not run in her name. It's an American hospital--she is American--called after her mother, I believe. The Pearl Ambulance is what it's called and everybody here knows about it; all of us nurses and doctors, I mean. Her organizing power is as wonderful as her cures; her influence over her staff. They all worship the ground she walks on."

"Pearl, Pearl Toner," Oldmeadow was saying to himself. How complete, how perfect it was. And the nurse went on, delighted, evidently, to talk of an idol, and rather as if she were speaking of a special cure they had installed, a sort of Carrel treatment not to be found anywhere else: "Everything's been different since she came. It's almost miraculous to see what the mere touch of her hand can do. Matron says she wouldn't be surprised if it turned out she was a sort of nun and wore a hair shirt under her dress. Whatever she is, it makes one feel better and stronger just to see her and one would do anything for her just to have her smile at one. She has the most heavenly smile."

It was all very familiar.

"Ah, you haven't abandoned me after all, though I have found you out," he said to Adrienne Toner that night.

He was able at last to see her clearly as she came in, so softly that it was like a dream sliding into one's sleep. She was like a dream in her nurse's dress which, though so familiar on other women, seemed to isolate and make her strange. Her face was smaller than he had remembered it and had the curious look, docile yet stubborn, that one sees on the faces of dumb-mutes. She might have looked like that had she been deafened by the sound of so many bursting shells and lost the faculty of speech through doing much and saying nothing among scenes of horror. But she spoke to him, after all, as naturally as he spoke to her, saying, though with no touch of his lightness: "You mustn't talk, you know, if I come to make you sleep. Sir Kenneth wants sleep for you more than anything else."

"I promise you to be good," said Oldmeadow. "But I'm really better, aren't I? and can talk a little first."

"You are really better. But it will take a long time. A great deal of sleeping."

"No one knew what had become of you," said Oldmeadow, and he remembered that he ought to be sorry that Adrienne Toner had not been killed.

She hesitated, and then sat down beside him. He thought that she had been going to ask him something and then checked herself. "I can't let you talk," she said, and in her voice he heard the new authority; an authority gained by long submission to discipline.

"Another night, then. We must talk another night," he murmured, closing his eyes, for he knew that he must not disobey her. All the same it was absurd that Adrienne Toner should be doing this for him; absurd but heavenly to feel her hand fall softly, like a warm, light bird, and brood upon his forehead.