Part 40 (1/2)
”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 comrades.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.ses: 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, p.r.i.c.king, leaping, burning, drowning the hammer-beats!
”But I'll stick it!” thought Phil.
CHAPTER XXIX
IN HER PLACE AGAIN
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 fas.h.i.+oning 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 pa.s.sing 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.