Part 17

She shivered as though a chilly draught had pierced her blue alpaca. Nurse Pidge had not let the topic sleep. She had reverted to it often in that odd _argot_,--(compound of homely, commonplace, modern English; up-to-date scientific terms; Public School, Clubland and Army slang),--which comes so trippingly from the tongue of the trained nurse of To-Day.

Pidge had quoted her idol Wyers, Oppenshaw Wyers, F.R.C.S., of Harley Street, Lieutenant Colonel R.A.M.C. (T.), Consulting Surgeon attached to the Staff of the Base Hospital of which the Convalescent Camp was an offshoot.

Who has not heard of Wyers, coarse, gross and tubby in his khaki, who showed the tenderness of an angel and the insight of a demigod in his dealings with shell-shocked men--victims of War's dire curse, hysteria--whose limbs and members, flaccidly limp, or strangely twisted and distorted, refused to obey the bidding of their owners' brains. Who, seized by epilepsy, would fall down foaming, or weep and sob like heart-wrung women; or stumble in their gait and speech like the infant members of a Kindergarten; or sit, staring vacantly, lost in a grey dream of infinite bewilderment--as Teddy used to sit--as Teddy was sitting now.....

"Helpless and hopeless, beyond the aid of Science, dead to the voice or touch of old, sweet love, seemingly unhelped by prayer. Until--just as the stopped watch begins to tick on the removal of some globule of oil, or speck of dust that clogged the mechanism--the paralysed nerve thrills once more into life, the unlocated lesion heals, the infinitesimal blood-clot dissipates, and the man rises up, sane, freed from bonds, healed of his infirmity."

Thus Wyers, as many other men no less great have said before and will say after him, honestly trying to deal with the problem that to the end of all Time will baffle the human race: "And how or why that change takes place cannot even be conjectured by any of us wiseacres.... Call it a Miracle if you will,--it's as good a word as any other. But until that Miracle takes place--and the Angel troubles the pool--Medicine and Surgery must twiddle their thumbs."

Were the waters moving now? Edward Yaill's new-made wife asked herself, timorously watching him. When he had spoken in that new, masterful tone--looked at her with that new glance, so cold and keen and observant, a little shiver had run through her underneath her blue alpaca. The Miracle, she knew in her soul, would spell for her Disaster. Secretly she must have wished that the Angel would never trouble the pool....

The best laid plans will gang agley. Nurse Burtonshaw, formally relieved of her duties by ukase from the Chief Matron on the Front in France, had quitted the Convalescent Camp on the previous afternoon. Two or three letters had been brought in on Number 80's breakfast-tray that morning.... A bill from a Bond Street tailor, a communication from Cox's Bank, London, and a square envelope of thick ribbed linen note with the Cauldstanes postmark, addressed in a clear, firm handwriting--a letter that would, one conjectures--but for the interposition of Destiny,--have joined its fellows in that Pandora casket, the Japanese Box.

Teddy, always indifferent where correspondence was concerned, had not had time to read the letters, hurrying to tie the Knot that takes so much undoing. He had thrust his mail hastily into a breast-pocket of his Service jacket--it would well keep till by and by. Now he fished the letters out and laid them on the clean coarse napery of the breakfast-table, with another envelope containing two official leaflets badly printed on thin yellowish paper, duly stamped and _viséd_ by Military Authority, and having names and personal details filled in with red ink. Ensuring to Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Angus Sholto Yaill, etc., etc., late C.O. Tweedburgh Regiment of Infantry, Discharged from the Convalescent Hospital Camp B---- Base, and Proceeding Home on (indefinite) Leave--as to Lucy Alice Burtonshaw T.N. of such and such a Nursing Detachment. Invalided Home from Service in France under the British Red Cross--transit at the expense of the British Government, per steamer and rail to Folkestone, London and Coombe Bay, Devonshire. The passes arrested Yaill's eye. He did not open the letters. He thrust them back in his pocket; and said with a glance at the new, cheap silver wrist-watch that had been the wedding-gift of his bride:

"We have just time to catch the boat without hurrying you, I think, dear!"

And so they had gone out by the _Couronne's_ side-entrance to the debilitated fiacre that waited on the cobblestones in the cold bright forenoon, and for the moment the guilty fears that throbbed under the blue alpaca were lulled to treacherous rest....

Old friends--these chiefly warriors going back on Blighty leave--came up to Colonel Yaill upon the Folkestone boat, with hearty greetings and crushing hand-grips. Service and Club acquaintances saluted and spoke. People were frightfully glad to see Yaill looking so beany, and generally tophole.... Every one was expecting soon to hear of his going back to the Front.... Meanwhile a rest--well-earned, by the Living Tinker!--discreetly combined with recreation, would soon set him on his legs. Country-house Bridge, and pillow-ragging, or London jazz and champagne-parties only good for lieutenants.... A bit of huntin' and a pleasant house-party just the thing, etc., what? ... Shooting and fishing had generally gone to the dogs, all the junior keepers having been called up--but there were woodcock and snipe and hares--that place of yours in Cumberland must be stiff with 'em! and up North--the Gala Water--or at a pinch--(the speaker twinkled knowingly)--the Rushet where it ran through the Kerr's Arbour property,--might supply a decent fish or two....

So, as the Folkestone steamer pushed through the crowded War-traffic of the English Channel waters, chaperoned by the dim grey shape of a T.B. destroyer,--watched from the air by a pilot seaplane,--the desultory chatter ran on.... With a reference or so to the War news of the month-end; the German aircraft-raid on the Kentish coast, the Arabs of the Senussi dispersed in West Egypt, the impending declaration of War by Albania on Austria: winding up with a proposed adjournment to the bar for drinks; though Government-controlled Scotch, thirty-five under proof--and Government-brewed malt-liquor--cursed rotten swipes--eh, what? ...

The speaker pulled himself up with a surprised glance at the fresh-coloured young woman in the white straw hat and the pale blue alpaca gown peeping from underneath a starred Regulation cloak, who had laid her rather large ungloved hand on the arm of the fellow-officer addressed, saying:

"No! ... It wouldn't be good for you! ... Please not, Teddy!"

"Beg pardon, Nurse! ... I thought my friend alone. Didn't seem to realise you'd got him on a lead. Quite right to give me the tip. Colonel, the invitation's off! ... Unless you'll pledge me in something soft; lemon-squash or ginger-beer!--pretty rotten, I expect!--or tea, or coffee. Perhaps Nurse'll join?" He thought as he screwed his eyeglasses tighter: "_What glorious hair! ... My favourite colour.... Yaill strikes me as rather a lucky kind of chap!_" ...

"No, thank you!" Lucy drew herself up and looked at her husband.

With that possessive hand upon his arm, Yaill hesitated the fraction of an instant, then took the header:

"'No thanks!' for both Mrs. Yaill and myself.... We breakfasted rather late, didn't we, Lucy? ... Let me introduce Major Scales-Packard, my wife...."

"Awfully delighted!"

The eyeglass of Scales-Packard, who knew Katharine Forbis,--leaped out of its orbit as his eyebrows shot up under the peak of his cap. He grew red,--stammered something congratulatory, saluted and speedily vanished. And Lucy breathed more freely. Dimly she sensed that she had stepped across the frontiers of a new, and possibly hostile country. That man, Teddy's friend, had looked at her--when Teddy had introduced him,--as though she had been guilty of child-stealing....

Had she? ... The question probed to the quick, so that she paled and shivered; and found relief in the solicitude her convalescent displayed: permitting Teddy in his new role of guardian and protector, to envelop her in plaids and waterproofs, to find her a seat upon the smutty leeward side of the grimy after-deck saloon-cabin--and supply her with Captain's biscuits and tea, both of War's villainous brand. Her mental qualms would have been justified had she overheard Scales-Packard confiding to numerous acquaintances on board:

"See that tall, good-lookin' man with a blue Hospital brassard? ... That's Yaill, late C.O. of the Tweedburgh Regiment! Gassed and shell-shocked last September somewhere north of Loos.... Married his nurse at the Base C.O.C. and comin' home--poor silly blighter!--to break it to the finest woman God ever made--who's waited for him years and years."

XV

There had been--Yaill remembered, staring into the red-gold heart of the fire, where sapphire and violet and emerald flames played over the burning turfs and hissing oaken billets, making as they devoured them a little purring sound;--there had been a little hitch over baggage when they got to Folkestone. Two heavy strapped cowhide trunks, recovered from Regimental Headquarters; now found to be lacking some necessary red or blue chalk lettering,--were nearly being shipped back to the Base. Battered, mildewed, smeared with whitewash, they presented a deplorable appearance on the truck with Teddy's brand new Gladstone, (War manufacture, of American cloth masquerading as leather) and Lucy's green canvas-covered box.

The keys of the trunks had long been lost,--necessitating an explanation with the Representative of Customs. But Yaill had needed nothing that those leather trunks might contain during the three days they had spent in London, on the third floor of a vast caravanserai of a hotel, looking on the myriad-voiced Strand. But he had sent for a locksmith on the second day, and had fresh keys fitted. And on the morning subsequent to the arrival of the bride and bridegroom at the Tor View Hotel, Coombe Bay, he had gone into the dressing-room adjacent to their nuptial chamber, fresh from his bath, rumpled as to the hair,--and opened one of the battered receptacles in search of a khaki tie. Quite haphazard, and as chance would have it--on the top--between a mouldy Field Service mess-frock, and some khaki shirts with burnt holes in them made by red-hot shell-splinters--he had found a silver-mounted leather photograph-frame, much tarnished, and gone white in spots....

The frame held a portrait of large panel-size, and at the back was a strut to stand it up by. He lifted the frame and set it up against the lid of the open trunk, on the top of the mouldy clothes, and Ah!--what a warm, rich, fragrant gale of memories blew through the man's sick brain and desolate heart as those dear eyes of Katharine's looked candid love into his own! Something like a cry escaped him--he choked it back fiercely....

"Did you call me, Teddy?" asked his wife from the next room, where she sat in a blue Japanese kimono, brushing her wonderful red-gold hair before a modest display of nickel-silver-backed brushes and toilet-bottles. For through the partly-closed door of the dressing-room, or so it seemed to Lucy, she had heard a woman's name.... And to Lucy's Nonconformist mind, the woman a man cries out for must be his lawful married helpmeet; and if she isn't, then the wife has got a (legal, mind you!) right to know the reason why.... "Did you want me, dear?" she reiterated,--and saw reflected in the toilette-glass behind her blue kimono-covered shoulders and round fresh country face--from which the bloom had faded suddenly,--the half-open door of the dressing-room close softly, and heard the key turn in the lock upon the other side....

The chambermaid came through with Yaill's shaving-water, and said that the bath was ready for the lady; and Lucy went at once. Purposely prolonging her matutinal ablutions, so that Teddy had dressed and gone down to the coffee-room by the time she returned, much more composed in mind....

When she came down the wide shallow staircase with its artificial palms in mock-bronze vessels, and British-made Turkey carpet,--he was waiting for her there.... The manager, an alleged Swiss, had given them a table in the window, and--sensing the honeymooners with the infallible instinct of his tribe--enclosed it with lincrusta screens--and placed by each cover a sprig of white heather of the artificial kind. It is strange how Fate and Destiny, twin-balances of the scales in which poor human lives are weighed, will be tipped one way or the other by gewgaws such as this....

Within the glass of the photo-frame, against the knee of the tall, erect, womanly-gracious figure, was a withered sprig of the real white heather, plucked on the moors above Kerr's Arbour, and placed there by Katharine.... Against the raging heart of Yaill lay Katharine's latest letter.... He had found it on the dressing-glass with the notification from Cox's Bank, and the Bond Street tailor's bill.

He knew that letter word for word. He saw the short, poignant sentences in the beloved handwriting written on the walls of the coffee-room, across the imitation-tapestry paper; on the white tablecloth and serviettes; on the alleged Swiss manager's badly-starched shirt-front, and smug dingy-pale face.

He refused ham and eggs; broke War-bread toast, and drank down cup after cup of doubtful coffee, unseen by Lucy, who was fluttered by the observant lorgnette of a large lady, breakfasting with one obese elderly gentleman in the silver-grey of the Local Coast Defence Corps--and two tanned young men in khaki with shabby Sam Browne belts and sword-straps, sufficiently like the large lady, to be, as in fact they were, her sons....

Now the large important lady--upon the shoulder-straps of whose blue serge jacket glittered the four-pointed gold star of a Commandant above the numeral of the Detachment--the honoured title of the Red Cross Society and the name of her County--happened to be Lady Ridgely, Commandant of a Convalescent Hospital for Private Soldiers, a large white mansion standing in neatly-kept grounds, above the Tor View Hotel, on the same side of the Torcliff Road.... For certain reasons of her own Lady Ridgely had taken to breakfasting at the Tor View Hotel; and being a rigid martinet _re_ the observance of Regulations, the sight of Lucy's pale-blue alpaca Foreign Service Off Duty dress had very much shocked her,--worn in combination with an officer so manifestly an invalid: "For even without his Hospital brassard, which he must have forgotten to take off--the man looked simply ghastly, my dear!"

Thus Lady Ridgely afterwards, per telephone, (the receiver being held by her sister-in-law, the Deputy-Assistant Director-General of the L.L.W.S.L. at the London Headquarters)--and a cousin, as Fate would have it, of the protagonist. Of whom Lady Ridgely took no note at first, being wholly absorbed in the blue alpaca--and not unconscious of the fact that its wearer was embarrassed by the rigid glare of her lorgnetted eye.

When at length she lowered the instrument, it was to signal the Coffee-Room Manager, alleged Swiss, who hurried to her side....

"Kindly tell me the names of those two persons breakfasting at the table in the window. The invalid officer and the pale blue nurse," commanded Lady Ridgely. And the alleged Swiss Manager of the Coffee-Room, relieved--for very private reasons, to find another than himself the object of Lady Ridgely's lorgnette--bounded away to consult the Visitor's Book in the vestibule-office--returned with the information, was thanked, and gratefully effaced himself. Subsequently interned under the Defence Of The Realm Act, upon conviction of communication by flashlight with certain undersea activities in the Channel--we are to see his pasty German face no more.

The dreary meal came to an end. When his wife rose, Yaill went with her to the staircase-foot and said in a quiet, level tone:

"You were so--kind as to put some letters of mine away in a box for me.... Might I ask you to be so good as to let me have them now?"

She tried, poor goose!--a mingling of self-assertion and coquetry:

"Give 'em you now? ... I like that tone of yours.... Now that we're married and one flesh ... I'm not at all so sure I shall!"

He looked her full in the eyes and said to her quietly:

"You will go upstairs to our--to your room,--and bring them to me here!"

"Will I? ... Oh! well,--I suppose I must, since you're so set on it."

She dropped her head like a sulky child, and mounted the wide stairs slowly. Yaill stood at the stairfoot watching, while the blue alpaca was in sight. She did not return. He followed, and knocked at the door of their bedroom. She cried "Come in" and he went in, to find her with a tear-stained, sulky, mulish face, standing at the bedside.... The Japanese workbox--a tawdry thing of imitation lacquer--was lying on the counterpane. She gulped to him that she had mislaid the key that opened the stupid thing. He responded:

"Break open the box. I will buy you--others!"

"My hands aren't strong enough!"

She feigned that those broad, strong dairywoman's hands that had put up many a twelve-pound frail of muslin-enwrapped pats for the market,--that had held down delirious men upon their Hospital beds--were too feeble to break the flimsy lock of Japanese manufacture. He accepted her explanation with unmoved countenance.

"Then be good enough to allow me!"

The letters were in his hands. But even as they poured forth from their camphor-scented prison, so from his wife's swollen, trembling mouth poured a stream of wordy defence. He could hear the voice pleading now with its broad, soft Somerset accent....

"How was I to be sure she told the truth? ... And didn't she ask me--and didn't you too--to put by the letters? ... Haven't I said to you over and over, when you swore how much you loved me. '_Tell me, Teddy, on your oath! Are you sure you're not engaged?_'--And you always swore you weren't, and that till you met me you'd never known what it meant to love any woman! Am I to be blamed--called wicked and treacherous--because I believed you? Oh, Ted!"

He had ground his heel into the carpet beneath his feet, and set his teeth to keep back the curses he longed to shriek at her. That plump, fresh-coloured, well-proportioned, deadly-commonplace young woman would never know what murderous frenzy boiled in her Teddy's blood, and tautened his muscles then. But he crushed down the ugly, murderous impulse and said to her with elaborate gentleness:

"I do not blame you.... I have not reproached you with--anything. And--I have spoiled your box, and you were fond of it. You shall have one ten times as good as soon as they can send it from Liberty's."

So, with the promise of a new box instead of the smashed one, he carried away his letters, and went up on the moors where he might be alone to read.... And the larks were singing in the pale harebell skies of late January.... And the spicy smell of the larches, the raw-red trunks of the pines, and the rasp of the wintry ling underfoot reminded him of Scotland. And the rust-brown of the frost-nipped bracken was the shade of Katharine's hair. And the colour of the little streams, running crystal-bright over dead drowned leaves and red-brown Devon sandstone had the very, very colour of those beloved eyes.... Stars that would never now look down upon the slumber of their child....

To Wyers of Harley Street, Lieutenant-Colonel (T) R.A.M.C., Consulting Surgeon attached to the Staff of the Base Hospital in connection with the Convalescent Camp at B---- the Chief Medical Officer, was at that moment saying--Wyers having just returned by 'plane from a professional visit to the Front:

"You know Yaill left us for Blighty on Tuesday morning? I'm wondering whether it wouldn't have been better to have kept him on here a bit? Or have sent him to that Hydro at Les Bonnes Eaux."

"Instead--" Wyers flicked off the ash of his inevitable Trichinopoli, and deftly picked up a little sheaf of papers clipped together from the big leather-topped writing-table in the C.M.O.'s official room. He reversed the chart, to glance with cool professional interest at the history-sheet behind it, and turned back to the doctor's card with the inky scrawl beneath the heading:

"Discharged.... Convalescent" ... and the date of three days back.

"Instead of striking him off the sheet with leave to get married! I don't see why not, for my part. He's as well as ever he will be, unless--you know my theory! And marriage may help him. Should, certainly--supposing him to have got hold of a woman of the right sort."

"Ah, but has he? Query,--is she?" The Chief Medical Officer, deftly packing fragrant Navy Cut into a well-burned briar-root, looked up from his deft thumb-work, under an anxiously-puckered brow. "You're not aware that he's married the chart-nurse of No. 8. Hut Ward C.O.C. That little Burtonshaw--you remember Burtonshaw? Blonde and blue-eyed, faintly frisky, but a model of provincial propriety for all of that. And a good nurse--to do her justice!--now discharged invalided, after two years' Foreign Service with her unit of the Red Cross."

"H'm!" The nod of Wyers conveyed his knowledge of Nurse Burtonshaw. "There's only one thing to say for a match of that kind. It may turn out successfully. One hopes of course it will. But for a man of that stamp--ultra refined, highly-bred, and used--going by what one has heard--" whatever Wyers had heard, he retained with Sphinx-like taciturnity,--"to a very different type of woman,--Happiness will not depend on his ultimate return to the normal,--do you follow? But on his stopping exactly where he is. For the Miracle wouldn't benefit him--under the present circumstances. Better for him that the Angel should never trouble the pool!"

Thus Oppenshaw Wyers, who may or may not have heard the name of Katharine Forbis. But the Miracle had happened, Yaill had returned to the normal.... And the thin chance of happiness in an unequal union with the poor thing he had married--lay shattered into fragments at his unlucky feet.

Sitting on a crumbling ledge of the grey-pink cliffs of Devon, he read his love's letters--that had come so much too late. Such fond womanly letters--and gallant and courageous, written from her Receiving Hospital in France, and from the Base--and from a London Nursing Home and from Kerr's Arbour.

Here was one dated from the Receiving Hospital in Belgium in the previous April. It shall be quoted here:

"MY MAN OF ALL MEN....

"To-day I met a Tommy (one of a great many) on the frightfully muddy road that leads from Our Shop to the fighting-line. We were bringing down wounded--(Canadians chiefly). This long-legged, gaunt, black-a-vised man was going up with the Relief. A Jew unmistakably--going by his leading feature--and in evident trouble about a chum who had got crumped. So your Kathy, wangling a spare seat from under an orderly--undertook to convey Private Abrahams' chum back to Hospital...."

Added some hours later: