Chapter 14

And then, I must ask you to believe, we fell to talking “shop.” I knew a little more about cholera than did Fitz, and we got quite interested in our conversation. It is, I have found, only in books that men use the last moment to advantage. Death has been my road-fellow all through life, and no man has yet died in my arms saying quite the right thing. Some of them made a joke, others were merely commonplace, as all men really are whether living or dying.

When the time came for me to turn back, Fitz had said nothing fit for post-mortem reproduction. We had talked unmitigated “shop,” except the few odd observations I have set down.

We shook hands, and I turned back at once. As I galloped I looked back, and in the light of the great tropical moon I saw Fitz sitting forward in his saddle as the horse rose to the slope of a hill, galloping away into the night, into the unknown, on his mission of mercy. At his heels rode the Sikh, enormous, silent, soldierly.

During my steady run home I thought of those things concerning my craft which required immediate consideration. Would it be necessary to send down to India for help? Cholera at Capoo might mean cholera everywhere in this new unknown country. What about the women and children? The Wandering Jew was abroad; would he wander in our direction, with the legendary curse following on his heels? Was I destined to meet this dread foe a third time? I admit that the very thought caused a lump to rise in my throat. For I love Thomas Atkins. He is manly and honest according to his lights. It does not hurt me very much to see him with a bullet through his lungs or a sabre cut through the collar-bone down to the same part of his anatomy. But it does hurt me exceedingly to see honest Thomas die between the sheets--the death of any common civilian beggar. Thomas is too good for that.

It was nearly three o'clock in the morning when I rode into the palace square. All round I saw the sentinels, their bayonets gleaming in the moonlight. A man was walking backwards and forwards in the middle of the square by himself. When he heard me he came towards me. At first I thought that it was my servant waiting to take the horse, but a moment later I recognized Charlie Thurkow--recognized him by his fair hair, for he was hatless. At the same time my syce roused himself from slumber in the shadow of an arch, and ran forward to my stirrup.

“Come to the hospital!” said Thurkow, the moment I alighted. His voice was dull and unnatural. I once heard a man speak in the same voice while collecting his men for a rush which meant certain death. The man was duly killed, and I think he was trembling with fear when he ran to his death.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

We walked--almost ran--to the hospital, a long low building in the palace compound. Charlie Thurkow led the way to a ward which we had never used--a ward I had set apart for infectious cases. A man was dozing in a long chair in the open window. As we entered he rose hastily and brought a lamp. We bent over a bed--the only one occupied. The occupant was a man I did not know. He looked like a Goorkha, and he was dying. In a few moments I knew all that there was to know. I knew that the Wandering Jew had passed our way.

“Yes,” I said, rising from my knees at the bedside; “we have it.”

Of the days that followed it is not my intention to say much. A woman once told me that I was afraid of nothing. She was mistaken. If she chance to read this and recognize it, I hope she will believe the assertion: I am, and always have been, afraid of cholera--in India. In Europe it is a different matter. The writing of those days would be unpleasant to me; the reading would be still less pleasant to the reader.

Brigadier-General Thurkow rose to the occasion, as we all expected him to do. It is one thing to send a man to a distant danger, and quite another to go with him into a danger which is close at hand. Charlie Thurkow and I were the only two doctors on the spot, and before help could reach us we should probably all be dead or cured. There was no shirking now. Charlie and I were at work night and day, and in the course of thirty-six hours Charlie got interested in it. He reached the fighting point--that crisis in an epidemic of which doctors can tell--that point where there is a certain glowing sense of battle over each bed--where death and the doctor see each other face to face--fight hand to hand for the life.

The doctor loses his interest in the patient as a friend or a patient; all his attention is centred on the life as a life, and a point to be scored against the adversary Death.

We had a very bad time for two days. At the end of that time I had officers bearing Her Majesty's commission serving under me as assistant nurses, and then the women came into it. The first to offer herself was the wife of a non-commissioned officer in the Engineers, who had been through Netley. I accepted her. The second woman was Elsie Matheson. I refused point blank.

“Sooner or later,” she said, looking at me steadily with something in her eyes which I could not make out, “you will have to take me.”

“Does your father know you have come to me?” I retorted.

“Yes; I came with his consent.”

I shook my head and returned to my writing. I was filling in a list of terrific length. She did not go away, but stood in front of me with a certain tranquillity which was unnatural under the circumstances.

“Do you want help?” she asked calmly.

“God knows I do.”

“But not mine--?”

“Not yet, Elsie. I have not got so far as that yet.”

I did not look up, and she stood quite still over me--looking down at me--probably noting that the hair was getting a little thin on the top of my head. This is not a joke. I repeat she was probably noting that. People do note such things at such moments.

“If you do not take me,” she said, in a singularly even voice, “I shall go up to Capoo. Can you not see that that is the only thing that can save me from going to Capoo--or going mad?”

I laid aside my pen, and looked up into her face, which she made no pretence of hiding from me. And I saw that it was as she said.

“You can go to work at once,” I said, “under Mrs. Martin, in ward number four.”

When she had left me I did not go on filling in the list from the notes in my pocket-book. I fell to wasting time instead. So it was Fitz. I was not surprised, but I was very pleased. I was not surprised, because I have usually found that the better sort of woman has as keen a scent for the good men as we have. And I thought of old Fitz--the best man I ever served with--fighting up at Capoo all alone, while I fought down in the valley. There was a certain sense of companionship in the thought, though my knowledge and experience told me that our chances of meeting again were very small indeed.

We had not heard from Capoo. The conclusion was obvious: they had no one to send.

Elsie Matheson soon became a splendid nurse. She was quite fearless--not with dash, but with the steady fearlessness that comes from an ever-present sense of duty, which is the best. She was kind and tender, but she was a little absent. In spirit she was nursing at Capoo; with us she was only in the body.

When Charlie Thurkow heard that she had gone into ward number four, he displayed a sudden, singular anger.

“It's not fit for her,” he said. “How could you do it?”

And I noticed that, so far as lay in his power, he kept the worst cases away from number four.

It occasionally happens in life that duty is synonymous with inclination; not often, of course, but occasionally. I twisted inclination round into duty, and put Elsie to night work, while Charlie Thurkow kept the day watches. I myself was forced to keep both as best I could.

Whenever I went into number four ward at night before (save the mark) going to bed, I found Elsie Matheson waiting for me. It must be remembered that she was quite cut off from the little world that surrounded us in the palace. She had no means of obtaining news. Her only link with the outer universe was an occasional patient brought in more dead than alive, and too much occupied with his own affairs to trouble about those of other people.

“Any news?” she would whisper to me as we went round the beds together; and I knew that she meant Capoo. Capoo was all the world for her. It is strange how some little unknown spot on the earth will rise up and come into our lives never to leave the memory again.

“Nothing,” I replied with a melancholy regularity.

Once only she broke through her reserve--through the habit of bearing pain in silence which she had acquired by being so much among dying men.

“Have you no opinion?” she asked, with a sharpness in her voice which I forgave as I heard it.

“Upon what subject?”

“Upon... the chances.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“He is a good man--there is no better in India--that is all I can say. Just hold the candle a little closer, will you, please? Thanks--yes--he is quite dead.”

We passed on to the next bed.

“It is both his duty and his inclination to take care of himself,” I said as we went--going back with her in the spirit to Capoo.

“How do you know it is his inclination?” she asked guardedly.

And I knew that I was on the right path. The vague message given to “any one” by Fitz as he rode by my side that night--only a week before, although it seemed to be months--that message was intended for Elsie. It referred to something that had gone before, of which I had no knowledge.

“Because he told me so,” I answered.

And then we went on with our work. Charlie Thurkow was quite right. I knew that all along. It was not fit for her. Elsie was too young, too gentle and delicate for such a place as ward number four. I make no mention of her beauty, for I took no heed of it then. It was there--but it had nothing to do with this matter. Also I have never seen why women who are blessed or cursed by beauty should be more considered in such matters, as they undoubtedly are.

I was up and about all that night. The next morning rose gloomily, as if the day was awakening unrefreshed by a feverish sleep. The heat had been intense all night, and we could look for nothing but an intensification of it when the sun rose with a tropical aggressiveness. I wanted to get my reports filled in before lying down to snatch a little rest, and was still at work when Charlie Thurkow came in to relieve me. He looked ghastly, but we all did that, and I took no notice. He took up the ward-sheets and glanced down the columns.

“Wish I had gone to Capoo,” he muttered. “It couldn't have been worse than this.”

I had finished my writing, and I rose. As I did so Charlie suddenly clapped his hand to his hip.

“I say!” he exclaimed, “I say!”

He looked at me in a stupid way, and then suddenly he tottered towards me, and I caught him.

“Old chap!” he exclaimed thickly, with his face against my shoulder, “I've got it. Take me to number four.”

He had seen by the list that there was a vacant cot in number four.

I carried him there, stumbling as I went, for I was weak from want of sleep.

Elsie had just gone to her room, and Mrs. Martin was getting the vacant bed ready. I was by that bedside all day. All that I knew I did for Charlie Thurkow. I dosed myself with more than one Indian drug to stimulate the brain--to keep myself up to doing and thinking. This was a white man's life, and God forgive me if I set undue store upon it as compared with the black lives we were losing daily. This was a brain that could think for the rest. There was more than one man's life wrapped up in Charlie Thurkow's. One can never tell. My time might come at any moment, and the help we had sent for could not reach us for another fortnight.

Charlie said nothing. He thanked me at intervals for some little service rendered, and nearly all the time his eyes were fixed upon the clock. He was reckoning with his own life. He did not want to die in the day, but in the night. He was deliberately spinning out his life till the night nurse came on duty. I suppose that in his superficial, happy-go-lucky way he loved her.

I pulled him through that day, and we managed to refrain from waking Elsie up. At nightfall she came to her post. When she came into the room I was writing a note to the brigadier. I watched her face as she came towards us. There was only distress upon it--nothing else. Even women--even beautiful women grow callous; thank Heaven! Charlie Thurkow gave a long sigh of relief when she came.

My note was duly sent to the brigadier, and five minutes afterwards I went out on to the verandah to speak to him. I managed to keep him out of the room by a promise that he should be sent for later. I made no pretence about it, and he knew that it was only the question of a few hours when he walked back across the palace square to his quarters. I came back to the verandah, and found Elsie waiting to speak to me.

“Will he die?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Quite sure?”

There was a strange glitter in her eyes which I could not understand.

“Quite,” I answered, forgetting to be professional. She looked at me for a moment as if she were about to say something, and then she apparently decided not to say it.

I went towards a long chair which stood on the verandah.

“I shall lie down here,” I said, “and sleep for an hour.”

“Yes, do,” she answered almost gratefully.

“You will wake me if you want me?”

“Yes.”

“Wake me when... the change comes.”

“Yes.”

In a few moments I was asleep. I do not know what woke me up. It seemed to be very late. All the sounds of barrack life were hushed. The moon was just up. I rose to my feet and turned to the open window. But there I stopped.

Elsie was kneeling by Charlie Thurkow's bed. She was leaning over him, and I could see that she was kissing him. And I knew that she did not love him.

I kicked against the chair purposely. Elsie turned and looked towards me, with her hand still resting on Charlie Thurkow's forehead. She beckoned me to go to them, and I saw at once that he was much weaker. She was stroking his hair gently. She either gave me credit for great discernment, or she did not care what I thought.

I saw that the time had come for me to fulfil my promise to the brigadier, and went out of the open window to send one of the sentinels for him. As I was speaking to the man I heard the clatter of a horse's feet, and a Sikh rode hard into the palace square. I went towards him, and he, recognizing me, handed me a note which he extracted from the folds of his turban. I opened the paper and read it by the light of the moon. My heart gave a leap in my throat. It was from Fitz. News at last from Capoo.

“We have got it under,” he wrote. “I am coming down to help you. Shall be with you almost as soon as the bearer.”

As I walked back towards the hospital the brigadier came running behind me, and caught me up as I stepped in by the window. I had neither time nor inclination just then to tell him that I had news from Capoo. The Sikh no doubt brought official news which would reach their destination in due course. And in the mean time Charlie Thurkow was dying.

We stood round that bed and waited silent, emotionless for the angel. Charlie knew only too well that the end was very near. From time to time he smiled rather wearily at one or the other of us, and once over his face there came that strange look of a higher knowledge which I have often noted, as if he knew something that we did not--something which he had been forbidden to tell us.

While we were standing there the matting of the window was pushed aside, and Fitz came softly into the dimly lighted room. He glanced at me, but attempted no sort of salutation. I saw him exchange a long silent look with Elsie, and then he took his station at the bedside next to Elsie, and opposite to the brigadier, who never looked up.

Charlie Thurkow recognized him, and gave him one of those strangely patronizing smiles. Then he turned his sunken eyes towards Elsie. He looked at her with a gaze that became more and more fixed. We stood there for a few minutes--then I spoke.

“He is dead,” I said.

The brigadier raised his eyes and looked across to Fitz. For a second these two men looked down into each other's souls, and I suppose Fitz had his reward. I suppose the brigadier had paid his debt in full. I had been through too many painful scenes to wish to prolong this. So I turned away, and a general move was the result.

Then I saw that Elsie and Fitz had been standing hand-in-hand all the while.

So wags the world.

THROUGH THE GATE OF TEARS

Give us--ah! give us--but Yesterday!

In the old days, when the Mahanaddy was making her reputation, she had her tragedy. And Dr. Mark Ruthine has not forgotten it, nor forgiven himself yet. Doctors, like the rest of us, are apt to make a hideous mistake or two which resemble the stream anchors of a big steamer warping out into the Hooghly. We leave them behind, but we do not let go of them. They make a distinct difference to the course of our journey down the stream. Sometimes they hold us back; occasionally they swing us into the middle of the current, where there is no shoal. Like the stream anchors, they are always there, behind us, for our good.

Some few of the Mahanaddy passengers have remarked that Mark Ruthine invariably locks his cabin-door whenever he leaves the little den that serves him for surgery and home. This is the outward sign of an inward unforgotten sore.

This, by the way, is not a moral tale. Virtue does not triumph, nor will vice be crushed. It is the mere record of a few mistakes, culminating in Mark Ruthine's blunder--a little note on human nature without vice in it; for there is little vice in human nature if one takes the trouble to sift that which masquerades as such.

It was, therefore, in old days, long ago, on an outward voyage to Madras, that Miss Norah Hood was placed under the care of the captain, hedged safely round by an engagement to an old playmate, and shipped off to the land where the Anglo-Saxon dabbles in tragedy.

Norah is fortunately not a common name. Mark Ruthine's countenance--a still one--changes ever so slightly whenever he hears the name or sees it in print. Another outward sign, and, as such, naturally small.

When the captain was introduced by a tall and refined old clergyman to Miss Norah Hood, he found himself shaking hands with a grave young person of unassertive beauty. Hers was the loveliness of the violet, which is apt to pall in this modern day--to aggravate, and to suggest wanton waste. For feminine loveliness is on the wane--marred, like many other good things, by over-education. Norah Hood was a typical country parson's daughter, who knew the right and did it, ignored the wrong and refused to believe in it.

The captain was busy with his Mahanaddy. He looked over his shoulder, and, seeing Mark Ruthine, called him by a glance.

“This is my doctor,” he said, to the scholarly parson. “He will be happy to see that Miss Hood is comfortably settled among us. I am naturally rather a busy man until we leave the Start Light behind us.”

So Mark Ruthine hovered about, and discreetly looked the other way when the moment of parting came. He suspected, shrewdly enough, that Norah was the eldest of a large family--one less to feed and clothe. An old story. As the great ship glided gently away from the quay--in those days the Mahanaddy loaded at Southampton--he went and stood beside Norah Hood. Not that he had anything to say to her; but his calling of novelist, his experience of doctor, taught him that a silent support is what women sometimes want. They deal so largely in words that a few unexplained deeds sometimes refresh them.

He stood there until the tall, slim form in the rusty black coat was no longer discernible. Then he made a little movement and spoke.

“Have you been to your cabin?” he asked. “Do you know where it is?”

“I have not seen it,” she answered composedly. “The number of my berth is seventy-seven.”

There was a singular lack of fluster. It was impossible to divine that she had never trod the deck of a big steamer before--that her walk in life had been limited to the confines of a tiny, remote parish in the eastern counties. Ruthine glanced at her. He saw that she was quite self-possessed, with something more complete than the self-possession of good breeding. It was quite obvious that this woman--for Norah Hood was leaving girlhood behind--had led a narrow, busy life. She had obviously lost the habit of attaching much importance to her own feelings, her own immediate fate or passing desires, because more pressing matters had so long absorbed her. There was a faint suggestion of that self-neglect, almost amounting to self-contempt, which characterizes the manner of overburdened motherhood. This would account for her apparent ignorance of the fact that she was beautiful.

As he led the way down below Ruthine glanced at her again. He had an easy excuse for so doing on the brass-bound stairs, where landsmen feet may slip. He was, above all things, a novelist, although he wrote under another and greater name, and those around him knew him not. He looked more at human minds than human bodies, and he was never weary of telling his friends that he was a poor doctor. He concluded--indeed, her father had almost told him--that she was going out to be married. But he needed not to be told that she was going to marry a man whom she did not love. He found that out for himself in a flash of his quiet grey eyes. An expert less skilful than himself could see that Norah Hood did not know what love was. Some women are thus--some few, God help them! go through life in the same ignorance.

He took her down to her cabin--a small one, which she was fortunate enough to have to herself. He told her the hours of the meals, the habits of the ship, and the customs of the ocean. He had a grave way with him, this doctor, and could put on a fatherly manner when the moment needed it. Norah listened with a gravity equal to his own. She listened, moreover, with an intelligence which he noted.

“If you will come,” he said, “on deck again, I will introduce you to a very kind friend of mine--Mrs. Stellasis. You have heard of John Stellasis?”

“No,” answered Norah, rather indifferently.

“You will some day--all the world will. Stellasis is one of our great men in India. Mrs. Stellasis is a great lady.”

This was a prophecy.

They went on deck, and Mark Ruthine effected the introduction. He stayed beside them for a few moments, and did not leave them until they were deeply engrossed in a conversation respecting babies in general, and in particular a small specimen which Mrs. Stellasis had lately received.

An Indian-going steamer is rather like a big box of toys. She goes bumping down Channel, rolling through the Bay, and, by the time that Gibraltar is left behind, she has shaken her passengers into their places.

Norah Hood shook down very quietly into the neighbourhood of Mrs. Stellasis, who liked her and began to understand her. Mrs. Stellasis--a good woman and a mother--pitied Norah Hood with an increasing pity; for as the quiet Mediterranean days wore to a close she had established without doubt the fact that the engagement to the old playmate was a sordid contract entered into in all innocence by a girl worthy of a better fate. But Mrs. Stellasis hoped for the best. She thought of the “specimen” slumbering in a berth six sizes too large for it, and reflected that Norah Hood might snatch considerable happiness out of the contract after all.

“Do you know anything of the old playmate?” Mrs. Stellasis asked Dr. Ruthine suddenly one afternoon in the Red Sea.

Mark Ruthine looked into the pleasant face and saw a back to the question--many backs, extending away into a perspective of feminine speculation.

“No,” he answered slowly.