with a crucifix in his hands, and the sight of his neat compact figure
and intent scholarly face would recall to me his other holy calling,
and make me wonder. He was so unlike the big priest in the black
cassock with the white head bandage, who strode through the hospital
grounds swinging a walking stick, and who had won the Croix de Guerre
with three palms for bravery in the field. Guerin had looked to me,
when he first came to us, a bit of a prig. He had a slightly quizzical
expression; his manner was dry and impersonal; but he was on duty at
six in the morning, and although he was supposed to go off twelve
hours later, he was usually there busy with Pim until late in the
evening, swabbing tables, boiling up instruments, or writing letters to
someone’s dictation.
They were a very satisfactory couple. They scarcely spoke to each
other, but they worked together as if they had been born for this, and
this alone--this silent, quick, watchful, unceasing battle with death;
this struggle to save men’s lives, by doing small things accurately
at the right moment--without fuss, without noise, without sign of
fatigue or hurry, or nervousness or despair. Their hands, their feet,
their eyes never faltered and were never still. They made the same
calm, quick, exact movements, took no unnecessary steps, left nothing
undone. Yes, a curiously harmonious pair, this tall Englishwoman and
small sturdy Frenchman. But Guerin did more than Pim did, because he
understood more and had more to do. He believed in the Holy Catholic
Church and the Remission of Sins and the Life Everlasting. He had set
himself a task that he never mentioned. These wounded were not only
his countrymen, they were his children, and he considered himself
responsible for their immortal souls.
So he frowned and his small sharply-cut features took on a look of
added sharpness and his keen eyes grew suddenly alert when the
stretcher-bearers brought the Enfant de Malheur into the ward. He
didn’t interfere with Pim, but he watched. He didn’t warn her or try to
stop her, or keep her away from the lovely Greek god whom he knew to
be one of the damned and a fiend out of hell; but when she leaned over
the beautiful fierce chiselled face he was always on the watch. And
so he saw what Pim, who didn’t understand, couldn’t see. He saw that
this damné, this vile savage rat from the sewers of Paris, was puzzled,
bewildered, intimidated by Pim’s stolid impersonal gentleness. He saw
him gradually stop jumping to one side of the bed and take to wriggling
and squirming with acute discomfort under her candid gaze, and he heard
him muttering and snarling under his breath with exasperation at the
insufferable presence of this Madonna-like woman with the cold, white,
calm face. Guerin understood how uncomfortable the Enfant de Malheur
would be in the presence of the beautiful Mother of God, and he watched
him wriggle to avoid Pim’s cool maiden eyes. And so on the third day,
when the Apache beckoned Pim to come to him, Guerin was even more
surprised than Pim was, because he knew that the wicked brute in the
boy had been tamed by the power of Pim’s unconscious serenity. Pim
approached calmly. She was rather a stupid woman in some ways. “What is
it?” she asked in her virginal English voice. “Que voulez-vous?” And
Guerin, listening, watchful still, but with his tense face relaxed a
little, heard the Apache whisper as he pulled Pim down: “Come close.
I want to tell you something. I want to tell you,” said the child of
misfortune into Pim’s clean white ear, “that I have never deliberately
killed a woman in my life.”
And then Guerin heard Pim murmur quietly in her stiff polite way, as
if she were interviewing some well-meaning but unfortunate backsliding
parishioner in the Deanery: “I’m so glad to hear it.” And then the
fiend out of hell, incarnate in the sewer rat with the angel face, fell
back on his pillows with a sudden look of sharp self-disgust, and Pim
moved off down the ward about her business.
I don’t think it occurred to her to wonder what his phrase implied, or
how many women he had killed, as he would have called it, by accident,
or how many men with intent. I don’t believe she was aware of the
immense compliment he had paid her, or of having gained any victory
over him. She had no knowledge of vice or evil. She did not know that
he was truly one of the damned, and that his heart was black and heavy
with a sick black weight of fear that came sweeping over him in his
new weakness, and so next day, when he began to be frightened, she was
surprised by the wild gleams of fear that came and went in his eyes.
But Guerin knew. He was a student of men, and he knew that the Enfant
de Malheur was his brother, and believed in what he himself believed,
namely, in the Holy Catholic Church and the Life Everlasting, in God,
and the Mother of God, and the Holy Son of God, against whom he had
fought and blasphemed since the day he was born.
His condition, both physical and moral, grew rapidly worse after this.
Symptoms of gangrene set in. A second amputation was necessary, high
up the thigh, almost at the hip, and again Pim, who had followed her
patient to the operating room, was told to go away. She refused. She
stood there obstinately while streams of filth and obscenity spurted
from his beautiful pale mouth--putrid psychic sewage of the underworld
spouting from him like a fountain; but to the surgeon’s embarrassed,
irritated excuses she answered: “I don’t understand his language, so
what difference does it make?” and she took him back and put him gently
to bed.
But when he came to after the operation, there was a new look in his
eyes. Pim went white at the sight of it, and her hand, as she put the
long saline needle into his side, trembled, and she went in search of
Guerin.
“He is so frightened,” she said, “he is so afraid to die. I can’t bear
it. We must save him, Guerin.”
So they conspired to save him. There were forty beds in the hut,
and they were all full; but those two--Pim and Guerin--without fuss
multiplied themselves. No royal patient was ever nursed with greater
care than our Enfant de Malheur, but he grew worse, and his fear grew
worse. His fear increased until its presence filled the ward, and the
old greybeards in their beds turned away their faces and stopped their
ears to hide from it.
He began to sweat terribly. He began to toss and writhe. He began
to smell bad. Moods of blasphemous bravado alternated with fits of
uncontrollable panic. In the middle of a curse his teeth would begin to
chatter. Then suddenly his eyes would start from his head in terror,
and he would shriek for help and thrash out wildly till Pim came to him
or Guerin. Sometimes he sobbed like a child in Pim’s arms. More often
he raged at her, cursed her and Guerin and God. His bed became a centre
of obscenity. Foul odours, foul words, foul matter swirled round him,
and always there was that terror in his eyes, and the sweat pouring
down his body that was greenish now as if covered with slime. The
tattooed lady smiled through the slime on his back, and he would wave
his wasted arm and hit out with it, and the big letters seemed to shout
to Pim down the ward: Enfant de Malheur!
Finally he could not bear her near him, could not bear the sight of her
near his bed or the touch of her hands. One afternoon he yelled at
her to go away, leave him alone. She had maintained so far her stolid
serenity, but at that she broke down. I found her behind her screen at
the end of the ward with her shoulders shaking, her face twisting. It
was nine o’clock in the evening. I told her to go off duty at once.
“But he is going to die in the night,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“And he is terribly frightened.”
“I know.”
“His fear is so ugly. It frightens me and the others, all the old men.
We must do something. Can’t we do something?”
“Perhaps Guerin can do something. You and I, what can we do?”
“If only he weren’t so sane. If only he didn’t realise. But his fever
seems to have sharpened his wits. He knows he is going to die. He never
forgets for a second. He hasn’t had a wink of sleep. Dying usually
slows down, blurs everything, brings a merciful dullness; but for him
there is no such mercy. His nerves are live wires. Morphine has no
effect. I’ve given him extra doses. No good, not a bit of good. But
he must have relief, I tell you. This is impossible.” Her face had a
slightly crazed look. “I tell you I am ready to give him any amount of
stuff. I’ll do anything to put an end to it.”
I said, “Come along, Pim. You can’t kill your patient. Come now at
once. You’re doing no good here.” What he wants, I said to myself,
is to be convinced that he has nothing to be afraid of. But suppose
I tried to convince him that there was nothing to fear, no God, no
crucified Christ waiting, no everlasting life stretching ahead of him,
nothing but nothingness, I could never convince him--never. I had no
power over his fear.
Guerin met me at the door of the hut as I was going out with Pim. He
was polishing his eyeglasses.
“I would like permission to spend the night in the ward,” he said in
his quick way, adjusting his pince nez on his pointed nose.
“Very well, Guerin. You’ve been on duty all day, and you’ll be on all
day to-morrow, remember.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said briefly, dismissing us both with a
wave of his hand.
“Can I do nothing, Guerin?” Pim asked meekly.
“Nothing, Mademoiselle.”
They looked at each other. Then she looked down the ward to where the
boy was lying and her mouth contracted. We could distinguish from our
distance the terrified eyes.
“What is he afraid of?” she asked, shuddering.
“Of hell, Mademoiselle,” said Guerin. And suddenly, as if he had heard
us, some power jerked the boy off his pillow, and his arms shot out
in front of him. “Je ne meurs pas,” he cried; “Je ne meurs pas. Je ne
voudrais pas mourir.” I hurried Pim away.
When I went back, Guerin was on his knees by the boy’s bed reading
in low rapid tones from a little book. The Enfant de Malheur was not
listening. He was quite unaware of him. He was entirely and horribly
absorbed by another presence that seemed to be attacking him as an
octopus attacks with a dozen arms. He was writhing in the unseen
clutches. He was dodging and twisting and hissing at the thing through
clenched teeth, and his eyes darted this way and that like beings
separate from himself, possessed by a panic of their own.
I went from bed to bed attending to the old grumbling ones and trying
not to look, but I could hear his fear increasing. Its tempo grew
audibly more rapid, more frantic. His invisible enemy seemed to be
going for him now in rushes and leaps of increasing fury. I hurried
through my work, scolding in whispers the old men who were annoyed by
his noise and troubled by his fear. I rattled my basins and kettles,
making a noise of my own to distract them. But I could hear the boy’s
sobbing breath, hear him choking and shuddering, and every few seconds
his voice would burst from his suffocating chest in a wail of defiant
terror, and once he went off into a peal of hysterical laughter.
Guerin’s low voice went on through it all. His words followed each
other rapidly, in a monotone, in a level directed chant. He was aiming
them straight at the head of the sweating terror-struck creature beside
him. He paid no attention to me. Neither of them was aware of me. I
hurried past them and went out.
I had a great deal to do. I went from hut to hut. I gave piqures
and medicines and drinks, adjusted bandages and pillows, filled hot
water bottles. I busied myself busily, making an unnecessary fuss
over my duties, and tried to absorb myself in relieving the shadowy
suffering forms that lay so patiently, murmuring their gratitude. I
was greedy for their gratitude. I wanted badly to be comforted. But I
had a feeling of sickening suspense and miserable futility. I could
not forget those two. But I thought of them as three. I caught myself
saying to myself: “There is Guerin and the Enfant de Malheur and
another. It isn’t just a case of one man fighting the panic of another.
That’s what you call it. That’s what you want to believe it is. But
there is something there that inspires the panic. Something else,
something immense. The boy is a worm; the priest is an insignificant
little man. But there are huge invisible things assaulting that noisome
bed. What? The powers of darkness?”
“Nonsense,” I said to myself. I was adjusting the pulleys of a fracture
case. “There are no dark powers abroad in the world. There is only
death and pain and human evil and puny human remorse. The boy is a
murderer, a thief, a vile rat, and he knows it; that’s all, but soon it
will all be over. Soon he’ll be nothing, nothing. You know all the rest
is silly superstition. If Guerin didn’t happen to be a Catholic priest
he wouldn’t take it so hard.”
But even the quiet huts full of sleeping men seemed to be filled with
mystery, and I hurried to get back to that other one across the way,
where I knew an immense struggle was going on. I couldn’t bear not
to see what was happening. I was afraid to go back, but fascinated,
haunted, allured. “If Guerin didn’t happen to be a priest he would
be as useless as you are in the face of this,” I said to myself. But
could even Guerin do anything? Who was Guerin? A good orderly, a
conscientious little man who believed in old legends. Very well, very
well. Put it that the power of an aged belief was being put to the
test in that ugly hut. I must see; I must know. I was devoured with
curiosity.
My round took me two hours. It was midnight when I got back to them.
Guerin was in the same position, on his knees, but he was praying now
with a crucifix in his lifted hands and his eyes were closed. His face
showed signs of great fatigue; it was tight and strained, but it wore
a curious expression. And this expression was so concentrated that it
seemed to come from his face and shoot upward like a shaft of dark
light. I cannot describe it otherwise. His voice, too, had gained in
power; it was low, level, and penetrating, but there were undertones in
it that made one’s nerves tingle. “Dieu qui nous regarde, ayez pitié.
Dieu le Saveur, je vous supplie--”
The Enfant de Malheur, I saw with a sickening catch in my side, had
changed too, and the change was dreadful. I had hoped. What had I
hoped? In his growing exhaustion and terror he had a look of madness.
He was almost unrecognisable. There was a devilish hatred on his
clammy face, a vile frantic fury, as well as an agony of terror. His
fury seemed directed toward Guerin and the crucifix, while his terror
was concentrated on something straight in front of him. His lips were
twisted into a malevolent and hideous snarl; his eyes were the eyes
of a suffering lunatic; they shot sullen sidelong looks of wild
vindictiveness at the crucifix. As I passed he gave a vicious leap
toward the foot of the bed, flung his tortured body past the priest’s
head, hit out at the Christ with his fist, and, grinding his teeth,
yelled out a hideous curse into the shadows. Guerin’s voice became
audible again an instant later: “Dieu, notre seul espoir--Dieu, notre
Sauveur.” The old men groaned and muttered, half waking.
At two o’clock the struggle was still going on and the situation seemed
to me at first unchanged except that the apache and the priest were
both fainting with exhaustion; but I noticed presently that they had
come to closer grips with each other. Guerin, still on his knees, was
talking now with his mouth close to the boy’s head, talking with a
breathless intensity, saying apparently the same thing over and over,
as if he were trying to drive home into that maddened brain a single
important fact, and it seemed to me that through his terror the dying
boy was listening in spite of himself. His attention was now very
evidently divided between the death that menaced him at the foot of
his bed and the voice that spoke in his ear. He was still fighting,
but while he fought he listened reluctantly, fearful of allowing his
attention to be distracted from his awful antagonist for a second, but
nevertheless compelled to pay attention. And his antagonist seemed to
have withdrawn a little. The beast was crouching, was cowering now, so
it seemed to me. I stood at a distance under the lamp that hung from
the peaked roof and watched. Guerin was panting for breath as if he had
been running in a long race. But he seemed to be winning: he seemed
to have pushed back a little that dark power. The boy was undoubtedly
listening to his rapid, determined, insistent voice. The power in it
was reaching him. What power? Guerin’s, you fool, I said to myself,
but what powers did Guerin have to draw on. He had been at it now for
four hours. Could he last out, keep it up? Keep up what? What, after
all, was he doing? Was he telling the sewer rat lies to get him quiet?
But how could he go on lying and lying? What power lay in tricks and
falsehood to rout that awful terror? If Guerin failed he would, I
caught myself thinking, be proved a liar; but if he won, what then?
And just at that moment I saw the boy break away from Guerin’s voice
and plunge with a shriek back into his agony and begin to writhe again
as if grappling with a monster; and I almost ran to the door, sick with
horror and disappointment.
“He has failed,” I said to myself. “Guerin has failed.” And I hurried
away with my lantern through the bitter air, making excuses for him.
“It’s too long, it’s too much. He’s been at it all night. No man on
earth could keep it up at that pitch of intensity.” I stopped, stood
staring down at my lantern. “But he’d almost got him,” I whispered,
“and now he’s lost him again.” But had he? I turned round. Suppose
Guerin had given up? I went running back. “I couldn’t bear that,
Guerin,” I whispered. “I couldn’t bear to see you beaten;” I felt half
suffocated as I crept to the door and looked in again.
Guerin had not relaxed or changed his position; he was still praying,
praying. His words came to my ears like the soft raps of a small
muffled hammer, hammering away, hammering and hammering.
And as I went on my rounds again, from hut to hut and bed to bed, I
kept hearing Guerin’s voice, hammering away, hammering away at the
gates of Heaven for the sake of the poor Enfant de Malheur. I knew
now that nothing could stop him, that he would never give in, but I
knew, too, that his time was getting short. The boy couldn’t last
much longer. Soon he would die. Would he die in terror, aware of his
unutterable vileness? Would Guerin be forced to see that happen? Would
he be proved to himself to be a liar?
I felt cold and very tired. The sky was beginning to pale. It was
four o’clock, the hour when life beats most feebly in the bodies of
men. I went from hut to hut again, listening for the little sounds of
uncertain fluttering life. Was this one slipping away or that one? “No
one, no one else must die to-night,” I kept saying to myself. “There
is only one death here to-night.” Then I turned towards Guerin’s hut.
It stood ungainly and ugly in the half light, a wooden shelter through
which many men had passed, some to go home, some to be buried in our
cemetery where the wooden crosses stood so modestly above the ground.
None of them stayed with us. All were lost to us. They passed like
shadows. I could not remember them. They had no names, no faces in my
memory. Who were they? What were they? What had become of them? I did
not know. I knew nothing about them; I knew nothing of the dead or the
living. I felt cold. I felt dreadfully cold as I approached the door,
but as I entered I was aware that a strange hush had come into the
ward, and through it I heard the old men breathing, and a young voice
talking. It was the Enfant de Malheur who was speaking. He was talking
to Guerin in a small weak child’s voice, and Guerin was kneeling
beside him with the sweat pouring down his face. I saw Guerin take his
handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his forehead, but he did not take
his eyes from the boy’s eyes while he did this. They were both quiet;
Guerin was very, very quiet, but the boy was sobbing a little, He was
confessing his sins. He was pouring out all his dark, secret, haunting
memories into Guerin’s ears and sobbing with relief. I turned and
tip-toed out again, and stood for awhile against the wall of the hut,
trembling. I went back at five. I could not keep away. I went back
half through my round. I knew that I must not miss the last act of the
drama that was playing itself out so quietly on that ugly narrow bed. I
knew that I would never again in this world see anything so mysterious.
The dawn was filtering into the long wooden hut, filling it with the
twilight of morning. The old men in their beds lay asleep. I looked
down the long row apprehensively with a last catch at the heart. Was
it over? Had Guerin really won? No, it was not over yet. Yes, yes, he
had won. There they were, the two of them, and the boy’s white face was
smiling above smoothed sheets. His eyes were closed. He lay relaxed, at
peace, happy, and a small crumpled figure was still kneeling beside his
bed and a low voice was praying again: “Jesu--Dieu--Sauveur qui nous
regard.” And I knew that the Enfant de Malheur was listening. I knew
that he could hear, because he moved a little, and touched the priest’s
arm, half opened his eyes, and smiled as I watched him.
He died at six o’clock, holding Guerin by the hand. Then Guerin loosed
his hand, and crossed the boy’s two hands on his wasted chest over the
small crucifix, and rose from his knees and walked stiffly to the door.
The sun was rising. He staggered a little as he came out into the fresh
morning air. I stood beside him. He began polishing his pince-nez.
The sky was crimson behind the wooden sheds. Suddenly, softly, it
filled with golden light. Great luminous bands spread up and out like
a fan from the horizon. I looked at Guerin, so small, so crumpled, so
exhausted. He did not look at all like a man of God. He looked like a
book-worm, a bit of a prig, an insignificant little man.
“What does it mean, Guerin?” I asked. “It was like a miracle; but what
does it mean?”
“He is safe.” Guerin said briefly. Then he adjusted his pince-nez, gave
me a quick sharp look, and turned away to his own quarters.
ROSA
The stretcher bearers staggered under his weight when they brought him
along through the sunlight to the operating room. They put him down
for a moment on the ground outside the operating hut and wiped the
sweat off their old foreheads. It was a hot summer’s day. The sector
was quiet. The attack that had filled the hospital two days before had
fizzled out. Now only occasional ambulances lurched in at the gate,
bringing men who had been missed by the stretcher bearers, left out
for a couple of nights on No Man’s Land, or been wounded unnecessarily
by stray bullets after the big push was over. This man had come up
over the horizon alone, a red giant, brought unconscious through the
summer afternoon in a battered Ford, and deposited like a log on our
doorstep, solitary character of some obscure incident in the aftermath
of battle. He lay on the ground like a felled ox, a bull mortally
wounded, breathing noisily.
His head was bound with a soiled bandage; his eyes were closed; his
bruised mouth was open. Thick tufts of red hair pushed through the head
bandage. There was dried blood round his immense rough lips. His huge
red face was dark and blurred. He was covered with dust. He looked as
if he had been rolling in a dirty field like some farm animal. He was a
man of the soil, of the dark earth, with the heavy power of the earth
in him. The bright sun shining on his massive unconscious bulk made
the darkness of his lost consciousness visible. He seemed to lie deep,
distant, withdrawn in a shadowy abyss. His spirit--brother spirit of
ox and bullock and all beasts of the field--was deep asleep, in that
sleep which is the No Man’s Land of the soul, and from which men seldom
come back. But his immense body continued, in spite of his absence to
hum and drum like a dynamo, like a machine whose tremendous power takes
time to run down, and his breath came whistling and spurting through
his rough bruised lips like escaping steam.