She sucked her little finger thoughtfully.
"Give him the thermometer," she said. He couldn't take it in his mouth,
" ... for if I shut my lips they'll never open." I put it under his arm
and waited while his feet kicked and his hands twisted. He was normal.
Sister smiled.
But by a coincidence the doctor came, gimlet-eyed.
"Hysteria...." he said to Sister in the bunk.
"Is no one going to reassure Gayner?" I wondered. And no one did.
Isn't the fear of pain next brother to pain itself? Tetanus or the fear
of tetanus--a choice between two nightmares. Don't they admit that?
So, forbidden to speak to him, I finished my splint till tea-time. But I
couldn't bring myself to sit down to it, for fear that the too placid
resumption of my duties should outrage him. I stood up.
Which helped me, not him.
After the dressings are over we scrub the dishes and basins in the
annexe.
In the annexe, except that there is nothing to sit on, there is leisure
and an invitation to reflection.
Beneath the windows legions of white butterflies attack the
cabbage-patch which divides us from the road; beyond the road there is a
camp from which the dust flows all day.
When the wind is from the north the dust is worse than ever and breaks
like a surf over the cabbages, while the butterflies try to rise above
it; but they never succeed, and dimly one can see the white wings
beating in the whirlpool.
I shall never look at white butterflies again without hearing the sounds
from the camp, without seeing the ring of riders, without thinking,
perhaps, of the dairyman and of the other "dairymen."
The butterflies do not care for noise. When, standing beside the
cabbage-patch, the bugler blows the dinner-bugle, they race in a cloud
to the far corner and hover there until the last note is sounded.
I think it is I who am wrong when I consider the men as citizens, as
persons of responsibility, and the Sister right when she says "the
boys."
Taken from their women, from their establishments, as monks or boys or
even sheep are housed, they do not want, perhaps, to be reminded of an
existence to which they cannot return; until a limb is off, or the war
ends.
To what a point they leave their private lives behind them! To what a
point their lives are suspended....
On the whole, I find that in hospital they do not think of the future or
of the past, nor think much at all. As far as life and growth goes it is
a hold-up!
There is really not much to hope for; the leave is so short, the
home-life so disrupted that it cannot be taken up with content. Perhaps
it isn't possible to let one's thoughts play round a life about which
one can make no plans.
They are adaptable, living for the minute--their present hope for the
cup of tea, for the visiting day, for the concert; their future hope for
the drying of the wound, for the day when the Sister's fingers may
press, but no drop be wrung from the long scar.
Isn't it curious to wish so passionately for the day which may place
them near to death again?
But the longing for health is a simple instinct, undarkened by logic.
Yet some of them have plans. Scutts has plans.
For a fortnight now he has watched for the post. "Parcel come for me,
Sister? Small parcel?"
Or he will meet the postman in the corridor. "Got my eye yet?" he asks.
"What will it be like, Scutts?" we ask. "Can you move it? Can you sleep
in it? Did he match your other carefully?"
"You'll see," he says confidently. "It's grand."
"When I get my eye...." he says, almost with the same longing with
which he says "When I get into civies...."
Scutts is not one of those whose life is stopped; he has made plans.
"When I get into civies and walk out of here...." His plans for six
months' holiday "are all writ down in me notebook."
"But what shall you do, Scutts? Go to London?"
"London!... No towns fer me!"
He will not tell us what he is going to do. Secretly I believe it is
something he wanted to do as a boy but thought himself a fool to carry
out when he was a man: perhaps it is a sort of walking tour.
Among his eleven wounds he has two crippled arms. "I'm safe enough from
death," he says (meaning France), "till it fetches me in a proper way."
Perhaps he means to live as though life were really a respite from
death.