A girl was standing in the doorway; she wore a dressing-gown, and
beneath it her slim ankles peeped out of a pair of the felt slippers
nurses wear at night.
"Betty! What's the matter?"
"Did you hear the firing?"
Margaret nodded. Was the betrayal of her nerves infectious? Had it
communicated itself to the whole staff? For a swift instant she
despised her sex--she who had devoted her life to it. "Yes. Another
big engagement. We shall be busy. I was going to ride down to the
cliffs to see. . . . What's the matter, Betty--can't you sleep? Come
in and shut the door; I'll give you a cup of tea." She spoke in her
accustomed quiet tone, and crossed to the side table, where the kettle
was giving out little fitful puffs of steam.
Betty closed the door and sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands in
the side pockets of her dressing-gown. Her hair was plaited loosely in
two long plaits, one of which hung down over her shoulder and somehow
gave her face an added effect of extreme youth.
Margaret handed her a cup of tea. "Drink that and run back to bed.
No--hop into mine and keep warm. Haven't you slept?"
Betty drank the tea and drew the dressing-gown closer round her young
form. "I couldn't sleep. The firing . . . No, I'm quite warm,
thanks. But it got on my nerves lying there waiting for it to get
light. I heard you moving, and I got up." She passed her hand over
her eyes. "After the last time I kept seeing those poor things. . . .
I don't mind once we start--I don't mind the operating-table. It's
when they come in . . . like dumb things--trying to smile, with their
mouths all screwed up and tight." She caught her breath half
hysterically.
Margaret put down her cup quickly and sat down by the girl's side.
"Betty! Don't talk like that. You mustn't think about it in that way.
Listen----"
"It's easy to be calm when you haven't any--anybody out there in the
North Sea belonging to you. But I've got a brother and a--and he's a
Gunnery Lieutenant," ended Betty a little feebly.
"I know, dear. But you mustn't go to pieces when we all want every bit
of pluck and steadiness. We're getting used to it now, too--and I'm
sure your brother would like to think you were being as brave as--as
he. . . ." She turned her head and stared out of the window. Was she
a hypocrite, she wondered, to try to preach to anyone the virtue of
womanly courage when her own heart was sick with she knew not what?
Betty stood up. "I'm a fool," she said abruptly. "Can I come with
you? Could you wait ten minutes while I put my riding things on? Miss
Dacre said I could take her horse when I wanted to--will you wait for
me, Margaret? I'll ride down to the sea with you."
Margaret nodded and rose, too. "I'll get the horses saddled while you
dress. . . . Bring some biscuits."
She descended the broad oak stairway, crossed the hall, and opened the
door of a little room adjoining the main entrance. It was her day
sanctum--in scholastic days, the matron's sitting-room, a small
apartment, with pretty chintz-covered furniture, and roses in bowls on
the table and bookstands. Margaret unhooked a pair of field-glasses
hanging on the wall, and passed out into the early morning sunlight.
Betty joined her ten minutes later in the stables, and together they
mounted and rode down the long avenue, bordered by firs, out on to the
open wold that commanded a view of the sea.
With the dewy turf under them, they shook their impatient horses into a
canter until they reached the highest point of a bluff promontory that
stretched out into the sea. Here they reined in and scanned the
horizon, side by side.
The water was leaden-coloured, shot with coppery gleams. Below them to
the northward the little harbour of the fishing village was stirring to
life: wisps of smoke, curling from a score of chimneys, blended with
the mists of early morning. Small specks that were people began to
move about an arm of the breakwater, towards which a dinghy came
stealing sluggishly from one of the anchored fishing craft.
Without speaking, Betty abruptly raised her whip and pointed towards
the north. A Torpedo Boat Destroyer was approaching the entrance to
the harbour, her funnels jagged with shot-holes pouring out smoke. In
silence Margaret handed the glasses to her companion. On the far
horizon there were faint columns of smoke north and east. Some were
smudges that dissolved and faded to nothing; others grew darker, and
presently resolved themselves into distant cruisers passing rapidly
south. Margaret's horse lowered his head and began cropping the short
grass.
"Margaret," said Betty suddenly, "did you ever care for anybody--a man,
I mean?" To Betty's mind the thirty-five years that sat so lightly on
Margaret's brow relegated such a possibility, if it ever happened, to a
past infinitely remote. For a moment there was no reply.
Margaret stretched out her hand for the glasses, and focused them on
the horizon.
"Yes," she said at length, quietly. The Destroyer was entering the
harbour; faint confused sounds of cheering drifted up to them.
"Why didn't you marry him? Did you send him away?"
Again a pause, and again came the low-voiced affirmative. Margaret
lowered the glasses and returned them to the case slung across her
shoulder. "I thought I was doing right. . . . But I was wrong." The
night had not been without its lesson. "He's out there." She nodded
towards the North Sea, and as she spoke the blunt bows of a hospital
ship crept round a distant headland, making towards them. Silence tell
between them again.
Margaret broke it. "Betty," she said, "if the time ever comes for you
to choose between the love of the man you love and--and anything else
in the wide world, don't be misled by other claims . . . by what may
seem to be higher claims. Loving and being loved are the highest
responsibilities that life holds."
Betty turned her head and stared. "But," she said, "if you think duty
doesn't give you the right to----"
"Love gives you all the right a woman wants," replied Margaret, still
in the same low, sad tone. "If it's only the right to cry. . . . If
you forego love, you forego even that." She gathered the reins and
turned her horse. "Now we must get back to bath and dress. There's a
lot of work ahead of us."
Neither spoke again as they rode back across the downs. In the filmy
blue overhead a lark sang rapturously, pouring out its soul in gladness.
* * * * *
Margaret was in the hall when the first of the long line of
stretcher-bearers arrived. As each stretcher was brought in, a surgeon
made a brief examination of the wounded man, and he passed through one
or other of the wide doorways opening out on either side of the hall.
There was a subdued murmur of voices as every moment brought a fresh
arrival. Two blue-jackets, who came up the steps carrying a hooded
stretcher, stood looking about them as if for orders. The surgeons
were all occupied, but, catching sight of Margaret in uniform, with the
broad red cross on her breast, the blue-jackets crossed the hall
towards her and laid the stretcher at her feet, as if they had brought
their burden all this way for her alone.
"Second door on the left," said Margaret. "Wait--is it a bad case?"
"Too late, I'm afraid, Sister," said the stalwart at the head of the
stretcher. "'E's died on the way up."
"'Emmerage, Sister," supplemented the other, anxious to display his
familiarity with the technicalities of her profession. "'E wouldn't
take 'is turn to be attended to aboard of us--we was in a Destroyer,
an' picked 'im up 'angin' on to a spar. Would 'ave the doctor fix up a
German prisoner wot was bleedin' to death. Said 'e wasn't in no
particular 'urry, speakin' for 'isself. An' 'im a-bleedin' to death,
too. As fine a gentleman as ever stepped."
The other nodded, warming, sailor-like, to the hero-worship of an
officer. "That's right, Sister. 'E give 'is life for one of them
Germans, you might say."
"Is he dead?" asked Margaret in her clear, incisive tones.
"Yes, Sister." The speaker knelt down and turned back the hood,
uncovering the face and shoulders of the motionless figure on the
stretcher.
For a moment a feeling of giddiness seized Margaret. A great blackness
seemed to close round her, shutting out the busy scene, the voices of
the bearers, and the shuffle of their feet across the tiled hall. With
a supreme effort she mastered herself, and somehow knew she had been
waiting for this moment, expecting it. . . .
The man who had been kneeling rose to his feet, and the two stood
before her as if awaiting orders. Outside the entrance a motor
ambulance arrived and drew up with throbbing engine.
"The mortuary----" she began. "No--bring him here . . . out of all
this." She walked across the hall and opened the door of the small
room on the left of the entrance. The scent of roses greeted them: it
was the room from which she had fetched her glasses early in the
morning.
The two men deposited the stretcher on the floor and came out, glancing
at her white face as they passed. "Shall we carry on, Sister?"
"What? . . . Oh, yes, please."
They saluted awkwardly, and left her standing irresolute, as if dazed,
in the midst of all the bustle and traffic of suffering.
He had come back to her. Torps, who in life had never broken his word,
was also faithful to it in death.
2
The journey across the lawn to one of the seats in the shelter of the
clipped hedge of evergreens was accomplished at length.
The Indiarubber Man lowered himself with a little grimace into the
seat, and laid the crutches down beside him. One leg, encased in
splints and bandages, was stiffly outstretched on a stool in front of
him; his uniform cap--a very disreputable one, with a tarnished
badge--was perched on top of the bandages that still swathed his head.
"Phew!" he said; "thank you. That was a bit of a Marathon, wasn't it?"
He measured the distance across the lawn with a humorous eye.
"It was very good for a first attempt," said Betty, considering him
professionally. "Is that leg comfortable?"
"Quite, thank you." He leaned back and closed his eyes with a
luxurious sigh. "'Pon my word, this is what I call cutting it pretty
fat. Fancy my lolling here in the sun, and you . . . and you----" he
opened his eyes, regarding her as she stood before him in her trim,
nurse's uniform. "It's quite like a play, isn't it, where everything
comes right in the end? Miss Betty----"
"You mustn't call me that," said Betty primly. "I told you before.
You must say 'Nurse.'"
"Can't I say 'Nurse Betty'?"
"My name is Elizabeth. If you wanted to distinguish me from other
nurses you might conceivably say 'Nurse Elizabeth.' But even that's
not necessary, as I'm the only nurse here at the moment."
The Indiarubber Man looked cautiously round the sunlit enclosure.
"True. So you are----"
"And it's time for your beef-tea," added Betty severely, marching off
in the direction of the distant wing.
Her patient watched her slim form retreating and vanish down a green
alley. "You dear," he said, "you dear!" He meditated awhile. "It's a
rum world," he soliloquised. "Torps has gone. The Young Doc.'s gone.
The Pay's gone."
He mused awhile. "But we gave 'em an almighty hammering. And here am
I, alive and kicking again. And there's Betty. . . . It's a rum
world." He bent forward and gathered a daisy growing in the border
beside his seat. With his bleached, rather unsteady, fingers, he began
picking the petals from it one by one.
"She does, she doesn't. She does, she doesn't. She doesn't," repeated
the Indiarubber Man in a woeful voice.
A thrush hopped across the lawn, and paused to regard him with one
bright eye. Apparently reassured, it deftly secured and swallowed a
worm.
The Indiarubber Man laughed. "Doesn't anybody love you either?" he
said.
Betty reappeared in the distance carrying a tray in her hands. The
thrush, as if realising that two is company and three none, flew away.
Betty handed a cup to the invalid. "There's a piece of toast too--you
must soak it in the beef-tea, and here is a little bell. If you want
anything, or you aren't comfortable, you can ring it."
"I see." The Indiarubber Man gravely accepted all three gifts and laid
them on the seat beside him. "Thank you awfully. But you aren't going
away, are you?"
"Of course I am," said Betty. "I'm very busy. You _must_ remember
that this is a hospital, that you're a patient and I'm a nurse." She
moved off sedately.
"Miss Betty!" called the Indiarubber Man. "I mean 'Nurse.'" Betty
turned and retraced her footsteps. "Wouldn't it be awful if I was
suddenly taken very ill indeed--if I came over all of a tremble, and
tried to ring the toast and soaked the bell in my beef-tea?"
"From what I've seen of you during the last six weeks," replied Betty
the Hospital Nurse, "such a thing wouldn't surprise me a little bit."
She left him to his graceless self.
For a while after she had gone the Indiarubber Man tried to read a
book. Tiring of that, he lit a pipe and smoked it without enthusiasm.
Tobacco tasted oddly flavourless and unfamiliar. Then he remembered
his beef-tea and drank it obediently, soaking the toast as he had been
bidden. Remained the bell. For a long time he sat staring at it.
"Much better get it over," he said aloud. "One way or the other."
Cautiously he looked round. No one was in sight; the windows at the
back of the hospital that overlooked this secluded lawn had been the
windows of class-rooms, and were of frosted glass. With the aid of his
crutches he got up unsteadily, and then, maintaining a precarious
balance with one crutch, he thrust the other one under the seat
leverwise, and with an effort tipped it over backwards on to the
flowerbed.
This accomplished, the Indiarubber Man looked round again to convince
himself that the manoeuvre was unobserved. Reassured on this point, he
lowered himself down gingerly over the seat until he was lying on his
back with his legs in the air and his head in a clump of marigolds. In
this attitude he seized the bell and rang it furiously, feebly waving
his uninjured leg the while.
The moments passed. From his prostrate position behind the seat he was
unable to obtain a view of the lawn, and stopped ringing the bell to
listen. He heard a faint cry in the distance, and then the flutter of
skirts. The next instant Betty was bending over him, white and
breathless.
"Oh!" she cried, "how _did_ it happen? Did the seat tip over
backwards--are you hurt?" and kneeling beside him raised his unhallowed
head. The Indiarubber Man closed his eyes.
"You told me to ring if I wasn't comfortable, and I wasn't a bit. I
hate the smell of marigolds too. No--please don't move; I'm very
comfortable now." Betty looked wildly in the direction of the house
for help.
"I heard the bell," she said in a queer, breathless little voice, "and
I just came out to look . . . and then I ran. I ought to have called
someone. Ring the bell--I can't move you by myself. We must have
assistance. How _did_ this happen?"