When a man's own organs, senses, wits conspire against him, in league
with an enamoured woman who plays traitress, what earthly chance has
the man?
Yaill stared into the glowing rose-red heart of the fire, conjuring
up for the thousandth time that part played by one brown puppet of a
myriad of puppets similarly attired, in War's dread drama; cheek by
jowl, night in and day out--with the grim tragi-comedian Death; whose
paces, poses and antics, grown commonplace by dint of familiarity--at
length ceased to cause a shudder, or provoke a passing jest....
The War.... A waking nightmare of cold, heat, thirst and hunger;
exertion, anxiety, responsibility, fatigue; sleeplessness and NOISE,
NOISE, in a ceaseless, maddening crescendo, until that flaming
white-hot moment when the German 5.9 H.E. shell blew in the Advanced
Telephone Communication dug-out. When consciousness of these things
abruptly ceased for Yaill.
So it came to pass that stark-naked as when he was born into this
world, save for a platinum disc-chain on his wrist, bearing his name,
religion, rank and regiment, and a small gold Crucifix slung by a
blackened cord about his neck, Number 40, Shell Shock Ward 8, General
Casualty Hospital 70, on the Lines of Communication, came into being.
Later on, when the Great Blank had given place to a drab-hued mental
twilight, wherein men, women and children; animals, trees and houses
could dimly be conjectured or unemotionally discerned; and a little
later yet, when one began again to realise oneself a living puppet,
playing a dull, dull part in a dreary production called Life,--with
some character dimly sensed as missing from the cast, whose presence
would have made a world of difference!--Number 80, Convalescent
Officers' Camp, B---- Base, began to take what other nurses called a
"good deal of notice" of Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw.
You are to conceive of Nurse Burtonshaw as anything but a purposeful
Delilah. The piously-reared daughter of one Burton, a respectable
West of England dairy-farmer,--calling herself "Burtonshaw" for
reasons of her own, while serving in concert with thousands of other
admirable young British women, enrolled for Service at Home and
Overseas under the auspices of the Red Cross,--how shall she be held
blameworthy because there beat under her Navy blue lustre overall,
and white bibbed apron with its badge of red twill Turkey, a woman's
heart, susceptible to Love....
Does any woman wonder? Does any man ask Why? Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw
had washed Number 80; combed him, fed him, dressed him,--and put him
to bed again. Administered general massage and tonics, and
superintended the ministrations of the orderly-barber, unwearying,
for months on end. She had soothed him,--waking from brief daylight
sleeps in panics bred of hideous, nerve-shattering
visions,--reproductions of such sights,--burned in upon the brain and
reproduced by the subconscious memory, as made the nights grim
ordeals of dread. She had alternately scolded and encouraged her
patient, gaining strength mentally and physically under her
unselfish, able care, until she had established herself as the hub of
his universe. The sky and sea, the flowers and trees, and that fresh
West Country face with its blunt features and well-opened grey-blue
eyes, were the only books the patient ever cared to read in. The
printed lines, the written sheets, were torture to Yaill's dazed
brain and astigmatic vision. So the Commandant's private secretary
attended to his business letters, and the correspondence of his
friends was dealt with by Nurse....
Upon her arm at first, by her side later, he took his first walks in
the Convalescent Camp grounds. When later still, he was taken for
drives in the company of other shell-shocked officers, it was Nurse
Burtonshaw who persuaded him not to rebel against this order of the
C.M.O.... Nurse, who waited for the return of the big, crowded car
and unpacked him, smiling, at the gates of Canvas Park Row, the
double avenue of roomy tents pitched on the green, tree-clumped
slopes rising North of the Base Port, behind the big square stone
house where the Staff officers and quarters were,--and the huge,
shapeless, plank-built zinc-roofed bulk of the Hospital.
"There now, you're back again and no bones broken. And whether you
liked it or not, the air has done you good," she would say
cheerfully, unwinding his muffler, knitted by herself in her scant
spare time. For all Yaill's personal, immediate baggage had been
destroyed by a Boche bomb-raid upon Battalion Staff Headquarters, and
as Number 80 never wrote letters, such lacking necessaries had been
replaced by Red Cross gifts.
Subsequently, when some battered portmanteaux were received from
Regimental H.Q. in France,--but of that later in the chapter.... You
are to see Nurse taking off the muffler, over which her patient
stared down at her with grey, brooding, mournful eyes. Those eyes
followed her about, burning holes in her grey print. If she had
established herself as the hub of Number 80's universe, she was none
the less the adoring slave of him whom--in private and at his
entreaty she called "Teddy."
For Lord help this bedevilled man! he who in all his thirty-five
years of life had been "Edward" to all who loved him, holding pet
names in abhorrence,--had invited Nurse Burtonshaw to address him by
this fond diminutive. "My mother used to call me 'Teddy,'" he would
say, with his sad eyes brimming: "and though she has married again--"
the poor widowed lady being dead and buried years previously--"and I
am nothing to her now, I somehow like to hear it."
So Nurse called him "Teddy," scrupulously selecting moments when they
were quite alone and out of earshot. Then Teddy, who was a Border
laird of ancient lineage, as well as a Squire in Cumberland, with a
solid rent-roll of four thousand a year, some thriving home-farms and
a park of many acres, confided to Nurse that he was a poor
man--without a rap beyond his pay. But if Lucy had no fear of
poverty, shared with a poor broken wretch who loved her--one to whom
the love of woman had been a sealed book until he saw her face....
"You're getting too stuck on that Colonel man of yours, Burtonshaw!"
expostulated a friend some hours later on, when the day-nurses went
off duty. "Because when it comes to kissing Good-night--and I
couldn't help but hear!--the partition between the O.C. wards being
merely canvas! Of course you can trust me not to talk, though I hope
you won't again!--a warm handshake as between friends being properer,
and not against the Regulations--which I will say I never knew you go
against before. Now own up. Am I right, or wrong?"
"I did, I'll own it.... I do truly feel for Number 80," admitted
Nurse Burtonshaw. "He's alone in the world and quite poor, though
three hundred and seventy pounds a year, which is his pay--not
counting War allowances,--seems like riches to little me."
"Bless me!" cried the friend, "then you've actually clicked! ... He's
asked you to marry him? ..."
Nurse Burtonshaw demanded, with rather a defiant flare lighting up
her well-opened grey-blue eyes, and with a decided deepening of the
steady bloom on her broad, blunt-featured West of England face,
nunlike in the setting of flowing white linen hiding the rich
red-gold hair that was her one undeniable beauty:
"Do you think I'd let him kiss me--a girl brought up like I've
been--unless he'd behaved himself honourable? Not one of my friends
can say a word--"
"But what will _his_ friends say about you?" asked the other nurse
acutely, "when they hear how you've fixed things? To marry a Regular
Army toff, who not so long ago was queer in his head, and had to be
mothered and seen to and fed as if he'd been a blinking baby--"
Nurse Burtonshaw asserted:
"He's well, and going to get his discharge next week. They say his
cure's my doing. And he's got no friends. He's told me so, over and
over again!"
"That makes it better for you. And I'm not saying that you won't
turn out a happy pair, not for a minute! Don't lots of patients
marry their nurses and live happy ever after? And, whenever I've
read your teacup, Fate has seemed to point that way. But as to his
having no friends--that won't half wash!"
"And why won't it?"
"Just because your Teddy's a Society Toff, poor or not poor! Belongs
to a crack Scotch regiment.... Gets lots of letters in lovely
envelopes with the names of topping County places on some of 'em--and
coronetted crests and monograms...."
"The smart folks who wrote those letters don't count. Hasn't he told
me? 'Not one of them,' he says,--'matters to me a straw.'"
"He may have said so, but are you _sure_? I'm asking out of
friendship. Wasn't there a woman--isn't there a woman who writes as
if he mattered to her more than several stacks of straw? Oh, Luce!
..."
Nurse Burtonshaw stood her ground obstinately:
"I've questioned him over and over.... 'I may have liked her, since
she says I did,' he says.... 'But all the same, she's less than
nought to me.... What did you say her name was?' he asks in that
simple way of his." ...
"And did you tell him?"
"What does that matter to you?"
"It'll matter to you one of these days, as sure as I'm certificated!
And you told me she'd begged you to keep the letters until he was
able to read them without hurting his head. You haven't given them
to him! ... Straight--are you going to? Infirmary-trained we both
may be, and not Hospital--but I hope we know what's due to the
professions to say nothing of the Red Cross! When will you give him
those letters?"
Behind Nurse Burtonshaw's blue-grey eyes a red flame kindled. She
retorted, confronting her interlocutor:
"When he asks me to! Haven't I told you?"
"Not much, you haven't. And about your first venture--with the
Didlick boy--poor thing! Killed at Mons and buried no one knows
where--are you going to tell him about that?"
"I--am--NOT! ... Is that plain enough? ... Now let me get to bed!"
When Katharine should learn that those letters, written from her post
of service at the Receiving Hospital in France, and later from a
London Nursing Home,--and later still from Kerr's Arbour,--had never
been delivered to Nurse Burtonshaw's patient, would she
believe--Yaill wondered dismally, or doubt like all the rest of the
world, the man who had married the nurse?