A SMILING HELEN
The War Office must foresee everything; that men must be drilled before
they know how to fight and that when they fight some will be wounded.
There must be experts in salvage as well as in preparation; depots to
mend broken parts in the immense, complicated machine.
On a hillside where they would miss none of the rare winter sunshine,
the summer breezes, or the tonic of fresh spring air, rows of long,
green barracks had risen. Gravelled paths connected them between
stretches of transplanted sod and geranium beds. Women in nurses'
uniforms, and surgeons twiddling stethoscopes, and hospital corps
attendants bearing trays of food, went along the paths. Sometimes the
surgeons stopped to talk about this or that case, in their professional
jargon. Some were youngsters who had not yet begun practice; others of
the old regular service had looked after the health of Mr. Thomas
Atkins in India and out-of-the-way places, where flies and mosquitoes
are busy in tropical heat with their wicked occupations; and still
others were grey-haired, eminent specialists from London used to
receive fees that gave the youngsters a giddy feeling, but now working
for a lieutenant's pay. All the talent and skill of the medical and
surgical world were at the service of this repair shop of damaged men.
Indoors the X-ray "sharp" was always busy locating bits of steel as
black points on hazy photographs; still forms were wheeled into the
operating-room so softly that it seemed as simple a business as
slipping a paper into a drawer; the beds in the wards were in rows
between a broad aisle, with screens moved here and there by the
noiseless sleight-of-hand of nurses trained to their part no less than
infantry in the use of the bayonet.
One of the nurse's duties is to smile. However tired she is she must
smile, just as a soldier must salute and obey orders with alacrity. A
smile in passing for the fellow with one eye showing through a swathe
of bandages, for him with splinted legs held fast by weights, or the
one dreamily convalescent, and particularly for the one quivering with
pain. The man who awakes from a sweet sleep or the one who has been in
a nightmare with a dozen machine-guns playing on him and bombs bursting
all around, is greeted by a smile as he returns to the world of reality.
The nurse has life, strength, tenderness in her facile, confident
attention to those who are without strength and dependent as children.
She makes each patient feel that he is the only one in the world, which
is the way that patients like to feel. All the nurses without
exception seemed good-looking, even the plain ones when you looked into
their kindly eyes as they turned toward you.
The sometime tempery and the sometime morbid Helen was always smiling
these days; smiling from the depths of her fine eyes as well as with
her lips. Her personality glowed with opportunity and grew with it.
Every day she worked so long and hard that when night came she fell
asleep as soon as her head was on the pillow. This was good, too, as
it prevented any fiends of melancholy from tugging at her heart.
It is not only surgery and medicines and leaving nature to do the rest,
as the grey-haired specialists knew, which brings recovery; it is also
the desire to live which surroundings may induce. There are perfectly
good nurses with perfectly good smiles who do everything required of
them, not to say that there are slack nurses and possibly nurses who
flirt with young officers. Then, as in other walks of life, there is
occasionally a person who has what one of the grey-haired specialists
called the gift, when he spoke of Helen.
She had fancy, as we know, and she could put her fancy on paper with a
quickness and sureness of stroke which had led M. Vailliant to think
that she might do dry points. All the talent she had, all her heart,
belonged to the wounded. She was comrade to Mr. Atkins, whether
rosy-cheeked boys of the "Kitcheners" or a stoical old regular, who
accepted fighting as his job, had no home, and refused to be a hero.
"At first I didn't think you was what you'd call a beauty!" said one,
who got red after he had blurted out the fact.
"I'm not. You've good eyesight," she replied.
"But now I think you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen!" he
added; and this statement was as honest as the first. It made Helen
infinitely happy; for there was nothing that she so much desired in her
inmost heart as to be good-looking.
She drew a long series of cartoons for that gallant who had been hung
up in the barbed wire in the moonlight, played at bombs back and forth
with the Germans around "Wipers," and been pulled out of mudholes and
buried by shells. The cartoons were her best card in the pack of her
hospital cheer. One anecdote illustrated called for another. Helen
knew more about the life of the army in Flanders than the "brass hats,"
the staff and all the war correspondents. For these survivors of hell
did not want gloomy pictures. Reality was enough without adding to its
horrors that of long faces. They liked something to make them smile
even when death was at their elbow. They sent her cartoons home in
their letters, or if they had no homes, put the sheets away with their
treasures. One even cautioned his wife not to be jealous, because this
jolly nurse drew cartoons for everybody; and he had the rank of major.
Helen kept on doing what she called real drawings, which were appearing
the world around. Even the censors could not find any military secrets
in them, particularly after she sent the chief censor a cartoon of her
imaginary portrait of a censor in his most diabolical mood of
evisceration. Some of the cartoons, too, got into print, bringing more
requests from editors, which she could refuse now in view of the checks
coming in for the real drawings. M. Vailliant, who had been wounded
and was now convalescent, had gathered up some of the floating strands
of his affairs and wrote his congratulations to Helen, hoping that she
would not go to America after the war. Let America come to her in
Paris.
"You are trying to swell my head," she wrote back; "and I do believe
that it is a little larger. How can it help being!"
Nevertheless, that tugging at her heart would come at times. When she
ought to be perfectly happy she was not, as she found whenever her work
gave her a moment to search her inner self.
All this about Helen, when Henriette was just across the road with what
the doctors and nurses in Helen's unit referred to as "Lady
Truckleford's lot." Sometimes the doctors when they looked in that
direction said something almost profane about volunteer organisations
and people who had influence. Lady Truckleford flitted back and forth
to London, where she was on a number of boards and lists of patronesses
without knowing what they were all about unless she asked honourable
secretaries, which was a bore, as the honourable secretaries could not
be along when somebody gave you a poser. However, she did not allow
such details to disturb her placidity for long.
If you were a young officer whose people were of some account and you
were only slightly wounded, "Lady Truckleford's lot" was a most
delightful lot to be with; and in addition you were certain of
attention from real trained nurses who were also a part of the
establishment. In charming company you could sit in the same sun and
breathe the same air as the convalescents of the professional unit and
look out to sea and watch the boats coming and going across the
channel; and you could also make trips in automobiles to the
neighbouring seaside resort, where once French and English people came
in the holidays of peace before the world's game was war. Aside from
Henriette among Lady Truckleford's lot was Lady Violet Dearing,
characterised by doll-like beauty and a lisp. She was poor and
dependent on her friends; and despite her lisp and her attractiveness
she had had no luck in making any definite attachment though she was
twenty-eight, which is a desperate age for doll-like beauties.
Occasionally Helen went to see Henriette; oftener, indeed, than
Henriette came to see her sister. Once Helen made some cartoons for
the young wounded officers at tea-time, who thought that they were
"ripping." Lady Violet quite agreed with their view, but Henriette was
cool to her sister when they parted. Helen made no more cartoons for
Lady Truckleford's lot.
Gossip ran its rounds in this as in other communities. Lady
Truckleford's lot knew that there was a young American by name of
Sanford, who was Henriette's seventeenth cousin; and Lady Violet teased
Henriette about the seventeenth cousin when she had been the object of
too much attention from the young officers. If anybody who was
somebody in the Truckleford world was wounded, the Truckleford lot soon
knew it; and if he were interesting it was still possible, in those
early days before the hideous old War Office became utterly
inconsiderate of all the nicer human feelings, to have him transferred
to "more congenial surroundings."