A SITTING CASE
"Yes," murmured the doctor at the casualty clearing station, after he
had listened to Phil's heartbeats and examined an opening in a bandage
of gauze and cotton. "Yes, another one of the miracles. They say that
the Boches in such cases----"
He wiped his brow, his sentence unfinished, as Phil gave another
involuntary cough to keep the trickling thing out of his lungs. The
appeal of nature, struggling for self-preservation, brought the doctor
back to the definite.
"No chance if he is left lying down!" he exclaimed. "We'll make a
sitting case of it. Hold him up all the way."
They lifted the limp figure into the ambulance, where two other sitting
cases were waiting for further passengers.
"Now, you're off!"
The swift, kindly-springed ambulance sped on out of the zone of
shell-fire along the hard roads between the avenues of poplars in the
glorious sunshine.
Phil realised that some one was keeping him from slipping and that he
would slip and keep on slipping to the very bottom of things if left to
himself. Little hammers were beating on his brain. Their tat-tat kept
him from any continuity of thought. As soon as he had an idea they
crushed it while it was only fluttering in vagueness. Indeed, they
moved about over his brain on the lookout to crush any conscious grasp
of anything. He would outwit them; he would know what all this was
about. Straining his eyelids open--they were as heavy as steel
doors--there was only a black curtain in front of his eyes as the
reward of the effort. This must mean--but the hammers would not let
him find out what it meant. He tried to listen and there was a void
beaten by noiseless hammers which were striking into pulp--his brain.
He was afraid of something; something ghastly indefinable.
Again he was slipping. He would just let himself slip. That was best.
When you slipped the hammer-blows became muffled. They did not hurt so
much; only when you slipped you had to cough to keep back the trickling
thing. The strong arm of the hospital corps man straightened him up.
Apparently some one did not want him to slip. This must be the man who
ran the hammers and wanted to keep them busy--those noiseless,
merciless hammers in the black night.
"It's lucky just to get it in the leg," said one of the two sitting
cases opposite, with a red spot on a white wrapping showing through his
slit trousers' leg.
"Bang in the middle of the head's better than that," said the other,
who had his arm in a sling.
"God, yes!"
Up and down hill the ambulance, its green curtains drawn on its
secrets, ran smoothly on past the long trains of motor-trucks that fed
the army, past well-muscled, comely, eager, whistling, and singing
youth on the march, through villages and towns, through the orderly
world of health and action to that quiet world where the nurses smiled,
inside the long, low buildings connected by gravelled paths.
Phil knew that he had arrived because he had been lifted down from
somewhere onto something, which was a signal for the hammers to do a
snaredrum dance which made him unconscious for a moment. The hammers
did not like him to be unconscious. Having beaten him out of
consciousness, they beat him back to it with a different kind of
tattoo. Then, he was being carried along in a sort of cradle.
"Keep his head up!" said the little ticket which came with all who were
sent to the human repair shop.
"Very particular about that!" insisted the tired medical corps man, who
had held Phil up for the whole journey.
Phil had only the sense of being laid on something soft, with his
shoulders propped up against something still softer. Then they were
taking off his clothes. These people were very kind, but they could
not stop the hammers; nothing could. Perhaps they would let him slip
down, down, down, on that downy pillow till the hammers stopped. He
would tell them about the hammers; then they would understand why he
wanted to slip. So he tried to speak, though he was uttering only a
gurgle and he could not have heard his own voice if he had been
articulate. The hammers were drowning his voice with their beat. They
did not mean to let him slip. If he could not hear his own voice, how
could he expect the kind people to hear it?
A young surgeon used his stethoscope; then waited on his superior, Dr.
Smythe, to come before attempting any redressing.
"An eighth of an inch more would have done it!" said Dr. Smythe, as
they removed the bandages. "Why not the fraction? It would have been
more merciful."
"The Boches, they say, in such cases----" began the young doctor.
"We can't---and won't!" was the reply of the senior.
Phil felt that the hot sponge had been removed. He could breathe more
freely. More air in his lungs revived him. Shooting pains ran out in
forked tongues from the hammer-beats, bringing an acute consciousness
of why the sponge had been there. His hand went up involuntarily,
quickly, on its mission of discovery. The doctors, realising his
purpose, reached for it in common impulse, to save him from the truth,
but too late. The sense he had left, that of touch as acute as ever,
felt the moist and fractured horror. His arm hung a dead weight in the
surgeons' grip as they laid it back by his side on the cot. His brain
had been struck another stunning blow, such as it had received from the
shell. It rebounded with wild consciousness as he tried to lift
himself forward in delirious effort. But a strong hand was pressing
his forehead; other strong hands were forcing him back into place. The
hand on his forehead said to him: "It is useless; you cannot." And the
hammers had it, there in that soundless, dumb, sightless world of
torture.
Now he must pretend to yield; yes, he must keep one thing in mind.
They might hold his head up, but this would not prevent him from
slipping. He would will that he should slip and keep on willing it
till he reached the bottom of things. Yes, that had been done before
and he could do it. They could not make him live under the
hammers--live for such a monstrous future as he foresaw. Yes, just
will it and it would not take long to die; no, not long--a few hours,
perhaps. He was sure of this. Beat on, hammers, while you may; the
harder, the sooner the end.
"It's a chance for Bricktop to make good," said Dr. Smythe. "We've
heard so much of his wonders. Send for him."
Already word had passed through the ward and even across the way to
Lady Truckleford's lot that there was a terrible case at Number Four,
gunner officer, named Sanford. It reached Henriette when she was at
tea and Helen when she was at her quarters off duty and drawing. The
young doctor who had gone for Bricktop met them coming in at the door
and noted their startled, anxious faces.
Henriette leading, they came down the aisle. When Dr. Smythe, whose
form hid Phil, drew aside and Henriette saw what lay against the white
pillow she screamed and placed both hands over her eyes to hide the
sight and turned away, reeling and shuddering.
"Let me go!" she cried, stumbling toward the door.
"The screen!" exclaimed Dr. Smythe.
Helen, too, had her hands over her eyes; she, too, was shuddering but
not moving. She brought her hands down with a kind of wrench,
stiffened her chin, and then stepped behind the screen.
"Cousin Phil!" she said, striving to keep her voice steady--and she saw
that his glazed eyes were sightless.
"He is quite deaf from shell-shock, too!" said Dr. Smythe.
So this was Helen's cousin; therefore, Henriette's.
For a moment she was silent, with deep breaths, as if between impulses,
before she dropped down beside the cot. Those hammers could not
prevent Phil from knowing that a woman's hand was grasping his, a soft
palm and slim fingers were pressing his tight, as if they would send a
current of cheer through him. She could do that when he was so
monstrous! If only the shell had finished him. With her other hand
she was rolling up his sleeve; then she slipped her left hand in place
of the right in his. Dr. Smythe and the nurse in attendance looked on
in a spell of tragic curiosity.
Now Phil felt a finger moving on his arm. Sensitive little nerves--he
had never known that there were such sensitive ones--followed the
movement and carried the sense of their progress to the brain in spite
of the hammers.
"I am trying to write so you will understand," she slowly traced the
letters. "If you do, two pressures of the hand is yes."
"Yes," came the signal.
"He does!" said Helen, smiling up to Dr. Smythe in triumph.
"Ripping!" he said.
She repeated the message aloud, firmly, confidently, as she slowly
wrote:
"I have good news. You will recover your hearing, speech, and sight
completely. We have a miracle man here who will make you whole again,
just the same that you were before except for a few little scars that
will go away. You must just want to get well, in order to give the
miracle man his chance and for the sake of your father and mother and
those who love you." And after the last word she hesitated, then wrote
the letter "H."
Each letter surging along those sensitive nerves, and letters slowly
spelling words. She could look at the monstrous sight that he was, at
that gaping wound, and ask this of him! _She_ wanted him to live! So
be it. He would not try to slip. The miracle man should have his
chance. It was between the hammers on one side and her and the miracle
man on the other.
"Wonderful! I admire your courage in saying it!" Dr. Smythe remarked
thickly.
"But it will and must come true!" said Helen sturdily, as she rose to
her feet and looked straight into his eyes, her own aflame with
resolution. "No one must even think the contrary."
Another person had overheard the message written on Phil's arm as he
looked around the corner of the screen. Lean he was and angularly
built. His hair was brick-red, his face freckled, his age about
thirty-five, and he had a smiling turn to the corners of his mouth. He
had come down the aisle with a noiseless step, as if propelled by
inexhaustible nervous vitality, and he had the air of a man with
distinctly eccentric qualities, who would never stop on a street corner
to ask anybody to tell him how to do his work. No second glance would
be required to see that he was American--"corn-fed and from Kansas," to
use his own words.
"Well, picture girl, you seem to have put it up to me!" he said
cheerily. "You've made a lot of promises in my name; but that's just
the kind of talk that helps."
Bricktop examined the wound, while Helen studied his features; but she
could tell nothing by them. She knew that there were cases which he
refused to undertake, and nothing could change his mind. Too many
"possible" cases came back from the front behind the green curtains for
him to waste time on the "impossible."
"Remember he is an American!" she whispered.
"So? What part?"
"New England and the Southwest."
"That makes an all-round man. Not that gunner Sanford?"
"Yes."
"Peter Smithers--but this is a little world."
All the while his mind was on that wound: his talk an incidental byplay
of his intense concentration. He began making quick, nervous little
movements with his hands as if he were illustrating a mechanical
process in pantomime. When he had first appeared at the hospital this
habit was considered gallery play; but most of the doctors had learned
to believe in him, though some were still sceptical, as was Smythe in a
measure. Here was a test. When Bricktop looked up he met professional
inquiry in Smythe's eye.
"Can you?"
"Now, if I said that I could," Bricktop replied, "and I didn't, all the
stick-in-the-muds would say there was one on me. I'm going to try.
It's amazing how bad it is and yet what there is to work with. But
there's one thing--I don't know. Never had anything like it before. I
can make him as good as he was--or it's a complete failure. I want him
brought over to my place immediately. And you, picture girl, you are
going to stand by and write cheerful messages on his arm?"
"Yes, always!" said Helen.
"As for his ears, eyes, and vocal chords--that is up to other sharps,"
said Bricktop.
Phil was lifted up again and placed on something not so soft as the bed
and by the motion he comprehended that he was making another journey.
It was to an entrance with the sign "Oral Surgery." As Bricktop said,
"This means Yours Truly!" Here he was autocrat, this stranger from
Kansas by way of New York. On the door of a room fitted out with
dentist's accessories and many little drawers was painted "William
Smith, D.D.S." He was always glad to tell people about himself,
because, as he said, this saved them from wasting time in guessing and
allowed him the start in the kind of information which was being passed
around about him.
"Glad father and mother, who were sensible people, had a sense of
harmony or something like that," he would say, "and didn't name me
Decourcey or Charlemagne Smith. Good old name, Smith! Everybody knows
how to spell it. Makes the inside of the city directory look
companionable. But usually," he pointed to his hair, "I'm known as
Bricktop. At school they called me Bill Bricktop; but I considered
that too illiterate and undignified after I hung out my shingle.
D.D.S.--I'm a dental surgeon; dental surgeon--surgeon, mind, and some
other kinds of a surgeon, too. When I get time I'm going to do a book
on jaws. 'Bricktop on Jaws'! Sounds like the personal memoirs of a
henpecked husband, eh?"
Not only dentist, but surgeon! That was the fact that he kept beating
into the British mind, which seemed to him somewhat opaque at times,
when he was fighting to get the opportunity to do the work that he was
now doing. He had an air of not caring for anybody, this William
Smith, with his bright grey eye and smiling mouth, which frequently
leads to professional success and even to average mortals being
regarded as geniuses. In New York his reputation for delicate and
original work brought him many rich patients, which he never allowed to
interfere with his hospital experiments on jaws. He made enough money
to take care of the little Smiths as they arrived, one, two, three,
four, and all red-headed.
"I should have been rather disappointed if they hadn't been," he said.
"There's something in the very fact of being a red-headed Smith that
ought to give any kid a start in life."
When the war broke out and he read about the havoc wrought by bursting
shells he set out for Europe, believing in himself and his mission to
do more good in the world repairing fractured jaws than by making up
the deficiencies of nature in the mouths of the rich; but because he
believed in himself that was no reason why the War Office should
believe in him.
The first permission that he had secured after arriving in England was
to look around the hospitals for bad cases and then to go ahead with
one which everybody had given up. When he transformed an officer
condemned to wear a black cloth over his face for life into a
presentable human being, he had a walking testimonial of his skill
which gave him an entry into the big hospital in France. What an
amazing lot of things he required: laboratories and X-ray apparatus and
the more the authorities gave him, the more he wanted--this William
Smith, D.D.S. When equipment was not forthcoming through the regular
official channels, he went into his own pocket for the funds to buy it.
His bank account depleted, he was relieved from a fit of depression by
a draft from an angel in New York for twenty thousand dollars.
"Now, don't say that angels cannot draw drafts," he told Dr. Braisted,
the great eye specialist from London, "or I'll think that the English
have no sense of humour at all."
Braisted was as extremely British as Bricktop was American. Possibly
this was why they got on so well together. Being a big man himself who
had given up a practice of a hundred thousand dollars a year to save
soldiers from blindness, Braisted could appreciate Bricktop's
professional eagerness and altruism; and after a half-hour's talk with
the American he understood that the American had a thorough groundwork
of training, plus a gift. This made him one of Bricktop's early
partisans. Another was Helen. There was no criticising William Smith,
D.D.S. when she was about. She knew the subjects of his skill.
"You sit down and draw for them and they forget their jaws ache," he
told her, as he nodded to the figures with faces and jaws swathed in
bandages in the courtyard of his kingdom.
As soon as their wounds healed he had them again under the knife, for
the next process in reconstruction. Those little contrivances
fashioned in his laboratory which they had to wear caused intense pain;
but they bore it with noble patience. Whenever he appeared their eyes
followed him with a beautiful gratitude, a childlike confidence. He
was changing them from monstrosities into whole men.
"Better pay than you get filling teeth for millionaires!" said
Bricktop. "Stopping teeth, I should say; that's English."
It was a familiar thing for the men in the court to see stretchers
wheeled into the operating-room. After this they watched for that
red-headed man with the smiling mouth to walk across from his office,
as another part of the regular routine of their existence, and their
sympathy went out to the fellow on the stretcher as no one else's could.
The picture girl walking beside the stretcher this afternoon did not
even look up at them, let alone send them a smile as usual. When
Bricktop came across from the office she was waiting at the door of the
operating-room, and they noted the appeal in her eyes as she spoke to
him. Very observing those maimed men who could not speak, but still
had their eyesight. Whoever was on that stretcher must mean a great
deal to the picture girl. Afterward, while the operation was on, she
came over to them and talked, but they felt that her mind was inside
the operating-room and that she was suffering. That was the thing
about her: she could feel how others suffered. It did them more good
than her drawings.
After he was through with the preliminary probing and splicing and
wiring, which he foresaw must be followed by many other sessions,
Bricktop had what he called one of his "blow-outs."
"Fine business, war; so sensible, so logical, so considerate of
everybody's feelings!" he stormed. "A man who had a robber baron for
an ancestor and who likes to see his picture in the papers and wear a
uniform and thinks that everything is his by divine right, when what he
needs is a swift kick, wants some more glory! So he puts on his
war-bonnet and starts the glorious old game, with
improvements--sidewipes with jagged bits of steel that make a mess like
this! Enough money fired away in one day to give everybody good teeth.
Think of that--if everybody had decent teeth and well-shaped mouths!
But they can't afford it. It's the killing season. The good old sport
must be kept up!"
The nurses were familiar with the "blow-outs," which usually came with
the reaction after a trying operation, when those skilful fingers had
been so certain in their touch under an eye which was like the steel of
the instruments that he used.
Phil had awakened to find that they had taken away the thing over his
nose that had put him to sleep. And they had put back the sponge-like
thing in his mouth; but he could breathe better than before. Then they
were taking him on another journey and propping him up in bed again, in
his world of silent night. He knew, instantly her hand touched his,
that it was she again. She was writing:
"It went all right. The miracle man is pleased."
"Brave little liar!" thought Bricktop, whose pessimism with the first
results had made his "blow-out" particularly bitter.
"I am writing to your father for you and telling him that you will be
as good as ever," she continued. "The miracle man says that the pain
will be bad, and if it is too bad, clap your hands and they will stop
it. But he would rather not, if you can endure it."
Phil gave her hand two pressures to signify that he understood, and had
a pressure in response before she withdrew her hand with a fluttering,
nervous quickness. This return pressure helped. It was like
comradeship in battle. He was not making the fight alone.
Next, they were doing something to his eyes, which were finally covered
with a compress. The people out in that silent blackness were divided
into classes: She and they. Then they were doing something to his
ears. The eye and the ear experts said the same as Bricktop. Both
would try; for all three were big men, who said just what they meant.
Phil, guessing their purpose, waited for the message on his arm.
"It is all right," she wrote again. "They say you will see again and
hear again as well as ever."
He believed her with the faith of those men in the court who followed
Bricktop with their confident eyes. Soon the pain came; needlelike
shoots of broken nerves that had been numbed by shock. A thousand
needles sewing, pricking, leaping, burning, drowning the hammer-beats!
"But I'll stick it!" thought Phil.