LIGHT
Either Helen or Phil had given the eye expert the name of Mr. Eyes and
the ear expert that of Mr. Ears, which these great men who had
honourific alphabetical court trains to their names did not mind. As
guardian of the nerve which enables us to know whether the tenor is in
good voice or not and to tell the notes of the lark from those of the
nightingale or, what was more important in the latest European
operations, the cough of the _soixante-quinze_ from the rattle of a
machine-gun, Mr. Ears was champion of silence in the hospital, which
might have been as noisy as a boiler factory without disturbing Phil.
The ambulances ran softly up to the door; the nurses spoke low; they
did not rattle the dishes when they brought food from the diet
kitchens. After Phil's nurse had placed his tray in front of him
preparatory to feeding him, she was called to the other end of the room
for something, when she heard a crash behind her. She turned to see
broken glass and crockery scattered on the floor. Extraordinary! This
had never happened before to him. As she bent over to wipe up the
small delta of milk she saw Phil's foot wiggling energetically,
demanding his pad--a rare request unless he knew that Helen was present.
"Did it make a noise?" he asked.
"Of course, and an awful mess!" she replied. "How did it happen?"
"Experiment!" he wrote.
Experiment? It was a plain case of being out of his head. She hoped
that Helen would come soon, as she always brought him around if he gave
signs of delirium. Meanwhile, she must be on the watch lest he tear
off his bandages, as other of Bricktop's patients had done, but her
apprehensions were quite groundless.
The downfall of the tray was a test after vague intimations that sound
was entering Phil's silent world. It was as loud to his ears as the
crackling of a sheet of newspaper. His elation over the discovery was
so great that he had a reaction when the nerve-devils began plying him
with their scepticism.
"Well-known psychological illusion!" they said, using professional
language which they had picked up from long association with hospitals.
"Imagination played you a trick. You knew it was going to crash!"
Very likely they were right. Hadn't he imagined that he could see the
interior of the ward and how Henriette looked when she bent over him to
write on his arm? Hadn't he sometimes heard her steps in imagination
around his chair? He set all his mind into his ears, straining for
some other sound. There was none.
"This torture is called hope unfilled!" chirruped the nerve-devils.
"Oh, what a dance we shall give you to-morrow after the operation! The
operation is to-morrow, isn't it?"
Of course the nurse related the whole affair to Helen when she arrived.
"'Experiment,' he said. How extraordinary!" exclaimed the nurse, who
was still more astounded when Helen gave an outcry of joy and, leaning
over, puckered her lips and uttered a sharp whistle--which was one of
her accomplishments--in Phil's ear.
Here was real test! No imagination about this, if he had heard. She
drew back, quivering with suspense. Phil was wiggling his foot almost
violently for his pad and pencil.
"Did somebody whistle in my ear?" he asked.
"I did! I did!" she repeated wildly, as she wrote her reply.
"They said it was imagination"--she knew who "they" were, those
"Boches" of nerve-devils.
"Score one for the Allies!" she wrote on his arm. "I'm off to tell Mr.
Ears!"
The Great Man came swinging along the gravel path, half running to keep
up with Helen. After the scientific test which he promptly applied he
felt as triumphant as a brigadier who had taken the first line trenches
on a front of a thousand yards in the Ypres salient.
"Only a question of time, he says," Helen wrote.
"Hurrah!" Phil replied. "If anybody has a steam siren handy and blew
it in my ear it would be all the more comforting."
"Soon I shall not have to write on your arm any more," she told him.
"That will be odd."
"Yes, very!" she said.
Mr. Ears had gone to tell Bricktop, who said that it would hearten Phil
for the operation the next day and then despatched a messenger to the
parents and Peter Smithers. The news travelled fast about the
hospital. It was across the street with the Trucklefords in half an
hour.
"Clever of him, wasn't it, dropping the tray?" said Lady Violet. "And
so American!"
Of course the Truckleford lot had met Peter Smithers by this time. He
and the Sanfords had even had tea over there on the primary invitation
of Henriette, renewed unanimously by all present. He was a card, this
dry American worth three millions, which were to go to that poor fellow
struggling to become a whole human being again without yet knowing that
he was to be the heir. Phil's case took on fresh interest. So he
could hear a little! And the big operation was to-morrow! If that
should succeed and he should recover his sight!
Dr. and Mrs. Sanford sat on one of the benches in the court, at times
furtively clasping hands as they thought of what was going on in the
operating-room. Peter Smithers and Helen were walking up and down; and
they, too, were silent. All felt their helplessness. Everything was
with the skill of that red-headed dental surgeon. The eyes of the men
in pain lying on the grass or resting on other benches were bright with
sympathy, peering out from the white balls of bandages. Phil's was the
worst case ever admitted, and theirs had been bad enough. The magician
they knew had only made the attempt for the sake of those two old
people sitting as quiet as if they were of stone.
Surprise appeared in the faces of the Sanfords, Peter, and Helen as
Henriette came under the Oral Surgery sign. She met their glances with
one of appealing inquiry, as she stood hesitant, looking from one to
another. It occurred to Dr. and Mrs. Sanford how beautiful she was,
and again for the thousandth time to Helen. The father and mother
could not help thinking of the thing that they had promised to keep out
of mind, as they saw the contrast between the two, with the
well-moulded features of Henriette and the irregular ones of Helen in
repose.
"Nothing yet!" said Peter. "We wait."
There was a glint of passing sharpness in his shrewd eye. She smiled
in the face of it as one will who asks not to be misunderstood; then
joined him and Helen in their pacing.
"You have been so wonderful to Cousin Phil," she said to Peter.
"Bricktop will do it!" remarked Peter, closing his fist and giving it a
little shake. "Wonderful, did you say? Me?"
"Yes," she smiled up at him. "I did not know that there could be such
men as you in the world."
"Lots of them in America!" replied Peter. "Growing them is one of our
national industries! Competition is hard and they knock one another
about so much some of 'em get calloused, I suppose."
"How worthy Phil is of all your generosity we found at Mervaux,"
Henriette continued.
"Yes. He's in there!" Peter concluded, nodding toward the
operating-room.
"Yes!" she murmured. "It's too awful!"
She, too, was silent, taking her cue from his evident desire. As she
paced beside him she had an atmospheric feeling of the power of the man
as something absolute and indomitable, centred on fighting with his
will for a decision in favour of Phil. He made talk of any kind seem
petty.
When the door of the operating-room opened they heard its swing,
noiseless as were its hinges. Dr. and Mrs. Sanford rose mechanically
in answer to that signal; the others turned in their tracks. As
Bricktop appeared in the doorway two pairs of old eyes saw him
indistinctly through a swimming haze. They were going to learn now if
Phil would ever be to their sight as he was before, or---- Bricktop's
round face drawn with effort lighted with a smile, as he held up his
hand.
"You've done it! By God, you've done it, Bricktop!" Peter cried,
rushing toward him.
"Right!" said Bricktop. "Unless there is some setback in the next two
or three days. I don't think there will be. Expect to make him as
good as new, only a few little scars!"
Two pairs of old eyes still saw that red head like a sun through a fog,
but they had heard his words. They did not cry out; their only
demonstration was to clasp hands. Helen could not speak, only look at
Bricktop with glorious wonder in her eyes, which he was quick to see.
"We beat the Boches to it, eh?" he said to her.
Peter, too, had become silent in his inexpressible happiness, after he
had wrung Bricktop's hand.
"If now he should recover his sight!" Henriette exclaimed abstractedly,
her words apparently the beginning of a train of thought too rapid to
be expressed in speech.
"He will!" said Helen and Peter together.
Phil was being wheeled from the operating-room back to the ward.
Bricktop beckoned the waiting group to come in; then bade them pause at
the door until Phil was transferred from his carriage to the bed. The
nurse said that he had recovered consciousness, though there was no
sign of it in his motionless form.
"You tell him!" said Bricktop to Helen.
"Bricktop has done it! You win!" she wrote on his arm.
Many days awaited him, with the pain devils in their last big dance,
but with every day meaning less torture. His hearing had become
distinct enough to perceive an ordinary conversation around his chair
as a faint hum. The silver harness still clinched his jaw and the
bandages were still over his eyes.
"Quite as he was before--only a few scars," Bricktop, whom Henriette
had met coming out of his office, said in answer to her inquiry when
she was on her way to Phil.
Mr. Eyes happened to be coming along the path at the time. Henriette
joined him and together they crossed the court.
"What hope?" she asked. She put the question to him with increased
fervour every time that she saw him; and of late she had chanced to see
him frequently.
"I am going to change the bandages," he replied.
Sometimes the great man had doubts about the system of bandages, which
nine out of ten specialists would not have favoured, perhaps; but when
he considered an operation he fell back on them as the only way.
Shell-shock was baffling, freakish, in its results, and the truth was
that he was groping in professional darkness to save Phil from eternal
darkness. Yesterday he had strengthened the application. A matter of
daily routine the change of the bandages. It brought him every
afternoon to the ward and always Helen was there to receive him, the
same look of confident anticipation in her eyes, as yet unfulfilled.
He pressed his hand on Phil's forehead, and this Phil had long ago come
to recognise as Mr. Eyes' private signal which preceded the removal of
the bandages. He was particularly welcome to-day, as Phil had had a
kind of restless sensation back of his eyeballs. As the medicated pad
was withdrawn, a gurgling outcry rose from his throat and he leaned
convulsively forward, fingers outstretched, opening and closing as if
he were trying to grasp at a reality that might escape.
"It's not true! Imagination again!" snarled the pain devils; but they
could not deceive him about this.
Light had come into his black night, soft, dreamy, vague, amazing
light--just light, light, light! There were no people in it, no
houses, no trees, only light which seemed like silver gauze hung before
his eyes and yet to stretch to the ends of the world. It had brought
something dead to life as by miracle, with a touch as soft as
eiderdown, sending little thrills knitting in and out all through him.
Light for the first time since he had heard that hurtling scream of the
shell! Light was in his brain, his veins, his tissue, singing and
frolicking as it opened the doors of dark places. He wanted to embrace
it, fondle it, run it through his fingers with a miser's greed of gold
and gather a store of it while he might. Out of the light, as if
traced by the hand of light, a message was being traced on his arm.
"What is it, Phil?" Helen asked him.
He would not attempt to speak again. He had forgotten himself when he
made that gurgling outcry. It was one of the idiosyncrasies of his
sick man's pride that he would not try to talk before the one who wrote
on his arm. The sounds that he emitted through the bandages and silver
harness must be like a stuttering idiot's lisp, as he expressed it, and
he thought of himself as repulsive enough to her brave eyes without
that. Speech would return normally, the throat expert had said, when
the removal of Bricktop's apparatus should give it a chance.
"Light!" he wrote. "Just light, without seeing you or where I am. It
seems as if I were hung up in the ether, without seeing sky or earth
and light held me up and I ate it and drank it and breathed it. Oh, it
is good, good!"
"Yes, good!" repeated phlegmatic, kindly Mr. Eyes, who had brought
light to many people for large fees from the rich and for nothing for
those who live in the alleys. Light was his business. Yet he, too,
must find some outlet for his emotion, which was to pat Helen on the
head. General Ears had taken only a thousand yards, while General Eyes
felt as triumphant as if he had taken five miles of first line trench,
ten thousand prisoners and a hundred guns. It was the knock-out blow
for the little pain devils.
When he had made some experiments and put on fresh compresses and was
about to go, he said, choosing his words carefully:
"I think that I may safely say, barring unforeseen complications, that
he will entirely recover his sight with time. How about that?" he
added, to Helen.
Her eyes were moist with happiness. She was incapable of speaking.
Her first coherent thought was that Phil himself did not yet know.
"Victory!" she wrote on his arm. "You will completely recover your
sight, on the high authority of Mr. Eyes himself."
For a space he made no movement. His consciousness was absorbing a
transcendent fact. Helen sat beside him, waiting. Henriette, who had
remained all the while in the background, silent except for a prolonged
cry of delight, came nearer and stood on the other side of him, also
waiting. At length he wrote:
"Soon I shall see you!"
"Yes," Helen replied.
"And father and mother, too. Tell them quick--and Peter and Bricktop
and Helen--everybody!"
"Yes. I will go instantly."
She should have thought of this before, she said to herself, as she
hurried away on her mission.
Henriette was left alone with Phil. She regarded him with lashes
half-closed and with her lips set in a way much like Madame Ribot's.
As she grew older she would more and more resemble her mother. A step
and another, slowly, gracefully, as she bent her lithe figure, her eyes
opening now in venturesome inquiry as she took the place which Helen
had just vacated. She had written on his arm a good deal of late and,
fascinated by the accomplishment, had even practised on her own arm in
her room. Phil received the hand-clasp which signalled Helen's return.
"A messenger has gone," she wrote. "Wouldn't you like to take a walk
in the court?"
"Yes," was the answer. "It will make the happiness still more real to
feel my legs under me."
She directed his steps as Helen had directed them many times. The men
of pain lounging in the court looking out through the holes in balls of
white, watched two figures pacing in rhythmic step which was familiar
when their backs were turned; but when facing them, the girl who was
like a picture was in place of the picture girl. They wondered about
it; wonder was a habit of their tired minds. She was beautiful,
surpassingly so, soothing to the eyes, and she played Helen's part,
too, by smiling at them as she passed. Her smile was more radiant than
Helen's. It was a better short-acquaintance smile, one of them
thought, while Helen's sent a warming, lasting glow all through you and
was better for easing pain. Of the two, they would rather have Helen
about every day. The men of pain were not articulate, but little that
passed in the court escaped their eyes. If a sparrow lighted on a roof
or a nurse appeared at a window, they knew it.
Then, just as Phil and Henriette had made a turn with their backs to
them, they saw Helen appear under the sign and something happened that
puzzled pain-weary heads. At the very point where the court was in
view the picture girl stopped short at the sight of the two who were
promenading. For an instant she was perfectly still, only an instant,
as she looked at the backs of Phil and the girl who was like a picture.
Then she put her hand up to her head abruptly, as one will who
recollects something, and turned away before the two had wheeled to
walk back toward the Oral Surgery sign.
It was a pantomime that set the men into a prolonged quandary. Some
had an idea, from the way that Helen put her hand up to her head, that
there had been a flash of pain as sharp as any they had ever known
through it; others thought that she was relieved to find another in her
place. Perhaps both were right, and all kept thinking of it after Phil
and Henriette had gone indoors.
When she had led him to his chair and drawn the coverlet over his legs
as she had seen Helen do, she gave him the hand-clasp which meant
"good-night." In answer, he gripped her hand tightly and drew her
toward him. The other hand moved slowly back and forth in the air till
its fingers touched her hair. Then, with the feathery touch of the
blind, he traced the line of her forehead. A frown like her mother's
gathered as he went on to her eyes, her nose, her lips, and her chin.
"It is the first time that you ever did that," she wrote on his arm.
When she brought his pad and he began writing, her head was bent, lips
tight, eyes squinting with intensity, as she watched the tracing of
each word.
"Yes. I often wanted to----" Her frown had gone. Her head rose as
she drew a deep breath and smiled as she would at herself in the
mirror. His pencil hesitated, then went on. "----but thought that you
might think I was rude. You don't think so, now?"
"No. You did it beautifully, wonderfully," she replied. "It was the
next best thing to knowing that you could really see me. And soon you
shall."