PURGATORY
Jim came to himself in purgatory. It seemed to him that he came slowly
out of a dead black sleep into a horrible wakening dream.
He was in a vast room, low-roofed, with massive arches which
obstructed his view and lay like weights on his brain. Small, heavy
windows let in a murky light. All about him were dismal groanings, and
mutterings, and curses, and a most evil atmosphere, which turned his
stomach.
He tried to move, and was seized with grinding pains up his right side
and arm and shoulder.
He tried to grope back into the meaning of it all, and suddenly he
remembered the shell.
It must have burst and wounded him. His right hand shot suddenly with
burning pangs.
He wondered how Jack had fared. He could not remember whether he had
succeeded in pitching it down the slope or not. He had done his best;
but he remembered that the fuse was very short. . . .
Was he really alive? . . . or was he dead, and this hell? . . . The
groans and curses . . . that awful smell of blood and dead men! . . .
He came to himself again, and it was all black about him--thick,
heavy, chill darkness, full of groans and curses and the smell of
blood and dead men.
The heavy little windows came slowly out of the black void first, then
the massive pillars, and after a long, long time he saw dim figures
moving slowly about in the twilight.
One passed close to him, and he wanted to call to him to ask him about
Jack, but when he tried to speak he found he could not.
Then two more men came and dragged away the bodies of the two who lay
in the straw on each side of him. Their clothes rubbed his as they
went. He had not thought about them because they had lain so quiet.
The men came back with another man, who groaned as they laid him down,
and then with another on the other side who groaned also, and Jim
wished they had left him the quieter ones.
It was a very long time before a surgeon came round to look at the
new-comers, and Jim had had plenty of time to think as well as he was
able to.
If he lay there much longer he would die. He must get them to take him
away. How?
His dulled wits, roaming for possibilities, came on thought of the
Grand Duke's doctor who had pulled Jack through. If he could get them
to send for him. . . . Though why he should come was quite beyond
him. . . . Still it was a chance.
The surgeon took off his right-hand neighbour's leg where he lay, by
the light of a lamp. The man gave a sudden gasp and a choke, the
surgeon said "Ach!" and they carried the body away.
He took off the left-hand man's arm and strapped it up.
Jim with a mighty effort said, "Monsieur!" And the rumpled surgeon
looked down at him and wiped his fingers on a piece of dirty rag.
"I beg you," said Jim, and the surgeon bent down to him.
"Well?" he said brusquely, for loads of broken men lay waiting for
him, and he had cut and carved till his hands and arms were tired and
his back stiff with bending.
"I want . . . the Grand Duke's doctor," murmured Jim.
"The deuce you do? Anything else?" And he was going.
"The Grand Duke's own orders. . . He will tell you." And then he went
out into the darkness again.
But the feeble words had caused the surgeon to look more closely, and
then to make inquiries, and when Jim came back to life he was in bed
at Mme Greski's, and Tatia was sitting by the bedside. And to Jim it
was like a sudden leap from hell to heaven.
Tatia nodded cheerfully to him.
"Where's Jack?" he asked in a whisper.
"They've not found him yet. They're searching for him," said Tatia,
after a moment's hesitation. "You're not to talk, or to think, or do
anything but what I tell you. Drink this." And he drank, and fell
asleep again.
It was not until many days afterwards, when he had grown accustomed to
the fact that he would have to go through life with one sleeve looped
up to a button--though he still complained at times of pains in that
hand--that Tatia gently broke the news to him that Jack was gone. The
shell had killed him on the spot, had literally blown him to pieces.
And she broke down at sight of his face; and when he turned it over to
the pillow and sobbed silently, she crept quietly out of the room and
left him to his sorrow.
Jack gone! _Jack!_ He felt stupid and newly broken. Dear old
Jack! . . . smashed by that cursed shell! A British shell, too, unless
he was very much mistaken. That was hard lines, after coming through
so much. Hard lines! Hard lines!
He was very weak yet, and the tears welled out again and again, as he
lay thinking dreamily of all the old times on the flats, and how close
they had been to one another all through their lives. And Jack was
gone . . . killed by a British shell! And he was so much the better
man of the two. And now, if he himself lived, he would have to go
home--some time--if this wretched war ever came to an end--and break
all their hearts with the news. In his weakness and sorrow he wished
that cursed shell had made an end of them both.
It was early summer before he was about again, for the bursting shell
had ripped open his side and shoulder, in addition to shattering his
arm beyond repair, and had given a shock to his system from which it
recovered but slowly.
And still the siege dragged on. Early in June came the third
bombardment. All the southern portion of the town had long been a heap
of grass-grown ruins. Now, even the northern slopes became almost
untenable.
The theatre was shattered out of all knowledge; in every barricaded
street the roadway was furrowed like a ploughed field by the shot and
shell which came raining in, and these were collected each day and
piled into pyramids ten feet high. Not a house but was damaged, many
were in ruins; the vertical shells from the mortars came down like
bolts from heaven and spread destruction where they fell.
It was death to walk the streets, and no safer to stop indoors. Many
crossed the harbour to the northern heights. The Greskis and Jim
fitted up their cellars and lived there as in a bomb-proof.
Greski himself had made but a slow recovery. The bullet-wound in his
thigh took long to heal, and left him limping still and quite unfit
for service--at which nis mother and Tatia rejoiced greatly, and he
did not greatly repine.
"As a soldier," he said, "I would shirk nothing; but all the same
Russia is not my country, but my oppressor, and it makes a difference.
For Poland I would die ten deaths. For Russia I grudge a finger."
When the bombardment slackened again, he limped out on Jim's sound arm
to gather news, and managed to keep a portentously long face as his
fellows in the café told them of the taking of the Mamelon and Sapoune
by the French, and the closing of the harbour road leading out to
Inkerman.
But alone with Jim and his own people, he let his feelings have play.
"Now we're getting on a bit. I mean you are. The Mamelon is one of the
keys to the door. I see the end in sight But your people are
strangely, dilatory or overcareful. From what they were saying down
there you could have got in more than once if you'd only come on."
"I wish they had come on," said Jim heartily. "Maybe there are too
many cooks at the pie."
Ten days later came the fourth bombardment, and in the comparative
safety of their cellars they heard the neighbours' houses crumbling
and falling, and the upper part of their own came down with a crash
which blanched the women's faces, till the ruins settled into position
and left them still alive.
Then one day, in an appalling cessation of the thunders to which their
ears were accustomed, Jim and Greski, stealing out to the south slope,
heard on the hill-side the solemn wail of the Dead March, and
presently a great salute of unshotted guns, and learned later that
Lord Raglan was dead, and, according to Greski, was succeeded by one
Sampson, whom Jim failed to recognise under so large a name.
Sebastopol was becoming one great hospital, one might almost say
charnel-house, for the wounded were beyond their capacity for tending,
and the dead lay for days in the streets unburied. And over it all the
summer sun shone brightly, and flowers bloomed gaily among the
shattered columns and fallen walls of houses which had once made this
one of the fairest cities of the East.
The siege lapsed again into dullness, in spite of Greski's prophecy.
The thinned ranks behind the bastions were replenished from the
northern camps. All day long the harbour was alive with the boats that
brought them across. And the bastions themselves grew stronger and
stronger, with the myriads of men working on them and the tons of shot
rained into them from the outside.
Working parties streamed up to the front all day long, carrying great
stakes and poles for the abattis, and fascines and gabions for the
ramparts, and in this work every English and French prisoner they had
taken was employed.
Jim found it refreshing to hear the hearty British oaths which rattled
about such fatigue parties, and he generally hailed the speakers and
got a hearty word in reply.
"God bless you, sir, but this ain't no work for British sailormen, an'
it does one a sight o' good to cuss 'em high an' low, even if they
doesn't understand it."
"Perhaps just as well," said Jim. "Can you use any money?"
"Try me, sor! God bless your honour! This night I'll be as drunk as a
lord, an' so will all me mates. 'Twill lighten the day an' the weight
of these ---- stakes. ----- ----- all Rooshians! They don't know how
to treat a sailorman."