We swoop, as it were, to the skies, and we drop, as it were, to the very
sea bed, and we are seasick to the souls of us, one and all; and of
the five hundred men the staunch boat carries, there are a round four
hundred and fifty wounded, and a round four hundred who will never see
the skies with conscious eyes again. We are bound for Scutari, where
an enlightened intelligence, awakened at last to some beginning of
elementary necessity, has established a hospital; for Government,
as usual in such matters, after five hundred years of more or less
victorious prowling to and fro in the world and more of gathered
experience than any other body of men ever had in the history of the
world, has positively made up its mind to shelter broken bones and sick
bodies from the mere inclemencies of the weather.
It would not have done so much had it not been for the intervention of
a lady whose name deserves to be immortal so long as the British Empire
paints itself red upon the map; but Florence Nightingale had enlisted
the sympathy of English hearts more quickly than the Queen’s shilling
had enlisted fighting men, and the Crimean hospitals were the centre
of a thousand human interests. The authorities had somehow caught and
impounded the good ship _Cæsar_ at Odessa, and had despatched it to a
desert bay with no landing place or chartered sounding, near Ouklacool
Aides, and, having loaded it there with wounded, had ordered it across
to the Black Sea and down the Dardanelles. The stout Ayrshire heart
of the captain was sick and sore within him many a time on that grim
voyage, for before it was half over he had spent his last round shot on
board and his last bit of spare canvas in the sewing up and weighting of
men who were fated to be buried in the deep.
Amongst those who escaped this dreary fate were Polson Jervase and the
enemy he had rescued at so grave a risk of his own life, and they
two, with about one half the original human cargo of the ship, reached
Scutari, and were landed there, and carried into hospital. A rough sea
voyage in January weather in the Black Sea affords no pleasant nurture
for a wounded man, and the poor fellows who were carried or helped
ashore were a pitiable crew indeed. Neither Polson nor his enemy was
conscious at the hour of landing, or had been truly conscious throughout
the whole of the long and trying voyage. They were lowered in their
stretchers from the ship’s side to the caiques which were brought
alongside, pulled to the shore and carried by hand to the hospital.
They were luckier in this respect than the majority of the men, who were
huddled into the straw of the lumbering octagonal-wheeled arabas. The
rustic Turk had not yet mastered the art, even if he has mastered
it to-day, of constructing a cartwheel in a circle. He makes it
eight-sided, and builds his vehicles without springs, and the wounded
went along the vile road with a compound jolt for every foot of ground
they traversed. There are men yet living who remember that piercing
scene, and the cries which were wrung from the hearts of the stoutest
fighting men in the world along that _via dolorosa_. It happened that
the rescued and the rescuer were laid side by side, each on a bed some
twenty inches in width; and there they were tended many days before
either of them awoke to a real knowledge of his surroundings. In their
waking hours they babbled deliriously, the pair of them, letting out the
secrets of their very souls, if anybody had been there to listen. Day by
day, and night by night, Polson, as he remembered afterwards, heard the
best loved voice in the world from time to time, and sometimes with it
and sometimes alone the voice he hated most. The wind was blowing the
rain against the windows of the grey-stone house on Beacon Hill, and
Irene and his father were whispering secrets together in the parlour.
Then De Blacquaire was chattering there and saying all manner of things
which were not pertinent to the case in hand, and Irene was answering
him. John Jervase was talking by turns to all three, and was sometimes
absurdly sentimental, dropping tears on the listener’s upturned face.
All this was so strange and confused, so much a dream of delirium, that
when at last the sufferer awoke to reason, he attached no meaning to it.
It was the 1st of February, as he found out afterwards, and he had been
crazy for five weeks. He stared feebly up at the ceiling and wondered
as to his whereabouts. He tried to lift a hand, but he might have worn
a gauntlet of lead, it felt so heavy; though, when at last he struggled
into a changed posture, it looked as if it were made of egg-shell
porcelain, it was so thin and worn.
‘I wonder,’ he said within himself--and this was his first conscious
thought, ‘I wonder if I saved that sweep.’ And then at his side he heard
De Blacquaire’s voice.
‘Thank you,’ it was saying. ‘You’re awfully sweet and kind, and I’m very
much obliged to you. That is much easier.’
Polson was greatly interested, but in the very act of turning over to
look at his enemy, and to find out whom he was addressing, he fell into
a deep sleep. The next time he came back to consciousness it was dark,
except for a sickly burning oil lamp on a sconce fixed against a wall
at a little distance. He began to be aware of the fact that he was
amazingly hungry, and the memory of what he imagined to have been his
last meal came back to him. He laughed feebly, and he spoke.
‘I wonder what the beggars did with the rest of that pig.’
There was the sound beside him as of an emotional snuffle, and John
Jervase blew his nose resoundingly, so that Polson knew that his father
was there before the old man bent his head above him. He was too weak
to be surprised at anything, and had no earthly notion as to his own
whereabouts.
‘Why, you’ve come round again, Polly,’ said his father. ‘You know me,
don’t you?’
It was in Polson’s mind to return a hearty nod in the affirmative, but
all he managed to do was to close his eyes and open them again.
‘Why, that’s hearty!’ said Jervase, smoothing the bedclothes above him
with a tremulous hand. ‘That’s hearty, old chap. They said you wouldn’t
pull through, but I knew better all along. Now, you was to take this,
if you woke up, and you’ve got to keep very still and quiet. This is the
very best beef tea as you can get for love or money in all Asia Minor.
You let me tuck this napkin under your chin, Polly, and I’ll feed you
with a golden tablespoon. You’d ‘ardly believe it, but I bought this
in Vienna on my way out here, and it used to belong to the Empress
Catherine of Rooshia, and I gave a twenty-pun’ note for it, and it’s got
her monogram. You don’t mind me chattering, old chap, but I don’t want
to excite you, and it’s the doctor’s orders that I mustn’t; but it’s
pretty nigh on two years now since I set eyes on you, and when you get
stronger and begin to walk about again, I shall have a heap of things to
tell you.’
The wounded man lay face upwards, and sipped at the tepid liquid
presented to his lips with a huge physical enjoyment. In his whole life
he had never conceived of so complete a pleasure. Only the convalescent
knows the joys of the table.
‘That’s the last spoonful, Polly,’ said John Jervase, wiping the pale
lips with the napkin he had tucked beneath the invalid’s chin at the
beginning of the meal. ‘You’d like more, wouldn’t you?’
Folson tried to nod again, and again achieved nothing more than a
lowering and raising of the eyelids.
‘You haven’t got to have it, you know, old chap. You’ve got to be kept
hungry. It’s been touch and go for weeks, but you’ll be all right now,
if we take care of you. And I reckon we’ll do that amongst us.’
A weary voice rose from the neighbouring bed.
‘Stop that infernal cackle, whoever you are, and let me sleep. Don’t you
know better than to make a row like that in a hospital?’
Once more Polson--this time wide awake--was conscious of the voice of
his enemy.
‘It’s all right,’ his father whispered. ‘I’ll come back next time you’ve
got to be fed, old chap, but he doesn’t like me, and he’s been down on
me a hundred times already.’
The sick man stared at the ceiling where the oil lamp in its sconce on
the wall had made a smoky semi-circle, and where the yellow light now
slept upon the whitewash within the limits of the smoked half-ring. He
was too weak to think very deeply, and too weak to feel very strongly;
but the sense of home within his mind, and the father was the father,
and the voice and the hand had never been unkind since he could
remember, and the scorn and passion of his heart had somehow worn away,
and he was not angry or contemptuous or full of hatred as he had been.
Jervase leaned over him in a momentary farewell, and Polson saw that the
old man’s eyes were full of tears. One dropped plump and warm on the tip
of his own nose, and there was something comic and touching in the fact,
and he giggled and snuffled over it to the verge of a weak hysteria.
‘I wasn’t to disturb you, Polly,’ said Jervase, ‘and I’m misbehaving
myself. I’ve got to go, and you’ve got to go to sleep; but I’ll be back
as soon as ever they’ll let me, and in a day or two’s time you’ll be
strong enough for you and me to have a talk together.’
‘I wish,’ said the feeble, drawling voice from the neighbouring bed,
‘that you would hold your tongue or go. I want to sleep.’
John Jervase stooped to kiss Polson on the forehead, and went his way
down the silent ward, with his boots creaking with a fainter and
fainter sound, until he reached the folding doors at the far end of the
dormitory.
The lad lay quiet. He had parted with his father in bitter disdain and
anger, but somehow these emotions had all departed from him by this
time, and had left him as if they had been an evil spirit, banished by
some better influence. He did not know--he was too weak and tired to
think about things--but at his side there was an angry stirring and a
peevish voice spoke to him.
‘That’s you, is it?’
Polson, a little strengthened by the food he had taken, managed to roll
round upon his shoulder, and looked his late enemy in the face.
‘It’s I,’ he said. ‘Indubitably. And it’s you, to a certainty. Where did
you get hit?’
There was so long a silence that each thought that the other had fallen
asleep; but when it had endured for perhaps the space of twenty minutes,
De Blacquaire began to turn and murmur, and at last his words found an
articulate form.
‘I say,’ he began, ‘you there! You! Sergeant! Are you awake?’
‘Wide,’ said Polson.
The man beside him lay with pallid face and big bird-like eyes, staring
at the smoked semi-circle on the ceiling, and after the inquiry he had
offered and the answer given, there was silence again, whilst a man
might have counted twenty.
‘They’ve told me all about it,’ said Major de Blacquaire, ‘and I don’t
understand it.
And I want to understand. What in the name of hell did you fetch me out
for?’
‘You go to sleep,’ said Polson, ‘and don’t ask ridiculous questions.’
‘I want to know,’ said De Blacquaire.
‘I’ll tell you to-morrow,’ the Sergeant answered. ‘But it’s no good
thinking about things just now.’
Again there was a silence, and it lasted for a full hour. The rank
petroleum lamp in the sconce burnt out and left a sickening stench upon
the air. The whole space in which the wounded men lay went dark, and
the wild free wind and the cruel driving rain beat at the window. In the
black darkness voices spoke here and there. There were notes of fever
from wounded men, and once or twice there was a last message whispered
to a nurse’s ear, never to be delivered. Dark and storm, and the heroic
long-suffering soul released from the heroic long-suffering body, and
going home at midnight.
Sick men who have been half-starved for a year or two, and who have run
through every note of the gamut of emotion, may be quicker to appreciate
these influences than common people are: but Polson Jervase, lying
on his back and staring upwards in a futile endeavour to trace the
semi-circular ring of smoke upon the ceiling, felt them all deeply.
Whilst he lay there, staring upwards, there was a sudden patter of bare
feet on the bare floor at his side, and a hand clutched him.
‘Look here,’ said Major de Blacquaire, and even in his half dream he
knew the voice instantly, as if he had been wide awake and the room had
lain in broad daylight. ‘Look here, what the devil did you do it for?’
‘Get back into bed,’ said Polson, ‘and I’ll try to talk to you.’
The beds were not more than twenty inches in width, and there was barely
a foot between them, so that a man by the stretching of a hand could
touch a comrade.
Out of the dark, to the Sergeant’s intense surprise, there came a
groping hand, which sought his own, and found it and Clutched it.
‘What the devil did you do it for?’ said De Blacquaire.
‘Well,’ said the wounded Sergeant, ‘it’s pretty hard to say. I suppose
it’s a mixed-up kind of thing altogether. I saw you drop, and you
promised to break me in the morning, and if I’d let your chance go by,
d’ye see----’
‘See! ‘said De Blacquaire, holding on to the hand in the darkness.
‘You’re not half a bad fellow, Jervase.’
‘Ain’t I?’ said Jervase. ‘You go on like this, Major, and I shall begin
to think that you’re a better sort than I fancied you were.’
The two men went to sleep together, each holding the other’s hand. It
was an odd thing, and quite unlikely to have been prophesied by anybody;
but it happened.
An hour or two later, when the elder Jervase stole in on tiptoe, with
a new cup of priceless beef-tea, he saw the two men lying there, with
their faces turned to each other, as if they had been lovers, and hand
holding hand. He took Polson by the wrist, and shook the grasp gently
asunder.
‘You’ve got to take this, old chap,’ he said, and setting down the
candle he carried, and fixing it by its own grease to the rough hospital
table at the bed head, he began to feed the boy once more.
You are not to imagine the ward silent all this time. There are valiant
souls of men passing with every hour, and groans of death and anguish,
and all the living axe conscious.
When Jervase had fed the Sergeant to the last teaspoonful, he retired
again, leaving the candle burning on the table at the bed head.
‘These poor chaps,’ he said, ‘may find a little bit of comfort in a
light, and any way, good English wax don’t stink like Turkish lamp oil,
does it, old chap?’
The ‘old chap’ winked. He had no strength to express himself in any
more emphatic manner; but he had got to love his father once again, for,
after all, the ties of blood are strong, and a man may have been a wrong
doer without giving his own son an eternal cause to hate him. And when
a man has a bullet hole through the neck, and has been unconscious for
many days, and delirious for many weeks, and finds a once familiar face
bending over him, habit asserts itself; and any hatred or despite which
may have come in between two people long ago is likely to be scattered.
It was a foreign air which howled about the gables and chimneys. It was
a foreign wind which wept and moaned about that abode of sorrow, and
drove the rain against the window panes. But to the boy, the feel of
whose father’s hand was still warm in his own, it was home, home, home.
The candle dwindled down, and he had been watchful enough to prevent the
whole place being set on fire by waiting to blow out its final flame as
it drove towards the bare wood on which it rested. Darkness came down
and slumber with it; and then on the top of slumber a quiet whisper and
a dawning light which waked many men in the long bare corridor. There
was a candle carried by a hospital nurse in the sombre uniform of her
craft, and behind it came a lady whom every waking man there present
turned to thank, if it were only by a movement of the enfeebled hand,
or a droop of the eyelid, or a motion of the deadened lips. Men who are
dying after long sickness in hospital cannot cheer. Men who fall in
the full tide of the strength of manhood on the battlefield can acclaim
their leader. The wasted forces had naturally gone, but as the gleaming
candle light led Florence Nightingale from couch to couch, the wakers
turned and gave such signals as they could. The pitying, watchful,
gracious face went by, and the candle light departed.
A good many weeks and months went by before the name of the owner
of that gracious face and that memorable smile was known even to the
parting souls and suffering bodies which were cheered by it.
Spring comes up earlier in the region of Scutari than it does in London,
and there were many scores of ragged silken-bearded fellows rambling up
and down the streets of the place on crutches before the first leaf
had declared itself in any park in London, and almost before the first
wayside flower had bloomed in any English country hedgerow.
Away to the north-east of the hospital lies that cemetery which for
many a year to come will be a place of pilgrimage for the British
globe-trotter. There are the hunched, high-shouldered monuments of many
buried men, with the turban with its wreathen carvings to indicate the
resting place of the master sex. In those days, when the shallow graves
were being very quickly filled, the convalescent inmates of the hospital
made the cemetery their favourite promenading ground, and it was
here, upon a shining March Monday, that Polson and Major de Blacquaire
encountered each other on their wanderings amid the tombs, the one on
crutches, and the other painfully supporting his footsteps by the aid of
a walking stick.
‘Since they began to sort us about,’ said De Blacquaire, ‘I’ve lost
sight of you. And you’ve never answered my question. Now, what the devil
_did_ you do it for?’
‘Look here,’ said Polson, using his favourite locution, ‘you’ve
threatened two or three times to make an end of me.’
‘Yes,’ said the Major, nodding and drawling on the word. ‘That’s right
enough, But what’s that got to do with it?’
‘Well, you see,’ said Polson, ‘I’d got to give you the chance to do it.’
‘Had you?’ said Major de Blacquaire.
The one man was leaning on his crutches, and the other was stooping on
his crutch walking-stick, and there was nobody near so far as either of
them could see.
‘I don’t know,’ said De Blacquaire, in a drooping voice. ‘I may be all
wrong, and in a sort of way knocked to pieces, don’t you know. But I
think on the whole, Sergeant, that you have acted like an unusually
damned good fellow. Do you mind?’--he pointed to a sunken tomb by a
motion of one of his crutches, and he sat down upon it. ‘What has a
fellow got to do when another fellow has fetched him out of the fire at
the risk of his own life, and one fellow hates the other fellow like the
very devil? I’ll tell you straight, Polson,’ said De Blacquaire, in his
old-mannered drawl, ‘I’d have seen you damned and done for before I’d
have reached out a finger to save you. And I think that you are the
blamedest kind of an ass and a duffer to have pulled me out. And yet I
don’t know--I’m not so cursed certain that you’ll suffer for it.’