It was a tiny room at the top of what used to be a princely London
mansion, the home of a great noble--a tiny room, eight feet by five,
the sleeping-receptacle, in the good old days, for some unconsidered
scullery-maid or under-footman. The walls were distempered and bare;
the furniture consisted of a camp-bed, a chair, a deal chest of
drawers, and a wash-stand--everything spotless. There was no
fireplace. An aerial cell of a room, yet the woman in nurse's uniform
who sat on the bed pressing her hands to burning eyes and aching brows
thanked God for it. She thanked God for the privacy of it. Had she
been a mere nurse, she would have had the third share of a large,
comfortable bedroom, with a fire on bitter winter nights. But, as a
Sister, she had a room to herself. Thank God she was alone! Coldly,
stonily, silently alone.
The expected convoy of wounded officers had been late, and she had
remained on duty beyond her hour, so as to lend a hand. Besides, she
was not on the regular staff of the private hospital. She had broken a
much needed rest from France to give temporary relief from pressure; so
an extra hour or two did not matter.
The ambulances at length arrived. Some stretcher-cases, some walking.
Among the latter was one, strongly knit, athletic, bandaged over the
entire head and eyes, and led like a blind man by orderlies. When she
first saw him in the vestibule, his humorous lips and resolute chin,
which were all of his face unhidden, seemed curiously familiar; but
during the bustle of installation, the half-flash of memory became
extinct. It was only later, when she found that this head-bandaged man
was assigned to her care, that she again took particular notice of him.
Now that his overcoat had been taken off, she saw a major's crown on
the sleeve of his tunic, and on the breast the ribbons of the D.S.O.
and the M.C. He was talking to the matron.
"They did us proud all the way. Had an excellent dinner. It's awfully
kind of you; but I want nothing more, I assure you, save just to get
into bed and sleep like a dog."
And then she knew, in a sudden electric shock of certainty.
Half dazed, she heard the matron say,
"Sister, this is Major Shileto, of the Canadian army."
Half dazed, too, she took his gropingly outstretched hand. The
gesture, wide of the mark, struck her with terror. She controlled
herself. The matron consulted her typed return-sheet and ran off the
medical statement of his injuries.
Major Shileto laughed.
"My hat! If I've got all that the matter with me, why didn't they bury
me decently in France?"
She was rent by the gay laughter. When the matron turned away, she
followed her.
"He isn't blind, is he?"
The matron, to whose naturally thin, pinched face worry and anxiety had
added a touch of shrewishness, swung round on her.
"I thought you were a medical student. Is there anything about
blindness here?" She smote the typed pages. "Of course not!"
The night staff being on duty, she had then fled the ward and mounted
up the many stairs to the little room where she now sat, her hands to
her eyes. Thank God he was not blind, and thank God she was alone!
But it had all happened a hundred years ago. Well, twenty years at
least. In some vague period of folly before the war. Yet, after all,
she was only five and twenty. When did it happen? She began an
agonized calculation of dates----
She had striven almost successfully to put the miserable episode out of
her mind, to regard that period of her life as a phase of a previous
existence. Since the war began, carried on the flood-tide of absorbing
work, she had had no time to moralize on the past. When it came before
her in odd moments, she had sent it packing into the limbo of deformed
and hateful things. And now the man with the gay laughter and the
distinguished soldier's record had brought it all back, horribly vivid.
For the scared moments, it was as though the revolutionary war-years
had never been. She saw herself again the Camilla Warrington whom she
had sought contemptuously to bury.
Had there been but a musk grain of beauty in that Camilla's story, she
would have cherished the fragrance; but it had all been so ignoble and
stupid. It had begun with her clever girlhood. The London University
matriculation. The first bachelor-of-science degree. John Donovan,
the great surgeon, a friend of her parents, had encouraged her
ambitions toward a medical career. She became a student at the Royal
Free Hospital, of the consulting staff of which John Donovan was a
member. For the first few months, all went well. She boarded near by,
in Bloomsbury, with a vague sort of aunt and distant cousins, folks of
unimpeachable repute. Then, fired by the independent theories and
habits of a couple of fellow students, she left the home of dull
respectability and joined them in the slatternly bohemia of a Chelsea
slum.
Oh, there was excuse for her youthful ardency to know all that there
was to be known in the world at once! But if she had used her
excellent brains, she would have realized that all that is to be known
in the world could not be learned in her new environment. The unholy
crew--they called it "The Brotherhood"--into which she plunged
consisted of the dregs of a decadent art-world, unclean in person and
in ethics. At first, she revolted. But the specious intellectuality
of the crew fascinated her. Hitherto, she had seen life purely from
the scientific angle. Material cause, material effect. On material
life, art but an excrescence. She had been carelessly content to
regard it merely as an interpretation of Beauty--to her, almost
synonymous with prettiness.
At the various meeting-places of the crew, who talked with the
interminability of a Russian Bolshevik, she learned a surprising lot of
things about art that had never entered into her philosophy. She
learned, or tried to learn--though her intelligence boggled fearfully
at it--that the most vital thing in existence was the decomposition of
phenomena, into interesting planes. All things in nature were in
motion--as a scientific truth, she was inclined to accept the
proposition; but the proclaimed fact that the representation of the
Lucretian theory of fluidity by pictorial diagrams of intersecting
planes was destined to revolutionize human society was beyond her
comprehension. Still, it was vastly interesting. They got their
plane-system into sculpture, into poetry, in some queer way into
sociology.
A dingy young painter, meagerly hirsute, and a pallid young woman of
anarchical politics assembled the crew one evening and, taking hands,
announced the fact of their temporary marriage. The temporary
bridegroom made a speech which was enthusiastically acclaimed. Their
association was connected (so Camilla understood) with some sublime
quality inherent in the intersecting planes. In these various pairings
gleamed none of the old Latin Quarter joyousness. Their immorality was
most austere.
To Camilla, it was all new and startling--a phantasmagorical world.
Free love the merest commonplace. And, after a short while, into this
poisonous atmosphere wherein she dwelt there came two influences. One
was the vigilancy of the Women's Social and Political Union; the other,
Harry Shileto, a young architect, a healthy man in the midst of an
unhealthy tribe.
First, young Shileto. It is not that he differed much from the rest of
the crew in crazy theory. He maintained, like everyone else, that
Raphael and Brunelleschi had retarded the progress of the world for a
thousand years; he despised Debussy for a half-hearted anarchist; he
lamented the failure of the architectural iconoclasts of the late
'Nineties; his professed contempt for all human activities outside the
pale of the slum was colossal; on the slum marriage-theory he was
sound, nay, enthusiastic. But he was physically clean, physically
good-looking, a man. And as Camilla, too, practised cleanliness of
person, they were drawn together.
And, at the same time, the cold, relentless hand of the great feminist
organization got her in its grip. Blindly acting under orders, she
interrupted meetings, broke windows, went to prison, shrieked at
street-corners the independence of her sex. And then she came down on
the bed-rock of a sex by no means so independent--on the contrary,
imperiously, tyrannically dependent on hers. The theories of the slum,
uncompromisingly suffragist, were all very well; they might be
practised with impunity by the anemic and slatternly; but when Harry
Shileto entered into the quasi-marriage bond with Camilla, the instinct
of the honest Briton clamored for the comforts of a home. As all the
time that she could spare from the neglect of her studies at the
hospital was devoted to feminist rioting, and a mere rag of a thing
came back at night to the uncared-for flat, the young man rebelled.
"You can't love and look after me and fool about in prison at the same
time. The two things don't hold together."
And Camilla, her nerves a jangle,
"I am neither your odalisk nor your housekeeper; so your remark does
not apply."
Oh, the squalid squabbles! And then, at last,
"Camilla"--he gave her a letter to read--"I'm fed up with all this rot."
She glanced over the letter.
"Are you going to accept this post in Canada?" she asked sourly.
"Not if you promise to chuck the militant business and also these
epicene freaks in Chelsea. I should like you to carry on at the
hospital until you're qualified."
"You seem to forget," she said, "that I'm like a soldier under orders.
If necessary, I must sacrifice my medical career. I also think your
remarks about The Brotherhood simply beastly. I'll do no such thing."
Eventually it came to this:
"I don't care whether women get the vote or not. I think our Chelsea
friends are the most pestilential set of rotters on the face of the
earth. I've got my way to make in the world. Help me to do it. Let
us get married in decent fashion and go out together."
"I being just the appanage of the rising young architect? Thank you
for the insult."
And so the argument went on until he delivered his ultimatum:
"If I don't get a sensible message by twelve o'clock to-morrow at the
club, I'll never see or hear of you as long as I live."
He went out of the flat. She sent no message. He did not return.
After a while, a lawyer came and equitably adjusted joint financial
responsibilities. And that was the end of the romance--if romance it
could be termed. From that day to this, Harry Shileto had vanished
from her ken.
His exit had been the end of the romance; but it had marked the
beginning of tragedy. A man can love and, however justifiably, ride
away--gloriously free. But the woman, for all her clamoring
insistence, has to pay the debt from which man is physically exempt.
Harry Shileto had already arrived in Canada when Camilla discovered the
dismaying fact of her sex's disability. But her pride kept her silent,
and of the child born in secret and dead within a fortnight, Harry
Shileto never heard. Then, after a few months of dejection and loss of
bearings and lassitude, the war thundered on the world. Her friend,
John Donovan, the surgeon, was going out to France. She went to him
and said: "I've wasted my time. It will take years for me to qualify.
Let me go out and nurse." So, through his influence, she had stepped
into the midst of the suffering of the war, and there she still
remained and found great happiness in great work.
At length she drew her hands from her brow and went and poured out some
water, for her throat was parched. On catching sight of herself in the
mirror, she paused. She was pale and worn, and there were hollows
beneath her eyes, catching shadows, but the war had not altogether
marred her face. She took off her uniform-cap and revealed dark hair,
full and glossy. She half wondered why the passage of a hundred years
had not turned it white. Then she sat again on the bed and gripped her
hands together.
"My God, what am I going to do?"
Had she loved him? She did not know. Her association with him could
not have been entirely the callous execution of a social theory. There
must have been irradiating gleams. Or had she wilfully excluded them
from her soul? Once she had needed him and cried for him; but that was
in an hour of weakness which she had conquered. And now, how could she
face him? Still less, live in that terrible intimacy of patient and
nurse? Oh, the miserable shame of it! All her womanhood shivered.
Yet she must go through the ordeal. His bandaged eyes promised a short
time of probation.
In the morning, after a restless night, she pulled herself together.
After all, what need for such a commotion? If the three and a half
years of war had not taught her dignity and self-reliance, she had
learned but little.
There were four beds in the ward. Two on the right were occupied by
officers, one with an arm-wound, another with a hole through his body.
The third on the left by a pathetic-looking boy with a shattered knee,
which, as the night Sister told her, gave him unceasing pain. The
fourth by Major Shileto. To him she went first and whispered:
"I'm the day Sister. What kind of a night have you had?"
"Splendid!" His lips curled in a pleasant smile. "Just one long,
beautiful blank."
"And the head?"
"Jammy. That's what it feels like. How it looks, I don't know."
"We'll see later when I do the dressings."
She went off to the boy. He also was a Canadian officer, and his name
was Robin McKay. She lingered awhile in talk.
"Strikes me my military career is over, and I'll just have to hump
round real estate in Winnipeg on a wooden leg."
"They aren't going to cut your leg off, you silly boy!" she laughed.
"And what do you mean by 'humping round real estate?'"
"I'm a land surveyor. That's to say, my father is. See here: When are
they going to send me back? I'm afraid of this country."
"Why?"
"It's so lonesome. I don't know a soul."
"We'll fix that up all right for you," she said cheerily. "Don't
worry."
The morning routine of the hospital began. In its appointed course
came the time for dressings. Camilla, her nerves under control, went
to Shileto.
"I've got to worry you, but I'll try to hurt as little as I can."
"Go ahead. Never mind me."
A probationer stood by, serving the laden wheel-table. At first, the
symmetrically bandaged head seemed that of a thousand cases with which
she had dealt. But when the crisp brown hair came to view, her hand
trembled ever so little. She avoided touching it as far as was
possible, for she remembered its feel. Dead, forgotten words rose
lambent in her memory: "_It crackles like a cat's back. Let me see if
there are sparks_."
But in the midst of a great shaven patch there was a horrible
scalp-wound which claimed her deftest skill. And she worked with
steady fingers and uncovered the maimed brows and eyelids and
cheekbones. How the sight had been preserved was a miracle. She
cleansed the wounds with antiseptics and freed the eyelashes. She bent
over him with deliberate intent.
"You can open your eyes for a second or two. You can see all right?"
"Rather. I can see your belt."
"Hold on, then."
With her swift craft, she blindfolded him anew, completed the
bandaging, laid him back on his pillow, and went off with the
probationer, wheeling the table to the other cases.
Later in the day, she was doing him some trivial service.
"What's the good of lying in bed all day?" he asked. "I want to get up
and walk about."
"You've got a bit of a temperature."
"How much?"
"Ninety-nine point eight."
"Call that a temperature? I've gone about with a hundred and three."
"When was that?"
"When I first went out to Canada. I'm English, you know--only left the
Old Country in Nineteen thirteen. But, when the war broke out, I
joined up with the first batch of Canadians--lucky to start with a
commission. Lord, it was hell's delight!"
"So I've been given to understand," said Camilla. "But what about your
temperature of a hundred and three?"
"I was a young fool," said he, "and I didn't care what happened to me."
"Why?" she asked.
For a while he did not answer. He bit his lower lip, showing just a
fine line of white teeth. Memory again clutched her. She was also
struck by his unconscious realization of the aging quality of the war
in that he spoke of his Nineteen-thirteen self as "a young fool." So
far as that went, they thought in common.
Presently he said,
"Your voice reminds me of some one I used to know."
"Where?"
"Oh, here, in London."
She lied instinctively, with a laugh.
"It couldn't have been me. I've only just come to London--and I've
never met Major Shileto before in my life."
"Of course not," he asserted readily. "But I had no idea two human
voices could be so nearly identical."
"Still," she remarked, "you haven't told me of the temperature of a
hundred and three."
"Oh, it is no story. Your voice brought it all back. You've heard of
a man's own angry pride being cap and bells for a fool? Well"--he
laughed apologetically--"it's idiotic. There's no point in it. I just
went about for a week in a Canadian winter with that
temperature--that's all."
"Because you couldn't bear to lie alone and think?"
"That's about it."
"Sister!" cried the boy, Robin McKay, from the next bed.
She obeyed the summons. What was the matter?
"Everything seems to have got mixed up, and my knee's hurting like
fury."
She attended to his crumpled bedclothes, cracked a little joke which
made him laugh. Then the two other men claimed her notice. She
carried on her work outwardly calm, smiling, self-reliant, the
perfectly trained woman of the war. But her heart was beating in an
unaccustomed way.
Her ministrations over, she left the ward for duty elsewhere.
At tea-time she returned, and aided the blindfolded man to get through
the meal. The dread of the morning had given place to mingled
mind-racking wonder and timidity. He had gone off, on the hot speed of
their last quarrel, out of her life. Save for a short, anguished
period, during which she had lost self-control, she had never
reproached him. She had asserted her freedom. He had asserted his.
Nay; more--he had held the door open for a way out from an impossible
situation, and she had slammed the door in his face. Self-centered in
those days, centered since the beginning of the war in human suffering,
she had thought little of the man's feelings. He had gone away and
forgotten, or done his best to forget, an ugly memory. Her last
night's review of ghosts had proved the non-existence of any illusions
among them. But now, now that the chances of war had brought them
again together, the sound of her voice had conjured up in him, too, the
ghosts of the past. She had been responsible for his going-about with
a temperature of a hundred and three, and for his not caring what
happened to him. He had lifted the corner of a curtain, revealing the
possibility of undreamed-of happenings.
"You were quoting Tennyson just now," she remarked.
"Was I?"
"Your cap-and-bells speech."
"Oh, yes. What about it?"
"I was only wondering."
"Like a woman, you resent a half-confidence."
She drew in a sharp little breath. The words, the tone, stabbed her.
She might have been talking to him in one of their pleasanter hours in
the Chelsea flat. In spite of her burning curiosity, she said, "I'm
not a woman; I'm a nurse."
"Since when?"
"As far as you people are concerned, since September, '14, when I went
out to France. I've been through everything--from the firing-line
field-ambulances, casualty clearing-stations, base hospitals--and now
I'm here having a rest-cure. Hundreds and hundreds of men have told me
their troubles--so I've got to regard myself as a sort of mother
confessor."
He smiled.
"Then, like a mother confessor, you resent a half-confidence?"
She put a cigarette between his lips and lit it for him.
"It all depends," she said lightly, "whether you want absolution or
not. I suppose it's the same old story." She held her voice in
command. "Every man thinks it's original. What kind of a woman was
she?"
He parried the thrust.
"Isn't that rather too direct a question, even for a mother confessor?"
"You'll be spilling ash all over the bed. Here's an ash-tray." She
guided his hand. "Then you don't want absolution?"
"Oh, yes, I do! But, you see, I'm not yet _in articulo mortis_, so
I'll put off my confession."
"Anyhow, you loved the woman you treated badly?" The question was as
casual as she could make it, while she settled the tea-things on the
tray.
"It was a girl, not a woman."
"What has become of her?"
"That's what I should like to know."
"But you loved her?"
"Of course I did! I'm not a blackguard. Of course I loved her." Her
pulses quickened. "But much water has run under London Bridge since
then."
"And much blood has flowed in France."
"Everything--lives, habits, modes of thought have been revolutionized.
Yes"--he reflected for a moment--"it's odd how you have brought back
old days. I fell in with a pestilential, so-called artistic crowd--I
am an architect by profession--you know, men with long greasy hair and
dirty finger nails and anarchical views. There was one chap
especially, who I thought was decadent to the bone. Aloysius
Eglington, he called himself." The man sprang vivid to her memory; he
had once tried to make love to her. "Well, I came across him the other
day with a couple of wound-stripes and the military-cross ribbon. For
a man like that, what an upheaval!" He laughed again. "I suppose I've
been a bit upheaved myself."
"I'm beginning to piece together your story of the temperature," she
said pleasantly. "I suppose the girl was one of the young females of
this anarchical crowd?"
Obviously the phrase jarred.
"I could never regard her in that light," he said coldly.
"The war has got hold of her, too, I suppose."
"No doubt. She was a medical student. May I have another cigarette?"
His tone signified the end of the topic. She smiled, for her
putting-down was a triumph.
The probationer came up and took away the tea-tray. Camilla left her
patient and went to the other beds.
That night again, she sat alone in her little white room and thought
and thought. She had started the day with half-formed plans of flight
before her identity could be discovered. She was there voluntarily,
purely as an act of grace. She could walk out, without reproach, at a
moment's notice. But now--had not the situation changed? To her, as
to a stranger, he had confessed his love. She had not dared probe
deeper--but might not a deeper probing have brought to light something
abiding and beautiful? In the war, she had accomplished her womanhood.
Proudly and rightly she recognized her development. He, too, had
accomplished his manhood. And his dear face would be maimed and
scarred for the rest of his life. Then, with the suddenness of a
tropical storm, a wave of intolerable emotion surged through her. She
uttered a little cry and broke into a passion of tears. And so her
love was reborn.
Professional to the tips of her cool fingers, she dressed his wounds
the next morning. But she did not lure him back across the years. The
present held its own happiness, tremulous in its delicacy. It was he
who questioned. Whereabouts in France had she been? She replied with
scraps of anecdote. There was little of war's horror and peril through
which she had not passed. She explained her present position in the
hospital.
"By George, you're splendid!" he cried. "I wish I could have a look at
you."
"You've lost your chance for to-day," she answered gaily. For she had
completed the bandaging.
After dinner, she went out and walked the streets in a day-dream, a
soft light in her eyes. The moment of recognition--and it was bound
soon to come--could not fail in its touch of sanctification, its touch
of beauty. He and she had passed through fires of hell and had emerged
purified and tempered. They were clear-eyed, clear-souled. The
greatest gift of God, miraculously regiven, they could not again
despise. On that dreary afternoon, Oxford Street hummed with joy.
Only a freak of chance had hitherto preserved her anonymity. A
reference by matron or probationer to Sister Warrington would betray
her instantly. Should she await or anticipate betrayal?
In a fluttering tumult of indecision, she returned to the hospital.
The visiting-hour had begun. When she had taken off her outdoor
things, she looked into the ward. Around the two beds on the right,
little groups of friends were stationed. The boy, Robin McKay, in the
bed nearest the door on the left, caught sight of her and summoned her.
"Sister, come and pretend to be a visitor. There's not a soul in this
country who could possibly come to see me. You don't know what it is
to be homesick."
She sat by his side.
"All right. Imagine I'm an elderly maiden aunt from the country."
"You?" he cried, with overseas frankness. "You're only a kid yourself."
Major Shileto overheard and laughed. She blushed and half rose.
"That's not the way to treat visitors, Mr. McKay."
The boy stretched out his hand.
"I'm awfully sorry if I was rude. Don't go."
She yielded.
"All the same," she said, "you'll have to get used to a bit of
loneliness. It can't be helped. Besides, you're not the only tiger
that hasn't got a Christian. There's Major Shileto. And you can read
and he can't."
The voice came from the next bed.
"Don't worry about me. Talk to the boy. I'll have some one to see me
to-morrow. He won't, poor old chap!"
"Have a game of chess?" said the boy.
"With pleasure."
She fetched the board and chessmen from the long table running down the
center of the ward, and they set out the pieces.
"I reckon to be rather good," said he. "Perhaps I might give you
something."
"I'm rather good myself," she replied. "I was taught by--" She
stopped short, on the brink of pronouncing the name of the young Polish
master who lived (in a very material sense) on the fringe of the
Chelsea crew. "We'll start even, at any rate."
They began. She realized that the boy had not boasted, and soon she
became absorbed in the game. So intent was she on the problem
presented by a brilliant and unexpected move on his part that she did
not notice the opening of the door and the swift passage of a
fur-coated figure behind her chair. It was a cry that startled her. A
cry of surprise and joy, a cry of the heart.
"Marjorie!"
She looked up and saw the fur-coated figure--that of a girl with fair
hair--on her knees by the bedside, and Harry Shileto's arms were round
her and his lips to hers. She stared, frozen. She heard:
"I didn't expect you till to-morrow."
"I just had time to catch the train at Inverness. I've not brought an
ounce of luggage. Oh, my poor, poor, old Harry!"
It was horrible.
The boy said:
"Never mind, Sister; he's got his Christian all right. Let's get on
with the game."
Mechanically obeying a professional instinct, she looked at the
swimming chess-board and made a move haphazard.
"I say--that won't do!" cried the boy. "It's mate for me in two moves.
Buck up!"
With a great effort, she caught the vanishing tail of her previous
calculation and made a move which happened to be correct.
"That's better," he said. "I hoped you wouldn't spot it. But I
couldn't let you play the ass with your knight and spoil the game.
Now, this demands deep consideration."
He lingered a while over his move. She looked across. The pair at the
next bed were talking in whispers. The girl was now sitting on the
chair by the bedside, and her back hid the face of the man, though her
head was near his.
"There!" cried the boy triumphantly.
"I beg your pardon; I didn't see it."
"Oh, I say!" His finger indicated the move.
With half her brain at work, she moved a pawn a cautious step. The
boy's whole heart was in his offensive. He swooped a bishop
triumphantly athwart the board.
"There's only one thing can save you for mate in five moves. I know it
isn't the proper thing to be chatting over chess, but I like it. I'm
chatty by nature."
"Only one course open to save me from destruction?" she murmured.
"Just one."
And she heard, from the next bed:
"Are you sure, darling, you're only saying it to break the shock
gently? Are you sure your eyes are all right?"
"Perfectly certain."
"I wish I could have real proof."
Camilla stared at the blankness of her vanished dream.
"Come along, Sister; put your back into it," chuckled Robin McKay.
She held her brows tight with her hands and strove to concentrate her
tortured mind on the board. Her heart was in agony of desolation. The
soft murmurings she could not but overhear pierced her brain. The
poignant shame of her disillusionment burned her from head to foot.
Again she heard the girl's pleading voice:
"Only for a minute. It couldn't hurt."
The boy said:
"Buck up. Just one tiny brain-wave."
At the end of her tether, she cried: "The only way out! I give it up!"
and swept the pieces over the board.
She rose, stood transfixed with horror and sense of outrage. Harry
Shileto, propped on pillows, was unwinding the bandages from his
mangled head. Devils within her clamored for hysterical outcry. But
something physical happened and checked the breath that was about to
utter his Christian name. The boy had gripped her arm with all his
young strength in passionate remonstrance.
"Oh, dear old thing--do play the game!"
"I'm sorry," she said, and he released her.
So she passed swiftly round the boy's bed to that of the foolish
patient and arrested his hand.
"Major Shileto, what on earth are you doing?"
The girl, who was very pretty, turned on her an alarmed and tearful
face.
"It was my fault, Sister. Oh, can I believe him?"
"You can believe me, at any rate," she replied with asperity, swiftly
readjusting the bandage. "Major Shileto's sight is unaffected. But if
I had not been here and he had succeeded in taking off his dressings,
God knows what would have happened. Major Shileto, I put you on your
honor not to do such a silly thing again."
"All right, Sister," he said, with a little shame-faced twitch of the
lips. "_Parole d'officier_."
The girl rose and drew her a step aside.
"Do forgive me, Sister. We have only been married five months--when he
was last home on leave--and, you understand, don't you, what it would
have meant to me if----"
"Of course I do. Anyhow, you can be perfectly reassured. But I must
warn you," she whispered, and looked through narrowed eyelids into the
girl's eyes; "he may be dreadfully disfigured."
The girl shrank terrified, but she cried,
"I hope I shall love him all the more for it!"
"I hope so, too," replied Camilla soberly. "I'll say good-by," she
added, in a louder tone, holding out her hand.
"I'll see you again to-morrow?" the girl asked politely.
"I'm afraid not."
"What's that?" cried Shileto.
"I told you I was only here as a bird of passage. My time's up to-day.
Good-by."
"I'm awfully sorry. Good-by."
They shook hands. Camilla went to Robin McKay and bent over him.
"You're quite right, my dear boy. One ought to play the game to the
bitter end. It's the thing most worth doing in life. God bless you!"
The boy stared wonderingly at her as she disappeared.
"I'm glad she's not going to be here any more," said the girl.
Her husband's lips smiled.
"Why?"
"She's a most heartless, overbearing woman."
"Oh, they all seem like that when they're upset," he laughed. "And I
was really playing the most outrageous fool."
She put her head close to him and whispered,
"Don't you guess why I was so madly anxious to know that you could see?"
She told him. And, from that moment, the possessor of the remembered
voice faded from his memory.
Camilla went to the matron.
"I'm sorry, but I've bitten off more than I can chew. If I go on an
hour longer, I'll break down. I'm due in France in a fortnight, and I
must have my rest."
"I can only thank you for your self-sacrificing help," said the matron.
But, four days later, ten days before her leave had expired, Camilla
appeared at the casualty clearing-station in France of which she was a
Sister-in-charge.
"What the devil are you here for?" asked the amazed commanding medical
officer.
"England's too full of ghosts. They scared me back to realities."
The M.O. laughed to hide his inability to understand.
"Well, if you like 'em, it's all the same to me. I'm delighted to have
you. But give me the good old ghosts of blighty all the time!"
The piercing of the line at Cambrai was a surprise no less to the
Germans than to the British. The great tent of the casualty
clearing-station was crammed with wounded. Doctors and nurses, with
tense, burning eyes and bodies aching from strain, worked and worked,
and thought nothing of that which might be passing outside. No one
knew that the German wave had passed over. And the German wave itself,
at that part of the line, was but a set of straggling and mystified
groups.
Camilla Warrington, head of the heroic host of women working in the
dimly lit reek of blood and agony, had not slept for two nights and two
days. The last convoy of wounded had poured in a couple of hours
before. She stood by the surgeon, aiding him, the perfect machine. At
last, in the terrible rota, they came to a man swathed round the middle
in the rough bandages of the field dressing-station. He was
unconscious. They unwound him, and revealed a sight of unimaginable
horror.
"He's no good, poor chap!" said the surgeon.
"Can't you try?" she asked, and put repressing hands on the wounded man.
"Not the slightest good," said the medical officer.
No one in the great tent of agony knew that they were isolated from the
British army. From the outside, it looked solitary, lighted, and
secure. Two German soldiers, casual stragglers, looked in at the door
of the great tent. In the kindly German way, they each threw in a
bomb, and ran off laughing. Seven men were killed outright and many
rewounded. And Camilla Warrington was killed.[1]
[1] The bloody and hideous incident related here is not an invention.
It is true. It happened when and where I have indicated.--W.J.L.
The guards, in their memorable sweep, cleared the ground. The casualty
clearing-station again came into British hands.
There is a grave in that region whose head-board states that it is
consecrated "to the Heroic Memory of Camilla Warrington, one of the
Great Women of the War."
And Marjorie Shileto, to her husband healed and sound, searching like a
foolish woman deep into his past history:
"It's awfully decent of you, darling, to hide nothing from me and to
tell me about that girl in Chelsea. But what was she like?"
"My sweetheart," said he, like a foolish man, "she wasn't worth your
little finger."