Evening of the Good Samaritan (36 page)

“That English child looks tuberculous.”

“A number of them do, but I’m supposed to have gotten them in time. I’m hoping you’ll go over them for me, Marcus. There’s a man comes down from Belfast when he can, but he’s harassed as a shrew’s husband, poor man, and not a very good doctor even at leisure.”

Marcus smiled. “Down from Belfast. I’d have said ‘up’.”

“That’s our contrariness. We’re all far-downers up here.”

Marcus got up from the tea table and went to the window where he stood a moment. Elizabeth made neat the things on the tray and scraped the bit of butter he had left back into the jar. Returning, he glanced up at the dark portrait hung over the mantel. It was only in the late afternoon light it was distinguishable as the picture of a man.

“Who is it?”

“My great-grandfather, Lord Peter McMahon. He built McMahon Manor—dark and windy as himself from what I’ve read of him. I dare say it’s true from what I know of his descendants—and mine.” She had but one—two, counting the child, Tad. But Marcus did not rise to the bait.

“Is there a Lord McMahon now?”

“No. My father gave up the title. He was more a Gael than a nobleman.”

“That was when you went to America, at that time, wasn’t it?”

“You might say I was exported then.”

“You belong here, Elizabeth,” he said, willing enough to talk of her if not of himself and his.

“One belongs where one can love,” she said.

“Yes!” He agreed with such fervor she was distressed at having probed the wound without yet knowing its nature.

She joined him at the window. “Look at them out there,” she said, retreating further within her own experience. “Hungry little beggars, every one. The need for love is the child’s need. Some of us never outgrow it, but the time comes for most of us when it’s surpassed by the need to give love; whatever we do in response to that need is the best we can do, I am convinced.”

Marcus nodded, blinking, studying the end of his cigaret until it began to burn him. He rubbed it out on a brass scuttle and threw it into the grate. “When do you want me to look them over?”

She suppressed a sigh. “Morning would be best, I think, so they won’t have nightmares. You’ll have to convert some of them, you know.”

“To what?”

“Well, now that you ask it, I’m not sure,” she said, more ready than he was to end their first interlude, “especially since I’ve brought them round to soap and water myself. Ah, but they were dear, dirty things when I got them.”

“I remembered your voice,” he said, “the music in it.”

“I never sang,” she said.

“And I remember how you played.”

She lifted her head. “Yes, I played.” For herself only so much of the time, and when she would have given her soul for it to have been otherwise. Her husband had always liked something with a tune in it, God forgive her contempt of the dead, and Alexander was about as musical as a clothespin. She returned to the table for the tea tray and carried it to the ledge of the half-door to the pantry. “I’ll take you down now, Marcus. A cottage here is a hut. No electricity, a short walk to the convenience, and a boy will bring you shaving water in the morning.” She explained the routine of the farm and the house as they walked a graveled path along which the wild roses were beginning to bud: dinner at noon, supper at seven in the common room. Once it had been called the ballroom although she could not remember a ball in it, only the meetings of the Gaelic League there in her youth. “When Philip is home …” Philip was her brother … “he and I sup alone sometimes at the cottage, but I like to supervise the children myself. I hope you’ll join us, but you don’t need to.”

“I’d like to,” Marcus said.

“I’m glad of that. They’re devils, but they do love to have a man to lord it over them.”

The cottage lay before them, its roof top deep golden in the afternoon sun.

“A thatched roof, is it?” Marcus said.

“It’s a strange economy. The barns are also thatched. One of our tenants is a thatcher, you see, an old man, and it’s the only sensible way to take the rent of him.”

“Aren’t they practical?” He meant the roofs.

“Marcus, nothing in all Ireland is practical—except the British landlords.”

He laughed for the first time with her and stopped in the path. “Elizabeth, I can go on from here alone if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all.” But she laid her hand on his arm. “Marcus, you will put things as you want them—for your own comfort.” She was thinking of the pictures with which one of the walls was hung, the sight of which, she could only suppose, he would want to avoid until his own good time.

“I’ll find my way,” he said whether or not he understood her.

Somewhere nearby cattle were lowing and as Marcus reached the cottage he heard a voice that cracked between youth and manhood calling out to them. He surmised it to be milking time. “All things come home at eventide…”: he had not thought of the song for years. There was a heroic middle section to it he had used to bawl at the top of his lungs when his own voice was not long changed. It occurred to him that patriotism was in the universal character of youth. In old age it was stronger among those who had never properly grown up.

It was not quite necessary, but he stooped to enter the doorway. The room, insofar as a cottage allowed severity, was severe: books in order along the walls, and a piano, but nothing of the clutter and knicknackery he remembered about Elizabeth’s studio in Traders City. A small bedroom opened to the side. He had never seen a monk’s cell but this would serve a monk he thought, not ungrateful. He saw the row of pictures toward the eaves and instantly put off looking at them until it was time to light a candle. He went outdoors again, and tilting a chair against the side of the house he settled in it and watched the setting of the sun. There was a slight haze and a smell in the air he supposed to be the smoke of peat since it made him think of Irish whisky. Almost constant was the bleating of sheep, sometimes near, sometimes distant as an echo, and the forlorn cry of the curlew. He could hear children’s voices, the jerk and halt of a pump handle and the splash of water as it began to draw, but nowhere in the blessed twilight was there smoke or blast of guns.

Sitting at the supper table that night with twenty children lined, boys down one side, girls up the other, he might have been both doctor and major—either of which title was to them, Elizabeth said, as good as a knighthood—but the God’s truth was he felt more like a priest, exalted and indulged, given the first cut of meat and the last drop of gravy.

Herbie, his English companion of the cart, treated him with a respectful familiarity. The boy himself was marvelously cured of shyness among his own. “Major-doctor, ’ave ’e looked up the poem yet, eh?”

“Not yet, but I shall, Herbie.”

“Say the bit, will ’e?”

“And Noah he ate an ostrich egg in an egg cup big as a pail,” Marcus thought he said it with feeling, though he had begun to suspect the line was not quite as written.

But Herbie said it after him with style.

Marcus murmured to Elizabeth, “He sounds like Gracie Fields.”

“Wait till Saturday night. We have a regular music hall revue.”

After supper when the children had taken out their plates and utensils, each washing his own, and the tables were taken apart, being no more than planks on sawhorses, in the midst of games a minor misfortune occurred: one of the boys jammed his head against an iron sconce and laid open an inch of scalp.

Marcus, taking a look at the gash, said, “You wanted to find out if I’m really a doctor, didn’t you? Come along.”

Elizabeth led the way up a drafty stairway to the infirmary. “I’m afraid it’s rather primitive.”

Marcus agreed silently when he saw the stock of remedies and antiseptics. He looked again at the wound. “I think we can get it to close up without stitches.”

“I’m not a bloody chicken,” the boy said, seeing himself compared to a trussed bird at the mention of stitches.

Elizabeth said, “You’re a wee fighting cock.” Which praise gave him pleasure almost commensurate to his pain. He let out but one howl as Marcus cauterized the wound.

“Brave fellow,” Marcus said, and finished things off with a large, handsome patch.

“Can I go back now, Major-doctor?”

“Yes, but I think you need a day or two of rest.”

“If they makes me a sergeant-major, could I play?”

When the boy was gone, Marcus said, “Are they all war orphans?”

“They’ve lost at least one parent each in the blitz.”

“And still they play at war.” He was going over her store of medicines in an abstracted sort of way, rearranging, tossing some into the waste box much to her amusement, without a by-your-leave or explanation. He stopped suddenly, glanced at her, and then into space beyond the medicine table. “I have a funny dream, Elizabeth. When I was a child I used to dream of rising off the earth—many children do—but now it’s come back and it’s changed. I’m able to see myself from up there, wherever it is. I look down and the hospital tent is removed, and I’m working, operating. One after another, faceless, nameless, numbered soldiers, and the litterers take them away as I’m through. But the stranger thing yet: they litter them back to the front, and I can see these—grotesques rise up and take guns. Even if they don’t have hands, in my dream they can manage guns without them. I suppose it’s all over in a minute, as they say dreams are, but it seems endless. And you know, I’ve never actually seen combat. We’re four or five miles back from the front generally. I’ve been closer. And I’ve seen reinforcements come up the beach to meet a counter-attack … I guess I have seen combat. But I sometimes wonder if a man knows the satisfaction of killing until he’s done it hand-to-hand. Doesn’t it seem futile to you—rushing men in to kill and be killed, then rushing them out the minute they’ve fallen—decimated, dehumanized—as though they were the most precious treasure on earth? How can you kill and save at once?”

He waited and only looked at her sidewise, the blinking started again.

“They are precious at that moment, I suppose,” she said, “because any one of them might have been you or me—or whoever’s alive to carry them out.”

“And what we’re doing is showing our gratitude?”

“Do they complain of it?”

“No,” he said. “Very little. That’s the truth. Only the able-bodied men complain.”

“And do they want to die?”

“Some who know, do—and some who don’t know. Not many. No, not many.” He gave a short, self-deprecatory laugh. “How I loathe myself after those dreams.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. For being there, I suppose. I don’t know.”

She went back to something he had said before. “I don’t know why men must kill, but I don’t think it’s for satisfaction. Perhaps because they’re afraid.”

“Was Hitler afraid? Is he afraid?”

“Possibly.”

“No.” Marcus shook his head. “I know a surgeon at home—I suppose you know him, too. Yes, of course, you do. I swear to you, Elizabeth, that man enjoys using the knife. I think it’s merest chance that he’s a surgeon and not a butcher. Mind, everyone would say he does good work. He does. He can remove a tumor as neatly as a speck from your eye.”

“Marcus, is it possible that he’s attending all the people you are not attending?”

“Yes,” he said, glancing at her and then away. “I guess it’s partly that.” But she could tell he did not really think so.

“Mind, let it not be said I spoke too loudly in praise of Nathan Reiss.”

Marcus laughed. “Most women do, you know.”

“Not over here any more, I shouldn’t think. America is the right place for him. Do you mind my asking, Marcus, why you took him in with you?”

“Reciprocity, I suppose. Doctor Winthrop suggested it—and it had to be someone.”

“Alexander? I wonder why … But I know, of course. Whenever it is a matter of taste, Alexander has none. He relies entirely on someone else’s judgment. And I suppose his wife to be politically sentimental. Am I right?”

“On the nail.”

“I’m glad it wasn’t Martha pushed him,” Elizabeth said. How much there was of deliberate mischief in the words, she could not have measured, herself. It was a woman’s wile, but surely the cause was just. Love might exist without jealousy, but where jealousy kindled there must be love.

Marcus took a cigaret from his pocket but did not light it. “I think I shall be able to get a few things for you from the Army Medical Depot. For God’s sake, let us save the children if we can. Perhaps they’ll be wiser. They could scarcely be less.”

“Marcus, Marcus,” she said and went to the door, not seeing the way in which he looked after her as though he would call her back. He followed and she switched off the infirmary light. The three unoccupied white-covered beds shone bleakly in the afterglow. “What was it Goethe said: ‘Nothing is more terrible than active ignorance’?”

“There was a time I would have said passive intelligence is worse. I’m not so sure now.” He lit his cigaret.

Elizabeth said, “We must go down. It’s time for music to soothe my little savages.”

“Do you play for them?”

“I beat out rhythms on the piano for them to sing by.”

He touched his hand to her elbow to detain her. “Will you play for me while I’m here?”

“I will. But you must not be too appreciative. I mightn’t be up to that.” She glanced up at him and smiled, trying to make light of her words as soon as they were out.

“You are a most beautiful woman, Elizabeth.”

She met his eyes with frankness, honesty, and fortunate it was she thought afterwards that the landing light was no more than a candle’s worth. “I always have thought you the only beautiful man I knew.”

She fled down the stairs and gathered in the children as they flocked about her. Then all of them swarmed in one sweep together to the piano. Marcus sat for a long while on the drafty stairway, smoking and listening. He left quietly while they sang the hymn that was to end the day.

He lay in bed afterwards, and when a flicker of the candlelight started a whisper of motion across the wall he saw again the row of pictures. He knew of whom they were and felt himself stiffen into an almost rigid concentration as he tried to draw them before him in his mind. He started up, having almost broken through, and then fell back, empty. He turned and blew out the candle and lay in the darkness listening to the loud stillness until he heard, or imagined that he heard, the rhythmic wash of the sea. Deliberately he sank himself into it and then he slept.