The Light Heart (49 page)

“But—think how it would
look,
Charles! Our close friends like Archie and Virginia would understand, perhaps, might even encourage us. But what about the others? What about your own people there at Cleeve, they’d have a right to resent me, I couldn’t face them—”

“There isn’t a family on the place that doesn’t remember you and inquire after you, and ask me when you are coming back.”

“The simple ones, perhaps—but remember the vicar’s wife. I should be cut by the vicar’s wife!”

“I doubt that, in the circumstances. I’ll ask her, if you like.”

“And there’s Mamma—and Evelyn too. I can’t
think
what Mamma would say!”

“You listened to Mamma last time, have you forgotten? You have fulfilled the bargain she made with His Highness,” said Charles, with his teeth on edge. “He’s had fourteen years of your life, and what has he made of it? If he came to you now on his knees, making the kind of promises a man in love will make, would you go back to him?”

“No,
no
—!” She put it from her with such vehemence, with both her hands, that his eyes narrowed on her, and he took a step forward.

“As bad as that, was it,” he said.

“He won’t come for me—it isn’t that—if the war ended tomorrow he’d never want me back—it isn’t that—”

“Well, then? Even people without imagination must have some idea what it means to an Englishwoman to be married to a German these days. If it’s only that you’re afraid of what people will say—”

“About
you!”
she entreated. “
I
don’t matter. If you weren’t Cleeve now, if we could live quietly somewhere—”

“I never wanted to be Cleeve, God knows,” he said quietly. “But somebody has to be, and I was always round the place, you see, they all know me, and can count on me, while Bufly’s still something of a stranger to them because of the regiment’s
being in India so long. At a time like this they need something to hold on to—”

“Yes, and if you bring home another man’s wife—”

“I shall bring home Miss Rosalind. They’ve never called you anything else.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Later on, perhaps, if you—if Buffy can take over at Cleeve and you still want to—to go away somewhere with me, where it wouldn’t matter—”

“What, as though I were ashamed?” He was smiling.

She gave him a long, incredulous look from across the room, and then came to him slowly, and when she reached him she offered both her hands, which he took in both his, looking down at her.

“You’re very good to me,” she said humbly.

“Am I? How?”

“You haven’t made a scene, or—been offended, or tried to—to sweep me off my feet—”

He gave again that half-embarrassed gasp of laughter, as though she had said something too fantastic to be taken seriously.

“What good would that do?” he asked.

“None. But how did you know that?”

“Horse sense, I suppose,” said Charles, and Rosalind threw up her chin and laughed as once she had never expected to laugh again. “Some day you’re going to love me—I hope—if I behave myself, that is,” Charles explained. “But it doesn’t take much intelligence not to shove myself at you until then.”

“How I feel about you isn’t the question, Charles—not any more.” She stood with her hands in his, feeling all his patient strength and devotion flow into her, up her arms and through her body till it sang. “There was a time when I would have said it was no use at all—that the power to love anybody had gone out of me, if I had ever had it. I’d got sort of numb inside. But now—well, I’m all pins and needles again. Seeing you did that. And as for
loving you—” She leaned against him, pressing her face into the rough smoky tweed of his coat. “—more than anything else in the world, when everything seemed so hopeless, I only wanted to see you again—”

“’Fraid there’s not much to look at, now you come to it,” said Charles contentedly, and laid his arms around her.

4.
London
Autumn,
1916

P
HOEBE
left for the Continent early in the new year with Bracken, who delayed his return in order to take her with him after the necessary interviews at the headquarters of the Belgian Red Cross at the Savoy in London, and at the American Embassy, and the inoculations, and the red tape.

Via Boulogne—which was full of British khaki and French blue, with a white hospital ship at the quay, and where Bracken left her—via Calais, and Dunkirk, she arrived in less than thirty-six hours at a hospital which had once been a big summer hotel in a straggling Belgian seaside town so near the front lines that in the darkness the red flames of the guns could be seen across the reverberating sands, and a searchlight playing over the water revealed the British gunboats on guard offshore.

Though the hospital belonged to the Belgian Red Cross, most of the nurses were English, said the starched night nurse who introduced herself as Sister Ida, while Phoebe followed her along corridors filled with wounded on stretchers awaiting their turn at the operating rooms. Many of them were caked with mud and filth, and the floor and stairs were mired from the feet of the bearers. The wounded were brought in at night, when the ambulances could travel more safely, and often arrived at the hospital not more than twenty minutes after they had been hit—others had lain for days unattended in No Man’s Land. Only the worst cases were allowed to remain here. The
rest were given dressings and nourishment and sent on to the hospitals at Boulogne or in England.

The bedroom assigned to Phoebe was a tiny cubicle on the top floor with a heavily curtained window facing the sea. Sister Ida said that Phoebe was just in time for supper with the night nurses, and nodded wisely when she replied that all she wanted was to go to bed.

“You shouldn’t have had to travel all that way alone the first time,” she said, and came back in ten minutes with a cup of tea in one hand and a hot water bottle in the other.

When Phoebe protested against such babying, Sister Ida advised her drily to make the most of it, as she was expected to go on duty the next morning. Phoebe began to explain rather nervously that she was only a probationer, and Sister Ida laughed.

“Bless you, most of us are-only half trained,” she said, “but there arc no probationers here. We’re all called Sister, and we all do anything that comes along. You start tomorrow with twenty beds in the same surgical ward I’m in—and you’re expected to help with the dressings anywhere else in the ward. I’ll be coming off as you go on, but I’ll wait and show you round a bit if you like. You’ll soon get the hang of it here, hospitals are all pretty much alike, don’t you think?”

The door closed on her friendly smile, and Phoebe was left alone with the sound of the guns, which so far she was too exhausted to find very alarming.

She slept restlessly, and woke in the dawn hearing
aeroplanes
overhead—French ones, she decided, going to the window, and stood a minute wrapped in her coat and shivering in the unheated room, gazing at the view which was to become so drearily familiar. Her room looked out to sea over the wide, level beach where there was no surf, and scattered fishing-boats had been abandoned just above high tide when their owners went to war. There were a few twisted, wind-blown trees, and a quantity of long dry grass, and a huddle of rather ordinary little villas with sandy gardens. A few able-bodied Belgian
soldiers were already about—orderlies, men on rest or in reserve, perhaps convalescents, all looking shabby and cold and undersized. The guns around Nieuport still muttered, and the window-casing jarred rhythmically as it had done all night.

Remembering Sister Ida’s promise to show her round, Phoebe dressed quickly in her uniform after a hasty, chilly wash, and found her way downstairs. A passing surgeon,
red-eyed
and sleepless, glanced at her sharply, a broad peasant woman on her knees scrubbing the muck off the stairs gave her a shy Good-morning in Flemish.

Sister Ida met her in the lower corridor and Phoebe saw in the morning light that she was pretty in a faded way with a sweet, confidential smile. She was introduced to Matron and conducted through the rooms on the ground floor, including the ones where the operating was done. The big hotel parlour was converted into a recreation room, with a gramophone to amuse the convalescents, and a place where the nurses off duty could write letters—its windows faced on the flat, windy beach, with the flat white line of the incoming tide on the sand. Even here there was the familiar hospital smell of drugs and
disinfectant
.

In the wards she saw for the first time victims of the war who were not soldiers—women caught in the bombardment of a nearby market town and maimed for life, children who had lost limbs. A priest passed soundlessly, bestowing smiles and confidence as he approached a cot with a screen set around it. A nun sat motionless beside a sleeping child….

Sister Ida’s low voice ran on, describing the cases which would be in Phoebe’s care—the boy with the bandage across his eyes was very young and frightened, and often cried out in his sleep—you had to be patient, it comforted him to hold on to your hand, and a cup of hot milk sometimes helped him to doze off again—there was just a chance of saving a little sight in one eye—most of them were very cheerful, even in pain—as they got better they always wanted to talk, but no doubt Phoebe had already noticed that!—changing the draw-sheet
for the Scotsman with the gangrenous leg was always a terrible business, it took three of you, and even then he screamed with pain—the littlest baby had died in the night, but as it had lost both arms that was probably a good thing—if somebody would send out some rubber air-cushions it would be a great mercy—and a bit of chocolate would help too, the food was so dull, and eggs were hard to get—they had only eleven
thermometers
for a hundred and twenty beds, and there was always a shameless grab for the odd one—some new Belgian girls had just arrived from the London training school, but couldn’t be trusted with temperatures and respirations, and it took two hours for one Sister to do the whole ward….

This was to be Phoebe’s life, all through the spring and into the summer—while the long battle of Verdun began and ebbed without advantage to the German attackers, who in the end cried sour grapes and published fabulous figures of French casualties and prisoners, to prove that it was immaterial whether or not Verdun was taken—the Germans themselves having recklessly spent forces which would never be replaced, and without breaking the French front or luring the Allies into a premature offensive.

The winter gales gave way to a hot sun which glared
pitilessly
on the tin roofs of
the pavilion wards and the hot breeze blew sand into everything, and swarming black flies had to be brushed out of the wounds open to be dressed, and then they crawled on the food. Matron wrote to the Belgian Committee in London for something to be done about the sanitary
conditions
, but nothing happened, and the garbage was left standing uncovered for hours in the heat. There was no ice, there were no cold drinks and no electric fans, and the men lay gasping for breath. There were never enough pyjamas to give them a refreshing change often enough. The head nurse got ill, simply overdone, and several of the Sisters dropped in their tracks, so that the ones who were left took thirty beds apiece and forgot what it was to sit down.

Phoebe bore it all without complaining, in a kind of fierce
resignation. She was no good for anything but this any more, these were the people who needed her, she might as well be here as anywhere else, and the idea of quitting never occurred to her because there was no one to fill her place. Her feet gave out, like everybody else’s, and she went on duty each day with them tightly bandaged. And then one morning towards the end of that dreadful summer, she woke with a flaming sore throat and sharp pains everywhere and the room went round while she tried to dress.

She had no sooner got downstairs than she was sent back up again, and then was carted off on a stretcher like a
blessé
to the Isolation Villa with a temperature of 103°, and had scarlet fever. For days she knew nothing except that the bedclothes were on fire and that she was always thirsty, and that she was going to die there alone, and she wished she had drowned, because of the way the sun beat down on the sand, and the flies woke her every morning crawling on her face, going from one infectious case to another….

Then gradually, against all the odds, the fever broke and her racked body began to mend, and she was able to be sent away to a villa near Boulogne to recuperate. Bracken came to her there, thin and worn himself, but smiling and capable and
kin,
and once more they made the journey across the Channel together, and up to London—which was under the threat of gas bombs now—and thence to Farthingale and a glorious feeling of home and family once more.

V
IRGINIA
came down for Phoebe’s first week-end and brought all the latest news. Aeroplanes as well as Zeppelins were raiding England now, and Dover in particular was having a bad time. The summer fighting on the Somme had filled everything up with new casualties and the hospitals were all overworked. Archie was doing a job in Paris and had not been
seen for weeks. Clare was running the convalescent home at the Hall and had just had another son. Winifred was perfectly splendid and did the work of two people at the St. James’s Square house, where they had made another ward by clearing out the library. Maia was sure that the Germans would use gas over London and had got them all gas-masks, which everyone doubted would be worth anything.

Things had got so touchy and difficult between Maia and Winifred, Virginia said, that it had been arranged for Maia to work at Lady Shadwell’s house in Chelsea for a while—she was good at reading to the blinded men, and they seemed to like her well enough, they were grateful to anybody, poor lambs, though it was hard on Lady Shadwell’s staff having her there, for Maia was edgy and unreasonable all the time now, and admitted that the raids were getting on her nerves. Clare had heroically invited her for a spell of duty at the Hall for a change, but Maia refused to leave London so long as Oliver was at the War Office, which was no doubt very wifely and commendable, said Virginia, but at the same time very trying for everybody, including, she should think, Oliver.