VC - A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea Part 14

CHAPTER XI

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 s.h.i.+lling 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 s.h.i.+p _Caesar_ 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 Ayrs.h.i.+re 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 ash.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+p's side to the caiques which were brought alongside, pulled to the sh.o.r.e 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-sh.e.l.l 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 Roos.h.i.+a, 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.p.a.ce 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce 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.