That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
those who spend their lives in trying to help the unfortunate. And,
West or East-Enders--the most chronic cases among 'em wouldn't suffer a
finger to be laid on your wife. All the same, I'll attend to your
instructions. Doors at 7. The men shall be there. Don't worry
yourself! Four ready back of the Platform and four more posted right
and left of the proscenium. Don't mention it! Very proud to....
Good-afternoon!"
"Good-afternoon and thanks, Superintendent!"
And Saxham rang off, more relieved in mind than he would have cared to
own. Then the horn of a motor sounded below in the Hospital courtyard,
and another and another followed. Tyres crackled on gravel. The
running feet of men pattered on pavement. The hall-porter whistled up
the speaking-tube into the Medical Officer's Room, and Saxham went down,
meeting the black-robed Mother Prioress and the Sister Superintendent on
their way to the great vestibule.
*CHAPTER LXII*
*WOUNDED FROM THE FRONT*
The wide-leaved front doors stood open. Doctors and surgeons,
theatre-assistants, students, white-habited Sisters,
blue-and-white-uniformed nurses and probationers, were swarming in the
great vestibule. Already a double stream of canvas stretchers, laden
with still figures swathed in iodined gauze and cotton-wool padding,
were being carried up the wide steps, from the big grey-painted Red
Cross motor-ambulances, by R.A.M.C., and blue-uniformed bearers of St.
Theresa's Association, while omnibuses, private cars, taxis from Charing
Cross and Victoria were hauled up behind, waiting to disgorge their
loads. And cheer upon cheer went up from the packed sidewalks and
roadway; handkerchiefs waved from the windows of the nearest houses, and
the passengers on the roofs of the omnibuses passing up and down
Wellington Road, Edgware Road, and Praed Street, stood up and craned
their necks in the fruitless endeavour to glimpse the reason of those
frantic cheers.
For the first convoy of wounded from the Front had reached the Hospital.
These unwashed, begrimed, hairy brigands, these limping tramps in
tattered khaki, these bandaged cripples leading blind comrades, were our
Guards, our Gunners, our Highlanders, Kents, Middlesex men and Munsters,
our Rifles and Northamptons, our Welsh and Gloucesters, our Scots Greys
and Lancers, our immortals of those red-hot days of August, and their
compeers, the terrible fighters of the Marne and the Aisne....
They were back, full of cross-nicked, nickel-coated Mauser bullets, bits
of shell and lumps of shrapnel, cheap jokes, music-hall choruses,
vermin, and spunk. The reek of lysol and carbolic, the sickly whiff of
dysentery and the ghastly stench of gangrene, brought back to Saxham the
Hospital at Gueldersdorp, as he passed back and forth between the
stretchers, issuing swift orders, briefly wording directions,
marshalling his trained forces with the generalship that had
distinguished him of old.
"Doctor!"
"What is it, Ironside?" Saxham turned to speak to the Resident Medical
Officer. "You look off-colour, man!"
"I feel off, sir. They're so damned full of grit, and cheerful! Not
only the cases from the Base Hospitals, but those casualties they've
sent us direct from the trenches.... Two days in the train getting to
Calais--and Lord! the straw and filthiness in their wounds! And we've
been told our next War'd be carried out on an absolutely Aseptic Basis,
and here we are back in 1900!"
"Not quite," said Saxham. "Wounds like these were never made by Boer
shrapnel. Human bodies shattered beyond imagination by High Explosive,
rank among the triumphs of Modern Science. After the Stone Age and the
Iron Age, the Golden Age and the Age of Shoddy has come the Age of
Militant Chemistry. Martianism, in a word."
"It's an ugly word.... Doctor, that man over there," the speaker
indicated a pair of hollow eyes staring hungrily over a huge
iodine-smeared gauze muffler, "wants to know if we can save his lower
jaw? Not that there's much left of it. His pal, who interprets for
him, says a wounded German officer shot him in the face with his
revolver, 'cos he went to give the blankety blank a drink out of his
water-bottle. One of the Gunners--and not long married, according to
the pal."
"All right, tell him! Name him for one of my beds," Saxham said
brusquely, and nodded to the owner of the desperate eyes, saying, as
they flared back their gratitude: "Even if it had been 1821 in the
cattle-truck, we're in the Twentieth Century here. Warn Burland," he
named the anaesthetist, "for duty at once. Gaynor Gaynes and Frost to
be ready with the X Ray on Flat I. Mr. Whitchett and Mr. Pridd to act
as Assistant Surgeons. We'll take the worst cases straight away----"
"But, my God, sir! most of these men are beyond Surgery," groaned
Ironside, cracking his finger-joints. "Broken and mashed and rent as
they are, what they need is to be re-created! ... If Christ were to look
in here just now," the Medical Resident cried in his bitterness,
"there'd be plenty of work in His line. New tissues to make, bony
structures to re-build. Organs to replace where organs have been
destroyed. He'd have done it by mixing earth with His saliva and
anointing. We might as well spit on twenty per cent. of these
fellows--for all the good we can do!"
"Give them liquid nourishment--brandy where necessary, and send those
I've tagged up to the theatre. No waiting to wash--in their cases. And
remember my Gunner gets the first look-in!"
Saxham turned and ran at speed, making for the nearest elevator, found
it just going up full of stretcher-cases lying close packed as sardines,
turned and shot up the stone staircase three steps at a time to the
first floor, glittering with white enamel, polished oak, brass fittings
and cleanliness, under the discreet radiance of shaded electric lights.
The centre space was occupied by the tribune engirdling the domed
Sanctuary of the Chapel. Short corridors tastefully adorned with
red-enamelled buckets, blue glass bombs of chemical fire-extinguisher,
and snaky coils of brass-fitted hose, led to long wards running east,
west, north, and south.
"Eh, Doctor!"
A fair-faced, gentle-eyed Sister of Mercy, in the wide-winged starched
linen cap and guimpe, and white twill nursing-habit with the black
Cross, stood near the lift, talking to a tall, raw-boned, white-haired
Surgeon-General of the R.A.M.C. She greeted Saxham's appearance with a
little womanly cry:
"Eh, Doctor! Never it rains buddit pours." There was a hint of
Lancashire in her dialect. "The R.A.M.C. have sent us ten more cases.
Dear, dear!--but we'll have our hands full."
"Then you'll be happy, Sister-Superintendent. I've never known you so
beamingly contented as when you were regularly run off your feet, and
hadn't a minute to say your Rosary. Anything specially interesting, Sir
Duncan?"
"Aweel!" The broad Scots tongue of Taggart droned the bagpipe-note as
of old. "Aweel! There's an abdawminal or twa I'd like ye to throw your
'ee over--an' a G.P. that ye will find in your line. Fracture o' the
lumbar vairtebra from shrapnel--received ten o'clock yesterday
morr'ning!--an' some cases o' shellitis, wi' intermittent accesses o'
raging mania an' intervals o' mild delusions--an' ane will gar you draw
on the Medical Officer's Emergency List o' Abbreviated Observations I
supplied ye wi' a guid few years agone."
"I've not forgotten."
"I'm no' dootin' but ye have found it unco' useful." Taggart's frosty
eyelashes twinkled. "It has saved my ain face from shame mair times
than I daur tell." He quoted, relishingly: "M.B.A.--Might Be Anything!
G.O.K.--Guid Only Knows! L.F.A.--Luik for Alcohol. A.D.T.--Any Damned
Thing! 'Toch, Sister, I beg your parr-don! The word slipped oot--I
have nae other excuse! But my case o' shell-shock, Saxham. What say ye
to an involuntary simuleetion o' _rigor mortis_? A man sane an' sound
an' hale--clampit by his relentless imagination into the shape o' a
Polwheal Air-Course Finder, or a pair o' dividers. Half open, ye ken.
Ye may stand him on the ground upo' his feet, an' his neb is pointing at
the daisies--or ye may lie him o' his back in bed--an' his taes are
tickling the stars. Am thinking it long till I'm bringing ye thegither!
But ye are busied. I'll no' keep ye the noo."
Racing for the second lift, just emptied of its sorrowful burden, the
big shirt-sleeved Doctor checked in his stride and touched the handle of
a sliding door. The door shot back noiselessly in its grooving. Saxham
was in a cushioned tribune high above the level of the chapel Altar.
The scent of flowers and the perfume of incense hung like a benison on
the still air of the sacred place.
In one of the carved stalls of the nave the figure of a priest in
cassock and biretta sat reading from a breviary. It was the Chaplain,
waiting in readiness to be called to administer Holy Unction and
Viaticum to some Catholic soul about to depart. In the choir behind the
high Altar a slight girl, in the frilled cap and prim black gown of the
Novitiate, knelt on a rush-bottomed prie-dieu absorbed in meditation,
her black Rosary twisted round her clasped hands. Prayers that are most
earnest are frequently incoherent. Saxham formulated no petition as he
knelt there in the tribune, but the cry of his heart to the Divine
Hearer might have been construed into words like these:
"_If Thou wert here in the visible Body as when of old Thou didst walk
on earth with Thy Disciples, Thou wouldst heal these broken sons of
Thine with Thy look. Thy Touch, Thy Word! Yet art Thou here--for Thou
hast said it, ever present for Thy Faithful in Spirit, Flesh, and Blood.
Help O Helper! Heal O Healer! Lord Jesus, present in the Blessed
Sacrament of the Altar, give power and wisdom to Thy servant. Aid me,
working in the dark by my little flame of hard-won knowledge, to
preserve life, Thou Giver of Life! Amen._"
So having prayed, the Dop Doctor went up to the theatre and wrought
mightily, doing wonderful things in the way of patching and botching the
broken bodies of men. Later, as he sat in the Harley Street dining-room
playing the courteous, attentive host to sad-eyed, wistful Madame van
der Heuvel and her two pretty daughters--for Lynette had dined earlier
on account of the Suffrage Meeting--he heard a latch-key in the
front-door and Patrine's well-known step in the hall.
He excused himself, rose and went out, and spoke to his niece. She made
a croaking sound in answer, as unlike the voice of Patrine as the
pinched and sunken face revealed by the hall electroliers, resembled the
face of dead David's handsome girl. The mouth hung lax. The cheeks had
fallen. The eyes stared blank and tearless, from hollow caves under the
broad black eyebrows. He said with a pricking of foreboding:
"You have had a long day! ..."
"Not long enough to tire me. I am made of india-rubber, I think, and
steel."
He considered her a moment with grave, keen eyes that had no gleam of
curiosity.
"Sherbrand is well? He returned from France in safety?"
"He was quite in the pink when he arrived--and ditto when he left. Not
that he had much time. A wireless came, ordering him to replace an
aviator of the Royal Flying Corps, killed on observation-duty--or
whatever it is they call it--with our fellows on the new Front. Rough
on him, but he took it smiling. No, thanks! I'm not keen on dinner....
You won't mind if I go to my room?"
"One moment. Have you had food to-day?" he asked her.
"I forget.... Yes, of course! There was luncheon at one o'clock. The
people at the Air Station did us tremendously well." Her mouth twisted.