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IV
A WOMAN OF THE WAR

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.