XXV
He followed his guide up the steep flights, which seemed to become buoyant and lift him like waves. It was as if the muscle that always dragged back his lame leg had suddenly regained its elasticity. He floated up as one mounts stairs in a dream. A smell of disinfectants hung in the cold air, and once, through a half-open door, a sickening odour came: he remembered it at Châlons, and Fortin's murmured: "Gangrene—ah, if only we could get them sooner!"
How soon had they got his boy, Campton wondered? The letter, mercifully sent by hand to Paris, had reached him on the third day after George's arrival at the Doullens hospital; but he did not yet know how long before that the shell-splinter had done its work. The nurse did not know either. How could she remember? They had so many! The administrator would look up the files and tell him. Only there was no time for that now.
On a landing Campton heard a babble and scream: a nauseating scream in a queer bleached voice that might have been man, woman or monkey's. Perhaps that was what the French meant by "a white voice": this voice which was as featureless as some of the poor men's obliterated faces! Campton shot an anguished look at his companion, and she understood and shook her head. "Oh, no: that's in the big ward. It's the way they scream after a dressing. . ."
She opened a door, and he was in a room with three beds in it, wooden pallets hastily knocked together and spread with rough grey blankets. In spite of the cold, flies still swarmed on the unwashed panes, and there were big holes in the fly-net over the bed nearest the window. Under the net lay a middle-aged bearded man, heavily bandaged about the chest and left arm: he was snoring, his mouth open, his gaunt cheeks drawn in with the fight for breath. Campton said to himself that if his own boy lived he should like some day to do something for this poor devil who was his roommate. Then he looked about him and saw that the two other beds were empty.
He drew back.
The nurse was bending over the bearded man. "He'll wake presently—I'll leave you"; and she slipped out. Campton looked again at the stranger; then his glance travelled to the scarred brown hand on the sheet, a hand with broken nails and blackened finger-tips. It was George's hand, his son's, swollen, disfigured but unmistakable. The father knelt down and laid his lips on it.
"What was the first thing you felt?" Adele Anthony asked him afterward: and he answered: "Nothing."
"Yes—at the very first, I know: it's always like that. But the first thing after you began to feel anything?"
He considered, and then said slowly: "The difference."
"The difference in him?"
"In him—in life—in everything."
Miss Anthony, who understood as a rule, was evidently puzzled. "What kind of a difference?"
"Oh, a complete difference." With that she had to be content.
The sense of it had first come to Campton when the bearded man, raising his lids, looked at him from far off with George's eyes, and touched him, very feebly, with George's hand. It was in the moment of identifying his son that he felt the son he had known to be lost to him forever.
George's lips were moving, and the father laid his ear to them; perhaps these were last words that his boy was saying.
"Old Dad—in a motor?"
Campton nodded.
The fact seemed faintly to interest George, who continued to examine him with those distant eyes.
"Uncle Andy's?"
Campton nodded again.
"Mother———?"
"She's coming too—very soon."
George's lips were screwed into a whimsical smile. "I must have a shave first," he said, and drowsed off again, his hand in Campton's. . .
"The other gentleman—?" the nurse questioned the next morning.
Campton had spent the night in the hospital, stretched on the floor at his son's threshold. It was a breach of rules, but for once the major had condoned it. As for Mr. Brant, Campton had forgotten all about him, and at first did not know what the nurse meant. Then he woke with a start to the consciousness of his fellow-traveller's nearness. Mr. Brant, the nurse explained, had come to the hospital early, and had been waiting below for the last two hours. Campton, almost as gaunt and unshorn as his son, pulled himself to his feet and went down. In the hall the banker, very white, but smooth and trim as ever, was patiently measuring the muddy flags.
"Less temperature this morning," Campton called from the last flight.
"Oh," stammered Mr. Brant, red and pale by turns.
Campton smiled haggardly and pulled himself together in an effort of communicativeness. "Look here—he's asked for you; you'd better go up. Only for a few minutes, please; he's awfully weak."
Mr. Brant, speechless, stood stiffly waiting to be conducted. Campton noticed the mist in his eyes, and took pity on him.
"I say—where's the hotel? Just a step away? I'll go around, then, and get a shave and a wash while you're with him," the father said, with a magnanimity which he somehow felt the powers might take account of in their subsequent dealings with George. If the boy was to live Campton could afford to be generous; and he had decided to assume that the boy would live, and to order his behaviour accordingly.
"I—thank you," said Mr. Brant, turning toward the stairs.
"Five minutes at the outside!" Campton cautioned him, and hurried out into the morning air through which the guns still crashed methodically.
When he got back to the hospital, refreshed and decent, he was surprised, and for a moment alarmed, to find that Mr. Brant had not come down.
"Sending up his temperature, of course—damn him!" Campton raged, scrambling up the stairs as fast as his stiff leg permitted. But outside of George's door he saw a small figure patiently mounting guard.
"I stayed with him less than five minutes; I was merely waiting to thank you."
"Oh, that's all right." Campton paused, and then made his supreme effort. "How does he strike you?"
"Hopefully—hopefully. He had his joke as usual," Mr. Brant said with a twitching smile.
"Oh, that———! But his temperature's decidedly lower. Of course they may have to take the ball out of the lung; but perhaps before they do it he can be moved from this hell."
The two men were silent, the same passion of anxiety consuming them, and no means left of communicating it to each other.
"I'll look in again later. Shall I have something to eat sent round to you from the hotel?" Mr. Brant suggested.
"Oh, thanks—if you would."
Campton put out his hand and crushed Mr. Brant's dry fingers. But for this man he might not have got to his son in time; and this man had not once made use of the fact to press his own claim on George. With pity in his heart, the father, privileged to remain at his son's bedside, watched Mr. Brant's small figure retreating alone. How ghastly to sit all day in that squalid hotel, his eyes on his watch, with nothing to do but to wonder and wonder about the temperature of another man's son!
The next day was worse; so much worse that everything disappeared from Campton's view but the present agony of watching, hovering, hanging helplessly on the words of nurse and doctor, and spying on the glances they exchanged behind his back.
There could be no thought yet of extracting the bullet; a great surgeon, passing through the wards on a hasty tour of inspection, had confirmed this verdict. Oh, to have kept the surgeon there—to have had him at hand to watch for the propitious moment and seize it without an instant's delay! Suddenly the vision which to Campton had been among the most hideous of all his crowding nightmares—that of George stretched naked on an operating-table, his face hidden by a chloroform mask, and an orderly hurrying away with a pile of red towels like those perpetually carried through the passages below—this vision became to the father's fevered mind as soothing as a glimpse of Paradise. If only George's temperature would go down—if only the doctors would pronounce him strong enough to have the bullet taken out! What would anything else matter then? Campton would feel as safe as he used to years ago, when after the recurring months of separation the boy came back from school, and he could take him in his arms and make sure that he was the same Geordie, only bigger, browner, with thicker curlier hair, and tougher muscles under his jacket.
What if the great surgeon, on his way back from the front, were to pass through the town again that evening, reverse his verdict, and perhaps even perform the operation then and there? Was there no way of prevailing on him to stop and take another look at George on the return? The idea took immediate possession of Campton, crowding out his intolerable anguish, and bringing such relief that for a few seconds he felt as if some life-saving operation had been performed on himself. As he stood watching the great man's retreat, followed by doctors and nurses, Mr. Brant suddenly touched his arm, and the eyes of the two met. Campton understood and gasped out: "Yes, yes; we must manage to get him back."
Mr. Brant nodded. "At all costs." He paused, again interrogated Campton's eyes, and stammered: "You authorize———?"
"Oh, God—anything!"
"He's dined at my house in Paris," Mr. Brant threw in, as if trying to justify himself.
"Oh, go—go!" Campton almost pushed him down the stairs. Ten minutes later he reappeared, modest but exultant.
"Well?"
"He wouldn't commit himself, before the others———"
"Oh———"
"But to me, as he was getting into the motor———"
"Well?"
"Yes: if possible. Somewhere about midnight."
Campton turned away, choking, and stumped off toward the tall window at the end of the passage. Below him lay the court. A line of stretchers was being carried across it, not empty this time, but each one with a bloody burden. Doctors, nurses, orderlies hurried to and fro. Drub, drub, drub, went the guns, shaking the windows, rolling their fierce din along the cloudy sky, down the corridors of the hospital and the pavement of the streets, like huge bowls crashing through story above story of a kind of sky-scraping bowling alley.
"Even the dead underground must hear them!" Campton muttered.
The word made him shudder superstitiously, and he crept back to George's door and opened it; but the nurse, within, shook her head.
"He must sleep after the examination. Better go."
Campton turned and saw Mr. Brant waiting. A bell rang twelve. The two, in silence, walked down the stairs, crossed the court (averting their eyes from the stretchers) and went to the hotel to get something to eat.
Midnight came. It passed. No one in the hurried confused world of the hospital had heard of the possibility of the surgeon's returning. When Campton mentioned it to the nurse she smiled her tired smile, and said: "He could have done nothing."
Done nothing! How could she know? How could any one, but the surgeon himself? Would he have promised if he had not thought there was some chance? Campton, stretched out on a blanket and his rolled-up coat, lay through the long restless hours staring at the moonlit sky framed by the window of the corridor. Great clouds swept over that cold indifferent vault: they seemed like the smoke from the guns which had not once ceased through the night. At last he got up, turned his back on the window, and lay down again facing the stairs. The moonlight unrolled a white strip along the stone floor. A church-bell rang one . . . two . . . there were noises and movements below. Campton raised himself, his heart beating all over his body. Steps came echoing up.
"Careful!" some one called. A stretcher rounded the stair-rail; another, and then another. An orderly with a lantern preceded them, followed by one of the doctors, an old bunched-up man in a muddy uniform, who stopped furtively to take a pinch of snuff. Campton could not believe his eyes; didn't the hospital people know that every bed on that floor was full? Every bed, that is, but the two in George's room; and the nurse had given Campton the hope, the promise almost, that as long as his boy was so ill she would keep those empty. "I'll manage somehow," she had said.
For a mad moment Campton was on the point of throwing himself in the way of the tragic procession, barring the threshold with his arms. "What does this mean?" he stammered to the nurse, who had appeared from another room with her little lamp.
She gave a shrug. "More casualties—every hospital is like this."
He stood aside, wrathful, impotent. At least if Brant had been there, perhaps by some offer of money—but how, to whom? Of what earthly use, after all, was Brant's boasted "influence"? These people would only laugh at him—perhaps put them both out of the hospital!
He turned despairingly to the nurse. "You might as well have left him in the trenches."
"Don't say that, sir," she answered; and the echo of his own words horrified him like a sacrilege.
Two of the stretchers were carried into George's room. Campton caught a glimpse of George, muttering and tossing; the moonlight lay in the hollows of his bearded face, and again the father had the sense of utter alienation from that dark delirious man who for brief intervals suddenly became his son, and then as suddenly wandered off into strangeness.
The nurse slipped out of the room and signed to him.
"Both nearly gone . . . they won't trouble him long," she whispered.
The man on the third stretcher was taken to a room at the other end of the corridor. Campton watched him being lifted in. He was to lie on the floor, then? For in that room there was certainly no vacancy. But presently he had the answer. The bearers did not come out empty-handed; they carried another man whom they laid on the empty stretcher. Lucky, lucky devil; going, no doubt, to a hospital at the rear! As the procession reached the stairs the lantern swung above the lucky devil's face: his eyes stared ceilingward from black orbits. One arm, swinging loose, dangled down, the hand stealthily counting the steps as he descended—and no one troubled, for he was dead.
At dawn Campton, who must have been asleep, started up, again hearing steps. The surgeon? Oh, if this time it were the surgeon! But only Mr. Brant detached himself from the shadows accumulated in the long corridor: Mr. Brant, crumpled and unshorn, with blood-shot eyes, and gloves on his unconscious hands.
Campton glared at him resentfully.
"Well—how about your surgeon? I don't see him!" he exclaimed.
Mr. Brant shook his head despondently. "No—I've been waiting all night in the court. I thought if he came back I should be the first to catch him. But he has just sent his orderly for instruments; he's not coming. There's been terrible fighting———"
Campton saw two tears running down Mr. Brant's face: they did not move him.
The banker glanced toward George's door, full of the question he dared not put.
Campton answered it. "You want to know how he is? Well, how should he be, with that bullet in him, and the fever eating him inch by inch, and two more wounded men in his room? That's how he is!" Campton almost shouted.
Mr. Brant was trembling all over.
"Two more men—in his room?" he echoed shrilly.
"Yes—bad cases; dying." Campton drew a deep breath. "You see there are times when your money and your influence and your knowing everybody are no more use than so much sawdust———"
The nurse opened the door and looked out. "You're talking too loudly," she said.
She shut the door, and the two men stood silent, abashed; finally Mr. Brant turned away. "I'll go and try again. There must be other surgeons . . . other ways. . ." he whispered.
"Oh, your surgeons . . . oh, your ways!" Campton sneered after him, in the same whisper.