Chapter XIII

When a man's own organs, senses, wits conspire against him, in league with an enamoured woman who plays traitress, what earthly chance has the man?

Yaill stared into the glowing rose-red heart of the fire, conjuring up for the thousandth time that part played by one brown puppet of a myriad of puppets similarly attired, in War's dread drama; cheek by jowl, night in and day out--with the grim tragi-comedian Death; whose paces, poses and antics, grown commonplace by dint of familiarity--at length ceased to cause a shudder, or provoke a passing jest....

The War.... A waking nightmare of cold, heat, thirst and hunger; exertion, anxiety, responsibility, fatigue; sleeplessness and NOISE, NOISE, in a ceaseless, maddening crescendo, until that flaming white-hot moment when the German 5.9 H.E. shell blew in the Advanced Telephone Communication dug-out. When consciousness of these things abruptly ceased for Yaill.

So it came to pass that stark-naked as when he was born into this world, save for a platinum disc-chain on his wrist, bearing his name, religion, rank and regiment, and a small gold Crucifix slung by a blackened cord about his neck, Number 40, Shell Shock Ward 8, General Casualty Hospital 70, on the Lines of Communication, came into being. Later on, when the Great Blank had given place to a drab-hued mental twilight, wherein men, women and children; animals, trees and houses could dimly be conjectured or unemotionally discerned; and a little later yet, when one began again to realise oneself a living puppet, playing a dull, dull part in a dreary production called Life,--with some character dimly sensed as missing from the cast, whose presence would have made a world of difference!--Number 80, Convalescent Officers' Camp, B---- Base, began to take what other nurses called a "good deal of notice" of Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw.

You are to conceive of Nurse Burtonshaw as anything but a purposeful Delilah. The piously-reared daughter of one Burton, a respectable West of England dairy-farmer,--calling herself "Burtonshaw" for reasons of her own, while serving in concert with thousands of other admirable young British women, enrolled for Service at Home and Overseas under the auspices of the Red Cross,--how shall she be held blameworthy because there beat under her Navy blue lustre overall, and white bibbed apron with its badge of red twill Turkey, a woman's heart, susceptible to Love....

Does any woman wonder? Does any man ask Why? Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw had washed Number 80; combed him, fed him, dressed him,--and put him to bed again. Administered general massage and tonics, and superintended the ministrations of the orderly-barber, unwearying, for months on end. She had soothed him,--waking from brief daylight sleeps in panics bred of hideous, nerve-shattering visions,--reproductions of such sights,--burned in upon the brain and reproduced by the subconscious memory, as made the nights grim ordeals of dread. She had alternately scolded and encouraged her patient, gaining strength mentally and physically under her unselfish, able care, until she had established herself as the hub of his universe. The sky and sea, the flowers and trees, and that fresh West Country face with its blunt features and well-opened grey-blue eyes, were the only books the patient ever cared to read in. The printed lines, the written sheets, were torture to Yaill's dazed brain and astigmatic vision. So the Commandant's private secretary attended to his business letters, and the correspondence of his friends was dealt with by Nurse....

Upon her arm at first, by her side later, he took his first walks in the Convalescent Camp grounds. When later still, he was taken for drives in the company of other shell-shocked officers, it was Nurse Burtonshaw who persuaded him not to rebel against this order of the C.M.O.... Nurse, who waited for the return of the big, crowded car and unpacked him, smiling, at the gates of Canvas Park Row, the double avenue of roomy tents pitched on the green, tree-clumped slopes rising North of the Base Port, behind the big square stone house where the Staff officers and quarters were,--and the huge, shapeless, plank-built zinc-roofed bulk of the Hospital.

"There now, you're back again and no bones broken. And whether you liked it or not, the air has done you good," she would say cheerfully, unwinding his muffler, knitted by herself in her scant spare time. For all Yaill's personal, immediate baggage had been destroyed by a Boche bomb-raid upon Battalion Staff Headquarters, and as Number 80 never wrote letters, such lacking necessaries had been replaced by Red Cross gifts.

Subsequently, when some battered portmanteaux were received from Regimental H.Q. in France,--but of that later in the chapter.... You are to see Nurse taking off the muffler, over which her patient stared down at her with grey, brooding, mournful eyes. Those eyes followed her about, burning holes in her grey print. If she had established herself as the hub of Number 80's universe, she was none the less the adoring slave of him whom--in private and at his entreaty she called "Teddy."

For Lord help this bedevilled man! he who in all his thirty-five years of life had been "Edward" to all who loved him, holding pet names in abhorrence,--had invited Nurse Burtonshaw to address him by this fond diminutive. "My mother used to call me 'Teddy,'" he would say, with his sad eyes brimming: "and though she has married again--" the poor widowed lady being dead and buried years previously--"and I am nothing to her now, I somehow like to hear it."

So Nurse called him "Teddy," scrupulously selecting moments when they were quite alone and out of earshot. Then Teddy, who was a Border laird of ancient lineage, as well as a Squire in Cumberland, with a solid rent-roll of four thousand a year, some thriving home-farms and a park of many acres, confided to Nurse that he was a poor man--without a rap beyond his pay. But if Lucy had no fear of poverty, shared with a poor broken wretch who loved her--one to whom the love of woman had been a sealed book until he saw her face....

"You're getting too stuck on that Colonel man of yours, Burtonshaw!" expostulated a friend some hours later on, when the day-nurses went off duty. "Because when it comes to kissing Good-night--and I couldn't help but hear!--the partition between the O.C. wards being merely canvas! Of course you can trust me not to talk, though I hope you won't again!--a warm handshake as between friends being properer, and not against the Regulations--which I will say I never knew you go against before. Now own up. Am I right, or wrong?"

"I did, I'll own it.... I do truly feel for Number 80," admitted Nurse Burtonshaw. "He's alone in the world and quite poor, though three hundred and seventy pounds a year, which is his pay--not counting War allowances,--seems like riches to little me."

"Bless me!" cried the friend, "then you've actually clicked! ... He's asked you to marry him? ..."

Nurse Burtonshaw demanded, with rather a defiant flare lighting up her well-opened grey-blue eyes, and with a decided deepening of the steady bloom on her broad, blunt-featured West of England face, nunlike in the setting of flowing white linen hiding the rich red-gold hair that was her one undeniable beauty:

"Do you think I'd let him kiss me--a girl brought up like I've been--unless he'd behaved himself honourable? Not one of my friends can say a word--"

"But what will _his_ friends say about you?" asked the other nurse acutely, "when they hear how you've fixed things? To marry a Regular Army toff, who not so long ago was queer in his head, and had to be mothered and seen to and fed as if he'd been a blinking baby--"

Nurse Burtonshaw asserted:

"He's well, and going to get his discharge next week. They say his cure's my doing. And he's got no friends. He's told me so, over and over again!"

"That makes it better for you. And I'm not saying that you won't turn out a happy pair, not for a minute! Don't lots of patients marry their nurses and live happy ever after? And, whenever I've read your teacup, Fate has seemed to point that way. But as to his having no friends--that won't half wash!"

"And why won't it?"

"Just because your Teddy's a Society Toff, poor or not poor! Belongs to a crack Scotch regiment.... Gets lots of letters in lovely envelopes with the names of topping County places on some of 'em--and coronetted crests and monograms...."

"The smart folks who wrote those letters don't count. Hasn't he told me? 'Not one of them,' he says,--'matters to me a straw.'"

"He may have said so, but are you _sure_? I'm asking out of friendship. Wasn't there a woman--isn't there a woman who writes as if he mattered to her more than several stacks of straw? Oh, Luce! ..."

Nurse Burtonshaw stood her ground obstinately:

"I've questioned him over and over.... 'I may have liked her, since she says I did,' he says.... 'But all the same, she's less than nought to me.... What did you say her name was?' he asks in that simple way of his." ...

"And did you tell him?"

"What does that matter to you?"

"It'll matter to you one of these days, as sure as I'm certificated! And you told me she'd begged you to keep the letters until he was able to read them without hurting his head. You haven't given them to him! ... Straight--are you going to? Infirmary-trained we both may be, and not Hospital--but I hope we know what's due to the professions to say nothing of the Red Cross! When will you give him those letters?"

Behind Nurse Burtonshaw's blue-grey eyes a red flame kindled. She retorted, confronting her interlocutor:

"When he asks me to! Haven't I told you?"

"Not much, you haven't. And about your first venture--with the Didlick boy--poor thing! Killed at Mons and buried no one knows where--are you going to tell him about that?"

"I--am--NOT! ... Is that plain enough? ... Now let me get to bed!"

When Katharine should learn that those letters, written from her post of service at the Receiving Hospital in France, and later from a London Nursing Home,--and later still from Kerr's Arbour,--had never been delivered to Nurse Burtonshaw's patient, would she believe--Yaill wondered dismally, or doubt like all the rest of the world, the man who had married the nurse?