A Furnace of Earth

XV.

Margaret passed along through the light-freshened ward, following Lois closely, and fighting desperately the active feeling of nausea which almost overcame her. All her sensitive nature cringed in this atmosphere. Through the brightness and cleanliness of wood and metal, the absolute whiteness of the stamped bed-linen and the fresh smell of antiseptics, she had a morbid sense of the ugliness of disease, of the loathsomeness of contact with physical decrepitude that is one of the selfishnesses of the artistic temperament. She felt the dread, incubus-like, pressing upon her and sucking from her what force and vitality she had. A feeling of despair of being able to cope with this thrusting melancholy beset her and she fought it off with her strongest strength.At intervals, as they passed, was a cot shut off by screens of white linen, fluted and ironed, as high as the eyes. These spotless blanks stood out more awful to Margaret in intimation of hidden horror than any open physical convulsion. Behind these screens was more often silence, but sometimes came forth an indistinct and restless muttering, and once a sharp, panging groan. A sick apprehension gripped her, and she felt her palms growing moist with sweat. She was sickly sensible of the sweet, pungent smell of carbolic and ether, sharpened by a spicy odor of balsam-of-Peru. From the pillows curious eyes peered at her, set in faces sharp-featured and hectic, or a shambling figure in loose garments moved, bent and halting, across their path. She caught a sidewise view, through a swing door, of a tiled operating-room, with a glittering mÊlÉe of polished instruments. Here and there she thought the lapping folds of bandages moved, showing blue glimpses of gaping cuts and festering tissue. It seemed as if the long rows of white coverlids and iron bed-bars would go on eternally.

As they came to the extreme end of the room, Margaret suddenly stopped, gripping Lois’s arm with vise-close fingers. “What is that?” she whispered.

“What is what?”

She stood listening, her neck bent sideways, and a flush of excitement rising on her cheeks. “Didn’t you hear him call me?” she said.

“Hear him? Hear who?” said Lois.

But she did not answer. “Take me away; oh, take me away!” she said weakly. “I want to go back to the room. I—I can’t tell you what I thought I heard. It would sound such nonsense. I must have imagined it. Oh, of course I imagined it! Oh, Lois, I don’t believe I will ever be any good here, do you?”

Lois drew her into the outside corridor and up the hall. “I do believe you are sick yourself!” she said. “Why, you have quite a fever. There is something troubling you, dear, I’m sure. Can’t you tell me about it?”

“Oh, no! Indeed there is nothing!” cried Margaret. “Lois, I want to see all the patients—the worst ones. Promise me you’ll take me with you when you go around to-night. Indeed, indeed, I must! You must let me! I will be just as quiet! You will see! You think it wouldn’t be best—that I’m too fanciful and sensitive yet—but indeed, it isn’t that. Maybe it’s because I only look on from a distance. I don’t touch it, actually. I’m only a spectator. If I could go quite close, or do something to help with my hands, maybe they would seem more like people, and the sickness of it would leave me. Do, dear, say I may to-night!”

They had reached the room now, and Lois gently forced Margaret upon the lounge. “Very well,” she said, “I will. I’m going through at nine o’clock. I’m not afraid of your sensitiveness. It’s the sensitive ones who make the best nurses, Dr. Goodno says. They can feel their diagnosis. But you must lie down till I can come for you.”

Left alone, Margaret pressed her head into the cushions and tried to think. She could not shake off the real impression of that cry. “Ardee! Ardee!” It had come to her with such suddenness that every nerve had jumped and jerked. Could she have dreamed it? Was the sound of that old intimate name of hers, breathed in that peculiar voice, only a trick of the imagination? Surely it must have been! Her nerves were overwrought and frayed. She was hysterical. It was only the muttering of some fever patient! And yet, she had felt that she must see. An indefinable impulse had urged her to beg Lois to take her with her. And now the same horror would seize her again, the same sickening repulsion, and she would have the same fight over.

When Lois came for her, Margaret prepared herself quickly and they passed down. At the door of the surgical ward they met the house surgeon, who nodded to Margaret at Lois’s introduction. “Just going in to see Faulkner’s trephine case,” he said. “It’s a funny sort.”

“Is he coming through all right?” asked Lois. “That’s the one that was brought in on your train the other night, Margaret,” she added.

“I’m afraid it’s going to be the very devil. He took a nasty temperature this afternoon, and the nurse got worried and called me up. I found we had a good old-fashioned case of sepsis—wound full of pus and all that. What makes it bad is that he has hemiplegia. The whole left side seems to be paralyzed. The operation didn’t relieve the brain pressure, and with his temperature where it is now, we’ll have to simply take care of that and let any further examination go. I’ve just telephoned to Faulkner. It won’t be a satisfactory case, anyway. There is possibly some deeper brain injury in the motor area, and if we beat the poison out, he stands to turn out a helpless cripple. Some people are never satisfied,” he continued, irritably. “When they start out to break themselves up, they have to do it in some confounded combination that’s the very devil to patch up. Coming in?”

He held the door open, and they followed him quickly to a nest of screens at the upper end of the ward, passing in with him.

Margaret forced her unwilling eyes to regard the patient as the doctor laid a finger upon his pulse, attentively examined the temperature chart, and departed. He lay with his left side toward them. The head was partly shaven, hideous with bandages, and in an ice-pack. The side-face was drawn, distorted and expressionless. His left hand lay quiet, but the fingers of the right picked and tumbled and drummed on the coverlid unceasingly. He was muttering to himself in peculiar, excitable monotone. On a sudden his voice rose to audible pitch:

“Now, then! you’ll come. Don’t say you won’t! Why—you can’t help it! You will! Do you hear? * * * * Take the straight pike to the crossroads, and then two miles further on. The Drennen place—yes, I know!”

At the tone Margaret started in uncontrollable excitement. An inarticulate cry broke from her. She ran to the foot of the bed, and, her fingers straining on the bars, gazed with fearful questioning into the features of the sick man. As she gazed, his head rolled feebly on the pillow, displaying the right side of the face. Then a low, terrible, choking, sobbing cry rose to her lips—a cry of pain, of remonstrance, of desolation. “Why, it’s—it’s my—my—it’s Richard Daunt!”

Lois reached her in a single step and held her, trembling. But after that one bitter sob she was absolutely silent. She hardly breathed; all her soul seemed to be looking out of her deep eyes. The uncouth mumbling went on, uncertain but incessant.

“* * Drennen place. That’s where she is. I’ll find her! Let me go! Quick, take this off my head! I tell you, I’ve got to go! * * * Oh, my dear, don’t you want to see me? You look like an autumn leaf in that scarlet cloak. Come closer to me. Your hair is like flame and you’re pale—pale—pale! Look at me! * * * How dare you treat me this way? How dare you! You knew I’d come to you—you knew I couldn’t help it. Some one told me you didn’t want me to come. * * * It was a letter, wasn’t it? Some one wrote me a letter. But it was a lie!”

Lois readjusted the ice-pack, and the voice died down into broken mutterings. Then he began again:

“Where’s Richard Daunt? You’ve got to make her understand! You’ve got to, and you can’t. You’ve failed. She used to love you, and now she’s gone away and left you. She won’t come back! You can go to the devil! * * * Ardee! See how your hair shines against the old cross! Pray for her soul! Pray—for—her—soul! * * Ardee!”

Margaret bowed her face on her hands, still clasping the bed-rail. Great, clear tears welled up in her eyes and splashed upon the coverlid. She saw, as if through a fleering maze of windy rain-sheets, the dull, round, staring eyes, the yellow skin, the restless fingers and unlovely lips. Then she stood upright, swaying back and putting both hands to her temples as though something tense had snapped in her brain.

A pained wonder was in the look she turned on Lois—something the look of a furred wood-animal caught by the thudding twinge of a bullet. The next moment she threw herself softly on her knees by the cot, stretching her arms across the straightened figure, pressing her lips to the rounded outline of the knees, and between these kisses, lifting her face, swollen with sobless crying, to gaze at the rolling, unrecognizing features beside her. Agony was in the puffed hollows beneath her eyes, and her lips were drawn with the terrible yearning of a mother for her ailing child.

Lois raised her forcefully, yet feeling a strange powerlessness, and drew her away, with a finger on her lip and a warning glance beyond the screens, and Margaret followed her with the tranced gaze of a sleep-walker. There was no repugnance or distrust in it now, or fleshly horror of sickness.

In her room again, she stood before the window, her mind reaching out for the new sweetness that had dropped around her. All that she had thought strongest in her old love had shrunk to pitiful detail. Between her young, lithe body and the broken and ravaged wreck she had seen, there could then be no bond of bounding blood and throbbing flesh; but love, masterful, undismayed, had cried for its own. Something was dissolving within her heart—something breaking down and away of its own weight. She felt the fight finished. It had not been fought out, but the combatants who had gripped throat in the darkness had started back in the new dawn, to behold themselves brothers. There was a primal directness in the blow that had thrust her back—somewhere—back from all self-questionings and the torture of mental misunderstanding, upon herself. It was an appeal to CÆsar. Beneath the decree, the rigidity of belief that had lain back of her determination turned suddenly flexible. She did not try to reason—she felt. But this feeling was ultimate, final. She knew that she could never doubt herself again.

The green glints from the grass-plots on the tree-lined street and the sun on the gray asphalt filled her with a warm tenderness. Every bird in all the world was piping full-throated; every spray on every bush was hung with lush blossoms and drenched with fragrance. The swell of filling lungs and tumultuous blood—the ecstasy of breathing had returned to her. The joy-bitter gladness of the heart and the world, the enfolding arms of the unforgot, clasped her round. It was for her the Soul’s renaissance. The Great Illumination had come!

As Lois gazed at her, mystified, she turned, with both hands pressed against her breast, and laughed.

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