“Ah, ces Américains!” exclaimed the mother.
“Un peuple tout à fait fou!” added the aunt.
It was practically an engagement.
14
The Furies of Pain
I
The little town of Beauvais lies about fifty miles to the north of Paris. It is something over a thousand years old, and has an ancient cathedral, and battlements now made into boulevards. It was like Paris, in that the Germans had got there almost, but not quite. Its inhabitants had heard the thunder of guns, and were still hearing it, day and night, a distant storm where the sun came up. Thunderstorms are capricious, and whether this one would return was a subject of hourly speculation. People studied the bulletins in front of the ancient Hôtel de Ville and hoped that what they read was true.
To keep the storm away, everybody was working day and night. The Chemin de Fer du Nord passed through the town, which had become a base: soldiers detraining, guns and ammunition being unloaded, depots established to store food and fodder and pass them up to the front, everything that would be needed if the line was to hold and the enemy be driven back. No use to expect comfort in such a place; count yourself lucky that you were alive.
Beauty Budd was here because she belonged to that class of people who are accustomed to have their own way. She had met cabinet ministers at tea parties and salons, she had given a generous check for the aid of the French wounded, she bore the name of a munitions family now being importuned to expand their plant and help to save la patrie. So when she appeared at the door of an official, the secretary bowed and escorted her in; the official said: “Certainly, Madame,” and signed the document and had it stamped.
So the car with the red-headed college boy chauffeur had been passed by sentries on the edge of Beauvais, and the harassed authorities of the town did their best to make things agreeable for a lady whose grief added dignity to her numerous charms. “Yes, Madame, we will do our best to find your friend; but it will not be easy, because we have no general records.” There was another battle going on; the grumbling guns were making hundreds of new cases every hour, and they were dumped here because there was no time to take them farther.
“We will go ourselves and search,” said Madame; and when they told her that all the buildings in the town which could be spared had been turned into hospitals, she asked: “Can you give me a list?” The boys drove her to one place after another, and she would stand waiting while a clerk looked through a register of the living and another of the dead; her hands would be clenched and her lips trembling, and the two escorts at her side would be ready to catch her if she started to fall.
At last they found the name of Marcel Detaze; in a dingy old inn, so crowded with cots in the corridors that there was barely room to get through. It was Milton’s “Stygian cave forlorn, ’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.” Beauty Budd, accustomed to every luxury, was plunged into this inferno, ill-lighted, clamorous with cries and groans, stinking of blood and suppurating wounds and disinfectants. Ambulances and carts were unloading new cases on the sidewalk; sometimes they were dead before a place could be found for them, and then they were carted to open graves outside the city.
II
Marcel was alive. That was all Beauty had asked for. They could not tell her much about him. His legs had been broken and had been set. His back was injured, they didn’t know how badly. He doubtless had internal injuries. His burns had been dressed; very painful, of course, but they did not think he would be blind. “We have no time, Madame,” they said. “We do not sleep, we are exhausted.”
Beauty could see that it was true; doctors and nurses and attendants, all were pale and had dark rings under their eyes, and some of them staggered. “C’est la guerre, Madame.” “I know, I know,” said Beauty.
They took her to where he lay upon a cot, with a dozen other men in the same room. There would have been no way of recognizing him; his head was a mass of bandages, only an opening for his mouth and nose, and these appeared to be open sores. She had to kneel by him and whisper: “Is it you, Marcel?” He did not stir; just murmured: “Yes.” She said: “Darling, I have come to help you.” When she put her ear to his lips, she heard faintly: “Let me die.” There was something wrong with his voice, but she made out the words: “Don’t try to save me. I would be a monster.”
Beauty had never been taught anything about psychology; only what she had picked up by watching people she knew. She had never heard of a “death-wish,” and if anyone had spoken of autohypnosis she would have wondered if it was a gadget for a motorcar. But she had her share of common sense, and perceived right away that she had to take command of Marcel’s mind. She had to make him want to live. She had to find what might be an ear under the mass of bandages, make sure that the sounds were going into it, and then say, firmly and slowly:
“Marcel, I love you. I love your soul, and I don’t care what has happened to your body. I mean to stand by you and pull you through. You have got to live for my sake. No matter what it costs, you must stand it, and see it through. Do you hear me, Marcel?”
“I hear you.”
“All right then. Don’t say no to me. You must do it because I want you to. For the sake of our love. I want to take you away from here, and nurse you, and you will get over this. But first you have to make up your mind to it. You have to want to live. You have to love me enough. Do you understand me?”
“It is not fair to you—”
“That is for me to say. Don’t argue with me. Don’t waste your strength. You belong to me, and you have no right to leave me, to deprive me of your love. I don’t care what you say, I don’t want to hear it—I want you. Whatever there is of you that the doctors can save—that much is mine, and you must not take it from me. You can live only if you try to, and I ask you to do that. I want your promise. I want you to say it and mean it. I have to go out and make arrangements to take you to Paris; but I can’t go till I know that you will fight, and not give up. You told me to have courage, Marcel. Now I have it, and you have to repay me. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“I want your promise. I want to know that if I go out to get help, you will fight with everything that’s in you to keep alive, to keep your hope and courage, for my sake, and for our love. There’s no use talking about love if you’re not willing to do that much for it. Answer me that you will.”
She put her ear to the opening again, and heard a whisper: “All right.” She touched him gently on the shoulder, not knowing what part of him might be a wound, and said: “Wait for me. I’ll come back just as quickly as I can make arrangements. Anything else I can do?”
“Water,” he said. She didn’t know how to give it to him, for she was afraid to lift his head, and she had no tube, and no one to ask. She dipped her handkerchief into a glass and squeezed a little into his mouth, and kept that up until he said it was enough.
III
The doctors made no objection to having a patient taken off their hands. They said he couldn’t be crowded into an automobile, that would surely kill him; and there was no ambulance available. It was a question of making changes in Beauty’s own car, one of the new and fashionable kind called a “limousine,” a square black box. It might be possible to take out two of the seats, the right-hand ones, and make a place to lay a narrow mattress on the floor. Then Jerry made a suggestion—why not put a board platform on top of the two seats, with a mattress on that?
They drove to a garage; there was nobody but the wife of the proprietor and an elderly mechanic, both greatly startled by the idea of cutting out a piece of the back of a luxury car, so that a wounded soldier could be slid into it. The windshield was large, and the mechanic thought he might be able to remove that. Beauty said: “Break it if necessary. We can have it replaced in Paris.” Jerry took the proprietress aside and spoke magic words: “C’est l’ami de cette belle dame.”
“Ah, c’est l’amour!” That explained everything, and they w
ent to work with enthusiasm. Love will find out the way! They managed to get the windshield off without too great harm, and they put some boards together and made a platform, and the proprietress brought an old mattress, and Lanny worked at it with his pocket knife, cutting it down to the right size. “Ah, ces Américains!”
While all this was being done, Beauty was out looking for a telephone, to call a surgeon she knew in Paris, and arrange for Marcel to be received at a private hospital. When she got back, the platform was in place, and the mattress on top of it, a reasonably good place for a wounded man to lie for the time it would take to get him to the big city.
Two tired attendants carried the patient down and slid him onto the mattress without damage. Beauty distributed money to everyone who helped them, and Jerry gave them cigarettes, which they wanted even more at the moment. It was dark when they set out, but no matter—Marcel was alive, and Beauty sat in the rear seat, which brought her head about level with his ear, and for two hours she whispered: “Marcel, I love you, and you are going to live for my sake.” She found a thousand variations of it, and Lanny listened, and learned things about love. He was in a cramped position—they had taken out some of the bags and tied them onto the rear of the car, and Lanny was squatting on the floor at his mother’s knees, underneath Marcel’s mattress. He couldn’t see anything, but he could hear, and he learned that love is not all pleasure, but can be agony and heartache, martyrdom and sacrifice. He learned what the clergyman was talking about in the marriage service: “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
IV
The human body is a complicated engine with many miles of elastic pipes large and small. In order that the engine may develop the maximum horsepower per pound of weight, the pipes are made of fragile materials, and the framework which encloses and supports them is porous and brittle. When you take such a contraption fifty feet up in the air and explode a mass of hydrogen gas above it, and let it crash onto hard ground, you produce in a second or two results which surgeons and nurses may need a long time to remedy.
There were no physicians in Paris who were not overworked, and no hospital which was not crowded; but the lady with the magical name of Budd used her influence, and Robbie, getting the news by cable from his son, replied: “Spare no expense.” So Marcel was X-rayed and investigated, and his burns were treated according to the modern technique of cleaning away damaged tissues. After several days of watching, the doctors said that he would live, if he did not become discouraged by the ordeals he would have to undergo, and if his amour propre was not too greatly wounded by the certainty of looking like a scarecrow.
It was up to Beauty. She could have that scarecrow if she wanted it, and she did. There were no more thoughts about Pittsburgh now; she had made her bed and she would lie in it—right here in a private room in a maison de santé. She got herself some nurse’s uniforms and made a job of it; the people of the place were only too glad, having plenty to do without this difficult case. She had a cot in one corner of the room, and for weeks hardly ever left it; she took no chance of Marcel’s amour propre breaking loose and causing him to throw himself out of the window. She would be right there, to keep reminding him that he belonged to her, and that her property sense was strong.
Troops of little demons came and sat upon the metal bars which made the head and foot of Marcel’s bed. His physical eyes were swathed in bandages, but he saw them plainly with his mind’s eye. Some had round shaven heads with Pickelhauben on; some had sharp-pointed mustaches which they twisted and turned up at the ends; others were just regular devils with horns and red tails. They came in relays, and pinched the painter’s wounded flesh and poked needles into it; they twisted his broken joints, they pulled and strained his damaged pipes—in short, they gave him no peace day or night. The sweat would stand out on him—wherever he had enough skin left for that to happen. He would writhe, and do his best not to groan, because of that poor woman who sat there in anguish of soul, talking to him when he couldn’t listen, trying to help him when there wasn’t any help. When you are in pain you are alone.
There were the burns that kept having to be dressed; there were bones that had been set wrong and had to be broken again; he was always being transported to the operating room for more probing and poking. The doctors could give him opiates, of course, but there was a limit, if they intended to keep him alive. He just had to stand it; he had to learn to live with pain and make a game of it. The doctors would help him by making jokes, and letting him make them. He took to calling them “plumbers,” and threatening to get an American one, because the French ones didn’t know their business. They answered that they would know it a lot better before this war was over. Beauty could hardly stand such jokes, but she toughened herself. “C’est la guerre.”
V
The youth and his youthful tutor had rooms in a hotel near by. The walls had white wainscoting and pink flowered silk above it, and the chairs were upholstered to match. The elevators looked as if they were made of gold, and were of open grillwork, so that you could watch people rising up or sinking down. An elderly official in a grand uniform set the front doors to revolving for them, and young women musicians in red coats and gold braid played Hungarian dances while they ate their meals. It was a life of unimaginable luxury for Jerry Pendleton, whose father owned a couple of drug stores in a town of Kansas.
They got some books and faithfully studied every morning. After lunch they walked, and looked at pictures and the other sights of Paris, and then went to relieve Lanny’s mother so that she could have a nap. The pair were a comfort to Marcel; for men have to be together, it appears; they just can’t stand women all the time. Men understand why you have to get out into the world, in spite of danger and death. When Marcel was able to listen, he enjoyed hearing about American college life, including football; and about a trip on a cattle boat, and then tramping over Europe, sleeping in haystacks. He wished that he had thought of something so original when he was a youth.
Also, of course, he had to know about the war. Beauty had hoped never to hear of it again, but she had to read the news to him, and learn to think about strategy instead of broken bodies. Those two armies had locked themselves together, like wild stags which have got their horns caught and are doomed to butt each other around the forest until both of them drop. All that bitter winter the armies would thrust here and yield there, until gradually they got settled down into the earth. The Germans constructed an elaborate set of entrenchments, line behind line; to the defense of these lines they would bring up everything they had, and Britain and France would do the same on the other side of “no man’s land.” Each army was frantically getting ready for the spring “push” that was to end the war—so the experts all said, only they differed as to what the ending would be.
Winters in Paris are disagreeable, and people of means do not stay if they can help it. But Beauty hardly ever went out, and the boys didn’t mind, because they were young and everything was new and delightful. They saw motion pictures, French and American; they went to plays, and Jerry improved his French. They had a piano in their suite—for Robbie wrote that he was making a pile of money, and Lanny might have anything he wanted, provided he did not smoke or drink or go with prostitutes.
Friends came to see Beauty and Marcel: Emily Chattersworth, very serious now, completely wrapped up in the affairs of her blessés; Sophie and her Eddie, she trying so hard to keep her man entertained and hoping that the sight of poor Marcel might teach him the cruelty and wickedness of fighting. But it didn’t work that way; men seemed to be drawn to death like moths into the flame; they thought of vengeance rather than of safety. Lanny wrote to Rick, telling what had happened, and it surely did not act as a deterrent with the English boy; he longed all the more to get up there in the air and hunt a Taube.
The time came when the sufferer’s burns were healed enough so that the bandages could be taken off. That was a
time of fresh trials for Beauty—the doctors had to warn her, she must be prepared for the worst, and not let Marcel see any trace of horror in her face. He wouldn’t have a mirror, but of course he would put his fingers to his face and feel what was there. His friends must help him get used to it, and make him believe that it made no difference to them.
Beauty, who had been named for her looks, and valued hers and others’ very high among the gifts of life, had chosen a man who possessed fine blond hair and mustaches, grave, melancholy features, and an expression of romantic tenderness. Now he had no hair at all, just a red scalp, and his face was a flaming scar. His lips were gone on one side, so that he could only make a pretense at articulating the letters b and p. Out of the gaping wound his teeth grinned hideously, and the gum of the lower jaw was all exposed. Some day a facial surgeon might replace the lip, so the doctors assured him. Fortunately his eyesight was uninjured, but one of his upper eyelids was gone, and most of his ears.
Beauty had to go and look at that mask, and smile affectionately, and say that it didn’t matter a bit. Marcel’s right hand was well enough to be kissed, and that was where she kissed him. Since he liked so much to make jokes, she told him that she would take up needlework, like other old ladies, and learn to patch up his skin. Seriously she insisted that it was his soul she cared about, and that wasn’t changed. After saying all this, she went off to the little room which she had to dress in, and there wept hysterically, cursing God and the Kaiser.