Читать книгу Old Wine - Bottome Phyllis - Страница 5

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Eugénie dressed hurriedly and went out shivering into the deserted streets. Usually she loved her morning walk, it freshened her for the day’s toil, and sometimes she carried a vision of beauty into the wards that lingered throughout the day. From the bridge, which crossed the Canal leading to the Prater Strasse, she could see the hills of Kahlenberg and Leopoldsberg round as apples, caught by rosy clouds and shining down upon the City. To-day the fog covered them, the cold was pressing a white clammy sheet over the whole plain. The houses stood up in the sickly light, like dark shadows of old sins. Eugénie hastened; she felt a bitter revolt against ugliness, and against the futility of struggling with it. What had she gained by keeping alive a few hundred miserable babies, while Rosalie was charming Otto with her humming-bird hats? She came to a bleak and wind-swept yard, enclosing the abandoned grey barracks, now used as a children’s hospital.

Eugénie stood still for a long moment before she entered the door of her ward; she waited until her face changed; her lips softened, her eyes became full of laughter. She went into the ward at last as if she had been wafted in by music. There were sixty beds in the long narrow room, and each one held a child. The name of a Saint was written over the door. This was the ward of St. Agnes, and these were St. Agnes’ lambs; but no kindly-hearted butcher was there to put them out of pain. They were all under the shadow of tuberculosis: abscesses, defective limbs, defective organs, or simply the persistent dwindling of vitality. Some of them were terrible to look at, mere scraps of bone and skin. Some had the remains of beauty, like menaced flowers blown first this way and then that by the harsh wind of their disease. Yet when they saw Eugénie each of them smiled. She went from one bed to the other, with her eyes full of love. The bitterness in her heart had gone deep; and was hidden deep; none of it escaped her. The night sister gave Eugénie her notes and said a few words, lingering—although night nurses seldom linger—to take her part in the festival of Eugénie’s presence. It was a festival in spite of the long weary night; the sour fetid smell of the ward, so seldom aired on account of the scarcity of fuel; in spite of the pain in the little wizened faces. Washing, dressing, bed-making, breakfast; one by one these regular processes took place, and each child was so loved, so encouraged by its sense of unique importance, that every process, however painful to the little injured body, became a pleasure to the child’s responsive mind. The two young nurses who worked under Eugénie, ignorant rough girls whom she had trained, were full of the same spirit of tenderness. Everyone who worked in the hospital learned it as an inviolable rule. No voice was ever to be raised, no child to be disheartened by a frown. As to punishment, how could anyone punish those whom life had so condemned?

At breakfast Eugénie received a fresh shock. There was no more cocoa. With their black bread the children would have to have a dreadful drink made of acorns and hot water. There was no sugar to sweeten it with. The nurses looked at her and then looked away again. Nobody said anything. At ten o’clock came the Doctor. This was the hour for the dressings; it should have been the most painful hour in the day, but just because it might have been, it was turned into their highest pinnacle of joy. The door opened; every face turned towards it as if by clockwork, and Dr. Carl Jeiteles entered. He stood there for a moment with his eyes twinkling, his hands in the pockets of his white linen suit, his whole being concentrated upon the little world of pain in front of him, and from it came a moan not of pain but of joy. ‘The Herr Doktor! The Herr Doktor!’ Each day they greeted him with fresh rapture, as if they were greeting the sudden presence of God. All who could stand, fell upon him in a struggling mass; but those who could not move knew that he would stay with them longest. He disentangled one by one the clustering figures climbing over him, and Eugénie, standing by his side, laid her hand on each head in turn, lifting each face tenderly to his, and gave him the child’s history since he had last seen it; and in turn he took each child in his arms, kissed it, dismissed it with its own joke, its own encouragement, for the day; and then the next, and the next, without haste, without intermission, until he stood free again and went to the beds for the dressings. Piteous little faces scowling with pain opened like flowers as he bent over them. His touch, infinitely gentle, quick and sure, gave pain, but something in him promised a sure relief from pain. He was going to make them better; they lay still in his hands, moaned a little, cried a little, and when it was over he stayed by each bed long precious minutes, remaking the shattered confidence, turning the little frightened mind back to security. No matter what else he had to do or how long the day’s work stretched before him, Dr. Carl Jeiteles never hurried these morning visits. ‘We must’, he would say to Eugénie, ‘put the heart as well as the little body right for the day.’ He and Eugénie bent together over one baby in silence. She was a year old, and only the size of a tiny doll. She was dying of pneumonia and starvation, only she wouldn’t die. She lifted blue eyes heavy with fever up to theirs, questioningly, as if they could tell her why she was so painfully there, and closed them again as if she saw they could not answer her. The little body, shaken by its cruel breathing, refused to let the spirit go. ‘See how she means to live,’ Dr. Jeiteles said with a sigh, ‘this poor little one! It would be better not—all this fight—for at the end it will be the same as if she had not fought!’ He lifted the little body in his hands, raising it higher to ease the difficult breathing. ‘We have nothing to give her; even the cocoa has stopped,’ said Eugénie harshly. ‘I know—I know, Sister,’ Carl Jeiteles said apologetically; ‘it seems that if we had the money there is none to be got.’ Eugénie bowed her head. She had given more than half her fortune to the hospital; if she gave the whole of it, she could not live. She had sometimes thought of giving it all, in spite of the fact that she was a good Catholic and knew that suicide was a sin. However, she had not been allowed to do so because Carl Jeiteles refused to accept any more money from her. He lifted his eyes from the baby, and met hers. His quick searching spirit pierced her outward serenity and felt the trouble at her heart. ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘at 10.30 I will have Joachim for his hip operation, at eleven little Mitzi for the ear, and at half-past twelve I will ask you to come to me for a moment while I am in the dispensary. This little one dies to-day, I think, in spite of her great will. Do not trouble her with any more of our bad food. A little morphia if she struggles—and then it is over!’ ‘Yes, Doctor,’ said Eugénie. She wished he would stay; while he was there a curious confidence persisted in making itself felt; but he had other wards to visit, and operations to perform. He was escorted to the door by his swarm of babies, and at the door he stopped and waved his hand to the cot babies; and all the cot babies waved back, except the dying baby and one tall little girl who stood at the foot of her cot and talked all day long to herself, and never saw anybody because her mind had gone.

Eugénie settled back once more into her struggle for the children’s happiness; she brought out their toys from a big cupboard. Then she got Joachim and Mitzi ready for the theatre. Joachim took a stuffed rabbit with him on the stretcher, and Mitzi a headless doll. After the two children had been taken to the theatre, she went back to the dying baby and sat by her for an hour.

Eugénie thought how much better it would be to go through the hospital with a morphia injection and give each child enough for an eternal sleep. Then she would send them all in hundreds of little coffins to the Allies with the cattle they were proposing to exact under the Peace Treaty. She wanted the cry of the children out of her ears; the pain out of her heart; the sight out of her eyes.

She put all the comfort she had into the children who came back from the operating room, and at last she found she had none left. She waited impatiently for the baby to begin its struggle so that she could give her the morphia and know it was all over. But the baby would not make ready for death; her incomprehensibly strong heart beat steadily on. Eugénie had often wanted to see a child escape before, but she had wanted it with exquisite gentleness, with her prayers following the little spirit up into the Virgin’s arms. But to-day it was with a deep impatience that she waited for the child to die and without any faith that its spirit would go from a mother on earth to the Mother of all mothers in Heaven. She looked at the clock, sent one of the nurses for the dinners, and went out of doors into the icy air without her cloak. She crossed the courtyard to one of the smaller sheds which was Carl Jeiteles’ dispensary, but she no longer wished to see him; she was angry even with Carl Jeiteles. What was the use of pretending happiness when there was no happiness? Of loving, when there was no place for love?

‘I am glad you have come,’ said Carl Jeiteles gently; ‘we have had very good news, Princess. I wanted to tell you myself. Professor Wenckebach has come back from England and has brought us stores of disinfectants and drugs. I was afraid to tell you last week—we were very near the end of the chloroform.’ Eugénie said nothing. ‘Princess, you are glad?’ Dr. Jeiteles asked pleadingly, looking round from his dispensary table. ‘Certainly I am glad of chloroform,’ said Eugénie icily. ‘As there is now nothing the children can eat, it would be kindest to put them all under chloroform and keep them there. This morning I gave them black bread, and hot water with acorns in it, and half of them refused to touch it. For dinner they are to have carrots, and at night they will again be offered black bread and acorn juice. Yes, I am glad the English have sent us chloroform. I hope they have been sufficiently thanked for it. Is that all you have to say to me?’ ‘No,’ said Dr. Jeiteles, ‘it is not all. Sister, you believe in God, I think?’ ‘I did,’ said Eugénie harshly; ‘one lives and learns, Herr Doktor. I should not myself care to be responsible for having made this world.’ ‘I do not believe in God,’ said Dr. Jeiteles still more gently. ‘You are a great lady and no doubt you have read much and filled your mind with noble ideas. I do not myself find that these things are a help to one. But if there is no God, there is certainly a greater responsibility laid on man. You feel that to serve these children is a waste; but one thing I see, whether it has an end or not, that out of these struggles some live, and that all those who fail to live, if they are served with tenderness and understanding, suffer less. They actually suffer less, Princess; this is a fact. My way of looking at it then is this. If you believe in God, help God. If you do not believe in God—help man. That is what I had on my mind to say to you.’ ‘I am ashamed,’ said Eugénie in a low voice, ‘I will go back into my ward, and I will try not to fail our children again.’ ‘You have not failed them yet, Princess,’ said Jeiteles, smiling at her, ‘and I had not for a moment supposed that you would. I only thought perhaps you were a little disheartened. An affair like the coming to an end of the cocoa this morning is disheartening. I find it so myself. Remember, you do more than I; you keep the light burning in sixty little hearts all day long. There is one thing that would be worse than anything we have yet seen, and that is if you let the light in those little hearts go out.’ Eugénie held out her hand to him. ‘I will not let the light go out,’ she said steadily. The shabby Jewish doctor bent over her hand and kissed it reverently.

At five o’clock the children had their supper, and to make up for their having had no cocoa, Eugénie stood in the middle of the ward and sang to them. She had a beautiful voice. She stood by the cot of the dying baby where she could look down at it every now and then; her hand rested lightly on its tiny hands. She sang the Lieder that the children knew and loved. The doors were all thrown open so that the other wards could hear as well. First she sang:

‘Schlaf, Herzens Söhnchen,

Mein Liebling bist Du!’

And then she sang:

‘Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,

Dass ich so traurig bin.’

As the last notes rang out through the heavy fetid air, Eugénie glanced across the ward and saw a little group of people who had entered silently: Dr. Jeiteles and two strange women. Eugénie knew in a flash (even if she had not seen the expression of Carl Jeiteles’ face) that this was the first Relief Mission; and she knew what its coming meant. Only the little baby lying under the touch of her hands must die—all the rest of them—that silent, suffering, helpless little band—were going to live; and some of them were going to get well.