Читать книгу A Toast to Tomorrow - Cyril Henry Coles - Страница 4

Table of Contents

There was a German Naval Hospital at the top of the Avenue de la Reine in Ostende in the latter part of the Great War, and in January 1918 a man was brought in, completely unconscious, and clad only in his underwear. He had been picked up on the beach, having evidently swum or floated ashore, and in addition to suffering from exhaustion and exposure, he was wounded in the head. When they had cleaned, dried and patched him up they stood round his bed and looked at him.

“The injury at the back of the skull,” said the senior house-surgeon, “may give us trouble, it is impossible to say how much damage has been done to the brain. The facial injuries are trivial.”

“He’ll have a couple of lovely duelling scars when they heal up,” said the medical student. “Simply too Heidelberg for words.”

“One is prompted to wonder how he received them,” said the ward sister in her prim voice. “The contused wound in the occipital region is more easily explicable.”

“He can hardly have been fighting a duel in the sea,” said the surgeon, who had a literal mind.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the student. “Two fellows desiring to shun publicity while they settle their differences, what could be better? Hop on a raft and shove off, loser’s body is automatically and hygienically disposed of by the conger of the deep, winner paddles happily ashore, what?”

“He would appear to have thrown both the seconds to the conger-eels too, my good Muller,” said the surgeon.

“Of course, and while he was dealing with one of them, the other clouted him with the paddle, hence the contused wound in the occipital region.”

“One is perhaps permitted to doubt whether the explanation is meant to be taken seriously,” said the ward sister.

“No doubt at all, it isn’t,” said Muller, “but it’s a dashed good one.”

Their patient stirred suddenly, mumbled something, and then said in a clear, commanding voice, “Look at that, you insubordinate hound!” He shifted uneasily, and the sister slipped her arm behind his shoulder lest he should slide down and disarrange the dressings on his head.

“If he is going to be restless,” said the surgeon, “he will have to be watched. He may have a morphia injection.”

“Yes, sir,” said the ward sister.

“He is certainly an officer,” said Muller. “All that insubordinate hound business is quite definitely Potsdam.”

“I think he may have received his injuries from a bursting shell,” said the surgeon, “when there was all that firing from the coastal batteries early this morning—a mysterious light offshore, I understand. As to how he came to be swimming about out there, I have no conjecture to offer, unless he was washed off a submarine.”

“Or escaped from Donington Hall and just swam across,” suggested Muller.

“I think your remarks are regrettably frivolous,” said the house-surgeon, who always disciplined with difficulty. “No doubt he will tell us all about himself in the morning.”

But the surgeon was wrong, for his patient was quite unable to give any account of himself in the morning. While he was being dragged unwillingly back from the fringes of pneumonia, he talked incessantly in the German of the educated classes, but there was never enough continuity in his remarks to give them any clue as to what or who he was. In fact, apart from telling them in a wonderful variety of well-chosen phrases what he thought of some gunners and their shooting, he did not refer to his past at all. So things went on until the day came when the stranger opened his eyes and looked about him intelligently.

The ward sister was informed of it and came to bend over him and give him the usual encouragement. “There now,” she said cheerfully, “you are a lot better this morning, aren’t you?”

Her patient made an effort to speak, and she expected the usual “Where am I?” but to her surprise he said, “Who am I?” instead. She thought she must have misunderstood him, and answered, “You are in the Ostende Naval Hospital. You’ll have some nice soup now and go to sleep again, you’ll be——”

“I see it’s a hospital,” he whispered feebly. “What I said was, ‘Who am I?’ ”

“Never mind that now,” she said, “you’ll remember presently when you are stronger.”

The nurse who brought his soup smiled at him and said, “I’ll help you to drink it, shall I?” but instead of thanking her he stared at her and asked, “Who am I?”

“You poor dear,” she said. “Don’t worry about it now. Drink this and go to sleep. I expect you’ll remember when you wake up again.”

He obeyed her and dropped at once into the sudden easy sleep of weakness, but neither when he awoke again, nor the next day, nor for very many days to come did he remember who he was. He soon left off asking his pathetic question, but there remained in his eyes the puzzled, hurt expression of a child to whom some inexplicable unkindness has been done, though he was plainly a man in the late twenties. Once the senior house-surgeon, Lehmann, passing through the ward very late at night, heard small uneasy sounds from the direction of the stranger’s bed, and discovered him awake and struggling with a frightful attack of panic.

“My dear fellow,” said Lehmann kindly, “what is the matter?”

“I don’t know—I’m frightened. I don’t know who I am. Oh, God! Tell me who I am!”

“Hush, gently,” said the surgeon, taking a firm hold of the hot hands which clung to him for comfort. “Don’t wake the others. Try to calm yourself; you will make yourself ill again. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

“But there is! You see, I don’t know what I’ve done, do I? I may be some criminal—and some day somebody may walk up to me and say, ‘Ha! Got you at last!’ and they’ll put me in prison for years and perhaps hang me, and I’ll never know what it’s all about. Oh, God——”

“Listen to me,” said Lehmann in a tone of authority. “You are frightening yourself with shadows. Do you think that we, whose lives are spent in seeing mankind in its worst moments, do not know good from bad? I don’t know who you are, but I will stake every penny I have that you are perfectly all right. Even when you were most delirious you never said anything brutal or base, and in your utmost weakness you were courteous and unwilling to give trouble. You a criminal? Nonsense! Turn over and go to sleep again, you are torturing yourself for nothing, believe me.”

“But,” objected his patient, still only half-convinced, “some criminals are delightful people, I believe. Even a murderer might be. It doesn’t mean you’re all evil if you have killed somebody—if you have killed somebody you—I can’t remember——”

“Stop that at once,” said Lehmann. “As for killing somebody, since there is a war on and you are of military age, I should think it’s quite probable you have. You must pull yourself together. I am going to get you something to drink, and then you will lie down and go to sleep again, and we will have no more of this. In the meantime, think this over. You may or may not have killed somebody, has it occurred to you that it’s more likely that you have married somebody?”

In the abysmal silence which followed this appalling suggestion, Lehmann disengaged himself and went away. When he returned with a glass in his hand he found his patient lying quietly back on his pillows murmuring to himself.

“Margareta. Marie. Julie. Helene. Susanne. Elsa—Elsa. No, I don’t think so. Klara. Anna.” He looked up with a sparkle of fun in his eyes. “Do I look married?”

“Not particularly,” said Lehmann, “and you don’t wear a wedding-ring. But men don’t always wear one, and besides you might have lost it. Drink this.”

“Fancy me with a wife,” said the stranger, between sips. “This stuff is rather nice. I wonder what she’s like.”

“I should think you’d be a good picker,” said the surgeon judicially, “I have noticed you betraying a certain discrimination in the matter of nurses.”

“You are extraordinarily good to me. I wish I had a name, though.”

“You can have mine if you like,” said Lehmann diffidently, “till you find your own. I am quite sure it will be safe with you.”

“If you’re so damned decent to me,” said his patient chokily, “I shall blub on your shoulder in a minute. I say, d-do you think I’ve got a family?”

“I should say at least eight,” said the surgeon, patting his shoulder.

“All with noses that want blowing?”

“Oh, go to sleep—Lehmann,” said Lehmann senior, and went away laughing to himself.

The next day a committee of nurses round the stranger’s bed christened him, after discussion, Klaus, because he came from the sea and Nikolaus is the patron saint of sailors, and Klaus Lehmann, feeling already that he had the beginning of an identity again, started life afresh.

When he was well enough to be discharged from hospital they sent him to Hamburg on the assumption that if, as seemed likely, he had been in the Imperial Navy, he was more likely to come across someone who knew him in a Naval base than anywhere else in Germany. He said good-bye to the only people whom he knew in all the world, and set out for Hamburg in a state of trepidation which he knew he had felt before somewhere, and when he was thinking of something else the memory returned to him. He had felt like that when he was a small boy and was sent, all by himself, to the dentist.

This was so wonderful that his spirits rose with a leap. Then his memory was not destroyed, only stunned, and one day some door would re-open in his brain and he would be a person again, with a home and friends and relations of his own. He still shied at the thought of a wife, probably because he was still too weak to bear the thought of responsibility. He tried to remember more about the dentist, but that was a failure. Never mind, it was a beginning. “When I was a little boy,” he said to an imaginary hearer—the carriage being empty—“I used to be sent to the dentist all by myself. Spartan training, what?” Splendid.

He was so uplifted that he stepped out of the train at Hamburg with his chin well up and his chest thrown out, and began to run up the steps which led to the road level, when suddenly to his rage and disgust his knees bent beneath him and he found himself sitting abruptly and watching his little suit-case bumping away down the stairs again, right to the bottom, miles away.... He closed his eyes and clutched the banisters. Six people rushed instantly to his assistance, three of them tried to pick him up while the other three patted him and told him to sit still and take it easy. Four more people brought him his suit-case, and a porter came with a glass of water.

“Thank you a thousand times,” said poor Klaus, feeling horribly conspicuous. “I am sorry—so stupid of me, my legs gave way.”

“It is no wonder, my poor man. You have been wounded.”

“But only in the head, gracious lady.”

“The head controls the legs, or should do so. Lean on my arm.”

“Let me help you on this other side.”

“Take it easy, these stairs are steep.”

“I have your suit-case, it is safe with me.”

“My brother has attacks, just like this.”

“My sister’s husband also, but he turns quite blue.”

“There we are at the top. Would you like to rest a moment?”

“Where do you wish to go?”

“I think you should have some coffee. It is a stimulant.”

“I think he should go and lie down quite flat. My brother always does.”

“My sister’s husband, on the other hand——”

“I think I will take a cab,” said Klaus, who felt he would really like to be alone, “the air will restore me.”

“You may be right, if the movement does not upset you.”

“Have you far to go?”

“Are you going to friends?”

“It is plain to me, gracious lady,” said Klaus, “that in the city of Hamburg everyone is a friend.”

They chose him the cab with the steadiest-looking horse on the rank, commended him to the personal surveillance of the driver, and Klaus at last drove away.

He was given employment in the Naval depot and spent wearisome days filling up forms indenting for vests, singlets, jumpers, trousers and socks, Naval ratings, for the use of, in the intervals between devastating headaches, but he never met anyone who had known him. He lived in the Naval barracks at Hamburg where men came and went continually, but still no one said, “I remember that fellow. He was with me in the so-and-so.”

As the summer of 1918 drew to its close and the news from the Western Front grew steadily worse, the morale of the Navy deteriorated. Discipline became slack and finally bad, little groups of idle men stood about and were harangued by Communist agitators, and ratings were covertly or openly insolent to their officers. Unpleasant scenes were continually occurring, where frayed tempers, undernourishment and despair combined to make men lose control of themselves; on one of these occasions Klaus heard a Naval officer call a seaman “you insubordinate dog.” At that the little door in his mind opened for an instant, and he heard himself saying, “Look at that, you insubordinate hound,” something to do with petrol, a dump somewhere, and men in field grey. The door closed again at once and he could remember no more, but that must have been in the Army, not the Navy. No wonder the life here seemed unfamiliar and no one ever knew him, he must have been a soldier, not a sailor.

Work in the depot petered out, and in October he was discharged. In pursuance of a plan he had formed in his mind, he left Hamburg just before the rioting broke out and drifted down towards the Western Front to look for his lost identity somewhere in the German Army. He wandered through Hanover, Dortmund, Elberfeld, and Dusseldorf towards Aachen, sometimes stopping several days in one place if he liked the look of it, and sometimes going on again next morning. He stayed for nearly a fortnight at a tiny place called Haspe among the forests northeast of Elberfeld, because there was an old lady there who said that Klaus Lehmann strongly reminded her of her brother at about that age, and he had left a son who had been reported missing. She did not know the son, and Klaus might, conceivably, be he. She produced a photograph of the late Herr Rademeyer to prove her point.

“There you are,” she said. “You can see it for yourself, a child could see it. The same forehead, the same nose, one ear sticking out more than the other, the likeness is ludicrous. You are thinner, of course, my brother was well covered.”

Klaus looked with awe at the presentment of a portly gentleman with a stuffed expression, and suppressed an impulse to describe him mentally as a pie-faced old sausage-maker—after all, this might be his father—and said, “He has a kind face, kind but firm.”

“You might have known him, to say that. Of course, since he was your father you probably did. I mean, since he was probably your father, you did. Georg was a great character, quiet but unyielding. You will stay with me till Thursday week when his widow, your mother, comes to visit me. She ought to know.”

So Klaus Lehmann stayed on at the white house among the trees in Haspe, and was introduced to the local worthies, among them the old doctor, who had known Herr Rademeyer well.

“Quiet but unyielding,” he said, when Klaus quoted this. “Obstinate, she means. Dumb and stubborn as an army mule was Georg Rademeyer, and the more he dug his toes in, the dumber he became. Heaven forgive me, he is now dead.”

“You do not seem to have been one of his admirers,” said Klaus, much amused.

“There was this to be said for him, he was no chatterbox. He had nothing to say and he didn’t say it, heaven rest his soul.”

Klaus waited in Haspe for a possible parent, and was fussed over and made much of by a possible aunt. He was well fed for the first time for years, or so it seemed, since, though beef and mutton were almost unobtainable, there were still chickens scratching in the weedy stable-yard and wild-looking pigs ran about in the woods. The storeroom shelves of the white house were still full of jams, pickles and preserves, and there was wine in the cellars. Klaus would come out on the verandah after lunch, with a pleasantly replete feeling, and sit in a warm corner in the late sunshine with an overcoat and a book, listening to Hanna singing in the kitchen and the dry beech leaves whispering in the hedges till he fell asleep and dreamed of things he could not recall when he awoke. An idyllic existence, and he grew stronger and better every day, but still he could not remember who he was.

At the time appointed Frau Rademeyer came and dispelled the illusion of peace.

“Nonsense, Ludmilla! The young man is no more like Georg than he’s like the Shah of Persia, and he’s even less like my Moritz. You must be in your dotage, Ludmilla.”

“Nonsense yourself,” said the old lady stoutly. “There is a strong resemblance.”

“Besides, Moritz had scars on his left knee ever since he fell against the staircase window. Young man, show me your left knee.”

“I fear I am not the Herr Moritz Rademeyer,” said Klaus, pulling up his trouser-leg. “Quite unblemished, as you see. Well, I must go on looking, that’s all—— For pity’s sake, Fräulein Rademeyer!”

For the gallant old woman had crumbled into a heap in her chair and burst into tears.

“I wanted him for my nephew,” she wailed. “I am so much alone.”

“Let’s pretend I am,” suggested Klaus, and kissed her hand. “It will be just as nice.”

“You are a fool, Ludmilla, to let yourself be imposed upon by some good-for-nothing from no one knows where, but what can one expect from an old maid but folly?”

“Leave my house, Mathilde! I will not be insulted!”

“I shall be only too pleased——” began Frau Rademeyer, rising from her chair, but at that moment the servant Hanna burst into the room.

“Oh, Fräulein! Oh, Herr Lehmann! The postman has been and he says the war is over!”

“Control yourself, Hanna,” said her mistress. “Go and fetch old Theodor with his truck for the luggage, the Frau Rademeyer is leaving us.”

“But, gnädige Fräulein, the war——”

“Hanna!”

Hanna went, and so did Frau Rademeyer.

Klaus stayed on for a few days, but the news had made him fidgety. Somewhere out there, beyond these prison-walls of pines, great events were stirring, and he in this backwater——

“I must go,” he said. “I will come back, but I must go and see what is happening. Perhaps I shall find myself, and I’ll come back to tell you I’m no longer a good-for-nothing from nobody knows where.”

“If you quote that vixen to me,” said Fräulein Rademeyer, “I will throw the inkpot at you. Yes, go, my dear boy, but do not be away too long.”

Klaus Lehmann reached Aachen in time to see the German Army coming home. There were triumphal arches across the streets and the people tried to cheer, but the soldiers dragged their feet and walked dispiritedly along, sometimes not even in step, tired, shabby, defeated. They fell out as the evening came on, and people took them into their houses to sleep, the inns also were full of them, and Klaus went about trying to make them talk. They talked willingly enough, but not about the war, that was too recent and too hopeless, they spoke only of their homes and the quickest way to get there, and grumbled about their bad boots and the food, the weather and the mud. Still no one recognized Klaus out of all those thousands, nor did the Army customs and the Army slang awaken any response in his mind, he felt no more at home there than he did in the Navy. “I must have belonged to one or the other, surely,” he said to himself, “unless I was in the Air Force. Perhaps that was it, and I made a forced landing in the sea, and that’s how I came to swim ashore. It’s a reasonable solution. I will go and look for the Air Force—what’s left of it.”