Читать книгу Wounded Souls - Philip Gibbs - Страница 11

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We fumbled our way to a street on the edge of the canal, according to Brand’s uncanny sense of direction and his remembrance of what the Irish girl had told him. There we found the convent, a square box-like building behind big gates. We pulled a bell which jangled loudly, and presently the gate opened an inch, letting through the light of a lantern which revealed the black-and-white coif of a nun.

“Qui va là?”

Brand told her that we had come to see Miss O’Connor, and the gate was opened wider and we went into the courtyard, where a young nun stood smiling. She spoke in English.

“We were always frightened when the bell rang during the German occupation. One never knew what might happen. And we were afraid for Miss O’Connor’s sake.”

“Why?” asked Brand.

The little nun laughed.

“She did dangerous work. They suspected her. She came here after her arrest. Before then she had rooms of her own. Oh, messieurs, her courage, her devotion! Truly she was heroic!”

She led us into a long corridor with doors on each side, and out of one door came a little group of nuns with Eileen O’Connor.

The Irish girl came towards us with outstretched hands which she gave first to Brand. She seemed excited at our coming and explained that the Reverend Mother and all the nuns wanted to see us, to thank England by means of us, to hear something about the war and the chance of victory from the first English officers they had seen.

Brand was presented to the Reverend Mother, a massive old lady with a slight moustache on the upper lip and dark luminous eyes, reminding me of the portrait of Savonarola at Florence. The other nuns crowded round us, eager to ask questions, still more eager to talk. Some of them were quite young and pretty, though all rather white and fragile, and they had a vivacious gaiety, so that the building resounded with laughter. It was Eileen O’Connor who made them laugh by her reminiscences of girlhood when she and Brand were “enfants terribles,” when she used to pull Brand’s hair and hide the pipe he smoked too soon. She asked him to take off his field-cap so that she might see whether the same old unruly tuft still stuck up at the back of his head, and she and all the nuns clapped hands when she found it was so, in spite of war-worry and steel hats. All this had to be translated into French for the benefit of those who could not understand such rapid English.

“I believe you would like to give it a tug now,” said Brand, bending his head down, and Eileen O’Connor agreed.

“And indeed I would, but for scandalising a whole community of nuns, to say nothing of Reverend Mother.”

The Reverend Mother laughed in a curiously deep voice, and a crowd of little wrinkles puckered at her eyes. She told Miss O’Connor that even her Irish audacity would not go as far as that, which was a challenge accepted on the instant.

“One little tug, for old times’ sake,” said the girl, and Brand yelped with pretended pain at the vigour of her pull, while all the nuns screamed with delight.

Then a clock struck and the Reverend Mother touched Eileen (as afterwards I called her) on the arm and said she would leave her with her friends. One by one the nuns bowed to us, all smiling under their white bandeaux, and then went down the corridor through an open door which led into a chapel, as we could see by twinkling candlelight. Presently the music of an organ and of women’s voices came through the closed doors.

Eileen O’Connor took us into a little parlour where there were just four rush-chairs and a table, and on the clean whitewashed walls a crucifix.

Brand took a chair by the table, rather awkwardly, I thought.

“How gay they are!” he said. “They do not seem to have been touched by the horrors of war.”

“It is the gaiety of faith,” said Eileen. “How else could they have survived the work they have done, the things they have seen? This convent was a shambles for more than three years. These rooms were filled with wounded, German wounded, and often English wounded, who were prisoners. They were the worst cases for amputation, and butcher’s work, and the nuns did all the nursing. They know all there is to know of suffering and death.”

“Yet they have not forgotten how to laugh!” said Brand. “That is wonderful. It is a mystery to me.”

“You must have seen bad things,” said Eileen. “Have you lost the gift of laughter?”

“Almost,” said Brand, “and once for a long time.”

Eileen put her hands to her breast.

“Oh, learn it again,” she said. “If we cannot laugh we cannot work. Why, I owe my life to a sense of humour.”

She spoke the last words with more than a trivial meaning. They seemed to tell of some singular episode, and Brand asked her to explain.

She did not explain then. She only said some vague things about laughing herself out of prison and stopping a German bullet with a smile.

“Why did the devils put you in prison?” asked Brand.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“In Lille it was bad form if one had not been arrested once at least. I was three weeks in a cell half the size of this, and twenty women were with me there. There was very little elbow-room!”

She proved her sense of humour then by that deep-throated laugh of hers, but I noticed that just for a second behind the smile in her eyes there crept a shadow as at the remembrance of some horror, and that she shivered a little, as though some coldness had touched her.

“It must have been like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” said Brand, measuring the space with his eyes. “Twenty women herded in a room like that!”

“With me for twenty-one,” said Eileen. “We had no means of washing.”

She used an awful phrase.

“We were a living stench.”

“Good God!” said Brand.

Eileen O’Connor waved back the remembrance. “Tell me of England and of Ireland. How’s the little green isle? Has it done well in the war?”

“The Irish troops fought like heroes,” said Brand. “But there were not enough of them. Recruiting was slow, and there was—some trouble.”

He did not speak about the Irish Rebellion.

“I heard about it vaguely, from prisoners,” said the girl. “It was England’s fault, I expect. Dear old blundering, muddle-headed England, who is a tyrant through fear, and twists Irish loyalty into treason by ropes of red-tape in which the Irish mind gets strangled and awry. Well, there’s another subject to avoid. I want to hear only good things to-night. Tell me of London, of Kensington Gardens, of the way from the Strand to Temple Bar, of the lights that gleam along the Embankment when lovers go hand-in-hand and see stars in the old black river. Are they all there?”

“They are all changed,” said Brand. “It is a place of gloom. There are no lights along the Embankment. They have dowsed their glims for fear of air-raids. There are few lovers hand-in-hand. Some of the boys lie dead round Ypres, or somewhere on the Somme, or weep out of blind eyes, or gibber in shell-shock homes, or try to hop on one leg—while waiting for artificial limbs,—or trudge on, to-night, towards Maubeuge, where German machine-guns wait for them behind the ditches. Along the Strand goes the Painted Flapper, luring men to hell. In Kensington Gardens there are training camps for more boys ear-marked for the shambles, and here and there among the trees young mothers who are widows before they knew their wifehood. There is vice, the gaiety of madness, the unspeakable callousness of people who get rich on war, or earn fat wages, and in small stricken homes a world of secret grief. That is London in time of war. I hate it.”

Brand spoke with bitterness and a melancholy that startled the girl who sat with folded hands below the crucifix on the whitewashed wall behind her.

“Dear God! Is it like that?”

She stared at the wall opposite as though it were a window through which she saw London.

“Yes, of course it is like that. Here in Lille we thought we were suffering more than anybody in the world. That was our egotism. We did not realise—not in our souls—that everywhere in the world of war there was equal suffering, the same cruelty, perhaps the same temptation to despair.”

Brand repented, I think, of having led the conversation into such abysmal gloom. He switched off to more cheerful things and gave some elaborate sketches of soldiers he knew, to which Eileen played up with anecdotes of rare comedy about the nuns—the fat nun who under the rigour of war rations became as slim as a willow and was vain of her new grace; the little French nun who had no fear of German officers and dared their fury by prophecies of defeat—but was terrified of a mouse in the refectory; the Reverend Mother, who borrowed a safety-razor from an English Tommy—he had hidden it in his shirt—to shave her upper lip, lest the Germans should think her a French poilu in disguise.

More interesting to me than anything that was said were the things unspoken by Eileen and Brand. In spite of the girl’s easy way of laughter, her quick wit, her avoidance, if possible, of any reference to her own suffering, I seemed to see in her eyes and in her face the strain of a long ordeal, some frightful adventure of life in which she had taken great hazards—the people had told me she had risked her life, often—and a woman’s courage which had been tested by that experience and had not failed, though perhaps at breaking-point in the worst hours. I supposed her age was twenty-six or so (I guessed it right this side of a year), but there was already a streak of grey in her dark hair, and her eyes, so smiling as a rule, looked as if they had often wept. I think the presence of Brand was a great pleasure to her—bringing to Lille a link with her childhood—and I saw that she was studying the personality of this newly-found friend of hers, and the strong character of his face, not unscathed by the touch of war, with curious, penetrating interest. I felt in the way, and left them together with a fair excuse—I had always work to do—and I was pleased that I did so, they were so obviously glad to have a more intimate talk about old friends and old times.