Читать книгу The Road South - Roderick Stuart Kennedy - Страница 5

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A chilling mist swirled in from the North Sea and joined with the deepening twilight to soak the countryside in sombre grayness. The yellow road, the hedges, and wind-stunted trees were clear and sharp to the men in the column trudging past, but beyond a narrow radius nothing was visible except cold, gray light. It was as if the sun had never shone, as if the mist itself were the source of light.

Riding at the rear of the column, Major Baxter hitched the collar of his Burberry closer to his ears, and turned to his silent companion. "You'd make a fortune in this climate, Doc!"

Doctor—and Captain—Joe Todd, looked around him distastefully and listened to the murmur of surf below the cliffs on their left. He thought of answering that he would rather starve in Canada. He thought of saying that the English were not affected by their climate. He thought for quite a long time about adaptability to environment and the effect of climate on national character. In the end he merely grunted, and tugged the corner of his greatcoat from between his knee and the saddle flap.

Captain Todd rode his horse as awkwardly as he bore his military rank. The two things went together, and he endured both with the same stoical half-amusement. His natural scepticism had been intensified during his year in the army. This rather nondescript little country doctor from the Eastern Townships of Quebec did not find himself very convincing as a Captain riding his charger to war.

For a time they rode silently with the g.s. wagons rumbling behind them, until a whitewashed cottage appeared through the mist, and young Wentworth, of Number 8 Platoon hailed them.

"Hey, Doc.! Wait a moment! Here's a case for you." He was standing just outside the wooden gate, beside a girl in brown tweeds. She looked broad beside his slim, uniformed figure, and leaned with masculine impassiveness on a heavy walking stick.

"Miss Brador, this is Captain Todd, our Medical Officer.

"Miss Brador stopped me just now, Doc., to ask if we had an M.O., so I said I'd wait and point you out when you came along. I'd better hustle and catch up my platoon. Miss Brador says we're right in Caster End now. That's where we billet."

Captain Todd started to dismount, then hesitated. "Urgent?" he asked.

"Yes, I'm afraid so. An old woman,—here." She nodded toward the cottage

He dismounted clumsily. "Morton!" he called to the driver of the last wagon, which was just rumbling past. "Wait. Back-up here. I want my case."

While waiting, he questioned her about the patient. The reins were hanging over his arm, but he had forgotten his uniform. He was the alert, confident physician who, in spite of scepticism and impatience with pretense, was unexplainably popular among the farmers of his district.

"It's old Mary," the girl explained. "She's eighty if she's a day. Bronchitis,—pneumonia, too, I expect. I'm afraid you can't do much, but I had to stop you. Our local medico, Dr. Beringer, is up the coast. He won't be back for some hours. My mother is with her now."

"Quite right to stop me, Miss Brador. We doctors don't do any work in the army anyway,—at least, I haven't,—yet. Dr. Beringer will forgive me no doubt. I'll call on him before we pull out to-morrow.

"Put the case inside, will you, Morton? And wait a few minutes." He was turning to go in when the tugging reins reminded him that he still had a horse. He handed them up to the other man on the driver's seat. "Hang on to this beast, Mackell. He can't tread on your foot again, if you stay up there!"

The young man glanced at his bandage-swathed foot and grinned. "I'll take care of that, sir! Once is enough!"

"Ready," he told Miss Brador, and walked up the brick path beside her. The door opened into a flagged kitchen, bare, clean, chilly. Morton placed the medicine case on a whitely-scrubbed deal table and went out.

Through a door into an inner room, Todd could see the foot of a bed, and, sitting in a Windsor chair beside it, a very erect, tweed-clad lady who repeated mechanically at intervals, "There, there, Mary! Quite all right, quite all right!"

She rose briskly as they came in. "Is that the doctor, Dorothy? Very good of you, doctor,—very good indeed." As she shook his hand, she leaned slightly forward as if to whisper something confidentially, but the words, when they came, were as loud as her greeting. "No hope doctor," she said. "None at all." Then, picking up a ground ash and a little brown basket, she went over to the door. "Very kind of you, doctor. So sorry I must go,—very busy,—ask Dorothy if you want anything."

She nodded again, flashed a smile which disappeared as suddenly as it came, leaving no trace in the darting eyes or tightly pressed lips, and clicked across the kitchen with back and head decisively erect.

Captain Todd watched her for a moment, nonplussed. He had never seen a back which said more explicitly, "Well, that's that!"

"Mother doesn't like deaths."

He understood the explanation and glanced up from his black case to say so. He was looking directly into her rather pale blue eyes for the first time, and he found so much comprehension there that he did not feel it necessary to speak at all. With a slight movement of his lips, which might have been the beginning of a smile, he drew up a chair beside old Mary's bed.

Only a short examination was needed to confirm Mrs. Brador's tactless announcement. The old woman's bloodless lips whispered faint, unintelligible words, and occasionally her body twitched as if she was trying to raise herself, but there was no understanding in the staring eyes. The announcement of her approaching death had been unheeded, the touch of death's finger would be unfelt.

"I could give an injection," he said doubtfully. "It would keep her a little longer. Is there anyone who should be here?"

It was the sense of the old woman's loneliness which made him ask. He was a chance stranger, the Bradors doing a charitable duty. There was not even a photograph in the room to link old Mary's life to that of any other human being. Only a bright lithograph of Queen Victoria stared moodily down from the distant past. The cheap, painted furniture might have come from the warehouse of an auctioneer.

"No, there's no one. She doesn't come from this part of the country, and her husband and son were drowned in a trawler out of Yarmouth. She's always lived alone since. Mr. Russell might have put in an appearance,—the Vicar, you know, but—"

Immediately he knew that she did not admire the Vicar, and his understanding must have communicated itself, for she smiled.

"Yes, he's—well, something like Mother in that way! But I don't really blame him this time. Mary doesn't like him and never hesitates to show it.

"So there is no one you need consider except Mary herself, Captain—? I'm afraid that nice young lieutenant's introduction went no farther than 'Doc'."

"It's a pretty complete diagnosis, Miss Brador, but Todd is the name, Joe Todd."

He looked thoughtfully at the dying woman. "We will just make her as comfortable as possible," he said at last.

He raised the shrunken figure slightly while she smoothed the sheets. He watched her while she found a clean counterpane in the bureau, replaced the creased one, and with brush and comb softly tidied the wisps of gray hair which straggled down the old face. As she finished, she laid her fingers caressingly against the cheek. "Poor Mary," she murmured.

His habitual, ironical self-analysis failed to elucidate his feelings. The girl was unusual. Solid common sense obviously, and humour,—but a glimpse of something beyond. He had sat beside many death beds, but none had seemed so serenely natural as this.

He shrugged his shoulders and took out his pen. "There are one or two things I must attend to, Miss Brador, if you'll excuse me." He sat down at the kitchen table and tore a couple of pages from his field service pocket book. "I'm afraid our Quartermaster will think one of his baggage wagons is lost," he explained, and took the notes to the door.

She joined him, holding out her hand to say good-bye. "It's really been awfully kind of you to take all this trouble for perfect strangers, but I had to ask you—."

He looked down at the hand, then into her eyes,—slowly, and with an ironical twist at the corner of his mouth which was effective in preventing her from finishing the sentence. "You don't really think I'm going off, do you? And leave you alone? Huh!"

The twilight had deepened in the last half hour. It was easier to see the two glowing cigarettes above the wagon, than the men smoking them. "Come here a minute, Morton," he called.

Morton jumped down and came across to the little gate.

"Sorry I had to keep you so long. You can hump along now. Give this note to the Quartermaster. It'll save your skin! And give this to Mackell for Captain Blaikie. I want him to put Mackell in a billet where his foot can be looked after properly.

"And Morton, tell Nott to find my billet and get my things there. I may be quite a time. I wonder—" He turned to Miss Brador. "Is there some place in the village where I could be sure of meeting my batman?"

"It's not more than half a mile to the Bull Inn. I should think that would be the best place."

"No doubt Nott will agree! D'you hear, Morton? Tell Nott to wait for me at the Bull Inn."

"O.K., sir."

While Captain Todd and Morton were talking, Brian Mackell, perched on the driver's seat and aloof from responsibilities saw a girl appear out of the gathering darkness. She was walking briskly from the direction of the village, and stopped abruptly when she reached the wagon. She looked at the two dim figures at the gate, then up at Mackell. She seemed undecided, standing silent in the road, while Mackell—immobilized by his broken foot, and too close to the proprieties of his village home to volunteer assistance—sat silent and waited.

Then she came as close to the wagon as possible, and looked up. "Could you tell me if—" She glanced at the two men at the garden gate, "if anything has happened to old Mary? Is anyone with her?" She was close enough for him to realize the soft brilliance of her dark-lashed gray eyes, and their eloquence—in spite of her air of intense reserve.

"I mean—," she went on, "—you men—are you waiting because Mary is ill, or—?"

Brian hastily threw away his cigarette,—far over the hedge. At last he understood that a girl coming to visit old Mary might well be taken aback at finding strange soldiers, wagons, and horses gathered at the gate. For the other girl was standing almost concealed in the doorway.

"I'm very sorry," he apologized, "I didn't see what you meant at first. Captain Todd, our Medical Officer's in there, over by the gate. That girl in the doorway who stopped him. Miss—Miss—Brady, I think they said."

"Oh! Miss Brador! I understand." Her low-pitched voice, freed of its restraint, was full of relief, and when she turned to cross the road, saying quietly, "Thank you very much, I'll speak to her," the sweetness of the tone conveyed such a depth of gratitude that even Brian guessed that it was due to the voice rather than the speaker.

She walked quickly up the pathway. "I heard that old Mary was sick, Miss Brador. Polly Dyer told me at the post office, but she didn't say you were here. I thought perhaps I could . . . I don't think Polly and some of the other women like her very much, and I know the Vicar—"

"And I know the Vicar!" Miss Brador interrupted. "But it was good of you to think of her, Miss Page. I came down this afternoon. And then when I found Dr. Beringer was away, I held up this Canadian battalion and demanded theirs. He's done everything possible, but—" She thought for a moment. "Would you mind doing this, Miss Page? Explain to Mrs. Beringer what I've done, and that Mary is dying,—she's quite unconscious now. I've no doubt Doctor Beringer knows how ill she was, because he saw her yesterday. But some arrangements must be made,—you understand? I can hardly stay here all night just as a watcher. Make it all clear to Mrs. Beringer, will you, so that the doctor will see about getting someone as soon as he comes back?"

Joan Page nodded slowly. She hesitated before answering. "And if the Vicar doesn't come, Miss Brador, do you think it would be any help if Father—? Should I ask him?"

Miss Brador seemed to understand her hesitation, and stopped her with a friendly touch on the shoulder, firmly denying any need for Mr. Page, or the Vicar. "It wouldn't be the least good, I'm afraid. I would certainly call on your father if it would, but Mary is far beyond anything like that."

"All right, Miss Brador. I'll see Mrs. Beringer immediately. Good evening,—and thank you." She inclined her head slightly, and walked quickly back to the road.

The horses were just leaning to their collars as she turned along beside them, and for the gallant Morton, for once in sole command of a detachment, there was only one thing to be done. "Give you a lift, Miss?" he called, hospitably. "Lots o' room, with a bit of a squee—Ouch!"

Brian's elbow jabbed heavily into his side. "What th' hell you doing?" Morton gasped, turning savagely and trying to recover his wind.

But Brian had applied the whip, and the horses were trotting briskly ahead before the outraged driver had recovered enough breath to insist on an explanation. Brian gave it more warmly than was justified, considering his unprovoked aggression. "Haven't you got enough sense to see that's not the kind of a girl to offer your silly lift to? A couple of strange Tommies on a muddy buckboard!—in the middle of the night! Use your head!"

"Aw, ye'r bughouse!" Morton growled sulkily, but impressed by such aggressiveness in his easy going friend. "I've a mind to knock yer block off for that punch."

There was more habit than intention to the threat, but Brian, his head turned over his shoulder, was not much interested. "Try it!" he said, coolly, and watched the slim, straight figure receding into the darkness behind them.