Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 5

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An avenue of lime trees led from the high road to the red brick chateau occupied by C.C.S. No. 37. A colony of huts and of tents had gathered around this rococo country-house with its faked towers, and sleep slated roofs, and its imitation battlements. A high road lined with Lombardy poplars disappeared over the swelling bleakness of a ploughed hill.

Scarsdale lived in a tent. He was a nursing orderly at No. 37. He shared the tent with eight other men, and when it rained, a squdge of mud decorated the opening in the canvas. The tent was the last in the row, and nearest to the chateau gate where the motor ambulances swung in from the high road. They came and they went. They were so frequent that their wheels wore hollows in the roadway by the gate, and when these hollows were full of mud and water the cars would come lurching and squelching in between the two stone pillars.

Men were detailed to fill up the ruts and hollows with broken brick and cinder. It was done, and in a month the via Dolorosa needed more brick and cinder. The cars came and the cars went.

Scarsdale, when off duty, would sit on a ground-sheet in the opening of the tent and stare at these cars. Never in his life had he done so much staring. It was as though he sat and stared while something happened to his soul. His eyes were the eyes of an animal, brown, staglike, dumb. His consciousness too had a muteness, an inarticulate, shocked wonder. It was as though some super-slaughterman had taken him and dealt him a blow that had stunned him without killing. He sat and stared; he saw things, horrible things, and unlike other men he had not grown dulled to the horror of them. It was as though the soul of him suffered daily from the same shock, the wounds that remained bleeding.

He sat and stared. To the other and cruder men he was something of an oddity. He seemed bemused, asleep. And at night he slept badly. They had known him to start awake shouting and struggling. He spoke gently, slowly, and seldom. He never went to the estaminet and got merry and tickled Josephine the fat little waitress. When not on duty he always appeared to be sitting and staring and meditating upon some strange problem that was never solved.

Yet there were two Scarsdales, the nursing orderly and the man who sat and stared. In the wards he was known as “Hands” or “Old Bossy” because when at work he was the best orderly in the Clearing Station. He had gentleness, a quite extraordinary gentleness, strength, tenderness of touch. When some particularly ghastly case had to be handled, that poor piece of pulp was fortunate if Scarsdale’s hands were there on duty. In bending to lift some poor devil his face had a kind of beauty.