Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “To what?”

  “Well, now that you ask it, I’m not sure,” she said, more ready than he was to end their first interlude, “especially since I’ve brought them round to soap and water myself. Ah, but they were dear, dirty things when I got them.”

  “I remembered your voice,” he said, “the music in it.”

  “I never sang,” she said.

  “And I remember how you played.”

  She lifted her head. “Yes, I played.” For herself only so much of the time, and when she would have given her soul for it to have been otherwise. Her husband had always liked something with a tune in it, God forgive her contempt of the dead, and Alexander was about as musical as a clothespin. She returned to the table for the tea tray and carried it to the ledge of the half-door to the pantry. “I’ll take you down now, Marcus. A cottage here is a hut. No electricity, a short walk to the convenience, and a boy will bring you shaving water in the morning.” She explained the routine of the farm and the house as they walked a graveled path along which the wild roses were beginning to bud: dinner at noon, supper at seven in the common room. Once it had been called the ballroom although she could not remember a ball in it, only the meetings of the Gaelic League there in her youth. “When Philip is home …” Philip was her brother … “he and I sup alone sometimes at the cottage, but I like to supervise the children myself. I hope you’ll join us, but you don’t need to.”

  “I’d like to,” Marcus said.

  “I’m glad of that. They’re devils, but they do love to have a man to lord it over them.”

  The cottage lay before them, its roof top deep golden in the afternoon sun.

  “A thatched roof, is it?” Marcus said.

  “It’s a strange economy. The barns are also thatched. One of our tenants is a thatcher, you see, an old man, and it’s the only sensible way to take the rent of him.”

  “Aren’t they practical?” He meant the roofs.

  “Marcus, nothing in all Ireland is practical—except the British landlords.”

  He laughed for the first time with her and stopped in the path. “Elizabeth, I can go on from here alone if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all.” But she laid her hand on his arm. “Marcus, you will put things as you want them—for your own comfort.” She was thinking of the pictures with which one of the walls was hung, the sight of which, she could only suppose, he would want to avoid until his own good time.

  “I’ll find my way,” he said whether or not he understood her.

  Somewhere nearby cattle were lowing and as Marcus reached the cottage he heard a voice that cracked between youth and manhood calling out to them. He surmised it to be milking time. “All things come home at eventide…”: he had not thought of the song for years. There was a heroic middle section to it he had used to bawl at the top of his lungs when his own voice was not long changed. It occurred to him that patriotism was in the universal character of youth. In old age it was stronger among those who had never properly grown up.

  It was not quite necessary, but he stooped to enter the doorway. The room, insofar as a cottage allowed severity, was severe: books in order along the walls, and a piano, but nothing of the clutter and knicknackery he remembered about Elizabeth’s studio in Traders City. A small bedroom opened to the side. He had never seen a monk’s cell but this would serve a monk he thought, not ungrateful. He saw the row of pictures toward the eaves and instantly put off looking at them until it was time to light a candle. He went outdoors again, and tilting a chair against the side of the house he settled in it and watched the setting of the sun. There was a slight haze and a smell in the air he supposed to be the smoke of peat since it made him think of Irish whisky. Almost constant was the bleating of sheep, sometimes near, sometimes distant as an echo, and the forlorn cry of the curlew. He could hear children’s voices, the jerk and halt of a pump handle and the splash of water as it began to draw, but nowhere in the blessed twilight was there smoke or blast of guns.

  Sitting at the supper table that night with twenty children lined, boys down one side, girls up the other, he might have been both doctor and major—either of which title was to them, Elizabeth said, as good as a knighthood—but the God’s truth was he felt more like a priest, exalted and indulged, given the first cut of meat and the last drop of gravy.

  Herbie, his English companion of the cart, treated him with a respectful familiarity. The boy himself was marvelously cured of shyness among his own. “Major-doctor, ’ave ’e looked up the poem yet, eh?”

  “Not yet, but I shall, Herbie.”

  “Say the bit, will ’e?”

  “And Noah he ate an ostrich egg in an egg cup big as a pail,” Marcus thought he said it with feeling, though he had begun to suspect the line was not quite as written.

  But Herbie said it after him with style.

  Marcus murmured to Elizabeth, “He sounds like Gracie Fields.”

  “Wait till Saturday night. We have a regular music hall revue.”

  After supper when the children had taken out their plates and utensils, each washing his own, and the tables were taken apart, being no more than planks on sawhorses, in the midst of games a minor misfortune occurred: one of the boys jammed his head against an iron sconce and laid open an inch of scalp.

  Marcus, taking a look at the gash, said, “You wanted to find out if I’m really a doctor, didn’t you? Come along.”

  Elizabeth led the way up a drafty stairway to the infirmary. “I’m afraid it’s rather primitive.”

  Marcus agreed silently when he saw the stock of remedies and antiseptics. He looked again at the wound. “I think we can get it to close up without stitches.”

  “I’m not a bloody chicken,” the boy said, seeing himself compared to a trussed bird at the mention of stitches.

  Elizabeth said, “You’re a wee fighting cock.” Which praise gave him pleasure almost commensurate to his pain. He let out but one howl as Marcus cauterized the wound.

  “Brave fellow,” Marcus said, and finished things off with a large, handsome patch.

  “Can I go back now, Major-doctor?”

  “Yes, but I think you need a day or two of rest.”

  “If they makes me a sergeant-major, could I play?”

  When the boy was gone, Marcus said, “Are they all war orphans?”

  “They’ve lost at least one parent each in the blitz.”

  “And still they play at war.” He was going over her store of medicines in an abstracted sort of way, rearranging, tossing some into the waste box much to her amusement, without a by-your-leave or explanation. He stopped suddenly, glanced at her, and then into space beyond the medicine table. “I have a funny dream, Elizabeth. When I was a child I used to dream of rising off the earth—many children do—but now it’s come back and it’s changed. I’m able to see myself from up there, wherever it is. I look down and the hospital tent is removed, and I’m working, operating. One after another, faceless, nameless, numbered soldiers, and the litterers take them away as I’m through. But the stranger thing yet: they litter them back to the front, and I can see these—grotesques rise up and take guns. Even if they don’t have hands, in my dream they can manage guns without them. I suppose it’s all over in a minute, as they say dreams are, but it seems endless. And you know, I’ve never actually seen combat. We’re four or five miles back from the front generally. I’ve been closer. And I’ve seen reinforcements come up the beach to meet a counter-attack … I guess I have seen combat. But I sometimes wonder if a man knows the satisfaction of killing until he’s done it hand-to-hand. Doesn’t it seem futile to you—rushing men in to kill and be killed, then rushing them out the minute they’ve fallen—decimated, dehumanized—as though they were the most precious treasure on earth? How can you kill and save at once?”

  He waited and only looked at her sidewise, the blinking started again.

  “They are precious at that moment, I suppose,” she said, “because any one of them might have
been you or me—or whoever’s alive to carry them out.”

  “And what we’re doing is showing our gratitude?”

  “Do they complain of it?”

  “No,” he said. “Very little. That’s the truth. Only the able-bodied men complain.”

  “And do they want to die?”

  “Some who know, do—and some who don’t know. Not many. No, not many.” He gave a short, self-deprecatory laugh. “How I loathe myself after those dreams.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. For being there, I suppose. I don’t know.”

  She went back to something he had said before. “I don’t know why men must kill, but I don’t think it’s for satisfaction. Perhaps because they’re afraid.”

  “Was Hitler afraid? Is he afraid?”

  “Possibly.”

  “No.” Marcus shook his head. “I know a surgeon at home—I suppose you know him, too. Yes, of course, you do. I swear to you, Elizabeth, that man enjoys using the knife. I think it’s merest chance that he’s a surgeon and not a butcher. Mind, everyone would say he does good work. He does. He can remove a tumor as neatly as a speck from your eye.”

  “Marcus, is it possible that he’s attending all the people you are not attending?”

  “Yes,” he said, glancing at her and then away. “I guess it’s partly that.” But she could tell he did not really think so.

  “Mind, let it not be said I spoke too loudly in praise of Nathan Reiss.”

  Marcus laughed. “Most women do, you know.”

  “Not over here any more, I shouldn’t think. America is the right place for him. Do you mind my asking, Marcus, why you took him in with you?”

  “Reciprocity, I suppose. Doctor Winthrop suggested it—and it had to be someone.”

  “Alexander? I wonder why … But I know, of course. Whenever it is a matter of taste, Alexander has none. He relies entirely on someone else’s judgment. And I suppose his wife to be politically sentimental. Am I right?”

  “On the nail.”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t Martha pushed him,” Elizabeth said. How much there was of deliberate mischief in the words, she could not have measured, herself. It was a woman’s wile, but surely the cause was just. Love might exist without jealousy, but where jealousy kindled there must be love.

  Marcus took a cigaret from his pocket but did not light it. “I think I shall be able to get a few things for you from the Army Medical Depot. For God’s sake, let us save the children if we can. Perhaps they’ll be wiser. They could scarcely be less.”

  “Marcus, Marcus,” she said and went to the door, not seeing the way in which he looked after her as though he would call her back. He followed and she switched off the infirmary light. The three unoccupied white-covered beds shone bleakly in the afterglow. “What was it Goethe said: ‘Nothing is more terrible than active ignorance’?”

  “There was a time I would have said passive intelligence is worse. I’m not so sure now.” He lit his cigaret.

  Elizabeth said, “We must go down. It’s time for music to soothe my little savages.”

  “Do you play for them?”

  “I beat out rhythms on the piano for them to sing by.”

  He touched his hand to her elbow to detain her. “Will you play for me while I’m here?”

  “I will. But you must not be too appreciative. I mightn’t be up to that.” She glanced up at him and smiled, trying to make light of her words as soon as they were out.

  “You are a most beautiful woman, Elizabeth.”

  She met his eyes with frankness, honesty, and fortunate it was she thought afterwards that the landing light was no more than a candle’s worth. “I always have thought you the only beautiful man I knew.”

  She fled down the stairs and gathered in the children as they flocked about her. Then all of them swarmed in one sweep together to the piano. Marcus sat for a long while on the drafty stairway, smoking and listening. He left quietly while they sang the hymn that was to end the day.

  He lay in bed afterwards, and when a flicker of the candlelight started a whisper of motion across the wall he saw again the row of pictures. He knew of whom they were and felt himself stiffen into an almost rigid concentration as he tried to draw them before him in his mind. He started up, having almost broken through, and then fell back, empty. He turned and blew out the candle and lay in the darkness listening to the loud stillness until he heard, or imagined that he heard, the rhythmic wash of the sea. Deliberately he sank himself into it and then he slept.

  “However did we manage without you?” Elizabeth remarked at tea a few days later.

  “I’m beginning to wonder, myself,” Marcus said. He had by now examined not merely the children, but half the cottagers and farmers for miles around. Word spread quickly that an American doctor was staying at the manor and ills that would never have got beyond the chemist’s shop were put into his confidence. In addition he refereed badly, not sure of the rules, the Saturday afternoon cricket match between the village boys and the manor boys, but the sum of his errors was impartial. It fell to his charge on Sunday morning to take the Protestant children to the Established Church, while Elizabeth went with her handful to the Roman Catholic, and he promised afterwards to come to tea with the vicar whose church mouse he suspected to be richer. But the country poor, except in the case of famine, have at least their dignity. It was a good tea in a threadbare house: fresh-made bread, sweet butter and gooseberry jam. The vicar’s proudest luxury was his pipe tobacco brought him from London by Philip McMahon which he stored in a crock in the well alongside the butter. Marcus enjoyed a pipe with him, while he heard tales of the manor in the old days and of its present owner whom he was not to meet. McMahon was member of Parliament from the district and now in London.

  What Marcus came to remark most in Ireland was the sufficiency of the people to themselves: their lives were spent more in mending and making than in getting. Not that the majority wouldn’t have traded all for a one-way ticket to America; he knew that. And if he had not known it, Elizabeth reminded him.

  “It will change, Marcus. It must. But I’m glad it may not happen in my lifetime. Work is better for man than leisure—if it’s work he can see the shape of and take pride in. To be sure, too much of either will kill him, one the body, the other the spirit.”

  “And you are content here?”

  “To the deep heart’s core.”

  “You don’t miss company of your own sort?” He was remembering her at Winthrop’s ball on the night he had met her, exquisitely groomed and gowned, the center of interest among the people of Traders City to whom music was almost as important as Society. She was said to have been a fine teacher.

  “I’m glad you’ve come, Marcus. It is enough.”

  “Perhaps you’ll return for a visit some day?”

  “No, no. Not ever. You see I’m the greatest snob of them all.”

  He understood.

  “But I want you and Martha and the child to come to me.”

  “Do you?” He probed more deeply than she dared probe him.

  “I do, as God is my witness. But you are right about… till now. I was never loved as I wanted. I would have found it cruel to watch you. I might even have been cruel—as I managed often enough to my unfortunate husband. I would have loved a man like you until the death even as will my daughter. There, I’ve said it, Marcus. But there is nothing in us deeper than the need to love, Martha and me…”

  “I know …” he said, trailing out the word as though it pained him. He stood as in a daze, intent, his face a grimace, piteous as a beggar who has abandoned shame. Except that charity could not help him.

  It crossed her mind to try to break him down completely then. She thought she could do it. But she dared not say it would be best, not she, the father of whose child had hung himself in the garden.

  And this was but an instant’s trembling. Marcus drew a long breath and was again the master of his own presence. He took out a c
igaret. His hand was almost steady as he lit it.

  “You ought to apply for your discharge, Marcus,” she said. “You’ve had enough. You ought not to have to go back.”

  “But I want to more than anything else,” he said, although he avoided her eyes, saying it.

  The music she played for him was Chopin and Schumann and then the darker sonatas of Beethoven. She had put on a velvet gown that evening and wore gold pendulous earrings that shone in the lamp light. The light also shimmered through the jewels of the Spanish combs she wore in her crown of black hair. Her long neck and bare throat reminded him of the marble fragment he had wept over in the Salerno ruins.

  He got up and crossed the room and, bending down, kissed the back of her neck. She continued playing so that he went to the door where it was open, and leaned against the frame, looking out. A crest of white mist hung behind the ridges of the hills. Presently she finished and came and stood beside him.

  “We shall have the long twilights soon now,” she said. “Almost till midnight it will linger day. And I’ll remember, standing here alone.”

  He did not say anything. Nor did he move.

  “Marcus.”

  He turned his head. He was only a little taller than she so that she reached up her hands and took his face in them and kissed him on the mouth. “Good night, my dear one,” she said, still holding his face in her hands, “my dearly loved one.” She left him, and taking her shawl, went up the path.

  He stood some moments watching the way she had gone. Then, feeling the wind with a mist in it, he went inside and closed the door. Taking the lamp to the table, he sat down and commenced a letter home.

  “My dear,” he wrote. “I know my silence puts a heavy burden on you. My presence when the time comes may put even a heavier one. You may have to come and get me—which is a manner of speaking, you understand. Not literal. But you must remember I have said this for I may not be able to say it again. Tonight I am alive. Alive. I know because I love …” He paused and thought for a moment and decided to end the sentence there: “I know because I love.”