He had to take a gamble then on whether there was a fifth or sixth Boer somewhere behind the dead boy, for there was better cover there in the form of a spur of rock. Once he was behind it, the marksmen on the lower terraces would be in his sights. He half-rose to his feet, dashed forward, and was within a yard of it, his left foot braced on the outflung arm of the boy's corpse, when his head exploded like a rocket, painlessly yet with a kind of deliberate wrenching movement that stretched every nerve and muscle in his body.
* * *
He was still breathing when they found him, sprawled half across a spur of rock at the very summit of the ridge, with the dead boy touching his foot and the other man he had shot some ten yards lower down the western slope of the hill. Kneeling over him, the stretcher-bearers debated among themselves whether or not it was worth their pains to carry him down to the ambulance behind the company of Devons now advancing in open order towards Cookham's survivors half-a-mile down the valley. On one side of his temples was the familiar small puncture. On the other, exactly opposite, a jagged gash, welling blood. The middle-aged trooper, identifying and reclaiming his carbine and bandolier, decided the matter for them, saying, laconically, "Stop yer gab an' take the pore bleeder where he can snuff it in shade. But for 'im that bloody look-out detail woulder made it all the way back an' give their mates the tip. Looks like he got two of 'em before they got 'im." He moved on, walking upright to the spot about two hundred yards on, where the two other members of the outpost lay, one dead, shot from below at long range, the other holed in the leg and biting on a plug of tobacco while a medical orderly applied splint and bandages to the shattered shinbone. So Hugo's gamble had been justified in a sense. There could have been no fifth Boer crouched behind that spur of rock, and one more bound would have won him the contest. The stretcher-bearers, grumbling at his weight, worked their way slowly to level ground and the wound was plugged pending closer examination, providing he survived the ride back to the nearest field ambulance tent. Two wounded troopers of the 21st Lancers, salvaged from among the casualties higher up the valley, tried to divert attention from the smart of their own wounds, by having a bet on the issue.
2
Sybil, eldest daughter of the Earl of Uskdale, currently directing her dynamic energy into the administration of the military base hospital at Queenstown, had two public faces. To her intimates, in the enclosed circle in which she had been reared, she was cool, sophisticated, uniquely purposeful, and self-contained. To the public at large, particularly those who devoured bulletins from the war fronts, she was rapidly qualifying for a niche in the pantheon of English heroines alongside Grace Darling, Boadicea, and Florence Nightingale. Both images were too facile to equate with the truth. To a great extent, Sybil Uskdale's life up to this point had been a masquerade for, contrary to all public and private estimates of her character, she was a complex personality and her positivity concealed a canker of self-doubt.
There was logic in this. Rejecting, instinctively, the social strictures of her times and, more especially, of her class, she had not yet succeeded in filling the vacuum that renunciation implied and was still, in a sense, preoccupied with her quest for a credible alternative. Her obsession with nursing was one aspect of this search, and her acquisition of Hugo Swann as husband was another, her most daring decision up to that time. Both spiritually and physically she yearned for fulfilment in a changing world where the tide was beginning to run against wealth, privilege, and social protocol, and had long since set her face against the purely decorative, submissive role that most well-endowed women accepted with equanimity. But one does not slough off the habits and training of childhood and background at a bound, and there were times, particularly of late, when she questioned not only her ability to fly in the face of convention, but her right to pursue the course she had set herself.
Physically, as a vigorous and exceptionally robust woman of thirty, she had coveted Hugo Swann ever since she saw him stretched out in that committee tent at the Putney fete. But so far the marriage had been oddly frustrating, for she soon decided he was really no more than an overgrown boy, disinclined, unable perhaps, to use her as she longed to be used. Awed by what he obstinately regarded as her social superiority, his demands so far had been faltering and inexperienced, so that she had been forced back on her original resolve, that is to use him as a crutch and fanfare in her drive to develop into what she dimly realised might be a fulfilled woman. He was young and lusty, and there was time enough ahead. But then, before she had time to come to grips with this new situation, the war had engulfed them both and she found herself running a hospital overflowing with maimed and desperately sick men, all of them young and full of promise, each calling to her to be nursed through a personal crisis involving stomach wounds, shattered limbs, devastating facial and head wounds, and, more pitiful still, the ravages of enteric fever, now accounting for three out of every four patients brought in on the hospital trains. In the strain of facing up to her responsibilities, she had almost forgotten Hugo.
The death rate was appalling by any standards. At some hospitals, they said, men were dying at the rate of fifty a day from this scourge alone, and the nursing staff and doctors were hopelessly inadequate to deal with such a situation. They did their best, God knows, and Sybil among them, working stints of up to twenty hours, but with the advance to the north the rate of casualty increased, and the strain thrown on the administration became intolerable. She was tough, but she did not know how long she could survive the demands made upon her and then, a challenge that made every other shrink to insignificance, they wheeled in what was left of Hugo, shot through the head in a skirmish up in the hills and certain, so the surgeons said, to die.
* * *
Her immediate reaction was one of terrible guilt, for she reasoned that, but for her, Hugo would be safe at home, jogging round the running track and turning up every now and again with another of those silver trophies. She saw herself, at that moment, as a murderess who had deliberately plotted his death and in her misery she wanted nothing else than to die herself and ahead of him.
But then, when he refused to die, when Udale, the chief surgeon, told her that he had a chance, she rallied, by no means shedding her crushing packload of guilt but finding sufficient resolution to set it aside, a parcel that would have to wait its turn to be opened. Gradually she not only reintegrated herself into the daily rhythm of the hospital, but also delegated herself Hugo Swann's guide back to the land of the living.
She had him isolated in her own quarters, and although this isolation would be seen as an exercise of privilege on her part, she did not care. Hugo was her personal responsibility, the victim of her vanity, and if, by sheer force of will, she could restore him to even partial health, nothing was going to be allowed to stand in her way.
These were her attitudes during the initial period, when Hugo, head swathed in bandages, lay silent in his cot, a hulk with a fingertip grasp on life. Her first reaction was the deliberate postponement of the acknowledgment of guilt, her second a resolve to atone for the terrible wrong she had done him. When Udale came to her to report the successful conclusion of his third operation, she allowed herself to hope, after the surgeon, in response to her persistent badgering, gave it as his opinion that the patient's reason did not seem to have been affected by the clean passage of the bullet.
"How can you be sure of that?" she asked, breathlessly.
"He talked, more or less rationally, under the anaesthetic. For what it's worth, that in itself is unusual with a wound of that nature."
"What did he say?"
"Mentioned a Lancer subaltern by name. 'Cookham' it sounded like. That, and a young Boer who pointed a rifle at him."
"Does that alone signify anything?"
"A little. For your sake I took some trouble to find out the names of officers involved in that scrap. A Lieutenant Cookham was the fellow who sent him on that run with the message."
"What about the Boer?"
"
That might mean anything or nothing. Some fleeting impression of the battle that stayed with him, possibly."
She derived some comfort from this and spruced herself up for her next spell of watching at the bedside, where she combined the office of nurse with that of general administrator. The mirror in her tented quarters showed her a gaunt, holloweyed stranger, quite unlike the bustling woman who had presided here before the Stormberg ambush. She even went to the lengths of using papier-poudres on the dark areas under her eyes, and a touch of rouge to her cheeks against the time when they removed his bandages for the first time.
But then Udale insisted on a fourth operation, and the night it was performed, again successfully, he piloted her to a secluded corner of the convalescent sector and admitted the true source of his evasiveness during earlier discussions on the case.
"Someone has to tell you, Lady Sybil, and everyone else shirks it. He'll recover all right. Not much need to worry on that score. But he won't see again, not a glimmer."
It was as though a mailed fist had crashed into her abdomen, and then the same assailant had grabbed her by the throat and squeezed until tears streamed from her eyes and she had the utmost difficulty in breathing.
"Won't see? He's blind? Hugo Swann, blind ?"
He nodded, reaching out to steady her, but she shook him off.
"But that's… that's monstrous! It can't be so! It can't!"
"You must have considered it."
"Never! Never once! I thought of everything but not that… not that!"
He said, his eyes on the scorched turf, "The bullet severed the optic nerve. Only vital damage it did. A pure freak. Chance in a million it didn't kill him outright, or leave him a cabbage." He took a silver flask from his pocket and unscrewed the stopper. "Take a swallow of that. Please, I insist!" and she took the flask and gulped down the raw spirit, but it did little to steady her. She whispered, presently, "Go back to the wards, Mr. Udale. Tell everybody I'm not to be approached, not for any reason." Surprisingly, he went, leaving her on the threshold of a little pergola they had built for sitting-out patients.
She stood there without moving for a long time, only half aware of the medley of background noises of the vast, tented purgatory, the dolorous squeaks of unoiled ambulance axles, the continuous murmur that rose from the huge convalescent marquee, housing men who were short of a limb, and permanently disfigured perhaps but not one, so far as she could recall, deprived forever of his eyesight and reduced to the helplessness of Samson in the camp of the Philistines. There was a bitter analogy here. Samson Swann, noted not for his strength but his fleetness that seemed to her, indeed to all who knew him, the very essence of his being. Samson made a sacrifice to Dagon, the Philistine god. Not by his enemies, not by the Boer who had fired that freakish shot, but by her, Sybil Uskdale, who had coveted him, won him, and led him out to make sport for the multitude. Surely no woman since the world began had gratuitously laid upon herself such a mountain of guilt and shame.
And then, without warning, there burst from her a terrible sob that was like a soft explosion between her breasts, yet so violent that she sagged and almost fell, clutching the upright of the pergola porch and groping her way to the seat beyond. She would have given all she possessed, life itself, to be released into tears, but her eyes were dry and her throat, fearfully constricted, once more in the grip of that merciless fist. The thought of self-destruction came to her, warm and welcome as a fur-lined cape in winter, and she conjured with various possibilities—the row of bottles marked "poison" in the dispensary, a razor at her wrists, a rope about her neck to anticipate the slow strangulation of the mailed fist. She considered them all, clinically and objectively, but neither one nor the other seemed adequate as a means of escape or retribution, and as she rejected them the idea slipped away like a rebuffed beggar; she was left with nothing but a tiny spark of defiance that had never ceased to glow in her from the day she put aside the frivolities and proscriptions of her caste.
She said, acknowledging as much aloud, "It was my doing and I'll finish it, for no one else can." She got up and walked jerkily to her quarters, lifting the tent flap and averting her eyes from the still, mummy-like head on the pillow. She sat down and looked in the mirror again, flinching but forcing herself to study the reflection, a small-boned woman in a starched coif with a blue, scarlet-lined cloak about her shoulders. A woman with good features and light blue eyes ringed by sallow areas below the lids. A wide mouth firmly compressed and drawn down at the corners. The famous Uskdale chin, small and resolutely pointed, jutting slightly out but softened somewhat by the central cleft. Behind her the man on the bed shifted and muttered, then relaxed as his breathing became heavy and regular. She said, again aloud, "I'll tell him and I won't put it off. No sense in holding out hope, in breaking it gently over a period. That's his due and my obligation."
3
She was there when they removed the bandages four days later and watched an orderly scrape away at his bristles, seeing the familiar face emerge from a cloud of lather and marvelling that the scars were so small and insignificant. A pinkish circle on the right temple, puckered and no more than a centimetre across. A zigzag line like a small hedge tear in the left temple, where the bullet had emerged and the stitching remained to be cut. And about this second wound an area of heavy bruising, fading from dark blue to coral where new hair was growing in a ragged sideburn. They left the eyes covered with gauze and cotton wool, and then, as arranged, the doctor shooed everybody out and she waited for Hugo to speak.
He was talking freely then. Two days earlier he had asked them what had happened upon that ridge, whether young Cookham and his survivors were saved, whether the Boers had made good their escape and, at length, how long it would be before they removed all these damned wrappings from his head.
Mr. Udale told him what he knew of the battle. Cookham and his survivors had been rescued. He and Cookham had been recommended for decorations. The main body of the ambush party had slipped away, but they had captured the rearguard, thirty-odd marksmen who came down off the ridge under a white flag.
As to his wound, his wife, Lady Sybil, would tell him about that, for right now, Udale said, he had too much on his hands and so, for that matter, had she. "All I can say is you're lucky, Swann. Couple of months and you'll be out of here and sailing for home."
Sybil fed him then, spooning broth into his mouth, crumbling bread between her long, slim fingers, and jokingly pushing it between his bearded lips. He said, when she told him they were alone, "Odd, me turning up here so quickly. Seems only a day or so since I said goodbye and went off with the new draft. How long have I been in hospital, Sybil?"
"More than a month," she said, "but we'll talk about that later. Right now you must sleep. You were in very bad shape when you came in, dearest, but Mr. Udale thinks you've done splendidly."
"Where was I hit?"
"In the head. Just once but it was as the surgeon said, you were lucky not to be killed."
He lifted his hand to the bandages and canvassed them from ear to ear, from the crown of his head down to the chin. "My God, it must have come close," he said. "That chap lower down the hill. One of two of 'em, firing from either side, crafty devils. Simply never occurred to me they'd move off the crest." And then glumly, "Sorry about that kid, though."
"What kid, Hugo?"
"The one I had to shoot. Couldn't have been more than fifteen. Stood there bold as brass after I'd got the older one. Who the devil would want to kill a kid that age?"
"Don't think about it. The fault lies with the men who sent him there. Try and sleep."
She could have told him then, she supposed, but it seemed wiser to wait and build up his strength a little, and once they had the bandages off he made tremendous strides, so that she wasn't surprised when he sat up as soon as Udale cleared the tent and said, "When can I see you, Sybil?"
She choked at that and had to summon every scrap of courage to prevent herself breaking down there and then, b
ut at least he had given her an opening. She took his hand, lifted it, and pressed it to her lips.
"Hugo, dear."
"Yes?"
"I've got something bad to say. Can you take a grip on yourself? Can you hear me out without… without shouting me down, trying to get up, making a… a fuss?"
His brow contracted. Clearly the statement puzzled him very much. She took a tighter grip on his hand, still covered with the tape they had put over the long bullet crease on the palm. He said, finally, "There's something else? I was hit somewhere else? But you said…"
"No. You've just the one wound but that… it was as bad as could be. The bullet went in one side and came out the other…"
"My face is smashed up?"
"No, dearest. You're as handsome as ever. The most handsome man in the world," and she kissed the freshly shaven face twice, still without releasing the hand.
Give Us This Day Page 25
