Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  It came, he learned later, during a pilgrimage Sybil and Hugo made to Netley Military Hospital, in the autumn of 1905, with the object of a final consultation with Udale, the surgeon to whom Hugo owed his life.

  Udale was permanently stationed at Netley now, caring for several hundred maimed victims of the fighting, and after a prolonged physical check he pronounced Hugo completely fit, but privately expressed some concern regarding the patient's state of mind.

  "He's too… too passive," he told her, while Hugo was making a tour of the wards. "Ordinarily this might not matter, might even be a help and a handhold but not with a chap like Swann. More than anyone I know, he concentrated his entire being on physical prowess, and you'll never capture his interest with any of the usual pursuits of the blind. It isn't as if he had ever been engaged in manual labour, or work calculated to tax his brains. We have to hit on something that will focus his mind on some kind of variant of his former occupation, that is give him a renewed interest in his muscles, sinews and staying power."

  "He exercises regularly," Sybil told him. "He's walking and riding every day, and he spends a good deal of his time swimming."

  "I wasn't thinking of exercise. He needs to use that magnificent body of his to someone else's advantage." Sybil remembered, during the second stage of convalescence, how insistent Hugo had been on regular massage to counteract a flabbiness encouraged by the helplessness of a man without sight. She said, "Do you do much massage here, Mr. Udale?" At once Udale's quick mind sparked and he thumped his desk, exclaiming, "Why, Lady Sybil, that might be the answer! Massage! Professional massage, and I don't mean on the receiving end."

  "He once took a course in massage and spent one day a week at a teaching hospital soon after we came home. It didn't seem to interest him at the time."

  "But it might here," Udale urged. "You say he learned the theory? Well, why don't I hustle him along to our gymnasium?" And he picked up his desk telephone, the first Lady Sybil had ever seen, and turned the handle with emphasis, asking the operator to put him through to Corporal Corkerdale at the gym. But Hugo confounded them both so completely that afterwards Sybil speculated seriously on the theory of thought transference, currently fashionable among some of her friends in Belgravia. The N.C.O. in charge of the gymnasium, learning that Mr. Udale intended to bring a blind officer down for a visit replied, instantly, "Would that be Lieutenant Swann, the athlete, sir?"

  "That's who I had in mind. How did you guess?"

  "But he's already here, sir. Working on Sergeant Toller's legs."

  "Working on them? How do you mean exactly?"

  "Well, sir, manipulating. He and Toller served together in South Africa, and Mr. Swann told me he was qualified as a masseur and would like to give Toller a going over. Did I do wrong to give my consent, sir?"

  "No," Udale said briefly, "you hit the bullseye in one, Corkerdale. I'll explain later," and he replaced the earpiece and recounted the conversation to Sybil. "We'll go down and watch," he suggested. "I've time before my next round."

  * * *

  His tour of the wards, in search of two or three men he had met in the early days of his convalescence, had been depressing for Hugo. Failing to find those he sought—Sergeant Toller, hit in both legs by a shrapnel burst at Modder River and confined to a wheelchair ever since, was one of them—he soon discovered that the pity he generated among the crippled servicemen more than outweighed any comfort or cheer he could dispense. As one young officer put it, rather crudely, "I'm short of one leg and one arm, but what's that compared to your problem, Swann? Damned if I feel like complaining when I meet a chap who has lost his sight. Nice of you to look in."

  Someone told him Toller was exercising on the bars in the gym so he let his watchdog guide him there. Toller retained both legs but they were little more than props, and the two casualties sat side by side on a bench comparing notes. Toller, having seen Hugo canter the open mile at Stamford Bridge just before the war, showed more tact than the officer upstairs. "You're looking pretty fit to me, sir. You must be taking a deal of exercise."

  "Oh, I exercise," Hugo said. And then, petulantly, "It's about all I do these days, Toller."

  "I can't get enough," the sergeant complained, "but it's not my fault. The quacks tell me I could get the use of my legs back in time but the fact is… well, I'm dog-tired in five minutes and have to give up, what with that and the pain. It's no wonder, I suppose. I stopped about two pounds of lead out there, and it was a bloody miracle I didn't lose both legs. But I might as well for all the use they are. Feel here, just below the knee joint," and he guided Hugo's hand to scarred and pitted areas of flesh where Toller's calf muscles had once bulged. "I was a bit of a miler myself," Toller went on, "never in your class, of course, but I brought home some pots in my time."

  "You could again," Hugo said, unexpectedly.

  "How's that, sir?"

  "You could again. There's no permanent damage to the bone structure, is there?"

  "They say not, not in either leg. There were five fractures at the time but they all healed. It's torn sinew and wasted muscle, I suppose. No damned go in 'em, sir."

  There was not much Hugo did not know about leg muscles. Ever since he was the boy wonder on the Exmoor plateau, he had submitted to the routine calf massage of his brother Giles and, later, to that of his trained fag in anticipation of some cross-country event, he had been a student of muscles and how they responded to the strains put upon them. In his championship days, he had met, in many a stadium dressing-room, dozens of coaches, most of them professionals, who had taught him how to eradicate the stiffness from overtaxed muscles, how to nurse minor injuries, and, above all, how to induce a suppleness that was essential to muscles subjected to the strain of a prolonged training session. Legs, for so long, had been Hugo's stock-in-trade, and he knew his own as well as his father knew the main roads of the Swann network. His accumulated knowledge told him that what the doctors said of Toller's legs was probably true. All the man needed to walk again was expert massage over a long period, combined with a graduated course of specially-designed exercises using a few simple items of equipment. He said, "I'd like to have a shot at you, Toller. I'll lay you ten to one in sovereigns I could put some real go into those stumps. Given time and plenty of grit on your part." And after a brief word with the gym instructor, he went to work, hammering away at Toller until he shouted for a respite.

  He was so engrossed that he did not notice Udale and Sybil enter and stand beside the gymnast who was watching Hugo with interest. Corkerdale said, in a quiet aside, "He's a dab hand at it an' no mistake, sir. We could do with someone like him to chivvy 'em up. And it's not just the way he goes about it either… it's…"

  "What else is it, Corkerdale?" Udale, unlike most members of his profession, was a good listener, particularly when confronted with a specialist in one field or another. "Well, sir, it's Lieutenant Swann being blind… beggin' your pardon, Ma'am… I mean, not letting it gripe 'im, the way it would most of us."

  "Go on," said Udale, gravely. When Corkerdale hesitated, Udale said, "I'm right in assuming there was an idea behind that idea, wasn't there?"

  "Maybe, sir, but who am I to talk about it in front of someone like you?"

  "Why not? We don't know everything, we only pretend we do. Tell me what you were going to say."

  "Well, sir, it's him being blind. Having someone like that, even worse off than most of 'em, that is, makes 'em sit up and take notice, and that's very good for 'em, sir, seein' as how so many are down in the dumps. Do you follow me, sir?"

  "All the way, Corkerdale, thank you. We'll see what we can do about it," and he watched Hugo shrewdly, so absorbed in the massage that he was still unaware of their entry, so that presently Udale motioned to Sybil to withdraw.

  She put it to him that same night, armed with some figures Udale had given her. In Netley Hospital alone there were close on two hundred maimed ex-servicemen, some of whom were permanently crippled, but others for whom there
was hope of regaining the use of a limb or limbs under protracted courses of treatment. Toller was a typical case. Encouraged and bullied, he could, in time, make a fifty per cent recovery and might even dispense with crutches. It depended, Udale insisted, more on his own reserves of will-power than upon outside agencies. "Udale swears that you could bridge that gap, Hugo," she urged. "He tells me that one of the biggest handicaps facing them as regards men with a sporting chance is the unconscious resentment patients feel for those who prescribe their courses and deluge them with advice from the standpoint of the hale and active. He's very anxious to take you on full-time down there. We can find a house, overlooking Southampton Water, and the sergeant could drive you in every day. Why don't you think about it over Christmas, dearest?"

  He thought about it. Indeed, he thought about little else, ranging the coverts and uplands of the Weald on horse and foot, until there grew in him a conviction that here, perhaps, was a field where he might engage his unused stock of energy that could find no outlet in conventional exercise, taken with no other object than keeping his own body at concert pitch. For by now he had adjusted to his blindness in most ways. Moving in a familiar background such as Tryst, or about their home in Eaton Square, he could walk about almost unaided, and he discovered that an enlargement of his other senses, particularly those of touch and hearing, had occurred much the way Udale had prophesied. He was not exactly unhappy, but he was confused and indecisive regarding a purpose and self-justification, for until the moment of his tragedy his athletic prowess had been an end in itself and he had never ranged as far as the point where he would be too old and stiff-jointed to compete with younger men. It was as though all his life he had been loping up an incline without asking himself why, yet finding a full measure of satisfaction in the certainty that he could move faster and with more precision than any challenger, and this supreme faith in his physical ascendancy had persisted right up to the moment he reached the top of that scrub-sown hill and lay in wait for the Boers manning the outpost beyond. Then, in a single moment, he had lost his bearings and paused to ask himself where he was travelling and why, and what was the nature of the trophy they would award him, and in the period since his mind had been mostly a blank, without anything to focus upon other than moments of guilt concerning that dead boy, or the transitory repose he found in his wife's body and the prattle of their child, Humphrey.

  He was touched, deeply so, by the kindness of those about him, sensing their patient efforts to convince him that he was still at one with them but he knew very well that he was not and could never be so long as he lived, and that he must face this formidable truth sooner or later. And yet he continued, assiduously, to nurse his body, losing no opportunity of keeping it in the peak of training, for somewhere ahead there might be a use for it and, in any case, it was all he had in the way of capital.

  A few rare bonuses had come his way since he had learned how to surmount the worst aspects of his handicap, to think beyond the daily challenges of shaving, dressing, and eating his food without having it cut up by Sybil or by the sergeant, and perhaps the most rewarding of these was a heightened physical relationship between himself and Sybil, dating from that first embrace in the tented hospital where, or so Sybil declared, young Humphrey had been conceived. At the time he had regarded it as no more than a release of fear and anger, prompting him to use her body as a buffer for his wretchedness. But when, in more tranquil moments, it returned again and again, promoted by her in a way that never failed to stir him, he came to think of it as a source of solace, freely available as an outlet of tensions within him, and would sometimes try and tell her as much, in stumbling, half-articulated phrases, when he was spent and lying still in her arms. And the wonder of it was she seemed to understand, indeed, to revel in her role as comforter, murmuring over and over again, "But I love you, dearest… you're everything…"

  But there was another more subtle consolation that was harder to understand and evaluate, and it had to do with his frozen memory of the sounds and scents of the countryside where he had spent his boyhood. These were now intensified to a degree where he could isolate and savour each of them, identifying the smell of autumn and the stir of spring, and this awareness of images brought to him out of the past: violet mist in the Bray valley on a still October afternoon; rain blurring the escarpment behind Tryst, ripening fruit in the cages and orchards south of the house; rows of leather-bound books in his father's library; the steady surge and recoil of winter breakers on the seashore; the rush of hounds breaking covert when the huntsman sounded "Gone Away," all kinds of things that had once never impinged on him when he had eyes to see them but were now like old friends helping him along the way.

  Yet for all this placid acceptance of his limitations there remained the emptiness of his future, and it was not until he sensed, through his fingertips, the flacidity of Toller's wasted legs, that he saw, as it were, a glimmer of light in the surrounding darkness, identifying it there and then into hope of a kind so far denied him. Energy surged back into him then, of the kind that had launched him at such speed down the embattled valley among the remnants of Montmorency's shattered column, and something told him that here, at last, was the elusive secret of regeneration, the use of his own bones and flesh to restore the crippled bodies of other poor devils whose youth and vigour had been taken from them out on the veldt.

  He went to Sybil on the last day of the old year, saying briefly, "Write to Udale. And look for that house in Hampshire. I'll work at Netley for as long as he needs me, as long as there are men there who can be helped, even slightly."

  "There'll always be someone to help, dearest," she said, gladly, and kissed him, but impatiently, for she did not want to waste a moment in setting the seal upon the victory.

  * * *

  She came to Adam with the news in early February, a week or two after Hugo had joined the Netley staff, with full details of his vocation and their impending move to Hampshire. "As chirrupy as a sparrow," as he afterwards told Henrietta, making no attempt to conceal his own satisfaction. Henrietta heard him out and then had a private session with Sybil, plying her with innumerable questions concerning Hugo and their new base southwest of the Gosport road and overlooking Southampton Water. When Sybil, with her usual air of setting out on a royal progress, had bustled about her business, Henrietta withdrew to her sewing-room, wondering about her and what strange alchemy had been at work to fuse a woman of that kind with that great son of hers, the splendid young man she recalled so vividly in the days before they shot away his sight. It was a case, she thought, that paralleled Hugo's own pursuit of trophies, for that was how Lady Sybil Uskdale must have thought of him when they met and married. But now, instinct told her, it was different. Something strange and secret had developed between them, that had nothing much to do with Hugo's fame and popularity, but was concerned with a compulsion on the part of that rather overpowering woman to make amends for the wrong she had done him by dragging him off to that terrible war. But there was something else, she sensed, behind Sybil's assessment of him whenever she discussed the boy, or even looked at him, and this was a hint Henrietta could interpret without much fear that she was jumping to a conclusion. Lady Sybil had found in Hugo the kind of fulfilment that she, as wife and mother, had found in Adam all those years ago, and Hugo's blindness, cutting him off from diversions, and making him entirely dependent on her, had proved a kind of boon to both of them, adding something essential to a relationship that had been little more than an arrangement when it began. She thought, I never did understand the woman before. I suppose I was always a little scared of her. But I'm not any more, for she's really no different from any of us when it comes down to essentials… And then, whooping like one of those Red Indians in Buffalo Bill's Travelling Circus, Adam hurried into the house, calling for her at the top of his voice, flinging open the sewing-room door and brandishing a telegram that he must have taken from the boy she saw pushing his bicycle up the drive.

  "It's fr
om Giles!" he bellowed. "He's in with a thumping majority! Over two thousand, by God!" She thought, taking the telegram from him and reading it carefully, They're such a whirlwind tribe and he's no different from any of them, for he keeps pace with them somehow and that's more than I can do these days. But she said, trying hard to match his enthusiasm, "How wonderful for him. I do hope he likes it when he gets there," and that, for some reason that she did not understand, made him laugh, a fact that underlined somehow the sad but undeniable fact that she was getting left behind with stay-at-homes like Stella and Denzil, in the family's advance into new and frightening worlds.

  It was no wonder, really, for things were changing at such a pace for her and for everyone else who could remember older, more tranquil times, when the social frontiers were fixed and nothing (if you excepted the new railway engines) moved faster than a horse. She remembered that Adam, in one of his jocular moods, had called these changes "another spin of the whirligig" and they did not appear to distress him at all, even though he was twelve years older than her. Perhaps this was because his newspapers prepared him for them, or perhaps, even without newspapers, he had the temperament to adapt to change. For her part, she found it increasingly difficult, what with daughters finding new and improbable husbands, George rushing about the country on all those horseless carriages, Alex talking about all these frightful new weapons men were using in battles, and with Giles becoming a Member of Parliament, Hugo becoming a sort of doctor, and every one of them caught up in some cause or invention that hadn't concerned anyone but people like the Royals and Messrs. Disraeli and Gladstone when she was their age. She was sixty-six now, and a grandmother a dozen times over.