CHAPTER XXXI
A THOUGHT FOR HELEN
"Bricktop!"
"Peter!"
They took a grappling hold of each other, as if about to engage in a wrestling match to prove which was the more jubilant over this meeting; for Peter was a man after Bricktop's own heart and Bricktop after Peter's.
"You're red-headed as ever!" said Peter.
"What did you expect? That I'd dip my locks in a dye-barrel? Needed all the red I had and some more to deal with some of the stick-in-the-muds, who would not believe that I am a surgeon. Say, but you're good for sore eyes and nostalgia!"
"Think of you being over here and operating on Phil!" Peter held William Smith, D.D.S., off at arm's length in respectful admiration.
"If you hadn't sent me that twenty thousand I wouldn't have had the equipment for the job," Bricktop replied.
"You don't mean that that twenty thousand—maybe it's saved Phil!"
"Exactly what I do mean!"
"Think of that!" Peter swallowed hard and blinked. "But don't you tell him about it—not yet. Here I am talking, when there is somebody outside that——" He did not finish his sentence, but drew Bricktop out of his office into the reception-room, where Dr. and Mrs. Sanford were waiting.
"I don't need any introduction. You're his father and mother!" Bricktop exclaimed.
"Yes, we are here, thanks to Peter," said Mrs. Sanford. "He has a wonderful way of managing things."
"Peter was born to manage things!" said Bricktop. "He gave me my start."
"Just as Dr. Sanford's father gave me mine. And we are here because Phil's is a special case which cannot be moved over to England. Merely had to make the authorities see the light. But it seems to me, Bricktop, you and I are doing a lot of gassing, when what we want is to see Phil. How is he getting on?"
Peter had hesitated to put that question, thinking of what this day meant to the Sanfords. Bricktop looked into the honest, serene eyes of the old pair and seeing that they were not afraid of it, told the truth.
"In two or three days I'll come to the big test," he said. "If that operation succeeds, the rest will be easy."
Then a soft voice, which had the very melody of cheer, added:
"And it will succeed!"
Helen, coming into the room, had overheard Bricktop's opinion, and impulsively reinforced it with her faith. Dr. and Mrs. Sanford for the first time looked into the eyes of the woman who had written to them for Phil and about Phil. Their transparent depths reflected the quality which they had associated with her. Something told her that she was not plain to them, and the thought gave her a thrill of happiness.
"What beautiful eyes!" exclaimed Mrs. Sanford involuntarily. "They are like your spirit!"
"I——" Helen flushed. No one had ever said this to her except the old artist teacher. That any one should think that anything about her was beautiful!
"I'm afraid I was personal!" murmured Mrs. Sanford; and both were embarrassed.
"It was a very nice way to be personal," Helen stammered, finding her smile. "How happy he will be to see you! How he loves you!"
"And his sight and hearing and speech?" asked Mrs. Sanford.
"A long treatment, but they will come back," replied Helen.
She led the way into the ward where Phil was in a big chair, a comely figure of youth up to his chin. The rest of him was a ball of white, with a harness of silver woven in with bandages for his lower face, and bandages over his eyes.
"Your father and mother have come," Helen wrote on his arm.
They sat down without any demonstration, one on each side of his chair, and each took one of his hands, receiving a strong answering clasp. Peter "filled up," as he put up, and went out into the court to pace up and down. When he returned they were in the same position.
This hand in his own left hand Phil knew was his father's, because it was larger and bonier than the one in his right, which was soft and yielding. He was thinking of Longfield; seeing the village street under the old elms, the garden and the porch, and the glory of sunrise and sunset in the Berkshires; relieving the joys of sight. In turn, in that silent communion, Dr. and Mrs. Sanford saw him coming up the path to the porch at all ages and on all occasions.
"That wiggle of his right foot," said Helen, "means that he wants to talk. Oh, we've developed a remarkable code and we've not gone in for the blind raised letters because he never will need them."
She brought a pencil, which she slipped between his fingers, and a pad, which she fixed on a slanting table fastened to the chair.
"He's becoming wonderfully good at it," she said, "though at first he was always getting off the track and writing one line over another."
Slowly but quite clearly he wrote his big letters on small pages, which Helen passed to the father and mother.
"Some family reunion, this! It is a cinch that I get well—father, pardon the language!"
This was the first sheet. The two looked at each other and smiled. "It's Phil, all right!" murmured Peter, echoing their thoughts.
"When I get my new countenance, new eyes and ears, and descend on Longfield, even Jane will admit I'm grown up. I am going to show Hanks that he is not the only one who can branch out"—this on the second sheet.
"Peter arranged it so you could come, I hear," came the third. "Tell him he has been so kind that I almost regret I did not go to work for him and ruin his business."
There was something very like a snort from the direction of Peter, who was caught grinning when the others looked around.
"Tell Bill Hurley, who is for the Allies but a pessimist about their chances, that the Allies are going to win the war. And you are coming often, aren't you? Won't they let you? This conversation is getting one-sided." He pulled up his sleeve, which was a signal to Helen.
"Yes," she wrote, at Dr. Sanford's dictation. "Peter has got a little house for us and permission to stay near you."
"This is just simply HAPPINESS"—Phil spelled out the word in capitals. "Tell Peter he is certainly some arranger. Isn't he going to come and see me, too?"
Peter was swallowing hard—a habit that he had formed since he had arrived at the hospital. He advanced to Phil's side.
"Peter is here," Helen wrote.
Phil's hand went out, searching in the darkness, and Peter's leapt toward it and the two clasped in a firm, prolonged grip.
"Shall I tell him that every cent I have is his, when he expected nothing?" Peter put the question to Helen.
She knew only the vague outline of their story, yet understood the principle involved, and she hesitated. Peter studied her face with his shrewd glance.
"I guess not," he said. "He's fighting for something worth more than three millions and money won't make a fellow of Phil's calibre fight any harder. I guess it would be kind of cheap to do it now. I'll wait till he can see me, or till we know that he is not going to——"
"He will!" put in Helen sharply.
"Say," Peter said admiringly, "they ought to put you in command of an army corps out there! You've got the kind of spirit that would break the line."
"Spirit has nothing to do with it," Helen replied. "It is simply a fact."
"I'd make it the whole army!" said Peter, who belonged to the school which believes that if you make up your mind to do a thing you will do it.
Phil was writing again, his fingers moving more rapidly than usual, his writing less distinct, as if he were under the pressure of strong emotion:
"I should have slipped if it had not been for her. It is a thing one can't talk about—the great thing of all, that makes me bear the pain and make the fight—what Henriette has done for me."
"Henriette!"
Dr. and Mrs. Sanford and Peter uttered the word together and stared involuntarily at Helen, in blank inquiry. She looked away quickly at the floor and murmured:
"Yes, Henriette!"
There was a silence then, while she took the pad and pencil from Phil and removed the little table, which provided her with the relief of movement.
"Not too much at one time, lest we tire him," she said.
She went with them through the court, where the seeing men in their pain watched them passing; and on the way her glance hovered into theirs beseechingly and her lips were parted as if about to speak, but she could not find words until they were on the path.
"You would make me any promise, wouldn't you," she asked, "in order to save him?"
Now she told the secret which only she and Henriette knew, how she had been mistaken for her sister.
"You must not undeceive him, or think of it, or speak of it! You will promise?"
Her nostrils were quivering and her eyes had the steady light of command. As they nodded, the father and mother felt a trifle in awe of her, this woman in a warrior's mood who had been a link between them and their son. She gave them a smile of thanks; then, in the flutter of an impulse, kissed Mrs. Sanford on the cheeks and abruptly started back to the ward, where she gave Phil a hand-clasp to signal her return and two clasps to learn if he wanted anything. He asked for his pad:
"It's pretty hard on them. Did I cheer them up?"
"Yes, and they know that you are going to get well."
"Good! Aren't they dears? Shall we take a constitutional? It tired the old head-piece a little, all that excitement."
The constitutionals were promenades up and down the court, with digressions sometimes out onto the paths when he felt particularly venturesome. Her arm through his, wheeling on him as a pivot when they came to the turns, he feeling the touch of her hand upon his wrist, she realising the helplessness of that tall form without some one to guide it, they had paced back and forth so many times now that these promenades had become a part of their existence. His silence she must share. They might think each his own thoughts in the nearness, the interdependence, of that strange companionship. Sometimes he carried on imaginary conversations with her and she with him; and the great things to both were the unspoken things, rather than those written on his arm or on the pad. When the revelation should come that she was not Henriette—but Helen never thought of that. It was the bridge on the other side of the promised land of his recovery.
She was not surprised when she saw Henriette enter the court just as they were turning toward the ward. Henriette came faithfully every day to inquire how he was and reported her visit at dinner with Lady Truckleford's lot. These were practically the only occasions when the sisters met. Henriette's manner was that of affectionate sympathy for Helen and pity for Phil.
"His father and mother have been to see him?"
"Yes. It made him very happy."
"And Peter Smithers was with them?"
"Yes."
Phil, who knew only that Helen had stopped to speak with some one, had no means of knowing who. She was the same to him as any other person of millions in his silent night, unseen, unheard. His circle of actual human beings consisted of Helen, or Henriette, as he thought, Bricktop, the nurses, the specialists, and now his parents and Peter. They were the visible stars in the darkness. And Helen was taking him back to his chair now.
"You've heard that Smithers will leave all his fortune to Cousin Phil, willy-nilly?" said Henriette, following them indoors. "Mother wrote it from Paris. She had it from Truckleford."
"Only they have not told him," Helen said.
"Why not? I should think that if there were anything that would make him want to live it would be the thought that he was to have three millions."
"Mr. Smithers decided not," Helen replied.
"And how has he stood the day?" Henriette asked the stereotyped question of her sister.
"Very well!" was the answer. "I'm afraid it may have tired and excited him, though." She was careful not to let him overtax himself; and now, when he wanted his pad, she added: "I must not let him write much."
If Henriette prolonged her visits it was when Helen was writing him messages or he was writing to her. The process seemed to fascinate her.
"There is a question I want to ask," Phil wrote. "I have wondered about it a good deal. Helen never sends me any messages. She has not even shaken my hand and said hello to her seventeenth cousin. I can't see her new cartoons, but I remember all of her old ones. Tell me!"
Henriette had been looking over his shoulder as he wrote, Helen standing to one side till he had finished the first sheet. A number of times before he had asked where Helen was, and after a strange thrill that dried her throat she had replied:
"Drawing and in her ward. She inquires about you every day."
It was Henriette who reached for the first sheet this time. When he had finished the second sheet she passed both to Helen, with a studious inquiry on her face and without speaking. Then she looked around the room. It was empty, save for one form asleep on a cot in the far corner. Helen did not look up. She was motionless, staring at the sheets. He was hurt because she had never shaken his hand—she who had no thought except him! And, yes, he had thought of her for herself a little—a part of his kindness even when he was racked with pain. She folded the sheets gently, but without the stir of so much as an eyelash, when Henriette's voice brought her out of her daze.
"The hoax seems complete," said Henriette. "He is wholly convinced that you are I."
"Yes," said Helen. "You wished it, didn't you, and it has helped him—yes, he has said that it kept him alive!"
"Kept him alive!" repeated Henriette, in a monotone.
"Yes, you, not I, kept him alive!"
When people knew this! Henriette was thinking of the Lady Truckleford lot. There were pitfalls ahead which she had not foreseen.
"Why didn't you undeceive him?" she demanded.
"I—I could not. It meant so much to him. As soon as he is well then I shall tell him."
"And if he never gets well——"
"He will!" Helen insisted. "But taking the view that he will not," she added, "only his father and mother know and Peter Smithers. They found it out inadvertently and have sworn to keep the secret." Henriette half closed her eyes thoughtfully as the two sisters looked at each other.
"It seems safe," breathed Henriette, raising her lashes and smiling in relief.
Phil was writing again:
"You do not answer. Helen wrote only one letter to me while I was at the front. I fear that I have offended her. Won't you tell me?"
"I—I must explain in some way!" said Helen.
"Let me!" Henriette interposed. "I've never tried writing on his arm, but I think that I know how from watching you."
She rolled up his sleeve and taking his hand to hold up the arm, as she had seen Helen do, traced the letters, slowly announcing each word as she wrote it:
"This is Helen. She has just come to see you and has come often and thinks that you are making the bravest kind of a fight."
He caught her hand in both of his and shook it warmly in his happiness.
"You don't write as well as Henriette," he wrote in reply, "but I have a lot of experience and could read it. What are you drawing? What cartoons are you making? What mischief are you up to generally?"
"I will tell you when I can write better. Now I shall be going so as not to tire you. Good-night!"
She gave his hand another clasp and turned to Helen, smiling, as she said: "I'm in your place, now, as well as you being in mine!" not forgetting to press her lips to Helen's before withdrawing.
She had gone through it all with a graceful facility and self-command, while Helen had found herself unable even to murmur "Good-night." For an instant, again alone with Phil, she felt that she also was groping in a noiseless and sightless world and that she, too, was maimed. Henriette was beautiful—oh, very beautiful! It was no wonder that men fell in love with her. Just to look at her must make any man want to live. Only to the blind could she herself be beautiful. If his sight should come back, it would be the end of the walks in the court and the writing of messages for him. There was dreadful mockery in the thought when he became well he might think that she who had shared his pain in the dark night cared more for making cartoons than for him. For an instant revolt flamed up in her mind; but only for an instant. It was smothered by the appeal of his helplessness as she looked around at him.
Now he began writing again, and her thoughts were bound up in his finger-ends, in the glow of the comradeship which was sufficient unto itself from day to day. She had learned to tell his mood and if the pain were particularly bad by the way he wrote. The letters were coming slowly, ponderingly, from his pencil-point. Something puzzled him. She looked over his shoulder just as his first sentence was finished.
"Her message did not sound like Helen," he had written.
Every nerve taut with suspense, she waited with quick breaths for what was to follow.
"There was a certain style about everything that she did and said. I think that I could tell her hand from yours since I have become so sensitive to touch; though I suppose that with all the pain and the blindness I imagine all sorts of things which are not real."
A leaping something within her that was for the moment irresistible, quick desire shining in her eyes, made her stretch out her hands toward him. Then her heart seemed to stop beating and she checked herself in the reaction of one who finds herself on the verge of treason. What might have been the effect on him if she told him the truth! All her work might have been undone. She gathered her wits, mastered her emotion, and lashed them together with her will.
"It's time for you to close the writing and thinking shop for the day," she wrote on his arm; but when she started to take his pencil and pad he clung to them. He had something more which he must say, and it was best to yield to his wish, as she had learned.
"The shutters of darkness are always down on that shop," he wrote, "but there is always a light within—you!"
A glow came into her cheeks at the compliment. The light was the face of Henriette, her charm and grace, and the labour of Helen. It proved the wickedness of the impulse to tell him the truth. How dependent he was upon Henriette in his fight!
"Now, that writing and thinking shop idea was like Helen," he was thinking—and thinking was much faster than writing and gave lazy minds more freedom to wander. "Isn't it odd? No, it's because I can't hear or speak or see—and I am tired."
"Good-night!" said her hand-clasp out there in the darkness, but bringing her very near him.
"Good-night!" his return clasp signalled back. Soon he was dozing. The pain was not sharp just then. He was nearly healed enough for another operation.
"He ought to sleep well," Helen said to the night nurse as she went out, with a peculiar relief in going, such as she had never felt before.
When she reached her room, for the first time since she had put them away the night after the ambulance brought Phil to the hospital she took her drawing materials out of her trunk, in answer to some tangent demand of the distraction that possessed her, only to put them back in and the unanswered demands of editors with them, as if she had no concern with them now. There was nothing to do but to keep on marching and fighting, without bothering what bridges were to be crossed on the other side of the promised land of his recovery.
Phil had no idea how long he had dozed when the head pain devil, who sat on the point of his jaw directing the operations of all the little devils on the lines of communication, prodded him awake. For him the little pain devils were articulate. He lived in a world of imagined voices.
"What if you should never get well? What if we should keep you always?" said the Fiend General Commanding. "We are a trifle weak now, but you wait till after the next operation. Then we shall have a rare old dance of it. What if it should be just one operation and another and another forever? Let your wounds heal and get back your strength, only for another bout! What if you should never see green fields or hear the birds sing again?"
On such occasions there must be prompt "counter battery work," as they say at the front, or he would go out of his head. His answer was to call upon his memory for the ammunition of battle; to relieve happy incidents of the past. His father and mother and Peter Smithers and all his friends must help him.
His thoughts ran in leaping waves of half-consciousness from one picture of recollection to another... Yes, it was Helen who had been to see him last... What a ninny she had made him appear when he proposed to her by mistake under the tree!... How the mischief would leap out of her eyes!... How many kinds of Helen were there? Sometimes he had thought that she suffered because she was plain. No, all she cared for was to make drawings. How would she and Peter get along? They would be a pair! She would be certain to cartoon him... The terrace at Mervaux! That last night when the three had walked up and down together in the dusk. White slippers moving in unison with his own steps—odd that he should remember that! Two voices were so alike that either girl might have been speaking. Why, it was quite the same as if he had his hearing back and could not see...
Henriette smiling from her easel at him—how good she was to look at! Helen with her quips as she was drawing the cartoons! Helen in her intensity as she made the real drawing! Henriette silent, smiling, her lips parted as if she were speaking and Helen's words seeming to be here! Oh, afternoon of afternoons! Air sweet to the nostrils and genial sunlight! All the senses in tranquil enjoyment!...
And Henriette! Oh, he had been hard hit that day. It was enough for any woman to be as beautiful as she was! But how little he realised her worth then! Her beauty had dimmed her other qualities. She was all of Helen and Henriette, too... That glorious courage of Henriette in face of the shells! The woman who had waited had not been afraid. When she had only to raise her finger to bring the strong and the well to pay her court, her loyalty had not faltered when he was too horrible to remain alive. If he had not been wounded he would never have known her true worth...
How had such luck come to him? Silence, you pain devils! It had—it had! The messages of her sturdy determination that had fortified him and of the nonsense that cheers which she had written on his arm were recalled. Now he was imagining the touch of her fingers on his arm writing good news. Any minute he might feel her hand-clasp announcing her return. For he had no idea of time; her comings and goings set his calendar. This Henriette made the other seem only a doll. She said that he would get well. He should. It was too good a world for his sight not to come back in order that he might feed it on the beautiful vision of her—now that suffering had taught him how to appreciate her.
"You are very eerie this afternoon," whispered the Fiend General Commanding, beaten down to a grumbling complaint. "If we could only stop you from thinking of her we'd soon have you."
"You never will!" Phil replied. "She has the measure of such imps of hell as you."
And he slept.