THE JADE TEAPOT
Private Saunders, of the Ninth Infantry, was flushed and dazed with fever, but able to walk from the ambulance up a stone stairway into what looked to him like a huge and gilded warehouse. At first glance, he did not see the long rows of cots whose gray blankets blended with the carpet of dusk and shadow in the late winter afternoon. Monstrous golden dragons seemed to writhe and flicker against the roof beams far above him, or twist in play on lines of massive columns. Saunders dropped his kit and leaned on his rifle while he rubbed his eyes with a trembling hand. If this was the hospital of the American army in Peking, he wished that some one would turn out the guard and capture the menagerie that had taken possession. Sliding uncertain feet across the flagged floor, he fell over a cot and gripped a protesting leg, whose owner sputtered:
"Get off o' me, you left-footed lobster. Ain't there no chance for a man to be sick without the roof fallin' on him? Why, hello, Jim, what in blazes is the matter with you? Brace up and holler for the orderly. He's somewhere down at the end of the line, packin' up what's left of Chase of P Company, who just passed in his checks."
Saunders sat on the edge of the cot and wept with the whimper of a tired child:
"Is it the hospital sure enough, Shorty? All them ten-foot dragons makin' faces at me in the dark ain't comfortin' to a man with wheels in his head. Guess this must be the Emp'ror's private temple. Why, here's a dozen o' my pals spraddled around over the floor. I've hit the right place, all right. Lead me to my bunk, an' get me bedded down."
The overworked hospital corps private, who was nurse and orderly for the ward, picked up the accouterments of Saunders, and helped him crawl under the blankets of the cot alongside "Shorty" Blake. The contract surgeon, delaying to question a group of convalescents in the courtyard, came in to examine the new patient, and said "pneumonia" to the nurse. Saunders heard nothing of the consultation, for he was looking up into the gloom of the distant rafters, and trying to count the racing gilded dragons that would not be still and made his head ache intolerably. When lanterns were lighted at the ends of each aisle, the shadows danced worse than before, and to his fevered eyes the great temple was populous with glittering shapes in terrifying agitation.
This, the largest of the clustered buildings in the park of the Temple of Earth, was an extraordinary hospital, even in daylight. Sacred to the annual pilgrimage of the Emperor in his worship of the Supreme Deity, these temples had been inviolate for many centuries until profaned by the conquering foreign allies. The walled park became the camp of the American forces, and one of the most sacred shrines of the land was used as a field hospital. A regiment could have been drilled on the marble pavement without crowding, and the two hundred sick soldiers scattered in the vastness of it were bitten with a sense of chilling desolation.
Between flights of delirium, through his first night in hospital, Saunders heard the groans and restless muttering of many men, and his fancies magnified them into an army. There were neither screens nor walls to divide the wards, only the rows of cots between the carved pillars that marched across the temple floor, so that all individual suffering and the tenacious struggle of dying became common property. The soldiers who passed away in the night time did not trouble their comrades so much as when death came in daylight, and the end was a spectacle thrust upon those in surrounding cots.