Green for Danger (12 page)

“You talk as if I were accusing you of carelessness, my boy,” said Cockie, gruffly.

“Well, it's so idiotic to suggest that I neglected to do something which it would have been sheer idiocy to
do
.”

“I look at it from the layman's point of view,” said Cockrill; it was not like him to be so humble.

Barney cursed all laymen under his breath; and Higgins above all for dying and letting him in for all this maddening heckling; and Cockrill for—for coming to the hospital and doing his best to stop ugly questions about himself! He tried to smile and appear a little more grateful. “Anything else?” The party would be in full swing by now.

“I don't think so. But on our way out,” suggested Cockrill with a certain temerity, “you might just show me where the empty cylinders are kept.…”

Barney pushed open the door of a big cupboard. “The stock's kept downstairs in the Reserve Medical Store, of course; but we have a certain amount of stuff here for current use.” A number of cylinders were ranged on brackets along one wall, and half a dozen lay rolled together on the floor. “These are sent back to the manufacturers for refilling,” said Barnes, drubbing his toe against them. “Here's a list of what's in, what's being used, and what's actually been used. It all seems to check up O.K.”

The swing doors closed behind them. “If this has been a penance to you, my boy,” said Cockrill, fishing for paper and tobacco, rolling a cigarette and slapping his pockets noisily for matches; “it's nothing to what it's been to me.” A light flared in the dim hall and he drew deeply on his first cigarette in more than half an hour.

CHAPTER V

1

A
routine investigation into an anæsthetic death had seemed to the Commanding Officer insufficient reason for cancelling his seven days' leave; and when the C.O. took his seven days' leave, the Mess automatically threw a party. A large, rather dingy room called the Ladies' Room, was dusted and polished for the first time since the Colonel's last absence, a motley collection of buns and sandwiches was arranged on one of the tables, and a row of bottles stood on the piano top. There was the usual little difficulty as to whether the Sisters would kick up a fuss if V.A.D.s were invited, and the usual decision that this was only an informal do, and it didn't matter in the least whether they did or not; there was the usual mix-up as to who had promised to see about the French chalk, and the usual rejoicing on the part of a lance-corporal who was taken away from some more arduous duty to fix up the radiogram. The older members of the Mess retired to the ante-room and confided to each other that it was difficult to know whether one should shut one's eyes to this kind of thing or just mention it to the C.O. on his return and let him do any blinking that
he
thought advisable; and ended by agreeing that boys would be boys and, after all, there was no harm in it. As the boys concerned were all qualified doctors and surgeons and included Major Moon who was getting on for sixty, this would appear to have been a rational decision. The officers' wives arrived in full force and there was a little competition in condescension between themselves and the Sisters, for most of the wives were very young and took their husbands' pips or crowns with the utmost solemnity; while the Queen Alexandras, besides ranking as officers themselves, had the unquestionable advantage of being on their own home ground. The younger officers had brought V.A.D.s from their various departments or wards; Barnes, because Frederica was on night duty, had invited Esther; Gervase Eden had for so long produced Sister Bates upon these occasions that it had been impossible to alter his custom; and Major Moon, who steadily went the rounds asking a different person each time so that nobody should feel left out, had brought his own theatre V.A.D., Woods. Woody, in pursuance of her plan, took advantage of Freddi's absence to make hay with Major Eden. She sat on the arm of a chair and ran her hand provocatively from knee to ankle of one of her exquisite, silk-clad legs. He said, at last: “Don't do that; you're driving me crackers.”

She stopped and turned towards him, the whole lovely line from ankle to hip exposed. “Am I? I don't see why?”

“Heaven help me!” thought Gervase. “Here I go!” His expression was the expression of a drowning man. He suggested: “Let's go out and get some air.”

The black-out curtains were closely drawn, there was no ventilation, and the atmosphere grew hot and full of smoke and the smell of beer. The guns still pounded outside, but the raid had not developed into anything serious. The wives, who had mostly come from a distance, leaving nannies and babies safe in the country for a single night, took advantage of the precious evening to flirt with their own husbands. The Sisters and V.A.D.s whirled round with their chosen officers, laughing and chattering and having a very good time. Marion Bates stood alone by the piano and poured herself out a very large gin. Barnes arriving, saw her there; he made his apologies to his own guest, Esther, who had arrived before him and was sitting with Major Moon, and went over to the mantelpiece. “Hallo, Sister! Aren't you dancing this one?”

“No, I'm drinking it,” she said sullenly.

He took the glass out of her hand and put it on a corner of the piano. “It'll keep; come and dance with me.”

She danced round in silence, but she was beside herself with jealousy and pain and after a few minutes she burst out: “Why doesn't he come back?”

“I should let him go,” said Barney quietly.

She pulled a little way from him and looked into his face, though she continued, automatically, to dance. “How did you know who I was talking about?”

He smiled at her with gentle mockery. “It isn't very difficult to guess. He's only out in the garden, walking up and down with Woody; I saw them as I came in.”

“I hate him,” she said vehemently.

“There's such a delicate little line of difference between love and hate, isn't there?” said Barney, in his quiet voice. “It's like a sort of circle—you don't quite know where love stops and where hate starts.”

“Gervase knows where love stops all right,” said Bates angrily. She added, as though struck by an idea: “And he knows where hate starts, too. It starts at you!”

His eyes clouded over, but he said immediately: “Oh, nonsense; why should Eden hate me?”

“Most people hate anyone they do an injury to,” she said shrewdly. “It's a sort of protection against their own conscience. And Gervase Eden is doing you an injury all the time. Don't pretend you don't know that.”

“Well, never mind,” he said. “Don't let's talk about it.”

“You
are
a
fool
,” she said, her eyes on the door. “You think it's nothing, just a mild little attraction, don't you? Well, you're wrong. I caught him kissing her in the bunk the other night; he swore he wasn't, but I know better—he was. And I saw his face. He never looked like that after he'd kissed
me
. I believe he really is falling in love this time; before you know where you are, he'll be asking her to marry him—and
then
will she stick to you?”

“I think so,” he said gravely, though his heart was cold with dread; he could not bear to discuss it with her, but he felt impelled to argue: “Besides, he's a married man.”

“Married my foot,” said Bates, with vulgar contempt. “Do you think I don't know that old gag? Oh yes, I fell for it at first; every man who wants a little flirtation with you tells you that he's a married man: he hasn't lived with his wife for years, but the lawyers made a muddle of the divorce and here he is tied to her for life … and now he can't offer you anything but love, baby! Don't tell
me
—I know!”

He felt sorry for her, for she was not made to be ugly and bitter and vulgar. “Poor little you,” he said, looking down at the foolish face and unhappy eyes.

“Poor little you!” she retorted roughly, still watching the door. “Don't you realize that he's rich and glamorous, he's got a marvellous practice in Harley Street.…”

“Well, I don't think I'm glamorous,” admitted Barney mildly. “But I've got a good practice too, you know, and a nice old house and—well, I don't know, most things a girl could want.” He added, laughing: “And anyway, what is all this nonsense about?—he's with Woody now, not Frederica.”

The music stopped. He handed her her drink and got one for himself, and they lit cigarettes, and she stood there silently, watching the door like a dog; her fair hair curled itself up in little frizzy tendrils, round her white veil, and her foolish face was ugly with despair. The clock began to strike eleven and she seemed to be taking a resolution; as the last chime died away and still he did not return, she made up her mind. She said, as though casually: “Did you kill a girl last year, during an operation?”

Barney stiffened and went a little white. “I had a girl die under an anæsthetic, yes. I didn't know that anyone here knew about it.”

“Gervase knows about it,” said Sister Bates.

Eden had referred to it in the theatre; had put his hand to his mouth as though he should not have spoken. “How does he know?” said Barnes.

“Higgins told him,” she said steadily, and her eyes were no longer on the door. “Higgins saw you in the ward when you came in to go over him with the stethoscope for the anæsthetic. Gervase examined him afterwards, before operation, and Higgins asked him if you were a doctor in the town, and Gervase said yes, he thought you used to be; and Higgins said that just before the war you'd killed the daughter of a friend of his. He said that it had all been rather forgotten, but that now he knew you were at Heron's Park, they would write up to the War Office about it; he said that the people would hound you out of Heronsford and out of the army, too.”

“The death was from natural causes,” said Barney shortly. “Every anæsthetist comes across a few cases like that in his career; death was caused as much through the operation as through the anæsthetic, and the coroner exonerated both the surgeon and myself at the inquest. Nobody could say anything against me; they couldn't do me any harm.”

“Gervase didn't seem to think that,” said Bates. “I know because I went and waited for him outside the ward. He was talking to the man for a long time …”

“About
me
?” said Barney incredulously.

“Well, of course about you; what else? He'll have gone very carefully, naturally; he won't have said very much. But if Higgins had gone back into Heronsford and spread it about that one of the other doctors agreed that there had been some bad mistake about that girl—well, it would have wrecked your practice, wouldn't it?”

“What good on earth would that have done Eden?” protested Barney, whose mind reacted slowly to treachery and guile.

“Then you wouldn't have had ‘most things a girl could ask for' to offer to your Frederica,” said Sister Bates, and finished the rest of her drink.

2

Esther sat beside Major Moon on a sofa in one corner of the room. She wished she had not started on gin for it always depressed her and made her talk too much. She found herself telling him the long, sad story of her mother's death. “I'm sorry; this isn't much of the party spirit, is it?”

“Don't be sorry, my dear,” said Major Moon. “It does us all good to speak of our troubles sometimes; and it's odd, isn't it? how often one feels like doing it to strangers … not that you and I are strangers, of course, but I dare say you can't often open your heart like this even to your more intimate friends …?”

“They have their troubles too,” said Esther sombrely; “one can't always be moaning about one's own. Freddi has no home to go back to after the war; her father's married to some awful, common woman, and all her life's sort of fallen apart.… She's engaged now, of course, but—well, I don't know …”