The Diamond Waterfall (35 page)

He didn't say anything about coming home, although he'd decided he'd go there the first time he had proper leave. He had had a weekend pass already which he had spent at Gus's home. He'd visited Bert's home and met Winnie, and Snowy's family, who lived next door.

Meanwhile at the barracks, he could amuse them. They found him amusing, their clown.

“Give us your
Fräulein,
Marmaduke. Listen to his Nibs now. Fuck Von Kluck.”

“Give us the Sarge talking to his missus. Now, Sarge's missus talking to Sarge…. Better than pierrots last summer, Scarborough—”

“Good as a night at the Empire.”

“Don't push your luck after Lights Out…. Mild and bitter twice, once down, once up. Watch out for Sarge.”

“04 Greenwood—I didn't hear you. … 04 Greenwood.
Do you hear me?
You'd soon find it if there was hair round it.”

The letter, which had traveled through Holland and was over three months old, reached Alice in the May of 1916 when she was already in France. It had been stamped by the censor. She wondered what he had made of it, that, to her, so familiar round yet spiky hand, more used to German than to modern
script. The letter was in English, but the recognizable confused English of Fräulein in one of her emotional states. Alice could see the great face distorted, collapsed with distress.

She began to read. And as she did so, shocked, part of her thought,
But of course …

All the day now I am thinking of Family Firth, please I don't understand how I lived among you with my
wickedness
which was not being punished. That sad day when the God of War struck our two countries, I was trying
very hardly
to make my confession. I was not able. Now, it is
God
who punishes.

It is I who take the rubies and emeralds and other matters from your home. (I did not
wish
this knowledge where and how the keys are being kept.) In my great despair concerning my beloved Augustin, I listened to the Evil One.
Und
he speaks, Alice, with such a voice that it made for me a command:
Save Augustin!

I cannot speak even yet of the journey I have taken home after and of how every man was for me a police, so afraid I was. I never speak to Augustin of this—a life full of worries such as he has, it was not for me to make it more full.

These jewels, I sold them, and it made no difficulty. And I was happy, yes, even though so wicked—because there was so much gold for him, and he isn't going to prison.

Then I did not sleep any nights until I have a letter and learn that you find the stones are gone, but no man has arrestation for it. This suspicion of the boy from the farm … Such persons are used to these things. I hear when I return in the month of January that all is for now forgotten. I believe then in God's hand, because Augustin works now a serious man—it means from bad I have been bringing good.

But I
cannot forget
So when suddenly I have learned that because of our Kaiser I must leave you—it is not for me bearable. I know then I must tell you
all
I was thinking they shall put me in
English
prison to be punished.
Und
after, again we are friends once more.

Excuse me that I write in this confusion, I am not in good health and have some “woman trouble” so that I am going to the hospital here. But now because I make confession and ask that you please forgive the wicked thing I do in your house, I ask also God that He forgives me—and that He takes away the
worst
punishment.

Augustin is in Russia. Yes! Such a man, thirty-five years of age— he was already Oktober '14 in the army—Why dear Gott does he do this when they have not asked for the ones of this age? But He will protect him now I have confessed and pay this debt.

Some of the writing was illegible, the paper tear-stained. Tears from that great, inexhaustible source. “Fräulein's fountains,” as Hal had called them— or was it Gib? It did not matter, except that it belonged to the far-off days.
We made jokes then,
she thought.

As of course they did now. But differently—in defiance of this war which already had altered their lives beyond any return. Crowded events of the last twenty months—with their twin peaks of distress: disappearance of Hal, Gib's departure for the Dardanelles …

She had found those early months of the war frustrating. Gib, although still in England, was away training. Belle Maman was preoccupied turning The Towers into a hospital, and Papa was suddenly so busy he had time for no one. Not only would he be taking care of the hospital administration, but he was also chairman of the War Aid Committee, on the board of the Local Aid Committee and the Recruiting Committee, as well as helping administer the Belgian Relief Fund. There'd been, too, the arrival in the village of Belgian refugees: Teddy settling down to learning French, both formally and informally, but seeming to be everywhere, wanting always to be “helpful.”

For Alice, who would like really to have been on one of Papa's committees, there was to be work in the hospital. Belle Maman had assured her of this, even consulting her in matters of organization.

So far, though, her life had been ridiculous bandaging parties: rolling bandages, or unrolling them in order to encase healthy people like mummies. Too much time was spent traveling to and from these parties, which ended up often as social occasions. In the autumn as the news worsened, when it became apparent that not only would life not be normal by Christmas but that it would never be the same again, she took a First Aid Certificate. After that it seemed the best thing since she had decided (No, they had
both
decided) not to marry yet—that she should become a nurse.

A VAD. “Victim Always Dies,” Hal told her, having read it somewhere. There was a little teasing generally. Gib was neither approving nor disapproving. A little admiring, perhaps.

So by November it was Gib in the south of England, she at a hospital in York. From her window she could see soldiers drilling out on the near frozen grass. In early December they left for France, and as it was a free period, she went with other nurses to see them off at the station. She'd grown over the weeks to think of them as “her” soldiers. That night as she undressed for bed she found herself sobbing.

She knew that she worried about Gib. That every soldier she saw, most especially those she nursed, was a reminder. Khaki, hospital pajamas, hospital blue—it made no matter. Once Gib left the safety of England how would she dare to breathe by day, sleep by night?

Fortunately he seemed in no hurry to go. He'd said to her once or twice,

“I don't know why some chaps make such a fuss—when we're needed, they'll use us soon enough. Until then, best to learn all one can.” He wrote to her that Vesey had a commission with the Sherwood Foresters, while Saint had surprised them all by choosing the sea, and was now in the RNVR.

She wrote daily to Gib, managing to see him once during her three months in York. In early February she got a place in a London hospital, together with her friend Marjorie Penruddock. (She found the plump, always smiling, red-headed girl, eight years her junior, a mixed blessing. From the first day she had thought Alice quite wonderful. “You
never
get things wrong, Miss Firth.”)

The girls she nursed with knew Alice was promised in marriage. They assumed that she was waiting for the first convenient opportunity to have the ceremony. But she knew that she, that both of them, were right not to marry yet, with the world as it was, the war going so badly, so much uncertainty. (Had not Gib himself remarked, “I can't think it's right to bring children into the world, just now.” But such matters, having babies, she did not want even to think about.) Marriage was difficult enough in a peaceful, predictable world. She had only to remember what her own mother had suffered. How badly Belle Maman had behaved…. Even for those who truly loved each other, were there not pitfalls?

Within a few weeks of her arrival in London, she heard the news of Hal. Everyone was sympathetic, knew someone who had a son, a brother, a cousin who had done just that. But in most of the stories the boy had come home to confess what he had done, to be forgiven, to be supported. Hal had not merely joined up, he had run away—without trace.

Belle Maman's distress, the frantic letter to Alice, the War Office called upon to help. Papa's friends. The searches promised for a “Firth, HRF.” She could not understand how those same strings, so easily pulled for her, now seemed useless. Worry, desperation, and finally anger. A letter from him. At last, his return. His first leave at home.

She herself had been terrified—as those years ago when he had come back screaming from the scene of Jack's death. What would become of him? Wouldn't he be, if nothing else, desperately homesick? He who had never been away to school. And those other worse fears of the family—that he might simply have disappeared? Fallen among thieves. An innocent abroad. Robbed, murdered, who knew what?

In York, she had had time to think. Now, in London, working in the military extension of one of the big teaching hospitals, she did not so much postpone thought as find it crowded out by activity.

She was completely unimportant. Nurse Firth and Miss Firth of The Towers were two different persons. Nurse Firth was one cog in a giant wheel. She discovered that in many ways she preferred that. All those years of being an alone child…. She slept now in a dormitory with the thinnest of partitions
separating her from her fellow nurses. Almost every minute of her day ordered, prearranged—and shared.

She was good at the work, certainly good enough to pass muster. I must be more practical than I realized, she told herself. And sharp: perhaps it was an advantage to be sharp—here it meant alert, quick-thinking, anticipating wants, needs.

Before all this she would never have believed she would like being teased. But when a boy, no older she would have sworn than Hal, said to her, “My sister's a VAD too, Victim Always Dies—only I prefer Very Artful Darlings. Are you artful or just a darling?” “I'm a darling,” she told him in her crispest voice.

She nursed officers, probably, she thought, because she wasn't obviously pretty or even very young. In fact, not likely to flirt. During her second week, a convoy of wounded had arrived. In the nonstop nursing that followed, she discovered about herself many new things, hidden strengths. Where she'd expected to be squeamish or shocked—she was neither. She could do anything, however intimate, for any of them. She saw a naked man for the first time, and realized she'd been afraid of that, for years. Now when it happened, in a setting of bedpans, dressings, pain, dependency—it did not matter.

It was the wounds that frightened her the most, although she would never have allowed her fear to show. Bad enough in themselves—flesh and bone were no match for all that flying metal, sheer weight of weaponry—they were made even worse by the fearful infections that were so common a sequel. These were not the clean wounds of the Boer War, from fighting on sandy soil (oh, those easy heroic days of
With the Flag to Pretoria
when in their imaginings Gib's Galloper cousin thundered across the veldt), but rather wounds quickly infected by bacteria from rich plowland. The sight, the smell (above all the smell), the suffering became commonplace. She had seen nothing of this in York—she who had never so much as dealt with a sink of dirty dishes now handled flesh that suppurated, green, black, blue. Often her own arms and hands would be covered in the pus that poured out and poured out. This wasn't the lifeblood, warm and red, the “wine of youth” of which people spoke and wrote so romantically, so carelessly. In her mind, this disgusting, stinking pus stood for all the war had now become.

It was from one of these wounds that she had the trouble with her left hand that first winter. Both hands in the extreme cold had become covered with chilblains—she had not had these since her days in the schoolroom. Some of these became cracked so that even putting on or taking off her uniform in the icy dormitory was an ordeal. Then, pus from a gangrenous leg, which she was holding during dressing, ran over her hands. One finger became badly infected. The abscess was lanced but there was some permanent damage, so that she had a stiff, almost useless fourth finger. (And it was there
that Gib would place, and she would wear, the gold band when they were wed.)

“You're already having a much worse war than I am,” he told her, on one of his weekend passes when he would stay with an uncle in Highgate and she would try to arrange her little free time to fit. He seemed mildly depressed, not so much wishing to see action as beginning to feel he was being passed over. Still part of the Reserve Battalion. (Possibly, she thought, because of his teaching abilities—he was an excellent instructor.)

They spoke of the days when it would all be over. Sitting opposite him in a tea shop, she imagined instead that they sat over the breakfast table in their own home—which would be part of the school where Gib would teach.

The issue of marriage came up again when Gib heard suddenly that he was to go abroad. Not to France or Belgium. There was to be a new front out East. The details she only understood later: that the idea behind it was to break the deadlock, apparent in the trenches since the autumn, by turning the Germans' attention elsewhere. The Dardanelle straits to be forced, Constantinople to be taken.

Where he was going there would be no “few days' leave.” And—
he might not come back
A notion so obvious, so horrible she could not voice it. But once again, the same arguments applied. What had a hurried ceremony, signing of a register, sharing of a name to do with what bound her and Gib?

“No,” she said, “I don't think so.
You
don't, do you?”

“If you don't wish it, no. Better not.”