The Story of Dr. Wassell (8 page)

The doctor thought that it had really mattered a great deal, but he backed
up Renny and urged the men to go to sleep again. Then he went into Wilson’s
room across the corridor. He did not speak for a long time. Wilson was awake
and smoking.

“Twelve it was,” said Wilson quietly. “I heard the men arguing.”

“Yes, twelve,” agreed the doctor. “The thirteenth should have been
ours.”

After another long pause Wilson lit a fresh cigarette and added more
quietly still: “Did you ever feel as bad about anything in your life?”

“Yes, once.”

“When?”

“About fifteen years ago—in China.”

“Anything similar to this?”

“Hardly.”

“What then? Or is it something private?”

“Oh no. Don’t mind telling you if you’re interested. I’d been working for
years tracking down the carrier of amoebic dysentery, and at last I found it
just about a day before an article appeared in a medical journal announcing
the same discovery by someone else.”

“Tough luck.”

“Well, maybe—in a sense—but after all it’s the discovery that
counts, not who makes it. Don’t you think so?”

Later the doctor could not sleep, and while he was lying awake he heard a
tap on his door and went to open it. Dr. Voorhuys was standing in the
corridor, fully dressed and apparently quite calm. But there was something a
little odd about him that the doctor sensed immediately, though he could not
exactly say what it was.

“I’m glad you are awake,” said Dr. Voorhuys, “because there is something
you ought to know at once. I did not think it would happen. The enemy has
landed on Java.”

The doctor from Arkansas nodded. It was a blow but he felt himself struck
rather than surprised by it. And suddenly, at that singularly inappropriate
moment, he began to smile, because he had just noticed what was particularly
odd about the doctor. It was something he would not have mentioned, except
that he felt he must explain the smile, and there was nothing, he could think
of but the truth. Dr. Voorhuys was already walking away along the corridor
when the Arkansas doctor overtook him. “Why, Doctor,” he exclaimed, “you’re
smoking
!”

Dr. Voorhuys puffed the smoke of his long black cigar into the clean
antiseptic air of the hospital corridor. Then he smiled also. “Perhaps, sir,
it is a time for breaking the rule of a lifetime, since our lifetime may not
be as long as we expect.”

The doctor went back to his own room, dressed quickly and glanced into the
ward where the men lay. All were asleep, and the Dutch nurse in charge was
reading a book so comfortably that it was clear she had not heard the bad
news. The doctor then glanced into Wilson’s room and saw that he too was
asleep. Next he telephoned to Tjilatjap, waiting almost an hour before he
could get through. After that he left the hospital and walked into the town.
Evidently the news had reached there, for crowds were congregated at street
corners, and the lobby of the Grand Hotel was as busy as—indeed, busier
than—at a normal noon. There was no panic, but a tensely rising
excitement, and just before dawn this excitement soared to fever pitch when
the foremost vehicles of an apparently endless British convoy parked in front
of the hotel, and its commanding officer, dressed in khaki pants and a brown
sun helmet, entered to ask what he could buy in the way of food and supplies.
This officer was not the kind of man the doctor took to on sight. There was a
sort of languid aloofness about the way he gave his orders to the hotel
people and to his subordinates; yet the doctor had to admit that each order
was perfectly clear, despite the languor, and perfectly reasonable, despite
the air with which it was delivered. The doctor thought about this for a
moment, but found it somewhat incomprehensible; so, shrugging off all
feelings about it, he nerved himself to approach the fellow and say “Hello.”
At this the Englishman’s manner instantly froze (the mere conditioned reflex
of being accosted by a stranger), then unfroze very slightly at the sight of
the uniform. “How do you do?” he mumbled as from a great distance.

“Excuse me, but are you evacuating your men to Tjilatjap?” asked the
doctor.

“Rather,” answered the Englishman, almost yawning.

A sergeant touched the officer’s elbow to deliver some message which
elicited another expression of languid assent; after which the sergeant
saluted and the officer turned again to the doctor. The latter was
fidgeting.

“Anything I can do for you by any chance?” continued the Englishman, his
politeness now chilled with infinite boredom.

Suddenly the doctor had it. He said abruptly: “Sure you can, if you will.
I have nine wounded men in my charge—most of them stretcher cases. How
about taking us with you?”

The manager of the hotel was now at hand, proffering chits for the officer
to sign. As he signed them he muttered: “Don’t mind—provided they can
travel in trucks, and you have ‘em here in two hours…”

This time the doctor did not fidget. He snapped out “Okay” and dashed off
through the crowded lobby.

The doctor woke each man as quietly as he could, then went to the end of
the ward and leaned over the rail of McGuffey’s bed. “Boys,” he said, “we’ve
another chance to get out of here and it’s a last chance. Get ready as quick
as you can.”

They tried to delay him with a chorus of questions, protests, and
complaints. “Listen,” he shouted, over their voices, “don’t ask me for
details. You don’t
have
to go, but
I’m
going and I’ll take
anybody with me, and I hope it’ll be everybody. So hurry up…I’ll be back in
half an hour for those who’ve made up their minds.” Then from the door he
added: “If you want any reasons, I’ll give you just two. The Japs are in
Java, and those planes we heard last night weren’t reinforcements—they
were our own planes getting the hell out…”

He woke Wilson and gave him more details. “There’s a British convoy in the
town—the captain says he’ll take us to Tjilatjap. I know there are
ships still there, because I telephoned this morning. So get ready…that is,
if you want to go.
I’m
going.”

“What,
again?
” said Wilson, putting all his thoughts into that one
word.

“Yes, again,” answered the doctor. “And don’t pack all that stuff you took
the last time—there won’t be room.”

He knew that it had been a big bluff, talking like that to Wilson and to
the men. He knew that if a single one of them refused, he could not leave
him,
would
not leave him—and what would happen then he could lay
no plans for. When the half hour had elapsed he hesitated for a second
outside the door of the ward, as if aware that he was about to try the last
possible key in the lock of fate.

All the men were ready.

He looked at them for a moment, unable to speak; then he made the thumbs-
up sign and said: “Good for you, boys. Let’s get going.”

So the nine men from the
Marblehead
went down to
Tjilatjap a second
time.

There had been second farewells at the hospital, but with a new and wilder
note in them—the nurses kissed and embraced the men with a half-
preoccupied air, for they were already constrained to think of other things,
of what would happen to them and to their friends and families later. The men
were derisive in an American way that the Dutch and Javanese could not
properly understand—how
could
anyone joke at such a moment? But
some of the men kept kidding about the whole situation. “Don’t worry,
nurse—we’ll be back to-morrow. Have a nice meal ready for us, won’t
you?…The doe’s just taking us for another day at the beach, that’s
all…”

The doctor heard but did not object to these remarks. They seemed to him
as helpful as anything else that could have been said.

The nine men from the
Marblehead
sorted themselves out (under the
doctor’s supervision) into worse and better cases. The latter rode in a
truck, lying down as best they could on the flat boards. The former climbed
into the Ford car whose springs and cushions were kinder to their wounds;
there were Sun, whose legs were not yet much recovered, and Francini, who had
to sit upright. The doctor fixed Sun so that his legs stretched comfortably,
over the back of the front seat. Wilson, whose wounds enabled him to sit and
almost now to stand, took the seat next to the doctor.

Muller, with the shattered leg, was given a lift in the British captain’s
car.

The doctor would not start until the entire convoy had passed, so that he
knew for certain that his men had not been left behind. This entailed a
considerable wait, for there were some two hundred trucks, containing ack-ack
guns, field kitchens, traveling repair shops—the whole outfit of a
modern mechanized force.

The journey began before the sun was high, and continued slowly but
without a pause until well into the afternoon. The doctor did not at first
regret the slow pace, for it was years since he had driven a car before, and
both the gear shift and the “keep-to-the-left” rule were new to him. It took
him several hours to get really used to these novelties and relax a little.
Wilson, in pain but not complaining, slept for long stretches. Sun was so
quiet that it was hard to tell whether he were even in pain or not. Francini
sat carefully upright, trying to minimize the jolts of the roadway by flexing
his muscles in advance. The doctor tried as far as he could to avoid such
jolts, but sometimes it was impossible and then he would half turn round and
say “Sorry” to the boy behind. Somehow he knew there was no point in saying,
“Sorry,” since the boy knew he couldn’t help it, but he still went on saying
it.

Towards noon he began to feel sleepy, but fortunately a British
motorcyclist, red-faced and incredibly cheerful, rode alongside to shout a
warning of possible air attack. The whole convoy was to be spaced out to
minimize the risk of bomb hits, and everyone must be prepared to jump out at
a moment’s notice and take shelter in the roadside ditches. The cyclist rode
off in a cloud of dust, having delivered this message, leaving the doctor to
wonder how Sun and Nilson and Francini could perform such acrobatic feats in
any conceivable emergency. But there was nothing for it but just to drive on
and hope for the best. At any rate, the incident had served to wake him
up.

But not some other drivers, apparently, for at several places he noticed
trucks burning at the roadside, either from driving mishaps or because they
had broken down irreparably and had been deliberately fired.

He had to concentrate on his own driving for another reason: the Dutch
officer who was leading the way began to pick out side roads which he knew
were tree-shaded, so as to lessen the risk of Jap planes spotting the convoy.
This meant longer, slower, and (unfortunately for Sun and Francini) much
bumpier travel. And there was an increasing amount of opposite
traffic—Dutch Army cars loaded with soldiers, Staatswacht troops in
forest-green uniforms, Red Cross ambulances, gaudily decorated native oxcarts
which were the worst peril of all. The doctor began to fear those oxcarts
more than bombs.

He did not talk much during the journey, except now and then a few
sentences over his shoulder to Sun and Francini—to the former, of
course, in Chinese. Whenever he spoke in Chinese, Wilson would rib him about
it—“Aw, for heaven’s sake, what sort of a lingo is that? How long did
it take you to learn it?”

“About ten years,” answered the doctor quietly. “And I still don’t know it
very well.”

“I guess they could use you as an interpreter, though.”

The doctor agreed. “I rather thought they would, but they sent me to look
after you fellows instead. And what a job!” He laughed, fishing in his pocket
meanwhile for a cigarette.

“Keep both your hands on the wheel, man,” Wilson shouted. “I’ll light one
for you.”

It was not easy for Wilson to use his hands, but at last he succeeded in
getting a cigarette alight; then he leaned over and found the cigarette
holder in the doctor’s breast pocket. “And don’t turn round and poke me in
the eye with it,” he added.

The more tired they became and the more arduous and perilous the journey
the more they grumbled at each other, jokingly, meaninglessly,
affectionately. It passed the time, and the doctor thought it probably helped
to cheer up Francini behind. Once, when he had said “Sorry” after a
particularly bad bump, and the boy had moaned slightly, the doctor continued:
“It’s just luck that you’re here, Francini, and not in that British officer’s
car instead of Muller. I’d be scared stiff if I was driving with that fellow
for two hundred miles…Oh no, he’s all right—I’ve nothing
against
him—matter of fact, he was pretty good to take
us—but he sort of looks at you as if you weren’t there.”

“We won’t be there, either,” said ‘Wilson, “if you don’t keep your eye on
the road.”

And so they went on, throughout the long hot afternoon. Once they saw
planes overhead that looked like a Jap reconnaissance, and for half and hour
afterwards thought of nothing but bombers, but presently the very fear in
their hearts grew bored with waiting. Then the doctor began to feel sleepy
again, and the effort to keep awake drove everything else out of his mind. He
would shut his eyes tight for a few seconds and then open them again sharply;
he hit himself on the forehead to produce actual pain; and at every stretch
of road where there was good shelter he hoped and even prayed that the convoy
might decide on a halt. Surely they must stop soon; even soldiers could not
keep up the strain indefinitely. Wilson, Francini, and Sun had all fallen
asleep—Wilson was snoring, and at first the doctor had thought the
snore was a lap bomber approaching over the roadside hedges. He laughed aloud
when he found out what it really was, and the laugh kept him awake for
another half mile. Then he resumed the struggle, and once—for perhaps
ten seconds—he must have been absolutely asleep, for he found the car
swerving way out to the right along the other lane. He pulled back sharply,
thanking heaven there had been no oxcart. His three passengers were still
asleep; no one would ever know how nearly he had come to meeting disaster.
The thought nerved him to another effort of wakefulness, and just when this
was about spent he saw arms waving from the truck a hundred yards in front.
It was the signal for a halt.