by A. J. Cronin
There was a silence while they slowly grasped his meaning. Lieutenant Shon smiled.
‘Cadavers are accumulating in the side streets at a disconcerting rate. It is discouraging to stumble in the darkness and fall into the arms of an unresponsive corpse.’
Francis shot a quick glance at Maria-Veronica’s expressionless face. Sometimes the young Lieutenant was a little indiscreet.
The doctor had moved to the nearest crate and, with stolid competence, was prying off the lid.
‘The first thing we do is fit you out properly. Oh! I know you two believe in God. And the Lieutenant in Confucius.’ He bent and produced rubber boots from the case. ‘But I believe in prophylaxis.’
He completed the unpacking of his supplies, fitting white overalls and goggles upon them, berating their negligence of their own safety. His remarks ran on, matter-of-fact, composed. ‘Don’t you realize, you confounded innocents … one cough in your eye and you’re done for … penetration of the cornea. They knew that even in the fourteenth century … they wore vizors of isinglass against this thing … it was brought down from Siberia by a band of marmoset hunters. Well, now, I’ll come back later, Sister, and have a real look at your patients. But first of all, Shon, the Reverend and myself will take a peek round.’
In his stress of mind, Francis had overlooked the grim necessity of swift interment before the germ-infested bodies were attacked by rats. Individual burial was impossible in that iron ground and the supply of coffins had run out long ago. All the fuel in China would not have burned the bodies – for as Shon again remarked, nothing is less inflammable than frozen human flesh. One practical solution remained. They dug a great pit outside the walls, lined it with quicklime, and requisitioned carts. The loaded carts, driven by Shon’s men, bumped through the streets and shot their cargo into this common grave.
Three days later, when the city was cleared and the stray carcasses, half-devoured and dragged away by dogs, collected from the ice-encrusted fields, stricter measures were enforced. Afraid lest the spirits of their ancestors be defiled by an unholy tomb, people were hiding the bodies of their relatives, storing scores of infected corpses under the floor-boards of their houses and in the kaolin roofs.
At the doctor’s suggestion Lieutenant Shon promulgated an edict that all such hoarders would be shot. When the death carts rumbled through the city his soldiers shouted: ‘Bring out your dead. Or you yourselves will die.’
Meanwhile, they were ruthlessly destroying certain properties which Tulloch had marked as breeding grounds of the disease. Experience and dire necessity made the doctor vengefully efficient. They entered, cleared the rooms, demolished the bamboo partitions with axes, spread kerosene, and made a pyre for the rats.
The Street of the Basket-makers was the first they razed. Returning, scorched and grimed, a hatchet still in his hand, Tulloch cast a queer glance at the priest, walking wearily beside him through the deserted streets. He said, in sudden compunction:
‘This isn’t your job, Francis. And you’re worn so fine you’re just about to drop. Why don’t you get up the hill for a few days, back to those kids you’re worrying yourself stiff over?’
‘That would be a pretty sight. The man of God taking his ease while the city burns.’
‘Who is there to see you in this out-of-the-way hole?’
Francis smiled strangely. ‘We are not unseen.’
Tulloch dropped the matter abruptly. Outside the yamen he swung round, gazing glumly at the redness still smouldering in the low dim sky. ‘The fire of London was a logical necessity.’ Suddenly his nerves rasped. ‘Damn it, Francis, kill yourself if you want to. But keep your motives to yourself.’
The strain was telling on them. For ten days Francis had not been out of his clothes, they were stiff with frozen sweat. Occasionally he dragged his boots off, obeyed Tulloch’s command to rub his feet with colza oil – even so his right great toe was inflamed with agonizing frostbite. He was dead with fatigue, but always there was more … more to be done.
They had no water, only melted snow, the wells were solid ice. Cooking was near impossible. Yet every day, Tulloch insisted that they all meet to have their midday meal together, to counteract the growing nightmare of their lives. At this hour, doggedly, he exerted himself to be cheerful, occasionally giving them Edison Bell selections on the phonograph he had brought out with him. He had a fund of North Country anecdotes, stories of the Tynecastle ‘Geordies’, which he drew on freely. Sometimes he had the triumph of bringing a pale smile to Maria-Veronica’s lips. Lieutenant Shon could never understand the jokes, though he listened politely while they were explained to him. Sometimes Shon was a little late in coming to the meal. Though they guessed that he was solacing some pretty lady who still, like themselves, survived, the empty chair took an unsuspected toll upon their nerves.
As the third week began Maria-Veronica showed signs of breaking down. Tulloch was bewailing the lack of floor space in the yamen, when she remarked: ‘If we took hammocks from the Street of the Netmakers we could house double our number of patients … more comfortably, too.’
The doctor paused, gazed at her with grim approbation. ‘ Why didn’t I think of that before? It’s a grand suggestion.’
She coloured deeply under his praise, cast down her eyes and tried to go on with her dish of rice. But she could not. Her arm began to shake. It shook so violently the food dropped off her fork. She could not raise a grain of rice towards her lips. Her flush deepened, spread into her neck. Several times she repeated the attempt and failed. She sat with bent head, enduring the absurd humiliation. Then she rose without a word and left the table.
Later, Father Chisholm found her at work in the women’s ward. He had never known such calm and pitiless self-sacrifice. She performed the most hateful duties for the sick, work which the lowest Chinese sweeper would have spurned. He dared not look at her, so unbearable had their relationship become. He had not addressed her directly for many days.
‘Reverend Mother, Dr Tulloch thinks … we all think you have been doing too much … that Sister Martha should come down to relieve you.’
She had regained only a vestige of her cold aloofness. His suggestion disturbed her anew. She drew herself up. ‘You mean that I am not doing enough?’
‘Far from it. Your work is magnificent.’
‘Then why attempt to keep me from it?’ Her lips were trembling.
He said clumsily. ‘We are considering you.’
His tone seemed to sting her to the quick. Holding back her tears, she answered passionately: ‘Do not consider me. The more work you give me … and the less sympathy … the better I shall like it.’
He had to leave it at that. He raised his eyes to look at her but her gaze was fixedly averted. He sadly turned away.
The snow which had held off for a week suddenly began again. It fell and fell unendingly. Francis had never seen such snow, the flakes so large and soft. Each added snow-flake made an added silence. Houses were walled up in the silent whiteness. The streets were choked with drifts, hindering their work, increasing the sufferings of the sick. His heart was wrung again … again. In the endless days he lost all sense of time and place and fear. As he bent over the dying, succouring them with deep compassion in his eyes, stray thoughts swam through his dizzy brain … Christ promised us suffering … this life was given us only as a preparation for the next … when God will wipe all sorrow from our eyes, weeping and mourning shall be no more.
Now they were halting all nomads outside the walls, disinfecting and holding them in quarantine until assured of their freedom from the disease. As they came back from the isolation huts they had thrown up, Tulloch inquired of him, overtaxed, frayed to a raw anger:
‘Is hell any worse than this?’
He answered, through the fog of his fatigue, blundering forward, unheroic, yet undismayed: ‘Hell is that state where one has ceased to hope.’
None of them knew when the epidemic eased. There was no climax of achi
evement, no operatic crowning of their efforts. Visible evidence of death no longer lingered in the streets. The worst slums lay as dirty ashes on the snow. The mass flight from Northern Provinces gradually ceased. It was as if a great dark cloud, immovably above them, were at last rolling slowly to the southwards.
Tulloch expressed his feelings in a single dazed and jaded phrase.
‘Your God alone knows if we’ve done anything, Francis … I think …’ He broke off, haggard, limp, and for the first time seemed about to break. He swore. ‘The admissions are down again today … let’s take time off or I’ll go mad.’
That evening the two took a brief respite, for the first time, from the hospital and climbed to the mission to spend the night at the priest’s house. It was after ten o’clock and a few stars were faintly visible in the dark-bowl of sky.
The doctor paused on the brow of the snow-embowered hill, which they had ascended with great effort, studying the soft outlines of the mission, lit by the whiteness of the earth. He spoke with unusual quietness: ‘It’s a bonny place you’ve made, Francis. I don’t wonder you’ve fought so hard to keep your little brats safe. Well, if I’ve helped at all, I’m mortal glad.’ His lips twitched. ‘It must be pleasant to spend your days here with a fine-looking woman like Maria-Veronica.’
The priest knew his friend too well to take offence. But he answered, with a strained and wounded smile:
‘I’m afraid she does not find it agreeable.’
‘No?’
‘You must have seen that she loathes me.’
There was a pause. Tulloch gave the priest a queer glance.
‘Your most endearing virtue, my holy man, has always been your painful lack of vanity.’ He moved on. ‘Let’s go in and have some toddy. It’s something to have worked through this scourge and to have the end of it in sight. It sort of lifts one up above the level of the brutes. But don’t try to use that on me as an argument to prove the existence of the soul.’
Seated in Francis’ room they knew a moment of exhausted exaltation, talked of home late into the night. Briefly, Tulloch satirized his own career. He had done nothing, acquired nothing but a taste for whisky. But now, in his sentimental middle age, aware of his limitations, having proved the fallacy of the world’s wide-open spaces, he was hankering for his home in Darrow and the greater adventure of matrimony. He excused himself with a shamed smile.
‘My dad wants me in the practice. Wants to see me raise a brood of young Ingersolls. Dear old boy, he never fails to mention you, Francis … his Roman Voltaire.’
He spoke with rare affection of his sister Jean, now married and comfortably settled in Tynecastle. He said, oddly, not looking at Francis:
‘It took her a long time to reconcile herself to the celibacy of the clergy.’
His silence on the subject of Judy was strangely suspect. But he could not speak enough of Polly. He had met her six months ago in Tynecastle, still going strong. ‘What a woman!’ He nodded across his glass. ‘ Mark my words, she may astound you one day. Polly is, was, and always will be a holy trump.’ They slept in their chairs.
By the end of that week the epidemic showed further indications of abatement. Now the death carts seldom rattled through the streets, vultures ceased to swoop from the horizon and snow no longer fell.
On the following Saturday Father Chisholm stood again on his balcony at the mission, inhaling the ice-cold air, with a deep and blessed thankfulness. From his vantage he could see the children playing in complete unconsciousness behind the tall kaolin fence. He felt like a man towards whom sweet daylight slowly filters after a long and dreadful dream.
Suddenly his gaze was caught by a figure of a soldier, dark against the snowbanks, moving rapidly up the road towards the mission. At first he took the man for one of the Lieutenant’s followers. Then, with some surprise, he saw that it was Shon himself.
This was the first time the young officer had visited him. A puzzled light hovered about Francis’ eyes as he turned and went down the stairs to meet him.
On the doorstep, the sight of Shon’s face stopped the welcome on his lips. It was lemon pale, tight-drawn, and of a mortal gravity. A faint dew of perspiration on the brow bespoke his haste, as did the half-unbuttoned tunic, an unbelievable laxity in one so precise.
The Lieutenant wasted no time. ‘Please come to the yamen at once. Your friend the doctor is taken ill.’
Francis felt a great coldness, a cold shock, like the impact of a frigid blast. He shivered. He gazed back at Shon. After what seemed a long time he heard himself say: ‘ He has been working too much. He has collapsed.’
Shon’s hard dark eyes winced imperceptibly. ‘Yes, he has collapsed.’
There was another pause. Then Francis knew it was the worst. He turned pale. He set out, as he was, with the Lieutenant.
They walked half the way in complete silence. Then Shon, with a military precision that suppressed all feeling, revealed briefly what had occurred. Dr Tulloch had come in with a tired air and gone to take a drink. While he poured the drink he had coughed explosively, and steadied himself against the bamboo table, his face a dingy grey, except for the prune-juice froth upon his lips. As Maria-Veronica ran to help him, he gave her before he collapsed a weak, peculiar smile: ‘Now is the time to send for the priest.’
When they reached the yamen a soft grey mist was drooping, like a tired cloud, across the snow-banked roofs. They entered quickly. Tulloch lay in the small end room, on his narrow camp bed, covered with a quilted mat of purple silk. The rich deep colour of the quilt intensified his dreadful pallor, threw a livid shadow upon his face. It was agony for Francis to see how swiftly the fever had struck. Willie might have been a different man. He was shrunken, unbelievably, as though after weeks of wasting. His tongue and lips were swollen, his eyeballs glazed and shot with blood.
Beside the bed Maria-Veronica was kneeling, replenishing the pack of snow upon the sick man’s forehead. She held herself erect – tensely, her expression rigid in its fixed control. She rose as Francis and the Lieutenant entered. She did not speak.
Francis went over to the bedside. A great fear was in his heart. Death had walked with them these past few weeks, familiar and casual, a dreadful commonplace. But now that death’s shadow lay upon his friend, the pain that struck at him was strange and terrible.
Tulloch was still conscious, the light of recognition remained in his congested gaze. ‘I came out for adventure.’ He tried to smile. ‘I seem to have got it.’ A moment later, he added, half-closing his eyes, as a kind of afterthought: ‘Man, I’m as weak as a cat.’
Francis sat down on the low stool at the head of the bed. Shon and Maria-Veronica were at the end of the room.
The stillness, the painful sense of waiting, was insupportable, growing, alike, with a frightful feeling of intrusion upon the privacy of things unknown.
‘Are you quite comfortable?’
‘I might be worse. Spare me a drop of that Japanese whisky. It’ll help me along. Man, it’s an awful conventional thing to die like this … me that damned the story-books.’
When Francis had given him a sip of spirits he closed his eyes and seemed to rest. But soon he lapsed into a low delirium.
‘Another drink, lad. Bless you, that’s the stuff! I’ve drunk plenty in my time, round the slums of Tynecastle. And now I’m away home to dear old Darrow. On the banks of Allan Water, when the sweet springtime had fled. D’you mind that one, Francis … it’s a bonny song. Sing it Jean. Come on, louder, louder … I cannot hear you in the dark.’ Francis gritted his teeth, fighting the tumult in his breast. ‘That’s right, Your Reverence. I’ll keep quiet and save my strength … It’s a queer business … altogether … we’ve all got to toe the line sometime.’ Muttering, he sank into unconsciousness.
The priest knelt in prayer by the bedside. He prayed for help, for inspiration. But he was strangely dumb, gripped by a kind of stupor. The city outside was ghostly in its silence. Twilight came. Maria-Veronica rose to l
ight the lamp, then returned to the far corner of the room outside the beam of lamplight, her lips unmoving, silent, but her fingers steadily enumerating the beads beneath her gown.
Tulloch was getting worse: his tongue black, his throat so swollen his bouts of vomiting were an agony to watch.
But suddenly he seemed to rally; he dimly opened his eyes.
‘What o’clock is it?’ His voice crouped huskily. ‘Near five … at home … that’s when we had our tea. D’you mind, Francis, the crowd of us at the big round table …?’ A longer pause … ‘Ye’ll write the old man and tell him that his son died game. Funny … I still can’t believe in God.’
‘Does that matter now?’ What was he saying? Francis did not know. He was crying and, in the stupid humiliation of his weakness, the words came from him, in blind confusion. ‘He believes in you.’
‘Don’t delude yourself … I’m not repentant.’
‘All human suffering is an act of repentance.’
There was a silence. The priest said no more. Weakly, Tulloch reached out his hand and let it fall on Francis’ arm.
‘Man, I’ve never loved ye so much as I do now … for not trying to bully me to heaven. Ye see –’ His lids dropped wearily. ‘I’ve such an awful headache.’
His voice failed. He lay on his back, exhausted, his breathing quick and shallow, his gaze upturned, as though fixed far beyond the ceiling. His throat was closed, he could not even cough.
The end was near. Maria-Veronica was kneeling now, at the window, her head back towards them, her gaze directed fixedly into the darkness. Shon stood at the foot of the bed. His face was set immoveably.
Suddenly Willie moved his eyes, in which a lingering spark still flickered. Francis saw that he was trying, vainly, to whisper. He knelt, slipped his arm about the dying man’s neck, brought his cheek close to the other’s breath. At first he could hear nothing. Then weakly came the words: ‘Our fight … Francis … more than sixpence to get my sins forgiven.’