Devil's Wind

by Patricia Wentworth

  Adela had said that she was killing herself with work, but it was not the work which weighed so heavily upon her strength. Work was salvation, but whenever she tended any wounded man, her old enemy, the imagination, showed her Dick so torn, so hurt, and alone, with no one to ease the pain and bring him water, or take the hand that had once grasped life so strongly, and now relaxing—letting it go for ever—yet groped for one human touch before the utter darkness closed.

  Adela dried her eyes and looked curiously at Helen.

  “You do look tired,” she repeated. “Oh, dear, won’t it be nice to sleep in a proper bed again, and have a bath. How long do you think we shall be in this dreadful place, Nellie?”

  “I hope not very long.”

  “Yes, you hope, but why doesn’t some one do something to get us out of it? That is what I want to know. I am sure I should do something if I were a man. I suppose anyhow we should have to wait till September before sailing for home, though I am sure I don’t know what I shall do when I get there, now that I haven’t got poor mamma to go to. Of course I shall have to keep very quiet for a year, and I don’t know what money there is. I suppose poor Richard’s life was insured. Mamma is sure to have insisted on that.”

  “Adela, I can’t bear it,” said Helen suddenly.

  “Really, Helen, what did I say? And as to bearing it, I don’t know what you mean. You haven’t lost your husband, and I shall have to wear black, which never suits me, and a frightful widow’s bonnet, and those bonnets make every one look forty; I’ve often noticed it. And I shall be burnt to a cinder in this dreadful heat. I try to be cheerful for the sake of other people; but I am sure it is enough to depress any one.”

  “Of course it is,” said Helen in a curious voice. “Poor Adie, a lost complexion would be the last straw, wouldn’t it?”

  It was almost dark in the long room now, and almost silent too. Helen got up, wearily.

  “The firing has stopped. I must go back,” she said. “Will you come?”

  “Helen, I told you I couldn’t, and oh, I wish you would stay here. It is so lonely, and I know you will be killed, and I shall have no one left.”

  “Poor Adie,” said Helen again.

  Her voice was quite gentle now.

  “I will try not to get killed, my dear. It would be rather like deserting, wouldn’t it?”

  She moved away, retracing her steps amongst the fanning women and the pale, fretful children.

  The shaft of sunshine was gone, for the sun had dropped, and the thick, hot darkness was coming down upon the room like a suffocating blanket. Beneath it some of the children were already beginning to fall into a restless sleep.

  The firing had ceased at sundown, and the room was full of small fretful noises. Here and there a baby wailed, here and there a mother crooned some little cradle-song.

  Helen stopped just by the door, and spoke to a small cross child of four, who was being undressed by a tired little lady in a soiled green

  gown.

  “Good-night, Jenny,” she said. “Not good-night, welly bad night,” said Miss Jenny with conviction. The mother gave a sad half-laugh.

  “She does so hate not having her bath,” she explained. “But I’ve got a lovely plan. I am going to undress her, and take everything off, and we will pretend a beautiful bath, and rub, and scrub, and go to bed ever so clean and comfy.”

  “Jenny wants real bath—Jenny hates pertence bath!” wailed Jenny.

  Helen stooped again.

  “This is a very special sort of pretence bath,” she whispered. “Just for Jenny. When Jenny has had it, she will go ever so fast asleep, and dream she is swimming in a lovely silvery sea, with pink fishes, and blue fishes, and sparkly goldy fishes, and to-morrow Helen will tell her a story all about real mermaids.”

  “Now! Tell Jenny now.”

  “To-morrow,” said Helen, nodding wisely. “First Jenny will have the pretence bath, and then she will have the lovely swimming dream, and to-morrow Helen will tell her the mermaid story; and she must have a kiss or else the dream will stay away.”

  The child put up her face. Only the eyes were visible in the half-light, and they were full of pleased anticipation. Helen kissed the little damp chin, and passed on.

  A very young girl with her fair hair in a loose plait was waiting by the door. She caught timidly at Helen’s dress, and then drew back colouring.

  “Oh, Miss Wilmot,” she breathed; and Helen smiled and said:

  “What is it, Lizzie?”

  “Oh, Miss Wilmot, don’t you think I might come and help in the hospital? Do ask them to let me.”

  “My dear, you are too young.”

  Lizzie Carthew made a hesitating and yet impulsive movement.

  “I am nearly eighteen,” she said. Her voice was the voice of a child who has always had all that it wanted.

  “I shall be eighteen in September, and I am engaged to be married, you know, and mamma always said I was a good nurse.”

  Helen laughed.

  “Wait till you are married,” she said teasingly.

  Lizzie pouted.

  “Papa said I must wait till I was eighteen to be married. Mamma was married when she was seventeen. Oh, Miss Wilmot dear, do you think they are being very unhappy about me? I do wish I could write and say I was safe. Perhaps they have heard that poor Aunt Martin was killed, and don’t know that I am safe. And John, perhaps he thinks I am dead. Oh, Miss Wilmot dear!”

  “Poor little Lizzie,” said Helen.

  “Dear Miss Wilmot, if you could get them to let me go to the hospital and help; if I might be doing something, I shouldn’t fret so. You don’t know how terrible it is to sit here all day long and think about poor Aunt Martin. I had only been staying with her for a week when it happened, and we were going to the hills a week later. I do want something to do so badly.”

  “Why don’t you help with the children?” said Helen. “They are such dears, and some of the mothers have more than they can manage.”

  Lizzie pouted again.

  “Oh—children,” she said. “No, I want to be like you. I do think you are so splendid. I want to nurse the wounded, and be useful, and for John and mamma to know I was quite grown-up and sensible. They do treat me like a child, really they do, and if I were like you, they couldn’t.”

  Helen laughed, and kissed her.

  “I sha’n’t be splendid if I am late,” she said. “Don’t be in too great a hurry to be grown up, Lizzie,” and she passed out through the shattered doorway.

  It was a relief to come out of the close, unwholesome room, even though it was almost hotter outside. The trampled mud underfoot, the piles of rubble, the brick walls of the barracks, radiated the day’s heat to an almost unbearable degree.

  Helen had left the hospital thermometer standing at 126 degrees, and the air had not yet grown perceptibly cooler, though the absence of the sun’s glaring light was a relief to eye and brain. She stood for a moment in the angle between the two buildings, and looked at the sunset. A belt of dull, yet glowing orange lay along the horizon. The black mass of one of the unfinished barracks rose against it and the trees on the road beyond. Above, the dusty air was all full of a crimson glow which deepened into great streaks and blotches, like smears of new-spilled blood. One narrow purple cloud lay like a menacing bolt between west and south, but all the rest of the sky was cloudless, hazy, and penetrated with soft dying shades of blue and green, that failed as the eye rested upon them, and darkened into shadowy grey.

  Helen stood and looked. She remembered the crimson light behind the tamarisk trees at Urzeepore, and how she had watched it with Dick. It was the same sun—the same light—the same glow, but everything else was changed. Of the little party of eight who had escaped the massacre at Urzeepore, three were gone already: George Blake, who had died in the cart, with her hand in his; Mrs. Crowthe
r, dead of heat apoplexy; and Grace Elliot, struck by a flying bullet. Carrie Crowther’s reason was gone, and Charles Purslake was dying.

  Helen felt a weary reluctance to return to the crowded hospital, where the tainted air was full of groans and the breath of dying men. To suffer oneself was not much—at least, it occupied the mind—but to see children suffer, and brave men who had been strong once—from these things her flesh shrank.

  Some one came to the hospital door and opened it. A confused murmur of sound came out, a sound of muttering, a sound of groaning—a man’s voice singing.

  Helen caught the words as she lifted her stained skirt out of the dust, and moved across the open space.

  It was Charles Purslake, who sang in a voice high with delirium:

  “Dey try for to sleep, but it ain’t no use;

  Sing song Kitty, can’t you ki me oh,

  Dere legs hang out for de chickens to roost,

  Keemo, kimo, dar oh whar,

  Wid my hi, my ho—”

  The voice strangled on a groan, and as Helen came to the doorway she heard the man in the next bed to Mr. Purslake praying aloud in a harsh and melancholy voice. He was the runaway son of a Methodist minister, and the unheeded prayers of his wild boyhood thronged his clouded mind. He, too, was dying.

  Helen turned for a last breath of air before she went in. As she did so, one of the lights that marked the enemy’s lines seemed to rise swiftly into the air. It travelled towards her with an inconceivable rapidity that paralysed her reasoning faculties. As it came she heard a loud whistling, hissing noise. Then it passed overhead, so close that she thought she could feel the heat of it. A man came behind Helen and pulled her through the door.

  “You shouldn’t stand there with the lights behind you,” he said.

  “What was it?” asked Helen.

  “That? They are trying to set us on fire. That’s all. I should like to wring the neck of the man who roofed this old death-trap with thatch! It will burn down as sure as fate some day.”

  It was burned down that night, and with the burning of the hospital, horror rose to its height.

  Helen never forgot the roar of the flames, as they lifted in a pillar of fire and smoke to the arch of the midnight sky. It was like the roar of all the waters of the world falling over some high and dizzy precipice. They fell thundering, and sent up a continual blinding spray, that shone, and showered, and burned the living flesh of any creature upon whom it came down. And it came down on many.

  Heroism had become part of the daily round. The men who all day long endured the sun, that they might defend the low mud wall, and braved a drift of bullets to draw water for the women, were trained to a courage beyond the common. They met the furious heat of the fire, as they met the tropic heat of the day, and all the time, as they went to and fro, dragging out the

  wounded, and struggling with the flames, the enemy’s fire poured in on them, and man after man went down, with a shattered limb or some wound more mercifully mortal.

  Some of the wounded perished in the fire, and all the medical stores, all the surgical instruments were destroyed. To be wounded meant an almost certain death henceforward, since it was impossible to extract a bullet, perform an operation, or dress wounds.

  At the very height of the fire, the enemy attacked in force; the crackle of musketry and the roar of the guns were added to the tumult, and children woke screaming to see their mothers upon their knees. The slate-roofed barrack stood, but it was soon overcrowded, and many women and children and wounded men were driven into the open, where they cowered down in any angle of the wall which could afford a temporary protection from the stinging drift of bullets, and the gusts of scorching air which blew from the blazing hospital.

  Helen found herself on the south side of the barrack, with two wounded privates, one of them in agony from a broken thigh, and the other the man whose bed had been next to Charles Purslake’s; Charles Purslake himself was dead. It seemed to Helen that he had been dead a long time, but this man was not dead yet, and whilst he lived he raved wildly about the burning lake of torment, and the worm that dieth not, the fire that is not quenched.

  Jenny and her mother crouched beside Helen, and Lizzie Carthew was with them. They had moved from their place near the door, and had been unable to get back to it. There were also two other women whom Helen did not know, one of whom had a baby in her arms, and two trembling children at her skirts. The baby fretted, and Jenny cried all the time, but the other children did not cry. Only they shook all over, and in the lurid light that failed and flared, and flared and failed again, Helen saw their eyes wide with a dreadful unchildlike terror, and their faces fixed in a dreadful unchildlike self-control.

  “Hell—burning, burning hell,” whispered the delirious man, and the intense horror in his voice made the words audible through all the din. “Burning, burning hell, and the smoke of their torment going up for ever and ever and ever. Amen, so be it.”

  Jenny gave a loud, terrified scream.

  “I daren’t move,” said the mother. “But this is so dreadful. Will he die soon, Miss Wilmot?”

  Then she broke off with a quick “God have mercy!” as a cluster of drifting sparks showered down not a couple of yards away, and with a loud and terrifying concussion which shook the ground upon which they sat, the guns of Ash’s battery broke upon the assault.

  At once there was a loud, wild outcry and a shrill, screaming sound that sank away again into the common clamour of battle, as the men in the trenches poured out successive volleys of musketry. Helen was past being afraid, but her heart ached for the children. She crawled a little nearer to the two who sat and trembled, and slipped an arm about each.

  “I am going to tell Jenny a story,” she said, “such a nice story. Come and listen.”

  The children shook a little more when she touched them, and the mother said under her breath:

  “Don’t take them away. Don’t take them away.”

  “Oh, no. I will sit just here. Jenny, don’t you want to listen? It’s a story about a palace made of fire, a beautiful golden palace.”

  There was less noise now, and here in the angle of the building they could hear themselves speak.

  “Don’t like fire,” fretted Jenny, who had almost cried herself to a standstill.

  “Oh, but it is ever so beautiful,” said Helen cheerfully. She pulled the strange little boy and girl close down on either side of her, and this time they yielded, and pressed against her like silent, frightened animals.

  “It is ever so beautiful, you know. Let us count the colours in the sky. I have counted eight already. That is one more than the rainbow has, and the eighth colour is the fire colour—the beautiful rosy pink colour—there, see, Jenny, up there. And just look at the golden, golden birds flying up there in the sky. Look, quick. I saw a whole cloud of them go by, and there comes a swarm of shining bees. I wonder what hive they belong to; I expect they will fly right on, and on, and on, till they come to the golden sun, and then they will hang down all in a cluster on the sun tree’s topmost branch, till the Angel of the Sun throws them one by one out into the dark sky, to shine in the night, and be beautiful golden stars.”

  Helen had a very full, soft voice. It filled the children’s ears, and their terror of the flying sparks was changed into interest.

  “They are sparks, not bees,” said the little boy doubtfully. “And they hurt. One hurt my hand. It fell on it, and hurt it.”

  “He doesn’t ever cry, because he is a boy, and boys don’t cry, but it did hurt. It hurted dreadful,” said the little girl.

  “Bees sting,” said Helen wisely. “All bees sting if they are touched; but we forgive them, because of the honey they make, and these bees made star honey for the baby angels.”

  “Is there baby angels?” demanded Jenny.

  “Oh, yes! Little darling baby ones, with baby wings, a
nd baby hymns to sing.”

  “And do they eat the star honey?”

  “They do. And then they grow up big and strong, and able to take care of the little earth babies, and sing them to sleep at night if they are frightened.”

  “Sing a baby angel’s song,” said Jenny imperiously. “Jenny’s sleepy, sing to Jenny.”

  The sick man in his delirium threw out his hands and groaned lamentably.

  “Water!” he cried. “Across the great gulf—one drop to cool my tongue, one single drop—Lazarus, Lazarus—”

  Helen crawled to him on her hands and knees, and when she came near he snatched at her dress, and she felt the burning fever in him strike through its tattered folds. She put her hand on his forehead, and he gave a sort of gasp, and said in an altered voice:

  “Mary—is it Mary? I have had such a dream. But it is all—right—now.”

  The words came slowly and sleepily. With the last he turned his head. There was only a strip of sacking between it and the trodden ground, but he lay still and slept Death’s sleep. The man beside him was drawing the long breaths of endurance. He never spoke nor moaned, only lay staring at the sky, and drawing those deep breaths.

  Helen stayed for a moment longer, bending her head, and praying. Then she came back to the children and sat down.

  “Has the noisy man gone to sleep again?” said Jenny. “Jenny wants to go to sleep. Sing to Jenny.”

  Helen’s own throat was burning, but the sleepy little voice was insistent. She put an arm about each of the stranger children, and sang:

  “I dreamed a dream the other night,

  And long before the dream was done

  I had seen the Angel of the Moon

  And the Angel of the Sun.

  “The Angel of the Moon was white,

  He had the strangest, kindest eyes;