Tomorrow Is Forever

by Gwen Bristow

  This reflection came to him of itself whenever he looked around. It occurred to him now, but he paid hardly any attention to it; he had another concern to occupy his attention. Tonight he was going to see Elizabeth. He was going into her home and see her there, surrounded by all the things she had ever wanted, and the prospect of it gave him a pleasure that was warm and tender, and none the less intense because while she had all these things she would never know that he had given them to her.

  He went over to the mirror on the wall and stood there looking at his reflection. It was not possible that she could recognize him. Between them lay not merely twenty-four years, but the wreckage made by that shell at Chateau-Thierry, which had destroyed him so terribly that it had taken one of the greatest surgeons in Germany five years to put together the semblance of a body that he now possessed. A makeshift that had been uncertain enough in normal times, this frame of his could hardly, after the effort to which it had been forced when he had to get out of Germany, be expected to last much longer. It was only because he was sure he could not last much longer that he was willing now to let himself see Elizabeth. He had never expected to see her again. In those frightful days in the German hospital, he had not wanted to. He had wanted her to be rid of him, as desperately as he had wanted to be rid of himself. Even now he trembled when he remembered that slow, tortured rebuilding, insertion of metal strips to replace shattered bones, stretching of shrunken muscles, inadequate food and inadequate anesthetics, his own screams and curses at the man who persisted in keeping him alive when he wanted to die.

  How that doctor had kept at him, with implacable hands that he himself could see only as instruments of horror, forcing into him the life he did not want, and slowly, through all of it, giving him against his will life that was really life—not mere physical existence, but a personality and a will, a recreation so profound that it seemed quite natural, when he began to realize what was being given him, that along with all the rest he had a new name. Kessler—thank heaven, he had thought then, it was easy to say, for in those days the new language had seemed very difficult, though now it was so much his own that when he first came back to the United States he found that he had half forgotten the old. The doctor’s name was not so easy. Jacoby. How he had dreaded that man at first!

  He remembered Jacoby, in the days when he himself did not know a word of German, struggling through a scanty knowledge of English to make him understand what was being done to him, which he did not understand and hated Jacoby for doing, never dreaming then that he was meeting the greatest man he was ever to know in his life. He shivered with a cold gust of hate whenever he remembered how the Nazis had hounded that great man to his death for no crime but the unforgivable iniquity of having been born a Jew, and of being so rockbound in his own goodness that he was incapable of accepting the evil of mankind until it had crushed him beyond escape. There had been little he could do in his love for Jacoby’s memory, nothing but get to the United States while there was still time to save Jacoby’s child.

  His grief and rage at what had happened to his friend, and his terror lest he not be able to bring Jacoby’s little girl to safety, had been so great that not until he was on the westbound steamer did he realize that when he got to America he was probably going to see Elizabeth. He knew her husband’s name was Spratt Herlong and that he was employed by Vertex Studio, and in his own luggage was a contract signed in the Paris office of Vertex. He would be virtually sure to meet Herlong some day, and it might follow as a matter of course that he would meet Elizabeth. He went into his cabin and looked at himself a long time in the glass, as he was doing now. If there was a chance of her knowing him he would break his contract and make a living as a translator, a clerk, anything that would provide little Margaret with three meals a day without destroying Elizabeth’s peace of mind.

  But a long scrutiny satisfied him that there was no chance of it. In no sense, except the memory of her behind all that had happened since that explosion at Chateau-Thierry, could he believe he had any trace of the Arthur Kittredge she had known. He was Erich Kessler, dear friend of the late Dr. Gustav Jacoby, author of books based on case-histories of Dr. Jacoby’s patients, and the change in his personality was as thorough as the change in his name. No man who had endured what he had endured in body and spirit could have much left in common with a happy, arrogant youth who did not know what it was to want anything he could not get.

  He looked thoughtfully at his image in the glass. Crippled as he was, his appearance was not repulsive. One could see that in spite of his uncertain legs he had been meant for a tall man, and since his torso had to carry his weight the muscles there were powerfully developed. The effect was inevitably one-sided, since his left sleeve had been empty so long, but his right arm was like that of an athlete, and the hand which for twenty years had supported him upon a cane, was strong enough to break a china cup between the thumb and fingers. His face had no visible trace of the wound there except a scar that went upward from beneath his beard in a thin curving line. His hair was still thick, gray like steel; his beard was heavy too, and darker. He had let it grow with no thought of disguise, but to cover the scars that all Jacoby’s careful-skin gratfing had not been able to eliminate. Now he was glad he had it and was so used to it, for in spite of having seen thousands of Hitler’s pictures most Americans still thought of Germans as being professors in dark beards.

  She would not know him, but he would know her, as readily as he had known the picture standing on Spratt Herlong’s desk. To be sure, he had been looking for it, but he would have recognized it anyway as Elizabeth. She had changed in those years, of course, but her alteration had been nothing more than the well-ordered development from youth into the maturity that could have been foreseen by anyone who had been as intimately acquainted with her as he had. Elizabeth had always known what she wanted out of life, because she was so eminently fit to have it. Physically and spiritually, she had wanted love, marriage, children, a home in which she would be no petted darling, but a versatile and devoted creator. From the beginning she had instinctively known herself capable of bringing all this into being, and so she had looked forward to it with the eagerness of those who have no doubt of their destiny. When he met Spratt, and saw the pictures of Elizabeth in Spratt’s office, he felt that the change time had made in her appearance had been no more than the change one observes in the achievement of something of which one has seen the beginning. Now that he could think of her without the pain of the earlier years, he was glad he had been wise enough to step aside so that she could have it.

  He saw the pictures last week, on the first day he went into Spratt’s office. Spratt had been talking for some time about the script, and if Kessler’s attention had wandered it was no matter, since he was going to read the script tomorrow anyway. When Spratt had finished, and he himself had risen to leave, he glanced at the photograph on the desk, saying with the casualness born of years of self-command, “Your wife, Mr. Herlong?”

  Spratt said, “Why yes,” taking up the picture and handing it to Kessler with the proud smile of a man showing his friend a treasure. “But that’s not very good of her—at least, I never did think those formal portraits were as good as candid shots, too smooth and pressed-out, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I understand and agree with you.” Kessler was looking at her face. “But this is very charming.”

  “Oh yes, so it is, but this one on the wall looks more like her. Over here by the door. Those are the children with her.”

  Kessler followed Spratt and looked at the picture on the wall. “Yes, yes,” he said with involuntary eagerness, “that, I am sure, is more like her.”

  For it was like her, he knew that without having seen the original in so long. The picture had been taken somewhere outdoors, perhaps on a ranch. Either Elizabeth and her children did not know they were being photographed, or the photographer was a genius at creating an unposed effect. Dressed
in a sweater and skirt, her hair blowing, Elizabeth sat on a fence beyond which grew an orange tree; a young girl leaned on the fence near by, while a tall youth who looked very much like Elizabeth was standing by the tree, pulling its branches forward between his mother and sister so they could pick off the fruit, and a little boy, sitting on the ground in front of the fence, was already peeling the skin off an orange. By accident or design, all the children were looking at their mother, and they were all four laughing. It was a group of healthy people who loved one another and were very happy about it. No wonder Spratt preferred it to the studio portrait on his desk. That was Elizabeth as she appeared to other people, her private life discreetly concealed behind a pleasant tranquillity of eyes and lips, but this was Spratt’s wife as he loved her. Looking at the group, the outsider from Germany knew more profoundly than he had ever known before how much he had given Elizabeth when he had made up his mind to leave her free of his own wreckage. He glanced at Spratt, who was looking not at him but at the picture of his family, and for a moment he hated Spratt so fiercely that he could have killed him. But that passed quickly; long discipline had steadied his emotions as much as his conduct, and after that moment of hatred he felt nothing but gladness that his gift to her had been as great as he had meant it to be.

  Today, alone in his office, he let his memory go back to the days when he had realized he had to do this because he loved Elizabeth too much to do anything else. The first days after the battle were nothing but confusion, fever and pain. He was in a place where there were a lot of other men on other cots, and women with pale harassed faces trying to take care of them, but he could not understand anything that was being said or anything that was done. He was strapped up in bandages that were far from clean, and among the people around him was a man gaunt as an ascetic, who came over now and then and did various horrible things to him. He did not know then that in those closing days of the war in Germany there was not cloth enough for fresh bandages or soap enough to wash those that had been used, or drugs to relieve suffering, or that his attendants had white faces and shaky hands because they were not getting enough to eat. Even when he began to discover this he did not care, because by that time he had begun to discover also the extent of the damage these Germans had done to him. He had no doubt that he was going to die, and the only wish he was strong enough to make was that he might die quickly and get it over.

  Babbling in the only language he knew, he begged the gaunt cruel man to let him alone. At first the doctor seemed to be paying no attention, but one day his patient observed that he was talking, and after several repetitions the ungainly syllables acquired meaning. The doctor was saying, “Forgive me that I hurt you.”

  His accent was so thick as to be almost unintelligible, but the fact that he had any English at all gave a flash of hope to the mangled object on the cot. Any effort was torture, but if this fool of a doctor could be made to understand that a dying man wanted nothing more than to be left in peace, it was worth the effort. His own words were muffled because of the bandage on his chin, but he managed to get them out.

  “Listen to me. I am not one of your countrymen—you know that, don’t you? My name is Arthur Kittredge. I am an American. Your enemy—don’t you get that? I am going to die anyway. Why don’t you just let me do it?”

  The doctor said something. Arthur did not understand it until it had been repeated several times, and when he finally caught the words they were not worth the trouble of listening, for all the doctor said was, “Quiet. You be quiet.”

  Arthur tried again, desperate with pain and weakness. “Do me a kindness. Give me something to finish it, won’t you?—Please listen—I’m talking as plain as I can! Finish it. That’s not much to ask, is it?”

  Again the doctor said, “Quiet.”

  “If you don’t care about doing a kindness to me, do it for somebody who can get up again—one of your own men. Why should you let me fill up a bed when German soldiers are lying on the floor? Or waste food on me when you haven’t enough for your own? Don’t keep me—”

  His words ended in a gasp of pain. But he still looked at the doctor, too weak to say any more but conscious enough to plead with his eyes. Whether or not the doctor had understood all his words, he had grasped enough to know what Arthur wanted. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No.” Exhausted as he was, Arthur could see him groping for more words. Mustering all his strength, Arthur managed to say again,

  “I’m going to die anyway.”

  “No, no. You are not going to die.”

  He spoke with a grim resolution that seemed to typify all Arthur had ever heard about the coldness of Germans and their inability to understand any reason why they might not always be right. Arthur was not able to form any more words, but he looked at the doctor with eyes that Jacoby told him later conveyed all his rage and disbelief. Arthur knew he was going to die and he wanted it over. But Jacoby’s thin face had no yielding in it. Jacoby left him then, but he came back later, and this time his bony hand brought up a German-English dictionary out of his frayed pocket. Even with this aid, his English was so poor that he could convey nothing but a repetition of his refusal. Alone in his prison of pain, Arthur thought, “At home they’d shoot a dog that had been smashed by a truck. But this can’t last much longer. It can’t. If I hadn’t been so healthy it would be over by now. But good God, have these people no mercy at all? I’d shoot the most heartless German under heaven before I’d let him die a death like this.”

  He was glad Elizabeth could not see him. She would never know anything about this lingering torment. They would simply tell her he was dead and she would think it had been quick and clean. “He never knew what hit him,” they would say to her, and at least it would be easier for her than if she had to know how long it had taken him to die. And of course he did have one thing to be thankful for—if that shell had to hit him, he could be glad it had done its work. He would be dead and done with, and would not have to go back to her a half-human caricature of what used to be her husband. Though that wretch of a German doctor refused to shorten this last phase, though he might be beast enough to enjoy seeing one of his enemies get what was coming to him, even he could not indefinitely prolong it.

  But at last Arthur discovered, with a revulsion that he could not have depressed if he had known the whole dictionary by heart, that this was exactly what the doctor meant to do to him.

  Jacoby had been trying to talk to him for some days. Arthur had ceased trying to understand him. He had about given up trying to do the only thing that interested him, which was to refuse nourishment and get it over that way, for they fed him through a tube and he was too weak to resist. He hated the sight of the doctor with his gaunt face and thin cruel hands. But though he could not resist him, he did not have to listen to the man’s awkward manipulations of the English language and try to make sense out of them.

  However, the creature persisted, talking to him with many references to his dictionary. Unable to pronounce Arthur’s name, he called him Kitt. He kept telling him something, in a low, insistent voice. He kept at it so long that at last one day the words he had been hearing arranged themselves in Arthur’s mind and became an orderly sequence.

  Stripped of its grotesqueries and repetitions, what Arthur understood went like this:

  “You are not going to die, Kitt. You will be alive a long time. Not as you were. But you have your eyes, your hearing, the jaw will heal and there will be a hand. I think you will be able to sit upright. Walking I cannot promise, but I will try. It will be long and hard. But work with me, Kitt, and I will work with you. Do you understand me? You are not going to die.”

  Arthur made an inarticulate noise. He looked at the doctor’s steely blue eyes. They were fixed on him with a determination that made Arthur feel that this fellow was regarding him not as a man but as the subject of an inhuman experiment. Instead of letting him go, Jacoby was going to keep him conscious for years
to come, simply to prove that he could do it.

  What was left of Arthur quivered with rage. “You brute,” he said, “you damned brute.” He continued with epithets worse than that. He had never been addicted to profanity and was surprised to find such language coming so readily to his lips. But the words were there and he used them, and continued using them every time he saw the doctor.

  Later he asked Jacoby if he had understood anything of what he had been saying then. Jacoby smiled with the grim humor Arthur had learned to recognize. “Not the vocabulary. But I did not need the vocabulary to understand what you were saying to me, and just then I did not blame you.”

  But at that time Jacoby paid no attention to the protests. He simply left Arthur there to contemplate his shattered body and go wild with the prospect of being forced to live in it. There was nothing else Jacoby could do. He was working eighteen hours a day, on a pittance of food that in pre-war Germany would not have been thought enough for an idle old man. Besides, since he knew so little English and Arthur knew no German at all, he had to let Arthur go on believing what he believed.

  There was no way then for Jacoby to explain that four years of this war had almost annihilated his faith in the human soul. There was no way for him to say that he too was on the edge of despair, searching desperately for some reason to believe that men could be saved from the evil they had wrought.