Tomorrow Is Forever

by Gwen Bristow

  Before the war, Jacoby had never doubted the essential worth of the spirit. He had not thought mankind was perfect or likely to become so, but he did respect his fellowmen because he thought that for the most part they deserved it. He had no patience with those contemptuous pessimists who shrugged at the human race as though they had looked it over and decided that it would never amount to much. To them he had been accustomed to say, “Most people have a lot to put up with and most of them put up with it very well. I know some of them are fools and scoundrels, but there’s a lot of courage in the world, and a lot of quiet unostentatious nobility. People in general are all right, and you’d find it out if you’d take the trouble to know them better.”

  That, expressed in homely language, was his faith in the fundamental value of life. He had believed in it. But that was in the pleasant days before the war.

  Then came the four years he had just lived through. The physical wrecks brought to him had been dreadful enough, but they were not the worst. Some of those he could heal and some he could not. But he had been appalled, sickened, and at last reduced almost to hopelessness as he saw the disintegration of humanity. He had seen men turned into brutes incapable of any emotion but hate, he had seen it over and over, so often that he wondered why he should be trying to save their lives when they had nothing left that made them fit to live. The fury and terror around him had come close to uprooting all the confidence he had ever had in men’s being fundamentally better than this. He wanted to believe they were. If this was all they were good for, the sooner they destroyed themselves the better. It was very hard, in this last year of the war, to go on believing in anything.

  Arthur had been brought to him when he had begun to feel himself giving in to a brutal cynicism. When he examined Arthur, he suddenly felt that here was a man who could prove the ultimate test, not of a human body to recover, but of human courage to overcome disaster. When this American realized what had been done to him his mind would be black with hate and horror, even if it had never been before. At first he had wondered if he had the right to prolong such a life as this. But after several of those examinations under which Arthur had screamed and cursed at him, Jacoby had convinced himself that with labor and patience he could guarantee that his patient would not be helpless. Arthur would have something to work with. If he could be made to use what he had, and with it regain any wisdom or generosity in spite of what he had lost, Jacoby promised himself that he would take it as meaning that humanity could do the same. As he worked with him, as he saw Arthur’s fury and despair, Arthur became to him a symbol of the world’s wreckage. If this shattered American could come back, there was hope. The damage of the war was done to the world as it was done to Arthur, but if Arthur could be made to go on, could be made to want to go on, there was a reason for living. By this time Jacoby was not sure that there was. But he was going to find out.

  Arthur still hated him. He had ceased to doubt that Jacoby meant exactly what he had said: Jacoby was not going to let him die, but was going to restore as much as he could of what had been lost. That there was so much he could not restore made no difference to his eagerness. Much of the work was necessarily experimental. “But it’s the sort of experiment he looks for,” Arthur told himself bitterly. “It’s not often he finds a patient who simply can’t be any worse off, no matter how many mistakes he makes. When he gets one like that he gives him the works. One man is better than a thousand guinea pigs. I can see the reasoning. Only I never thought of its happening to me.”

  When he did have a chance to talk to Arthur again, Jacoby’s difficulty with the language was so great that he could tell him very little. But after many attempts he managed to say,

  “When you were begging me to let you alone, I was trying to make sure you would keep your right arm. Believe me, Kitt, if you had lost both arms, or if there had been blindness with all the rest, I should have done what you asked me.”

  Arthur said angrily, “Why don’t you do it now?”

  Jacoby gave him a look of real surprise. “Do you still want me to?”

  “Yes. I do not want to be a subject for vivisection.”

  “Kitt, do you still think that is what I am doing to you?”

  “You know it is.”

  Jacoby shook his head. He fumbled for words. He said, “I watched you for many days. I fought a battle. I cannot say it well. Perhaps in English I cannot say it at all. You are a man, Kitt, but also you are mankind. You must live. You must want to live. You must—do you understand me?” He spoke so intensely that he was almost fierce. “Kitt,” he exclaimed, “let us try!”

  Though he did not realize it then, Arthur remembered later that his own resistance was gradually being worn away by the power of Jacoby’s determination. As time went on, he came to recognize the enthusiasm Jacoby was feeling. He had felt it himself when there was some almost impossible job to be tackled. “If I can do this, I can do anything.” He knew what it meant to roll up his sleeves, saying that.

  What he did not realize at the time was that this was not what Jacoby was saying. Jacoby was saying to himself, “If he can do this, I can do anything.”

  The first time he began to understand that Jacoby was not merely a cold scientist was the day when Jacoby came to his bedside with a slip of paper and a pencil.

  “Kitt, if you will tell me—spell it slowly—the name of the woman you kept talking to when you were delirious—?”

  Arthur groaned. His impulse was to grip Jacoby’s hand, but he could not do this. He could only say, “In God’s name, Jacoby, be merciful! If you’ve made up your mind to do this to me I can’t stop you. But don’t do it to her.”

  Without looking at Arthur, Jacoby said, “I thought it might be possible to get her a message. Through the Red Cross.”

  Arthur did not answer. After a pause Jacoby asked,

  “You do not want to tell me who she is?”

  Arthur said, “She is my wife.”

  Jacoby turned his head toward the bed then, involuntarily. He knew no words to speak and even if he had been using his own language there could have been nothing to say so eloquent as the pity he could not keep out of his eyes.

  He crumpled the slip of paper in his fist. There was a silence. At length Jacoby said, “Very well.” He turned and went away.

  But in the depth of his own despair Arthur felt a stir of astonished warmth. “My God, the man is a human being. There are some things even he can’t take without a shudder.”

  After that, slowly but unmistakably, he began to discover that Jacoby wanted to be his friend. He began, dimly at first, through those days and nights of desolation, to grasp what Jacoby had meant when he said, “You are a man, but also you are mankind.” It was a hard realization, and at first he was doubtful that it had any meaning. “He can make me stay alive,” Arthur said to himself wearily. “But can he make me find any reason for doing it? Can anybody? I don’t believe it.”

  Jacoby came back to his bedside often. He never again mentioned the woman Arthur had called for in his delirium. But there was more work on the arm, more on the jaw; the rest had to wait on the patient’s strength and the doctor’s opportunities. Arthur still had very little hope. Now that he understood Jacoby’s purpose, he tried to sympathize with it, but he found this hard to do.

  For after all, even after years of labor and pain, even with the highest success, what was the utmost Jacoby could give him? Power to use his right arm; power to sit up and write a letter; possibly, after a long time, power to hobble from place to place with a crutch. Power to look on hopelessly while healthy men and women went ahead with their healthy affairs, doing useful work and enjoying the rewards of it. Not even Jacoby’s genius could restore him the sense of knowing he could take care of himself no matter what happened, the old happy forthrightness of being able to look the whole world in the face and tell it to get out of his way. Jacoby could never restore him his marria
ge. He could never give Elizabeth the children she wanted, or even the security and companionship she had had with him. Lying in a helpless huddle on his cot in the intervals of being fed and washed by strange hands, Arthur had nothing to do but look ahead into the sort of life-sentence he would be giving her if he let Jacoby communicate with her. No doubt he had been reported missing in action. When they found him, the Red Cross would have means of notifying Elizabeth he was still alive. After the war, as soon as Jacoby had repaired him sufficiently to make it possible for him to go home, he would have to go.

  And then? Elizabeth would offer him everything she had. She was too loyal, and she loved him too much, to dream of doing otherwise. She would work, and use everything she could earn for his support. She would spend her life nursing him, amusing him, taking care of him, himself a broken wreck of a creature who could give her nothing in return except a doglike gratitude. Her splendid vitality would be spent in a twilight of half-living until she was dry and withered like fruit that had been broken off the tree before it had had a chance to ripen. As he thought of it he knew more and more surely that no matter what would become of him, he could not let this happen to her.

  His decision was not entirely unselfish. Arthur was too clearheaded to imagine it was. Not only could he not do this to Elizabeth, but he could not do it to himself. Bearing his tragedy alone would be easier than requiring her to share it.

  He knew, almost as if he were with her, what she would suffer at being told of his death. But that would not last forever, though at the time she would undoubtedly think it was going to. She would pick up the broken pattern of her life and set about putting it together again. Elizabeth was young, vital, alert, and there would be another man who would find her as lovable as he had found her. She would have again the sort of mating she should have. He tried instinctively to clench his fist with decision, and the pain that went like a bayonet-thrust into his shoulder, reminding him that he was not even able to make such a simple gesture, served to strengthen his resolve. When a man dies, he told himself, with more fierceness in his mind since there could be none in his body, it is like taking a teaspoonful of water out of a river. The water closes up, it is gone, and after an instant nobody notices it any more.

  When Jacoby came in again, Arthur told him what he had decided to do. He had to speak slowly, repeating often and waiting until Jacoby’s intelligence had limped through to comprehension. The effort to make Jacoby understand took his attention away from the bleak import of what he was saying.

  “I will make you a promise, Jacoby, if you will do one thing for me. Do it, and come back and tell me you have done it.”

  “I understand you. Go ahead.”

  “When I was brought in here, you found the metal tag of identification? And other things, maybe? Take those to the International Red Cross. Tell them your stretcher-bearers brought in an American who died of his wounds. You do not know his name. But you took these objects from his body. You will sign a death certificate, or whatever you have to sign. The American army will take care of the rest. If you will do this, and bring me some sort of proof that you have done it, I promise you that I will let you do whatever you please to me. But if you will not do it, I swear to you that I’ll make you do it because I’ll end my life as soon as I have a usable hand to do it with.”

  Deliberately, further to relieve his attention, he fixed his eyes on Jacoby’s eyes, tender as the eyes of a mother; on Jacoby’s strong, wise, gentle face; and while he repeated his sentences he noticed again what a thin face it was, the skin showing the waxiness of malnutrition, and guessed as he had guessed before that this man was denying himself part of his own rations to provide more nourishment for the men he was trying to save. At last he said, slowly and carefully, “You understand me? You will do what I ask, Jacoby?”

  Jacoby nodded. While he sought for his answer his right hand covered the right hand that could not yet be clenched, friendly across the wall of language. He said, “Yes, Kitt. I will do that.”

  It was all he could say, but by that time they had learned to do a good deal of communicating without language. Jacoby did not have a wife of his own. Until now his life had been too full of work and war to give him much chance to think of personal happiness. Later he was to find out what it meant to have a woman’s suffering mean more to him than his own. But he did not hesitate before Arthur’s request. Arthur continued,

  “You will not communicate with my wife. You will not try to find her.”

  “I understand what you are saying. I will not try to find her.”

  “She will marry again,” Arthur said. “Another man will love her, she will have children, she will be happy. Do you get it, Jacoby? She’s a splendid woman, I’m going to get out of her way. Oh, you don’t get all this, do you?—but I know I’m right.”

  Jacoby tried to answer. “You are—” he hesitated, reaching into his pocket for the dictionary he always carried now—“you are most completely right, Kitt.” He looked down at the bundle of bandages before him, and added, “I do understand.”

  “You—” Arthur’s voice broke in a sob, and the sob came from so deep that it sent points of pain through him and he had to wait till they subsided before he could go on—“you don’t understand. You never loved a woman.” Again the sob rushed up, and again he had to wait till the pain of it went down. “You never loved a woman,” he said, “enough to die for her.”

  Whether the barrier was language or experience, this time Jacoby did not try to answer. But he went and did what Arthur had asked him to do.

  6

  Jacoby used one of the precious night hours when he should have been asleep to rig up a sort of shelf across Arthur’s cot, and set the dictionary up on it. “My English is so faulty, Kitt, and I have no time to improve it. Why do you not learn to talk to me?”

  He read the first words aloud to him, slowly, so Arthur could begin to learn their pronunciation. While he was taking a hasty meal of turnips and potatoes Jacoby drew rough sketches of various objects in the room, writing their names beside them, and set the sheet up for Arthur to study during the day. Arthur blessed him for it. He was not yet able to push his thoughts forward into what he might be going to do with the future Jacoby was forcing upon him. This occupation was enough for the present. He filled up his mind with German words to keep it from being filled up with thoughts of Elizabeth. When Jacoby came to see him he talked in simple sentences, proudly, and felt a childish delight when Jacoby and the nurses began to understand him.

  Long afterwards, when they were looking back on those days, Jacoby said to him, “You did not know how you were encouraging me then.” Arthur answered, “Maybe you never knew how often I nearly gave up.” “Yes I did know,” said Jacoby, “but you did not give up. That is what I mean, Kitt.”

  To the very end, Jacoby sometimes called him Kitt. If anyone asked why, he said, “Oh no, Herr Kessler’s first name is Erich. Calling him Kitt is an old bad habit of mine, from years back.”

  They were both so used to it they generally forgot it was an abbreviation of his old name. The new name was provided by Jacoby after Arthur had been moved to the hospital in Berlin, while he was convalescing from another of the surgical operations Jacoby inflicted upon him. He had been very ill and Jacoby had given him a blood transfusion. When he was better and tried to express his thanks Jacoby retorted, “My blood isn’t good enough for gratitude, Kitt—made of nothing but turnips and a carrot or two. But I have something else for you, more important.” He produced a document, offering it with an air of triumph. “Here is your birth certificate.”

  Arthur laughed at that. Birth certificates had not been important in the United States before the war. He had never had one. But Jacoby was a German and thought like a German, and to him his beloved Kitt’s physical welfare was no more essential than the records which the Germans demanded even in their most chaotic days. Jacoby explained,

  “Lis
ten carefully, Kitt. From now on your name is Erich Kessler. I have lost sleep over wondering how you could identify yourself, until one morning about three o’clock I found the solution. When I was a child, my parents knew a couple named Kessler. They had a son named Erich. While the boy was still a baby, the Kesslers went to the United States. They lived in a town called—” he consulted his notes, and pronounced incorrectly—“Milwaukee. You have heard of it?”

  Arthur nodded. “Yes. I grew up in a town called Chicago. They are very near each other.”

  “You have been to Milwaukee?”

  “Frequently.”

  “That is good. While he was still a small child, Erich Kessler died. I know that, because his mother and mine used to correspond. But there is no official record of that in this country, because the Kesslers stayed in the United States and were naturalized. For all I know they may be there to this day.”

  “Making beer, perhaps?”

  “Why? Do you know them?”

  “Never heard of them. But I know Milwaukee. Go on, Jacoby.”

  “I have obtained Erich Kessler’s birth certificate. I have recorded that Erich—you—naturalized without his knowledge or consent when his parents were naturalized, was drafted into the American army. The rest follows. You have returned to the land of your birth, and can stay here now until you want to leave.”

  “I shall not want to leave, Jacoby.”

  “I hope not. But anyway, this makes you a German and at the same time takes care of your American accent. However, please listen to me and try to speak like me. Erich Kessler would have heard his parents speak German at home and would pronounce it better than you do.”

  “I’ll do my best. Correct me whenever you please.”

  Almost automatically, Jacoby was massaging the muscles of his patient’s right arm. “These are flabby,” he observed. “While you are lying in bed, for a few minutes at a time, clench your fist slowly and relax it slowly. Slowly, remember? That won’t tax your strength, and you must take care of this arm. You will need it.”