Mitchie slumped and began to weep with an obvious, chastening rage. That quelled them. That quelled Lady Tarlton too.
Damn you all! she yelled, and then lay panting. I have a son. I have a son who arrived here last spring. I have a son about to turn twenty-five years and he tried eighteen months ago to be taken as a soldier and at last, to hell with them, they did take him. His battalion is in this push. And I’m to sun myself somewhere in the distance? Damn you! Damn you all over!
Her tears stopped now as she realized she had seized a small corner of Tarlton’s authority and sureness.
Oh, it was all a mess in those days. There was no chance of marriage. I had to leave the little boy, you see, with my mother. But now my son knows I’m his mother. I met him in Boulogne and he was… he was just such a template of a boy. And I won’t leave him now. I won’t be dragged away by your orderlies or by provosts or any other bugger.
They were all silent. Nothing more conclusive could be said. Lady Tarlton looked at her two companions.
Major Darlington would be angry with us, she said. He will have us all wearing masks around you if you stay here.
I wouldn’t mind that, said Mitchie. I would rather stay here with masked friends than down there with barefaced people I don’t know. And… my boy!
Naomi swallowed. She knew it was all settled now. Lady Tarlton had given up Antibes.
I’ll go and get you some tea, Naomi said.
Good girl, said Mitchie—but like a reproof for having extended her duties to the menial. You go and do something like that. Bullying doesn’t become you.
Well, said Lady Tarlton as Naomi left the room yet could still hear. It looks as if we must cancel the travel plans. On the other hand, Mitchie, you must damn well promise me not to die.
If he lives, Mitchie told her, then I’ll live.
Making the tea, Naomi absorbed the revelation. She had thought of Matron Mitchie as a universal aunt. That she should be directly maternal hadn’t occurred to her. She returned to the room tentatively with the tray. For the anger which had been in Mitchie was unfamiliar and full of risk for emotional novices.
When she got back to the door there was silence inside. Lady Tarlton and Dr. Airdrie had obviously retreated. Mitchie called for her to come in and her voice retained no trace of anger. Once Naomi was inside and had poured the tea, Mitchie ordered her to sit down. Naomi saw that the matron was drying new tears. But they did not seem to be the tears of helplessness.
The father, she said, is a surgeon. At that time he had recently arrived in Australia from Edinburgh. Newly minted, newly lettered. Fine featured and very gifted. He was sure of what he knew but didn’t bully people with it. He was also certain of what he didn’t know and did not try to move into those areas. So he seemed a fine man. Men can be fine in all areas except one. He had arrived in Melbourne as if he was a single man and was rather quiet about the fact he was already married and his wife was waiting for their child to be born and to mature a little before she too took ship with it. And to be honest I wanted to believe he wasn’t already taken. He never told me straight out he was. He seemed too… young and singular and new made to be a married man.
Afterwards, I went home to Tasmania, pretended to be a widow and gave birth to the boy in Hobart. My mother—she was a brick, a true woman. My father pretended it wasn’t happening. But my mother stuck close to home and wrote to friends that she was the pregnant one—what a surprise! She was forty-five but one never knew! And we stayed together all through it and when the boy was born in a hospital she took him home with her and raised and presented him as her son. And so I became his much older sister, as far as the world was concerned. And my son believed it. The whole arrangement was a sort of cowardice on my part. But the other thing is—I wanted to save the boy from the stain of being a bastard. And when I went away to work and left him with Mammie… it was for him but it was for me too. Whenever I saw him it was a joy and a reproach, and I didn’t like reproach as a full-time business. You see now what sort of girl I was. How stupid and how shallow.
When I met the boy in Boulogne early last spring and I told him the facts, he was angry—he stormed out of the café where I told him, and I went back to my billet in town. But he sought me out later in the day and he had this forgiving sort of frown when he saw me and he put his arms around me and began to cry. What a dear boy! He was still dubious about it, I could tell. Trying to switch his whole compass around so that the needle pointed to me. But if I went to this Antibes, he wouldn’t be able to visit me down there. And if anything happened, I wouldn’t be in reach of him.
Naomi put out her hand and—after hesitation—laid it on Matron Mitchie’s.
I think Lady Tarlton is convinced now, she said.
I’ll tell you what, said Matron Mitchie. She’d bloody better be! Nor do I care who in the hell she tells anymore!
Mitchie could have been talking about an enemy.
In May a flood of men came down to the station from the morass. Nurses noticed the wounds had altered subtly—they were an hour or two older, since the front had gone forward. There were rumors that the casualty clearing station too might be moved some further miles northeast.
The terror of the front these days was borne in on Sally by the hollow-eyed stretcher bearers, who sometimes came directly from the line to the clearing station and then found a tent or hut and took a cup of tea and were felled by sleep on the fringes of some ward. The bearers had extracted men from the mired trenches and carried them against the traffic of food supplies and ammunition boxes and wire coils. The stretcher bearers with their burden of maimed soldier tottered on narrow duckboards, which felt like a raft at sea—or so one of these men told Sally. If pushed off the path, they and their wounded man might sink into muck that seemed to stretch to the earth’s core.
There was a new gas now—mustard gas. It did not cripple the membranes and crimp the alveoli. It burned all membranes instead. It burned the eyes, the face, the mucous membranes, and the walls of the lung. The mustard victims arrived at the gas ward stripped naked by the orderlies in reception and carried on a clean stretcher in a clean blanket. For the oily vapors of the chemical yperite which had entered their clothing could burn them through fabric.
Sally—now rostered in the gas ward as part of the earlier-proclaimed broad education—supervised nurses and orderlies here as the victims’ entire bodies, even groins and armpits, were sprayed with sodium bicarbonate. Other nurses hurried to them with steaming bowls of sulphates and sodas to inhale. If men could still not be comforted, and believed themselves drowning in their own lung fluid, the orderlies and nurses rushed oxygen cylinders and masks to them. The nurses did what could be done to help the naked and blistered, gasping men to gargle out the poison, to wash it from their noses and eyes. But the bodies of the gassed themselves exuded the poison, and every quarter of an hour nurses must go outside and take the fresh air and cough their throats clear of the communicated venom.
Bright remarked to Sally one night on a hurried visit that the pain in the head of a mustard-gas patient was as though acid-laced water was invading his nasal sinuses not once but continuously. This sense of drowning caused the wide-eyed distress she saw everywhere.
In the end they might be given chloroform or morphine to ease their burning membranes and their panic. The ward doctor more than once told Sally to cut open a man’s arm to reduce the volume of blood crying out for oxygen. When a man’s heart failed from edema—that inner drowning—Sally and her nurses reached for syringefuls of reviving camphor and pituitarin to revive the fellow.