The Daughters of Mars (17 page)

Sally shook her head. I wouldn’t like to blame them, she agreed.

Naomi still had her hand. Sally studied this meeting of flesh.

I can’t bubble away with conversation, that’s the problem.

Yes, said Naomi. I envy the gift to do it.

So do I, said Sally.

But if we could find friendship beyond that. If we could talk. About things held close. Secrets, even.

Is she preparing, Sally wondered, for the subject of subjects?

The cake trolley had come and they both took one more French pastry off it—winged capsules of cream.

I’ve told you about Ellis and his damned watch, said Naomi with a sort of pride. I have told you things I could not have said a year back.

Yes, said Sally. Now her hand, having been the limp object of affection, grasped Naomi’s as the band played “Rose of Tralee” and at a nearby table four officers of the Scots Guards were overtaken by gales of laughter at some folly of an absent colleague.

• • •

The women of the
Archimedes
visited Sacré Coeur to see Carradine and her husband. His wound was healing, but he was not yet ready for shipping to an English hospital. Apart from the wards full of long-term patients such as Lieutenant Carradine, they always found the place in partial chaos. In the lush, palmy gardens of the Beau Rivage, where the orchestra of Egyptians played sweet English ballads and lullabies and unexacting twiddly-dee pieces as tea was served, they would sometimes encounter an Australian or British girl who—utterly outnumbered by orderlies—worked alone or with one companion on these echoing troopships on which young men sang jolly songs on the way towards the great heap of debris, of rock and barrenness named Gallipoli, and swallowed down their dread. On the way back . . . well, they knew what was what by then.

T
he authorities now insisted that they spend two full days in the splendor of the Beau Rivage. Sally and Honora shared a room, since the friendship she had pledged her sister didn’t need to be slavish. They were told that in their absence the
Archimedes
would be refitted in some way, but “in some way” was not defined. By pure luck Sally and Honora were given a room appropriate for officers and with a balcony above the sea. Since it was early summer, the air was clear as the sun rose behind this piece of strand and revealed itself gigantically by breakfast time far down the coast. An embarrassment of recreations were at their command—they could ride along the coast on light horse mounts. They could attend picnics in the Botanic Gardens or accompany a British education officer on a tour of the antiquities from which their bush ignorance would come back amended. There were bathing parties they could join with swimming costumes provided by the Red Cross. And then the afternoon
th
é
dansant—
to which they were so used now and so worldly at.

It was at the end of an excursion to the Temple of Poseidon and Pompey’s Pillar that an officer approached them and asked, was it true they were from the
Archimedes
? In that case, what did they think of the
Archimedes
going black?

Black? they asked.

Becoming a troop carrier, I mean—traveling blacked-out.

He could tell they knew nothing and could barely understand him. Not to worry, he said. I believe it’s only temporary.

When they returned to the Eastern Harbour and the
Archimedes,
they saw Egyptian workers were hanging from the sides painting out all trace of red crosses. Approaching the ship along the mole they could also see its lower doors were cast wide open. Through these doors provisions were generally lumped aboard, but now it was mules and horses that were being led by bridles. Soldiers ascended the gangway with rifles and kit. Men with rifles on their backs already looked down from the railings and possessed the ship the nurses had thought of as theirs.

As they drank tea in their mess with jackets off to release the musk of the morning’s scurry through ancient places, Sergeant Kiernan himself arrived and said the colonel wanted to see them in their lounge. They went there straightaway. As they entered, the colonel seemed to nod to them individually. Fellowes and a new surgeon to replace Hookes stood there too—and near them Mitchie and another newer matron with set, uninterpretable features.

They all found seats and the colonel told them that for military necessity the authorities had decided to make the
Archimedes
a black ship pro tem. It was his recommendation that the nurses should choose to be left ashore until the higher authorities decided to transform it back to its true calling.

Nettice asked a question bearing on the point. Wasn’t it true that nurses traveled on black ships?

Not in great numbers, he said. Perhaps one or two per ship. Very much volunteers.

Captain Fellowes wanted to speak and sought the colonel’s nod.

You are entitled to leave the ship, he told them when he got it. The colonel cannot say so—but it seems to me an act of recklessness to chop and change the nature of a ship like this. For this journey we will replace you with competent orderlies. I heard a staff officer say that surely
they
—whoever that is—did not contemplate that you would sail for this journey, in any case. We’ll wait then and see what happens next to the ship.

When the colonel and the other surgeons left the room the nurses rose—militarily adept now—to honor their military ranks. Then Mitchie told them to resume seats.

Well, it’s all lunacy as usual, she declared like a reassurance. There’s the risk of submarines—you see—on a black ship.

That’s so, confirmed the other matron as if they might doubt Mitchie’s word.
That
ought to be taken into account.

The enlightened above us, Mitchie declared, intend that the ship go to the Dardanelles black and that we see these horses and mules and men off. Then the
Archimedes
will transform itself back to white and take on patients and go to Mudros and thence to Alex. Of course it is a folly and you must not let yourself be subject to it.

But are you going? Honora asked her.

Our situation is different, claimed Mitchie. They need us to guide the orderlies who—I am pleased to announce—fear us. But it is different with the rest of you.

But of course it was at once apparent—by eyes lowered to avoid the force of her argument as by exchanged looks with the same force—that they were all to go.

• • •

They waited all day. The loading of these men and ponies and mules of the Inniskilling Fusiliers ammunition train finished and then the soldiers sat on deck talking and smoking and contradicting each other in an accent sharp as an ax. They gave off a sort of discontent—the growls and mockeries of men who had just been worked hard and could foresee harder still. This unexpected form of soldier—all rifle and webbing—came hobnailing it through the main deck of the hospital. One of them turned on seeing nurses and—instead of the applause or the brotherliness of shouted greeting when soldiers on other ships passed the
Archimedes—
hooted with harsh delight.

Here come the fooking chorus girls!

Kiernan, however, tailed the soldiers and drove them along and told them that they were guests—this wasn’t
their
ship. They told him to get—as they said it—fooked.
And their rawness did own the
Archimedes
for now. Even so, the soldiery was relocated by their considerate officers and sergeant majors to places where it would be harder for them entirely to take away the purpose of the ship. Towards dusk the
Archimedes
pulled away from its mooring with a few blows of its whistle. Even the
Currawong
used to leave the Macleay with more ceremony.

Dr. Fellowes passed along the hospital deck, which was now restored to quiet. Ponies all over the cargo deck, he said. They’d built stalls and loaded them last night. How well would dung sit with medical supplies? Nurses went below and saw the mule lines and fed some sugar to the rows of ponies. They saw wagons and shoulder-high green boxes of munitions mysteriously numbered for war’s purpose. Young grooms in khaki shirts looked at the nurses with a blunt hunger unknown in the world of the town and the street.

On the promenade deck, Sergeant Kiernan and some orderlies were tying ropes from the inboard handrails to the ship’s railings to keep the men of the munitions train off the starboard promenade. The work with roping-off was done and the orderlies leaned back against the walls smoking or making their narrow cigarettes, seeing nothing in the haze.

You’re a fine fellow, Honora called to Kiernan, nearly as a tease.

Leo said beneath her breath once they had passed on, A man of beliefs. A Quaker.

Holy mother, said Honora. I can imagine a girl or two quaking for him.

Sally would remember this dusk—cramped in by haze—as having an air of uncertainty in which the
Archimedes
itself seemed to take part. She would think later that the day was like one in which a horse who could smell a cliff ahead, and had a purpose to avoid it, did not trust its rider to achieve the same level of wisdom.

Two destroyers appeared on either side of the ship. Surely this scale of naval seriousness wasn’t devoted to them. Was it a chance meeting at sea by vessels with the same landfall?

Sally heard Irishmen doing physical jerks on the afterdeck and an NCO telling them to put some elbow grease into whatever exercise he demanded of them. It was not a comfortable sharing that existed here. The nurses felt yarded in to their cabins and their salon lounge that night. The Irish soldiers loudly occupied the bunks on the hospital decks. All the ports were battened down to enclose any chance beam of light from inside. The nature of sleep seemed to Sally different from the usual. It meant—for a beginning—that when she woke she did not know whether it was day or night unless her watch inscribed
TO DEAREST SALLY ON YOUR GREAT DAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 1911
was consulted.

Next morning the women stirred—ill-humored—from the enclosed humidity of dreams.

Oh God, said Freud, as if she’d turned up in a world less satisfactory than yesterday’s.

Honora slipped warm as a loaf of bread from her lower bunk and began whispering her mysterious prayers fast. They needed to open the ports now to verify the day. Air which had lain all night on the ocean swept in. They dressed in their white ward uniforms and went up on deck to diagnose the morning. It was growing bright out there, and the sea breeze fell away to let in a torrid offshore wind from the nastiest core of Egypt. It penetrated their nursing veils and lightly flapped the red borders of their capes.

Honora asked, Could you really believe that down there below, in that great water somewhere, there is a steely tube of men who would do us harm? I could believe in a lot of things. But I can’t believe in that. The tube of steel with men inside.

They sat in the lounge reading and playing euchre. Tomorrow—after the soldiers’ last night aboard—they would be busy cleaning and readying the hospital deck. Restless by nine o’clock, they went up on deck. Naomi remarked that the destroyers had vanished. That—she hoped—had no sinister naval meaning.

D
uring the nurses’ visit to the promenade, the ship swayed in a way a person would not call alarming but that they were unused to. Some of the orderlies on deck stumbled and took their cigarettes from their mouths and looked at each other with a question. They did not return their fags to their lips until the balance of the ship had been regained.

My heaven, Honora told them, we’re swerving.

It’s to throw the fellows in your tube off, Honora, Freud asserted, narrowing her large eyes and sharing the joke with the glaring horizon.

They could see Lemnos—by now reduced from myth to the level of any other dreary island. The hot breath of land was left behind. The air had sharpened and there was that true sea again—that sea into which today the light dived and split apart and met again at some visible point far down—a gem of light beneath, hard to take your eyes off. It imbued Sally with a welcome if temporary joy.

They remained on deck that morning and Captain Fellowes—no surgery to perform—appeared looking grave and in the full authority of his uniform. He said, Ladies! But his nod—or so they liked to think—was directed at Leonora.

These Irishmen never stop saluting me, he said of the interlopers. I’m not used to that from orderlies. And have never had it from nurses.

They all laughed along a little creakily. He was almost too perfect a creature to exchange banter with. He tipped his cap and moved forward.

Oh well, said young Leonora then. She seemed happy with the exchange—if you could call it that. She nodded to them and went below.

Freud raised the old question. So do you think they’ve done it? You must understand what I mean. Fellowes and Leo?

There seemed no malice in the question. She appeared scientifically interested.

No, said Nettice. Nor should you ask.

Freud declared, Doctors are the men who know how to manage these things. Without damage to the girl, I mean.

What of the moral damage? asked Nettice dryly.

No one had asked Freud, Do you know these things from experience? But they presumed she did and gave her credit for her urbanity and the possibility of her glamorous sins.

Well, said Honora, moral damage or not, done it or not, she’s crazed for the man!

And why shouldn’t they have gone further? Naomi said as a sudden late challenge.

Oh, Mother of God, murmured Honora. Even the Methodists are voting for jig-a-jig.

Honora and Freud and Nettice and the Durance sisters decided amongst themselves to shift subjects by going to view the sea from the uppermost deck. They ascended a stairway or companionway and stood exposed totally to the sky with mysterious equipment and winches and piping for company amidst vibrating cowlings and heavy painted grilles. The two great funnels dominated, but the Egyptian painters had been here too and their red crosses were submerged behind a layer of white. The water seemed greener and vaster still. They all at once saw their future approach them like a fish—coming straight at them. You could faintly hear it thrash the water.