The Passing Bells (37 page)

“Say,” he said nervously, “you're not going to hand me a white feather or something, are you?”

“Why, whatever for?”

“Well, it happened once today. I guess I looked too healthy to be out of uniform.”

“You should have told her who you were,” she said heatedly. “The silly twit.” She touched his hand and smiled again. “I'm sorry if I gave you a turn. I was just being facetious. We've all read your articles in the
Post.
The men in the ward say you're the only one who knows what the soldier goes through. I'm terribly proud of you, Mr. Rilke, and I do brag a bit about knowing you. Fancy! I used to make your bed!”

“Golly, that was a long time ago.”

She scowled. “Oh, the more I think about it, the angrier I get. All those feather girls are frumps. Nothing better to do with their time than hang about street corners and shame young men.”

He touched the soft fabric of her uniform sleeve. “You've sure found something better to do with your time.”

“Yes. Joined the QA's last September. Her ladyship helped me get in by writing a letter of recommendation. I'm not a sister yet, of course. It takes ever so much training to become that. I'm a probationer, training at All Souls Hospital in Holborn.”

“You'll make it.”

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “I will. I know how to work. And, oh, Lord, do they work us hard. This is my first afternoon off in weeks and I doubt if I'll get another one for months.”

“When do you have to be back?”

“Eight o'clock.”

“It's only four-thirty. Had tea yet?”

“No.”

“Neither have I. Will you join me? I have great respect for the QA's. I met a dozen of your Sisters on Lemnos, and I owe every one of them a good cup of tea. There's a White Manor in Charing Cross.”

“I understand it's awfully posh,” she said doubtfully. “An orchestra and everything like that. I wouldn't want you to go to any expense. I believe there's an ordinary White Manor on Shaftesbury Avenue.”

“Ordinary places are for ordinary people. You're special, Ivy. And anyway, I've got three months' pay burning holes in my pocket.”

He talked about Gallipoli as they walked slowly toward Charing Cross and told her how he had met Charles Greville there, in the trenches at Cape Helles. She listened gravely, keenly aware of death and wounds.

“I hope that Master Charles is all right. That must be a hellish place. We haven't received any of the Gallipoli wounded. They send most of them to Egypt and Malta. It's just as well—we have so many coming in from Flanders.”

“Will they be sending you to France?”

“Not until I'm qualified to work on a surgical team. That might be nine months to a year from now. I hope the war will be over by then. Do you think it will?”

“No, I'm afraid I don't.”

“Oh, dear.” She sighed. “Neither do most of the chaps I talk to in the wards. But one lad placed a little sign behind his bed. He lettered it himself very cleverly with a colored pencil. It reads, ‘Peace be with us in nineteen sixteen.' Not that it will make much difference to him. He lost both legs and an arm at Festubert.”

Her somber, reflective mood changed as they walked into the plush elegance of the Grand Tea Salon on the second floor of the White Manor. An orchestra was playing a tango and many couples were dancing.

“Oh, my, isn't it the grandest place!”

The tea was lavish—petits fours and éclairs, slices of Madeira cake and ices—too rich for Martin. He toyed with a piece of cake and watched Ivy eat.

“A welcome change from hospital food, I bet.”

She nodded and bit into a petit four. “Yes, they boil everything. I missed Abingdon Pryory at first. They had such good cooks there, didn't they? I'm very fond of food, in case you haven't noticed, but I never gain an ounce. Must be glandular.”

“Just youthful energy burning it off. How old are you, Ivy?”

“I turned eighteen in March. Getting on in life. Oh, dear, there are so many things I'd like to do . . . places I'd like to see. Do you know, this is the first time I've ever been out to tea with a man. Think of that!”

“Make the most of it then. Would you care to dance?”

“I never learned how. I'd hate to make a fool of myself in front of all these people.”

“Watch the dancers. None of them are very good . . . just having a good time. Come on, they're playing fox-trots now. That's easy to do . . . just walk backward while I hold you.”

“It doesn't sound easy,” she said dubiously, “but I'll give it a whirl.”

The first touch of her slender body made his legs feel weak. It seemed incredible how neatly she fitted against him. He marveled at that revelation and held her tightly.

“Am I doing it correctly?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” he said, brushing his cheek against hers, “you're doing just swell.”

They danced until the tea dansant ended at six-thirty and the orchestra played its final number. It had been the most enjoyable couple of hours Martin had spent in a long time, and the most enjoyable she had ever spent, a fact that she made a point of telling him as they walked toward St. James's Park.

“Oh, I did like that! I can't wait to tell the other girls. And, oh, how beautiful some of those women looked in their gowns!”

“None as beautiful as you, Ivy.”

She stared ahead as though she hadn't heard the compliment.

“Do you go dancing with lots of girls, Mr. Rilke?”

“Martin . . . please call me Martin. And no, I've been too busy to go dancing.”

“Did you go dancing in Chicago?”

“Sometimes. There were frat house dances occasionally.”

“I never went to a dance. Da didn't approve of them. My da is a bit straitlaced.”

“Your father, you mean?”

“That's right.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“Works in a shoe factory. He's doing very well now. His establishment is making boots for the army. Queer, isn't it? Times were so hard for him before the war and now he's making ever so much money. Quite odd, if you stop to think about it.”

It would be light until nearly ten o'clock and this hour was the loveliest of the day, the sun catching the tops of the trees and all the buildings along Whitehall, the air cooling after the heat of the long day. The park was crowded with soldiers and their girls.

“I feel kind of silly carrying this briefcase, like some sort of door-to-door drummer.”

“I think it makes you look distinguished. I'm sure people think you just left Parliament and are on your way to see the king.”

“Taking my nurse with me, I suppose.”

“Yes. You're subject to seizures and fits . . . like my Uncle Arthur, only Da says he only has fits when he suspects the publican of watering the beer.” She suddenly spread her arms wide. “Oh, I do love green parks! London would be such a lovely town if they'd only allow grass to grow in the streets.”

He took her hand and led her away from the path toward a grotto of trees.

“You're such a happy soul, Ivy.”

“Do you think so? I'm not really. I'm a bit on the glum side most of the time. It's being around so much pain. Oh, you have to keep cheery, Matron insists on that, but inside—around the heart—there's always a dull ache.”

“Do you feel it now?”

“A little, yes. I mean to say, I'm enjoying myself and I'm awfully glad to be with you, but I have to be on duty in an hour and part of my mind is back in the ward. I'm in the amputee ward, you see—have been for the past nine weeks—and there's such a terrible amount of sadness there.”

He dropped the briefcase and took her impulsively into his arms, pressing her to him, his hands strong against her back. There were couples all around them, seated or lying on the grass, under the trees, strolling by the dark green lake. No one paid the slightest attention as he kissed her firmly on the lips, as she kissed him. All the horrors of Gallipoli lay in the leather case at his feet, but all thought of them vanished for a moment in the sweetness of her mouth.

Hanna Rilke Greville lingered over her tea on the terrace of Abingdon Pryory; it was a high tea, with watercress sandwiches and thinly sliced ham and smoked Scotch salmon. She avoided large, heavy meals in the summertime, believing them conducive to gout in later years. Across the stone balustrade she could see William and four of his friends making a mockery of a tennis game, slamming balls into the well-rolled, clipped grass to see how high they could bounce or using their rackets as cricket bats and slapping the white balls into the trees. High-spirited lads, happy to be down from Eton for the holidays. Seventeen. A difficult age—not quite boys, not yet men. She knew that her son and his houseguests smoked cigarettes behind the stables and sampled the sherry; Coatsworth turned a blind eye to the latter while keeping the better casks firmly under lock and key.

The heat lingered, rising from the terrace stones. She fanned herself with a silk Japanese fan and watched the boys, leaping over the net now, back and forth, back and forth, like sheep over a fence. William was growing so tall. He would be taller than Charles. A fine, strapping boy and the apple of his father's eye. So much like Tony—fine rider, good shot.

She felt a sense of dread the moment she saw the footman walk onto the terrace from the conservatory. His very age was disquieting. He moved so slowly and painfully on his old feet that it was really high farce to dress septuagenarians like him in livery. The poor man's leaden countenance foretold doom. The pale blue envelope on the small silver tray he carried confirmed it.

“By special post, your ladyship,” the footman said.

“Thank you, Crawshay.”

She held the envelope in her hand until the man had gone. War Office stationery. Addressed to her, but then they always addressed the letter to the mothers. She slit the envelope with a knife, her hand calm and sure, only her heart racing, a throbbing pain behind the eyes.

17th July, 1915

Dear Countess Stanmore:

It is with regret that I have received word today that your son, Capt. Charles Greville, 2/RWF, has sustained wounds during the recent fighting at Cape Helles. Accounts of the extent and severity of his injuries are necessarily sketchy at this time, but it is known to us that he has been evacuated from the peninsula and taken aboard a hospital ship.

We wish him well.

Yours sincerely,
T. Pike, Brig. Gen.

There had been a great many men wounded or taken sick during the July battles at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove. Finding the exact particulars about one man was next to impossible. Lord Stanmore haunted the War Office, and Martin sent messages through the press channels to Alexandria and Lemnos. Nothing. Captain Charles Greville was simply one of a multitude evacuated from the Aegean on hospital ships. No one was quite sure which ship had received him, and there was no way on earth of finding out until the ship docked somewhere and disgorged its sick. At that point, hospital orderlies would write down the particulars on each man and forward that information to London. It took two weeks, fourteen days and nights that moved in a timeless vacuum of nightmare for Hanna. Her husband's assurances that Charles was bound to be all right (“probably no more than a flesh wound”) sounded hollow and forced. She spent the days working on needlepoint to try to keep her mind occupied, but there was nothing she could do at night except lie in bed in a cold sweat and imagine her son lying on an antiseptically white bed, his body shattered and mutilated—limbless, faceless, a hollow-mouthed creature that could no longer even scream. She felt on the verge of madness. And then the afternoon came when William ran whooping into her sewing room, yelling, “Old Charlie's all right! Fractured hip and pelvis is all. They took him to Toulon on a French ship. . . . That chap from the army just rang up Father and told him!”

She burst into tears and was weeping uncontrollably when her husband came into the room. The sight of his mother's hysteria embarrassed William and he was moody for the rest of the day.

9th August, '15

My dearest Mother, Father, William, and Alex:

This short letter is for you all. I was almost literally hit by a Turk shell. The great ugly thing landed right next to where I was lying but failed to explode. Broke my right hip and pelvis in several places, but the bones are mending well. I am quite wasted from dysentery, but that condition is on the mend, so I should be back to passing normal in a few weeks and fit for active duty within three to four months.

I am in the French naval hospital in Toulon, a great stone barn of a place built by Napoleon with a magnificent view of the docks from the windows in my room. Long, cool passageways, very pretty French nurses, first-rate food, and a doctor who believes that half a liter of good red wine a day never hurt any man. Bless the chap in your prayers! I could not ask for better or more sympathetic care and will be evacuated to a hospital in England in about three weeks' time. It will seem odd coming home. I don't quite know how to put it, but I am not the same man who left just a few short months ago. So much has changed. So much more will be changed. But we shall talk about that when I arrive.

My warmest regards to Coatsworth, Mrs. Broome, and all the staff. Also, please convey to the vicar that God has been kind to me and I regret filching pears from the vicarage garden when I was eleven. All my love.

Charles

The earl scowled at the broken top of his soft-boiled egg.

“What do you think he means about change? Of course he's changed. Can't get hit by a shell and not be affected by it somewhat.”

“I suppose he means . . . many things,” Hanna said quietly. She read the letter through again silently and then placed it on the polished surface of the breakfast table. “I could weep.”