Tomorrow Is Forever (10 page)

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.

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.”