Wild Nights! Read online

  This time, Henry was better prepared for his visit to St. Bartholomew’s: he’d thought to bring a basket of soft, chewable fruits and chocolates, small jars of jam, crossword puzzles and slender books of verse by Tennyson, Browning, Housman. (He had considered bringing Walt Whitman’s more robust yet controversial verse, but had decided against it; for he was not altogether certain that he approved of this “barbaric” American poet, entirely.) Greeting the first of his patients, a sullen-faced young man who lay stiffly propped against what appeared to be soiled pillows in his narrow cot of a bed, Henry tried not to be distracted by the young man’s deep-shadowed eyes and haggard face but to speak in an uplifted manner, as the female volunteers were doing.

  “Hello! I hope that I am not disturbing…”

  With a grimace of dissatisfaction, or pain, the young man lifted his eyes toward the gentleman-volunteer stooping over his bed like a hulking bird of prey, but, as if the effort were too much for him, his gaze stopped at about the shiny, top button of the gentleman’s vest. His thin lips twitched in a mechanical smile in mimicry of the sort of polite behavior youth is expected to exhibit in the presence of elders for whom they have not the slightest feeling. Henry had been informed that the young man was a “shrapnel case” but he couldn’t see what the young man’s injuries were, at a quick glance; he was relieved that, unlike many of his comrades, he didn’t seem to have suffered a head injury and was not missing an eye. Henry asked what was the young man’s name?—and was told in a dispirited mumble what sounded like “Hugh”; Henry asked where was the young man from?—and was told what sounded like “Manchester.” To this, Henry could think of no response; unconsciously he was pressing a hand against his chest, as if to contain his heart, which beat and lurched like a drunken thing.

  Other inquiries into Hugh’s background, his position in the army, were answered in the same way, curtly, rather sullenly, with that same fixed mock-smile, while the bloodshot gaze held steady, not rising to Henry’s face. Henry wanted to plead But, my boy, look at me: my eyes! How yearning I am, to give comfort to you. Fumbling to say, as if such expressions were common to the Master, “And where, Hugh, did you ‘see action’ in France?—I assume it was France?” Now the young man’s face stiffened, his shoulders began to quiver as if he were very cold.

  Blundering Henry had said the wrong thing, had he? Yet what else might one say in these circumstances? Clearly Hugh wished now to talk, in a hoarse, anguished voice telling Henry a not-very-coherent story of himself and several other soldiers in his platoon, at Amiens; where someone seemed to have been killed, and where Hugh had been wounded; the last thing Hugh remembered was a deafening explosion. More than two hundred shrapnel fragments had penetrated his legs and lower body, he’d been told afterward. He’d almost died of blood poisoning, “sepsis.” Now Henry saw that the young man’s legs beneath the thin blanket didn’t look normal, the muscles appeared wasted, atrophied. And Hugh spoke so slowly, with such a distortion of his face, Henry had to wonder if he’d suffered some sort of brain injury, too; or had become mentally unbalanced by his ordeal. Now Hugh’s eyes snatched at his, in unmistakable misery and anger. He was trying not to cry, tears ran down his cheeks. Not knowing what he did, Henry fumbled to grip the young man’s hands, that shook badly. The fingers were icy cold yet closed eagerly about Henry’s fingers. “Dear boy, take courage. You are safe now on British soil, you will get the very best medical care in this hospital and be sent home to your family in…” These words, that might have issued from a politician’s smiling mouth, somehow issued from the Master’s mouth; he had no idea where they’d come from, or whether in any way they might be true. He was shaken by the fact that for the first time in his life he had reached out to touch another person in this way, and this person a stricken young man, a stranger.

  “You will be well! You will walk again! I am sure of it.”

  Only the watchful mineral-gaze of Nurse Supervisor Edwards, elsewhere in the ward, prevented Henry from sinking to his knees beside the young man’s bed.

  Also that day in Ward Six, smiling gravely and moving with portly dignity from bedside to bedside, pulses quickened in excitement he took care to conceal, the Master visited with young wounded soldiers named Ralph, William, Nigel, Winston. They were from Newcastle, Yarmouth, Liverpool, Margate. He read comforting verse to them (“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/Is hung with bloom along the bough”) and he offered gifts from his basket, like a doting grandfather. How fatigued he was, as if he’d been awake for a day and a night, or had traveled a great distance. He had not become accustomed to the shock of seeing so many young, injured and incapacitated men, and to the strange, unsettling intimacy of their being in their beds, and in hospital attire; nor had he become accustomed to the flies, and roaches underfoot, and the odors of human waste, gangrenous flesh. He was chastised to think how there were simply no names for such things in the literary works he and his companions wrote, as in their conversations with one another; in all of the Master’s lauded fiction, not one individual, male or female, inhabited an actual physical body, still less a body that smelled.

  Walking with a handkerchief pressed against his nose, as Henry left Ward Six he managed to avoid several of the other volunteers who were also leaving, for he was impatient to be alone with his thoughts. The ladies’ warm-hearted but banal chatter, after Ward Six, would be intolerable.

  The Master returned home by taxi. Staggered up the steps of the brownstone building, sank heavily onto the leather divan in the bay window. How exhausted he was, and yet—how exhilarated! That evening he wrote in his diary It is as if my skin had been peeled off, and all my nerves exposed. He marked the day with a red cross, the first in months: and beside the tiny cross the enigmatic initial H.

  For weeks, months in succession in the quickly waning year 1914 the oldest of the volunteers at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital moved like one entranced. Each time he stepped into the tumult of Ward Six the vision was a revelation and a shock to him. So many wounded! Maimed! Such pain, grief! Such a spectacle of suffering seemed to the Master a rebuke of him, as of his ornate, finely spun art for which the world had lauded him. Half in shame he thought This has been the actual world—has it?

  He had not seen Hugh again.

  Hugh, you. To whom he might have given his (aging, ailing) heart.

  Entering Ward Six the morning after his initial visit and with a fluttering pulse he saw a hellish sight: a white-curtained screen around the young soldier’s bed, hiding what took place inside. Henry stopped dead in his tracks. Henry could come no nearer.

  “You must not become attached to the young men, sir. You will see why.”

  Sharp-eyed Nurse Supervisor Edwards had noted the look in Henry’s face. She spoke sternly yet not without sympathy.

  Henry mumbled a reply. In truth, he could think of no reply.

  If there was not to be Hugh, there remained Ralph, William, Nigel, Winston. The newly arrived wounded from the front line, dazed with pain, missing arms, legs, eyes, red-haired Alistair, blue-eyed Oliver, to these as to others Henry would read verse, and he would read from the newspapers; he who had made it a practice to dictate to a stenographer for years, to ease the painful writer’s cramp in his right hand, found himself now delighted to “take dictation” and to write letters to soldiers’ families, in the most legible and elegant hand of which he was capable. Often it was a painfully emotional experience, writing such a letter; both the young man, and his elderly stenographer, were moved to tears. At the conclusion, if the young man could not see to sign his name, or could not manage a pen unassisted, Henry would grip the young man’s hand to aid him in signing.

  He paid for postage, he posted letters. He brought his usual gifts, to be passed around the ward. He brought adventure novels: Sir Walter Scott, R. D. Blackmore, Wilkie Collins. (For quickly he’d seen how unlikely it was that any of these young men, even the more intelligent among them, would wish to stumble through the Master’s highly refined, relentlessl
y analytical and slow-moving prose, that focused exclusively on the gossamer relations of men and women of privilege who had never suffered even the mild violence of a slap to the face.) He spent money rather recklessly, buying such items of clothing as underwear, socks, bathrobes, even pillowcases and linen, warm shawls, blankets, slippers, shoes. Though his heart sometimes pounded with the strain, he helped young men rise from their beds, adjust themselves to crutches or into wheelchairs; he was an eager volunteer to push the wheelchair patients to a sunroom at the rear of the building, overlooking the hospital grounds. On sunny days, he pushed them outside along the graveled paths beneath exquisitely beautiful plane trees, though the effort was considerable, leaving him short of breath.

  If he died in the effort, in a young man’s arms, perhaps!—it would not be so very tragic a death.

  In this winter of 1914 to 1915 the diary was riddled with red-inked crosses beside such initials as A., T., W., N., B.

  “My secret! My happiness, no one must know.”

  For there seemed to him, in the very tumult of his blood, something sinful, indeed vulgar and demeaning, about happiness.

  Now reading to the young wounded men, in the richly modulated tone of one who can barely keep his voice from quavering, the thrilling, suggestive verse of his great countryman Walt Whitman:

  Shine! shine! shine!

  Pour down your warmth, great sun!

  While we bask, we two together.

  And, these hypnotic words pulsing with the surge of his own awakened blood:

  O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.

  O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!

  O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!

  O now I triumph—and you also;

  O hand in hand—O wholesome pleasure—O one more desirer and lover!

  O to haste firm holding—to haste, haste on with me.

  In his diary the wistful plea Who would be Master, if he could be—“Camerado”?

  Pushing one of the young men in his wheelchair, along the crowded corridors of St. Bartholomew’s, suddenly he might confide, daringly: “D’you know, my ghost will haunt this place, I think! Long after the Great War has ended, and you have all been discharged, my melancholy figure will continue to haunt this site—the ‘ghost-lover.’”

  Ghost-lover. This was daring. This was risking a great deal. But the hospital so thrummed with noise, whichever young man he happened to be pushing in a wheelchair at this time, lost in a disturbing dream of his own, grimacing with physical discomfort, wouldn’t trouble to ask the elderly volunteer to repeat his curious words.

  “Oh! What has…”

  Hastily Henry lay aside his copy of Leaves of Grass to stoop over the stricken young man in the wheelchair whose name, in this terrifying moment, he’d quite forgotten, as the young man began shuddering and convulsing. Out of his anguished mouth blood welled, running down his chin and splashing onto his chest; Henry, in a panic, fumbled to remove from his pocket and to unfold, with trembling fingers, one of his monogrammed spotless-white linen handkerchiefs, to attempt to wipe away the ghastly welling blood.

  “…dear boy what has happened, O God don’t let…”

  An alarm went up, hospital workers intervened. The stricken patient was wheeled away for emergency treatment and the elderly volunteer, looking somewhat distraught, was sent home.

  …must for dear life make our own counter-realities.

  In the seclusion of his London flat on a quiet street, in the privacy of his bedchamber the Master reverently unfolded the linen handkerchief and for a long time stared at the damp crimson stain that seemed to him star-shaped, symmetrical. “Dear boy! I pray that God is with you.” Though the Master was not a religious man, nor in the habit of murmuring such prayers, even in private. He kissed the crimson stain. Carefully he placed the handkerchief, unfolded, on a windowsill to dry. And when it was dry, that evening before he retired to bed, he tenderly kissed the stain again, and placed the handkerchief, still opened, beneath his heavy goose-feather pillow, as he would place it for many nights to come; taking care each morning to remove the handkerchief, and to hide it away, that his housekeeper Mrs. Erskine would not discover it and think, to her horror, that the Master had been coughing up blood in the night.

  In his diary for these somber days so fraught with emotion, Henry would record, in delicious code, that no biographer might ever decipher, both black-inked and red-inked crosses:† † † † †

  “Sir! You have suffered a shock, I see.”

  Formidable Nurse Supervisor Edwards seemed, by her stance, to be blocking the entrance to Ward Six. Stolidly she stood with her strong, compact arms folded across her large, hard-looking bosom. Her spotless white-starched nurse’s cap, her spotless starched-white blouse and white apron, like the navy-blue skirt that flared at her wide hips and dropped nearly to her ankles, gave her the look, both austere and willful, of a Roman Catholic nun. Nurse Edwards’s voice was one of seeming sympathy belied by the ironic twist of her lips and the accusatory stare of her close-set eyes.

  “A—shock? I? But—”

  “Yesterday. Here. A sudden hemorrhaging, I was told. You—meant to give aid. You are the most devoted of our volunteers, sir? We do thank you, we are most grateful.” Still the nurse supervisor fixed the Master with her ironic, accusatory gaze, that provoked him to but a stammering and faltering reply, curtly interrupted by Nurse Edwards as she turned away, to allow him passage:

  “Such shocks show in the face, sir. Be warned.”

  She knows! She has seen into my heart. The woman is my enemy: nemesis. How can I prevail upon my nemesis, to take pity on me!

  It was so, in Henry’s eyes there had come to be an unnatural glisten, and in his lined, flaccid cheeks a ruddy blush, as if his face had been slapped. Like an opiate, the spell of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital had worked its way into his bloodstream.

  “Not I! The least likely of ‘addicts.’”

  How disapproving the Master was, of such weaknesses in others: heavy drinking, eating, tobacco smoking; lethal absinthe, and yet more lethal opium (in its genteel guise beloved by many fashionable women, as “laudanum”); above all, illicit, reckless, and demeaning liaisons with persons of a questionable rank or class. (The Master had had no sympathy, indeed, for the “squalid tragedy” of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde whose scandalous trial for “unnatural acts” with young men had captivated London in the 1890s, and had primly refused to sign a petition to alleviate the harsh condition of Wilde’s prison sentence.) Yet Henry had to concede, removed from the febrile atmosphere of St. Bartholomew’s, that he had become—to a degree!—“addicted” to it: to the young, wounded and so often maimed and crippled soldiers of Ward Six. Awake and asleep he was haunted by their faces: no less powerfully in the privacy of his London flat, than in their actual presence. How innocent they seemed to him, in the freshness of youth! How like boys, like mere children, fearful of what had happened to them, the terrible, perhaps irremediable alterations of their young bodies, yet, somehow, so heartrendingly, susceptible to hope. Henry’s relations with them were rarely other than formal for he dared not touch them lingeringly; if, assisting the nurses, he aided in feeding those incapable of feeding themselves, yet he took care not to press too near, and not to stare too avidly, with eyes of yearning. Only in the privacy of his bedchamber might the elderly volunteer murmur aloud: “I would die for you, my dear boys! If I could—somehow—take your place. These old, ailing legs I would give you, who have lost your legs! My breath, my heart, my very blood: if I could fill you with my life, and make you fit and whole again, my dear boys, I would.”

  Such proclamations made him breathless, light-headed as if he’d been drinking. Pacing about in his bedchamber, striking his fists lightly together, whispering, flush-faced and eyes glistening and his collar torn open at the throat, that he might breathe more freely.

  In secret, in this bedchamber, in a closet with a lock to which M
rs. Erskine had no key, Henry had set up an altar: on a beautifully carved mahogany box he had placed two votive candles to illuminate what he’d come to call his “sacred relics” which consisted, so far, of several handkerchiefs monogrammed HJJ, stiffened with dried blood; strips of medical gauze stained with blood and/or mucus; clumps of hair, a signet ring, a sock, several photographs (of young, smiling uniformed men taken in the happier days before they’d been shipped away to war); even a rosary, of shiny black beads, left behind by a discharged soldier. It was not discreet of him, Henry knew, to purloin such items at the hospital, nor was it discreet to assemble them in such a way, and in moods of wild exhilaration to kneel before the makeshift altar by candlelight and kneel and clasp his hands together in an attitude of prayer. The Master did not believe in prayer, as the Master did not believe in God. Yet his lips moved in the most giddy prayers: “Dear boys! My loves! You live in me. I live in you. But no one must know of you. Not even you.”

  Art is long and everything else is accidental and unimportant.

  So the Master wrote to a prominent literary acquaintance, an elder of distinction like himself. Smiling to think how biographers of decades to come, in reverence for his genius, would seize upon such pronouncements with little cries of discovery.

  4.

  “My blood is bad. Like my soul.”

  His name was Scudder: bluntest of names. His face creased in repugnance should anyone call him by his first name: Arthur.

  Scudder was an amputee, a new arrival on Ward Six. You could see that he’d had a boy’s face at one time, now scarred, scabbed, furrowed, his skin so very pale as to seem greenish. Scudder had had a head wound, his hair was shaved close to his scalp which was luridly crisscrossed with scars. For all Scudder’s misery he had an air of authority and so the elderly gentleman-volunteer who read to him from the London Times and the Manchester Guardian, and from the less sentimental poets, provided him with math-puzzle books and licorice twists and pushed him, in reasonably good weather, along the graveled paths behind the great hospital, wished to honor him by calling him “Lieutenant Scudder.”