ENFANT DE MALHEUR
His name was tattooed on his arm, and the head of a woman life-size on his back. He himself might have been fashioned by Praxitiles, but some sailor in a North African port had dug needles of blue ink into the marble flesh of his arm, and written there the indelible words—Enfant de Malheur. He waved that slender member of his incredibly perfect Greek body in the nurse’s face when she asked him his name, and said Voila! with a biting sarcasm and a snarl of pointed white teeth. Then, glaring defiance, defying her to knife him in the back, he turned over and displayed his back to her. The face of a chocolate box beauty done in colours decorated its smooth surface. Her silly blue eyes stared up from between his fine flat shoulder blades and her full red lips smiled on his spinal cord. She was a trashy creature, a plump, coarse morsel, no fit companion for this young prince of darkness. He had race, distinction, an exquisite elegance, and, even in his battered state, the savage grace of a panther. Not even his wounds could disfigure him. The long deep gash in his side made his smooth torso seem the more incredibly fair and frail. The loss of one leg rendered the other more exquisite with its round polished knee and slim ankle.
He was one of a lot of some twenty Apaches that had been brought in that morning. As I remember them, they were all handsome young men—these assassins, thieves, pimps and traffickers in drugs—with sleek elastic limbs, smooth polished skins and beautiful bones. It was, if I remember rightly, only about their heads that I noticed imperfection. Their skulls were not quite right somehow, nor the shape of their ears. Their foreheads were low and receding, their jaws weak, and their mouths betrayed depravity. Still they were beautiful, beautiful as young leopards, and they brought with them into the hospital the strange morbid glamour of crime. But the Enfant de Malheur was the most beautiful of them all. He had the face of an angel.
They were exiles, and they belonged to the Battalions D’Afrique that had been put into the line two days before on the eve of an attack. Excellent troops of assault, these young Parisian criminals who had been sentenced to penal servitude for life and conscripted in the army of North Africa; but no good for holding the line or for anything else, so the General told me. No stamina, no powers of endurance; but they were born killers and they went over the top when the signal was given like wolf-hounds suddenly unleashed. Moreover, they knew that if they distinguished themselves in battle they would win back their freedom and become again at the end of the war, citizens of Paris.
Paris! Montmartre! The lighted cafés of the Place Blanche; the jingling, flashing, merry boulevards; these boys who lay like Greek gods in their beds recalled fantastically all the romantic tales that had ever been written by liars about the underworld of that most brilliant and seductive of capitals. The cunning camouflage of their beauty made it all seem true. The wild breath of false romance swept down the huts over their beds. And they lay in their beds, glaring, defiant, suspicious, expecting, so it seemed, to be attacked, assassinated or robbed in their beds at any moment by any one of us.
Their arrival had created something of a sensation in the hospital. The line had been held for the last few weeks by regiments of territorials, the “old ones,” as we called them; and we had received for many days nothing but greybeards. Fathers and grandfathers. “Vieux Pères,” good troops they made for holding the line in the wet winter weather. They simply sat there doggedly in the cold, the mud and the wet, enduring the war and getting rheumatism in their old joints week after week. So the arrival of this gang of reckless, noisy, sardonic and suspicious cutthroats was a pleasant diversion. But the Medicin Chef wasn’t pleased. He divided them up carefully, put only two, or at the most three, in each hut, and turned the nurses out of the operating room, for when these lovely beings were laid out in their immaculate beauty on the operating table and the ether mask was put over their proud, depraved, contemptuous faces, a stream of language of such foulness spurted from their chiselled lips that even the surgeons turned sick.
Pim ignored this. Pim was in charge of the Enfant de Malheur. She was the daughter of an Archdeacon, and had been brought up in a cathedral close in the North of England, then had trained in Edinburgh. She was an excellent nurse, very fastidious about the care of the patients. Her blue uniform was always stiffly starched, her cap and apron were immaculate; so was her smooth severe Madonna face, with its childlike candid eyes and thin quiet mouth. Pim didn’t understand the word Apache. She didn’t understand the Enfant de Malheur. She didn’t, I believe, notice that he was beautiful. She was interested in his wounds and in saving his life. She had come to the front to nurse the French because she had been told that they needed nurses more in the French army than in England; but she was not interested in Frenchmen, nor in any man. She knew no men. She knew only her patients. And she fought for their lives grimly, quietly, with her thin gentle lips pressed tight together when the crisis came. So she did not look at her young Apache with curiosity, and she did not know why he glared at her or why he gave a start and leapt sideways in his bed when she approached him. She made no attempt at understanding his queer argot, and was unaware when he insulted her. She quite simply continued to look after him with complete serenity. She simply went on handling his dangerous body with the perfectly assured impersonal gentleness of an excellent surgical nurse—washing him, dressing his wounds, giving him injections, enemas and bed pans, as if she were at home in Edinburgh at work under the eye of the most exacting of Scotch surgeons.
It was Guerin who understood that the pain-racked body of the Enfant de Malheur was as dangerous as an unexploded bomb. Guerin was an orderly with the rank of corporal, and he shared with Pim the responsibility of the ward. He was a priest, mobilized for the war; but we forgot this the greater part of the time, because he was so efficient as a nurse and looked so little like a priest in his neat blue corporal’s uniform with his bright alert eyes looking out through his pince nez. Indeed, it was only when one of Pim’s patients died that we remembered that Guerin was a priest. Then Pim summoned him shyly and withdrew, leaving Guerin alone with the man who was dying.
Sometimes coming in I would find the little man kneeling by a bedside with a crucifix in his hands, and the sight of his neat compact figure and intent scholarly face would recall to me his other holy calling, and make me wonder. He was so unlike the big priest in the black cassock with the white head bandage, who strode through the hospital grounds swinging a walking stick, and who had won the Croix de Guerre with three palms for bravery in the field. Guerin had looked to me, when he first came to us, a bit of a prig. He had a slightly quizzical expression; his manner was dry and impersonal; but he was on duty at six in the morning, and although he was supposed to go off twelve hours later, he was usually there busy with Pim until late in the evening, swabbing tables, boiling up instruments, or writing letters to someone’s dictation.
They were a very satisfactory couple. They scarcely spoke to each other, but they worked together as if they had been born for this, and this alone—this silent, quick, watchful, unceasing battle with death; this struggle to save men’s lives, by doing small things accurately at the right moment—without fuss, without noise, without sign of fatigue or hurry, or nervousness or despair. Their hands, their feet, their eyes never faltered and were never still. They made the same calm, quick, exact movements, took no unnecessary steps, left nothing undone. Yes, a curiously harmonious pair, this tall Englishwoman and small sturdy Frenchman. But Guerin did more than Pim did, because he understood more and had more to do. He believed in the Holy Catholic Church and the Remission of Sins and the Life Everlasting. He had set himself a task that he never mentioned. These wounded were not only his countrymen, they were his children, and he considered himself responsible for their immortal souls.
So he frowned and his small sharply-cut features took on a look of added sharpness and his keen eyes grew suddenly alert when the stretcher-bearers brought the Enfant de Malheur into the ward. He didn’t interfere with Pim, but he watched. He didn’t warn her or try to stop her, or keep her away from the lovely Greek god whom he knew to be one of the damned and a fiend out of hell; but when she leaned over the beautiful fierce chiselled face he was always on the watch. And so he saw what Pim, who didn’t understand, couldn’t see. He saw that this damné, this vile savage rat from the sewers of Paris, was puzzled, bewildered, intimidated by Pim’s stolid impersonal gentleness. He saw him gradually stop jumping to one side of the bed and take to wriggling and squirming with acute discomfort under her candid gaze, and he heard him muttering and snarling under his breath with exasperation at the insufferable presence of this Madonna-like woman with the cold, white, calm face. Guerin understood how uncomfortable the Enfant de Malheur would be in the presence of the beautiful Mother of God, and he watched him wriggle to avoid Pim’s cool maiden eyes. And so on the third day, when the Apache beckoned Pim to come to him, Guerin was even more surprised than Pim was, because he knew that the wicked brute in the boy had been tamed by the power of Pim’s unconscious serenity. Pim approached calmly. She was rather a stupid woman in some ways. “What is it?” she asked in her virginal English voice. “Que voulez-vous?” And Guerin, listening, watchful still, but with his tense face relaxed a little, heard the Apache whisper as he pulled Pim down: “Come close. I want to tell you something. I want to tell you,” said the child of misfortune into Pim’s clean white ear, “that I have never deliberately killed a woman in my life.”
And then Guerin heard Pim murmur quietly in her stiff polite way, as if she were interviewing some well-meaning but unfortunate backsliding parishioner in the Deanery: “I’m so glad to hear it.” And then the fiend out of hell, incarnate in the sewer rat with the angel face, fell back on his pillows with a sudden look of sharp self-disgust, and Pim moved off down the ward about her business.
I don’t think it occurred to her to wonder what his phrase implied, or how many women he had killed, as he would have called it, by accident, or how many men with intent. I don’t believe she was aware of the immense compliment he had paid her, or of having gained any victory over him. She had no knowledge of vice or evil. She did not know that he was truly one of the damned, and that his heart was black and heavy with a sick black weight of fear that came sweeping over him in his new weakness, and so next day, when he began to be frightened, she was surprised by the wild gleams of fear that came and went in his eyes.
But Guerin knew. He was a student of men, and he knew that the Enfant de Malheur was his brother, and believed in what he himself believed, namely, in the Holy Catholic Church and the Life Everlasting, in God, and the Mother of God, and the Holy Son of God, against whom he had fought and blasphemed since the day he was born.
His condition, both physical and moral, grew rapidly worse after this. Symptoms of gangrene set in. A second amputation was necessary, high up the thigh, almost at the hip, and again Pim, who had followed her patient to the operating room, was told to go away. She refused. She stood there obstinately while streams of filth and obscenity spurted from his beautiful pale mouth—putrid psychic sewage of the underworld spouting from him like a fountain; but to the surgeon’s embarrassed, irritated excuses she answered: “I don’t understand his language, so what difference does it make?” and she took him back and put him gently to bed.
But when he came to after the operation, there was a new look in his eyes. Pim went white at the sight of it, and her hand, as she put the long saline needle into his side, trembled, and she went in search of Guerin.
“He is so frightened,” she said, “he is so afraid to die. I can’t bear it. We must save him, Guerin.”
So they conspired to save him. There were forty beds in the hut, and they were all full; but those two—Pim and Guerin—without fuss multiplied themselves. No royal patient was ever nursed with greater care than our Enfant de Malheur, but he grew worse, and his fear grew worse. His fear increased until its presence filled the ward, and the old greybeards in their beds turned away their faces and stopped their ears to hide from it.
He began to sweat terribly. He began to toss and writhe. He began to smell bad. Moods of blasphemous bravado alternated with fits of uncontrollable panic. In the middle of a curse his teeth would begin to chatter. Then suddenly his eyes would start from his head in terror, and he would shriek for help and thrash out wildly till Pim came to him or Guerin. Sometimes he sobbed like a child in Pim’s arms. More often he raged at her, cursed her and Guerin and God. His bed became a centre of obscenity. Foul odours, foul words, foul matter swirled round him, and always there was that terror in his eyes, and the sweat pouring down his body that was greenish now as if covered with slime. The tattooed lady smiled through the slime on his back, and he would wave his wasted arm and hit out with it, and the big letters seemed to shout to Pim down the ward: Enfant de Malheur!
Finally he could not bear her near him, could not bear the sight of her near his bed or the touch of her hands. One afternoon he yelled at her to go away, leave him alone. She had maintained so far her stolid serenity, but at that she broke down. I found her behind her screen at the end of the ward with her shoulders shaking, her face twisting. It was nine o’clock in the evening. I told her to go off duty at once.
“But he is going to die in the night,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“And he is terribly frightened.”
“I know.”
“His fear is so ugly. It frightens me and the others, all the old men. We must do something. Can’t we do something?”
“Perhaps Guerin can do something. You and I, what can we do?”
“If only he weren’t so sane. If only he didn’t realise. But his fever seems to have sharpened his wits. He knows he is going to die. He never forgets for a second. He hasn’t had a wink of sleep. Dying usually slows down, blurs everything, brings a merciful dullness; but for him there is no such mercy. His nerves are live wires. Morphine has no effect. I’ve given him extra doses. No good, not a bit of good. But he must have relief, I tell you. This is impossible.” Her face had a slightly crazed look. “I tell you I am ready to give him any amount of stuff. I’ll do anything to put an end to it.”
I said, “Come along, Pim. You can’t kill your patient. Come now at once. You’re doing no good here.” What he wants, I said to myself, is to be convinced that he has nothing to be afraid of. But suppose I tried to convince him that there was nothing to fear, no God, no crucified Christ waiting, no everlasting life stretching ahead of him, nothing but nothingness, I could never convince him—never. I had no power over his fear.
Guerin met me at the door of the hut as I was going out with Pim. He was polishing his eyeglasses.
“I would like permission to spend the night in the ward,” he said in his quick way, adjusting his pince nez on his pointed nose.
“Very well, Guerin. You’ve been on duty all day, and you’ll be on all day to-morrow, remember.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said briefly, dismissing us both with a wave of his hand.
“Can I do nothing, Guerin?” Pim asked meekly.
“Nothing, Mademoiselle.”
They looked at each other. Then she looked down the ward to where the boy was lying and her mouth contracted. We could distinguish from our distance the terrified eyes.
“What is he afraid of?” she asked, shuddering.
“Of hell, Mademoiselle,” said Guerin. And suddenly, as if he had heard us, some power jerked the boy off his pillow, and his arms shot out in front of him. “Je ne meurs pas,” he cried; “Je ne meurs pas. Je ne voudrais pas mourir.” I hurried Pim away.
When I went back, Guerin was on his knees by the boy’s bed reading in low rapid tones from a little book. The Enfant de Malheur was not listening. He was quite unaware of him. He was entirely and horribly absorbed by another presence that seemed to be attacking him as an octopus attacks with a dozen arms. He was writhing in the unseen clutches. He was dodging and twisting and hissing at the thing through clenched teeth, and his eyes darted this way and that like beings separate from himself, possessed by a panic of their own.
I went from bed to bed attending to the old grumbling ones and trying not to look, but I could hear his fear increasing. Its tempo grew audibly more rapid, more frantic. His invisible enemy seemed to be going for him now in rushes and leaps of increasing fury. I hurried through my work, scolding in whispers the old men who were annoyed by his noise and troubled by his fear. I rattled my basins and kettles, making a noise of my own to distract them. But I could hear the boy’s sobbing breath, hear him choking and shuddering, and every few seconds his voice would burst from his suffocating chest in a wail of defiant terror, and once he went off into a peal of hysterical laughter.
Guerin’s low voice went on through it all. His words followed each other rapidly, in a monotone, in a level directed chant. He was aiming them straight at the head of the sweating terror-struck creature beside him. He paid no attention to me. Neither of them was aware of me. I hurried past them and went out.
I had a great deal to do. I went from hut to hut. I gave piqures and medicines and drinks, adjusted bandages and pillows, filled hot water bottles. I busied myself busily, making an unnecessary fuss over my duties, and tried to absorb myself in relieving the shadowy suffering forms that lay so patiently, murmuring their gratitude. I was greedy for their gratitude. I wanted badly to be comforted. But I had a feeling of sickening suspense and miserable futility. I could not forget those two. But I thought of them as three. I caught myself saying to myself: “There is Guerin and the Enfant de Malheur and another. It isn’t just a case of one man fighting the panic of another. That’s what you call it. That’s what you want to believe it is. But there is something there that inspires the panic. Something else, something immense. The boy is a worm; the priest is an insignificant little man. But there are huge invisible things assaulting that noisome bed. What? The powers of darkness?”
“Nonsense,” I said to myself. I was adjusting the pulleys of a fracture case. “There are no dark powers abroad in the world. There is only death and pain and human evil and puny human remorse. The boy is a murderer, a thief, a vile rat, and he knows it; that’s all, but soon it will all be over. Soon he’ll be nothing, nothing. You know all the rest is silly superstition. If Guerin didn’t happen to be a Catholic priest he wouldn’t take it so hard.”
But even the quiet huts full of sleeping men seemed to be filled with mystery, and I hurried to get back to that other one across the way, where I knew an immense struggle was going on. I couldn’t bear not to see what was happening. I was afraid to go back, but fascinated, haunted, allured. “If Guerin didn’t happen to be a priest he would be as useless as you are in the face of this,” I said to myself. But could even Guerin do anything? Who was Guerin? A good orderly, a conscientious little man who believed in old legends. Very well, very well. Put it that the power of an aged belief was being put to the test in that ugly hut. I must see; I must know. I was devoured with curiosity.
My round took me two hours. It was midnight when I got back to them. Guerin was in the same position, on his knees, but he was praying now with a crucifix in his lifted hands and his eyes were closed. His face showed signs of great fatigue; it was tight and strained, but it wore a curious expression. And this expression was so concentrated that it seemed to come from his face and shoot upward like a shaft of dark light. I cannot describe it otherwise. His voice, too, had gained in power; it was low, level, and penetrating, but there were undertones in it that made one’s nerves tingle. “Dieu qui nous regarde, ayez pitié. Dieu le Saveur, je vous supplie—”
The Enfant de Malheur, I saw with a sickening catch in my side, had changed too, and the change was dreadful. I had hoped. What had I hoped? In his growing exhaustion and terror he had a look of madness. He was almost unrecognisable. There was a devilish hatred on his clammy face, a vile frantic fury, as well as an agony of terror. His fury seemed directed toward Guerin and the crucifix, while his terror was concentrated on something straight in front of him. His lips were twisted into a malevolent and hideous snarl; his eyes were the eyes of a suffering lunatic; they shot sullen sidelong looks of wild vindictiveness at the crucifix. As I passed he gave a vicious leap toward the foot of the bed, flung his tortured body past the priest’s head, hit out at the Christ with his fist, and, grinding his teeth, yelled out a hideous curse into the shadows. Guerin’s voice became audible again an instant later: “Dieu, notre seul espoir—Dieu, notre Sauveur.” The old men groaned and muttered, half waking.
At two o’clock the struggle was still going on and the situation seemed to me at first unchanged except that the apache and the priest were both fainting with exhaustion; but I noticed presently that they had come to closer grips with each other. Guerin, still on his knees, was talking now with his mouth close to the boy’s head, talking with a breathless intensity, saying apparently the same thing over and over, as if he were trying to drive home into that maddened brain a single important fact, and it seemed to me that through his terror the dying boy was listening in spite of himself. His attention was now very evidently divided between the death that menaced him at the foot of his bed and the voice that spoke in his ear. He was still fighting, but while he fought he listened reluctantly, fearful of allowing his attention to be distracted from his awful antagonist for a second, but nevertheless compelled to pay attention. And his antagonist seemed to have withdrawn a little. The beast was crouching, was cowering now, so it seemed to me. I stood at a distance under the lamp that hung from the peaked roof and watched. Guerin was panting for breath as if he had been running in a long race. But he seemed to be winning: he seemed to have pushed back a little that dark power. The boy was undoubtedly listening to his rapid, determined, insistent voice. The power in it was reaching him. What power? Guerin’s, you fool, I said to myself, but what powers did Guerin have to draw on. He had been at it now for four hours. Could he last out, keep it up? Keep up what? What, after all, was he doing? Was he telling the sewer rat lies to get him quiet? But how could he go on lying and lying? What power lay in tricks and falsehood to rout that awful terror? If Guerin failed he would, I caught myself thinking, be proved a liar; but if he won, what then? And just at that moment I saw the boy break away from Guerin’s voice and plunge with a shriek back into his agony and begin to writhe again as if grappling with a monster; and I almost ran to the door, sick with horror and disappointment.
“He has failed,” I said to myself. “Guerin has failed.” And I hurried away with my lantern through the bitter air, making excuses for him. “It’s too long, it’s too much. He’s been at it all night. No man on earth could keep it up at that pitch of intensity.” I stopped, stood staring down at my lantern. “But he’d almost got him,” I whispered, “and now he’s lost him again.” But had he? I turned round. Suppose Guerin had given up? I went running back. “I couldn’t bear that, Guerin,” I whispered. “I couldn’t bear to see you beaten;” I felt half suffocated as I crept to the door and looked in again.
Guerin had not relaxed or changed his position; he was still praying, praying. His words came to my ears like the soft raps of a small muffled hammer, hammering away, hammering and hammering.
And as I went on my rounds again, from hut to hut and bed to bed, I kept hearing Guerin’s voice, hammering away, hammering away at the gates of Heaven for the sake of the poor Enfant de Malheur. I knew now that nothing could stop him, that he would never give in, but I knew, too, that his time was getting short. The boy couldn’t last much longer. Soon he would die. Would he die in terror, aware of his unutterable vileness? Would Guerin be forced to see that happen? Would he be proved to himself to be a liar?
I felt cold and very tired. The sky was beginning to pale. It was four o’clock, the hour when life beats most feebly in the bodies of men. I went from hut to hut again, listening for the little sounds of uncertain fluttering life. Was this one slipping away or that one? “No one, no one else must die to-night,” I kept saying to myself. “There is only one death here to-night.” Then I turned towards Guerin’s hut. It stood ungainly and ugly in the half light, a wooden shelter through which many men had passed, some to go home, some to be buried in our cemetery where the wooden crosses stood so modestly above the ground. None of them stayed with us. All were lost to us. They passed like shadows. I could not remember them. They had no names, no faces in my memory. Who were they? What were they? What had become of them? I did not know. I knew nothing about them; I knew nothing of the dead or the living. I felt cold. I felt dreadfully cold as I approached the door, but as I entered I was aware that a strange hush had come into the ward, and through it I heard the old men breathing, and a young voice talking. It was the Enfant de Malheur who was speaking. He was talking to Guerin in a small weak child’s voice, and Guerin was kneeling beside him with the sweat pouring down his face. I saw Guerin take his handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his forehead, but he did not take his eyes from the boy’s eyes while he did this. They were both quiet; Guerin was very, very quiet, but the boy was sobbing a little, He was confessing his sins. He was pouring out all his dark, secret, haunting memories into Guerin’s ears and sobbing with relief. I turned and tip-toed out again, and stood for awhile against the wall of the hut, trembling. I went back at five. I could not keep away. I went back half through my round. I knew that I must not miss the last act of the drama that was playing itself out so quietly on that ugly narrow bed. I knew that I would never again in this world see anything so mysterious.
The dawn was filtering into the long wooden hut, filling it with the twilight of morning. The old men in their beds lay asleep. I looked down the long row apprehensively with a last catch at the heart. Was it over? Had Guerin really won? No, it was not over yet. Yes, yes, he had won. There they were, the two of them, and the boy’s white face was smiling above smoothed sheets. His eyes were closed. He lay relaxed, at peace, happy, and a small crumpled figure was still kneeling beside his bed and a low voice was praying again: “Jesu—Dieu—Sauveur qui nous regard.” And I knew that the Enfant de Malheur was listening. I knew that he could hear, because he moved a little, and touched the priest’s arm, half opened his eyes, and smiled as I watched him.
He died at six o’clock, holding Guerin by the hand. Then Guerin loosed his hand, and crossed the boy’s two hands on his wasted chest over the small crucifix, and rose from his knees and walked stiffly to the door.
The sun was rising. He staggered a little as he came out into the fresh morning air. I stood beside him. He began polishing his pince-nez. The sky was crimson behind the wooden sheds. Suddenly, softly, it filled with golden light. Great luminous bands spread up and out like a fan from the horizon. I looked at Guerin, so small, so crumpled, so exhausted. He did not look at all like a man of God. He looked like a book-worm, a bit of a prig, an insignificant little man.
“What does it mean, Guerin?” I asked. “It was like a miracle; but what does it mean?”
“He is safe.” Guerin said briefly. Then he adjusted his pince-nez, gave me a quick sharp look, and turned away to his own quarters.