“THEY SAY SHE KILLED HIM”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 March 1941, Page 10

“THEY SAY SHE KILLED HIM”

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

BY

PEARL BELLAIRS.

(Author of “Velvet and Steel,” “Christabel,” etc.)

CHAPTER XIV. (Continued/. When Trench and Valerie arrived at the bungalow with Simmonds, Mrs. Simmonds was there. A stout, greyhaired woman in a shantung costume. She was a more human person than Simmonds. She seemed delighted that they had come, and rattled on cheerfully.

“My word, I never expected this! He wanted me to go away on the Peiping and leave him to do his work alone!” with a nod at her husband. “But I said to him the responsibility was more than he could bear, apart from my place being with him. The responsibility has been terrible, doctor —but now’ thank goodness,, you’re here to take some of it!”

After Trench had discussed the possibility of better preventive measures with Simmonds, he got in a blow on behalf of his own anxiety: “I shan’t want you to work in the hospital any more, Mrs. Simmonds. Neither you, nor Miss Lane. It’s not a woman’s work.”

“Surely it's more suitable, doctor, to have a woman to look after them!” said Mrs. Simmonds, looking shocked. ‘lt’s an unnecessary risk.”

“But if my husband takes it, I must. Besides, it's too late now, I’ve been working at the hospital from the beginning.”

Nonplussed, Trench said nothing. Valerie who had been going to add that she intended to help Mrs. Simmonds said nothing either; and so gave him no opportunity to assert his disapproval again. They ate a hurried luncheon at the bungalow, Simmonds proposing to show Trench round afterwards, so that, he could decide what needed doing; and then take him to see the Governor and other influential Chinese citizens with a view to getting their co-opera-tion. The educated Chinese had a considerable respect for Western medical men.

At the end of lunch —which was well cooked, and efficiently served by a boy who looked scrupulously clean in a white linen coat—Trench took out his cigarette case. Mr. Simmonds interrupted a discourse on the new Chinese policy towards Japan, to shake his head warningly at Trench, with a glance at the servant. Trench slipped the case back into his pocket. As soon as the boy was out of the room, the missionary said:

“We don’t smoke here, if you don't mind. We spend so much time fighting the curse of tobacco that I must ask you not to give a bad example.” Trench apologised solemnly without turning a hair. Valerie reflected that a few months ago she would certainly have had -a case of her own to bring out, and wondered what Simmonds would have had to say about that. After luncheon, before Trench and Simmonds left Valerie and Trench were alone for a moment or two in the hallway, with its oleograph of the Flight into Egypt, and its brass umbrella stand. Trench seized the opportunuity to speak to her, saying in a low, intense voice: “I ask you at least, to keep out of this until we've talked it over!” In that dim light there was a rosy warmth in her face, and a golden glow in her brown hair. She looked at him with parted lips and shqok her head. Trench had no chance to say any more, for Simmonds came into the hall, and together they went out into the sunshine of the compound; and from there into the noises, smells, and dismal sights of the Chinese town. “Dr. Trench seems to be against your going on with your work at the hospital,” Valerie said, as soon as she and Mrs. Simmonds were alone in the livroom —so exactly .like an English room except for the sound of chanting voices in the distance and the continual banging of gongs. “It's a terrible strain,” Mrs. Simmonds said, voicing the first complaint she had made. “I can’t bear to see so much. I’ve told my husband we must go away. We must both have a change after this!” She told Valerie that they had a son of eighteen at a theological college in London.

“He’s been away three years now, Miss Lane. It would be wonderful for Mr. Simmonds to get leave so that we can go to England. But Mr. Simmonds is so conscientious. I hope I do my best, but I’m afraid I’m not so religious as Mr. Simmonds. But there you are, it’s the man who has the call; and the woman must follow, isn’t it so?”

Having dropped her pretence at cheerfulness Mrs. Simmonds looked weary, her eyes red-rimmed, and it seemed to Valerie, haunted by the horrors she had seen. This comfortable woman, she thought, would have been much better suited to an English country vicarage. “Won’t you stay here and let me take over the work you’ve been doing in the hospital?" “No, I would rather not. I don’t get so anxious about my husband if I do something myself.” Valerie’s intention of helping went without question. Her uniform had been in her trunk in the Hold of the Peiping and, she had nothing of the; kind with her. Mrs. Simmonds provided her with a long calico gown which tied tightly round the neck and wrists as a protection against infection, such as she wore herself.

Dressed like this they went down the ditch-like street to the mission school hospital. The street was about fifteen feet wide, filled to capacity with a stream of poor Chinese. The hovels on either side were grey and filthy, yet here and there a piece of carving, a lettered sign, an embroidered hanging stood out with exquisite beauty.

The crowd stared at the new female foreign devil, stopped in its tracks to

chatter and gaze. At the mission school there was a break in the line of hovels, where the building itself stood twenty yards back from the street behind a low mud wall. Two soldiers stood at the gate, and were arguing with an old man and a woman, relatives, who were refused admittance for fear of infection.

Within the wall all was quiet. Rows and rows of people, perhaps two hundred, were lying stretched on mats laid out in the compound; here and there some were huddled in the throes of illness, others lay utterly still, shrunken and corpse-like. A large oil drum, pierced with holes and used as an incinerator, was burning fiercely in one corner of the yard, and gusts of smoke and heat blew across the recumbent patients. A Chinese youth in European clothes was moving about filling each sufferer’s bowl with clay and water. “We burn the mats after they’ve used them,” said Mrs. Simmonds. “But the Governor was angry and forbade it because of the waste. He pretended to understand perfectly when my husband tried to explain, but gave orders for it to be stopped just the same. That was why we wanted the carbolic, so that we can disinfect the mats instead.”

As they went in through the schoolhouse doorway they met two soldiers carrying two unpolished, roughly nailed coffins, one on top of the other. In the one of the two long school rooms, shadowy after the sunshine outside, a double row of victims lay on mats, immobile colourless faces glimmering faintly, turned to the ceiling, bodies muffled in blankets; soldiers were tending big braziers burning at both ends of the room. From the other room came groans and cries and complaints of the sufferers who had not yet reached the stage of collapse. “They pass from one room to the other very quickly,” Mrs. Simmonds said. “Seldom more than a day in one, and a day in the other. We put the convalescents in the chapel.” She showed Valerie the chapel. Fifteen Chinese, six women, eight men and a small boy, all of them limp, corpse-coloured and emaciated, shared the white-washed room between them. “If we have managed to save even those it's something!” and Mrs. Simmonds, in answer to the look of horror in Valerie’s eyes. “And segregating the victims here, as Mr. Simmonds says, stops their passing the infection to others.” “I wasn't doubting the value of your work,” said Valerie, faintly. The noise from the conscious sufferers was nerve-racking and dismal beyond words. Young and healthy as Valerie was, apart from any fear she might have felt, she had to steel herself to the effort of staying within these dreadful walls. Never in her life had such things come her way. But so, without further thought of Trench and his objections, she set about the task she had given herself. She helped Mrs. Simmonds to give five permanganate pills to one terrified yellow girl, newly admitted in place of another carried out. They wrapped the body of an unconscious child in mats, and carried it in by the braziers for warmth; she collected and emptied receptacles into a vat of carbolic prepared with the supplies from the Peiping, by the soldiers. A weeping mother was relieved of the burden of her child, brought in to the hospital as a I last resource. It was then that Trench came in wi th Simmonds, while Valerie was standing in the doorway holding the child, trying to detect some signs of life in the fleshless body, the shrunken face, and glazed slit eyes. Trench merely looked at Valerie; she was too taken up with the child to care what he might say, but held it towards him as he moved past her, asking: “Is it—it is ?’’

Trench stopped. He bent for a moment, lifted an eyelid, felt for the wrist. “I’m afraid it’s dead!"

Fear of these incomprehensible words flitted across the yellow face of the mother staring so intently at them. Simmonds, speaking in Chinese, motioned Valerie to hand the child back; the mother clasped it to her, bursting into tears. Simmonds put one hand on her shoulder, and talked, pointing with his finger at the sky. Valerie found herself walking dully into the shadows of the school-house with Trench. An awful nightmare oppression had settled on her spirit. Trench's face was set in gloomy resignation, ignoring former disputes. “We’re going to have a hard fight to get anything done to improve conditions," he said. She realised that he had accepted her presence there. Later in the evening they all went back to the bungalow for baths and a meal. There was nowhere for Valerie to go, nothing for her to do but to let the Simmonds put her up at the bungalow. Whether Trench could have found other lodging she did not know, but she found lie was to stay there, too. After the meal, as they sat there discussing the epidemic, and the methods of the military Governor, it seemed to Valerie than London might never have existed. How far away all that she had known there seemed; her fattier, Daisy Lismore, Delfield, all the old friends with their trivial, nvvr-eivilised, comfortable lives. Trench was the only person to connect tier witti that remote existence. But personal mailers seemed to be forgotten except that now and again she would find him gazing al tier, his eyes dark with hidden thought, or—so it seemed to tier —some kind of suffering.

“My dear," said Mr. Simmonds. “Could we have a hymn, or are you too tired”

So Mrs. Simmonds played 'Abide With Me,” on the piano which had not been tuned since a wealthy Chinese

merchant had procured it for Mr. Simmonds from Hong Kong, and then they all went down to the hospital and worked until midnight. Trend) stayed on until dawn, when Mr. Simmonds went out again. Valerie knew when Trench came in, for she heard him moving about in the next' room. [ (To be continued.) I