More Miracle Than Bird

  MORE

  MIRACLE

  THAN

  BIRD

  ALICE MILLER

  TIN HOUSE / Portland, Oregon

  for Peter Miller and Sue Oakley

  CONTENTS

  One: Winter 1916

  Two

  Three

  Four: Winter 1914

  Five: Winter 1916

  Six: Pike

  Seven: Summer 1914

  Eight: Winter 1916

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen: Pike

  Fourteen

  Fifteen: Spring 1916

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen: Pike

  Twenty: Summer 1916

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four: Pike

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six: Autumn 1916

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight: Pike

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four: Pike

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four: Autumn 1917

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty: Pike

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six: Summer 1918

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Acknowledgments and Notes

  Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  —W. B. YEATS, “Sailing to Byzantium”

  ONE

  WINTER 1916

  Georgie was waiting outside in the empty hallway, aware that she was early, but at the sound of a scream she pushed the heavy door open.

  She stopped in the doorway and did not cover her ears.

  She had entered an enormous room with a high ceiling and long scarlet curtains, and a parquet floor lined with white beds filled with men. One of the men was sitting up, his eyes shut, mouth wide.

  No one else in the room seemed to hear him. One man was reading a newspaper, one sipping a glass of water. They had not noticed her come in, either. She could not say how long she stood in the doorway, but at some point the screaming stopped. The man reading the newspaper flipped over to the next page. For a moment, the silence was worse. She moved out of the doorway.

  “You’ll get used to it,” someone said near her. A low voice, from the bed nearest the door, where a young man was watching her. His feet were exposed below the sheet, and his toes were purple and red, rotted open, raw. All his toenails black. She tried not to stare. He noticed and smiled.

  “Trench foot. You’ll get used to that too.”

  Georgie looked away. Other men in the room were noticing her now, and she could feel their eyes on her.

  The young man was reaching forward to drape the sheet over his raw feet, wincing as the cotton brushed his toes.

  “The matron’ll be along any moment. She’s a good sort.”

  Georgie concentrated on keeping her face entirely neutral. The truth was, she’d walked here in a haze of self-congratulations. She thought she’d come up with a masterful plan: by getting a job at the hospital, she’d escaped her mother; she had her own—yes, modest, but her own—room provided for her; and she was in London where Dorothy Shakespear and Willy Yeats were, where she could see them as often as she wished. Not only that, but—this was always somewhat of an afterthought—she would be helping with the war. She didn’t believe in the war, but it wasn’t the soldiers’ fault that they’d been gulped down by it.

  But how was it that during those weeks of training, of making beds and mopping floors, she hadn’t imagined that the ward would be like this—these lines of anonymous white-sheeted beds filled with half-oblivious, damaged creatures? One of the best small hospitals, they had said. For officers only. Not a single death. Had she expected the men not to scream, not to have grotesque, rotting feet? Had she expected them to nod to her as she dutifully changed their pillowcases?

  “Hyde-Lees. You’re early.” Stated without emotion. The matron, Mrs. Thwaite, had arrived on the ward. She had the sort of gaze that took everything in at once—travelling, assessing, judging. Her eyes swept over Georgie.

  “We are very protective of our officers,” she said, as she started to walk down the centre of the room to the far end, with the expectation that Georgie would follow. The matron demonstrated the sort of posture that made you question your own.

  “I’ve heard very good things,” Georgie managed to say.

  “Of course. Our officers are first priority and last priority. If you neglect them in any way, we cannot be expected to keep you on.”

  Georgie nervously eyed the men. Willy had not been impressed to hear she was working at a war hospital. “You’re giving up all that time?” he’d said. She had responded stiffly that she preferred to think of it as giving time, rather than giving up time, but he was not convinced. Never mind. In time he would figure out why she was really here.

  “Colonel Fraser,” the matron was saying, walking down the line of beds, gesturing sharply to each man as they went past. This man was sleeping with his lips turned inwards, as though he were trying to suck his face in through his mouth. “Captain Christie” had curled his hand over the stained yellow bandage that covered his eye. “Captain Emery-May” was covered from head to toe with a blanket. “Lieutenant Gray,” staring at the wall, his face pale orange with dry scales, was the young man who had been screaming. They kept on towards the door. “Second Lieutenant Pike” was the man with the rotting feet, and on the other side of the room, an older man, “Major Hammond.” Although this last man was asleep, the matron pinched the edge of the white bedsheet, gently lifting it, to reveal the wound down the major’s side.

  It was a test for Georgie. The wound resembled a crude dotted map of Norway, long, lumpy, filled with blood, tissue, and ooze, and interspersed with fine white stitches, where, the matron reported, the doctor had extracted the shrapnel. It was clear to Georgie that these words were fictions; extract was far too clean a word when you were talking of meat and bone. As Georgie looked down, the major shifted in his sleep, and his wound winced—a sac of mustard-coloured pus drooped, threatened to fall on the sheet. Georgie did not take her eyes from it, clenching her fist hard against her hip.

  Mrs. Thwaite turned to Georgie and offered a cool smile.

  “All right, Hyde-Lees?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You can begin with the floors: start in the upstairs hallway, then the stairs, back through the kitchen. Upstairs there is one bed that needs to be stripped and made. Then mop the ward.” She pointed to a mop and an empty bucket with a rope handle, and headed out to the other room.

  Georgie took the bucket and went straight to the basin. She tried not to picture the man’s skin, the bubbled texture w
here tissue and blood mixed. She took the bucket upstairs and mopped as if it were a noble pursuit, as if she herself were fighting a war.

  When she returned after mopping the entire upstairs, there were no other hospital staff on the ward. She slid the mop along the floor, ignoring the new twinge in her back. She couldn’t imagine doing this again tomorrow. She was trying to concentrate only on the mop and not think of anything else. Still, she was wondering how she could manage to get out of this, how she could slink away with no one noticing. But when she glanced at the clock, she saw her shift was almost over.

  “First day’s the worst,” Second Lieutenant Pike called to her. She stopped beside his bed. Unlike the others, he was unshaven. From here she could see the individual hairs of his stubble. His skin stretched as he smiled. She held the mop in one hand.

  “It’s not so bad,” she said.

  “Come on, it’s horrid. Divine plan’s gone a bit awry, I reckon.”

  “I’m not the best person to talk to about divine plans.”

  “Why, you don’t believe in them? Me neither. Why make these feet just to mangle them?”

  The matron had come back into the room. Georgie exhaled, glanced at the clock once more, and returned the mop to the bucket. The matron was coming towards her.

  “Hyde-Lees,” she said, “what are you doing?”

  “My shift is over, ma’am.”

  “And I suppose that means you are free to prostrate yourself over the second lieutenant?”

  Georgie took a step back. “I beg your pardon?”

  “In my hospital, you may not lean over the men. You may not dangle over them.”

  “I did nothing of the sort.”

  Second Lieutenant Pike had overheard them. “It was my fault. I was chittering.”

  Across the room, Major Hammond laughed.

  “Oh come on, Matron. She’s sweet on our Tom! Plenty of rotten fish in the sea, but none—like—Pike.” Some of the men who had woken from the noise, or were already awake, were laughing. Someone gave a low whistle.

  “Want to get under his bloody sheets?” another called. “Naught more attractive than a man who can’t run from your clutches.”

  The second lieutenant was smiling a watery smile. Major Hammond was laughing with his mouth wide open, an overloud laugh that did not contain amusement. Georgie kept her back rigid and tried not to look at the faces of the men, either chuckling or comatose, as she walked between the beds towards the washroom.

  “Not much to look at though, is she,” one of the men said as she passed.

  “Well,” said another, “fine for wartime.” When she got to the washroom and shut the door, she could still hear one of the men: “We were called up, not to fight the Hun but to woo and screw the girls of England!” More laughter, and one of the men started to sing a song that Georgie didn’t know.

  She heard Mrs. Thwaite yell above them, “All right, gentlemen!” and one man’s laugh rang out like a howl. Georgie scrubbed her hands—pressing them together to stop them shaking—changed her clothes, and headed out onto the street.

  TWO

  Outside, the air was a gift, crowding her face. It had nothing to do with decay. A last streak of sun was creaking down behind the buildings, and soon it would be dark. She started to walk towards the dormitory. Still, she could hear that jeering, see the major’s bubbling wound, the matron’s cut-glass stare. For a moment she thought of writing to her mother, of admitting she’d been wrong to come. Already she yearned for the silence and privacy of her bedroom, of the small library on the first floor of her mother’s house.

  But she wouldn’t write. She would go back to her room and arrange the contents of her two leather suitcases on the few provided shelves and rest until her next shift at the hospital. Tomorrow she would write to Willy and to Dorothy and announce she was settled in London, and next week she would go to a meeting of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, without having to lie to her mother about where she was going.

  She’d glimpsed this kind of freedom at the first soirée that her mother had taken her to, back before the war, in 1908 when she had turned sixteen. The soirée was what she would come to know as the usual affair at Olivia Shakespear’s; in the large drawing room, clusters of people chatted and sipped, and Jelly d’Aranyi played Schumann on the violin, and a servant walked around refilling glasses of what Olivia whispered was rather middling claret that someone had gifted her and she was trying to get rid of. Discussions ranged from Schopenhauer to Schubert, tarot and Tattwa, to the most thrilling moments at recent séances. Olivia had attended a session only last month where an ancient Egyptian soul had spoken, declaring that the current age was nearly over and another was about to begin.

  Georgie had been taught to call her parents by their first names—never “Mother” but always “Nelly”—and in this room she saw a different Nelly from the one she knew. Nelly had clearly spent many evenings in that drawing room, and Georgie was startled to watch her integrate herself so effortlessly, talk without self-consciousness, and laugh with an ease that Georgie had rarely heard at home. Nelly introduced her to the pianist Walter Rummel, whom Georgie had seen play at concerts, and the poet W. B. Yeats—known to all as W. B.—whose poems Georgie knew and admired, and with whom she had a brief conversation about the Renaissance philosopher and occultist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Georgie even shyly mentioned that she had started to translate the early works of Pico from Latin, and she could have sworn that W. B. had looked impressed.

  But the person Nelly most wanted her to meet was Olivia’s daughter, Dorothy. When Georgie saw Dorothy across the room, chatting assuredly to two young men, she was doubtful that they would be friends. Dorothy was already twenty-three, and very pretty in an unreal way, like those drawings of jaunty women from Harrods advertisements. She wore a dark blue dress which, while not especially revealing, hung on her body and clung to every lovely angle of her, as if the dress itself had a kind of nonchalance. The guests around her, whether they faced her or not, all seemed aware of each dip of her head, each arching of her fine, white neck. Georgie was surprised to see her slide that neck to the side and fix her eyes right on her.

  “Are you Georgie? Nelly said you were coming.” Dorothy was smiling at her with white, even teeth that made Georgie nervous. The young men reluctantly made room so she could join them in the circle.

  “I suppose that makes you Nelly’s daughter,” one of the men said.

  “I suppose it does, but thankfully I’m many other things besides.”

  The man laughed but hardly managed to pry his eyes from Dorothy. He was handsome in a bland way and spoke with the hint of squeezed colonial vowels. He held an unlit cigar, but one of his fingers was twitching, and his laughter sounded as if he were on the verge of spitting, as if he were holding marbles in his mouth. Georgie waited for Dorothy to introduce them.

  Instead, she said, “Excuse us. I need to show Georgie something.” Without another word, she was gone. Georgie hesitated a moment—meeting the bewildered eyes of the men—before following Dorothy as she slipped out of the drawing room and down the hall. At the end of the hall, Dorothy turned into another room, and once Georgie went in, Dorothy closed the door behind them.

  She flicked a match and lit a thin white candle on the table, illuminating the library, with shelves full of books up to the ceiling and a narrow ladder leaning beside the window. Georgie looked around and back at Dorothy.

  “Alone at last,” Dorothy said.

  “That man’s in love with you,” Georgie said, realizing it herself. “They both are.”

  “They’re infatuated. It’s not the same.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Who cares. Freddie can’t stop telling me all about it. It’s horrendous.”

  “I can imagine,” said Georgie, who couldn’t.

  “Drink?” Dorothy pulled from a shelf a heavy cut-glass decanter of brandy and two tumblers, the kind Georgie’s father drank from. Georgie nodded. She was
rather overwhelmed by Dorothy’s ease, and she tried to unstiffen her own body as she found herself a place in a large leather chair. She could still hear the blur of chatter in the drawing room.

  Dorothy poured. “Do you paint?”

  “Terribly,” Georgie said, “but cheerfully.”

  “Good,” Dorothy said, who handed her a drink and, after offering a cigarette to Georgie, who declined, lit one for herself. Georgie took a cautious sip of the brandy. She knew she would have to go home for dinner—it was still only early evening—and she wondered what Nelly would say if she were visibly drunk.

  “Are the parties always like this?” Georgie said, watching Dorothy sit on another armchair and draw her knees up to her chest like a girl. Georgie had recognised other people out in the drawing room—the painter Rothenstein, the actress Florence Farr.

  “Always.” Dorothy glanced back towards the drawing room, as if the chatter were carrying on purely to irritate her. “Freddie, whom you didn’t quite meet, is on the road to being a typical Oxford man.”

  Georgie nodded. “I think I’d prefer to be an Oxford man than to marry one,” she said, taking a larger sip this time. “I am a translator.”

  “You are? That’s something, I suppose.” Dorothy was still frowning as she balanced her cigarette between two slim fingers. “But all those Oxford types are the same; I plan to do things a little differently. I’m on the lookout for something”—she tapped her fingernail on the lip of her glass—“though to be honest I’m not sure what yet.” She smiled. “Do you go in much for the occultish things, the séances and all that?”

  “Do you?” Georgie had only read about séances. She liked the idea of speaking to the dead, but at the same time she found something embarrassing in the expectation they would answer.

  “I’ve been to some, all dull. But I’ve heard about an occult order, a sort of society, one of those secrets everyone’s talking about. Very exclusive. I’m trying to get an invitation. You could come with me, if it was of interest? It will probably be codswallop but maybe entertaining codswallop. I won’t be asking Freddie or Herb to come, I know that much.”