Different Seasons(175)
And when the dust cleared, Gerard Tozeman, dazed and deaf, bleeding from his nose, his ears, and the comers of both eyes, his testicles already swelling from the force of the concussion, had come upon Carruthers’s body while looking for a way out of the abbatoir that had been the staff HQ only minutes before. He looked at the general’s body ... and then began to scream and laugh. The sounds went unheard by his own shellshocked ears, but they served to notify the medicos that someone was still alive in that strew of matchwood.
Carruthers had not been mutilated by the blast... at least, Tozeman said, it hadn’t been what the soldiers of that long-ago war had come to think of as mutilation—men whose arms had been blown off, men with no feet, no eyes; men whose lungs had been shrivelled by gas. No, he said, it was nothing like that. The man’s mother would have known him at once. But the map ...
... the map before which Carruthers had been standing with his butcher’s pointer when the shell struck ...
It had somehow been driven into his face. Tozeman had found himself staring into a hideous tattooed deathmask. Here was the stony shore of Brittany on the bony ridge of Lathrop Carruthers’s brow. Here was the Rhine flowing like a blue scar down his left cheek. Here were some of the finest wine-growing provinces in the world bumped and ridged over his chin. Here was the Saar drawn around his throat like a hang-man’s noose ... and printed across one bulging eyeball was the word VERSAILLES.
That was our Christmas story in the year 197-.
I remember many others, but they do not belong here. Properly speaking, Tozeman’s doesn’t, either ... but it was the first “Christmas tale” I heard at 249B, and I could not resist telling it. And then, on the Thursday after Thanksgiving of this year, when Stevens clapped his hands together for attention and asked who would favor us with a Christmas tale, Emlyn McCarron growled: “I suppose I’ve got something that bears telling. Tell it now or tell it never, God’ll shut me up for good soon enough.”
In the years I had been coming to 249B, I had never heard McCarron tell a story. And perhaps that’s why I called the taxi so early, and why, when Stevens passed out eggnog to the six of us who had ventured out on that bellowing, frigid night, I felt so keenly excited. Nor was I the only one; I saw that same excitement on a good many other faces.
McCarron, old and dry and leathery, sat in the huge chair by the fire with the packet of powder in his gnarled hands. He tossed it in, and we watched the flames shift colors madly before returning to yellow again. Stevens passed among us with brandy, and we passed him his Christmas honorariums. Once, during that yearly ceremony, I had heard the clink of change passing from the hand of the giver to the hand of the receiver; on another occasion, I had seen a one-thousand-dollar bill for a moment in the firelight. On both occasions the murmur of Stevens’s voice had been exactly the same: low, considerate, and entirely correct. Ten years, more or less, had passed since I had first come to 249B with George Waterhouse, and while much had changed in the world outside, nothing had changed in here, and Stevens seemed not to have aged a month, or even a single day.
He moved back into the shadows, and for a moment there was a silence so perfect that we could hear the faint whistle of boiling sap escaping from the burning logs on the hearth. Emlyn McCarron was looking into the fire and we all followed his gaze. The flames seemed particularly wild that night. I felt almost hypnotized by the sight of the fire—as, I suppose, the cavemen who birthed us were once hypnotized by it as the wind walked and talked outside their cold northern caves.
At last, still looking into the fire, bent slightly forward so that his forearms rested on his thighs and his clasped hands hung in a knot between his knees, McCarron began to speak.
II
The Breathing Method
I am nearly eighty now, which means that I was born with the century. All my life I have been associated with a building which stands almost directly across from Madison Square Garden; this building, which looks like a great gray prison—something out of A Tale of Two Cities-is actually a hospital, as most of you know. It is Harriet White Memorial Hospital. The Harriet White after whom it was named was my father’s first wife, and she got her practical experience in nursing when there were still actual sheep grazing on Sheep Meadow in Central Park. A statue of the lady herself stands on a pedestal in the courtyard before the building, and if any of you have seen it, you may have wondered how a woman with such a stem and uncompromising face could have found such a gentle occupation. The motto chiselled into the statue’s base, once you get rid of the Latin folderol, is even less comforting: There is no comfort without pain; thus we define salvation through suffering. Cato, if you please... or if you don’t please!
I was born inside that gray stone building on March 20th 1900. I returned there as an intern in the year 1926. Twenty-six is old to be just starting out in the world of medicine, but I had done a more practical internship in France, at the end of World War I, trying to pack ruptured guts back into stomachs that had been blown wide open, and dealing on the black market for morphine, which was often tinctured and sometimes dangerous.
As with the generation of physicians following World War II, we were a bedrock-practical lot of sawbones, and the records of the major medical schools show a remarkably small number of washouts in the years 1919 to 1928. We were older, more experienced, steadier. Were we also wiser? I don’t know... but we were certainly more cynical. There was none of this nonsense you read about in the popular medical novels, stuff about fainting or vomiting at one’s first autopsy. Not after Belleau Wood, where mamma rats sometimes raised whole litters of ratlings in the gas-exploded intestines of the soldiers left to rot in no man’s land. We had gotten all our puking and passing out behind us.