She drew a long series of cartoons for that gallant who had been hung
up in the barbed wire in the moonlight, played at bombs back and forth
with the Germans around "Wipers," and been pulled out of mudholes and
buried by shells. The cartoons were her best card in the pack of her
hospital cheer. One anecdote illustrated called for another. Helen
knew more about the life of the army in Flanders than the "brass hats,"
the staff and all the war correspondents. For these survivors of hell
did not want gloomy pictures. Reality was enough without adding to its
horrors that of long faces. They liked something to make them smile
even when death was at their elbow. They sent her cartoons home in
their letters, or if they had no homes, put the sheets away with their
treasures. One even cautioned his wife not to be jealous, because this
jolly nurse drew cartoons for everybody; and he had the rank of major.
Helen kept on doing what she called real drawings, which were appearing
the world around. Even the censors could not find any military secrets
in them, particularly after she sent the chief censor a cartoon of her
imaginary portrait of a censor in his most diabolical mood of
evisceration. Some of the cartoons, too, got into print, bringing more
requests from editors, which she could refuse now in view of the checks
coming in for the real drawings. M. Vailliant, who had been wounded
and was now convalescent, had gathered up some of the floating strands
of his affairs and wrote his congratulations to Helen, hoping that she
would not go to America after the war. Let America come to her in
Paris.
"You are trying to swell my head," she wrote back; "and I do believe
that it is a little larger. How can it help being!"
Nevertheless, that tugging at her heart would come at times. When she
ought to be perfectly happy she was not, as she found whenever her work
gave her a moment to search her inner self.
All this about Helen, when Henriette was just across the road with what
the doctors and nurses in Helen's unit referred to as "Lady
Truckleford's lot." Sometimes the doctors when they looked in that
direction said something almost profane about volunteer organisations
and people who had influence. Lady Truckleford flitted back and forth
to London, where she was on a number of boards and lists of patronesses
without knowing what they were all about unless she asked honourable
secretaries, which was a bore, as the honourable secretaries could not
be along when somebody gave you a poser. However, she did not allow
such details to disturb her placidity for long.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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