What did the doctor mean?
The dust from the ambulances came into her face with choking dryness, and the rotten smells were like a foul liquid in her nostrils.
“Hurry, child!
Come here.”
She picked up her skirts and went to him as fast as she could go across the rows of bodies.
She put her hand on his arm and felt that it was trembling with weariness but there was no weakness in his face.
“Oh, Doctor!” she cried.
“You must come. Melanie is having her baby.” He looked at her as if her words did not register on his mind.
A man who lay upon the ground at her feet, his head pillowed on his canteen, grinned up companionably at her words.
“They will do it,” he said cheerfully.
She did not even look down but shook the doctor’s arm.
“It’s Melanie.
The baby.
Doctor, you must come.
She—the—” This was no time for delicacy but it was hard to bring out the words with the ears of hundreds of strange men listening.
“The pains are getting hard.
Please, Doctor!”
“A baby?
Great God!” thundered the doctor and his face was suddenly contorted with hate and rage, a rage not directed at her or at anyone except a world wherein such things could happen.
“Are you crazy?
I can’t leave these men.
They are dying, hundreds of them.
I can’t leave them for a damned baby.
Get some woman to help you.
Get my wife.”
She opened her mouth to tell him why Mrs. Meade could not come and then shut it abruptly.
He did not know his own son was wounded!
She wondered if he would still be here if he did know, and something told her that even if Phil were dying he would still be standing on this spot, giving aid to the many instead of the one.
“No, you must come, Doctor.
You know you said she’d have a hard time—” Was it really she, Scarlett, standing here saying these dreadful indelicate things at the top of her voice in this hell of heat and groans?
“She’ll die if you don’t come!”
He shook off her hand roughly and spoke as though he hardly heard her, hardly knew what she said.
“Die?
Yes, they’ll all die—all these men.
No bandages, no salves, no quinine, no chloroform.
Oh, God, for some morphia!
Just a little morphia for the worst ones.
Just a little chloroform.
God damn the Yankees!
God damn the Yankees!”
“Give um hell, Doctor!” said the man on the ground, his teeth showing in his beard.
Scarlett began to shake and her eyes burned with tears of fright.
The doctor wasn’t coming with her.
Melanie would die and she had wished that she would die.
The doctor wasn’t coming.
“Name of God, Doctor!
Please!”
Dr. Meade bit his lip and his jaw hardened as his face went cool again.
“Child, I’ll try.
I can’t promise you.