The Struggle
Summary
On the blistered edge of empire, where fever tides hiss against a garrison of dented white-washed wards, Dr. Carew—scalpel monk, keeper of sutures and silent hungers—tends the broken bodies of colonial ambition while nursing one unspoken wound: an adoration for Marjorie Caldwell, social butterfly whose laughter flutters like a scarlet flag above the parade ground. She treasures his steadiness yet mistakes it for marble, not blood; enter Lt. Dames, freshly commissioned, eyes like wet ink, swagger that smells of gin and newsprint. In the candle-lit mess, string-quartet sentences are exchanged; Marjorie’s gaze pivots, compass-needle to Dames’s magnetism, and within weeks a regimental chapel witnesses vows that taste of gun-metal to Carew. The newly-weds sail into a Manila posting, but the widowed Mrs. Drew—veiled in jet and rumor—arrives, trailing the musk of disillusion; Dames, already bored, drifts into her boudoir orbit. Carew, sentinel of Marjorie’s sleep, absorbs the gossip, camouflages betrayal as “extra rounds,” and requests transfer east, hoping salt-water will cauterize longing. Both surgeons embark; typhoon, reef, scream of iron: the liner hemorrhages passengers. Dames, sodden with brandy, rips a cork jacket from a matron’s grasp and thrashes toward a lifeboat. Carew stays, half-cruciform, guiding Marjorie through corridors of rising black; dawn reveals them stranded on volcanic sand, corpses rocking like driftwood rosaries. Across the reef, Dames is salvaged by cassocked fishermen; fever, abscess, amnesia—his past dissolves. On island one, Marjorie, sun-scorched, sees Carew’s chivalry etched in salt rime; he withholds her husband’s cowardice, fearing the knowledge would scald. When a steamer’s silhouette glimmers, Carew wrestles his heart, torches a beacon that summons rescue and probable separation. Months later, San Francisco fog: cables list Dames “missing.” Carew proposes; Marjorie hesitates, sensing a ghost. Meanwhile Dames, now Brother Fabrician, kneels among lepers, peeling their bandages like pages of a book he cannot read. Carew tracks the story to that leper-crowned isle; recognition flickers, yet Dames denies the mirror. Abbot and confessional, Manila hospital, trepanation: shards of identity re-anchor. Memory restored, Dames reverts to carousing, intercepts Carew’s correspondence, twists Marjorie’s tenderness into treachery, lunges for revenge. He glimpses his own budding lesions—white as surrender—recoils, plummets into the bay, swallowed by phosphorescent jaws. Carew returns, narrates the ledger of failures; Marjorie, no longer girl but weather-worn woman, chooses the man who never needed reminding that love is an amputation of the self.
Synopsis
