“You are very kind. But such a position would hardly be fitting—”
“For a swell kid like him?” Under his helmet those keen eyes narrowed to
twin points of light. “Likely not. You rich hill folks can’t be expected
to know your own kids. You’ll send him to Harvard, then chain him up in
a solid-mahogany office, with a gang of solid-mahogany clerks to kowtow
to him, and teach him to make money. When he might be flyin’ with me.
Flyin’—with me!” His voice shook on a hoarse, exultant note. He threw
back his head; from under the leathern casque his eyes flamed out over
the world of sea and sky, his conquered province. “When he might be a
flier, the biggest flier the world has ever seen. Say, can you beat it?
_Can_ you beat it?”
His rudeness was past excuse. Yet I stood before him in the oddest
guilty silence. Finally—
“But please let me pay you. That broken strut—”
“Nothing doing, sister. Forget it.” He bent to his work. “Pay me? No
matter if my plane did get a knock, it was worth it. Just to see that
fat guy in white pants hot-foot it for deep water! Yes, I’m paid.
Good-by.”
Then, to that day of shards and ashes, add one more
recollection—Buster’s face when Aunt Charlotte laid it upon him that he
should never again enter that hangar door.
“Aunt Charlotte! For Pete’s sake, have a heart! I’ve got that plane
eatin’ out of my hand. If that plaguy cat’s-paw hadn’t sprung up—”
“You will not go to East Gloucester again, Richard. That ends it.” Aunt
Charlotte swept from the room.
“Gee!” Buster’s wide eyes filled. He slumped into the nearest chair.
“Say, Cousin Edie! Ain’t I got one friend left on earth?”
“Now, Richard—”
“Can’t you see what I’m tryin’ to put over? I don’t expect Aunt
Charlotte to see. She’s a pippin, all right, but that solid-ivory dome
of hers—”
“_Richard!_”
“But you’re different. You aren’t so awful old. You ought to understand
that a fellow just has to know about things—cars, ships, aeroplanes,
motors, everything!”
“But—”
“Now, Cousin Edith, I’m not stringin’ you. I’m dead in earnest. I’m not
tryin’ to bother anybody; I’m just tryin’ to learn what I’ve got to
learn.” He leaped up, gripped my arm; his passionate boy voice shrilled;
he was droll and pitiful and insolent all in a breath. “No, sirree, I
ain’t bluffin’, not for a cent. Believe me, Cousin Edith, us fellows
have got to learn how everything works, and learn it quick. I tell you,
we’ve _got_ to know!”
――――
Well.... All this was the summer of 1914. Three years ago. Three years
and eight months ago, to be exact. Nowadays, I don’t wear tea-rose crêpe
frocks nor slim French slippers. Our government’s daily Hints for Paris
run more to coarse blue denim and dour woollen hose and clumping rubber
boots. My once-lily hands clasp a scrubbing-brush far oftener than a
hand at bridge. And I rise at five-thirty and gulp my scalding coffee in
the hot, tight galley of Field Hospital 64, then set to work. For long
before the dawn they come, that endless string of ambulances, with their
terrible and precious freight. Then it’s baths and food and swift, tense
minutes in the tiny “theatre,” and swifter, tenser seconds when we and
the orderlies hurry through dressings and bandagings, while the senior
nurse toils like a Turk alongside and bosses us meanwhile like a
slave-driver. Every day my heart is torn open in my breast for the pain
of my children, my poor, big, helpless, broken children. Every night,
when I slip by to take a last peep at their sleepy, contented faces, my
heart is healed for me again. Then I stumble off to our half-partitioned
slit and throw myself on my bunk, tired to my last bone, happy to the
core of my soul. But day by day the work heaps up. Every cot is full,
every tent overflowing. We’re short of everything, beds, carbolic,
dressings, food. And yesterday, at dusk, when we were all fagged to
exhaustion, there streamed down a very flood of wounded, eight
ambulance-loads, harvest of a bombed munitions depot.
“We haven’t an inch of room.”
“We’ve got to make room.” Doctor Lake, sweating, dog-tired, swaying on
his feet from nine unbroken hours at the operating-table, took command.
“Take my hut; it’ll hold four at a pinch. You nurses will give up your
cubby-hole? Thought so. Plenty hot water, Octave? Bring ’em along.”
They brought them along. Every stretcher, every bunk, every crack was
crowded now. Then came the whir of a racing motor. One more ambulance
plunged up the sodden road.
“Ah! _Grand blessé!_” murmured old Octave.
“_Grand blessé!_ And not a blanket left, even. Put him in the
coal-hole,” groaned the head nurse.
“Nix on the coal-hole.” Thus the muddy young driver, hauling out the
stretcher with its long, moveless shape. “This is the candy kid—hear me?
Our crack scout. Escadrille 32.”
“Escadrille 32?” The number held no meaning for me. Yet I pushed nearer.
_Grand blessé_, indeed, that lax, pulseless body, that shattered flesh,
that blood and mire. I bent closer. Red hair, shining and thick, the red
that always goes with cinnamon freckles. A clean-cut, ashen young face,
a square jaw, a stubborn, boyish chin with a deep-cleft dimple.
Then my heart stopped short. The room whirled round me.
“Buster!” I cried out. “You naughty, darling little scamp! So you got
your way, after all. You ran off from school, and joined the
escadrille—oh, sonny-boy, don’t you hear me? Listen! Listen!”
The gaunt face did not stir. Only that ashy whiteness seemed to grow yet
whiter.
“We’ll do our best, Miss Preston. Go away now, dear.” The head nurse put
me gently back. I knew too well what her gentleness meant.
“But Doctor Lake can save him! Doctor Lake can pull him through!”
“Doctor Lake is worn out. We’ll have to manage without him.”
“Don’t you believe it!” I flamed. Then I, the greenest, meekest slavey
in the service, dashed straight to the operating-room, and gripped
Doctor Lake by both wrists and jerked him bodily off the bench where he
crouched, a sick, lubberly heap, blind with fatigue.
“No, you sha’n’t stop to rest. Not yet!” I stormed at him. Somehow I
dragged him down the ward, to my boy’s side. At sight of that deathlike
face, the limp, shivering man pulled himself together with all his weary
might.
“I’ll do my level best, Miss Edith. Go away, now, that’s a good girl.”
I went away and listened to the ambulance-driver. He was having an ugly
bullet scratch on his arm tied up. He was not a regular field-service
man, but a young Y. M. C. A. helper who had taken the place of a driver
shot down that noon.
“Well, you see, that kid took the air two hours ago to locate the
battery that’s been spilling shells into our munitions station. He
spotted it, and two others besides. Naturally, they spotted him. He
scooted for home, with a shrapnel wound in his shoulder, and made a bad
landing three miles back of the lines, and broke his leg and whacked his
head. Luckily I wasn’t a hundred yards away. I got him aboard my car and
gave him first aid and started to bring him straight over here. Would he
stand for that? Not Buddy. ‘You’ll take me to headquarters first, to
report,’ says he. ‘So let her out.’
“No use arguing. I let her out. We reported at headquarters, three miles
out of our way, then started here. Two miles back, a shell struck just
ahead and sent a rock the size of a paving-brick smack against our
engine. The car stopped, dead. Did that faze the kid? Not so you could
notice it. ‘You hoist me on the seat and let me get one hand on the
wheel,’ says he, cool’s a cucumber. ‘There isn’t a car made but will
jump through hoops for me.’ Go she did. With her engine knocked galley
west, mind you, and him propped up, chirk as a cherub, with his broken
leg and his smashed shoulder, and a knock on his head that would ’a’
stopped his clock if he’d had any brains to jolt. Skill? He drove that
car like a racer. She only hit the high places. Pluck? He wrote it.
“We weren’t fifty yards from the hospital when he crumpled down, and I
grabbed him. Hemorrhage, I guess. I sure do hope they pull him through.
But—I don’t believe—”
Soon a very dirty-faced brigadier-general, whom I used to meet at dances
long ago, came and sat down on a soap-box and held my hands and tried to
comfort me, so gently and so patiently, the poor, kind, blundering dear.
Most of his words just buzzed and glimmered round me. But one thought
stuck in my dull brain.
“This isn’t your boy’s first service to his country, Miss Edith. He has
been with the escadrille only a month, but he has brought down three
enemy planes, and his scouting has been invaluable. He’s a wonder,
anyhow. So are all our flying boys. They tell me that the German
youngsters make such good soldiers because they’re trained to follow
orders blindfold. All very well when it comes to following a bayonet
charge over the top. But the escadrille—that’s another story. Take our
boys, brought up to sail their own boats and run their own cars and
chance any fool risk in sight. Couple up that impudence, that
fearlessness, that splendid curiosity, and you’ve got a fighting-machine
that not only fights but wins. All the drilled, stolid forces in
creation can’t beat back that headlong young spirit. If—”
He halted, stammering.
“If—we can’t keep him with us, you must remember that he gave his best
to his country, and his best was a noble gift. Be very glad that you
could help your boy prepare himself to bestow it. You and his parents
gave him his outdoor life and his daring sports and his fearless
outlook, and his uncurbed initiative. You helped him build himself, mind
and body, to flawless powers and to instant decisions. To-day came his
chance to give his greatest service. No matter what comes now, you—you
have your royal memory.”
But I could not hear any more. I cried out that I didn’t want any royal
memories, I wanted my dear, bad, self-willed little boy. The general got
up then and limped away and stood and looked out of the window.
I sat and waited. I kept on waiting—minutes on gray minutes, hours on
hours.
Then a nurse grasped my shoulders, and tried to tell me something. I
heard her clearly, but I couldn’t string her words together to make
meaning. Finally, she drew me to my feet and led me back to the
operating-room.
There stood Doctor Lake. He was leaning against the wall and wiping his
face on a piece of gauze. He came straight to me and put out both big,
kind hands.
“Tell me. You needn’t try to make it easy—”
“There, there, Miss Edith. There’s nothing to tell. Look for yourself.”
Gray-lipped, whiter than ashes, straight and moveless as a young knight
in marble effigy, lay my boy. But a shadow pulse flickered in that bound
temple, the cheek I kissed was warm.
“No,” said Doctor Lake very softly. “He won’t die. He’s steel and
whipcord, that youngster. Heaven be praised, you can’t kill his sort
with a hatchet.”
He leaned down, gave Buster a long, searching look. His puffy, fagged
face twisted with bewilderment, then broke into chuckles of astonishment
and delight.
“Well, on my word and honor! I’ve just this moment recognized him. This
_blessé_ is the imp of Satan who used to steal my car up the North
Shore. He’s the chap who steered that confounded aeroplane into the
garden-party.... I’ve always sworn that, let me once lay hands on that
young scalawag, I’d lick the tar out of him!”
“Well, here’s your chance,” snivelled I.
He did not hear me. He had stooped again over Buster. Again he was
peering into that still face. Over his own face came a strange look,
mirthful, then deep with question, profoundly tender; then, flashing
through, a gleam of amazing and most piteous jealousy, the bitter, comic
jealousy of the most famous of all middle-aged American surgeons for
insolent, fool-hardy, glorious youth.
Then he turned and went away, a big, dead-tired, shambling figure. And
in that instant my boy’s heavy eyes lifted and stared at me. Slowly in
them awoke a drowsy sparkle.
“Hello, Cousin Edith. When did you blow in?”
I didn’t try to speak. I looked past him at Doctor Lake, now plodding
from the room. Buster’s eyes followed mine. Over his face came a smile
of heaven’s own light.
“Old stuffed shirt,” sighed Buster with exquisite content. He turned his
gaunt young head on the pillow; he tucked a brawny fist under his cheek.
Before I could speak he had slipped away, far on a sea of dreams.