of iron and the one on top of wood, and as he looked between them
from the canvas cot he recognized them as the prison-bars which held
him in. Outside his prison lay a stretch of blinding blue water
which ended in a line of breakers and a yellow coast with ragged
palms. Beyond that again rose a range of mountain-peaks, and, stuck
upon the loftiest peak of all, a tiny block-house. It rested on the
brow of the mountain against the naked sky as impudently as a
cracker-box set upon the dome of a great cathedral.
As the transport rode on her anchor-chains, the iron bars around her
sides rose and sank and divided the landscape with parallel lines.
From his cot the officer followed this phenomenon with severe,
painstaking interest. Sometimes the wooden rail swept up to the very
block-house itself, and for a second of time blotted it from sight.
And again it sank to the level of the line of breakers, and wiped
them out of the picture as though they were a line of chalk.
The soldier on the cot promised himself that the next swell of the
sea would send the lowest rail climbing to the very top of the
palm-trees or, even higher, to the base of the mountains; and when
it failed to reach even the palm-trees he felt a distinct sense of
ill use, of having been wronged by some one. There was no other
reason for submitting to this existence save these tricks upon the
wearisome, glaring landscape; and now, whoever it was who was
working them did not seem to be making this effort to entertain him
with any heartiness.
It was most cruel. Indeed, he decided hotly, it was not to be
endured; he would bear it no longer, he would make his escape. But
he knew that this move, which could be conceived in a moment’s
desperation, could only be carried to success with great strategy,
secrecy, and careful cunning. So he fell back upon his pillow and
closed his eyes, as though he were asleep, and then opening them
again, turned cautiously, and spied upon his keeper. As usual, his
keeper sat at the foot of the cot turning the pages of a huge paper
filled with pictures of the war printed in daubs of tawdry colors.
His keeper was a hard-faced boy without human pity or consideration,
a very devil of obstinacy and fiendish cruelty. To make it worse,
the fiend was a person without a collar, in a suit of soiled khaki,
with a curious red cross bound by a safety-pin to his left arm. He
was intent upon the paper in his hands; he was holding it between
his eyes and his prisoner. His vigilance had relaxed, and the moment
seemed propitious. With a sudden plunge of arms and legs, the
prisoner swept the bed-sheet from him, and sprang at the wooden rail
and grasped the iron stanchion beside it. He had his knee pressed
against the top bar and his bare toes on the iron rail beneath it.
Below him the blue water waited for him. It was cool and dark and
gentle and deep. It would certainly put out the fire in his bones,
he thought; it might even shut out the glare of the sun which
scorched his eyeballs.
But as he balanced for the leap, a swift weakness and nausea swept
over him, a weight seized upon his body and limbs. He could not lift
the lower foot from the iron rail, and he swayed dizzily and
trembled. He trembled. He who had raced his men and beaten them up
the hot hill to the trenches of San Juan. But now he was a baby in
the hands of a giant, who caught him by the wrist and with an iron
arm clasped him around his waist and pulled him down, and shouted,
brutally, “Help, some of youse, quick! he’s at it again. I can’t
hold him.”
More giants grasped him by the arms and by the legs. One of them
took the hand that clung to the stanchion in both of his, and pulled
back the fingers one by one, saying, “Easy now, Lieutenant—easy.”
The ragged palms and the sea and block-house were swallowed up in a
black fog, and his body touched the canvas cot again with a sense of
home-coming and relief and rest. He wondered how he could have cared
to escape from it. He found it so good to be back again that for a
long time he wept quite happily, until the fiery pillow was moist
and cool.
The world outside of the iron bars was like a scene in a theater set
for some great event, but the actors were never ready. He remembered
confusedly a play he had once witnessed before that same scene.
Indeed, he believed he had played some small part in it; but he
remembered it dimly, and all trace of the men who had appeared with
him in it was gone. He had reasoned it out that they were up there
behind the range of mountains, because great heavy wagons and
ambulances and cannon were emptied from the ships at the wharf above
and were drawn away in long lines behind the ragged palms, moving
always toward the passes between the peaks. At times he was
disturbed by the thought that he should be up and after them, that
some tradition of duty made his presence with them imperative. There
was much to be done back of the mountains. Some event of momentous
import was being carried forward there, in which he held a part; but
the doubt soon passed from him, and he was content to lie and watch
the iron bars rising and falling between the block-house and the
white surf.
If they had been only humanely kind, his lot would have been
bearable, but they starved him and held him down when he wished to
rise; and they would not put out the fire in the pillow, which they
might easily have done by the simple expedient of throwing it over
the ship’s side into the sea. He himself had done this twice, but
the keeper had immediately brought a fresh pillow already heated for
the torture and forced it under his head.
His pleasures were very simple, and so few he could not understand
why they robbed him of them so jealously. One was to watch a green
cluster of bananas that hung above him from the awning, twirling on
a string. He could count as many of them as five before the bunch
turned and swung lazily back again, when he could count as high as
twelve; sometimes when the ship rolled heavily he could count to
twenty. It was a most fascinating game, and contented him for many
hours. But when they found this out they sent for the cook to come
and cut them down, and the cook carried them away to his galley.
Then, one day, a man came out from the shore, swimming through the
blue water with great splashes. He was a most charming man, who
spluttered and dove and twisted and lay on his back and kicked his
legs in an excess of content and delight. It was a real pleasure to
watch him; not for days had anything so amusing appeared on the
other side of the prison-bars. But as soon as the keeper saw that
the man in the water was amusing his prisoner, he leaned over the
ship’s side and shouted, “Sa-ay, you, don’t you know there’s sharks
in there?”
And the swimming man raced back to the shore like a porpoise with
great lashing of the water, and ran up the beach half-way to the
palms before he was satisfied to stop. Then the prisoner wept again.
It was so disappointing. Life was robbed of everything now. He
remembered that in a previous existence soldiers who cried were
laughed at and mocked. But that was so far away and it was such an
absurd superstition that he had no patience with it. For what could
be more comforting to a man when he is treated cruelly than to cry.
It was so obvious an exercise, and when one is so feeble that one
cannot vault a four-railed barrier it is something to feel that at
least one is strong enough to cry.
He escaped occasionally, traversing space with marvellous rapidity
and to great distances, but never to any successful purpose; and his
flight inevitably ended in ignominious recapture and a sudden
awakening in bed. At these moments the familiar and hated palms, the
peaks, and the block-house were more hideous in their reality than
the most terrifying of his nightmares.
These excursions afield were always predatory; he went forth always
to seek food. With all the beautiful world from which to elect and
choose, he sought out only those places where eating was studied and
elevated to an art. These visits were much more vivid in their
detail than any he had ever before made to these same resorts. They
invariably began in a carriage, which carried him swiftly over
smooth asphalt. One route brought him across a great and beautiful
square, radiating with rows and rows of flickering lights; two
fountains splashed in the center of the square, and six women of
stone guarded its approaches. One of the women was hung with wreaths
of mourning. Ahead of him the late twilight darkened behind a great
arch, which seemed to rise on the horizon of the world, a great
window into the heavens beyond. At either side strings of white and
colored globes hung among the trees, and the sound of music came
joyfully from theaters in the open air. He knew the restaurant under
the trees to which he was now hastening, and the fountain beside it,
and the very sparrows balancing on the fountain’s edge; he knew
every waiter at each of the tables, he felt again the gravel
crunching under his feet, he saw the _maître d’hôtel_ coming forward
smiling to receive his command, and the waiter in the green apron
bowing at his elbow, deferential and important, presenting the list
of wines. But his adventure never passed that point, for he was
captured again and once more bound to his cot with a close burning
sheet.
Or else, he drove more sedately through the London streets in the
late evening twilight, leaning expectantly across the doors of the
hansom and pulling carefully at his white gloves. Other hansoms
flashed past him, the occupant of each with his mind fixed on one
idea—dinner. He was one of a million of people who were about to
dine, or who had dined, or who were deep in dining. He was so
famished, so weak for food of any quality, that the galloping horse
in the hansom seemed to crawl. The lights of the Embankment passed
like the lamps of a railroad station as seen from the window of an
express; and while his mind was still torn between the choice of a
thin or thick soup or an immediate attack upon cold beef, he was at
the door, and the _chasseur_ touched his cap, and the little
_chasseur_ put the wicker guard over the hansom’s wheel. As he
jumped out he said, “Give him half-a-crown,” and the driver called
after him, “Thank you, sir.”
It was a beautiful world, this world outside of the iron bars.
Everyone in it contributed to his pleasure and to his comfort. In
this world he was not starved nor man-handled. He thought of this
joyfully as he leaped up the stairs, where young men with grave
faces and with their hands held negligently behind their backs bowed
to him in polite surprise at his speed. But they had not been
starved on condensed milk. He threw his coat and hat at one of them,
and came down the hall fearfully and quite weak with dread lest it
should not be real. His voice was shaking when he asked Ellis if he
had reserved a table. The place was all so real, it must be true
this time. The way Ellis turned and ran his finger down the list
showed it was real, because Ellis always did that, even when he knew
there would not be an empty table for an hour. The room was crowded
with beautiful women; under the light of the red shades they looked
kind and approachable, and there was food on every table, and iced
drinks in silver buckets. It was with the joy of great relief that
he heard Ellis say to his underling, “_Numéro cinq, sur la terrace,
un couvert_.” It was real at last. Outside, the Thames lay a great
gray shadow. The lights of the Embankment flashed and twinkled
across it, the tower of the House of Commons rose against the sky,
and here, inside, the waiter was hurrying toward him carrying a
smoking plate of rich soup with a pungent, intoxicating odor.
And then the ragged palms, the glaring sun, the immovable peaks, and
the white surf stood again before him. The iron rails swept up and
sank again, the fever sucked at his bones, and the pillow scorched
his cheek.
One morning for a brief moment he came back to real life again and
lay quite still, seeing everything about him with clear eyes and for
the first time, as though he had but just that instant been lifted
over the ship’s side. His keeper, glancing up, found the prisoner’s
eyes considering him curiously, and recognized the change. The
instinct of discipline brought him to his feet with his fingers at
his sides.
“Is the Lieutenant feeling better?”
The Lieutenant surveyed him gravely.
“You are one of our hospital stewards.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Why aren’t you with the regiment?”
“I was wounded, too, sir. I got it same time you did, Lieutenant.”
“Am I wounded? Of course, I remember. Is this a hospital ship?”
The steward shrugged his shoulders. “She’s one of the transports.
They have turned her over to the fever cases.”
The Lieutenant opened his lips to ask another question; but his own
body answered that one, and for a moment he lay silent.
“Do they know up North that I—that I’m all right?”
“Oh, yes, the papers had it in—there were pictures of the Lieutenant
in some of them.”
“Then I’ve been ill some time?”
“Oh, about eight days.”
The soldier moved uneasily, and the nurse in him became uppermost.
“I guess the Lieutenant hadn’t better talk any more,” he said. It
was his voice now which held authority.
The Lieutenant looked out at the palms and the silent gloomy
mountains and the empty coastline, where the same wave was rising
and falling with weary persistence.
“Eight days,” he said. His eyes shut quickly, as though with a
sudden touch of pain. He turned his head and sought for the figure
at the foot of the cot. Already the figure had grown faint and was
receding and swaying.
“Has anyone written or cabled?” the Lieutenant spoke, hurriedly. He
was fearful lest the figure should disappear altogether before he
could obtain his answer. “Has anyone come?”
“Why, they couldn’t get here, Lieutenant, not yet.”
The voice came very faintly. “You go to sleep now, and I’ll run and
fetch some letters and telegrams. When you wake up, maybe I’ll have
a lot for you.”
But the Lieutenant caught the nurse by the wrist, and crushed his
hand in his own thin fingers. They were hot, and left the steward’s
skin wet with perspiration. The Lieutenant laughed gayly.
“You see, Doctor,” he said, briskly, “that you can’t kill me. I
can’t die. I’ve got to live, you understand. Because, sir, she said
she would come. She said if I was wounded, or if I was ill, she
would come to me. She didn’t care what people thought. She would
come anyway and nurse me—well, she will come.”
“So, Doctor—old man—” He plucked at the steward’s sleeve, and
stroked his hand eagerly, “old man—” he began again, beseechingly,
“you’ll not let me die until she comes, will you? What? No, I know I
won’t die. Nothing made by man can kill me. No, not until she comes.
Then, after that—eight days, she’ll be here soon, any moment? What?
You think so, too? Don’t you? Surely, yes, any moment. Yes, I’ll go
to sleep now, and when you see her rowing out from shore you wake
me. You’ll know her; you can’t make a mistake. She is like—no, there
is no one like her—but you can’t make a mistake.”
That day strange figures began to mount the sides of the ship, and
to occupy its every turn and angle of space. Some of them fell on
their knees and slapped the bare deck with their hands, and laughed
and cried out, “Thank God, I’ll see God’s country again!” Some of
them were regulars, bound in bandages; some were volunteers, dirty
and hollow-eyed, with long beards on boys’ faces. Some came on
crutches; others with their arms around the shoulders of their
comrades, staring ahead of them with a fixed smile, their lips drawn
back and their teeth protruding. At every second step they stumbled,
and the face of each was swept by swift ripples of pain.
They lay on cots so close together that the nurses could not walk
between them. They lay on the wet decks, in the scuppers and along
the transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners
clinging to a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship’s
bow be turned toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed
into a state of self-pity and miserable oblivion to their
environment, from which hunger nor nausea nor aching bones could
shake them.
The hospital steward touched the Lieutenant lightly on the shoulder.
“We are going North, sir,” he said. “The transport’s ordered North
to New York, with these volunteers and the sick and the wounded. Do
you hear me, sir?”
The Lieutenant opened his eyes. “Has she come?” he asked.
“Gee!” exclaimed the hospital steward. He glanced impatiently at the
blue mountains and the yellow coast, from which the transport was
rapidly drawing away.
“Well, I can’t see her coming just now,” he said. “But she will,” he
added.
“You let me know at once when she comes.”
“Why, cert’nly, of course,” said the steward.
Three trained nurses came over the side just before the transport
started North. One was a large, motherly looking woman, with a
German accent. She had been a trained nurse, first in Berlin, and
later in the London Hospital in Whitechapel, and at Bellevue. The
nurse was dressed in white, and wore a little silver medal at her
throat; and she was strong enough to lift a volunteer out of his cot
and hold him easily in her arms, while one of the convalescents
pulled his cot out of the rain. Some of the men called her “nurse”;
others, who wore scapulars around their necks, called her “Sister”;
and the officers of the medical staff addressed her as Miss Bergen.
Miss Bergen halted beside the cot of the Lieutenant and asked, “Is
this the fever case you spoke about, Doctor—the one you want moved
to the officers’ ward?” She slipped her hand up under his sleeve and
felt his wrist.
“His pulse is very high,” she said to the steward. “When did you
take his temperature?” She drew a little morocco case from her
pocket and from that took a clinical thermometer, which she shook up
and down, eying the patient meanwhile with a calm, impersonal
scrutiny. The Lieutenant raised his head and stared up at the white
figure beside his cot. His eyes opened and then shut quickly, with a
startled look, in which doubt struggled with wonderful happiness.
His hand stole out fearfully and warily until it touched her apron,
and then, finding it was real, he clutched it desperately, and
twisting his face and body toward her, pulled her down, clasping her
hands in both of his, and pressing them close to his face and eyes
and lips. He put them from him for an instant, and looked at her
through his tears.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered, “sweetheart, I knew you’d come.”
As the nurse knelt on the deck beside him, her thermometer slipped
from her fingers and broke, and she gave an exclamation of
annoyance. The young Doctor picked up the pieces and tossed them
overboard. Neither of them spoke, but they smiled appreciatively.
The Lieutenant was looking at the nurse with the wonder and hope and
hunger of soul in his eyes with which a dying man looks at the cross
the priest holds up before him. What he saw where the German nurse
was kneeling was a tall, fair girl with great bands and masses of
hair, with a head rising like a lily from a firm, white throat, set
on broad shoulders above a straight back and sloping breast—a tall,
beautiful creature, half-girl, half-woman, who looked back at him
shyly, but steadily.
“Listen,” he said.
The voice of the sick man was so sure and so sane that the young
Doctor started, and moved nearer to the head of the cot. “Listen,
dearest,” the Lieutenant whispered. “I wanted to tell you before I
came South. But I did not dare; and then I was afraid something
might happen to me, and I could never tell you, and you would never
know. So I wrote it to you in the will I made at Baiquiri, the night
before the landing. If you hadn’t come now, you would have learned
it in that way. You would have read there that there never was
anyone but you; the rest were all dream people, foolish, silly—mad.
There is no one else in the world but you; you have been the only
thing in life that has counted. I thought I might do something down
here that would make you care. But I got shot going up a hill, and
after that I wasn’t able to do anything. It was very hot, and the
hills were on fire; and they took me prisoner, and kept me tied down
here, burning on these coals. I can’t live much longer, but now that
I’ve told you I can have peace. They tried to kill me before you
came; but they didn’t know I loved you, they didn’t know that men
who love you can’t die. They tried to starve my love for you, to
burn it out of me; they tried to reach it with their knives. But my
love for you is my soul, and they can’t kill a man’s soul. Dear
heart, I have lived because you lived. Now that you know—now that
you understand—what does it matter?”
Miss Bergen shook her head with great vigor. “Nonsense,” she said,
cheerfully. “You are not going to die. As soon as we move you out of
this rain, and some food cook——”
“Good God!” cried the young Doctor, savagely. “Do you want to kill
him?”
When she spoke, the patient had thrown his arms heavily across his
face, and had fallen back, lying rigid on the pillow.
The Doctor led the way across the prostrate bodies, apologizing as
he went. “I am sorry I spoke so quickly,” he said, “but he thought
you were real. I mean he thought you were some one he really knew——”
“He was just delirious,” said the German nurse, calmly. The Doctor
mixed himself a Scotch and soda and drank it with a single gesture.
“Ugh!” he said to the ward-room. “I feel as though I’d been opening
another man’s letters.”
* * * * *
The transport drove through the empty seas with heavy, clumsy
upheavals, rolling like a buoy. Having been originally intended for
the freight-carrying trade, she had no sympathy with hearts that
beat for a sight of their native land, or for lives that counted
their remaining minutes by the throbbing of her engines.
Occasionally, without apparent reason, she was thrown violently from
her course; but it was invariably the case that when her stern went
to starboard, something splashed in the water on her port side and
drifted past her, until, when it had cleared the blades of her
propeller, a voice cried out, and she was swung back on her
home-bound track again.
The Lieutenant missed the familiar palms and the tiny block-house;
and seeing nothing beyond the iron rails but great wastes of gray
water, he decided he was on board a prison-ship, or that he had been
strapped to a raft and cast adrift. People came for hours at a time
and stood at the foot of his cot, and talked with him and he to
them—people he had loved and people he had long forgotten, some of
whom he had thought were dead. One of them he could have sworn he
had seen buried in a deep trench, and covered with branches of
palmetto. He had heard the bugler, with tears choking him, sound
“taps”; and with his own hand he had placed the dead man’s campaign
hat on the mound of fresh earth above the grave. Yet here he was
still alive, and he came with other men of his troop to speak to
him; but when he reached out to them they were gone—the real and the
unreal, the dead and the living—and even She disappeared whenever he
tried to take her hand, and sometimes the hospital steward drove her
away.
“Did that young lady say when she was coming back again?” he asked
the steward.
“The young lady! What young lady?” asked the steward, wearily.
“The one who has been sitting there,” he answered. He pointed with
his gaunt hand at the man in the next cot.
“Oh, that young lady. Yes, she’s coming back. She’s just gone below
to fetch you some hard-tack.”
The young volunteer in the next cot whined grievously.
“That crazy man gives me the creeps,” he groaned. “He’s always
waking me up, and looking at me as though he was going to eat me.”
“Shut your head,” said the steward. “He’s a better man crazy than
you’ll ever be with the little sense you’ve got. And he has two
Mauser holes in him. Crazy, eh? It’s a good thing for you that there
was about four thousand of us regulars just as crazy as him, or
you’d never seen the top of the hill.”