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THE DAY OF THE BEAST
BY
ZANE GREY
AUTHOR OF TO THE LAST MAN,
THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT,
THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER, ETC.
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
Made in the United States of America
THE DAY OF THE BEAST
1922
By Zane Grey
Printed in the U.S.A.
THE DAY OF THE BEAST
DEDICATION
Herein is embodied my tribute to the American
men who gave themselves to the service in the great
war, and my sleepless and eternal gratitude for
what they did for me.
ZANE GREY.
THE DAY OF THE BEAST
CHAPTER I
His native land! Home!
The ship glided slowly up the Narrows; and from its deck Daren Lane
saw the noble black outline of the Statue of Liberty limned against
the clear gold of sunset. A familiar old pang in his breast--longing
and homesickness and agony, together with the physical burn of gassed
lungs--seemed to swell into a profound overwhelming emotion.
"My own--my native land!" he whispered, striving to wipe the dimness
from his eyes. Was it only two years or twenty since he had left his
country to go to war? A sense of strangeness dawned upon him. His
home-coming, so ceaselessly dreamed of by night and longed for by day,
was not going to be what his hopes had created. But at that moment his
joy was too great to harbor strange misgivings. How impossible for any
one to understand his feelings then, except perhaps the comrades who
had survived the same ordeal!
The vessel glided on. A fresh cool spring breeze with a scent of land
fanned Lane's hot brow. It bore tidings from home. Almost he thought
he smelled the blossoms in the orchard, and the damp newly plowed
earth, and the smoke from the wood fire his mother used to bake over.
A hundred clamoring thoughts strove for dominance over his mind--to
enter and flash by and fade. His sight, however, except for the blur
that returned again and again, held fast to the entrancing and
thrilling scene--the broad glimmering sun-track of gold in the
rippling channel, leading his eye to the grand bulk of America's
symbol of freedom, and to the stately expanse of the Hudson River,
dotted by moving ferry-boats and tugs, and to the magnificent broken
sky-line of New York City, with its huge dark structures looming and
its thousands of windows reflecting the fire of the sun.
It was indeed a profound and stirring moment for Daren Lane, but not
quite full, not all-satisfying. The great city seemed to frown. The
low line of hills in the west shone dull gray and cold. Where were the
screaming siren whistles, the gay streaming flags, the boats crowded
with waving people, that should have welcomed disabled soldiers who
had fought for their country? Lane hoped he had long passed by
bitterness, but yet something rankled in the unhealed wound of his
heart.
Some one put a hand in close clasp upon his arm. Then Lane heard the
scrape of a crutch on the deck, and knew who stood beside him.
"Well, Dare, old boy, does it look good to you?" asked a husky voice.
"Yes, Blair, but somehow not just what I expected," replied Lane,
turning to his comrade.
"Uhuh, I get you."
Blair Maynard stood erect with the aid of a crutch. There was even a
hint of pride in the poise of his uncovered head. And for once Lane
saw the thin white face softening and glowing. Maynard's big brown
eyes were full of tears.
"Guess I left my nerve as well as my leg over there," he said.
"Blair, it's so good to get back that we're off color," returned Lane.
"On the level, I could scream like a madman."
"I'd like to weep," replied the other, with a half laugh.
"Where's Red? He oughtn't miss this."
"Poor devil! He sneaked off from me somewhere," rejoined Maynard.
"Red's in pretty bad shape again. The voyage has been hard on him. I
hope he'll be well enough to get his discharge when we land. I'll take
him home to Middleville."
"Middleville!" echoed Lane, musingly. "Home!... Blair, does it hit
you--kind of queer? Do you long, yet dread to get home?"
Maynard had no reply for that query, but his look was expressive.
"I've not heard from Helen for over a year," went on Lane, more as if
speaking to himself.
"My God, Dare!" exclaimed his companion, with sudden fire. "Are you
still thinking of her?"
"We--we are engaged," returned Lane, slowly. "At least we _were_. But
I've had no word that she----"
"Dare, your childlike faith is due for a jar," interrupted his
comrade, with bitter scorn. "Come down to earth. You're a crippled
soldier--coming home--and damn lucky at that."
"Blair, what do you know--that I do not know? For long I've suspected
you're wise to--to things at home. You know I haven't heard much in
all these long months. My mother wrote but seldom. Lorna, my kid
sister, forgot me, I guess.... Helen always was a poor correspondent.
Dal answered my letters, but she never _told_ me anything about home.
When we first got to France I heard often from Margie Henderson and
Mel Iden--crazy kind of letters--love-sick over soldiers.... But
nothing for a long time now."
"At first they wrote! Ha! Ha!" burst out Maynard. "Sure, they wrote
love-sick letters. They sent socks and cigarettes and candy and books.
And they all wanted us to hurry back to marry them.... Then--when the
months had gone by and the novelty had worn off--when we went against
the hell of real war--sick or worn out, sleepless and miserable,
crippled or half demented with terror and dread and longing for
home--then, by God, they quit!"
"Oh, no, Blair--not all of them," remonstrated Lane, unsteadily.
"Well, old man, I'm sore, and you're about the only guy I can let out
on," explained Maynard, heavily. "One thing I'm glad of--we'll face it
together. Daren, we were kids together--do you remember?--playing on
the commons--straddling the old water-gates over the brooks--stealing
cider from the country presses--barefoot boys going to school
together. We played Post-Office with the girls and Indians with the
boys. We made puppy love to Dal and Mel and Helen and Margie--all of
them.... Then, somehow the happy thoughtless years of youth passed....
It seems strange and sudden now--but the war came. We enlisted. We
had the same ideal--you and I.--We went to France--and you know what
we did there together.... Now we're on this ship--getting into port of
the good old U.S.--good as bad as she is!--going home together. Thank
God for that. I want to be buried in Woodlawn.... Home! Home?... We
feel its meaning. But, Dare, we'll have no home--no place.... We are
old--we are through--we have served--we are done.... What we dreamed
of as glory will be cold ashes to our lips, bitter as gall.... You
always were a dreamer, an idealist, a believer in God, truth, hope and
womanhood. In spite of the war these somehow survive in you.... But
Dare, old friend, steel yourself now against disappointment and
disillusion."
Used as Lane was to his comrade's outbursts, this one struck
singularly home to Lane's heart and made him mute. The chill of his
earlier misgiving returned, augmented by a strange uneasiness, a
premonition of the unknown and dreadful future. But he threw it off.
Faith would not die in Lane. It could not die utterly because of what
he felt in himself. Yet--what was in store for him? Why was his hope
so unquenchable? There could be no _resurgam_ for Daren Lane.
Resignation should have brought him peace--peace--when every nerve in
his shell-shocked body racked him--when he could not subdue a mounting
hope that all would be well at home--when he quivered at thought of
mother, sister, sweetheart!
The ship glided on under the shadow of America's emblem--a bronze
woman of noble proportions, holding out a light to ships that came in
the night--a welcome to all the world. Daren Lane held to his maimed
comrade while they stood bare-headed and erect for that moment when
the ship passed the statue. Lane knew what Blair felt. But nothing of
what that feeling was could ever be spoken. The deck of the ship was
now crowded with passengers, yet they were seemingly dead to anything
more than a safe arrival at their destination. They were not crippled
American soldiers. Except these two there were none in service
uniforms. There across the windy space of water loomed the many-eyed
buildings, suggestive of the great city. A low roar of traffic came on
the breeze. Passengers and crew of the liner were glad to dock before
dark. They took no notice of the rigid, erect soldiers. Lane, arm in
arm with Blair, face to the front, stood absorbed in his sense of a
nameless sublimity for them while passing the Statue of Liberty. The
spirit of the first man who ever breathed of freedom for the human
race burned as a white flame in the heart of Lane and his comrade. But
it was not so much that spirit which held them erect, aloof, proud. It
was a supreme consciousness of immeasurable sacrifice for an ideal
that existed only in the breasts of men and women kindred to them--an
unutterable and never-to-be-spoken glory of the duty done for others,
but that they owed themselves. They had sustained immense loss of
health and happiness; the future seemed like the gray, cold, gloomy
expanse of the river; and there could never be any reward except this
white fire of their souls. Nameless! But it was the increasing purpose
that ran through the ages.
The ship docked at dark. Lane left Blair at the rail, gloomily gazing
down at the confusion and bustle on the wharf, and went below to
search for their comrade, Red Payson. He found him in his stateroom,
half crouched on the berth, apparently oblivious to the important
moment. It required a little effort to rouse Payson. He was a slight
boy, not over twenty-two, sallow-faced and freckled, with hair that
gave him the only name his comrades knew him by. Lane packed the boy's
few possessions and talked vehemently all the time. Red braced up,
ready to go, but he had little to say and that with the weary
nonchalance habitual with him. Lane helped him up on deck, and the
exertion, slight as it was, brought home to Lane that he needed help
himself. They found Maynard waiting.
"Well, here we are--the Three Musketeers," said Lane, in a voice he
tried to make cheerful.
"Where's the band?" inquired Maynard, sardonically.
"Gay old New York--and me broke!" exclaimed Red Payson, as if to
himself.
Then the three stood by the rail, at the gangplank, waiting for the
hurried stream of passengers to disembark. Down on the wharf under the
glaring white lights, swarmed a crowd from which rose a babel of
voices. A whistle blew sharply at intervals. The whirr and honk of
taxicabs, and the jangle of trolley cars, sounded beyond the wide dark
portal of the dock-house. The murky water below splashed between ship
and pier. Deep voices rang out, and merry laughs, and shrill glad
cries of welcome. The bright light shone down upon a motley,
dark-garbed mass, moving slowly. The spirit of the occasion was
manifest.
When the three disabled soldiers, the last passengers to disembark,
slowly and laboriously descended to the wharf, no one offered to help
them, no one waited with a smile and hand-clasp of welcome. No one saw
them, except a burly policeman, who evidently had charge of the
traffic at the door. He poked his club into the ribs of the
one-legged, slowly shuffling Maynard and said with cheerful gruffness:
"Step lively, Buddy, step lively!"
Lane, with his two comrades, spent three days at a barracks-hospital
for soldiers in Bedford Park. It was a long flimsy structure, bare
except for rows of cots along each wall, and stoves at middle, and
each end. The place was overcrowded with disabled service men, all
worse off than Lane and his comrades. Lane felt that he really was
keeping a sicker man than himself from what attention the hospital
afforded. So he was glad, at the end of the third day, to find they
could be discharged from the army.
This enforced stay, when he knew he was on his way home, had seemed
almost unbearable to Lane. He felt that he had the strength to get
home, and that was about all. He began to expectorate blood--no
unusual thing for him--but this time to such extent that he feared the
return of hemorrhage. The nights seemed sleepless, burning, black
voids; and the days were hideous with noise and distraction. He wanted
to think about the fact that he was home--an astounding and
unbelievable thing. Once he went down to the city and walked on
Broadway and Fifth Avenue, taxing his endurance to the limit. But he
had become used to pain and exhaustion. So long as he could keep up he
did not mind.
That day three powerful impressions were forced upon Lane, never to be
effaced. First he found that the change in him was vast and
incalculable and vague. He could divine but not understand. Secondly,
the men of the service, disabled or not, were old stories to New
Yorkers. Lane saw soldiers begging from pedestrians. He muttered to
himself: "By God, I'll starve to death before I ever do that!" He
could not detect any aloofness on the part of passers-by. They were
just inattentive. Lane remembered with sudden shock how differently
soldiers had been regarded two or three years ago. He had read lengthy
newspaper accounts of the wild and magnificent welcome accorded to the
first soldiers to return to New York. How strange the contrast! But
that was long ago--past history--buried under the immense and hurried
and inscrutable changes of a nation. Lane divined that, as he felt the
mighty resistless throb of the great city. His third and strongest
impression concerned the women he met and passed on the streets. Their
lips and cheeks were rouged. Their dresses were cut too low at the
neck. But even this fashion was not nearly so striking as the short
skirts, cut off at the knees, and in many cases above. At first this
roused a strange amaze in Lane. "What's the idea, I wonder?" he mused.
But in the end it disgusted him. He reflected that for two swift years
he had been out of the track of events, away from centers of
population. Paris itself had held no attraction for him. Dreamer and
brooder, he had failed to see the material things. But this third
impression troubled him more than the other two and stirred thoughts
he tried to dispel. Returning to the barracks he learned that he and
his friends would be free on the morrow; and long into the night he
rejoiced in the knowledge. Free! The grinding, incomprehensible
Juggernaut and himself were at the parting of the ways. Before he went
to sleep he remembered a forgotten prayer his mother had taught him.
His ordeal was over. What had happened did not matter. The Hell was
past and he must bury memory. Whether or not he had a month or a year
to live it must be lived without memories of his ordeal.
Next day, at the railroad station, even at the moment of departure,
Lane and Blair Maynard had their problem with Red Payson. He did not
want to go to Blair's home.
"But hell, Red, you haven't any home--any place to go," blurted out
Maynard.
So they argued with him, and implored him, and reasoned with him.
Since his discharge from the hospital in France Payson had always been
cool, weary, abstracted, difficult to reach. And here at the last he
grew strangely aloof and stubborn. Every word that bore relation to
his own welfare seemed only to alienate him the more. Lane sensed
this.
"See here, Red," he said, "hasn't it occurred to you that Blair and I
need you?"
"Need me? What!" he exclaimed, with perceptible change of tone, though
it was incredulous.
"Sure," interposed Blair.
"Red--listen," continued Lane, speaking low and with difficulty.
"Blair and I have been through the--the whole show together.... And
we've been in the hospitals with you for months.... We've all
got--sort of to rely on each other.... Let's stick it out to the end.
I guess--you know--we may not have a long time...."
Lane's voice trailed off. Then the stony face of the listener changed
for a fleeting second.
"Boys, I'll go over with you," he said.
And then the maimed Blair, awkward with his crutch and bag, insisted
on helping Lane get Red aboard the train. Red could just about walk.
Sombrely they clambered up the steps into the Pullman.
Middleville was a prosperous and thriving inland town of twenty
thousand inhabitants, identical with many towns of about the same size
in the middle and eastern United States.
Lane had been born there and had lived there all his life, seldom
having been away up to the advent of the war. So that the memories of
home and town and place, which he carried away from America with him,
had never had any chance, up to the time of his departure, to change
from the vivid, exaggerated image of boyhood. Since he had left
Middleville he had seen great cities, palaces, castles, edifices, he
had crossed great rivers, he had traveled thousands of miles, he had
looked down some of the famous thoroughfares of the world.
Was this then the reason that Middleville, upon his arrival, seemed
so strange, sordid, shrunken, so vastly changed? He stared, even while
he helped Payson off the train--stared at the little brick station at
once so familiar and yet so strange, that had held a place of dignity
in the picture of his memory. The moment was one of shock.
Then he was distracted from his pondering by tearful and joyful cries,
and deeper voices of men. He looked up to recognize Blair's mother,
father, sister; and men and women whose faces appeared familiar, but
whose names he could not recall. His acute faculty of perception took
quick note of a change in Blair's mother. Lane turned his gaze away.
The agony of joy and sorrow--the light of her face--was more than Lane
could stand. He looked at the sister Margaret--a tall, fair girl. She
had paint on her cheeks. She did not see Lane. Her strained gaze held
a beautiful and piercing intentness. Then her eyes opened wide, her
hand went to cover her mouth, and she cried out: "Oh Blair!--poor boy!
Brother!"
Only Lane heard her. The others were crying out themselves as Blair's
gray-haired mother received him into her arms. She seemed a proud
woman, broken and unsteady. Red Payson's grip on Lane's arm told what
that scene meant to him. How pitiful the vain effort of Blair's people
to hide their horror! Presently mother and sister and women relatives
fell aside to let the soldier boy meet his father. This was something
that rang the bells in Lane's heart. Men were different, and Blair
faced his father differently. The wild boy had come home--the
scapegoat of many Middleville escapades had returned--the
ne'er-do-well sought his father's house. He had come home to die. It
was there in Blair's white face--the dreadful truth. He wore a ribbon
on his breast and he leaned on a crutch. For the instant, as father
and son faced each other, there was something in Blair's poise, his
look of an eagle, that carried home a poignant sense of his greatness.
Lane thrilled with it and a lump constricted his throat. Then with
Blair's ringing "Dad!" and the father's deep and broken: "My son! My
son!" the two embraced.
In a stifling moment more it seemed, attention turned on Red Payson,
who stood nearest. Blair's folk were eager, kind, soft-spoken and warm
in their welcome.
Then it came Lane's turn, and what they said or did he scarcely knew,
until Margaret kissed him. "Oh, Dare! I'm _so_ glad to see you home."
Tears were standing in her clear blue eyes. "You're changed,
but--not--not so much as Blair."
Lane responded as best he could, and presently he found himself
standing at the curb, watching the car move away.
"Come out to-morrow," called back Blair.
The Maynard's car was carrying his comrades away. His first feeling
was one of gladness--the next of relief. He could be alone now--alone
to find out what had happened to him, and to this strange Middleville.
An old negro wearing a blue uniform accosted Lane, shook hands with
him, asked him if he had any baggage. "Yas sir, I sho knowed you,
Mistah Dare Lane. But you looks powerful bad."
Lane crossed the station platform, and the railroad yard and tracks,
to make a short cut in the direction of his home. He shrank from
meeting any one. He had not sent word just when he would arrive,
though he had written his mother from New York that it would be soon,
He was glad that no one belonging to him had been at the station. He
wanted to see his mother in his home. Walking fast exhausted him, and
he had to rest. How dead his legs felt! In fact he felt queer all
over. The old burn and gnaw in his breast had expanded to a heavy,
full, suffocating sensation. Yet his blood seemed to race. Suddenly an
overwhelming emotion of rapture flooded over him. Home at last! He did
not think of any one. He was walking across the railroad yards where
as a boy he had been wont to steal rides on freight trains. Soon he
reached the bridge. In the gathering twilight he halted to clutch at
the railing and look out across where the waters met--where Sycamore
Creek flowed into Middleville River. The roar of water falling over
the dam came melodiously and stirringly to his ears. And as he looked
again he was assailed by that strange sense of littleness, of
shrunkenness, which had struck him so forcibly at the station. He
listened to the murmur of running water. Then, while the sweetness of
joy pervaded him, there seemed to rise from below or across the river
or from somewhere the same strange misgiving, a keener dread, a chill
that was not in the air, a fatal portent of the future. Why should
this come to mock him at such a sacred and beautiful moment?
Passers-by stared at Lane, and some of them whispered, and one
hesitated, as if impelled to speak. Wheeling away Lane crossed the
bridge, turned up River Street, soon turned off again into a darker
street, and reaching High School Park he sat down to rest again. He
was almost spent. The park was quiet and lonely. The bare trees showed
their skeleton outlines against the cold sky. It was March and the air
was raw and chilly. This park that had once been a wonderful place now
appeared so small. Everything he saw was familiar yet grotesque in the
way it had become dwarfed. Across the street from where he sat lights
shone in the windows of a house. He knew the place. Who lived there?
One of the girls--he had forgotten which. From somewhere the
discordance of a Victrola jarred on Lane's sensitive ears.
Lifting his bag he proceeded on his way, halting every little while to
catch his breath. When he turned a corner into a side street,
recognizing every tree and gate and house, there came a gathering and
swelling of his emotions and he began to weaken and shake. He was
afraid he could not make it half way up the street. But he kept on.
The torture now was more a mingled rapture and grief than the physical
protest of his racked body. At last he saw the modest little
house--and then he stood at the gate, quivering. Home! A light in the
window of his old room! A terrible and tremendous storm of feeling
forced him to lean on the gate. How many endless hours had the
pictured memory of that house haunted him? There was the beloved room
where he had lived and slept and read, and cherished over his books
and over his compositions a secret hope and ambition to make of
himself an author. How strange to remember that! But it was true. His
day labor at Manton's office, for all the years since he had graduated
from High School, had been only a means to an end. No one had dreamed
of his dream. Then the war had come and now his hope, if not his
faith, was dead. Never before had the realization been so galling, so
bitter. Endlessly and eternally he must be concerned with himself. He
had driven that habit of thought away a million times, but it would
return. All he had prayed for was to get home--only to reach home
alive--to see his mother, and his sister Lorna--and Helen--and
then.... But he was here now and all that prayer was falsehood. Just
to get home was not enough.. He had been cheated of career, love,
happiness.
It required extreme effort to cross the little yard, to mount the
porch. In a moment more he would see his mother. He heard her within,
somewhere at the back of the house. Wherefore he tip-toed round to the
kitchen door. Here he paused, quaking. A cold sweat broke out all over
him. Why was this return so dreadful? He pressed a shaking hand over
his heart. How surely he knew he could not deceive his mother! The
moment she saw him, after the first flash of joy, she would see the
wreck of the boy she had let go to war. Lane choked over his emotion,
but he could not spare her. Opening the door he entered.
There she stood at the stove and she looked up at the sound he made.
Yes! but stranger than all other changes was the change in her. She
was not the mother of his boyhood. Nor was the change alone age or
grief or wasted cheek. The moment tore cruelly at Lane's heart. She
did not recognize him swiftly. But when she did....
"Oh God!... Daren! My boy!" she whispered.
"Mother!"