THE AMETHYST MOMENT
I
Nathan had been too toughened by eighteen months of soldiering to remain
long indisposed. What he wanted more than all else was sleep,—hours and
hours of sleep.
The man never would have become so exhausted in so short a time as a
night and a morning and a journey through fifteen miles of muddy slough,
if he had not lost far more blood from the wound in his arm than he
realized, and if that flight had not been made in pitchy darkness which
turned his overwrought emotions and racked imagination inward and sapped
his nerve force with even far more deadly effect than the injury to his
shoulder. Therefore, when the mud and blood and filth had been washed
from his face and body, his wounds sterilized and bound, and his mind
fully saturated with the consciousness that he had been saved and the
whole horror was a thing of the past, his invalidism was short-lived.
They kept him under opiates the first day and night. The second morning
he awoke, raved for a time, was made to take food, then went back to
sleep again. The third morning he sat up, called for his clothes and got
them. There was small room on that train for invalids to remain invalids
for the luxury of it. His clothes had been cleaned in the time
intervening. He dressed with a doctor’s help. But he felt dizzy after
breakfast when he tried to smoke and lay down on his berth again. He
must have fallen asleep, for when he awoke it was high noon and the
train had stopped. Far out on the expanse of hard brown steppe, it had
turned upon a siding to permit an eastern-bound train of “empties” to
clear.
Nathan arose and looked out of the window. The world was surfeited with
sunshine. Never had there been such a day. The small white-enameled
compartment in which his bunk was located was empty. Off across the
prairie he saw doctors and nurses strolling. A warning whistle would
bring them back in time. Beside, they could see the western track for
miles, straight to the far horizon. Nathan suddenly wanted to be out
there in the sunshine too.
He discovered that his leg, where the jagged nail had penetrated, had
been cauterized and tightly bandaged. But it gave him no especial
distress. The cut in his forehead, when dried gore and caked muck had
been washed away, had turned out to be a two-inch gash above his right
eye which a bit of adhesive plaster covered. His wounded arm, in which
the feeling had begun to return about noon of the previous day, was
tightly bound against his body. Thirty hours of sleep had brought back
his strength and rebuilt his shattered nerves. Yes, Nathan suddenly
wanted to be out there in the sunshine too. There were several khaki
coats on the bunk above. He swung one around and got his good arm into
its right sleeve. He pulled it as best he could over his battered
shoulder and fastened a couple of black-copper buttons at the throat. An
officer’s cap hung on a hook in the passageway. Nathan went out into the
iron vestibule and down the steps.
He had not seen Madelaine since she had helped him to the hill top. The
car to which she was attached was far up forward. Nathan had been
hurriedly carried into the next to the last coach. He wanted to find
Madelaine, however, and thank her. But most of all, he simply wanted to
gaze into her face, to see “in a close-up” his Girl of the Window. His
stunned brain had not quite assimilated yet that he had found her, far
out on the other side of the globe, deep in the lands of the Tartars.
“What the devil are you doing out here?” demanded a sharp voice behind
him. Nathan turned to behold one of the surgeons.
“Soaking in sunshine,” was his simple response.
“You’re supposed to be sick—for another day, at least.”
“Sick? Hell! I’m all right. All I needed was sleep. And I guess I got
it.”
“But, man, you may take cold in those wounds.”
“I’ll be hanged if I’m going to stay in there and be fed beef tea while
the rest of you people enjoy yourselves outside on a day like this!”
“Were you on that smashed train we had to clear off the track?”
“Yes,” said Nathan. Briefly he recounted his experience. Doctors and
nurses gathered around as he talked. Madelaine was not among them.
“Fortunes of war!” observed one of the surgeons philosophically, when
the terse recital was ended. “Think of all the poor devils who have
failed to make their hill tops in time.”
“Can I ever forgot them?” asked Nathan huskily. “I wish I could!”
II
His stiffened limbs ached for action. He begged a cigarette and started
northward over the plain.
The air was balmy with a lingering suggestion of Indian Summer. But
there was no haze. The flatness of the earth only accentuated the vast
arch of the sky. That sky was sharp cobalt. The earth had mellowed to a
golden brown, awaiting the snow. And against that combination of cobalt
and golden brown, far on ahead, Nathan suddenly saw a furl and flash of
deep scarlet, a vivid splash of color as the noon breeze, blowing from
the ends of the world, caught the cape of a lone Red Cross nurse and
rippled it slightly ahead of her.
She was walking pensively as Nathan came up. She was leaning slightly
backward against the breeze. Her loosened hair was blowing about her
temples and face. In the crook of her right wrist she carried a book,
her forefinger keeping a place in the pages. Soul of the sky and the
earth and the wind and the distances, she seemed somehow,—a picture for
an artist!
She paused at his step behind her. Nathan paused also. He did not wish
to frighten her. The woman turned. Slowly they inventoried one another,
their eyes met.
Twenty-nine years were focussed in that moment.
The man saw his Woman of Vague Dreams before him in reality. She was
straight as a Norway pine, exquisitely turned as a Venus de Medici, dark
as a Castilian. She was fragile of ankle, strong of thigh, deep of
breast, soft of shoulder.
On her finely chiseled and sensitive features lay a slight pallor. Her
lips were half-parted. Great brown eyes were faintly startled,
inquiring, lucid with an infinite delicacy and tenderness. She was a
woman with a big soul! It was all there, on her features.
Madelaine beheld a man ten feet from her, unlike any man she had ever
seen. He was a head taller than herself, agile of carriage, cordy of
shoulder and bicep, sure of tread, controlled of muscle and nerve. His
features were burned to the hue of brick. His gray eye carried as true
as a rifle ball. And his mouth!—His lips were classic; every mean and
petty thing he had risen above, every heckling trial he had met with
infinite patience, every hell he had groped through because he believed
that to go on was self-obligation and that somewhere above a sun must be
shining gloriously, the whole long chronicle of what he had lived was
all concentrated in two cable jaw muscles and the manner in which he
closed his lips.
He also had calm eyes—now.
His strong, virile body, war-hardened, was clad in a uniform that
indicated no rubber-stamp soldier. His khaki shirt was left loosely open
at the throat, disclosing a chest as tough as leather. He wore his cap
at a rakish, he-man angle and his forehead wound and bungling shoulder
only accentuated his virility instead of making him clumsy.
The woman slowly viewed his face and his frame. And a queer thrill shot
deep and true, far down into the innermost reaches of her being. Here
was a _MAN_!
Two pairs of calm eyes met in that moment. Face to face, eye to eye,
they looked upon each other and those glances held. Male and female,
worthy of each other, made for each other, they met at high noon under
an infinite cobalt sky on a spot as level and far-flung as the
Tablelands of Eternity. And all around and about them was Sunshine. It
had to be in the sunshine, that!
III
The woman was the first to speak.
“Why! You’re the soldier who climbed toward me day before yesterday, out
of the fog.”
Nathan’s voice was steady.
“Out of the Fog, yes!” he replied. “And you were the Good Angel who saw
me trying to get out of the Fog and came down and helped me to make the
Top.”
“I suppose we should introduce ourselves, as there’s no one apparently
to do it for us. I am Madelaine Theddon from Springfield,
Massachusetts.”
The breeze stopped blowing for a moment. All sounds softened into
eternal silence. Even the sunlight waited. Nathan never took his eyes
from that cameo face.
“Forge is my name, Miss Theddon,” he said. “Nathaniel Forge! I’m from
Vermont.”
Off over the rim of the world, washed by the crisp whitecaps of a
mazarine sea, once was a coral island which no man’s chart has ever
compassed. There had never been a gray day upon that coral island. The
sunlight started there. Deep in its heart were bowered valleys and acres
of flowers, and in the vesper hour sweet notes came down the evening
silence, played upon reeds. It was the island of Arcadie. And far, far
back before the lid of Pandora’s Box was opened, loosing its swarm of
griefs and troubles upon the world, Everyman dwelt there and in the
starlit dark Someone came to him, Someone who was part of himself—and
covered him—with the wealth of her hair.
The gods were jealous of those who lived upon that coral island. They
destroyed it. And ever since, Everyman has been hunting, hunting, up and
down the worlds, for the one who came to him as a Whisper and a bit of
Incense, in that dark. Sometimes that search ends beautifully. Nathan
was not so far wrong in his youthful poetry after all.
“Forge!” cried the woman. “Nathaniel Forge!”
“Yes,” the man answered. He never knew why she spoke his name as she
did. He only knew that, gazing deep into her face, he saw the blood die
out and an expression come as though she would cry aloud. He knew that
she dropped the book and half-raised her arms toward him.
A man’s brain may play queer pranks in life’s Great Moments. Came to
Nathan then some lines he had written long ago, even as it was coming to
the woman, intuitively, subconsciously, that both of them, in some far,
previous incarnation had met so, had stood so, had spoken so,—long
before.
“... the toil and tears we may know, dear heart,
Must some day reach an end;
Through miles and years we must search sometimes,
Ten thousand for one friend.
Yet some great noon in the sun-glare bright,
In some vast, open space,
You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched,
And triumph on your face.
“I know few words will be needed then,
Lament nor name nor plea,
We’ll let our eyes speak the message sweet;
‘Grow old along with me!’
The soul of man has a thousand lives,
Yet Love has only one,
That leaps alive to the Glory Cry:
‘Dear Heart, the trek is done!’”
Nathan had builded better than he ever knew. It was his!—and hers!—that
noontime. The trek was done.
Madelaine’s eyes were starry, starry as they had never been before in
all her days. This copper-hued, clear-eyed, lean-jawed, firm-voiced man
was Nathaniel Forge! This was the one who had written a little poem
which she had folded away in lavender and old lace and placed in a
little casket deep beneath her Inner Shrine, turning piteously from the
poignant fantasy that it could possibly have been meant for her.
Romance? What was Romance? _This_ was Romance! This was Romance—the
height and the depth and the width and the breadth of it—idealism
unfathomable—the most beautiful thing in the world.
On a thousand nights in her orphaned heart she had wondered what he
could be like, how he could appear, how his voice might sound. But that
wonder had been forcibly sent away, off to the mystic vales behind the
sunset where all our little unborn wishes go. Kismet, however, could be
kind. This was a world after all in which action and reaction could be
equal. There were still rewards and fairies. The man of her little
heart-locked romance stood before her in the flesh at last. And he was
all that she had ever dreamed a man could be and more.
Yes, it was all there,—all there on his face.
“Let us walk together, you and I,” said Madelaine, when her heart
throbbed again and the great cog-wheels of the universe turned once
more.
But in the woman’s suggestion lay a far deeper significance than Nathan
grasped at the time.
IV
They fell into step and moved off, side by side, across the stubble. The
sunshine sang and the breezes rioted. What mattered it that they stood
in a land of blood and junk and chaos, with war roaring across the
horizons and all the world on fire? There was a cobalt sky above them
and the world stretched true into the western Infinite. It was a long
way to the horizon, a very long way.
“Miss Theddon,” said Nathan, “life is very queer at times, isn’t it—in
some of its coincidences and dénouements, I mean?”
“Yes,” replied Madelaine, scarcely recognizing her own voice. She was
trying to credit that this romantically garbed, erect-figured,
firm-footed, steady-voiced man by her side was Nathaniel Forge. She felt
rather light-headed about it. She did not note just where they were
walking. She did not care. There was a sky and it was blue. There was
sunshine and it flooded over them. There was a horizon, and as they
walked, it moved even farther away.
“Because, Miss Theddon, this doesn’t happen to be the first time I’ve
seen you, I believe, though I dare say you never knew. Some day I’d like
to tell you. Not now. Please don’t ask it. But somehow I feel I know you
very well, that I’ve always known you.” He laughed lightly. “After all,
Massachusetts and Vermont are very close together, aren’t they?”
How could she tell him? Could she tell him? She heard herself speaking,
as though she were a third person, listening to the conversation.
“And I feel that I know you too very well indeed. Though I’m not yet
quite over the shock of meeting you, away off here in the heart of Asia.
You—you wrote a poem once——”
He lost a step in his abrupt surprise. Then he recovered himself.
“While I was seventeen I had a period when I wrote a few rhymes, yes,”
he affirmed. “Every fellow does, I fancy. Only some write them worse
than others.”
“One of those poems happened into my possession. I found it in a
newspaper. It—it—interested me. I kept it. I wondered who you were
and—why you should have written such a poem.”
“Which poem was it? I wrote several.”
“I’ll tell you that—some day—when you tell me where you saw me before,”
she answered. It was sincerely spoken, not coquetry.
“We find we know one another and we meet out here! It is almost too much
to credit.”
On the mellow brown steppe they were two figures silhouetted against the
sky, a bronzed man in khaki and a beautiful woman in blue and scarlet.
They were walking rather close together.
In the far distance sounded a long-drawn whistle—the east-bound freight.
They had to return. But their Amethyst Moment had slipped into Memory!
V
“Look here, Forge,” cried a young surgeon angrily, when he came through
the train a quarter-hour later, “what the devil did you say to that
Theddon girl that she should come back, lock herself in her compartment
and shed tears all over the place? The nurses up front are all talking
about it.”
“Say to her? Tears? Me? Why, I didn’t say anything to her. Is she
weeping?”
“I said so, didn’t I? What the devil’s happened, anyhow? Have you ever
known her before?”
“From the beginning of the world, old man!”
“You’re bughouse!” snapped the doctor. “You haven’t come out of the
ether. The beginning of the world! Night before last you were seeing
stars. You’re a nut! Jack, where’s that morphine? Give this coot another
shot!”
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