Wallace did not sleep that night. He was up at early dawn, and roused
the chauffeur. Then he went to Vance’s room.
Vance was awake, lying back on his pillows, his arms under his head.
“Well?” he demanded, sulkily.
“It’s going to be a great day. If we start now, we can make Bath early,
and—”
“I’m not going to Bath.”
Wallace stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at him. Against
Vance’s childish peevishness he stood the genuine passion of Lily
Ruskin, and he marvelled. What was there about Vance that enlisted such
devotion? That kept Edith faithful, brought Lily to her knees, had cost
him a night’s sleep and the entire pleasure of the journey? Certainly
the element of boyishness that kept him, Wallace, always on the look-out
to save him from danger, was not his attraction for Lily. There was
nothing maternal in Lily’s love. He was her man.
“I’m not going to Bath,” Vance repeated.
Wallace suddenly lost his temper.
“You’re going to the devil,” he snapped. “That’s what you’re doing. And
I’m pretty sick of holding you back. I’m tired of mothering you.”
With one of his quick changes of mood, Vance laughed. Then, with a great
leap, he sprang out of bed and went to the window.
“God, what a day!” he said. “I’m not going to spend it riding between
these confounded hedgerows. It’s the sea for me.”
He turned and put an arm around Wallace’s shoulders.
“I’m sane this morning. Don’t look so—nervous. We’ll get a sailboat,
all of us, including George Broadhurst, and put our thumbs to our noses
as we pass old Johnny Bull’s cruiser out there. Look at the colour of
that water!”
He had thrown off the coat of his pajamas, and his splendid torso was
bare. He went to the window again, and threw out one magnificent arm
toward the sea.
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll,” he declaimed; “Ten
thousand fleets sail over thee in vain!”
Some outraged Britisher in the next room rapped sharply on the wall, and
his oratorical flight died in a chuckle.
“Go on out,” he said to Vance. “Order the car back to the garage, and
ask some one to call Lily, like a good chap. She oughtn’t to miss that
sea.”
Wallace was helpless against the flood tide of his morning good humour.
He tried to argue, to voice with Lily’s face before him the resolutions
of the night before. Vance splashed in his tub, and sang between
warnings.
More than once that morning Wallace was tempted to give up the fight and
go away. It was so evident that Vance’s infatuation was a temporary
madness, a wound that would quickly heal. After all, if anything
happened, it was up to the girl. Mrs. Byron, sitting under a sunshade in
the bow of the boat, found the situation amusing, a little leaven to the
unutterable boredom of the sail. Byron slept, face down in the sun, on
the little deck of the fishing boat. The fisherman sat with the tiller
ropes in his hand, and spat over the gunwale.
In the shadow of the sail Vance and Lily talked of immaterial things, or
sat, flushed and star-eyed, not talking at all. As the night before
Vance’s hand lay over hers, and once, when Wallace turned against the
wind to light his cigarette, Mrs. Byron laughed a quickly hushed
outburst. Wallace hated his situation and voiced his disgust.
“I’m not the watchdog,” he said. “If you two young idiots want to kiss
each other, you needn’t wait until I am barking around a corner.”
From the tragedy of the night before, the thing seemed to have descended
to broad farce. Wallace’s æsthetic sense was outraged. If the thing was
to be a summer flirtation, with its accompaniment of kisses stolen
behind the chaperon’s back, it was time he got out. His position was
neither dignified nor necessary.
But with the exuberance of Vance’s morning mood, passed the gaiety of
the excursion. Lily’s eyes were sombre as the boat came about and tacked
along her angular course back toward the pier. Something was said about
Avignon. Lily, it seemed, had the offer of a cottage there for the
summer. Her eyes met Vance’s, steadily.
Mrs. Byron babbled on, under her sunshade.
“Men always look so well in flannels,” she said. “You should always wear
flannels, Mr. Vance. You look like a Greek god in them.”
“Greek gods,” said Vance easily, “were mighty thrifty about flannels, or
any sort of clothes.”
* * * * *
The accident happened on their way back to the hotel. Long afterwards,
Wallace looked back on that morning, and wondered over many things. What
would have happened had the car of the cliff railway not made that
sudden jump? Would Lily and Vance have gone to Avignon? Why did the car
jerk? Was there, after all, a personal God to direct his puppets?
The party had gone soberly enough along the promenade, Lily, Mrs. Byron
and Vance ahead, Wallace and Byron behind, smoking. The terrier formed a
connecting link of palpitating life between the two divisions of the
party. The hot midsummer sun had made them all languid. Vance strode
along, easily conversational, but with eyes only for Lily. The girl
walked by his side, head bent, but every atom of her vibrant under his
gaze.
The little car started without the dog, and Vance volunteered to go back
for him. They had gone a few feet up the cliff face, and he was bent
forward, ready to jump. Then the cable jerked, and he went out on his
head.
The car climbed steadily. There was no way to stop and return. All of
that dreadful time Wallace stood on the platform holding tight to Lily,
who did not move, and staring down at the white bundle that was Vance.
He had been picked up when they got down to him, quite unconscious and
his head lolling back on the arms of his bearers. Wallace took charge
then, and they got him back to the hotel. It was concussion, possibly
fracture. His general condition was fair, under the circumstances.
Lily waited outside the door during the consultation, her face set like
stone. Then she went in and took charge. Wallace had sent for a nurse
and the two women worked together. Vance took a sinking spell in the
night, almost went under. During all that time the girl never whimpered,
but worked steadily, doing what she was told, with set lips and burning
eyes. And somehow, perhaps by the very will of her, he pulled through.
Wallace had notified Edith as soon as he knew definitely. The
responsibility was too great to bear alone. And that next morning,
early, he showed Lily a cablegram.
“Sailing to-day. Arrive Tuesday. Edith.”
She drew a long breath.
“Will you let me stay until then?”
“Do you think it wise?”
“What harm can it do? I am some one you know. I have helped a little.
What of it? I _have_ helped. And I can help more. He knows when I put my
hands on him. He is quieter. There is a sort of sixth sense that we have
when we love, that tells us if the one we love is near.” She shivered.
“I think, if I were dying, and he touched me, I should come back.”
After that, Wallace left things as they were. Vance went into delirium,
and opiates did little for him. But Lily, in her white frock, telling
him over and over about the cottage at Avignon, could quiet him for
hours. And into those whispered words she put all the dream month that
was to have been theirs and now never would be.
“This morning we breakfasted on the terrace,” she would croon in her
lovely voice. “Purple grapes from the hillside and butter from the
whitewashed farmhouse across the valley. And after breakfast we wandered
along the path, hand in hand. When we were weary we came back, and you
read to me. It was warm, and your voice—was very soothing.
I—fell—asleep.” Then, over and over: “I—fell—asleep”—until his wide
eyes closed, and he, too, slept.
And the fifth day he was clearly better. The mental confusion persisted,
but his general condition had improved. And that day he put his hand
over hers, as it lay on the bed. Lily went white and closed her eyes.
The nurse was walking on the terrace, and only Wallace was in the room.
Lily bent over the sick man, until her cheek was close to his.
“Last night,” she whispered, “last night we sat in the moonlight, under
the trees before the cottage. Do you remember? And at last I slid to
your feet, with my head against your knee, my dear, my dear. And I told
you all the things you are never to forget, never, so long as you live.
That I shall always love you, always. That I shall never love any one
else. Whenever you think of me you can know that I am thinking of you.
For I shall always be thinking of you. And I kissed you on your dear
eyes, like this. You will never forget that, either.”
Wallace looked at her and marvelled. She had taken on during the week a
spiritual quality which amazed him. The shadow of death lay in her eyes.
Sometimes he thought that Vance’s death would have been easier for her
than what was coming.
When Vance had dropped asleep, she took up the nurse’s prayer book. She
had fallen into that habit. Wallace remembered the couple who had been
so amazingly popular in Lily’s queer individualistic world, and the
woman who had shot herself on the man’s grave. “It is like that
sometimes,” she had said. Looking across the bed at her, he knew that it
was like that with her.
Edith came the next morning. Wallace met her, clothed in that garment of
old friendship which for so long had covered his heart.
“I got your wire in London,” she said briefly. “It was good news.” And
in the cab she turned to him, a little flushed. “All the way over, I
said to myself that you were with him, and if he could be saved, you
would do it.”
Where Lily had English reserve, Edith had poise. She told Wallace of the
children, had herself well in hand. Wallace, who had had some
fore-knowledge of Edith’s intuitions, had feared her questions. She
asked none.
The Byrons had left that morning. He was grateful for so much. But Lily
was still at the hotel. “I can’t do anything with her,” Mrs. Byron had
said, hysterically. “She says she will go to-night, but she scares me.
Did you ever know any one so strange? If you could know the men who have
been mad about her! And to see her hanging over that poor wreck!”
He had a poor opinion of Lily’s power to dissemble. If she were only not
in sight!
She was not in the room. She had promised that. The nurse was there, in
a state of mental confusion and some dismay. Wallace felt that he could
trust her discretion. Nevertheless he was anxious. But everything went
off well. Vance knew Edith and smiled at her. Edith was singularly
controlled. She told him about the little girls, and he listened with
his eyes on her face. Then she had brought news—a splendid cast for the
new play, the revival under favourable conditions of an early comedy.
Whereas Lily had soothed him with the cottage at Avignon, Edith roused
him with the thought of work.
In the midst of Wallace’s anxieties one of Vance’s own quips came to
him—“Every woman,” he had said, “should have two husbands, one to love
and cherish, the other to honour and obey.” What one woman could ever
satisfy Vance’s dual nature? What one woman ever could take the place of
all other women to him?
Edith dressed for dinner that night. The relief from strain had revived
her colour. Wallace thought she had never been so lovely. Lily had moved
to another table and dined alone. Wallace saw that she was not eating;
her eyes hardly left Edith’s face, a puzzled look, as if she were trying
to fit this wife into Vance’s life, trying to readjust all she knew of
him from this new angle. Wallace was uneasy.
It was when the fish had gone that Edith turned to him.
“The girl in black, to my right, Courtney—is she the woman?”
“What woman?”
Edith did not reply at once. She glanced at Lily, and for a moment their
eyes met.
“I see she is. She is very lovely.”
“Why should you think there is a woman?”
“There is generally a woman. You know that. I knew, of course, when he
changed his plans so suddenly. Am I a shock, or—did she know of me?”
“She knew of you,” said Wallace gravely.
“Just one thing more, Court, I’ll not ask any more questions. It _was_
an accident?”
“Absolutely.”
“He’s emotional, you know. Fearfully intense in each new affair.
I—wondered.”
The mutton had come on, and she sat calmly while they were served.
“I’ve often thought,” she said, “how curious things are. He loves us
all. He wouldn’t break up the family. He likes to feel that, somewhere
behind him, we are there to come back to. He feels that I am solid,
dependable. In a way he could hardly do without me. But—”
There seemed to be nothing to say. Wallace pretended to eat. Lily had
given up the pretence, and sat, her chin cupped in her palm.
“She’s badly hurt, poor thing,” said Edith, after a time. “Life’s an
awful mess, Court. Shall we have coffee on the terrace?”
Wallace had schooled himself so long that he had no longer any fear.
There had been times, earlier, when he had not often dared to see Edith
Vance. Now he had achieved, on a foundation of old friendship, a sort of
superstructure of philosophy. He took what the gods gave, and built
contentment from the fragments. So they sat together on the terrace,
where a week before Lily had poured out her plea to him.
Edith refused coffee.
“To be quite frank,” she said, “I’m giving the—the girl a chance to say
good-bye. She’d manage it somehow, judging by her eyes. So why not be
gracious and give it?”
“You are very wonderful.”
“Not at all. Only rather resigned and very experienced.”
“I suppose there’s nothing to do. If I talk to him—”
“You’d make him unhappy, and give him a grievance. It wouldn’t change
anything. Sometimes I think, if I made him fiercely jealous, it would
help. But it would be too humiliating, under the circumstances. I try to
think that, with him, it’s the desire to be loved. We all have that, I
suppose.”
“You?”
“I daresay. I’m very human, Court.”
Just for a moment the guards were down between them. No flame leaped
into Wallace’s eyes, but the yearning tenderness of a man who has loved
a woman long and hopelessly. She bent forward and touched his arm
lightly.
“It is a great comfort to me, always, to know that you are behind me.”
The flame was there, then, but she did not see it. He bent over and
kissed her hand.
* * * * *
Lily was gone. What her good-bye had been lay between her and Vance and
the bewildered nurse who waited in the passage. One thing was
certain—there was no resignation in her farewell. She went because she
must, creeping like a broken thing out of the room, and along the
corridor. Just inside the door of her bedroom was a small straight
chair. She dropped into it, and sat there, her hands in her lap.
Inconsequential things came into her mind—that she had packed her fresh
gloves and sent them in her box, that the early Victorian furniture of
the room was hideous, that she must remember to write and give up the
cottage at Avignon.
She shivered, and getting up, went to the window. The launch was once
again moving across the bay far below, but it was early twilight and
there was no star in the bow. She felt rather ill. By stepping out onto
the narrow stone balcony, she could see the window of Vance’s room. The
nurse had turned on the light. The wife was there now, probably, and
Vance’s friend, who had hated her and been kind to her. Three of them,
with years of old association to hold them together. And she, alone, on
the balcony in the night.
It was the end. She knew that. Had she had her chance, she might have
held him forever, held him with the thin strong chain of passion. But
they had jockeyed her out of her chance, all of them together. And now
she was going.
Wallace had offered to see her off, but she had refused. So now she went
down the staircase, very white, looking straight ahead, and crossed the
dingy lower corridor. She never even saw the suave lady manager who
bowed her out. The cab was waiting, and by it, in the dusk, Vance’s
wife. She had thrown a wrap about her; her head was uncovered and a
light summer breeze was blowing her fine hair about. She held out her
hand.
“I heard you were going. I—please let me thank you for all you have
done.”
The same amazing frankness that had characterised Lily’s love for Vance
persisted to the end. She ignored Edith’s hand, but there was no
defiance in her voice. It had all the hopelessness and directness of one
who leaves a dying message.
“I nursed him because I loved him,” she said, and got into the cab.
* * * * *
Vance hugged his grief sullenly for two days; refused to talk, drove
Edith frantic by lying for hours with his head pillowed on his arms,
generally sulked. But he was improving steadily, and on the third day
they got him out of bed.
Much to Wallace’s relief, Lily had not wired or written. Evidently she
had played her game hard, and knew herself beaten. It was up to Vance,
of course. He might have been harder hit than they thought, might elect
to follow her. Wallace, watching Edith with eyes that worshipped, knew
that she, too, was thinking of this. She voiced it at last.
“It is worse than I had thought, Court,” she said. “It’s not so much
that he’s in love with her. But he keeps thinking how mad she is about
him. It’s eating him like a fever.”
She was right. Vance’s one thought now was to see Lily again. He argued
to himself that if they were to part, he owed her that much. After all,
she had cared for him in his illness, and there had been nothing in
their relations to be ashamed of. When he found that Edith’s plan was to
go directly to Liverpool, he grew resentful. He would go to London,
anyhow. He could slip away at night and leave word he would join them at
the ship.
He reached his determination the day the nurse had gone. He would pack a
small bag that night and get away early in the morning. And having made
his plan, he was vastly cheerful all day, wrote some business letters,
dressed and went down to dinner, strutted a bit, if the truth be told,
over the interest his return to the life of the place aroused in the
hotel.
They had their coffee, as usual, on the terrace, Vance, beside Edith,
running his fingers caressingly up and down her arm; Wallace, a little
aloof, looking out over the sea.
“I’ll be glad to get back to work and to the kids,” Vance said,
suddenly. “What dreams I had about you all, Edith.”
“The children are quite well. Mademoiselle cabled to-day.”
He looked out at the sea, his cup in his hand.
“Court has a lot of theories about dreams—bally nonsense most of them.
Do you remember the lady you told us of, who dreams about a dog? What
was that, Courtney?”
“I was illustrating a point,” said Wallace, uncomfortably. “I don’t
usually cite cases from my practice.”
“Well, this was interesting. Court drew a moral and adorned a tale with
it. The lady is in trouble and deep in her soul is buried the fact that
she doesn’t love her husband as much as she loves somebody else. Do you
see? But every now and then, when she’s asleep, she dreams that a dog is
attacking her—isn’t that it, Court?—and she calls for the other man.”
“It sounds very thrilling,” said Edith, quietly. “Does your information
include the other man’s name, Court?”
Wallace put down his cup and rose.
“No,” he replied shortly.
Vance’s program was still one of early hours. By ten he was in his
bedroom, and Edith, in one of the soft white silk negligées she
affected, was reading on the couch in her room beyond. So impatient was
Vance to begin his preparations for London that he risked discovery, and
put a few things in his bag. He was exultant, almost triumphant.
To-morrow he would see Lily. Then he would go back to work, and he would
work as never before. Lily! Lily!
At something before midnight he went to the door of Edith’s room and
spoke to her. She was asleep on the couch, the book open on the floor
beside her. Had he not known Edith as a woman who seldom wept, he would
have said that she had been crying.
It was his custom to waken her with a caress. Quite frequently he kissed
her closed eyes until they wakened. But out of the delirium after his
accident rose vividly Lily’s kisses on his eyelids. His good taste
refused this particular caress now. He stood and looked down at her.
And then, quite suddenly, Edith spoke in her sleep, a low tone, quite
distinct, full of terror.
“It’s the dog again. He’s coming toward me! Drive him away. Courtney,
drive him away.”
She stirred, and her set muscles relaxed. Vance stood, staring at her.
Then he went into the next room and sat down. He was still rather weak.
His forehead was covered with cold sweat.
“Courtney!” he said. “So it’s been Courtney all these years. God!”
A madness of jealousy seized him. Weak as he was, he flung up and down
the room. He recalled, year after year, their married life, the
affection that he knew now had not been love, her sweetness, her beauty,
Wallace’s eyes as he looked at her. Deep buried, this love of hers; that
was like her. And Courtney Wallace did not know that he was the man.
What a mess the whole thing was!
From balcony to door and back to balcony he paced. Once he stopped in
front of the mirror and surveyed himself.
“She treated me like a child,” he panted. “She thinks I’m a weakling.
She pets me as she would a dog. She’s kind to me. By God, I’ll show her
I’m a better man than Courtney.”
Quite suddenly he saw his half packed bag on the bed. With an oath he
flung its contents back into the drawers. Then, quieter, but determined,
he went to his wife’s room and stood beside her.
“Edith!” he said. “You’d better waken and go to bed.” He stooped and
kissed her on the eyelids. He had quite forgotten Lily.
VIII
“ÇA NE FAIT RIEN”: The Dough Boy
I
Now the rivalry between Captain Trowbridge, the general’s youngest
aide-de-camp—called Tommy by the general when there were no inspectors
or other nuisances hanging round—and Sergeant Gray began before they
sailed for France. Not that Tommy would have conceded rivalry. The
distance vertically between an aide-de-camp and a sergeant is something
between the aviation record for altitude and the farthest fixed star.
As for significance and insignificance, there were times when Sergeant
Gray felt that he hardly cast a shadow, and numerous instances when
Tommy, though in the same room with him, could not see him at all. This
fading away of Sergeant Gray had begun with his leaving Harvard and
enlisting as a private in the Army, with a sort of Harvard idea of
proving that, in spite of certain indications to the contrary, he was
really no better than any one else. But his almost complete erasure—so
far as Tommy was concerned—had begun with the affair of the general’s
niece and the bran muffin.
By thus enlisting he had, of course, expected merely to demonstrate his
true democracy; and then after a suitable time to take such training as
was deemed necessary and immediately thereafter put on a Sam Browne belt
and a silver bar—perhaps two. Probably two. And have a striker to
polish his boots, and wear spurs and carry a crop and have people look
after him in the street and say: “I’ll bet that fellow’s some scrapper,
what?”
As a matter of honesty, one of the first investments he made after
enlisting was in a Sam Browne belt. He kept it locked up in the brown
tin trunk under his camp bed, of course, along with the signed
photographs of several débutantes and a reserve store of cigarettes and
some hand-knitted socks and three pairs of silk pajamas with his
monogram on the pocket, which he hid with a sense of deadly shame. After
a day or two with the troop he began to have nightmares about somebody
discovering those pajamas.
But as a matter of fact things slipped up badly. First the Government,
unable itself to swank round in anything but sack suits, issued a ban
against the military belt, and made a lot of otherwise well set-up and
slim young officers—and others—look as though they had dressed in a
hurry and forgotten something. Stout generals who had depended for years
on the belt rather than on their rectus and oblique muscles suddenly
extended in the direction in which they were going and had to have a
supplementary hook and eye put on below the lowest button. Thus the Army
at one stroke lost all waistline whatever, and a man was likely to find
his breeches reaching up to his armpits or clinging perilously to his
hip lines, depending on his tailor’s taste in figures.
That was the first blow, and Sergeant Gray took it sulkily. During the
first meeting of the staff after the aforesaid ruling he voiced his
sentiments to the general’s horse, which he was in process of polishing
to that varnished perfection which generals affect.
“Headquarters looks like a blooming maternity ward,” he muttered
bitterly.
On top of that came the second blow. No one could enter an officers’
training school until he was twenty-one. And Sergeant Gray was exactly
twenty years, eight months and three days old.
“Holy mackerel!” he reflected gloomily. “You’d think the Germans were
going to ask for our birth certificates. If I’m strong enough to valet
twenty horses I guess I could bear up under a Sam Browne belt.”
This second blow did something rather terrible for a time to Sergeant
Gray. He still loved his country, but he hated the War Department. It
had reflected on his manhood.
“Oh, very well,” he said to himself. “If I’m too young for
responsibility, I’m too young—that’s all.”
He then proceeded to demonstrate his lack of responsibility for four
lively months.
“What the devil has got into the Headquarters Troop, Tommy?” inquired
the general pettishly.
“Lot of young porch climbers! If they persist in jumping the M. P.’s
somebody’s going to get into trouble. The hospital’s full of ’em now.”
That, however, was before the situation developed between Gray and Tommy
and so Tommy merely said: “Not enough to do, sir, probably. Some of them
might help at the remount station. Lot of wild horses there now, sir.”
“Anybody know anything about horses?”
“I believe Gray does, sir. I understand his people have a ranch in the
West, and he plays polo somewhere on Long Island.”
“Curious thing, this new Army,” observed the general. It was not the
first time he had made the remark. The first time was when he had
happened on his youngest brother-in-law scrubbing the floor at division
headquarters. “But—_c’est la guerre_, Tommy. _C’est la guerre._ Send
him in.”
So Sergeant Gray came in and the general viewed his tall figure with
shrewd and kindly eyes—veiled, however, with the fiercest of eyebrows.
“I understand you know all about horses, sergeant,” he said.
“No, sir.”
“Humph!” said the general. “Know anything about them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, what do you know about the horse?”
Sergeant Gray considered.
“Sorry, sir,” he apologised. “Afraid I’ve forgotten most of it. It’s a
quadruped, of course, sir, belonging to the genus—”
Here the general, who had a cigarette in one hand and a lighted match in
the other, angrily put the match in his pocket and the cigarette on the
floor and got up. He was a very large man in several dimensions.
“Don’t be funny with me,” he snarled. “Don’t be funny with me!”
Sergeant Gray looked plaintively misunderstood.
“If the general will only explain what he means, sir,” he said. Generals
and so on are supposed to be addressed in the third person; see the
Manual for Instruction in Military Courtesy.
The general was eyeing him with the searching glance that comes with the
first star on a man’s shoulder and so increases with their number that
by the time a man has four he can see entirely through the War
Department.
“It was you, wasn’t it,” he inquired, “who sneezed into my horse’s ear
the other day when I was mounting?”
“It came on me suddenly, sir. One minute I was all right, and the
next—I’ve had a touch of coryza, sir. The dust—”
The upshot of it was that Gray went temporarily to the remount station
and in the intervals taught the Headquarters Troop—which is cavalry—to
ride.
He stood, tall and relentless, in the middle of a muddy ring at monkey
drill; and round him circled the terrified rookies on unsaddled horses,
clutching madly first at manes; then, as they slid inevitably back,
gripping with frenzied legs at the hip bones of their mounts; and
finally sliding with the slow relentlessness of fate off the rear,
giving a last despairing clutch at the tail as they fell into the mud.
“That fellow’s got real horsemanship, Tommy,” observed the general one
day. He had ridden up outside the paddock and, unseen by Gray, was
watching the scene. “Good-looking young devil, too. Perfect seat. What’s
he got those horses running for?”
It is unfortunate to have to record that at this moment the general
suddenly left his saddle and flew over the paddock fence. One moment he
was there, a fine soldierly figure on his English saddle with exactly an
eighth of an inch of white collar at the neck of his blouse—and the
next moment he was gone.
“Good Lord!” said Tommy.
On the other side of the paddock fence what appeared to be a largish
heap of mud stirred and then raised itself to a semisitting posture and
attempted to loosen a rope which was inexplicably about its chest. That
failing, it cleared away the mud from one eye and mumbled: “What the
hell happened to me?”
The one eye, rolling wildly, finally focused on a blue-white young face
bent over it.
“I didn’t see you, sir,” explained Sergeant Gray wildly. “I’m sorry. I
can’t tell you—let me at the rope, sir.”
The general was now sitting up and spitting mud. He said nothing. He
moved first one leg and then the other and then stared round him wildly.
Through the slats of the paddock fence he could see Tommy, alighted and
supporting himself by his horse’s neck and torn apparently by emotion.
He was quivering from head to foot.
“Nothing hurt, Tommy,” said the general finally. “If you can find a hoe
or something I should like to open my right eye.”
Tommy, thus adjured, took his handkerchief out of his mouth and gulped
twice.
“Very well, sir,” he said.
The general, still sitting, then turned his gaze on Gray and commenced a
sort of monologue which shall here be indicated as follows:
“!!!!?!?!?!!?——?——?——?”
Sergeant Gray’s colour came back slowly. After all, if the Old Man could
talk like that he wasn’t dead or dying. Nobody facing eternity would so
risk his soul.
“I was roping them, sir,” he said. “I didn’t see you. I used to be able
to throw a rope fairly well and I— You were behind the horses, sir,” he
finished feebly. “I hope you don’t think it was intentional. Why, I—I
might have killed you!”
“You’ve damned half killed me as it is,” said the general, carefully
standing up.
Then suddenly he began to shake. His vast figure quivered, his breath
came in gasps. Sergeant Gray, watching him with dreadful anxiety, heard
a deep stentorian rumble interspersed with breathless wheezes. The
general was laughing!
“I’d give a million dollars to have seen Tommy’s face,” he said, and
shook again.
There was after that a queer sort of understanding between the general
and Sergeant Gray, based as it were on mutual admiration—not unmingled
with apprehension. Sometimes there was a little twinkle in the general’s
eye when Gray’s back was turned, though his severity never relaxed. He
told the story on himself once or twice at dinners, too, and made a
great hit with it though he always told that Tommy had fainted; and as
it was Tommy’s duty to go to dinners with him and see that the general
was on the hostess’ right, with the prettiest débutante in the room next
to him, Tommy got rather fed up with it.
“Never knew what struck me,” the general would say with his deep-chested
rumble. “One minute I was on Sachem and the next I was over the fence
and completely buried. Had to be excavated—like a sewer. And there was
Tommy, crumpled up in a faint, and this young devil of a Gray digging
for me. Only found me by the end of the rope sticking up.”
So Sergeant Gray’s commission remained in the dim future, and round the
barracks he took to humming rather mournfully a song that ran like this:
_On his sleeve he wore a piece of ribbon;_
_He wore it in the summertime and on an August day._
_And when they asked him why in hell he wore it—_
_It stood for his commission, which was far, far away._
_The lieutenant inspected all the rifles;_
_And when he’d done inspecting them he said what he’d to say._
_Then all the lit-tle soldier boys were worried—_
_They knew that their commissions were far, far away._
“Far, far away!” bellowed Sergeant Gray in a plaintive howl like a dog
baying at the moon.
Then the division got ready to move and did move eventually. And owing
to the wager about a bran muffin, Sergeant Gray met the general’s niece
and went straight clean crazy about her. The pink hat she wore covered
the universe. The world was awheel when she was in her little car. And
the depth of his madness about her was exactly the profundity of his
jealousy of Tommy. They were held up for a week at the port of
debarkation after all; and every day for as many hours as possible
Sergeant Gray was mentally on the ground letting her walk on him. And
every evening Captain Tommy Trowbridge took her to the theatre or sat on
the veranda and spoke plaintively about a fellow’s chances over there;
and if he didn’t come back he wanted her to know that she had meant a
lot to him, and that somehow or other he was a changed man the last few
days.
“I’ll be darned glad,” said Peggy’s father—her name was Peggy—“when I
can sit on my own front porch again and not be mentally assassinated by
some young idiot in spurs who wants to rave about never coming back.”
But Peggy’s mother only smiled and sent the butler out with orangeade
and cookies. She knew that they were all little boys really—for all
their trappings. And she knew, too, that some of them would not come
back.
On the night they were finally to go Sergeant Gray very deliberately
went A. W. O. L. for three hours and lurked in the shrubbery round
Peggy’s house. He had already said good-bye to her and if he hadn’t had
a sense of humour he would probably have said a great deal more. But she
had only known him seven days; and all he said to her was that if he
didn’t come back he wanted her to know that she had meant a lot to him,
and that somehow or other he was a changed man the last few days.
So he lurked round the shrubbery—and Tommy was there, of course. But so
was the general and the elderly divisional chaplain, who was an old
family friend; and Gray’s fear of a sentimental parting between Tommy
and the girl died painlessly. Though even hearing her voice set his
heart alternately sinking because of leaving her, and beating one
hundred and twenty to the minute at the thought of coming back in a Sam
Browne belt, and so forth, and laying his one bar—possibly two,
certainly two—at her feet.
Ultimately he wandered back to the camp and was stopped by a sentry.
Sergeant Gray was singing.
“The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,” he warbled, “are as a string
of pearls to me.”
“Aw, stop that racket!” said the sentry coldly. “Where’s your pass?”
“Each hour a pearl, each pearl a tear,” carolled Sergeant Gray. “Why,
look who’s here!”
“Your pass!” repeated the sentry firmly.
“Now look here,” argued Sergeant Gray. “You’re not going to be
persistent, are you? Why, man alive, you are going to stay here, and
I”—he lowered his voice to a wistful key—“I am going, who knows
whither! In an hour, or perhaps two, I shall be gone, probably never to
return.” He became sepulchral. “As for man, his days are as grass—” He
forgot the rest of it.
After a time the harassed sentry let him by and stood staring after him.
“Gee!” he muttered.
Sergeant Gray swung along the dusty road between the line of barracks
and stopped outside headquarters. Late as it was, the building was
brilliantly lighted and through one of the windows the chief of staff
could be seen mixing himself a mild drink. Sergeant Gray stopped and
stared in at him. He admired the chief of staff. After all, why only one
bar—or two? If the war lasted long enough he might get to the very top
and be dined to the limit by people with sons who wanted commissions.
And then—
He gave an unconscious imitation of the stride of the chief of staff as
he went toward the troop headquarters.
The troop was frightfully busy. It was assembling in full kit and was to
march to the lighter carrying saddlebags, blanket roll, rifle, belt,
bayonet and pistol. The saddlebags bulged like pop-overs, since they
contained clothing, toilet articles and cigarettes. Also cigarettes.
Also more cigarettes. And yet again—
Sergeant Gray, still humming, wandered into the barracks, where the
stable sergeant said: “Where the hell’ve you been? Having a last drink
with the general?”
Sergeant Gray surveyed him with a loving eye. He loved the stable
sergeant. He loved the mess sergeant. He loved the whole mangy troop. He
loved the world.
“Let’s make it up, dear,” he said sweetly. “Kiss me, won’t you?” The
stable sergeant eyed him menacingly and then thought better of it. “I’ve
been out under the stars,” cooed Sergeant Gray, “thinking about the
exigencies of war and that you and I may perhaps be separated over
there, never to meet again. I’m all broken up, old man. If it happens,
promise me—”
The stable sergeant retired, muttering.
Gray then made a final inspection of his barracks bag, which contained
cigarettes. Also and incidentally:
(_a_) Extra uniform.
(_b_) Socks.
(_c_) Winter and summer underwear.
(_d_) Extra blanket.
(_e_) Extra shoes.
(_f_) Writing paper.
(_g_) Books, ranging from a Testament to a detective yarn.
(_h_) Pencils.
(_i_) Chocolate.
(_j_) Spurs.
(_k_) Sewing materials.
(_l_) Letters to read on shipboard.
(_m_) Foreign service cap.
Nor was this all. Surreptitiously stowed away was a pair of leggings and
a trench coat of great expense and admirable fulness of tail. These for
that great day when he received his commission. He packed and rolled
carefully, humming meanwhile:
_I want a belt just like the belt_
_That all the shavetails wear._
_It has a strap that goes up the back_
_And makes the ma’m’selles stare._
_It’s made of leather with a hook or two,_
_And you can bet it makes the girls love you._
_I want a belt just like the belt_
_That all the shavetails wear._
At last he was ready. On his head he placed his steel helmet and then
proceeded to hang his accoutrements onto various parts of his person. He
weighed about three hundred pounds by that time and walked rather like a
diver ready to submerge.
“Holy mackerel!” he groaned to the mess sergeant. “How far is it to the
blooming lighter, anyhow?”
“Only six miles,” said the mess sergeant cheerfully.
“I’m about as portable as a steel range.”
Nevertheless, he felt that now for the first time he presented a truly
martial appearance. He wished the girl could see him. He set his mouth
in grim and rather ferocious lines and took a glance at himself in the
broken mirror on the wall. Now bring on the Hun!
However, some of his joy in his appearance was dimmed by the appearance
on the scene at one A. M. of a camp orderly carrying a portable
typewriter. The troop, lined up and totally unable to sit, cast agonised
glances at the case.
“An extra machine for the general,” said the camp orderly in a bored
voice. “The general intrusts it to Sergeant Gray, who will be held
responsible for it.”
“Holy mackerel!” protested Sergeant Gray. “Look here, son! Look me over!
Do you see any place to hang that damned thing? You go back and tell the
general that if he wants me to carry it I’ll have to swallow it.”
However, in the end he had to take it; and something of his fine
military frenzy died in him.
At four that morning the division, as it stumbled in more dead than
alive, had coffee on the pier. Sergeant Gray, by getting into line ever
and anon, managed to land four cups, which he supplemented with some
doughnuts. He felt a trifle low in his mind, however. And for quite two
minutes he stood gazing in the general—and quite erroneous—direction
of the abode of the general’s niece. He then sighed and ate his eighth
doughnut and in due time went aboard ship. It took some four hours to
load five thousand troops; and during all that time Sergeant Gray stood
as lithe and graceful as a steel safe and guarded the general’s
typewriter.
All attempts to get rid of it were abortive. He appealed to the
general’s secretary, a wan and distracted young man, without success.
“Where is he anyhow?” he asked.
“In the bridal suite.”
“Well, you take this thing, won’t you?”
“Me? Don’t you think I’ve got anything to do? The staff’s in bed and the
aides—” Here words failed the secretary. “And keep away from the bridal
suite. The Old Man’s trying to get his wife on the ship’s telephone and
Central’s threatened twice to report him.”
By seven o’clock he got rid of the typewriter by placing it outside the
general’s door, where the division adjutant fell over it five minutes
later. Being a person of quick temper, when he had picked himself up he
kicked it and permanently disabled it. This is, so far as is known, the
only casualty suffered at any time by the division as a whole,
because—but why worry about the armistice now?
By seven o’clock the effect of the doughnuts and coffee was entirely
gone and there was no hint of breakfast.
“When do we eat?” inquired Sergeant Gray of the supply sergeant.
“Paris, probably,” returned the sergeant. “D’you know our heavy
freight’s gone astray? All we’ve got, so far as I can make out, is the
box with the chaplain’s communion service and the Old Man’s air
mattress. Not a saddle. Two hundred of ’em somewhere—probably shipped
to the Belgians.”
“Don’t find ’em,” implored Sergeant Gray. “If they’re found I’ll have to
carry the whole blooming lot. Seem to think I’m a slow freight.”
At ten o’clock Sergeant Gray performed a melancholy duty. This was to
sit at the peril of his life in an open gangway and write post cards
announcing his safe arrival on the other side. “If we ever get over,”
explained the noncom who distributed them, “they’ll cable and the cards
will be mailed. If we don’t—”
Sergeant Gray sent one to his mother first. After that he wrote one for
the girl. After that he sat and thought about Tommy for quite a length
of time. As man and man, he’d have given Tommy the race of his life and
won, he felt. As between Harvard and Yale, too, he’d back old Harvard
every time. But as between officer and noncom! And girls were queer too.
They fell for rank right along. Put an officer’s insignia on any sort of
a stuffed shirt, he considered miserably, and they’d put his photograph
in a silver frame and set fresh flowers in front of it.
“The thing to do,” he reflected, “is to work hard and keep out of
trouble. Then when I get my commission—”
This is the story of how Sergeant Gray kept out of trouble.
Now it should be understood from the start that Sergeant Gray had
nothing on Tommy as to jealousy. And it hurt his aide-de-camp-ly pride
to be jealous of a sergeant. And though he was normally a kindly young
man with good manners who always asked the dowagers to dance while
hoping they wouldn’t, he considered that the best way to hide his
jealousy was to assume an attitude that either ignored Gray altogether
or kept him underfoot.
So he found the general’s typewriter, badly wounded and with the key
with the interrogation mark entirely gone—and any general will know
that this absolutely impaired its usefulness, because generals are
always writing letters to Washington asking why certain things are not
being attended to—and he followed the scent as a dog trails a rabbit.
Which brought him to Gray. Not that this was surprising. It was Tommy
who had sent the typewriter to Gray to carry.
“Gray, did you leave that typewriter outside the general’s door?” he
demanded in his best imitation of the general’s manner when a
recommendation of his had come back from the War Department marked
“Disapproved.”
“I did, sir,” said Gray. The “sir” irked him fearfully just then.
“You didn’t by any chance kick it when you did so?” asked Tommy.
“I didn’t understand that I was to do so, sir,” said Gray.
Tommy gulped. It was he who found his rank a handicap just then.
“Go and get it,” he ordered, “and put it where it belongs. And don’t try
to be funny with me.”
He had got that, too, from the general.
Gray did as he was told, smiling grimly the while. If Tommy felt that
way about things, all right. But just then the honours were his and he
knew it. It was the beginning of the feud between them.
His rage against Tommy was most unjustly increased at finding himself
far below decks in a room with five others—to be exact, with the stable
sergeant, the mess sergeant, the supply sergeant and two duty sergeants.
They were dropping down the river by that time and the stable sergeant,
having selected the best bunk, was lying in it closely covered. Every
now and then he put the blankets over his head. Sergeant Gray eyed him
with some contempt.
“If you’re sick now,” he observed, “you’ll never reach the other side.”
“Sick, hell!” said the sergeant. “D’you see that sign?”
The sign was a melancholy one. It forbade absolutely all smoking below
decks and on the decks above after dark. To defeat which ruling the
stable sergeant was blowing the smoke from his cigarette under the bed
clothing.
“Put a dog under this blanket,” he said complacently, “and he’d come out
deloused all right. Say, I’m going to suggest that to—”
But Sergeant Gray was not listening. He was making an interesting
experiment, which was to see whether or not he could swallow the smoke
from a cigarette. He failed.
By twelve o’clock he felt very empty and extremely forlorn. The city was
not even on the sky line and already illimitable distance seemed to
separate him from Peggy. He stood at the rail and gazed back, but he had
extreme difficulty in imagining what she might be doing at that hour,
their common life having covered something less than twelve hours out of
the past week. But twelve hours was seven hundred and twenty minutes and
life was measured by heartbeats; seven hundred and twenty minutes at,
say, eighty heartbeats a minute—
After the noon mess of boiled cabbage, tripe and tea, orders began to
issue from headquarters.
The general had had a large desk put in the sitting room of the bridal
suite and sat behind it thinking up orders to issue. He did this because
his stomach was none too good and occupation kept him from worrying
about the sea.
“First of all,” said the general, “is the matter of neatness. Take this
order, Lewis.” Lewis was the secretary and was trying to steady the
tripod of the field typewriter between his knees—there was some motion
on—and to conceal a certain indigestion he had felt since the first
roller. “As military neatness is one of the first qualities of the
soldier, special attention is to be paid by the officer personnel to
cleanliness of the decks. It is therefore forbidden to throw burned
matches about.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes. He was feeling a trifle dizzy.
“Tommy!” he called.
The aides were in the next room, playing chuck-a-luck in cautious
silence. They had laid a folded bath towel on the top of the table and
on it the dice fell softly.
“Coming, sir,” said Tommy, and appeared in the doorway, rigidly at
attention, but with the edge of a two-dollar bill protruding from a
pocket of his blouse.
“When my aides-de-camp have finished shooting craps,” observed the
general suavely, “I would be greatly pleased if they will ask the staff
to meet me here at four o’clock.”
“Craps, sir?” said Tommy, greatly hurt.
“And I’d like to know whether you young gentlemen have entirely finished
with the candy my niece sent me.”
“Candy, sir?” Tommy’s tone was indignant.
“Don’t repeat everything I say!” warned the general as the ship gave a
real wallow. “Anchor that damned typewriter to something, Lewis, and
then go and bring me a cup of hot water. I’m heading for a bilious
attack.”
Then he eyed Tommy. He was in that state of mind and body when he
cherished no illusions about his friends, and the possibility of Tommy
as his nephew-in-law was not particularly pleasant. Tommy was just a bit
too military. His neatly shined boots were at too precise an angle.
The general, who had outlived that phase of militarism some twenty years
before and liked to relax now and then, felt sometimes that Tommy was
trying to set him a good example.
“About that candy, sir,” said Tommy, still aggrieved and every angle of
him correct, “I would like to say—”
The ship gave another roll. No, Tommy would not do. He was too damned
persistent.
“If my aides-de-camp have finished shooting craps, as I observed before
when you interrupted me,” said the general most unjustly, “I should be
highly gratified if they will say to the staff that, if they have quite
finished their various poker and bridge games, the commanding general
will see them here at four o’clock.”
Which, of course, was not precisely the message Tommy and the others
delivered. That is what aides-de-camp are for.
Now the real story of the enmity between Tommy and Sergeant Gray dates
from precisely thirty seconds after that speech of the general’s. For
Tommy, going out slightly ruffled, met Sergeant Gray in the passage—or
whatever they call it on a ship—and the sergeant, having just been
thrown against a doorway, had struck his right crazy bone and was
holding himself tight so he would not yell. Tommy, ignorant of the
accident, paused before Gray and said in his most aide-de-camp-ly
manner:
“Sergeant!”
At which the usage of war demands that the sergeant salute and reply,
“Sir.”
But Gray was past even the usages of polite society. He still stood
looking into vacancy and trying not to yell.
“Well?” said Tommy, waiting for the proper thing to happen.
Slowly Sergeant Gray came back to partial consciousness and turned a
pair of eyes filled with fury on Tommy.
“Oh, go away and lemme alone!” he said. Which was neither Harvard nor
regulations, and immediately made him liable to court-martial.
Tommy flushed.
“I’m in no hurry, Gray,” he said urbanely. “I’ll just wait here until
you have a moment to think.”
“I’ve d—I’ve darned near broken my arm.”
“I’m waiting.”
A dogged resolution not to salute Tommy at any price was rapidly forming
in Sergeant Gray’s mind. He dropped his right arm limp at his side and
made an abortive effort to raise it.
“Can’t lift my hand, sir. Awfully sorry.”
“There’s no hurry,” said Tommy. “The voyage will last ten days and I’m
prepared to stand here until you salute me, if—”
“If it takes all summer,” finished Sergeant Gray. “Very well, sir. But I
shall be obliged to report to my captain that I am being subjected to
persecution.”
It had ceased entirely to be a matter of rules and regulations and was
now a matter of a girl. Both of them knew it. The anger between them was
primitive jealousy complicated by a Sam Browne belt and two parallel
bars. Tommy under ordinary circumstances was a nice chap who sent his
mother flowers on her birthday and would pick up pedestrians in his car
and give them a lift quite often, unless he was on his way to play golf.
On those occasions he hadn’t time to stop. And Gray was one of those
fellows, even at Harvard, who liked to chat with motormen on street cars
and always sent the telephone girl a box of candy at Christmas and was
likely to pick up a stray dog ’most anywhere and take it into whatever
place was nearest and order it a square meal. Wrapped in paper of
course.
But a very brief acquaintance with a girl—the same girl—had changed
them both.
So they stood there rigidly and in silence until at two minutes after
four the general put his head out of the door and said:
“Tommy!”
“Yes, sir.”
“What the hell has happened to the staff?”
“Sorry, sir.” Tommy was a bright pink. “Gray has refused to salute me
and—I’ll notify them at once, sir.”
The general stood in the doorway and drew himself to his full and awful
height. He was not, at that, much taller than Gray, but he had a chest
like a hogshead and room enough for a whole constellation of stars on
his shoulders.
“Come in, sergeant,” he said grimly, and stalked into his room grimly
and creaked into his chair grimly.
Of course he would normally have done nothing of the sort. He would—the
matter forcing itself on his attention as it had—have ordered Gray in
irons at once. But there was the Peggy complication. He was very fond of
Peggy.
“Of course,” he said, also grimly, “you know this is a court-martial
offence?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Unless there are extenuating circumstances. In that case—”
He eyed Gray.
“I couldn’t move my arm, sir. I’d knocked my crazy bone.”
“Can you lift it now?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Very well,” said the general. “You will salute Captain Trowbridge fifty
times. In the passage when he returns.”
There was, for just the fraction of a second, the exchange of a glance
of understanding between the general and Sergeant Gray. It was, on the
general’s part, by way of being a twinkle; and on Sergeant Gray’s, of
triumph.
“May I ask a question, sir?”
“Well?”
“Is Captain Trowbridge to return the salutes?”
“According to regulations, he will.”
And again, for the fraction of a second, they exchanged glances. The
general liked Tommy, and in a sort of watchful and reminiscent
way—remembering West Point probably—he liked Gray. But whom a general
loves he chastens.
It was a very sulky Tommy who returned to the chuck-a-luck games some
time later, while the staff smoked cigarettes in the general’s room and
discussed such matters as physical exercise for the troops; and mumps
and submarines and the rotten food the Navy gave the Army; and what the
deuce had happened to the heavy freight; and seasickness; and the
fundamental motives of Pershing’s strategy. A certain number of them
began several times to say: “When I was in the Philippines—” and were
cut short hastily.
It was when they had all gone that the general sent for Gray and made
him his sergeant-orderly. He made it very clear that Gray was still
under the ban of his displeasure and that the real reason he was taking
him in at all was to clean up after the staff. For the floor of
headquarters looked rather like the floor of a pool room, being covered
with burned matches and cigarette ashes and torn-up bits of paper on
which various members of the staff had noted suggestions to be made to
the general—and then thought better of it.
“I have come to the conclusion, Gray,” finished the general, “that the
only way to keep you out of trouble is to keep you in it. You’ll have
plenty of it right here.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray with a sort of sinking conviction that he
would now have to polish the general’s boots, until he remembered that
the general had a valet along. What the deuce did a sergeant-orderly do,
anyhow?
“You will stay within call,” said the general, “and make yourself
generally useful. Better clean up this floor now. And hereafter,
sergeant, you will make note of the name of any officer throwing matches
or ashes on my floor. Keep a pad and pencil in your pocket.”
Then he went to have tea with the captain on the bridge, accompanied by
the chief of staff carrying his tea ball. The general drank only his own
tea.
This is really the story of a feud and its culmination. Feuds are of two
sorts: The sort that spring up spontaneously out of an initial injury,
and the ones that grow slowly from small things to greater ones. This
was both.
Some time later Tommy sauntered into the general’s room for one of the
general’s cigarettes. His own tobacco tasted queer to him—not that he
was seasick of course. And seeing Gray there he did not see him—which
happens in the Army now and then—and lighted a cigarette and threw the
match on the floor. Whereupon Sergeant Gray got a pad out of his pocket
and wrote something on it.
Tommy was vaguely uneasy. He went into the aides’ room next door and
pondered. And when he had lost three dollars and twenty cents more he
went back for another cigarette and lighted it and waited developments.
They came. Gray got out the pad again and wrote on it.
This time Tommy told the aides and they put their heads together, but it
was no use. It wasn’t the taking of the cigarettes. The general expected
that, for—having almost as much privacy as a canary bird—he had never
found a place where they were sufficiently concealed. Though he had done
fairly well for a few days once with a box marked: “Memoranda for book
on the new warfare.”
During the time the general was having tea Sergeant Gray’s list grew. He
got—to be exact:
The divisional judge advocate.
The divisional adjutant.
The chaplain.
The master-at-arms.
The ship’s executive officer.
A seasick brigadier general—who threw his whole cigar on the
floor and groaned. Gray had hardly the heart to put him down.
A lieutenant colonel. This latter waited some time and threw
three matches and two butts on the floor. But this was because
he was impatient. He had been notified that he was promoted to a
full colonel, but his papers had not come before sailing and he
wanted permission to put on his eagles for dinner.
Some time later the general returned. He was quite cheery, having done
all the talking and made an excellent case for the Army versus the Navy,
and he smiled grimly over Sergeant Gray’s list.
“Tommy!” he called. And when Tommy came, neater than wax and slightly
dignified owing to the matter of returning fifty salutes, the general
very pleasantly read:
“Captain Trowbridge, two matches.
“I am determined,” said the general rather oratorically, “to enforce
military neatness about me. Pick ’em up, Tommy.”
Which Tommy did, grinning sourly and avoiding Sergeant Gray’s eye.
“And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
The first thing that was noticeable was the Gallicisation of the ship.
The doughboys had French phrase books and pored over them diligently.
There was a sprinkling of British added to the conversation also, owing
to the magnificent presence of an English sergeant major on board.
“Attention for the sergeant majah!” or “Gangway for the sergeant majah!”
they would call when he appeared. “Cheer-o” and “Feeling rather ducky
this morning, aren’t you?” vied with such French phrases as “_Très
bon_,” pronounced tray bone, and “_Combien_,” pronounced according to
taste and directed at the boy behind the grating who sold tobacco and
candy. The routine of the ship went on, varied by reveille and mess
calls, by shooting craps and by physical exercise which consisted
mostly—owing to lack of space—of putting the men on their backs and
having them raise their legs in the air, on the count dropping them with
tremendous thuds to the deck.
“Not dignified,” reflected the general, watching them, “but better than
nothing. It might be good for the waistline.”
He took to doing it himself in his stateroom and one morning Sergeant
Gray, drowsily keeping watch on the deck outside the window of the
general’s cabin, was electrified to see a pair of strong and muscular
bare legs, topped by feet, rise into view and disappear some six times.
This keeping watch had been Gray’s idea. It had come as a result of the
united efforts of William, the general’s colored valet, and Lewis and
Sergeant Gray to get the general each morning into his rubber
life-saving suit for practice in case of necessity; and into his life
belt in time for fire drill. The general always blamed the suit for his
troubles—or his valet.
“What the hell’s the matter with you this morning?” he would roar. “Arms
paralyzed?”
And when it was all over and the general was near his boat and the
troops were rushing up the companionways like battering rams, each man
holding to the breeches belt of the man ahead, with the little fellows
who lost their footing swinging like the cracker on the end of a whip,
while the staff stood at different stations timing the drill with stop
watches, Lewis and Gray and William would sink into chairs and perspire.
“Eleven minutes!” Lewis would groan. “If we’re struck he’ll go down like
a stone. He’s too big to move fast.”
“Dollars to doughnuts he’d refuse to leave without full equipment,” said
Gray rather bitterly. “There’s only one thing to do, Lewis. He oughtn’t
to be alone at night.”
“He’s got a bunch of aides.”
“He has,” assented Gray grimly. “I call ’em, don’t I? D’you ever know
’em to waken until I’ve banged at their doors for ten minutes? Eleven
o’clock this morning before one of them showed up! No, this is up to you
and me, Lewis.”
“All right,” said Lewis without enthusiasm. He loved the general as a
mother loves a child, but he generally felt that he was running the
entire division. In speaking of the general to his intimates he always
said “we.”
“We issued an order about throwing cigarettes overboard this A. M.,” he
would say, for instance. “If a sub should pick up two in a line she
could get our course.”
Or: “Sorry, old-timer. No cards for me. We’re seeing the staff at
ten-thirty.”
So: “All right,” he said. “Well?”
“He’s all right in daylight,” said Gray. “Or he will be as soon as he
gives up that rubber-suit business and sticks to a life belt. It’s night
I’m thinking about.”
All of which leads merely to the next step in the feud. For Lewis and
Gray and William—at his own request—divided the night into three
watches and hovered like ministering angels on the deck outside the
bridal suite. But things were uneventful enough, except that William,
his first watch on, hearing strange and stertorous sounds from beyond
the porthole, roused Gray with a shuddering fear that the general had
had an attack of apoplexy. And except that the general, finding Gray
yawning all over the place one morning, observed tartly that he’d better
stop shooting craps all night.
“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray.
It is unfortunate perhaps that the night Tommy could not sleep for
thinking of the girl and the night Sergeant Gray saw the submarine
should have coincided. It was not really a submarine, so there is no
need for excitement.
Gray saw the periscope quite plainly. It may have been merely a
nocturnal whale dreaming, like Tommy and Gray, of a lost love, it must
be so frightfully easy for a whale to lose track of his love in the
Atlantic—or it may have been the leg of a table or an empty crate.
Considerable excitement was wasted on empty crates in the Atlantic
during the late unpleasantness. Whatever it was, Gray was not in much
doubt. But he waited to be quite sure, because a fellow hates to get
five thousand men up on deck in the middle of the night for what may
turn out to be the carcass of a horse.
So he stood bent over the rail. And at that moment a figure came along
the empty deck, walking as men walk at night when they dream of a house
in the country with a lot of vines and things and a girl waiting in a
runabout for the five-twenty from town—and the figure held between
wistful lips a lighted cigarette.
It took just one and a half seconds for Gray to knock the cigarette out
of the aforesaid wistful mouth—and then he did it by jarring rather
than direct action. For he miscalculated his distance and hit Captain
Trowbridge, Yale, ’16, aide-de-camp and captain of artillery, a mighty
slam on the ear.
Some moments later the general opened his porthole and put out his head.
On the deck just outside was a darkish mass which seemed to be still and
yet in violent movement.
“Stop that!” roared the general. “Get up out of that and get below
decks. What the—” There has been considerable military language so far.
We’ll call it mischief. “What the mischief d’you fellows mean, anyhow?”
The mass slowly became two masses and took on vertical instead of
horizontal dimensions. But neither mass spoke. By common consent they
separated, looking—as Elizabeth Browning says—two ways, and moving in
the direction they were looking.
It was the chaplain who first noticed next morning the coincidence that
one of the general’s aides-de-camp had a swollen left ear and that the
sergeant-orderly had a cut lip.
The chaplain sauntered into the bridal suite and—having been most
military for two seconds—took one of the general’s cigarettes, surveyed
himself in the general’s mirror and observed: “Been having a family row,
I see.”
“Pick up that match, chaplain,” said the general testily. “What sort of
a row?”
“Been some sort of a mix-up between Tommy and Gray. Wish I’d seen it.
Must have been considerable of a scrap.”
“Nonsense,” snapped the general. “What’d they fight about?”
“Search me!”
“Besides, an officer and a noncom—”
The chaplain, who was fond of boxing, had doubled up his fists and was
making tentative passes at the general’s trench coat, which was swinging
on a hook.
“They haven’t liked each other much for some days,” he said, and got in
a beautiful hook on the general’s collar. “’F you ask me, it’s mutual
jealousy.”
“I see,” said the general in a thoughtful tone. He greatly admired the
chaplain, though he complained of him bitterly. “Can’t teach him
discipline,” he would say at dinner parties. “Goes A. W. O. L. whenever
he wants to and turns up blithely with some excuse or other and a box of
cigars for me. I don’t know what to do with the fellow.”
“How dreadful!” the débutante on his right would breathe.
“Horrible,” the general would agree. “But I can’t put him in the
guardhouse, though I’ve threatened it. The men love him. They call him
the Bird of Paradise. Fact. I’m the Old Bird and he’s the Bird of
Paradise.”
Upon which his great shoulders would heave and the débutante would try
to think of the proper thing to say.
So the general saw how the chaplain’s mind was working.
“There wasn’t much time,” he observed.
“It wouldn’t take much time. Not with the young lady I have in mind. If
I were not a married man—”
But the chief of staff came in just then, very military and precise, and
the chaplain became just as military and precise and went out.
During the day the general issued more orders, to keep him from thinking
about his stomach, and went on deck to read for a while, taking a book
on military tactics and a detective story with him. So long as Tommy was
near him he read tactics. But for quite a long time he sat and looked at
the sea and thought about his niece back home, who was all the daughter
he had, and these two young rascals pommelling each other under his
window the night before. It took him back quite a number of years.
“The young fools,” he said reminiscently.
Well, there was no use worrying about it. They were going to war and no
one could tell who would come back. He looked aft along the deck to
where those fine boys of his were clustered against the rail, and he
wondered.