One morning some three weeks later Stacey received a night letter from
Omaha. It was addressed “Honorable Stacey Carroll” and read:
“_My husband Jim is awfully sick with flu and I am afraid he is going to
die. He keeps asking for you though he is out of his head and does not
know what he says. Please, Captain Carroll, come if you can because then
he might get well. Gertrude Burnham._”
Stacey wasted no time. He sent a telegram to say that he was starting
immediately, telephoned for a lower berth on the evening train, and
pulled a suitcase from a closet. But in the midst of his neat methodical
packing he suddenly paused and gazed abstractedly away. It had occurred
to him that perhaps if Burnham could see him as he had been in France
the sick man might be more likely to recognize him and might even—who
could tell?—draw a little strength from the old revived relationship of
command and protectiveness. Stacey took out the things he had already
packed, chose a larger bag, and put in his uniform at the bottom.
He arrived in Omaha early the next morning, drove to a hotel, unpacked
his bag, put on his uniform, and took a taxi to Burnham’s address.
The taxi stopped in front of a small dilapidated wooden house in a
shabby quarter surprisingly near the centre of town. Stacey descended
and paid the chauffeur.
But before he had time to reach the door of the house it opened and a
woman hurried out to meet him. She was thin, haggard, dishevelled,
though not slovenly, with a worn face and worn eyes about which strayed
limp locks of black hair, but there were faded traces of fineness in
her. Stacey remembered that Burnham had always spoken of his wife with
pride. She had, he often said, had a high-school education.
“Oh, Captain Carroll,” she cried, “it’s awful good of you to come, sir!
I knew I oughtn’t to’ve asked you, but I didn’t know _what_ to do!”
“Of course you ought,” Stacey returned briefly, shaking her hand.
“And you wore your uniform, too,” she added, with a pale half-smile.
“That was just right. I wouldn’t have thought you’d have thought of
that.”
They entered the house, in which the Burnhams occupied one-half of the
second floor. Three small children, shabby and not very clean, with
frightened faces, were waiting for them just inside, and stared at
Stacey.
“I keep them looking better than this, Captain Carroll, when
everything’s all right,” Mrs. Burnham explained apologetically, and they
all climbed the stairs in silence.
As they went, Stacey reflected swiftly on a number of things,—that what
life did to Burnham was very like what it did to Phil, and that a lot of
criminal rubbish was being talked about the prosperous workingman. Why,
thought Stacey, even his father, who was a kindly man, declared bitterly
that workmen were buying silk shirts to-day and denounced them as
profiteers! Well, suppose a man did earn six dollars a day for manual
labor, suppose he even earned it regularly for six days in every week
(which he didn’t), how much was that a year? Let’s see. Eighteen hundred
and some dollars, on which, with the price of everything gone wild, he
was supposed to raise a family and live in luxury. What rot! Stacey
himself, who lived at home, had a car that his father had given him, and
cared little for luxuries, felt pinched with two hundred dollars a
month. Oh, damn money!
They reached the top of the stairs and paused before a door through
which came a strange murmuring voice.
“Jim won’t know you, sir,—not now,” said Mrs. Burnham, “but if you’d be
willing just to sit there a while, maybe—”
“Of course,” said Stacey. “You have a good doctor?”
“Yes, sir. At least, I guess he’s good. They don’t any of them seem much
help. He’ll be here at ten o’clock.”
They went in, Stacey and Mrs. Burnham; the children were left outside
the door. Burnham, flushed with fever, lay tossing and muttering on a
narrow bed. Stacey looked down at him and lifted his hot hand, but there
was no recognition in the man’s eyes.
“I’ll sit here,” said Stacey after a moment, drawing up a chair beside
the bed.
The woman silently took another chair, and they remained so for an hour
and a half, neither of them speaking, she rising at regular intervals to
press a spoonful of medicine between her husband’s teeth, until the
doctor arrived.
He was brusque, had keen eyes, and appeared competent. Stacey drew him
aside at the conclusion of the visit.
“Any chance?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “fifty-fifty. He’s as likely to recover as not.
Splendid physique! There’s nothing much I can do except to give
stimulants in case of sudden collapse. We don’t know anything about flu
really, you know, and this pneumonia that follows on flu. I’ve seen
hundreds die of it—I was in France, too,—and hundreds get well,—both
without any reason. Served under you?”
“My first sergeant. Good man,—no better! Do your best for him.”
“It’s a strong bond, isn’t it?”
Stacey nodded. “Oughtn’t he to have a nurse?”
“It would be a great deal better. He’d have more of a chance.”
“Then send one around, will you please? At my expense, of course.”
“All right,” said the doctor, shook hands with Stacey, and departed.
The conversation had taken place in the hallway outside the door. When
Stacey reëntered the sick room Mrs. Burnham gazed at him wistfully.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Jim’s got a good chance. The doctor’s going
to send a nurse.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she opened her mouth as though to speak,
but closed it again, with only a strangled: “Thanks,” and turned her
head away. After a time she got up.
“I’ll go down and cook some dinner,” she said. “You’ll excuse me, sir,
if it isn’t much, won’t you? I haven’t had time to—”
“No,” he broke in, “you’re too tired to cook. Please go out and get some
lunch for yourself and the children if you know of some delicatessen
place,—and for me, too.” And he drew out his purse.
But at this her face colored. “No sir,” she said, with just a hint of
resentment, “I couldn’t.”
He thrust a five-dollar bill upon her. “Do as I tell you,” he said
imperiously. “This is no time for silly pride. Go on, and mind you get
good things and plenty of them.”
She cowered beneath his sternness and went meekly. And Stacey reflected
grimly that pride was a decorative handsome emotion that flourished
ornamentally, a highly esteemed orchid, in luxury. It couldn’t grow well
in poverty, came up sickly and scrawny,—the soil was too weak.
Half an hour later he heard her climb the stairs again and move quietly
about the next room. Presently she returned to the bedroom.
“Will you go in there now, sir?” she said. “Everything’s ready for you.
Here’s your change—two dollars and sixty-four cents.”
“No, no, please!” he replied. “Keep it for to-morrow.”
He wanted to insist on her eating first, but thought best not to try, so
he went, without comment, through the door she indicated into another
bedroom—the only other, he supposed,—that obviously also served as
dining-room and parlor. Dishes were disposed neatly on a table, with
sandwiches, Bologna sausage, eggs, coffee, and doughnuts.
He sat down, then looked up, listening, with a smile, and suddenly rose,
crossed the room, and flung open another door. The kitchenette. And
there, as he had thought, were the three children, sitting, very
terrified at his discovery of them, close together on a small bench.
“Hello,” he said, “you’re out here, are you? Well, come on! Let’s eat
together. Only I think we’d better do it in this room or your mother
will hear us.”
“She said we was to wait and not make a noise,” observed the oldest girl
in a small voice.
“Well, we won’t wait,” Stacey remarked. “There are doughnuts, you know.
You come on in with me,” he said to the girl who had spoken, “on your
tip-toes, and help fix the plates.”
She obeyed timidly.
“First we’ll fix one for your mother,” he whispered, and she nodded, her
lips pressed together.
He and the three children ate gravely in the kitchenette. Then Stacey
rose. “I’ll go back to your father now,” he said, “and send your mother
out.”
“Your plate is ready for you, Mrs. Burnham. And the children have
eaten,” he announced in a triumphant whisper.
She gasped, then suddenly her mouth curved prettily into a smile—the
first he had seen her give. Stacey sat down again by the bedside.
Burnham seemed a little calmer now, and his incoherent muttering had
ceased, but he looked very exhausted, and Stacey was relieved when about
one o’clock the nurse arrived.
The three of them sat there silently all the hot afternoon, with only
short intervals of release when Stacey stretched his legs in the hall or
Mrs. Burnham went out to keep an eye on the children. There was no
change in the sick man. The nurse said that the crisis would probably be
reached next day.
At six o’clock Stacey left the house, asking the nurse to telephone him
in case of a serious change. He walked back to his hotel.
He was abstracted, an isolated personality, growing more isolated with
every month that passed in his life; so that now he saw little of his
surroundings and glanced but carelessly both at the depressing quarter
from which he had set out and at the prosperous business section he
presently entered. He merely thought, idly, that the city seemed a
characterless place, like all other middle-western cities. And the
imposing court-house, of white marble, that he passed shortly before
reaching his hotel, did not impress him. It did, indeed, occur to him
once that there was a certain tensity in the air, like that which
characterizes a city in boom times, but the observation, purely
involuntary, did not particularly interest him. It interested him not at
all when later, glancing through the front page of a local paper, he
learned the cause of the tensity—trouble with the negroes, “Another
Dastardly Assault!”
Early the next morning he was back at Burnham’s house. The man seemed
worse, Stacey thought with a touch of real sadness,—more feverish, more
restless. There was no capacity for smiling, even faintly, left in Mrs.
Burnham. The nurse, cool, professional, would express no opinion; and
the doctor, too, when he came, was noncommittal.
“Before to-night there ought to be a decision one way or the other,” he
said to Stacey. “I’ll come again at four. Call me up earlier if
necessary.”
There was nothing to do but wait, and Stacey again settled himself in a
chair near the foot of the bed.
The crisis came early in the afternoon. Burnham tossed and kicked
furiously, and his incoherent muttering grew louder. Suddenly he raised
himself on the palms of his hands into a half-sitting posture and stared
directly at Stacey—or not really at him, through him.
“By God, Captain!” he cried wildly, in a high unnatural voice, “you’ve
got nerve! Might’ve been shot . . . shot . . . shot! What hell you care?
You wouldn’t do it!” He panted. “Not you, Captain! Said I’d follow you
to hell. Nerve . . . nerve . . . nerve. . . .” His voice trailed away to
silence, while the nurse leaned over him, pressing his shoulders down
firmly.
Stacey had started at the words. They were spoken, he knew, in delirium,
not to him but to a shadow vanished eleven months since, but Stacey
understood them. Burnham knew, then, did he, about that Argonne attack?
Good! Probably no other kind of approbation from any source would have
touched Stacey, even faintly. This, for an instant, made him thrill with
a fierce proud happiness. The next moment there was nothing left in his
consciousness but concern for his friend.
But Burnham lay quiet now, his color less vivid, his breath coming and
going easily, and the nurse looked at Stacey and Mrs. Burnham with a
smile.
“I think he’ll get along all right now,” she said pleasantly.
Stacey wiped his forehead, and Mrs. Burnham, collapsing into a chair,
laid her head on a table and wept softly.
“Fine!” said the doctor, when he came. “He’ll get well now. Just a
question of time.”
The next morning, when Mrs. Burnham opened the door to Stacey, he
observed that she was wearing a clean dress and had done her hair quite
prettily.
“Then Jim’s a lot better, isn’t he?” he asked, with a smile.
She flushed. “Yes,” she said. “He slept right through the night. Only
woke up once for just a minute, then went back to sleep again. Oh, I’m
so glad, Captain Carroll!” Her eyes filled. “And so grateful to you,
sir!”
“Oh, please!” said Stacey, embarrassed.
Late in the morning Burnham opened his eyes slowly and let them wander
curiously about the room. They rested on Stacey, and a puzzled
expression came into them, then, after a moment, recognition, and the
man tried to raise his hand in salute.
“Where’s the devil, sir?” he asked, in a thin voice. Then he smiled.
“Funny!” he said. “I thought I was in hell.” And he began to laugh
weakly.
“Shut up, Burnham!” Stacey commanded sternly, “and lie still!”
“Oh, all right, Captain, all right!” Burnham returned, still laughing,
and went to sleep again at once.
Stacey was rather tired in the evenings now from sitting so monotonously
still all day. He resented the excitement that he felt throbbing in the
streets and the nervous buzz of the groups through which he had to elbow
his way in the hotel lobby. His one recreation consisted in changing to
civilian clothes for dinner; for he always wore his uniform when he went
to the Burnhams’. It happened that the regiment in which he had
commanded a battalion had been recruited from this part of the country,
so that there were perhaps twenty-five of his men living right here in
Omaha, among them a first lieutenant whom he had sincerely liked. And,
ignorant though he was and knew himself to be of these men’s real
personalities, he was bound to each of them—worst as well as best—by a
closer bond than that which held him to Philip Blair or to Marian or to
Mrs. Latimer. He would have given lavishly of his money or his
time—nonsense! of something real! his freedom or his strength!—to any
of these men who needed it; and not in the least from a sense of
duty,—inevitably, as a matter of course. Yet he had no companionable
desire to see them. He made no attempt to look them up. He spent his
evenings in bed, reading “War and Peace,” which in former days he had
not cared for but now found singularly satisfying—more satisfying than
any book by his old idol, Dostoieffsky.
Burnham’s recovery was extraordinary. On the third day after the crisis
the doctor refused jovially to waste more time in visiting him—the
nurse had been dismissed the day before—and told him to eat, talk and
do as he pleased, short of getting up.
“I think,” observed Stacey that afternoon, “that I’ll pull out to-night
on the midnight. You’re as fit as ever, Burnham.”
He was, indeed, restless and anxious to go. Here, sitting near Burnham,
chatting casually of trivial things, he was strangely at peace; but an
increasing turmoil that he felt in the city each evening exasperated
him.
The man looked at him wistfully, then across at his wife. “Gerty,” he
said, “you go out with the kids for a little while, will you? I got to
talk to the Captain.”
She obeyed, but her face had flushed and her eyes were resentful.
“Now you’ve done it!” said Stacey cheerfully. “Fat lot of popularity
I’ll have with Gertrude from now on!”
Burnham laughed. “Funny thing, ain’t it, Captain?” he observed. “They
can’t seem to get onto it at all, women can’t. They go and get jealous,
like Gerty now.”
“Can’t get onto what?”
“Why, this—this here what-do-you-call-it.”
“Relationship?”
“Uh-huh, I guess that’s the word. It ain’t got a thing to do with them.”
He paused. “Maybe that’s why they don’t like it,” he concluded.
“Philosopher!” said Stacey. “Analyzing the female heart. You’ll be
writing for the magazines next.”
“Sure!” Burnham grinned, then frowned. “All the same, I don’t get onto
it very well myself,” he continued. “Now you’d think that I ought to be
feeling all upset with gratitude to you, the way Gerty is, and worried
about you wasting so much of your time and money. Well, I don’t feel
that way at all. Damned if I do! I just feel friendly and pleasant
and—natural-like. And of course some day I’m going to pay you back the
money you spent on the nurse ’n’ doctor, but it don’t seem important,
somehow, like it does to Gerty. If it was something you cared about,
Captain, I’d get up now, the way I am, and work all day to get it for
you, but Christ! you don’t care a damn for money!”
“Oh, shut up, Burnham!” said Stacey, laughing. “How you do run on!”
Nevertheless, the man’s words were pleasant to him, and reënforced his
own strangely peaceful mood.
“Seems sort of noisy out-doors to-day,” Burnham remarked suddenly.
“What’s the row, I wonder?”
And, indeed, through the window a dull and sullen murmur, that was like
a deep note held steadily in an organ, did enter and penetrate the room.
“Oh,” replied Stacey quickly, “I don’t know! It’s a noisy city.”
Burnham lay silent for a long time. Then he turned his eyes slowly to
Stacey. And in them and in his voice when he spoke again was apparent a
timidity which his huge bulk and rough unshaven face made somehow
touching.
“Captain,” he said hesitantly, “there was something I wanted to say to
you, only I don’t know if I’ve got the nerve. We boys was always kind of
scared of you, you know,—oh, not because you was a captain!—fat lot of
respect we had for captains _as_ captains!—but just because—oh, I
dunno! And it’s kind of hard to say anything to you that’s kind of
personal, as you might say. All the same, I’ll take a chance.” He rushed
on with his words to get it over. “What I want to say is that some of us
know all about that attack that—didn’t come off.” He paused
apprehensively, but with a sigh of relief.
However, Stacey was as friendly as before. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I
know you do. You let that out Wednesday in a lot of wild talk you were
spouting.”
“Well, what do you know about that?” Burnham exclaimed. “And me who
wouldn’t have told even Gerty! Did any one—”
“No, no, it’s all right! No one else understood. And I’m glad you know.”
“’N’ that’s why I said what I did about going with you to hell or
anywhere else. I ain’t the only one, Captain. There’s Morgan and Jones
and Petitvalle and Isaacs and all the rest of C Company that knows,
who’d fight to go along, too. Oh, it would be a nice little family
party!” And Burnham laughed gaily.
Well, Stacey had said to Phil months ago that this was the one exploit
of which he was proud, but he had said so haughtily, with his heart full
of bitterness. Just now his heart was calm, as though cleansed. He was
almost happy. Yet he could hardly have accounted for his state of mind,
even had he cared to try. It was not, certainly, that his vanity was
flattered. Perhaps it was, in part, that when Stacey had related the
episode to Philip Blair his defiance of the machine was first in his
thoughts, while now the stress was on the human results of that
defiance. Perhaps Burnham’s simple assertion of loyalty released Stacey
from his obsessing perception of greed, greed everywhere.
But the noise outside had increased. Rolling waves of sound entered.
“What in hell is going on?” Burnham exclaimed. “Tell me, Captain! You
know all right.”
“Well,” said Stacey doubtfully, but thinking it on the whole better not
to have the invalid aggravated by unsatisfied curiosity, “there’s been a
lot of race trouble here lately. Just now it seems to be mostly about
some negro—name of Brown—said to have assaulted a woman. He’s shut up
in the court-house jail, I believe. Sounds as though some sort of
demonstration—”
But at this moment a scattered crackling sound broke out in the
distance. Burnham sat up quickly, and Stacey crossed to the window and
looked out.
“Some sort of demonstration?” said Burnham. “Some sort of riot! That’s
shooting.”
Stacey nodded, pulled down the window sash, and came back to his chair.
Mrs. Burnham entered the room hurriedly, but, though frightened, she had
not forgotten her grievance. “I suppose I can come in now,” she said,
“since there’s a war or something going on.”
“Sure!” returned her husband, laughing. “It’s nothing, Gerty.”
Darkness fell while they sat there together, Mrs. Burnham soon ashamed
of her pettishness and trying to think up little things she could do for
Stacey, Burnham stretching his arms and legs to feel their returning
strength, all three chatting about the most casual matters. A lamp
sputtered alight in the street and shone in upon them.
Oddly, Stacey thought of that afternoon with Phil and Catherine in New
York five years ago. He had the same sense of calm now as then.
But this sea of sound that roared dully in the distance, at times
swelling for a moment so that Mrs. Burnham turned her eyes
apprehensively to Stacey,—it had been absent then. Had it, though? What
else was the war? Stacey thought fancifully.
“Well, I’ve really got to go now,” he remarked, and rose.
Mrs. Burnham tried stammeringly to express her gratitude, but Burnham
only gripped Stacey’s hand and smiled.
“May I say good-bye to the children?” asked Stacey, and Mrs. Burnham,
too, smiled at this and went in search of them.
“Now look here, Captain!” said her husband anxiously in a low voice as
soon as she had left the room, “you won’t get mixed up in that mess in
the streets, will you?”
Stacey shook his head. “No, no, I’ll be all right,” he replied
reassuringly.
The noise outside continued.