Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that
had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use
his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land
but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried
feebly to move his right arm.
But it was gone.
At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there
beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But
when he looked it was not there.
There was not one shock of discovery, but many. For each time he
roused from sleep he had forgotten, and must learn the thing again.
The elderly German woman stayed close. She was wise, and war had
taught her many things. So when he opened his eyes she was always
there. She talked to him very often of his mother, and he listened
with his eyes on her face--eyes like those of a sick child.
In that manner they got by the first few days.
"It won't make any difference to her," he said once. "She'd take me
back if I was only a fragment." Then bitterly: "That's all I am--a
fragment! A part of a man!"
After a time she knew that there was a some one else, some one he
was definitely relinquishing. She dared not speak to him about it.
His young dignity was militant. But one night, as she dozed beside
him in the chair, he reached the limit of his repression and told
her.
"An actress!" she cried, sitting bolt upright. "_Du lieber_--an
actress!"
"Not an actress," he corrected her gravely. "A--a dancer. But good.
She's a very good girl. Even when I was--was whole"--raging
bitterness there--"I was not good enough for her."
"No actress is good. And dancers!"
"You don't know what you are talking about," he said roughly, and
turned his back to her. It was almost insulting to have her assist
him to his attitude of contempt, and to prop him in it with pillows
behind his back. Lying there he tried hard to remember that this
woman belonged to his hereditary foes. He was succeeding in hating
her when he felt her heavy hand on his head.
"Poor boy! Poor little one!" she said. And her voice was husky.
When at last he was moved from the hospital to the prison camp she
pinned the sleeve of his ragged uniform across his chest and kissed
him, to his great discomfiture. Then she went to the curtained
corner that was her quarters and wept long and silently.
The prison camp was overcrowded. Early morning and late evening
prisoners were lined up to be counted. There was a medley of
languages--French, English, Arabic, Russian. The barracks were built
round a muddy inclosure in which the men took what exercise they
could.
One night a boy with a beautiful tenor voice sang Auld Lang Syne
under the boy's window. He stood with his hand on the cuff of his
empty sleeves and listened. And suddenly a great shame filled him,
that with so many gone forever, with men dying every minute of
every hour, back at the lines, he had been so obsessed with himself.
He was still bitter, but the bitterness was that he could not go
back again and fight.
When he had been in the camp a month he helped two British officers
to escape. One of them had snubbed him in London months before. He
apologised before he left.
"You're a man, Hamilton," he said. "All you Canadians are men. I've
some things to tell when I get home."
The boy could not go with them. There would be canals to swim
across, and there was his empty sleeve and weakness. He would never
swim again, he thought. That night, as he looked at the empty beds
of the men who had gone, he remembered his medals and smiled grimly.
He was learning to use his left hand. He wrote letters home with it
for soldiers who could not write. He went into the prison hospital
and wrote letters for those who would never go home. But he did not
write to the girl.
* * * * *
He went back at last, when the hopelessly wounded were exchanged. To
be branded "hopelessly wounded" was to him a stain, a stigma. It put
him among the clutterers of the earth. It stranded him on the shore
of life. Hopelessly wounded!
For, except what would never be whole, he was well again. True,
confinement and poor food had kept him weak and white. His legs had
a way of going shaky at nightfall. But once he knocked down an
insolent Russian with his left hand, and began to feel his own man
again. That the Russian was weak from starvation did not matter. The
point to the boy was that he had made the attempt.
Providence has a curious way of letting two lives run along, each
apparently independent of the other. Parallel lines they seem,
hopeless of meeting. Converging lines really, destined, through long
ages, by every deed that has been done to meet at a certain point
and there fuse.
Edith had left Mabel, but not to go to Lethway. When nothing else
remained that way was open. She no longer felt any horror--only a
great distaste. But two weeks found her at her limit. She, who had
rarely had more than just enough, now had nothing.
And no glory of sacrifice upheld her. She no longer believed that by
removing the burden of her support she could save Mabel. It was
clear that Mabel would not be saved. To go back and live on her,
under the circumstances, was but a degree removed from the other
thing that confronted her.
There is just a chance that, had she not known the boy, she would
have killed herself. But again the curious change he had worked in
her manifested itself. He thought suicide a wicked thing.
"I take it like this," he had said in his eager way: "life's a thing
that's given us for some purpose. Maybe the purpose gets
clouded--I'm afraid I'm an awful duffer at saying what I mean. But
we've got to work it out, do you see? Or--or the whole scheme is
upset."
It had seemed very clear then.
Then, on a day when the rare sun made even the rusty silk hats of
clerks on tops of omnibuses to gleam, when the traffic glittered on
the streets and the windows of silversmiths' shops shone painful to
the eye, she met Lethway again.
The sun had made her reckless. Since the boy was gone life was
wretchedness, but she clung to it. She had given up all hope of
Cecil's return, and what she became mattered to no one else.
Perhaps, more than anything else, she craved companionship. In
all her crowded young life she had never before been alone.
Companionship and kindness. She would have followed to heel, like
a dog, for a kind word.
Then she met Lethway. They walked through the park. When he left her
her once clear, careless glance had a suggestion of furtiveness in
it.
That afternoon she packed her trunk and sent it to an address he
had given her. In her packing she came across the stick of cold
cream, still in the pocket of the middy blouse. She flung it, as
hard as she could, across the room.
She paid her bill with money Lethway had given her. She had exactly
a sixpence of her own. She found herself in Trafalgar Square late in
the afternoon. The great enlisting posters there caught her eye,
filled her with bitterness.
"Your king and your country need you," she read. She had needed the
boy, too, but this vast and impersonal thing, his mother country,
had taken him from her--taken him and lost him. She wanted to stand
by the poster and cry to the passing women to hold their men back.
As she now knew she hated Lethway, she hated England.
She wandered on. Near Charing Cross she spent the sixpence for a
bunch of lilies of the valley, because he had said once that she was
like them. Then she was for throwing them in the street, remembering
the thing she would soon be.
"For the wounded soldiers," said the flower girl. When she
comprehended that, she made her way into the station. There was a
great crowd, but something in her face made the crowd draw back and
let her through. They nudged each other as she passed.
"Looking for some one, poor child!" said a girl and, following her,
thrust the flowers she too carried into Edith's hand. She put them
with the others, rather dazed.
* * * * *
To Cecil the journey had been a series of tragedies. Not his own.
There were two hundred of them, officers and men, on the boat across
the Channel. Blind, maimed, paralysed, in motley garments, they were
hilariously happy. Every throb of the turbine engines was a thrust
toward home. They sang, they cheered.
Now and then some one would shout: "Are we downhearted?" And
crutches and canes would come down on the deck to the unanimous
shout: "No!"
Folkestone had been trying, with its parade of cheerfulness, with
kindly women on the platform serving tea and buns. In the railway
coach to London, where the officers sat, a talking machine played
steadily, and there were masses of flowers, violets and lilies of
the valley. At Charing Cross was a great mass of people, and as they
slowly disembarked he saw that many were crying. He was rather
surprised. He had known London as a cold and unemotional place. It
had treated him as an alien, had snubbed and ignored him.
He had been prepared to ask nothing of London, and it lay at his
feet in tears.
Then he saw Edith.
Perhaps, when in the fullness of years the boy goes over to the
life he so firmly believes awaits him, the one thing he will carry
with him through the open door will be the look in her eyes when she
saw him. Too precious a thing to lose, surely, even then. Such
things make heaven.
"What did I tell you?" cried the girl who had given Edith her
flowers. "She has found him. See, he has lost his arm. Look
out--catch him!"
But he did not faint. He went even whiter, and looking at Edith he
touched his empty sleeve.
"As if that would make any difference to her!" said the girl, who
was in black. "Look at her face! She's got him."
Neither Edith nor the boy could speak. He was afraid of unmanly
tears. His dignity was very dear to him. And the tragedy of his
empty sleeve had her by the throat. So they went out together and
the crowd opened to let them by.
* * * * *
At nine o'clock that night Lethway stormed through the stage
entrance of the theatre and knocked viciously at the door of Mabel's
dressing room. Receiving no attention, he opened the door and went
in.
The room was full of flowers, and Mabel, ready to go on, was having
her pink toes rouged for her barefoot dance.
"You've got a nerve!" she said coolly.
"Where's Edith?"
"I don't know and I don't care. She ran away, when I was stinting
myself to keep her. I'm done. Now you go out and close that door,
and when you want to enter a lady's dressing room, knock."
He looked at her with blazing hatred.
"Right-o!" was all he said. And he turned and left her to her
flowers.
At exactly the same time Edith was entering the elevator of a small,
very respectable hotel in Kensington. The boy, smiling, watched her
in.
He did not kiss her, greatly to the disappointment of the hall
porter. As the elevator rose the boy stood at salute, the fingers of
his left hand to the brim of his shabby cap. In his eyes, as they
followed her, was all that there is of love--love and a new
understanding.
She had told him, and now he knew. His creed was still the same.
Right was right and wrong was wrong. But he had learned of that
shadowy No Man's Land between the lines, where many there were who
fought their battles and were wounded, and even died.
As he turned and went out two men on crutches were passing along the
quiet street. They recognised him in the light of the doorway, and
stopped in front of him. Their voices rang out in cheerful unison:
"Are we downhearted? No!"
Their crutches struck the pavement with a resounding thump.