sides rose and sank and divided the landscape with parallel lines. From
his cot the officer followed this phenomenon with severe, painstaking
interest. Sometimes the wooden rail swept up to the very block-house
itself, and for a second of time blotted it from sight. And again it
sank to the level of the line of breakers, and wiped them out of the
picture as though they were a line of chalk.
The soldier on the cot promised himself that the next swell of the sea
would send the lowest rail climbing to the very top of the palm-trees
or, even higher, to the base of the mountains; and when it failed to
reach even the palm-trees he felt a distinct sense of ill use, of having
been wronged by some one. There was no other reason for submitting to
this existence, save these tricks upon the wearisome, glaring landscape;
and, now, whoever it was who was working them did not seem to be making
this effort to entertain him with any heartiness.
It was most cruel. Indeed, he decided hotly, it was not to be endured;
he would bear it no longer, he would make his escape. But he knew that
this move, which could be conceived in a moment’s desperation, could
only be carried to success with great strategy, secrecy, and careful
cunning. So he fell back upon his pillow and closed his eyes, as though
he were asleep, and then opening them again, turned cautiously, and
spied upon his keeper. As usual, his keeper sat at the foot of the
cot turning the pages of a huge paper filled with pictures of the war
printed in daubs of tawdry colors. His keeper was a hard-faced boy
without human pity or consideration, a very devil of obstinacy and
fiendish cruelty. To make it worse, the fiend was a person without a
collar, in a suit of soiled khaki, with a curious red cross bound by a
safety-pin to his left arm. He was intent upon the paper in his hands;
he was holding it between his eyes and his prisoner. His vigilance had
relaxed, and the moment seemed propitious. With a sudden plunge of arms
and legs, the prisoner swept the bed sheet from him, and sprang at the
wooden rail and grasped the iron stanchion beside it. He had his knee
pressed against the top bar and his bare toes on the iron rail beneath
it. Below him the blue water waited for him. It was cool and dark and
gentle and deep. It would certainly put out the fire in his bones, he
thought; it might even shut out the glare of the sun which scorched his
eyeballs.
But as he balanced for the leap, a swift weakness and nausea swept over
him, a weight seized upon his body and limbs. He could not lift the
lower foot from the iron rail, and he swayed dizzily and trembled. He
trembled. He who had raced his men and beaten them up the hot hill to
the trenches of San Juan. But now he was a baby in the hands of a giant,
who caught him by the wrist and with an iron arm clasped him around his
waist and pulled him down, and shouted, brutally, “Help, some of you’se,
quick; he’s at it again. I can’t hold him.”
More giants grasped him by the arms and by the legs. One of them took
the hand that clung to the stanchion in both of his, and pulled back the
fingers one by one, saying, “Easy now, Lieutenant--easy.”
The ragged palms and the sea and block-house were swallowed up in a
black fog, and his body touched the canvas cot again with a sense of
home-coming and relief and rest. He wondered how he could have cared
to escape from it. He found it so good to be back again that for a long
time he wept quite happily, until the fiery pillow was moist and cool.
The world outside of the iron bars was like a scene in a theatre set
for some great event, but the actors were never ready. He remembered
confusedly a play he had once witnessed before that same scene. Indeed,
he believed he had played some small part in it; but he remembered it
dimly, and all trace of the men who had appeared with him in it was
gone. He had reasoned it out that they were up there behind the range
of mountains, because great heavy wagons and ambulances and cannon were
emptied from the ships at the wharf above and were drawn away in long
lines behind the ragged palms, moving always toward the passes between
the peaks. At times he was disturbed by the thought that he should be up
and after them, that some tradition of duty made his presence with them
imperative. There was much to be done back of the mountains. Some event
of momentous import was being carried forward there, in which he held a
part; but the doubt soon passed from him, and he was content to lie and
watch the iron bars rising and falling between the block-house and the
white surf.
If they had been only humanely kind, his lot would have been bearable,
but they starved him and held him down when he wished to rise; and they
would not put out the fire in the pillow, which they might easily have
done by the simple expedient of throwing it over the ship’s side into
the sea. He himself had done this twice, but the keeper had immediately
brought a fresh pillow already heated for the torture and forced it
under his head.
His pleasures were very simple, and so few that he could not understand
why they robbed him of them so jealously. One was to watch a green
cluster of bananas that hung above him from the awning twirling on a
string. He could count as many of them as five before the bunch turned
and swung lazily back again, when he could count as high as twelve;
sometimes when the ship rolled heavily he could count to twenty. It was
a most fascinating game, and contented him for many hours. But when they
found this out they sent for the cook to come and cut them down, and the
cook carried them away to his galley.
Then, one day, a man came out from the shore, swimming through the blue
water with great splashes. He was a most charming man, who spluttered
and dove and twisted and lay on his back and kicked his legs in an
excess of content and delight. It was a real pleasure to watch him;
not for days had anything so amusing appeared on the other side of the
prison-bars. But as soon as the keeper saw that the man in the water
was amusing his prisoner, he leaned over the ship’s side and shouted,
“Sa-ay, you, don’t you know there’s sharks in there?”
And the swimming man said, “The h--ll there is!” and raced back to the
shore like a porpoise with great lashing of the water, and ran up the
beach half-way to the palms before he was satisfied to stop. Then
the prisoner wept again. It was so disappointing. Life was robbed of
everything now. He remembered that in a previous existence soldiers who
cried were laughed at and mocked.
But that was so far away and it was such an absurd superstition that he
had no patience with it. For what could be more comforting to a man when
he is treated cruelly than to cry. It was so obvious an exercise, and
when one is so feeble that one cannot vault a four-railed barrier it is
something to feel that at least one is strong enough to cry.
He escaped occasionally, traversing space with marvellous rapidity and
to great distances, but never to any successful purpose; and his flight
inevitably ended in ignominious recapture and a sudden awakening in
bed. At these moments the familiar and hated palms, the peaks and the
block-house were more hideous in their reality than the most terrifying
of his nightmares.
These excursions afield were always predatory; he went forth always to
seek food. With all the beautiful world from which to elect and choose,
he sought out only those places where eating was studied and elevated
to an art. These visits were much more vivid in their detail than any he
had ever before made to these same resorts. They invariably began in
a carriage, which carried him swiftly over smooth asphalt. One route
brought him across a great and beautiful square, radiating with rows and
rows of flickering lights; two fountains splashed in the centre of the
square, and six women of stone guarded its approaches. One of the
women was hung with wreaths of mourning. Ahead of him the late twilight
darkened behind a great arch, which seemed to rise on the horizon of the
world, a great window into the heavens beyond. At either side strings
of white and colored globes hung among the trees, and the sound of music
came joyfully from theatres in the open air. He knew the restaurant
under the trees to which he was now hastening, and the fountain beside
it, and the very sparrows balancing on the fountain’s edge; he knew
every waiter at each of the tables, he felt again the gravel crunching
under his feet, he saw the maitre d’hotel coming forward smiling to
receive his command, and the waiter in the green apron bowing at his
elbow, deferential and important, presenting the list of wines. But his
adventure never passed that point, for he was captured again and once
more bound to his cot with a close burning sheet.
Or else, he drove more sedately through the London streets in the late
evening twilight, leaning expectantly across the doors of the hansom and
pulling carefully at his white gloves. Other hansoms flashed past him,
the occupant of each with his mind fixed on one idea--dinner. He was one
of a million of people who were about to dine, or who had dined, or who
were deep in dining.
He was so famished, so weak for food of any quality, that the galloping
horse in the hansom seemed to crawl. The lights of the Embankment passed
like the lamps of a railroad station as seen from the window of an
express; and while his mind was still torn between the choice of a thin
or thick soup or an immediate attack upon cold beef, he was at the door,
and the chasseur touched his cap, and the little chasseur put the wicker
guard over the hansom’s wheel. As he jumped out he said, “Give him
half-a-crown,” and the driver called after him, “Thank you, sir.”
It was a beautiful world, this world outside of the iron bars. Every one
in it contributed to his pleasure and to his comfort. In this world he
was not starved nor manhandled. He thought of this joyfully as he leaped
up the stairs, where young men with grave faces and with their hands
held negligently behind their backs bowed to him in polite surprise at
his speed. But they had not been starved on condensed milk. He threw his
coat and hat at one of them, and came down the hall fearfully and quite
weak with dread lest it should not be real. His voice was shaking when
he asked Ellis if he had reserved a table. The place was all so real, it
must be true this time. The way Ellis turned and ran his finger down
the list showed it was real, because Ellis always did that, even when he
knew there would not be an empty table for an hour. The room was crowded
with beautiful women; under the light of the red shades they looked kind
and approachable, and there was food on every table, and iced drinks in
silver buckets.
It was with the joy of great relief that he heard Ellis say to his
underling, “Numero cinq, sur la terrace, un couvert.” It was real at
last. Outside, the Thames lay a great gray shadow. The lights of the
Embankment flashed and twinkled across it, the tower of the House of
Commons rose against the sky, and here, inside, the waiter was hurrying
toward him carrying a smoking plate of rich soup with a pungent
intoxicating odor.
And then the ragged palms, the glaring sun, the immovable peaks, and
the white surf stood again before him. The iron rails swept up and sank
again, the fever sucked at his bones, and the pillow scorched his cheek.
One morning for a brief moment he came back to real life again and lay
quite still, seeing everything about him with clear eyes and for the
first time, as though he had but just that instant been lifted over
the ship’s side. His keeper, glancing up, found the prisoner’s eyes
considering him curiously, and recognized the change. The instinct of
discipline brought him to his feet with his fingers at his sides.
“Is the Lieutenant feeling better?”
The Lieutenant surveyed him gravely.
“You are one of our hospital stewards.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Why ar’n’t you with the regiment?”
“I was wounded, too, sir. I got it same time you did, Lieutenant.”
“Am I wounded? Of course, I remember. Is this a hospital ship?”
The steward shrugged his shoulders. “She’s one of the transports. They
have turned her over to the fever cases.”
The Lieutenant opened his lips to ask another question; but his own body
answered that one, and for a moment he lay silent.
“Do they know up North that I--that I’m all right?”
“Oh, yes, the papers had it in--there was pictures of the Lieutenant in
some of them.”
“Then I’ve been ill some time?”
“Oh, about eight days.”
The soldier moved uneasily, and the nurse in him became uppermost.
“I guess the Lieutenant hadn’t better talk any more,” he said. It was
his voice now which held authority.
The Lieutenant looked out at the palms and the silent gloomy mountains
and the empty coast-line, where the same wave was rising and falling
with weary persistence.
“Eight days,” he said. His eyes shut quickly, as though with a sudden
touch of pain. He turned his head and sought for the figure at the foot
of the cot. Already the figure had grown faint and was receding and
swaying.
“Has any one written or cabled?” the Lieutenant spoke, hurriedly.
He was fearful lest the figure should disappear altogether before he
could obtain his answer. “Has any one come?”
“Why, they couldn’t get here, Lieutenant, not yet.”
The voice came very faintly. “You go to sleep now, and I’ll run and
fetch some letters and telegrams. When you wake up, may be I’ll have a
lot for you.”
But the Lieutenant caught the nurse by the wrist, and crushed his hand
in his own thin fingers. They were hot, and left the steward’s skin wet
with perspiration. The Lieutenant laughed gayly.
“You see, Doctor,” he said, briskly, “that you can’t kill me. I can’t
die. I’ve got to live, you understand. Because, sir, she said she would
come. She said if I was wounded, or if I was ill, she would come to me.
She didn’t care what people thought. She would come any way and nurse
me--well, she will come.
“So, Doctor--old man--” He plucked at the steward’s sleeve, and stroked
his hand eagerly, “old man--” he began again, beseechingly, “you’ll
not let me die until she comes, will you? What? No, I know I won’t die.
Nothing made by man can kill me. No, not until she comes. Then, after
that--eight days, she’ll be here soon, any moment? What? You think so,
too? Don’t you? Surely, yes, any moment. Yes, I’ll go to sleep now, and
when you see her rowing out from shore you wake me. You’ll know her; you
can’t make a mistake. She is like--no, there is no one like her--but you
can’t make a mistake.”
That day strange figures began to mount the sides of the ship, and to
occupy its every turn and angle of space. Some of them fell on their
knees and slapped the bare deck with their hands, and laughed and
cried out, “Thank God, I’ll see God’s country again!” Some of them
were regulars, bound in bandages; some were volunteers, dirty and
hollow-eyed, with long beards on boys’ faces. Some came on crutches;
others with their arms around the shoulders of their comrades, staring
ahead of them with a fixed smile, their lips drawn back and their teeth
protruding. At every second step they stumbled, and the face of each was
swept by swift ripples of pain.
They lay on cots so close together that the nurses could not walk
between them. They lay on the wet decks, in the scuppers, and along the
transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners clinging to
a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship’s bow be turned
toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed into a state of
self-pity and miserable oblivion to their environment, from which hunger
nor nausea nor aching bones could shake them.
The hospital steward touched the Lieutenant lightly on the shoulder.
“We are going North, sir,” he said. “The transport’s ordered North to
New York, with these volunteers and the sick and wounded. Do you hear
me, sir?”
The Lieutenant opened his eyes. “Has she come?” he asked.
“Gee!” exclaimed the hospital steward. He glanced impatiently at the
blue mountains and the yellow coast, from which the transport was
drawing rapidly away.
“Well, I can’t see her coming just now,” he said. “But she will,” he
added.
“You let me know at once when she comes.”
“Why, cert’nly, of course,” said the steward.
Three trained nurses came over the side just before the transport
started North. One was a large, motherly-looking woman, with a German
accent. She had been a trained nurse, first in Berlin, and later in the
London Hospital in Whitechapel, and at Bellevue.
The nurse was dressed in white, and wore a little silver medal at her
throat; and she was strong enough to lift a volunteer out of his cot and
hold him easily in her arms, while one of the convalescents pulled his
cot out of the rain. Some of the men called her “nurse;” others, who
wore scapulars around their necks, called her “Sister;” and the officers
of the medical staff addressed her as Miss Bergen.
Miss Bergen halted beside the cot of the Lieutenant and asked, “Is this
the fever case you spoke about, Doctor--the one you want moved to the
officers’ ward?” She slipped her hand up under his sleeve and felt his
wrist.
“His pulse is very high,” she said to the steward. “When did you take
his temperature?” She drew a little morocco case from her pocket and
from that took a clinical thermometer, which she shook up and down,
eying the patient meanwhile with a calm, impersonal scrutiny. The
Lieutenant raised his head and stared up at the white figure beside his
cot. His eyes opened and then shut quickly, with a startled look, in
which doubt struggled with wonderful happiness. His hand stole out
fearfully and warily until it touched her apron, and then, finding it
was real, he clutched it desperately, and twisting his face and body
toward her, pulled her down, clasping her hands in both of his, and
pressing them close to his face and eyes and lips. He put them from him
for an instant, and looked at her through his tears.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered, “sweetheart, I knew you’d come.”
As the nurse knelt on the deck beside him, her thermometer slipped from
her fingers and broke, and she gave an exclamation of annoyance. The
young Doctor picked up the pieces and tossed them overboard. Neither of
them spoke, but they smiled appreciatively. The Lieutenant was looking
at the nurse with the wonder and hope and hunger of soul in his eyes
with which a dying man looks at the cross the priest holds up before
him. What he saw where the German nurse was kneeling was a tall, fair
girl with great bands and masses of hair, with a head rising like a lily
from a firm, white throat, set on broad shoulders above a straight back
and sloping breast--a tall, beautiful creature, half-girl, half-woman,
who looked back at him shyly, but steadily.
“Listen,” he said.
The voice of the sick man was so sure and so sane that the young Doctor
started, and moved nearer to the head of the cot. “Listen, dearest,” the
Lieutenant whispered. “I wanted to tell you before I came South. But I
did not dare; and then I was afraid something might happen to me, and I
could never tell you, and you would never know. So I wrote it to you in
the will I made at Baiquiri, the night before the landing. If you hadn’t
come now, you would have learned it in that way. You would have read
there that there never was any one but you; the rest were all dream
people, foolish, silly--mad. There is no one else in the world but you;
you have been the only thing in life that has counted. I thought I might
do something down here that would make you care. But I got shot going
up a hill, and after that I wasn’t able to do anything. It was very hot,
and the hills were on fire; and they took me prisoner, and kept me tied
down here, burning on these coals. I can’t live much longer, but now
that I have told you I can have peace. They tried to kill me before you
came; but they didn’t know I loved you, they didn’t know that men who
love you can’t die. They tried to starve my love for you, to burn it out
of me; they tried to reach it with their knives. But my love for you
is my soul, and they can’t kill a man’s soul. Dear heart, I have lived
because you lived. Now that you know--now that you understand--what does
it matter?”
Miss Bergen shook her head with great vigor. “Nonsense,” she said,
cheerfully. “You are not going to die. As soon as we move you out of
this rain, and some food cook--”
“Good God!” cried the young Doctor, savagely. “Do you want to kill him?”
When she spoke the patient had thrown his arms heavily across his face,
and had fallen back, lying rigid on the pillow.
The Doctor led the way across the prostrate bodies, apologizing as he
went. “I am sorry I spoke so quickly,” he said, “but he thought you were
real. I mean he thought you were some one he really knew--”
“He was just delirious,” said the German nurse, calmly.
The Doctor mixed himself a Scotch and soda and drank it with a single
gesture.
“Ugh!” he said to the ward-room. “I feel as though I’d been opening
another man’s letters.”
The transport drove through the empty seas with heavy, clumsy
upheavals, rolling like a buoy. Having been originally intended for the
freight-carrying trade, she had no sympathy with hearts that beat for
a sight of their native land, or for lives that counted their remaining
minutes by the throbbing of her engines. Occasionally, without apparent
reason, she was thrown violently from her course: but it was invariably
the case that when her stern went to starboard, something splashed in
the water on her port side and drifted past her, until, when it had
cleared the blades of her propeller, a voice cried out, and she was
swung back on her home-bound track again.
The Lieutenant missed the familiar palms and the tiny block-house; and
seeing nothing beyond the iron rails but great wastes of gray water, he
decided he was on board a prison-ship, or that he had been strapped to
a raft and cast adrift. People came for hours at a time and stood at the
foot of his cot, and talked with him and he to them--people he had loved
and people he had long forgotten, some of whom he had thought were dead.
One of them he could have sworn he had seen buried in a deep trench, and
covered with branches of palmetto. He had heard the bugler, with tears
choking him, sound “taps;” and with his own hand he had placed the dead
man’s campaign hat on the mound of fresh earth above the grave. Yet here
he was still alive, and he came with other men of his troop to speak to
him; but when he reached out to them they were gone--the real and the
unreal, the dead and the living--and even She disappeared whenever he
tried to take her hand, and sometimes the hospital steward drove her
away.
“Did that young lady say when she was coming back again?” he asked the
steward.
“The young lady! What young lady?” asked the steward, wearily.
“The one who has been sitting there,” he answered. He pointed with his
gaunt hand at the man in the next cot.
“Oh, that young lady. Yes, she’s coming back. She’s just gone below to
fetch you some hard-tack.”
The young volunteer in the next cot whined grievously.
“That crazy man gives me the creeps,” he groaned. “He’s always waking me
up, and looking at me as though he was going to eat me.”
“Shut your head,” said the steward. “He’s a better man crazy than you’ll
ever be with the little sense you’ve got. And he has two Mauser holes
in him. Crazy, eh? It’s a damned good thing for you that there was about
four thousand of us regulars just as crazy as him, or you’d never seen
the top of the hill.”
One morning there was a great commotion on deck, and all the
convalescents balanced themselves on the rail, shivering in their
pajamas, and pointed one way. The transport was moving swiftly and
smoothly through water as flat as a lake, and making a great noise with
her steam-whistle. The noise was echoed by many more steam-whistles; and
the ghosts of out-bound ships and tugs and excursion steamers ran past
her out of the mist and disappeared, saluting joyously. All of the
excursion steamers had a heavy list to the side nearest the transport,
and the ghosts on them crowded to that rail and waved handkerchiefs
and cheered. The fog lifted suddenly, and between the iron rails the
Lieutenant saw high green hills on either side of a great harbor.
Houses and trees and thousands of masts swept past like a panorama;
and beyond was a mirage of three cities, with curling smoke-wreaths and
sky-reaching buildings, and a great swinging bridge, and a giant statue
of a woman waving a welcome home.