David Malcolm Part 23

I had begun to suspect that Rufus Blight was not so obtuse as I judged him, but was pa.s.sing over that part of my story which had to do with Talcott, because he really liked Talcott and was inclined to lighten the shadow which his conduct that night had thrown on his exemplary character. I had told him all. I had repeated the exact words which the Professor had given me as the cause of the a.s.sault, and now in his brother's mind they were lost in a rapt interest in his adventures. If with design, then my mission had been futile, and it was wisdom to retreat. If without design, I could not bring myself to the role of a prosecutor, and to argue was to tread on dangerous ground. I had done what I believed right. I had kept my promise. So I rose to go. I must have given Rufus Blight a strange look as I held out my hand. I was furious at him for his obtuseness or his cunning, and I must have shown it, for he returned my gaze with a puzzled stare. Then a gleam of light filtered into that brain, so competent to deal with steel-works, so hopelessly dull on other matters.

"David," he said, "you have delayed a long time in telling me this.

Now, why?"

I answered him, speaking no longer in cold, business-like tones. I held out my hands wide apart and took a step toward him to bring my eyes nearer his, for every nerve was set to drive the truth into him.

"I tell you now because your brother's last words to me were, 'Take care of Penelope.' How can I take care of Penelope? She has gone far from me. It is for you that his words have meaning. Can't you see?"

His hands were groping vaguely in the air behind him. He found the arms of his chair and sat down weakly, and with his head thrown back he looked up at me with an expression of wonder on his face.

"I leave to-morrow," said I. "It will be a long time before I see you again. Will you say good-by to Penelope for me?"

"I see, David," he exclaimed. His voice snapped, as I fancy it did sometimes when affairs in the steelworks were awry. "I was so interested in Hendry I forgot all about that fellow Talcott. Now, tell me this--did he----"

"I have told you everything," said I. "There is nothing left for me to say except good-by."

Far, indeed, had Penelope gone from me. So I had said to Rufus Blight--almost my last word to him. So I said to myself as I stood by the steamer's rail and looked back to the towering ma.s.s of the lower city. That very morning I had seen her: she driving down the Avenue, alone, sitting very straight and still in her victoria; I on the pavement, taking my last walk up-town in the never failing hope to have a glimpse of her. Now, what would I have given not to have yielded to that temptation? She had seen me. I halted sharply and raised my hat, thinking that she might stop to say good-by, for she knew that I was going away. She did see me. She looked straight at me, coldly, and not even by a tremor of her eyebrows did she give a sign that to her I was other than any stranger loitering on the curb.

CHAPTER XXIV

Time, the philosopher said, takes no account of humanity. "The activest man sets around mostly," I once heard Stacy Shunk remark as he sat curled up on the store-porch, nursing a bare foot and viewing the world through the top of his hat. Did the most active man calmly and without egotism dissect the sum of his useful accomplishment, he would be highly discouraged, for time is a relentless destroyer. But a man can not take so disdainful a measure of his own value. He must live.

To superior minds like the philosopher's or Stacy Shunk's he may be living his tale of years happy in constantly hoodwinking himself with the idea that he is an important factor in some great purpose. Now in certain moods I might attain to the lofty view of the philosopher and Stacy Shunk. Then I would be confronted by my friend the Professor, who would have been dissatisfied had he been the author of Plato's dialogues or the victor of Waterloo. Then it seemed to me that the wise man would allow himself to be hoodwinked, and would walk hard and fast without too critical an eye on the results of his journey. It is when he sits around that Stacy Shunk's active man is discontented, and this is not because he accomplishes much when working, but because he accomplishes less when idle. Here I had the example of Rufus Blight, brought at last to expending his restless energy in chopping golf-b.a.l.l.s out of bunkers. So work became to me the panacea for my ills. I plunged into the struggle harder than ever, and in working found that self-forgetfulness which is akin to contentment. It was indeed marching under sealed orders.

Those nights at sea the Professor's words were often in my mind. I was terribly lonely, and I could stand by the hour at the ship's rail looking into the heavens, and beyond them into the limitless s.p.a.ces where our vulgar minds have placed the home of the Great Spirit whose mysterious purposes we fulfil. How infinitesimal seemed my own part in that purpose, though I played it as best I could. I turned in vain to those limitless s.p.a.ces to ask why and for what I lived? Did I ask how I should live, the answer came from the limitless s.p.a.ces within me as clearly as though written on this page. My mother had written it there, unscientifically yet indelibly, in my boyhood days, and Mr.

Pound had added his few words, almost hidden beneath a ma.s.s of verbiage about Ahasuerus, and before them my forebears had every one of them left imprinted some sage injunction gained from their experience in living. So I gathered my strength to do my best. But there was a lack of definiteness in my purpose. There was no goal at which I aimed. In my younger days I had had instilled into me the necessity of aspiring to a particular height, to something concrete, to become a leader at the bar, in politics or commerce, a Webster, a Clay, or a Girard. But now I cared little if I never owned the paper for which I worked. The task at hand alone interested me, and to that I bent every energy.

One task lay at my hand that year when I was in London, beside the routine of my office, and now I undertook its completion for the personal pleasure which it gave me to gather into concise form the result of some years of study and patient digging for facts in forgotten volumes and ma.n.u.scripts. The result was surprising. The book, offered to a publisher with diffident apology, raised a storm of discussion in a half-dozen languages. To me it had been only a pleasant intellectual exercise to trace "the habit of war" back to the simple animal instincts of our ancestors; to follow the changing methods of fighting from the days when men a.s.sailed one another with stone axes to the modern expression of fighting intelligence in the battleship; to show how, with every step which we had taken to eradicate disease and alleviate suffering, we had taken two in refining and organizing our power of destruction. I had facts and figures to mark the steps in this twofold human progress, and to show the cost to the race of a single century not only of warring, but of following the sage injunction to be prepared for war in times of peace. Had I closed my labor there, the book would have been lost on the shop-shelves; but writing ironically, I went on to argue on the benefits of war and of the necessity of the race continuing in the exercise of this elemental pa.s.sion. I had always abhorred preaching, and here to preach I used a method of inversion, peppering my argument with plat.i.tudes on war as a needed discipline for the spiritual in man by its lessons in fort.i.tude and self-sacrifice, and on the softening influences of peace. But what I had intended as subtle irony was discovered by a great conservative journal to be an una.s.sailable argument, supported by facts and figures, demonstrating the futility of the movements for international amity. I was hailed as a bold, clear thinker who had p.r.i.c.ked the bubble of unintelligent altruism, who at a time when philanthropists were preaching disarmament had proved that men could never disarm as long as they were born with arms, legs and healthy senses.

So David Malcolm was quite unexpectedly raised to some eminence by a conservative English journal which was clamoring for increased naval expenditure; and once discovered, he found himself not without honor in his own country, for he was a.s.sailed from the platform of Carnegie Hall by the advocates of a gentle life, and in Congress his work was used as a text-book by those who were fighting for a larger military establishment. The _Morgen-Anzeiger_, in Berlin, printed a translation with the purpose of quelling the opposition to army service, while the reading of a chapter in the French Chamber resulted in an appropriation for experiments in submarines. Such was the effect of my well-intended irony. To-day, of course, the true purport of the facts, figures and argument are better known, but then I had the chagrin of seeing my projectile explode in the wrong camp, and I did not try to right myself, because I feared that to explain the error might nullify the ultimate effect of the explosion. To my mother alone did I trouble to point out my real meaning, and then because she had been shocked to see me a.s.sailed in her favorite journal, the _Presbyterian Searchlight_, as a notable example of the result of philosophy unwarmed by religion.

That I should have to make my peace with my mother was not surprising, but my old professional mentor, Mr. Hanks, loved a paradox; if he wanted to call a man a fool, he praised him for his wisdom; if he wished to disprove a proposition, he argued for it, adroitly exposing its weakness, and yet he wrote to me indignantly.

"I can not understand how from the ma.s.s of facts you have gathered you could calmly advance to so cruel an argument," he said. "Your own figures protest against your bloodthirsty philosophy. Machiavelli's Prince is a mollycoddle beside your ideal modern statesman. And yet, Malcolm, you could as easily have produced a work which would have stood for years as a reproach to the diplomacy of our time."

Dear old Hanks! It was from his suburban heart that he spoke thus, as the father of four accomplished daughters, and not as the sceptic of the office who was always quick to p.r.i.c.k the bubbles of pretence. But it was not long before he had an opportunity to turn ironical himself, and I could fancy the grim smile with which he wrote the despatch which sent me from the academic discussion of war to the study of war at first hand.

"Join the Turks at once."

It was laconic. To me it said more. It was addressed to David Malcolm, suddenly become known as an advocate of wholesale human butchery, and told him to follow the camp and see how suffering benefits the race, to stand by the guns and watch them take the toll that nations pay for their aggrandizement. To-day, when the book is understood, when peace conferences invite me to address them and navy leagues condemn me in resolutions, Hanks wonders why I accepted his commission with such hearty acquiescence. He deems me inconsistent.

The truth was that my heart leaped at this opportunity for real adventure. I was years older than in the days when I dreamed of wearing a cork helmet and carrying the Gospel and an elephant gun into darkest Africa; but few of us, when we become men, really put away childish things. Here was my boyhood's dream come true and glorified.

And what a week I had buying my toys! The cork helmet became a reality, and with it I equipped myself with smartly fitting khaki, and in the quiet of my lodgings viewed myself with ineffable satisfaction.

I bought equipment enough to have lasted me through a three years'

campaign, as I have since learned from experience, for the exigencies of transport made me abandon most of it at the very outset of my new career. But the loss was more than compensated by the delight which I had in the brief possession of so much warlike paraphernalia.

For two years after that I lived in the midst of armies. It was action, and to me inaction was a dreadful sickness. Even when we lay in camps for weeks and months there was the never-ending preparation for the struggles which lay ahead, and though there were hours as quiet as Broadway in mid-August, days could not be dull when you could see the smoke of hostile fires on distant mountains or a wild scout hovering on the fringe of the desert. For me the happiest days were when I could ride with the marching columns, when the distant barking of the guns called me to a hard gallop, when at night by the scant light of a candle I sat in my tent cross-legged, with my pad on my knee and my pencil in hand.

In war man strips himself of the unessential things which make up the museum of superfluities that he calls his home. At home he has countless troubles. Here he has few, but though they are simple, they are vital. I faced these elemental problems for the first time when with my little caravan I set out to join the Turkish army where it lay camped near the Greek frontier. As I rode my vagrant thoughts might turn back to home, and in my heart I might feel the old dull pain and longing, but when a pack-horse was running away with half my commissariat on his back such moody meditations had to be broken short.

Some days the question of mere bread for a crying stomach became vital, or a flask of water for a parched throat. There were nights when I should have given all I possessed, not for the folding-bed long since abandoned, but for a blanket in which to wrap myself as I slept in a trench. Within a week it was hard for me to believe that I had not spent all my life in the wake of an advancing army. London, New York--they were of another age. Home to me was a tent pitched by the Thessalian roadside, with my s.h.a.ggy horses picketed about and my s.h.a.ggier attendants chattering their strange jargon. This was luxury to one who had slept the night before in the rain, or worse, perhaps, in some shamble in a filthy Greek village. This was hardship, but I came to love it for the action and the forgetfulness. In the brief weeks of an opera-bouffe war I had my first taste of great adventure, and once knowing the joy of it I forgot for a time my academic ideas on the absurdity of international quarrels, and was happy only when I rode with the marching columns.

I came even to love the Turks, and I rode almost a Turk at heart over the plain of Thessaly. For they were strong men, these st.u.r.dy brown fellows who slouched as they marched, but always went forward, never faltering when the bullets snapped around them and the red fezzes of their comrades were dropping in the dust. It angered me to see my fellow-Christians shoot them down and then run toward Athens and the protecting skirts of the powers, for I knew that the powers would render their battles futile and their conquests empty and send them back with ranks depleted to their distant hills. They fought, most of them, hardly knowing why, save that in some mysterious way it was for their faith. They were dirty and ragged, but they were patient and brave. Ill-fed and ill-clothed, they could march all day in the scorching sun, uncomplaining, shiver all night in chilling winds, and then shamble on in the face of death.

The Greeks fought a little and ran. They would stand and fight a little again--then run. I thought that we should chase them to Athens.

I had visions of riding into the city in the wake of Edhem Pasha and pitching my ragged camp by the Acropolis. But I never pa.s.sed Pharsala.

It was there that I met the Professor again.

He lay at the foot of a roadside shrine which had been wrecked by a sh.e.l.l and hardly cast a shadow. But he had been dragged out of the noonday heat into that bit of shadow by some kindly enemy and there left to die. The war had finished with him and had swung on. He was hardly worth even an enemy's glance.

Riding by with my eyes intent on the moving fight ahead, I should have pa.s.sed him but for my dragoman. To Asaf there was nothing unusual in the pitiful figure by the roadside, propped against a stone, with the head fallen on an outstretched arm and a still hand clutching an empty water-flask. It was the clothes that called a second glance. Save the cartridge belt around the waist there was nothing to mark the man as a soldier. The kindly hand which had placed him there had drawn over his face a soiled gray hat; his suit was a worn blue serge, dyed now with dark stains, and his feet were encased in patent-leather shoes, cracked and almost soleless. The plain ahead was filled with the clamor of battle; a pack-train clattered by me, hurrying to the front, and but for these and for Asaf, the ragged Turk at my side, pointing mutely to the still dark heap, I might have thought myself at home, in my own valley, come suddenly on a mountain tragedy. And now I dismounted, and, raising the hat, looked into the thin brown face that I had first seen years ago so wistfully watching the little flake of cloud which hovered over the ridges.

CHAPTER XXV

I had thought this morning that at last I was to see a pitched battle, for the Greek army was well intrenched in the hills north of Pharsala and made some show of a stand there. At noon I stood on the crest of the same hills watching the usual retreat. A few miles away, its gray houses blotched against the mountains which guard southern Thessaly, was the town, and in the valley, drawing in toward it, the Greeks, with the enemy on their rear and flanks enclosing them in a narrowing semicircle of fire. Before me stretched the road, a white band across the undulating green of the plain. In that road, a mile away, I saw the rear-guard as it retired swiftly but steadily, facing again and again to deliver its volleys into the lines of the advancing foe. Once before I had seen that same small company fighting bravely as they were now, checking the advance of a whole division. I knew them for the Foreign Legion. Little black patches were left in the road as they fell back, and it made me sick at heart to think of these men throwing away their lives in so futile a cause. That little black patch had been perhaps a student filled with fervor for Pan-h.e.l.lenism, a college boy out for an adventurous holiday, or perhaps a soldier of fortune who held his life cheaply and was ready to give it for the brief joy of a battle. Now I stood by one of those little black patches, by the first still outpost which marked the fight down the road.

Had the horse which I had bought from a dealer in Ellasona been four or five years younger, I might never have noticed my friend as he lay there by the ruined shrine. In the ride out from Larissa, on the day before, I had found the animal a very unsteady framework on which to load two hundred pounds. At the first gallop I put him to he went down on his knees and rolled over on me, so that thereafter I had to content myself with going more cautiously, keeping as close as I could to the cloud of dust raised by the general staff. So it happened that I was ambling along at a gait regulated only by my beast's vagrant will, when Asaf's exclamation checked me.

I stood now, gazing stupidly at the figure beneath me. He lay so still that I thought him dead. Then his fingers tightened on the water-flask and his arm trembled as he tried to draw it to him.

This was no time to stand idly by, wondering how and why he had come to this useless sacrifice. It was enough that he was here and living. I knelt at his side, and though my surgery was rough, it stopped the flow in which his life was draining away; his parched lips drank the proffered water, and when his head was on my knees he turned his face from the light and clasped his hands almost with contentment. He seemed to know that a friend was with him. The friend who had bound his wound and given him drink would find him a better bed than these rough stones and a kinder shelter than this bit of shadow, swept by the dust of endless pack-trains.

In such a place a friend could avail little. We carried him back from the turmoil of the road into the trampled wheat and there made him a rude tent of my blanket and a pillow of my saddle. Then I looked about me for help. The pack-trains clattered along the road and through them wounded men were threading their way, painfully hobbling to the field-hospital, miles away. Of ambulances there were none. I knew that when night came they would stagger back from the fighting front with their loads of wounded, and that so few were they in numbers the chance of finding a place in them was of the smallest. The Turk does not trouble much with the wounded. When a man is. .h.i.t and he can hobble miles to the hospital, then Allah be praised! If not, he lies where he falls till night comes and his comrades find him and tie him like a bag of grain on a pony's back and send him on a journey that would be death to any Christian. If a surgeon finds him he is lucky. Remembering this, I looked back over the road by which I had come, measuring the miles we must cross before we reached help, and then at the Professor lying at my feet hardly breathing. I knew that we stayed where we were. Then I looked to the front. There was help there. There were surgeons working in that wide-spread wreath of smoke. I pointed over the plain and called to Asaf to hurry and bring me a surgeon. He demurred, for he was always chary about entering the zone of fire. I promised him a hundred pounds, a farm, a horse, a flock of sheep, if only he would go and bring me a surgeon. Malcolm Bey was mad, he said; no surgeon would come at such a time, miles for a single wounded man.

I knew that he was right, but I could not sit idly watching my friend's life ebb away. I doubled the prize, and with a shrug of the shoulders Asaf mounted and galloped off.

I sat by the wounded man and waited. It was for hours. To me it seemed days. Thousands pa.s.sed by--the men of the trains, stragglers, wounded, troops of the reserve. There were among them hands willing enough to help, were there any help to be given, but between them and me there was the inseparable gulf of language. One officer, a tall Albanian, rode over, and in French asked if he could be of any a.s.sistance; the man was a Greek; it made no difference, if he was a friend of Malcolm Bey; he could spare a pony and men to take him back to Larissa. I pleaded for a surgeon and an ambulance, pointing over the plain as though there they could be had for the asking. He bowed gravely--my request was a simple one; he would send them at once. And he rode forward toward the smoke and the clamor.

I sat watching. My hand held the Professor's. My eyes were turned down the road to catch the first sign of Asaf and help.

"Davy!"

He was looking up at me from beneath half-raised lids. How long he had been watching me I did not know. His voice was very low, but in it there was no note of surprise. To him it was quite right that I should be there. That was enough. His sickened mind could not trouble itself with wherefores.

"I am here, Professor," I said. The old nickname of the valley sounded strangely, but I could not call him Mr. Blight when he lay this way, looking up at me with eyes that seemed to smile with contentment despite his pain.

"You will be all right, Professor, but you must lie here quietly till the surgeon comes."

"I will be all right," he repeated slowly, and closed his eyes.

I looked over the plain. Would Asaf never return? The dusk was gathering and the wide-spread wreath of smoke mingled with it and was lost. I could see the flash of the Greek guns as they made their last stand to hold back the enemy till night came with its chance of escape.

Even the near-by road had its moments of quiet and the moving figures grew blurred. Every clatter of hoofs might be Asaf coming, every rumble of wheels the ambulance. But Asaf did not come.