Leerie Part 20

a good pair o' shoes an' throwin' the odd away, while I'll be savin'

enough from the shoes I'll never have to be buyin' to keep mysel' in cigars for the rest o' my life."

"But Patsy's wondtherin' can ye lay the ghost, miss?" Timothy Brennan, who had lost the "cream of his face," repeated the question Larry had asked a half-hour before. The rest of the ward t.i.ttered expectantly.

"Let me see--" The Irish blood in her steadied the nurse's hands, while she drew her lips into quizzical solemnity and winked at Culmullen over her shoulder. "I always thought it was restlessness that sent ghosts walking. Maybe these have come back, looking for their boots."

The t.i.tter broke into a roar of delight. "Thrue for ye!" shouted Parley-voo Flynn, pounding the arm of Jamie's chair with his one fist.

"All ye've got to do, Patsy, is to be puttin' your boots beside your chair onct more, an' them legs will scrooch comfortably into them an' never haunt ye again. The la.s.s is right, isn't she, Jamie?"

Eleven pairs of eyes and an odd one shifted apprehensively from the lad who was being dressed to the lad in the wheel-chair, and the eyes all showed varying degrees of trouble, uncertainty, and sorrow. They had a way of searching Jamie out in this fashion many times a day, while he sat very still, with eyes bandaged and lips that never flinched but never broke to a smile.

Larry shook a hairy fist at Parley-voo and answered the question himself:

"Of course she's right! Isn't she always? An' who but a heathen would be doubtin' the manners of a ghost?"

"Aye, but where will I be gettin' the boots?" Patsy made a sour grimace.

"Me own purty ones had Christian burial somewhere back in that tremendous mud-puddle. Would any gentleman, now, still havin' two good legs, give me the loan of his boots for one night? Size eleven, if I don't disremember."

"That's Teig's number. Lend him yours, Teig, like a good lad, or we'll never be rid o' them ghosts." Mat O'Shaughnessy, at the other end of the line, fairly shook with the depth of his wail.

Teig Magee chuckled. He had lost an inch or so of back and was waiting the glad day when they could mend it with an inch or so of shin-bone; in the mean time he was paralyzed. "Say, Docthor, would ye mind reachin' undther my pillow an' fetchin' them out for me? The lads have a way of forgettin'

my hands are temporarily engaged. Thank ye. Ye can have them, Patsy, but ye'll have to go bail your ghosts won't up an' thramp off wi' them entirely."

It ended by the schoolmaster giving security--a half-crown with a bullet hole through it. Sheila was appointed custodian, and the boots were placed beside the color-sergeant's cot "against the comin' night."

As the chief and Sheila pa.s.sed on from cot to cot, the spirits of Ward 7-A never wavered. Johnnie, who had piped the lads into battle and out for four years, and who daily rejoiced over the fact that Fritzie had shown the good sense to take a foot instead of a hand, told them that he was in rare luck now, for there would be time to make wee Johnnie at home the grandest piper in all of Ireland--an honor he could never have promised himself before.

There was "Bertha" Milliken, named for the big gun he had put out of commission and the gun crew he had captured. He had been given the V. C.

for that. His pet joke was telling how the Fritzies grudged him its possession by shooting it away on the Scheldt along with a good bit that was under it. The nurse and surgeon handled "Bertha" very carefully; there was no knowing just what was going to happen to him. Casey Ryan had lost the odd of 'most everything the Lord had started him with, as he put it.

An eye, an ear, a lung, and a leg were gone, and he was beating all the others at getting well. Mat O'Shaughnessy had it in the "vital." He was continuously boasting that it was the handiest place of all, and if it didn't get him he'd be the only perfect specimen invalided home.

"Parley-voo," the only one of them who essayed French, had wounds many but inconspicuous. He was given to counting a hypothetical fortune that might be his if the Empire would give him a shilling for every time he had been hit. Joseph Daly and "Gospel" Smith, the one Methodist, carried head wounds, while "Granny" Sullivan, the oldest, wisest, and most comforting of the company, had one smashed hip and a hole through the other, "the devil of a combination." Never had the atmosphere of 7-A been keener or spicier. Jamie alone sat still and silent.

Jamie was the last to be dressed, and because there was little to do the chief slipped away and left him to Sheila. As the nurse pa.s.sed from Mat's cot to the wheel-chair, eleven pairs of eyes and an odd one followed her.

A hush fell suddenly on the ward. The lads never intended this should happen, but somehow, at the same time everyday, the silence gripped them, and they seemed powerless to stay it. It was "Granny" Sullivan who first threw it off.

"'Tis a grand day outside, Jamie. Maybe ye're feeling the sun, now, comin'

through the window?"

The nurse had lifted the bandage from the eyes. There was nothing there but empty sockets, almost healed. One could hear the quick intake of breath from the watching twelve, while every face registered an agony it had scorned to show for its own disablement. But for Jamie, "the singing lad from Derry" as they lovingly called him, it was different. They could face their own conditions with amazing jocularity, but they writhed daily under the torment of Jamie's. They could brave it no better than could he. For to put eternal darkness on the lad who loved the light, who would sit spellbound before the play of colors in the east at dawn or the flash of moonlight across troubled water, who could make a song out of the smile of a child or the rhythm of flying birds in the sky, that was d.a.m.nable. An arch-fiend might have conceived it, but where was G.o.d to let it happen? A crippled Jamie without an arm or a leg was endurable--that cried out for no blasphemy--but a Jamie without eyes--G.o.d in heaven, how could it be!

The face of the singing lad was the face of a dreamer, as exquisite as a piece of marble that might have been fashioned by Praxiteles for a sun G.o.d. Since the battle on the Scheldt it had become a white mask, shorn of all dreams. Almost it might have been a death-mask for the soul of Jamie O'Hara. It showed no response now when "Granny" spoke; only the lad's hands fluttered a moment toward the window, then dropped heavily back into his lap.

"Aye, maybe I feel it." The voice was colorless and tired. "I can't be remembering clear sunlight any more. The last days of the fighting, smoke was too thick in the sky, or the rains fell."

Eleven pairs of eyes and one odd one cast about for some inspiration.

"Sure, think o' somethin' pleasanter nor cannon smoke an' rain. Think o'--" "Granny" floundered for a moment, then gave up in despair.

"That's all I see when I look up. When I look down, it's worse--an everlasting earth, covered with mud and dying men!" Jamie shivered.

Larry struggled out of his torment. "I say, Jamie, don't ye mind the song ye were makin' for us the day we fell back from Cambrai? 'Twas an Irish one, full o' the sun an' the singin' birds of Donegal. Wi' the Fritzies risin' like a murdtherous tide behind us, 'twas all that kept the heart in us that day. Ye say it for Miss O'Leary. Sure, ye've never said a song for her yet."

Jamie shook his head. "I'm sorry, lad; I've lost it. I was making so many songs those days--ye couldn't be expecting a body to carry them all about in his head. Now could ye?" The lips tried bravely to smile, and failed again.

But Larry grinned triumphantly. "Sure 'Granny' has it wrote down. He showed it to me once. Fetch it, 'Granny,' an' let Jamie be re--" He broke off, aghast; the lads about him were staring in absolute horror. Only the singing lad showed nothing. He might not have heard, or, hearing, the words were meaningless.

So Sheila took matters into her own hands. She covered the eyes with fresh gauze, wrapped Jamie up, and bundled him out in his chair to Harrigan with the remark that the day was too fine to miss and there was more of it outside the hospital than in. She watched until she had seen Harrigan take him to a sunny, wind-sheltered corner of the gardens, and then she came back to 7-A. She was thinking of Peter Brooks, her man at the front, and she was trying to fathom with all her heart what manner of healing she would give had Peter come back to her as Jamie O'Hara had come. She closed the door of the ward behind her and faced the twelve.

"Lads, what are we going to do for Jamie?"

Larry groaned out loud. It was the first luxury of expression he had indulged in since Jamie had been wheeled out. "Aye, what are we goin' to do? That's what every man of us has been askin' himself since--since he knew."

"We act like a crowd o' half-wits, a-thryin' to boost his spirits a bit, an' all the time he grows whiter an' quieter." Patsy turned his head away; his lips were twitching.

"Aye, that's G.o.d's truth." "Bertha's" hoa.r.s.e croak was heavy with despair.

"Ye can see for yourself, miss, it's noways nat'ral for Jamie--that's the worst of it. It's been Jamie, just, that always put heart back in us when things went blackest. Wasn't it him that made it easy goin' for them that went west? Can one of us mind the time he wasn't ready with a song to fetch us over the top, or through the mud--or straight to death, if them was the orders? No matter how loud the guns screeched, we could always hear Jamie above them."

"We could hear him when we couldn't have heard another sound," Culmullen mumbled.

"Gospel" Smith raised a bandaged head and leveled piercing eyes at Sheila.

"You know what the Gospel says about the stars singing in the morning--all together like? Well, Jamie was the lad who could outsing them. You know how it feels at that gray, creepy hour o' dawn, when a man's heart jumps to his throat and sticks there, and his hands shake like a girl's? Often's the time we'd be waiting orders to attack just like that. The stars might have shouted themselves clear o' the sky, for all the good they'd have done us; but Jamie was different. He'd make us a couplet or a verse to sing low under our breath, something you could put your teeth into. And when the orders came our hearts were always back where the Lord had put them."

"Granny" Sullivan plucked nervously at his blanket. "An' now, when we want to hearten him, we're hurtin' instead. Seems as if the devil took hold of our tongues an' spilled the wrong words off."

"Shall I tell you what I would try to do, if I were one of you Irish lads who had fought with him?" Sheila's face was as drawn as any of the twelve.

"In G.o.d's name tell us!" Johnnie, the piper, spoke as reverently as if he were at ma.s.s.

"You heard what he said just now about seeing nothing but mud and dying men? Well, that's the trouble. He can't see any longer things he loves, the things he has always carried in his heart. All the beautiful memories have been lost, and all he has left are the horrors of those last days.

He's got nothing left to make into songs any more. Don't you see? You've got to bring that back to him, that power to see--here." The girl's hand pressed her heart.

"Aye, but how?" Patsy asked it breathlessly.

"Bring him back his memories--memories of Ireland, of the things he loved best to sing about. You have eyes; make him see."

A hush fell on Ward 7-A. Then Timothy Brennan muttered as a man alone: "'Tis the words of a woman. G.o.d's blessin' on her!"

All through the day there rang through Sheila's ears the last words Jamie had said to her that morning. He had turned his face back, as Harrigan had wheeled him away, to answer her "All right, Jamie?" with "As right as ever I'll be. Do ye know, the O'Haras are famous for their long living? My grandfather lived to be ninety-eight, and his father to be over a hundred.

That leaves me seventy-five years, maybe. Seventy-five years! And already I'm fearin' the length of a day." She was still hearing them when she came back to the ward at day's end to find Jamie in his old accustomed place by the window. His face was as masklike as ever, and Larry was talking:

"Sure, I mind often an' often how the neighbors used to tell me if I'd lie asleep with my ear to a fairy rath I'd be hearin' their music an' seein'

their dancin'. But I never did. But I saw a sight as grand, the flight o'

the skylark at ring-o'-day. Many's the time I've seen them leave the marsh an' go liltin' into the blue."

"And the lilting!" Culmullen closed his eyes the better to recall it. "I mind the last time I heard one. The sky was turned orange, and the lough turned gold. The marsh was glistening with mist, and out of the reeds where her nest was she flew. It was like a feathered bundle of song thrown skyward."

"Aye, what a song!" Johnnie, the piper, spoke with ecstasy. "Hark! I can make it." He puckered his lips, and through them came the sweet, lilting notes of the lark's matin song.

"Make it again." Jamie was leaning forward in his chair, his hands gripping the arms.