The Guarded Heights Part 70

Once more he glanced through blurred eyes at his clothing and saw livery, and this time he had put it on of his own free will. He seemed to hear Squibs:

"World lives by service."

"I'm in the service," he thought. "Got to serve."

It impressed him as quite pitiful that now he would never know just why.

"Where you going?" he demanded of the stretcher bearers who had begun to carry him back.

They tried to explain, hurrying a little. He threatened them with his revolver.

"Turn around. Let's go--with the battalion."

The lieutenant saw, the men saw, these frightened figures running with loping steps, carrying a stretcher which they jerked and twitched so that the figure lying on it with arm raised, holding a revolver, suffered agonies and struggled not to be flung to the ground. And the lieutenant and the men sprang to their feet, ran forward, shouted:

"Follow the Major!"

The German gunners, caught by surprise, hesitated, had trouble, therefore, shortening their ranges; and as panic spreads so does the sudden spirit of victory.

"Same side of the window!" George grumbled as the bearers set him down behind the captured guns.

"Just the same," he rambled, "fine fellows. Who said they weren't fine fellows?"

He wanted to argue it angrily with a wounded German propped against a shattered tree, but the lieutenant interrupted him, bringing up a medical orderly, asking him if he had any instructions. George answered very pleasantly:

"Not past me, Mr. Planter! Rank and file myself!"

The lieutenant glanced significantly at the medical orderly. He looked sharply at George's hair and suddenly pointed.

"They nicked him in the head, too."

The orderly knelt and examined the place the lieutenant had indicated.

"Oh, no, sir. That's quite an old scar."

XII

"Lost a leg or two?" Allen asked.

"Not yet. Don't think I shall. Planter's not so lucky, but he'll get home sooner."

Allen brought George his one relief from the deadly monotony of the base hospital. He had sent for him because he wanted his opinion as to the possibility of an armistice. Blodgett, however, hadn't waited for the result of the conference. The day Allen arrived a letter came from him, telling George not to worry.

"King Ferdy along about the last of September whispered I'd better begin to unload. It's a killing, George."

With his mind clear of that George could be amused by Allen. The friend of the people wore some striking clothes from London tailors and haberdashers. He carried a cunning little cane. He had managed something extremely neat in moustaches. He spoke with a perceptible West End accent. But in reply to George's sneering humour he made this astonishing remark:

"It isn't nearly as much fun being a top-hole person as I thought it was going to be."

"You're lucky to have found it out," George said, "for your job's about over. Of course I could get you something in Wall Street."

"Doubt if I should want it," Allen said. "I've always got my old job."

George whistled.

"You mean you'd go back to long hair, cheap clothes, and violent words?"

"Why not? I only took your offer, Morton, because I was inclined to agree with you that in the outside world's anxiety to look at what was going on over the fence people'd stop thinking. Russia didn't stop thinking, and after the armistice you watch America begin to use its brain."

"You mean the downtrodden," George sneered.

"That's the greater part of any country," Allen said, his acquired accent forgotten, his perfectly clean hands commencing to gesture.

But George wouldn't listen to him, got rid of him, turned to the wall with an ugly feeling that he had gone out of his way to nurture one of the makers of the h.e.l.l after war.

PART V

THE NEW WORLD

I

George crushed his uneasy thoughts, trying to dwell instead on the idea that he was going back to the normal, but all at once he experienced a dread of the normal, perhaps, because he was no longer normal himself.

Could he limp before Sylvia with his old a.s.surance? Would people pity him, or would he irritate them because he had a disability? And s.n.a.t.c.hes of his talks at the front with Wandel etched themselves sharply against his chaotic recollections of those days. Was Wandel fair? Was it, indeed, the original George Morton people had always liked? Here, apart from the turmoil, he didn't believe it, didn't dare believe it. Those people wouldn't have cared for him except for his a.s.sumption of qualities which he had chosen as from a counter display. Yet was it the real George Morton that made him in superlative moments break the traces of his acquired judgments, as he had done at New Haven, in the Argonne, to dash selflessly into the service of others? Rotten inside, indeed!

Even in the hospital he set out to crush that impulsive, dangerous part of him.

But the nearer he drew to home the more he suffered from a depression that he could only define as homesickness--homesickness for the old ways, the old habits, the old thoughts; and the memory of his temerity with Sylvia at the moment of their parting was like a great cloud threatening the future with destructive storm.

Lambert, wearing a contrivance the doctors had given him in place of what the country had taken away, accompanied by Betty and the Baillys, met the transport. Betty and Mrs. Bailly cried, and George shook his heavy stick at them.

"See here! I'm not going to limp like this always."

Bailly encircled him with his thin arms.

"You're too old to play football, anyway, George."

George found himself wanting Betty's arms, their forgetfulness, their understanding, their tenderness.

"When are you two going to be married?" he forced himself to ask.

Betty looked away, her white cheeks flushing, but Lambert hurried an answer.

"As soon as you're able to get to Princeton. You're to be best man."