Where the Souls of Men are Calling Part 17

Petulantly he shook off her hand; slowly she drew away from him, beginning--yet fearing--to understand. "But you must be, Jeb! You must be--to be _here_!"

"Help me, Jeb! There's a man behind you hit pretty hard!--help me get him in!"

She had again reached out and taken hold of him, but this time he jerked away, crying with his mouth against the earth:

"Let him stay! Only a fool would go out there!"

Her young eyes, already schooled in a realm of ravages that exists beyond the ken of those who do not go to wars, grew suddenly older. They seemed at last to have met a thing they could not look upon! They had witnessed the dying of many men--but here was a dying soul! As she had healed men, she now clutched for an heroic remedy in the hope of saving this more precious thing than life. But first, pitifully pleading, with her lips close to his ear, she asked:

"You _must_ be wounded! For the love of Christ tell me the sh.e.l.l blew you here--that you didn't come willingly! Tell me even that you're dying, Jeb, but not----"

She could not say it, and waited, while his silence answered. Forgetting everything else she sprang to her feet and stepped back, her eyes narrowing at what she had discovered to be under his uniform--or, rather, not under it! In a panic she realized that here was a derelict ship of manliness being irresistibly driven by a hurricane of Fear; that a complete wreck was imminent unless she were the master-pilot. Her cheeks were aflame with indignation, her body bending tensely forward might have been a spring of steel set to release some instrument of torture--and then she let the bolt descend like the wrath of furies.

With the smoke of sh.e.l.ls sweeping over them, sometimes enveloping her head and shoulders as though she were looking through a storm of anger, she called on G.o.d to witness that he was a cringing coward. She stood above him transformed into a superb though outraged figure of Liberty, lashing him with words that at any other time her tongue would have refused to speak; words, some of which she did not know the meaning but had heard from the lips of suffering soldiers. Unconsciously she was following the maxim of a famous officer who one day said to her that all men are cowards somewhere, but brave everywhere if sufficiently aroused; and now she brutally strove to bruise his soul, hysterically telling herself that if it could be made to bleed it would become purified.

Much of this, owing to her incoherence and the noise of battle--and, perhaps, the chaotic tumult in his brain--was unheard; but some little of it registered, for suddenly he turned upon his knees and stared at her, as though his normal faculties were beginning to quicken. For half a minute he stared. No words, no gestures, could have been as eloquent as the look which burned from his pale, haggard face; it was as liquid fire being poured upon the woman for whom he had once avowed a love, and who now cursed him! The tableau, with its weird setting--her condemnation as a whip of flame curled snake-like above his head--might have been a picture put into life, and called "The Flagellation of a Soul"! Then, clapping his hands to his ears, he bowed his head, shrieking:

"Stop it! You hurt!"

"I intend to hurt," she cried down at him. "If you were in the Army you'd be stood before the wall and shot for this!--maybe they'll do it yet! Thank G.o.d, the people at home can't see you, you d.a.m.nable coward!"

Yet with her next breath she was wailing to the torn world and tortured air: "Tell me that I've lied! Oh, Jeb, tell me that I've lied!"

He pressed his face again into the powdered earth, and something about his dogged att.i.tude said that she was going too far. Her woman's instinct sent this warning just in time, abruptly causing her to realize that a self-esteem once crushed into complete abas.e.m.e.nt can never look upon fellow man with its former level eyes--and she was here to save, not to destroy! The crouching figure on whom she had inflicted a wound without having done the slightest good, was, after all, a big, imaginative child in a vast night, utterly unprepared by rearing and training, psychology or properly directed thought, to cope with this demon-carnival into which he had been projected. And why should not the sh.e.l.l's concussion have stunned him into this sad plight?

Retrospection flickering as a shadow picture on the brain has more than once averted tragedies. In the pa.s.sing of a second she now saw two long-ago scenes: one, his desperate and victorious fight with a boy who had kicked her puppy; the other, neighbors rushing with blankets to a nearby pond, calling that he had swum out and saved a drowning lad--nearly perishing in the effort! While she stared, still horrified; while sh.e.l.ls rent the air, and dust and smoke half blinded her, a spirit of maternalism began to plead for this one-time schoolmate--champion of her little dog, life-saver to a comrade! What had she done but add to the agony of one already agonized beyond his power to escape!

A great pity filled her soul, and her body seemed to become liquefied into a tossing sea of tears. With a sob she bent over him and, as all ages of womanhood instinctively understand, gently drew his head against her breast.

"Oh, Jeb! Can't you pull yourself together? Won't you try to be a man?"

she asked fiercely.

He staggered up and backed against the crater, holding his hands out to keep her off when she would have followed. But his cheeks had turned from white to crimson, and his eyes flashed a holy, or an unholy, fire.

"I hope to G.o.d I never get back to-night," he cried hoa.r.s.ely. "I hope to G.o.d you'll never have to look at anything as despicable as I've been!"

It was he now who occupied the place of the mighty, and she the one who felt like cowering. Turning savagely he all but tossed the unconscious soldier to his shoulders, struggled up the sh.e.l.l hole and ran toward the dressing-stations. Scarcely knowing that her feet touched ground, she flew behind him; sobbing, laughing, wringing her hands--lifted by the great storm of victory which swept her soul.

But at the deserted trench he stopped, laid his burden on the little bridge and turned back.

"Jeb, take him all the way in," she pleaded, catching at his sleeve--but he shook off her hand, yelling like a madman:

"You can get help from here!--don't touch me!--I ain't fit!"

The next instant he was dashing headlong into the smoke. Frantically she screamed:

"Come back!--Jeb!--your unit!"

But she might have made the men on Mars hear as easily. Once she started to run after him, yet the fruitlessness of such a chase--and, more important still, the unconscious soldier's claim for aid--checked her.

Blinded by tears, she dashed up the road and down to the quadrangle, staggered into the dug-out, and cried in a strange voice to Bonsecours:

"There's a man out there I can't bring in!"

He sprang up as if electrified. But her words had not alarmed him so much as her appearance and, in desperation catching her by the shoulders, he demanded:

"What has happened--tell me!"

"N--nothing," she sank upon the box, burying her face in her folded arms. She was sobbing hysterically now, and nurses rarely did this--until they snapped!

"Tell me!--tell me!" he cried, leaning over her, and fighting as he had never fought to keep from holding her close to him. His heart had been too nearly starved, his strength too nearly exhausted, to withstand a scene like this. "If you pity me, tell me what has happened," he implored.

She did not look up, but impulsively reached for one of his hands and pressed it fiercely, almost savagely, against her cheek. This must have been the comfort she needed, this touch of a man who was every inch a man, because the sobs at once grew quiet; and, in full control of her nerves, she arose, saying urgently:

"Quick! He's on the trench bridge!"

As in a dream, the great Bonsecours sprang out.

CHAPTER XIII

Jeb dashed blindly ahead, indifferent to sh.e.l.ls and death, not caring where he went so that it was toward the thick of battle. He wanted to be killed; he wanted to die as Hastings died, showing the world how real men are capable of making the last big sacrifice. But his torturing conscience laughed at the presumption, for Hastings had typified a faultless courage; and his brain ceaselessly echoed the scorn which Marian had hurled at him, spurring him as rowels of hot steel to greater speed.

The smoke, as a heavy fog, shrouded the uncontested No Man's Land, being quite impenetrable beyond a radius of fifty yards. It was as though he were running constantly beneath a low, flattened dome which kept accurate pace with him, through the sides of whose inverted rim new objects sprang into view with almost magic suddenness. Yet he saw little of anything beyond a girl's look of horror, heard nothing but her outraged words. Scarcely knowing it he hurdled prostrate figures, stumbled into craters, tripped on vagrant ends of wire entanglements, till at last, through sheer exhaustion, he fell face down amidst a small group of the dead.

His maddened race had taken him close to the scene of battle; indeed, he had crossed the old first and second German trenches without observing them, so completely demolished had they been by the French _barrage_.

The fighting was yet somewhere beyond, although not waged with anything like the intensity of an hour ago. The artillery had almost entirely ceased, and the lesser rattle of machine-guns was diminishing. Yet he listened, trying to locate the thickest part of it, intending to push there as soon as he regained his breath; but always just above the noises came Marian's burning words, and for awhile he lay with tightly closed eyes, letting them beat upon him as blows.

Gradually, as his breathing grew more normal, other words mingled with hers in a kind of verbal potpourri--jumbled and unmeaning, yet soon getting clear of the confusion and sounding in his ears like a clarion voice:

"When man calls on the highest expression of his will, he becomes indomitable; he succeeds in the highest terms of success--and thus will you succeed, _mon pauvre enfant_!"

He thought this over with a sense of comfort. It _would_ feel good to become indomitable, to succeed in the highest terms of success! Had he ever stopped, and with solemn deliberation called upon the highest expression of his will? He tried to remember. Surely he had given no thought to will power when tossed into the ocean from the sinking ship--nor at any time since coming to this battle front! Each day, from the historic Sixth of April even unto the present minute, he unsparingly admitted, had been spent by him amidst concocted fears and magnified dangers; but never once had he buried his teeth in a single manly purpose, as Tim might have expressed it. This brought Tim to mind, and the many sane things he had said aboard ship. Then another voice, enriched not alone by affection but by the pride of age as it had spoken 'way back yonder in the Hillsdale _Eagle_ office:

"I want to be proud of you," it now said calmly. "You're going out to play a mighty big game, boy, wherein Humanity is trumps, and Patriotism, Righteousness and Service are the other three aces. Yet, even if you hold all these, you may still lose unless you possess one more magic card: Self-respect! We all owe to our soul a certain measure of self-respect, Jeb. It is a gentleman's personal debt of honor to himself, demanding payment before every other obligation, and is satisfied only when we face each of life's crises with steel-tipped, crystal courage!"

Jeb rolled despairingly over on his back, gripping his hands and whispering:

"Oh, G.o.d, give me that steel-tipped, crystal courage!"

The sun had set, and with its decline the battlefield grew peculiarly still. A barely perceptible current of air was stirring, and he watched the low canopy of smoke slowly drifting; feeling very small amidst the dead and desolation as he fancied that it might be a silent, winged army of souls gliding eastward to a new dawn.

Suddenly he wondered about the battle--what had become of it! Except for desultory cannonading far to the left, perfect quiet, almost peace, reigned over the darkening ground. In the region where he lay, human pa.s.sions seemed to have burned into ashes as cold and lifeless as the six or eight calm bodies near to him. He knew the Allies were silently consolidating their gains while, beyond, the Germans strengthened positions for another resistance; the armies of construction were creating what armies of destruction would furiously undo. So uncannily silent had the immediate world become that now, for the first time, he noticed a singing in his ears, caused by twelve hours of h.e.l.lish concussions--and then, coming more completely to himself, he discovered that for the first time in many days he was hungry.

Jeb sat up and seriously took stock of himself. He had come here to die, but was beginning to resent the very thought of it; he had run to get away from--what? Disgrace and mortification? Why continue to suffer these if a means were at hand to wipe them off the slate? For what purpose should he be disgraced and mortified if, henceforth, he played a man's part! Near his feet was a dead soldier whose face happened to be turned directly toward him, and through the gathering twilight Jeb saw that the eyes were open, steadily fixed upon him as if waiting to see what he would decide. But this ghastly picture brought him no feeling of revulsion as it might have, earlier; instead, he gazed back for quite a minute, seeming to discover in the dead eyes an expression of reproach so poignant that he finally whispered:

"I don't blame you, old fellow; I haven't done the right thing, at all."