Chapter M: R. S. Andrews: The Perfect Tribute; François Coppee: The (3)

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 youse, 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 theater 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 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 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 center 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 theaters 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 _maître d’hôtel_ 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.
Everyone in it contributed to his pleasure and to his comfort. In
this world he was not starved nor man-handled. 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, “_Numéro 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 aren’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 were 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 coastline, 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 anyone written or cabled?” the Lieutenant spoke, hurriedly. He
was fearful lest the figure should disappear altogether before he
could obtain his answer. “Has anyone 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, maybe 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 anyway 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 the 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
rapidly drawing 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
anyone 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’ve 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 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 woman
waving a welcome home.

The Lieutenant surveyed the spectacle with cynical disbelief. He was
far too wise and far too cunning to be bewitched by it. In his heart
he pitied the men about him, who laughed wildly, and shouted, and
climbed recklessly to the rails and ratlines. He had been deceived
too often not to know that it was not real. He knew from cruel
experience that in a few moments the tall buildings would crumble
away, the thousands of columns of white smoke that flashed like snow
in the sun, the busy, shrieking tug-boats, and the great statue
would vanish into the sea, leaving it gray and bare. He closed his
eyes and shut the vision out. It was so beautiful that it tempted
him: but he would not be mocked, and he buried his face in his
hands. They were carrying the farce too far, he thought. It was
really too absurd; for now they were at a wharf which was so real
that, had he not known by previous suffering, he would have been
utterly deceived by it. And there were great crowds of smiling,
cheering people, and a waiting guard of honor in fresh uniforms, and
rows of police pushing the people this way and that; and these men
about him were taking it all quite seriously and making ready to
disembark, carrying their blanket-rolls and rifles with them.

A band was playing joyously, and the man in the next cot, who was
being lifted to a stretcher, said, “There’s the Governor and his
staff; that’s him in the high hat.” It was really very well done.
The Custom-house and the Elevated Railroad and Castle Garden were as
like to life as a photograph, and the crowd was as well handled as a
mob in a play. His heart ached for it so that he could not bear the
pain, and he turned his back on it. It was cruel to keep it up so
long. His keeper lifted him in his arms, and pulled him into a dirty
uniform which had belonged, apparently, to a much larger man—a man
who had been killed probably, for there were dark-brown marks of
blood on the tunic and breeches. When he tried to stand on his feet,
Castle Garden and the Battery disappeared in a black cloud of night,
just as he knew they would; but when he opened his eyes from the
stretcher, they had returned again. It was a most remarkably vivid
vision. They kept it up so well. Now the young Doctor and the
hospital steward were pretending to carry him down a gangplank and
into an open space; and he saw quite close to him a long line of
policemen, and behind them thousands of faces, some of them women’s
faces—women who pointed at him and then shook their heads and cried,
and pressed their hands to their cheeks, still looking at him. He
wondered why they cried. He did not know them, nor did they know
him. No one knew him; these people were only ghosts.

There was a quick parting in the crowd. A man he had once known
shoved two of the policemen to one side, and he heard a girl’s voice
speaking his name, like a sob; and She came running out across the
open space and fell on her knees beside the stretcher, and bent down
over him, and he was clasped in two young, firm arms.

“Of course it is not real, of course it is not She,” he assured
himself. “Because She would not do such a thing. Before all these
people She would not do it.”

But he trembled and his heart throbbed so cruelly that he could not
bear the pain.

She was pretending to cry.

“They wired us you had started for Tampa on the hospital ship,” She
was saying, “and Aunt and I went all the way there before we heard
you had been sent North. We have been on the cars a week. That is
why I missed you. Do you understand? It was not my fault. I tried to
come. Indeed, I tried to come.”

She turned her head and looked up fearfully at the young Doctor.

“Tell me, why does he look at me like that?” she asked. “He doesn’t
know me. Is he very ill? Tell me the truth.” She drew in her breath
quickly. “Of course you will tell me the truth.”

When she asked the question he felt her arms draw tight about his
shoulders. It was as though she was holding him to herself, and from
someone who had reached out for him. In his trouble he turned to his
old friend and keeper. His voice was hoarse and very low.

“Is this the same young lady who was on the transport—the one you
used to drive away?”

In his embarrassment, the hospital steward blushed under his tan,
and stammered.

“Of course it’s the same young lady,” the Doctor answered, briskly.
“And I won’t let them drive her away.” He turned to her, smiling
gravely. “I think his condition has ceased to be dangerous, Madam,”
he said.

People who, in a former existence, had been his friends, and Her
brother, gathered about his stretcher and bore him through the crowd
and lifted him into a carriage filled with cushions, among which he
sank lower and lower. Then She sat beside him, and he heard Her
brother say to the coachman, “Home, and drive slowly and keep on the
asphalt.”

The carriage moved forward, and She put her arm about him, and his
head fell on her shoulder, and neither of them spoke. The vision had
lasted so long now that he was torn with the joy that after all it
might be real. But he could not bear the awakening if it were not,
so he raised his head fearfully and looked up into the beautiful
eyes above him. His brows were knit, and he struggled with a great
doubt and an awful joy.

“Dearest,” he said, “is it real?”

“Is it real?” she repeated.

Even as a dream, it was so wonderfully beautiful that he was
satisfied if it could only continue so, if but for a little while.

“Do you think,” he begged again, trembling, “that it is going to
last much longer?”

She smiled, and bending her head slowly, kissed him.

“It is going to last—always,” she said.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

A SOURCE OF IRRITATION
By STACY AUMONIER

TO look at old Sam Gates you would never suspect him of having
nerves. His sixty-nine years of close application to the needs of
the soil had given him a certain earthy stolidity. To observe him
hoeing, or thinning out a broad field of turnips, hardly attracted
one’s attention, he seemed so much part and parcel of the whole
scheme. He blended into the soil like a glorified swede.
Nevertheless, the half-dozen people who claimed his acquaintance
knew him to be a man who suffered from little moods of irritability.

And on this glorious morning a little incident annoyed him
unreasonably. It concerned his niece, Aggie. She was a plump girl
with clear, blue eyes, and a face as round and inexpressive as the
dumplings for which the county was famous. She came slowly across
the long sweep of the downland and, putting down the bundle wrapped
in a red handkerchief which contained his breakfast and dinner, she
said:

“Well, Uncle, is there any noos?”

Now, this may not appear to the casual reader to be a remark likely
to cause irritation, but it affected old Sam Gates as a very silly
and unnecessary question. It was, moreover, the constant repetition
of it which was beginning to anger him. He met his niece twice a
day. In the morning she brought his bundle of food at seven, and
when he passed his sister’s cottage on the way home to tea at five
she was invariably hanging about the gate, and she always said in
the same voice:

“Well, Uncle, is there any noos?”

Noos! What noos should there be? For sixty-nine years he had never
lived farther than five miles from Halvesham. For nearly sixty of
those years he had bent his back above the soil. There were, indeed,
historic occasions. Once, for instance, when he had married Annie
Hachet. And there was the birth of his daughter. There was also a
famous occasion when he had visited London. Once he had been to a
flower-show at Market Roughborough. He either went or didn’t go to
church on Sundays. He had had many interesting chats with Mr. James
at the Cowman, and three years ago had sold a pig to Mrs. Way. But
he couldn’t always have interesting noos of this sort up his sleeve.
Didn’t the silly zany know that for the last three weeks he had been
hoeing and thinning out turnips for Mr. Hodge on this very same
field? What noos could there be?

He blinked at his niece, and didn’t answer. She undid the parcel and
said:

“Mrs. Goping’s fowl got out again last night.”

“Ah,” he replied in a non-committal manner and began to munch his
bread and bacon. His niece picked up the handkerchief and, humming
to herself, walked back across the field.

It was a glorious morning, and a white sea mist added to the promise
of a hot day. He sat there munching, thinking of nothing in
particular, but gradually subsiding into a mood of placid content.
He noticed the back of Aggie disappear in the distance. It was a
mile to the cottage and a mile and a half to Halvesham. Silly
things, girls. They were all alike. One had to make allowances. He
dismissed her from his thoughts, and took a long swig of tea out of
a bottle. Insects buzzed lazily. He tapped his pocket to assure
himself that his pouch of shag was there, and then he continued
munching. When he had finished, he lighted his pipe and stretched
himself comfortably. He looked along the line of turnips he had
thinned and then across the adjoining field of swedes. Silver
streaks appeared on the sea below the mist. In some dim way he felt
happy in his solitude amidst this sweeping immensity of earth and
sea and sky.

And then something else came to irritate him: it was one of “these
dratted airyplanes.” “Airyplanes” were his pet aversion. He could
find nothing to be said in their favor. Nasty, noisy, disfiguring
things that seared the heavens and made the earth dangerous. And
every day there seemed to be more and more of them. Of course “this
old war” was responsible for a lot of them, he knew. The war was a
“plaguy noosance.” They were short-handed on the farm, beer and
tobacco were dear, and Mrs. Steven’s nephew had been and got wounded
in the foot.

He turned his attention once more to the turnips; but an “airyplane”
has an annoying genius for gripping one’s attention. When it appears
on the scene, however much we dislike it, it has a way of taking the
stage-center. We cannot help constantly looking at it. And so it was
with old Sam Gates. He spat on his hands and blinked up at the sky.
And suddenly the aëroplane behaved in a very extraordinary manner.
It was well over the sea when it seemed to lurch drunkenly and
skimmed the water. Then it shot up at a dangerous angle and
zigzagged. It started to go farther out, and then turned and made
for the land. The engines were making a curious grating noise. It
rose once more, and then suddenly dived downward, and came plump
down right in the middle of Mr. Hodge’s field of swedes.

And then, as if not content with this desecration, it ran along the
ground, ripping and tearing up twenty-five yards of good swedes, and
then came to a stop.

Old Sam Gates was in a terrible state. The aëroplane was more than a
hundred yards away, but he waved his arms and called out:

“Hi, you there, you mustn’t land in they swedes! They’re Mister
Hodge’s.”

The instant the aëroplane stopped, a man leaped out and gazed
quickly round. He glanced at Sam Gates, and seemed uncertain whether
to address him or whether to concentrate his attention on the
flying-machine. The latter arrangement appeared to be his ultimate
decision. He dived under the engine and became frantically busy. Sam
had never seen any one work with such furious energy; but all the
same it was not to be tolerated. It was disgraceful. Sam started out
across the field, almost hurrying in his indignation. When he
appeared within earshot of the aviator he cried out again:

“Hi! you mustn’t rest your old airyplane here! You’ve kicked up all
Mr. Hodge’s swedes. A noice thing you’ve done!”

He was within five yards when suddenly the aviator turned and
covered him with a revolver! And speaking in a sharp, staccato
voice, he said:

“Old Grandfather, you must sit down. I am very much occupied. If you
interfere or attempt to go away, I shoot you. So!”

Sam gazed at the horrid, glittering little barrel and gasped. Well,
he never! To be threatened with murder when you’re doing your duty
in your employer’s private property! But, still, perhaps the man was
mad. A man must be more or less mad to go up in one of those crazy
things. And life was very sweet on that summer morning despite
sixty-nine years. He sat down among the swedes.

The aviator was so busy with his cranks and machinery that he hardly
deigned to pay him any attention except to keep the revolver handy.
He worked feverishly, and Sam sat watching him. At the end of ten
minutes he appeared to have solved his troubles with the machine,
but he still seemed very scared. He kept on glancing round and out
to sea. When his repairs were complete he straightened his back and
wiped the perspiration from his brow. He was apparently on the point
of springing back into the machine and going off when a sudden mood
of facetiousness, caused by relief from the strain he had endured,
came to him. He turned to old Sam and smiled, at the same time
remarking:

“Well, old Grandfather, and now we shall be all right, isn’t it?”

He came close up to Sam, and then suddenly started back.

“_Gott!_” he cried, “Paul Jouperts!”

Bewildered, Sam gazed at him, and the madman started talking to him
in some foreign tongue. Sam shook his head.

“You no roight,” he remarked, “to come bargin’ through they swedes
of Mr. Hodge’s.”

And then the aviator behaved in a most peculiar manner. He came up
and examined Sam’s face very closely, and gave a sudden tug at his
beard and hair, as if to see whether they were real or false.

“What is your name, old man?” he said.

“Sam Gates.”

The aviator muttered some words that sounded something like “mare
vudish,” and then turned to his machine. He appeared to be dazed and
in a great state of doubt. He fumbled with some cranks, but kept
glancing at old Sam. At last he got into the car and strapped
himself in. Then he stopped, and sat there deep in thought. At last
he suddenly unstrapped himself and sprang out again and, approaching
Sam, said very deliberately:

“Old Grandfather, I shall require you to accompany me.”

Sam gasped.

“Eh?” he said. “What be talkin’ about? ’Company? I got these ’ere
loines o’ turnips—I be already behoind—”

The disgusting little revolver once more flashed before his eyes.

“There must be no discussion,” came the voice. “It is necessary that
you mount the seat of the car without delay. Otherwise I shoot you
like the dog you are. So!”

Old Sam was hale and hearty. He had no desire to die so
ignominiously. The pleasant smell of the Norfolk downland was in his
nostrils; his foot was on his native heath. He mounted the seat of
the car, contenting himself with a mutter:

“Well, that be a noice thing, I must say! Flyin’ about the country
with all they turnips on’y half thinned!”

He found himself strapped in. The aviator was in a fever of anxiety
to get away. The engines made a ghastly splutter and noise. The
thing started running along the ground. Suddenly it shot upward,
giving the swedes a last contemptuous kick. At twenty minutes to
eight that morning old Sam found himself being borne right up above
his fields and out to sea! His breath came quickly. He was a little
frightened.

“God forgive me!” he murmured.

The thing was so fantastic and sudden that his mind could not grasp
it. He only felt in some vague way that he was going to die, and he
struggled to attune his mind to the change. He offered up a mild
prayer to God, Who, he felt, must be very near, somewhere up in
these clouds. Automatically he thought of the vicar at Halvesham,
and a certain sense of comfort came to him at the reflection that on
the previous day he had taken a “cooking of runner beans” to God’s
representative in that village. He felt calmer after that, but the
horrid machine seemed to go higher and higher. He could not turn in
his seat and he could see nothing but sea and sky. Of course the man
was mad, mad as a March hare. Of what earthly use could _he_ be to
any one? Besides, he had talked pure gibberish, and called him Paul
something, when he had already told him that his name was Sam. The
thing would fall down into the sea soon, and they would both be
drowned. Well, well, he had almost reached three-score years and
ten. He was protected by a screen, but it seemed very cold. What on
earth would Mr. Hodge say? There was no one left to work the land
but a fool of a boy named Billy Whitehead at Dene’s Cross. On, on,
on they went at a furious pace. His thoughts danced disconnectedly
from incidents of his youth, conversations with the vicar, hearty
meals in the open, a frock his sister wore on the day of the
postman’s wedding, the drone of a psalm, the illness of some ewes
belonging to Mr. Hodge. Everything seemed to be moving very rapidly,
upsetting his sense of time. He felt outraged, and yet at moments
there was something entrancing in the wild experience. He seemed to
be living at an incredible pace. Perhaps he was really dead and on
his way to the kingdom of God. Perhaps this was the way they took
people.

After some indefinite period he suddenly caught sight of a long
strip of land. Was this a foreign country, or were they returning?
He had by this time lost all feeling of fear. He became interested
and almost disappointed. The “airyplane” was not such a fool as it
looked. It was very wonderful to be right up in the sky like this.
His dreams were suddenly disturbed by a fearful noise. He thought
the machine was blown to pieces. It dived and ducked through the
air, and things were bursting all round it and making an awful din,
and then it went up higher and higher. After a while these noises
ceased, and he felt the machine gliding downward. They were really
right above solid land—trees, fields, streams, and white villages.
Down, down, down they glided. This was a foreign country. There were
straight avenues of poplars and canals. This was not Halvesham. He
felt the thing glide gently and bump into a field. Some men ran
forward and approached them, and the mad aviator called out to them.
They were mostly fat men in gray uniforms, and they all spoke this
foreign gibberish. Some one came and unstrapped him. He was very
stiff and could hardly move. An exceptionally gross-looking man
punched him in the ribs and roared with laughter. They all stood
round and laughed at him, while the mad aviator talked to them and
kept pointing at him. Then he said:

“Old Grandfather, you must come with me.”

He was led to an iron-roofed building and shut in a little room.
There were guards outside with fixed bayonets. After a while the mad
aviator appeared again, accompanied by two soldiers. He beckoned him
to follow. They marched through a quadrangle and entered another
building. They went straight into an office where a very
important-looking man, covered with medals, sat in an easy-chair.
There was a lot of saluting and clicking of heels. The aviator
pointed at Sam and said something, and the man with the medals
started at sight of him, and then came up and spoke to him in
English.

“What is your name? Where do you come from? Your age? The name and
birthplace of your parents?”

He seemed intensely interested, and also pulled his hair and beard
to see if they came off. So well and naturally did he and the
aviator speak English that after a voluble examination they drew
apart, and continued the conversation in that language. And the
extraordinary conversation was of this nature:

“It is a most remarkable resemblance,” said the man with medals.
“_Unglaublich!_ But what do you want me to do with him, Hausemann?”

“The idea came to me suddenly, Excellency,” replied the aviator,
“and you may consider it worthless. It is just this. The resemblance
is so amazing. Paul Jouperts has given us more valuable information
than any one at present in our service, and the English know that.
There is an award of five thousand francs on his head. Twice they
have captured him, and each time he escaped. All the company
commanders and their staff have his photograph. He is a serious
thorn in their flesh.”

“Well?” replied the man with the medals.

The aviator whispered confidentially:

“Suppose, your Excellency, that they found the dead body of Paul
Jouperts?”

“Well?” replied the big man.

“My suggestion is this. To-morrow, as you know, the English are
attacking Hill 701, which for tactical reasons we have decided to
evacuate. If after the attack they find the dead body of Paul
Jouperts in, say, the second lines, they will take no further
trouble in the matter. You know their lack of thoroughness. Pardon
me, I was two years at Oxford University. And consequently Paul
Jouperts will be able to prosecute his labors undisturbed.”

The man with the medals twirled his mustache and looked thoughtfully
at his colleague.

“Where is Paul at the moment?” he asked.

“He is acting as a gardener at the Convent of St. Eloise, at
Mailleton-en-haut, which, as you know, is one hundred meters from
the headquarters of the British central army staff.”

The man with the medals took two or three rapid turns up and down
the room, then he said:

“Your plan is excellent, Hausemann. The only point of difficulty is
that the attack started this morning.”

“This morning?” exclaimed the other.

“Yes; the English attacked unexpectedly at dawn. We have already
evacuated the first line. We shall evacuate the second line at
eleven-fifty. It is now ten-fifteen. There may be just time.”

He looked suddenly at old Sam in the way that a butcher might look
at a prize heifer at an agricultural show and remarked casually:

“Yes, it is a remarkable resemblance. It seems a pity not to—do
something with it.”

Then, speaking in German, he added:

“It is worth trying. And if it succeeds, the higher authorities
shall hear of your lucky accident and inspiration, Herr Hausemann.
Instruct _Ober-lieutenant_ Schultz to send the old fool by two
orderlies to the east extremity of Trench 38. Keep him there till
the order of evacuation is given, then shoot him, but don’t
disfigure him, and lay him out face upward.”

The aviator saluted and withdrew, accompanied by his victim. Old Sam
had not understood the latter part of the conversation, and he did
not catch quite all that was said in English; but he felt that
somehow things were not becoming too promising, and it was time to
assert himself. So he remarked when they got outside:

“Now, look ’ee ’ere, Mister, when am I goin’ to get back to my
turnips?”

And the aviator replied, with a pleasant smile:

“Do not be disturbed, old Grandfather. You shall get back to the
soil quite soon.”

In a few moments he found himself in a large gray car, accompanied
by four soldiers. The aviator left him. The country was barren and
horrible, full of great pits and rents, and he could hear the roar
of artillery and the shriek of shells. Overhead, aëroplanes were
buzzing angrily. He seemed to be suddenly transported from the
kingdom of God to the pit of darkness. He wondered whether the vicar
had enjoyed the runner beans. He could not imagine runner beans
growing here; runner beans, aye, or anything else. If this was a
foreign country, give him dear old England!

_Gr-r-r! bang!_ Something exploded just at the rear of the car. The
soldiers ducked, and one of them pushed him in the stomach and
swore.

“An ugly-looking lout,” he thought. “If I wor twenty years younger,
I’d give him a punch in the eye that ’u’d make him sit up.”

The car came to a halt by a broken wall. The party hurried out and
dived behind a mound. He was pulled down a kind of shaft, and found
himself in a room buried right underground, where three officers
were drinking and smoking. The soldiers saluted and handed them a
type-written dispatch. The officers looked at him drunkenly, and one
came up and pulled his beard and spat in his face and called him “an
old English swine.” He then shouted out some instructions to the
soldiers, and they led him out into the narrow trench. One walked
behind him, and occasionally prodded him with the butt-end of a gun.
The trenches were half full of water and reeked of gases, powder,
and decaying matter. Shells were constantly bursting overhead, and
in places the trenches had crumbled and were nearly blocked up. They
stumbled on, sometimes falling, sometimes dodging moving masses, and
occasionally crawling over the dead bodies of men. At last they
reached a deserted-looking trench, and one of the soldiers pushed
him into the corner of it and growled something, and then
disappeared round the angle. Old Sam was exhausted. He leaned
panting against the mud wall, expecting every minute to be blown to
pieces by one of those infernal things that seemed to be getting
more and more insistent. The din went on for nearly twenty minutes,
and he was alone in the trench. He fancied he heard a whistle amidst
the din. Suddenly one of the soldiers who had accompanied him came
stealthily round the corner, and there was a look in his eye old Sam
did not like. When he was within five yards the soldier raised his
rifle and pointed it at Sam’s body. Some instinct impelled the old
man at that instant to throw himself forward on his face. As he did
so he was aware of a terrible explosion, and he had just time to
observe the soldier falling in a heap near him, and then he lost
consciousness.

His consciousness appeared to return to him with a snap. He was
lying on a plank in a building, and he heard some one say:

“I believe the old boy’s English.”

He looked round. There were a lot of men lying there, and others in
khaki and white overalls were busy among them. He sat up, rubbed his
head, and said:

“Hi, Mister, where be I now?”