That men and women loved Jethniah and encouraged him heartily in his weakness is not to be wondered at. For it is a singular fact that, whereas few persons can persuade themselves that they are beautiful, or profoundly wise, or inordinately brave, and only a very few extremely happy folks can delude themselves into believing that they are all three, yet practically all people in their secret hearts believe that they can sing, or, what is the same thing, that theycouldsing if they were encouraged.
Thus Jethniah, who in the long years had given up the exacting and critical attitude of the teacher and had developed a broad charity in art which looked only to the spirit and good will of the performance, encouraged and gave license to the craving that lies deep in all men's souls, to lift up their heads and howl. Men and women, who, left to themselves, would no more have dared try to sing than they would have attempted to walk a tight rope, shouted themselves hoarse and happy under Jethniah's all-condoning tuning fork.
When McQuade had hoped devoutly that Mr. Gamblin had not forgotten it, he referred, of course, to the justly celebrated tuning fork. Now when Jethniah had eaten all the wax that McQuade could press upon him, and when everyone else had stopped from sheer inability to proceed, McQuade was anxious for further festivities.
But Jethniah was unwontedly reluctant about starting a singing match. He felt half afraid to get upon his feet for he was aware that the centre of gravity in his short, round body had been shifted by the quantities ofsugar which he had eaten so that, standing, he would have been in the state which Physics callsunstable equilibrium, and his stomach was so full that, for certain physiological reasons, he was afraid to strain his diaphragm with the effort of singing. He had had a brisk walk against a stiff, cold wind, and the warm, full condition of his stomach and the heated air of the cabin combined to throw a heavy lethargy over him. Jethniah at that point would have given a great deal to be allowed to take a short nap. But McQuade was for immediate action.
"Never tell us ye left your music at home on the piano rack! Ye did not, for ye couldn't, unless ye were to leave your head there too. For it's in that round head o' yours that ye carry the finest ripertor of good tunes and words with them of any man in the country. There's not a postmaster in all these great United States that has the songs an' the music in him that ye have," McQuade cajoled.
"It's right hard on the voice," complained Jethniah, standing on professional grounds, "to sing after heavy eatin'."
"Eatin'?" said McQuade contemptuously. "I don't call that eatin' at all. We'lleatafter we've had a song or two. You'll sing, an' I'll sing, an' we'll all sing. Out with the tunin' fork!"
"Can't you tell a few lies, till we get our breath?" Jethniah suggested weakly.
"No. We'll have all the night to tell stories in after the girls are in bed. Now we'll sing," McQuade announced mercilessly.
Jethniah brought out the tuning fork reluctantly, snapping it critically and holding it up to his ear and listening doubtfully to the tone. He seemed to be artistically dissatisfied with the instrument and to be very hopeless as to the success of the whole project ofsinging. The truth was that he knew he was not in good fettle for singing and he was nervous about Wardwell and Augusta because they were, after all, strangers, and they might laugh.
But when McQuade had cleared away the pans of snow, Jethniah stretched himself as far as he dared and began to take an interest. He struck the tuning fork on the table several times, and as he listened his face became each time a little more hopeful.
Finally he caught the tone satisfactorily and announced, with a rising sweep of his free hand:
"Oh He Hum Ha-a-a-ah," crescendo, and holding the last note while he beamed and nodded hopefully around his audience.
"We will sing 'John Brown's Body' first," Jethniah announced. He arose manfully and smote the tuning fork sharply on the table. And again he gave the key note, this time with authority and confidence.
"All sing!"
It was rather a straggling performance, for the boys and men working around the fires came along two or three notes behind the leaders, and McQuade and Wardwell were so full of sugar that they could hardly do more than grunt. But when Jethniah heard Augusta's voice with him he took mighty heart and together they carried it through to a triumph.
Jethniah now awoke to the possibilities of the occasion. He had come here primarily to eat sugar. But in the prospect of a brilliant singing affair he was willing to forget even the first sugar eating of the season. If only he had not eaten quite so much already!
He next called for "Annie Laurie," and when that went through to a decided success, Jethniah was so carried that he insisted on rendering the "Kerry Dancers," which he had learned on Sundays spent fishing with McQuade.
And McQuade returned the compliment in a way that went to Mr. Gamblin's heart.
"Jethniah," he reminisced, in the pause that followed their latest effort, "d' ye mind the day we were fishin' the Racquette away below Forked Lake, and ye made a little song all out of your own head and sang it for me?"
"Does seem to me now," said Jethniah hesitating. McQuade was the best of friends, but he was an inveterate joker and Jethniah was always a little afraid of his humor when there was company. "But I can't just think right now. What about it?" he inquired cautiously. He remembered the little song very well. He had been humming it to himself ever since that day last summer when he had sung it for McQuade, but he had never had the hardihood to bring it out and teach it to people as his own composition. Jethniah was a kindly man, and easily hurt; and in this matter he had all of the fledgling author's fear of ridicule.
"Then it's me that remembers," said McQuade, triumphantly pulling a wallet from his hip pocket. From the wallet he drew out a little account book and found in it the page for which he looked. He handed it, open, to Jethniah, saying:
"There it's for you now. I copied it fair that day an' told you it ought to be in print. Let's hear it now, Jethniah, and we'll all learn it and give it a rousin' send off. Sing up, man! Sing up!"
Mr. Gamblin took the little book and began adjusting his spectacles to his kindling eyes. He was so proud and so pleased with McQuade's graceful thought that his hand shook as he held the little book up to the light of a lantern. Of course he knew the words by heart, but not for worlds would he have foregone the heady delight of reading his own work as it had been copied by some one who had thought well of it. It was almost as good as if he had actually seen it in print.
Finally he turned to McQuade and looked up at him over the rims of the spectacles. There was a misty dimness in the kindly, honest old eyes as he silently thanked his friend.
"Sing up, man. Sing up—Or I'll howl it meself!" blustered McQuade.
Jethniah began to hum, and then to sing tentatively. But his enthusiasm quickly mounted above his shyness, and grasping the tuning fork in a stout hand he brought it down sharply on the table. Then taking the fresh tone boldly and beating time with McQuade's little book in one hand and the tuning fork in the other, he struck bravely into his little song.
Sang Jethniah:
"Get up with the sun in themorn-ing,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing.Lie low in your bed till thenoon-time,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing."Work hard till the end like agoodman,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing.Come fishing and sing till thesun-down,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing."Who picks out my work for theLongDay,Tell Him I want to doboththings.Tell Him I want to doboththings."
"Get up with the sun in themorn-ing,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing.Lie low in your bed till thenoon-time,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing."Work hard till the end like agoodman,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing.Come fishing and sing till thesun-down,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing."Who picks out my work for theLongDay,Tell Him I want to doboththings.Tell Him I want to doboththings."
"Get up with the sun in themorn-ing,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing.Lie low in your bed till thenoon-time,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing.
"Work hard till the end like agoodman,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing.Come fishing and sing till thesun-down,Nowthat'sa beautiful thing.
"Who picks out my work for theLongDay,Tell Him I want to doboththings.Tell Him I want to doboththings."
Never did poet and songster have a happier audience for his maiden effort, for before he had gotten to the second verse they were joining him in the refrain and assuring himthatthat was a beautiful thing. And when it was finished McQuade led round after round of applause, while the boys roared and cheered around the fires.
"Again!" shouted McQuade. "Let us hear it again, till we learn it, an' we'll sing the roof off with it."
Again Jethniah smote the table with the tuning fork and sang now as though he would burst his stout old heart. And then they all stood about him, the boys towering and blackened like young Vulcans from their work among the fires, and Jethniah led a triumph that roared above the panting of the fires and shook the rafters of the solid old cabin. It was the supreme moment of Jethniah's life. And McQuade, whose heart was big for his friend's glory—and who dearly loved a racket anyway—wanted to fill that moment to the very brim. Again and again they had to sing through the song, until, in very pity for Jethniah, Fan McQuade put a partial stop upon the performance.
"Are you trying to save sugar by making your guests sing all night," she said pointedly to her husband.
McQuade apologized loudly and ran for the snow pans. They sat down again, and, to Wardwell's astonished delight and to Augusta's dismay, they found that their appetite for wax was practically undulled.
But Augusta soon saw that Fan McQuade was very tired—she and McQuade, since sun-rise, had driven fifty miles over the most frightful of roads—and Augusta herself was glad to have this as an excuse for pleading that she and Mrs. McQuade be allowed to retire to their beds in the little camp house, for she knew that as long as she stayed she would inevitably eat more sugar, and, in spite of McQuade's assurances, she was afraid of the consequences.
As McQuade had predicted, they told lies after the "girls" were gone to bed. But it was evident that the singing was not neglected. For, ever and again during the night, Augusta, dozing lightly in her hammock, was awakened to listen sleepily to Jethniah's pleasant philosophy of a future in which he would like to be upand doing and be dozing abed, be working and loafing, all at the same time.
Augusta and Wardwell long remembered this night. It was not that it was marked by any occurrence vital to themselves. It was merely the first night since they had come out upon the road that they had been separated. But it was full of new experiences for them, and somehow it seemed to mark an epoch, to put an end to one thing and to begin another.
McQuade and his Fan left the next day, already anxious to be at home, for Spring on the big dairy farm that was their home was a busy and important time.
Other parties, invited by the McQuade boys, and some that were not invited, came to eat sugar. But Jimmie and Augusta did not join in any of these festivities. Augusta knew that few people had Mr. Gamblin's ready sympathy or McQuade's big, hearty understanding. She did not care to be stared at and questioned as the curiosity that had come into the country in a gypsy wagon and had lived so strangely all winter in the sugar camp. She had learned that a sparsely settled country neighborhood is the most inquisitive and imaginative community in the world. And while she had laughed with Wardwell over the strange stories that were told, and believed, to account for their presence here, yet she did not propose to put herself upon exhibition.
The sugar season was over quickly, for the sap runs only in the brief period while the frost is actually leaving the ground, and it was a matter only of days until the men were hurriedly gathering the buckets and scalding them out and scouring the boiling pans to be stored away for the year under the rafters of the big cabin. Then they loaded their ox carts with the golden garnering of their hard work and drove shouting away down roads that were mere wallows of soft snow and mud.
Augusta and Jimmie turned gladly back to the freedom and the quiet of their work. It had been a most wonderful winter for them. There must, in the actual constitution of human nature, have been times when they were both horribly lonesome, when they must have longed for something to happen or for the sight of a new face. But there was very little that was petty or unforgiving in either of them, and love, which came deeper and sweeter to them with every turning day, with growing understanding of each other, with little unthought, unstudied kindnesses, love blessed them with a happiness that was almost fearful.
Their work, too,—for they squabbled desperately over it at times—furnished a ready ground wire to conduct off the too high tension of living so closely and solely with each other. That amazing book, which had been written by a method that had nothing but originality to commend it, had come along so surprisingly that Wardwell, always a grudging critic of his own work, had walked around in violent alternations of feeling. At one moment he was confident that the work was fine, and ten minutes later he would be attacked by a sickening distrust that, after all, they must be "kidding themselves."
Augusta's faith had never wavered. She knew that the book was at all times as good as Jimmie's best, and she wanted nothing more than that. Measured in written words, her own part in it was not great. But Wardwell knew that, from the moment she had come into it, the soul of the book was Augusta's own spirit in it.
When it was finished and Jimmie had waded down through breast-deep January drifts to the railroad station to mail the manuscript, and had come back with empty hands, Augusta sat down and cried bitterly. She had gotten to so love the book that, toward the end,every physical touch that she gave it was a caress. And now that it was gone it seemed almost as though a little fledgling boy of theirs had been driven out into a cold, blustering world to make his way alone.
But Jimmie was crafty in waiting, and wise in ways to disappoint disappointment.
"Don't let them see that we're anxious, darling," he counselled warily. "Let's just keep saying that we don't care a rap, and that we expect it to be rejected anyway. Then maybe it'll get by." He had all of an Ethiopian's superstition that the little gods of mischief were always watching around to snatch away the thing on which one set his heart too openly.
"We'll get right to work on something else," he said, holding Augusta curled up in his lap and petting her, "and pretend that we've forgotten all about it." He remembered grim, waiting days in the past when he had listened to the postman's whistle and had not dared to go down like a man to see what the mail had brought him, but had peeped shame-faced down the stairs at the hall table where the letters were piled, always expecting to see the thick neat packet of manuscript that meant another hope rejected.
Now it was all different, for he had another to think of. And his anxiety was not for the outcome itself so much as it was to save Augusta from the bitterness of a first crushing disappointment. The best that they could expect—he tried to tell her—was that the book might be considered, and, perhaps, if they could make the changes that the publisher would be sure to want, might be finally accepted. But, in any case, it would be at least a year before the book would bring them anything, either advertising or reputation or money, or anything else.
In the very first place they must begin to write some things that might be quickly turned into money. Theymust do some short stories at once. He had some, Jimmie said, which had been bumping around in his head all the time while he had been busy with the book. Now he would round them up and put them to work. They must make some money right away.
If Augusta wondered at his sudden anxiety about money, she did not ask questions. She was not incurious, but she never pried. She knew that he was sensitive about money, and that he was becoming more so. But she did not know of any new reason for his hurry to make money. She had known vaguely that he must have borrowed money that time when he had bought Donahue back for her, but she knew that he would not wish to be questioned on the matter, and she had refrained from speculating on it.
Wardwell was beginning to know that, in that time, he had done something that in the nature of things was altogether wrong. He did not know just why it was so very wrong. But he knew that it was beginning to bother him a great deal. And, in a man's foolish way of only seeing one thing, he believed that if he could only get money now it would set the whole thing right.
They had gone to work then, gravely pretending to have forgotten all about the ship that had gone to sea. And, to an extent, they did forget it. For Jimmie had some very good ideas for short stories and he fell to work upon them with an energy that surprised himself. And Augusta at first pecking diffidently at the typewriter, and then striking boldly for herself into untried waters, found herself at the end of three days almost hopelessly bewildered and drifting. Her story, which had seemed so easy and simple in the starting, would not go forward. And for three days more she sat futilely writing pages which she knew she would presently tear up. Jimmie sat by and at times he grinned sympathetically, but he offered no help, except to threaten to takeAugusta out and roll her in the snow if she persisted in sitting too long and closely at the typewriter. Then, when she was almost ready to cry in despair, the story began somehow to move, and almost before she knew what was happening it ran out to a triumphant conclusion that she had hardly dreamed of.
It was a beautiful little story, wind bitten, sun sweet, like Augusta's own self. And Jimmie knew that it was true work. Though she begged him to re-write it for her as he had done with what she had composed for the book, Jimmie would not touch it. He showed her a few places where her lack of training to the trade had left defects in construction. And when she had copied in her own corrections he took the story and addressed it and carried it proudly down to the railroad station.
After that their waiting and anxiety was all for the fate of Augusta's little story. And when, a full week before there was any reasonable hope for an answer from it, Wardwell went down to the station and actually brought home an acceptance and a check for it, they forgot everything and danced and capered about the fire in Indian glee.
"I shall now," said Jimmie comfortably, sitting down as the excitement subsided a little, "devote myself to the instruction of an appreciative future generation. I'll write for posterity, while my wife writes for bread and bacon."
But Augusta was not there to hear. She had taken the check and run out through the snow, to show it to Donahue.
From that time on through the winter Jimmie's weekly journeyings down to the station were an event. They had agreed to avoid the use of Jethniah's much nearer post office, not because they had anything to conceal from their old friend but because they did not wish to be discussed by the inevitable winter gossipswho sat on Jethniah's nail kegs and pilfered his soda crackers, so they had mail only once in the week. And every week now there was something to be hoped for, some manuscript to be heard from which they both said aloud would probably come back rejected, but which in their secret hearts they both thought "might stick," as Jimmie sometimes diffidently phrased it. For Augusta had fallen into Jimmie's way of never voicing the highest hope, lest a jealous power should hear and blast it. And they were for all the world like a pair of old fashioned New England parents who would never dare boast about their offspring, for that would mean that the children would surely come to some bad end.
They were so busy, and so happy in the varying ups and downs of hopes, disappointments and realizations, that when the letter came saying that the publishers were pleased with Wardwell's book and that, if agreeable to him, they would forward him a contract for its publication on the usual royalty basis, it hardly caused any more than the usual weekly excitement. It did not, in fact, reach up to half the importance of Augusta's first little check.
Wardwell was not disappointed, for he had not expected any other proposal than this one that had been made for the book. But he was not exactly satisfied. He would have much preferred to try to get a cash offer for the manuscript. For he was still sensitive to the thought that Augusta had spent on account of him all the little money that had been left from her mother, and that she was now, even though they had both begun to earn some money, practically penniless. He thought that he could not feel right again until he had been able to put into her hands at least the amount of money which she had had in the beginning. It was a little, unworthy way of looking at the matter, comparedwith the unthought, whole-hearted way in which Augusta had done the thing—and Wardwell knew this. But Jimmie was not, in these days, seeing things with his usual clear vision.
There was another matter—a matter that had been hanging over him since the day when he had telegraphed for money to buy back Donahue—which was hanging over him and spoiling his imagination and his insight. However, there was nothing that he could do except to work on as rapidly as he could.
Now that the noisy interruption of the sugaring had passed they turned back happily to the habits of their work—if indeed their ways of doing things could be called habits, for they worked or played or ate, or did none of these things, very much as the spirit of the moment suggested.
They had been obliged to take Mr. Gamblin into their confidence, for the checks which had been coming were of no practical use to them here, and it was necessary to have a banker.
"Checks" said Jethniah, when Jimmie had shown him the first of their earnings and had asked him to deposit them. "I thought all checks had Boynton & Bailey's name on 'em, and was to pay the farmers for milk."
"You needn't cash them now you know, Mr. Gamblin. If you'll just let them go through your bank down in Tupper, why, you can give us the money any time after they've gone through and so you can't be taking any risk at all."
"Risk!" Jethniah grumbled. "Who said risk? I wouldn't know this here Eagle Publishing Coe from Adam's pet hyena if I met them both face to face, an' this here Bank of Manhattan may be an ingrowin' hole in the ground for all I know. But you've writ your name on the back of one of these checks and your wife's writhers on t'other. An' that says they're good. So they're good.
"That's me, every time. Just like a post in the mud."
He gave his trousers a premonitory heave, as if to advise them of what was going to happen. And striking down deep into the right fore pocket he pulled forth a good roll of bills and began to count.
"But say?" he queried, in a gentle, wondering tone that invited confidence. "Don't you honestly have to doanywork at all—just write down things—and have them send you checks?"
"Not another thing," Jimmie asserted stoutly.
"Gosh all Fish 'ooks!" Jethniah exploded admiringly. "Why don't everybody do it!"
"I don't know," said Wardwell solemnly. "I've always wondered."
As the weeks drew on into the opening Spring, Augusta, sensitive always as a poplar leaf, began to feel that from somewhere a crisis was impending upon them. There was no tangible thing that could be a source of apprehension to them. The question of money, which had once been terrible for them, was now happily resolving itself into the simplest incidental of their work. Jimmie, she was at last sure, could for the rest of his life laugh at the threat of the disease which had driven them out upon the road. The Winter, which had indeed been formidable for them, was past; and for the Summer, which would be coming before very long, they would be as comfortable and as nicely situated as they could wish. They were welcome to stay on here. Or, if they were tired of the solitude and the closeness of the life, they knew that they could now easily earn as much as they needed to live nicely in almost any place.
Materially, it was plain, nothing could threaten them. For they were now as independent as it is possible for two people to be on this earth, where the price ofliving must always be paid in some kind. Even what is called independent wealth could not have made them more free than they were, because, with that, they would have more things to fear than they now had.
But Augusta well knew that this presentiment, which came treacherously stealing upon her in the dreaming moments when her spirit was wandering alone and unguarded in that border land where dreams and good stories come from, was not warning her against any material happening.
With a prescience as cruel as eye-sight could have been, she knew that this thing would strike at her heart. And, her heart could only be hurt through Jimmie.
Long ago she had foreseen and trembled at this day when love would make a coward of her. And although many times in the year past she had been able to believe that Jimmie loved her truly, the way a man chooses his girl and wants her, and not from any prompting of duty or mere affection, yet the fact remained, unescapable and unanswerable:they had not started fair.
She had taken Jimmie at his word, when pity, and probably affection, and a pretty childish attractiveness, had prompted him to ask her to marry him. But, even then, she had known that it was not fair, for, even then, though neither of them would have believed this, she had been a woman while he was an impulsive boy.
It was true that even in that time she had loved him with a love which he would not have believed her capable of even guessing at. But that made no difference. Jimmie had not been free. Nothing that had since passed had altered that fact. And Augusta had cruelly whipped herself into believing, that even if Jimmie had not cared for her in any way, his quick heart and his kindness for her mother and herself would have made him do just what he had done in the circumstances. (She was able to believe this because she knew that sheherself, at that time, would have married the most repulsive man in the world if it had been a necessary condition for getting her mother out of the madhouse.)
All this had lain away covered in her mind through the months of happiness and well being and hopeful, heart-filling work. But it was inevitable, as she had always known, that it would one day come forth and stalk upon her.
The outward signs that the peace of her mind and the safety of her love were being threatened were indeed very slight. Jimmie was restless. Something was troubling him, that much she knew. Once or twice she had felt that he was on the point of speaking out, but the moment had passed and had left her with the dizzy, sinking feeling of a threat suspended.
Sometimes she was able to lull the feeling of foreboding evil by the thought that it was merely the Spring. Everything about them was restless and stirring and shooting forth buds and blades, and all the little rivers of life were running full. It was only to be expected that they themselves, coming out of the close, storm bound life of the Winter, should feel a stirring of unrest, an urge of discontent and energy, towards something new.
Also, she knew that their reading of the war in Europe had been having an unsettling effect upon both of them. In the days of last Summer and Fall, when Jimmie's health was her single thought and when he himself was still subject to recurrent days of feverishness during which the doings of the world lost their interest for him, the first news of the world's tragedy had come dribbling to them through occasional old newspapers borrowed from Mr. Gamblin's store, and it had hardly aroused in them anything more than a puzzled and only half believing wonder. Belgium was mutilated—But Jimmie's temperature must be watched.
Later, however, when the shadow was definitely lifted from Wardwell's life, they began to follow the war with an avidity that was proportional to their detachment from the diversions and worries which took up the thoughts of other people more normally situated. They subscribed for a New York daily paper, and when Jimmie came home from the station with a week's papers in a bundle they sat down and devoured them eagerly.
Augusta, all pity and eager partisanship for the innocent and for the right, was disappointed in Jimmie. He, being half boy and whole writing man, thought only of the noise and the whole whaling wonder of the thing, and she wondered that he could take it all so impartially. But now there came a May day when Jimmie came home with his bundle of mail and tramped heavily into the room, without speaking.
He walked over to where she sat at the typewriter. Before her, over the machine, he spread a paper and laid his hand on the broad headlines. They told of the Lusitania horror.
After a little he leaned over her shoulder, as she read in silence, and pointed down a column of the known dead to the name of a man—a writing man—whom he had loved.
He walked slowly over to the table in the corner and dropped the mail quietly. Augusta stole a look at him as he stood there, leaning over slightly, brooding, his big hands, rough and red from work and wind, knuckled down hard on the bare table.
She was struck by a sense of something missing. The boyishness was gone from Jimmie's face. And, with a little shiver, she knew that she would never see it again. Her playboy had vanished. She was looking at a man who had hardened into a mold within the hour.
She had never seen Jimmie angry, for he had practicallyno temper. And he was not angry now, in any ordinary sense of the word. His face was no study. It was plain, and ugly with a single emotion. The emotion was as plain, and as old, as blood—revenge.
But Augusta knew that it was not the restlessness of Spring that threatened her. And she knew that not even the sullen restiveness of a call of blood could hurt in the way that she was going to be hurt.
She was a woman. And she knew that only through a woman could she be wounded to her heart's depth. That strange prescience, that border land insight which had come to her in other times, and had sometimes been kind to her and sometimes cruel, had lately been turning up pictures to her mind. And although she had not admitted them to her ordinary, self-controlled consciousness, yet fragments of them always remained, and in spite of her will to dissolve them she found them becoming more and more clearly parts of a composite picture of a woman—the tall, black woman whom she had seen that day when the Irish gypsy girl had forced the cards into her hands.
Now this was all in spite of her will. Her good sense, as she called it, fought these things down again and again. She would not let herself be morbid. And yet, all the time, her soul was summoning courage against the blow. When she should know that Jimmie wanted to go from her, she must make him free. That had been in the bond from the beginning. She herself had put it in the vow of her marriage.
On a morning just beyond the middle of May when the plum trees were all in white blossom, which, as all the world knows, is the one elect time for brook fishing, Jimmie went fishing.
Augusta stayed at home with the avowed, and honest, intention of fixing a dress. Their clothes had stood the rough wear remarkably well. But, as goodclothes will do, now that they were beginning to go they seemed to give out everywhere at once.
But Augusta never took any pleasure in fixing her own clothes. So by the time she had taken down her good dress and looked it over, and had poked tentatively at several slightly worn places in it, she decided that it was Jimmie's wardrobe that really needed attention.
His one fair coat was not at all what it should be. And she knew there was a rip under the right armhole. She must do that first. She would give it a thorough beating and cleaning and let it hang a while in the sweetening sun. The first thing was to clean out the pockets and turn them wrong side out. He always carried such truck in his pockets! Cigarette papers, loose matches—it was a miracle that he didn't burn himself up, improvised lead sinkers, stubs of lead pencils, a few loose cartridges, letters from publishers, scraps and pieces that had once been white paper and had had parts of stories written on them. She shucked them all out on the table and stood looking down at them with some of the consternation and wonder with which a young mother looks at the amazing contents of her boy's trouser pockets.
Long afterwards it came to Augusta as one of the bitterest things of all that her blow should have come upon her in what might have been the way of cheap and tawdry melodrama. She might have been a snooping wife going jealously through her husband's pockets.
She stood there a long time staring down at a letter that, of its own power it seemed, stood out apart and separated from all the rest. She did not touch the letter. There was no power in her, nor no wish, to turn a page of it. It had no envelope. And it had, with insensate malice, spread out the whole of its front page to her eye.
It was a love letter, one link of a chain of established correspondence between a woman and Jimmie Wardwell.
After the first, heart-withering look at the page which gave her this complete, all-embracing intelligence, Augusta did not read. She stood staring dumbly, and then, still keeping her eyes helplessly on the page, she began to back, step by step, cowering away from it.
Creeping backward still, she came against the chair on which she had thrown her dress. Her hand went out mechanically and she grasped the dress, just where she had stuck the forgotten needle in it.
The pain of the piercing needle mercifully took her eyes away from that letter. She pulled the needle from where it had stuck in the palm of her hand, and mechanically brought the hurt up to her lips.
Then she looked at the dress. What was it doing there?
Oh yes! She remembered. She was going away. She had always known that she was going away. Now it was the time.
She took the dress and carried it over behind the little curtain of her hammock bed.
When she was ready to go, she sat down at the typewriter and wrote a line in the middle of a clean sheet of paper.
She was not herself, of course; and we do not know just what was passing in her mind. But she wrote:
We may not live together. We shall not die apart.
As she rose from the typewriter she looked again, because she could not help it, at the letter, and in the lower part of the page that lay open before her she saw clearly the words "your Jean."
She did not need these words to tell her what she already knew, that the letter was from the woman with whom Jimmie had promised to have nothing todo. For she had already seen, in the first moment, a flash of the woman's dark, handsome, discontented face.
But the written words, the written claim, roused in her a swelling, choking anger.
She would not go away! She would stay andfightthat women to the death for her love!
Yet all the time she knew that she would go. It was inevitable, as her heart had always somehow told her that this hour would inevitably come.
Except for his broken promise—That was unanswerable—she had no heart to blame Jimmie. She would not go in anger. In her heart she had sworn that, if this day should come, she would free him completely, and without bitterness.
She was going.
Her love was spoiled, tarnished; another had touched it. She could never again have the glory of it. Dear heart of life, how beautiful it had been! And she must go, lest in her weakness she should grovel and bring that one beautiful thing of life down into dust with her.
As she passed the stable, Donahue whinnied lovingly at the sound of her step. But she dared not stop. For she knew that if she stopped now, and broke down and cried with her pet and friend, the miserable end would be that she would run to where Jimmie was and throw herself on her knees to him and beg weakly for his love. And—the shame of it!—he would talk, and talk, and talk, and in the end she would live on with him, to hate herself and him.
So her eyes were dry and her little shoulders bravely set as she trudged on down through the fringe of trees and into the brook path.
She did not know the cross-cuts by which Jimmie went to the station every week—Oh yes, Jimmie went to the station every week!—but she knew the directionfairly well. She would find it. She did not know how many trains there were in the day, but she was quite sure that there would be one before she could be missed and overtaken. Jimmie had gone fishing for the day.
Now this last thing one would rather not tell. Studied design could not have found anything quite so cruel to have done to her. It is, in fact, left for accident and blind, silly coincidence to furnish the most terrible thrusts of life. When Augusta came, still dry-eyed and hurrying, down the dusty road to the little station, she saw a man going away from the station and starting across the fields. He did not see her.
It was Jimmie. He had not gone fishing.
"Charles of Burgundy Comes, Thirteen Fifty-Eight—"
"He's a boob if he comes here!"
"That don't mean comes, you nut," some scholar elucidated. "Comesmeans Duke. Charles, Duke of Burgundy. He built the bridge."
"Wish t'ell he'd built it straight east and west." Don Mallet threw down the thin stone tablet in disgust. It had landed a moment before in the pit of his stomach. A German shell exploding a little distance on the other side of the bridge coping had gently lobbed the stone plate out of the wall where it had rested four and a half centuries and shied it playfully at Mallet where he sat on the ground.
When Charles of Burgundy had his name cut in that stone tablet and had it set in the bridge he did not foresee Mallet, nor the need of a bridge running east and west.
But Mallet was here, and fifteen others, all heartily approving his wish for a slight change in the alignment of the bridge, all except a German machine gunner and an American corporal who lay head to head close under the coping of the wall, with the body of a "pup" tent stretched impartially over their heads, and who did not care.
This party, with a lieutenant in command, had crossed the river to the north side before dawn. Behind them from the hills beyond the river the American artillery, as fast as it could come up to the river brow, was getting to work, firing high above this party anda score of other parties that had crossed the river in the dark under orders to find cover and stay.
In the dark they had stumbled into a machine gun position on this little bridge over the dry bed of a creek. They had gone over the five-foot coping on their bellies, their rifles with bayonets fixed swinging free in their hands.
Of the five Germans who had been on the bridge only the man now lying here unconscious had seen the dawn come down the valley a few minutes later. For, as Patsy Murtha had remarked:
"That Kamerad stuff's all right when you can see what their hands are doin'. But, in the dark—!"
With the coming of the light five of the men had put on the tunics and helmets of those who had lately held the place and had stood about the guns, to show enemy watchers on the slopes and in the gullies to the north that things were quite as they should be, while the remainder of the men hid themselves under the coping of the bridge.
But the ruse did not avail them long. And this was why Don Mallet was dissatisfied with the direction of the bridge. If it had run more nearly east and west they would have been invisible from a certain wooded gully that cut down through the hill beyond the bridge and which, as happened, lay directly in line with the bridge.
The full light had revealed the men in American uniforms strung along under the coping of the bridge. What the German machine gunners in the gully thought is not pertinent. A driving blast of wind swept across the bridge propelled by a rain of machine gun bullets which cleaned the bridge as swiftly as if a giant broom were sweeping ants off it.
The five men on the bridge came tumbling over the coping rolling the machine guns with them andfalling in grunting heaps among their friends. It seemed that they were quite miraculously unscathed from the blast which had driven them from the bridge. For when they had gotten to sitting postures, the five, in prompt concert, ripped off the German jackets, wadded them into the helmets and shied the whole over the bank down into the dry bed of the creek below the bridge. That this action was not merely a matter of sentiment was proven by the fact that the five immediately pulled off their own clean American shirts and began to shake and search them severely. These men had not now for weeks lived in an established trench or dugout. From away beyond the Ourcq to here, above the Vesle, they had come foot by foot, always in the open, drifting and seeping, drifting and seeping, in and out among the rear lines of a foe who always retreated yet who always kicked back murderously. Sometimes they had fought as part of a battalion, creeping in a long thin Indian file around a nest of machine guns, dragging themselves prone through the grass or the standing grain, until the line was near enough to spring yelling upon the surrounded foe. They had fought and drifted, singly, in squads, going forward sometimes in dozens, dribbling back through in twos and threes. They had learned to sleep behind a fallen tree trunk with machine gun bullets sifting above their noses. But for three blessed weeks they had lived in the open, crossing running water every day—and they were body clean! The five men were at that moment more afraid of German lice than they were of the wind of death that was driving over their heads. All values are, of course, relative.
Sergeant Jimmie Wardwell, his body well hidden by the deep foliage of the tree in which he had taken his post, poked a long-nosed rifle out across a limb. It was a hunting rifle that he had borrowed one daytwo years ago from a Canadian named Bray Stewart, a long-limbed fellow with a friendly grin, a gentle gray eye, and an unconquerable obsession that this war was a deer hunt. Stewart was irrevocably convinced that if "they" really wanted to win the war they had only to put enough North Ontario farmer boys up in convenient trees and pot all the Germans on earth, up to five hundred yards. He had a scheme for making salt licks in No Man's Land.
But Stewart, Jock as they called him—all Stewarts are called Jock, had been sent into the mud flats of the upper Lys, where there were no trees, and where the best possible shelter was a ditch two thirds full of water. And Jock, on the very day when in mere discouragement he had lent the long hunting rifle to Wardwell—for what conceivable purpose the rifle had either been borrowed or lent will never be known—Jock that day inhaled some of the first poison gas which the progressive Hun had used and Jock had lain face down in his ditch and drowned.
Wardwell had taken this as a personal and gratuitous injury. He had not known Jock very much, for Wardwell had just come over from a training camp in England and been filtered into Jock's company, while Stewart had come over with the Canadian regiment almost in the beginning. Jock was a veteran soldier of nineteen, while Jimmie was green and a Yank to boot. But Wardwell had listened respectfully to Jock's lies about the hunting in the hills far up on the road to Cobalt, where they saw snow ten months of every year. And Jimmie had lied moderately and with good judgment about the hunting in his own hills. They had respected each other.
Since then Wardwell had kept the rifle by him, in violation of the Articles of War, in more or less secret defiance of barrack sergeants, against the expressedwishes of high and low command, and to the death of many individual Germans who never saw him.
A tall German under officer strutted out from the woody shelter of the gully between the hills and stood boldly out on the slope. Evidently he thought that he was out of effective range and he saw that his own guns were not reaching the men strung under the coping of the bridge. He must get a gun out on the slope here where it could sweep the Americans where they lay. His problem was as plain to his intended victims as it was to himself. The boys were already swinging their captured machine guns into line.
"Hold your cannon, till you need them," said the lieutenant, speaking quietly from where he lay out in the grass half way between the men and Wardwell's tree. "If Heine'll just hold that pose for another couple of seconds, Wardwell will—"
Wardwell did. Jock's long rifle grunted once. The German put his hand up sharply to his throat, turned half around, then gave a funny little attempt at a jump sidewise, as though something had suddenly risen in the path before him, and slid bumping down into the grass.
Two German privates came out of the cover and stood over the body of the fallen man. Wardwell held his hand, while his companions below waited, understanding. If these two had come out risking their lives to drag a wounded officer to shelter he would not shoot.
One of the men leaned down examining the prone figure in the grass. He straightened up almost immediately and made a deliberate kick at the body. That officer was dead.
Not one man of those watching by the bridge offered a word of comment. They had been daily, hourly, learning strange things about this enemy as theyfought and followed him. But they had come to no conclusions except the one safe one that Wardwell presently punctuated.
The man who had taken a kick at the dead man now stood with his legs straddled wide apart looking down at the bridge. He did not seem to expect any danger, and since Wardwell was using smokeless powder and there was plainly no firing from the men who could be seen it is quite possible that the German thought the officer had been killed by a stray bullet from his own side. When Wardwell fired again it seemed to the boys in their eagerness that they could almost follow the bullet in its course.
They could, in fact, only see that the man dropped vertically like a stone dropping, but some one said excitedly:
"Eight hundred feet and over, and a clean drill between the eyes! that aint luck, that's hate."
"You've got good eyes if you can see all that," drawled a Yankee boy from northern New York. "But he does seem to have a kind of a prejudice against the Beerheads, at that."
"He aint like us here," explained a philosopher from Glens Falls. "We come here to fight 'cause the fightin's good here. But this Wardwell gent, he's seen too much. He aint fightin' Germans now. He's executin' them. He uses a rifle 'cause he can't get to 'em with a rope."
The remaining German had started running for the shelter of the ravine, but Wardwell's chance shot at the moving target caught him in the hip and he tumbled headlong down out of sight.
Wardwell had come far since a day long ago upon the hills above the lake when he had drawn what he thought was a perfect sight on a chipmunk's eyes at fifty feet and had ruined a perfectly good sap bucket which hungforgotten a good six feet below where the chipmunk had been.
Developments soon showed what the officer had had in mind when he came out on the slope of the hill. Sand bags and stones began flying up out of the ravine until they formed a respectable pile on the edge of the hill. Behind these came loose dirt hastily shovelled over and beginning to mark the line of a trench. The Germans were burrowing into the side of the hill. They would quickly run a shallow trench out along the slope of the hill to a point fifty feet or so in the open, from which point, when they had dragged a heavy machine gun to it, they could sweep the Americans from where they lay under the wall of the little bridge.
The boys quickly trained the captured guns upon the moving line of dirt where it seemed as though a big mole was nosing his way along the face of the hill. But the elevation was sharply against them, and the lieutenant saw that they were hitting nothing for there was no mark above the dirt.
"Save your ammunition," he commanded, "and cover up the guns. They might be handy if we had to come back this way in a hurry.
"Put the two wounded men under the bridge and take cover in the creek bed."
The two men were quickly eased down into the dry water course under the bridge and left as comfortable as was possible, while the lieutenant called up to Wardwell:
"We'll have to depend on you for a lookout, Wardwell. They might try to rush the creek from above or below. Though I don't think the outfit across there is anxious to rush anything this way. Stay where you are while you can. But if you think they've spotted you, make your rush for the creek bed. Don't stay if it should become—useless."
"'Right, Sir,'" said Wardwell, smiling to himself among the leaves. He knew that the young officer had started to say: "Don't stay if it should become too hot for you." But he was getting used to the way they thought of him and spoke to him. It had started with the boys. They were Irish descent, most of these with whom he had been through these weeks, and, what was worse, they had been brigaded in with an old Irish regiment in the British army early in the summer. What their own ready working imagination had not taught them, about war and its superstitions and its queer and unreadable chances, the Irish had supplied to them. One thing which the Irish had taught them came under the category 'important, if true.' It was founded on the well known fact that a man born to be hanged will never be drowned. Every man, it appeared, had a certain number fixed to him by fate. It represented the number of chances which were his against death, the number of times that he might face death front to front and escape. Some men had only a few chances, and a man might lose out on even the first of his chances. Others had many. But every time a man went through a desperate action he used one of his chances of escape. But there were certain men who had used up all of their chances, who had reached the very last number. And then, in this their last moment, by some queer stumble of fate, they had been missed. After that they were not merely safe, they were isolated. Death fled from them. They could hunt death, and some of them did—so the Irish said, but they could not achieve it from human hands.
Wardwell, it was whispered among the boys with wise nodding of heads, Wardwell was one of these. And they counted the tale of the numbered chances that he had used, until he had, somehow, missed the last unfailing one.
After that, they said, he had no chance. And they told of places where he had put himself in the path of death, of how men had died in front of him and behind him, how he had been shot through so many times that now he hardly bled when wounded. This last was untrue, of course. Many things that they told were over drawn, as they would be. Most of the tales were inaccurate. And, again as would happen, many of the things were only half told.
So Wardwell understood, and smiled when he felt his officer hesitate about naming the word danger to him.
He was partly Irish himself, and he knew that some of the times when he had escaped death it had been hardly short of miraculous. Also he knew that there were other men in the armies who like himself had lived through almost unbelievable numbers of chances and that these were marked men who did not seem to be able to die in battle.
For himself, however, he had no need of the theory of chances which explained these things to the men. He knew.
When the time should come, he would get his wound. And the wound would bring death. But before death could come he would see Augusta.
It was all simple, and as it had been ordained from the beginning.
The trench along the face of the hill was all but complete now, and at the end of it there grew a considerable rounded pile of sand bags. There they were going to set the gun. He saw signs of a movement along through the trench, and knew that they were dragging a heavy machine gun out to its place. A head and part of a shoulder came up momentarily above the line of dirt. Wardwell had his sight upon it but he did not try the difficult shot. He must give them time to get busy with the gun, and to grow careless.
No, there was nothing left to chance, or to any number of chances. Everything that had happened, and that was happening and going to happen, moved into place as the result of something that had gone before, as inevitably as one pebble is moved by the pressure of another pebble.
In his ignorance—it is only in ignorance that the fatal things are done, malice is not cunning enough—he had committed the one unforgivable sin. He had taken money from one woman to give to another.
He had not known at the time that it was the unpardonable sin. He had not, as he remembered it now, thought of anything except that he could not stand Augusta's grief for the loss of her horse. To get her pet back for her at that time he would have taken money from anybody.
It was true enough that the other woman had owed him the money in an entirely business-like way. He had loaned her the money at a time when she needed it.
Afterwards she had married a wealthy man. Several times when they had met she had laughingly tried to pay him back his loan, but he had always talked her around the matter, and later he had dropped out of her sight into the seclusion of Rose Wilding's house to make his fight for his book and a reputation.
That morning when he had seen Augusta grieving in the empty stable, and after he had talked with Jethniah, he had gone down to the station and sent the telegram to the woman saying simply that he needed the money and asking for it.
He had had no misgiving that he was doing anything that would ever hurt Augusta. He had thought no more of the matter than if he had been asking any man for the return of a loan at need.
The trouble was that the woman was discontented in marriage—as she would have been discontented insingleness, or discontented in jail, or discontented in what was her idea of heaven. She was looking for diversion, and her discontent took the form of imagining herself to be sadly and irretrievably in love with Wardwell. (If she had been obliged to live two weeks in a cabin with him she would have come to the point of murdering him.)
Not long after he had sent the telegram and received his money Jimmie had begun to be troubled with a sharp premonition of something wrong. Something was brewing up for him somewhere. He was quick to understand that the one contact which he had established with the world without was probably the source of his worry. He mooned around for a day or so, waiting for something to drop, as he put it to himself. Then he went fearfully down to the station.
There were six letters waiting for him.
He read the last first. It seemed that the woman had somehow learned that Wardwell had gone away sick. From the last of the letters he gathered that she had pictured him to herself as lying penniless and alone, and at the point of death, somewhere in the woods, and that she was about to fly to him. She was capable of doing it, he knew.
With the choking, hopeless feeling of a man being drowned, he wondered if she had already started. In his panic he telegraphed:
Do not come. Am leaving here.
No sooner was the wire gone than he repented the last words of it. Why had he lied? He should not have lied, for it would only lead to other lies. The woman was one to revel in mysteries, and his evading her now would merely determine her to come and search him out. He was not going away from here, and he should not have lied to say so. Now he would have to write, at once, and take back the lie.
Then and there he borrowed paper and wrote. He told her, circumstantially, that he was in perfect health. He explained that he and his wife—the woman evidently had not thought of the possibility of his being married—were living away up here in the woods in order that they might be able to go on with their writing without interruptions. He apologized abjectly for having annoyed her. He hoped that she would remember that only a temporary and acute crisis had made him trouble her, and at the same time he hoped that she would forget the whole matter.
The letter was so unlike his usual clear handed methods that he felt sure the lady would either think him deranged or that she would disbelieve the whole of it. But he sent the letter. At any rate he must try to keep her from coming here.
Then he started home to Augusta, dragging with him a weight of hang-dog misery that increased at every step.
Never had Augusta's sweetness and the dear simple beauty of her faith in him been so precious to him as in those minutes. He hated the other woman unreasoningly, viciously; and yet more he hated himself, because, somehow, he seemed to have thrown a slur upon Augusta. That day, when her heart was high and sweet with its sacrifice for him, he had forced her, in some shameful way it seemed, to take something—money in fact—which he had taken from another woman.
He knew, even in that walk home, that he had done a fatal thing. And the anxieties and the nightmares of the winter that followed came upon him inexorably and without surprise.
In alternate letters, and often alternately in the same letter, the other woman upbraided him for having deceived her, in being married, and being well, and on the other hand vowed that she did not believe a word ofwhat he told her but was sure that he was there sick and alone and that she must come to see.
Through all that winter and into the spring he lived under the constant dread that the woman might come, and he was obliged to answer every letter, profusely and carefully, lest something which he omitted to answer might give her the impulse that would bring her flying to find him. That the whole business was melodramatic, and entirely foolish, did not lighten the matter in the least. And at all times he was convinced with a miserable dull certainty that all he did was useless. Augusta would inevitably come to know, anyhow. He had never expected to be able to hide anything from her. He had sworn that he never would have anything to hide from her. He was certain that she would come to know of this, and in the most shameful and pitiless way. He had no hope that it would be otherwise.
Even now, as he watched the German gun being poked into its place above the line of the dirt on the far hillside, he shuddered at the humiliation and the ignominy of that winter. Augusta had known that there was something wrong. She had, of course, seen it in his eyes and sensed it in the air about him, from the very beginning. But he had never been able to tell her. He knew Augusta's peculiar jealousy. It was not the usual property-holding interest by which the average woman clings to her rights in a man, because she is afraid of the consequences of letting him slip away from her.
Augusta was in this, as in so many things, different from any woman whom Wardwell had ever known or imagined. Like all people that live a great deal within themselves, the things that were her own, even the little things, had a sacred and a touching value to Augusta. If a thing was not entirely her own she did not care for it at all. She wanted nothing near her that she had to share in any way with another person. Wardwellremembered that she had once given away her best coat because another girl had put it on herself just for a moment to see how she would look in it. And as for the loaf of her love, so far from being able to think of sharing it with anyone, he knew that the thought that another had even looked at it would be enough to spoil it for Augusta.
And he, with this full knowledge of her fiercely proud little heart, had brought another woman in to despoil the sacred shrine of Augusta's love. He knew that she had thanked him for getting her pet back for her as the dearest thing he had ever done for her. And now when she should come to know the truth—as she would—it would embitter her to know that she owed it to another woman.
As the letters continued to come and the worry and humiliation of keeping up what seemed like an intrigue grew upon him he moodily wished that Augusta might learn the truth.
He could not tell her, for the very fact that must be his excuse, that he had done what he did for the love of her, would be the very reason why Augusta would resent his going to another woman. Explanations were always useless to Augusta. She cared not at all for the details. She would understand instantly, he thought, and understand more justly than he could tell her. But she would be mortally hurt.
It did not occur to him that Augusta would be just like every other woman. He never thought that Augusta in the supreme test when her love was threatened, would lose her almost inspired insight and go blind to everything except the one condemning fact—that he was corresponding secretly with another woman.
When the end came, when he came home that day to learn that Augusta had left him, and to read her note with its stark and yet prophetic finality, he wasstunned by this thing which he had expected least of all.
The first emotion that he remembered was a furious anger with Augusta. It seemed that she had read but a part of one of the letters and had immediately jumped to the worst of conclusions. He was angry with Augusta, he remembered now, not because she had gone, but because she had allowed herself to be stupid.
How could she have misunderstood? Why should she have misjudged him so? She must have been deliberately blind, for Augusta had not only an unerring instinct for truth she had also a keenness of judgment such as he had hardly ever seen in man or woman.
But that was all very, very long ago, and he scarcely remembered now the boyish rage in which he had raved and had torn the hated letters and stamped them into the floor of the cabin.
He had chased feverishly to New York after her, and he had walked the city, without a starting point and without direction, looking for her, as he and she together had once walked the streets looking for Rose Wilding. Then, when at last he had become convinced that it was useless, that he would never find Augusta until the time that she should choose, he had gone back to the lake, to the Hills of Desire, to wait for her.
He found Donahue browsing contentedly among the trees much as he had left him, and a world mockingly unchanged.
Of course, he could not stay there. The haunting, whispering sweetness of Augusta's presence was there at every turn of his eyes, in the breath of every breeze that brushed his cheek, in the song of every bird that piped. There memories choked him, of the nights when she had fought the fever with him, of days when their hearts had danced together in the joy of work. There he had learned why the human race continues to wishto live—he had learned to know a sweet woman's heart.
On the morning of the fourth day he went down to the station and bought a ticket for Montreal. The station agent-postmistress told him with a simper that there were letters for him.
"Will you please keep them," Wardwell requested politely, "until I call on my way back. I—I might lose them."
The next day he was a member of a Canadian infantry regiment, on his way to an assembling camp.
Through two years he had lived and fought, as other men lived and fought. He had lain sick and had thirsted and despaired, as other men did; and he had seen how other men died. About the last matter he was not surprised, except at the unwinking simplicity of it.
A man stood beside you and asked for a chew of tobacco. The next time you looked at him he was a corpse, to be buried at once—if there was time. A man ran shouting by your side, and passed you, perhaps, and when you caught up with him he was dead. And they went out so untragically true to their ruling habit and disposition. A talkative man died talking. A quiet man turned his head from you and died his own way.
They had been sickening years, those two years when the claws of the Beast were at the throat of the world. And there had been many times when Wardwell, in the spirit weariness which every good man felt sooner or later, would have been willing to lie down and ask for death, saying that he had done his share. But death had not come for him, and his mind had turned definitely back and rested with conviction on the sentence which Augusta had written for him. They were not to have this life together, but he would not go from here until he had seen her.
The sense of injury and misunderstanding which he had at first nursed had drifted away. Neither did he feel any of the self blame with which he had loaded himself in the beginning. Augusta had not done this thing to them. Neither had his foolish doing effected it. Destiny working with its dull tool, chance, was fashioning out their lives. He did not understand. But it seemed that Augusta understood. So, then, he should not go until he heard her voice calling him.
Then there had come the long looked for call of his own country. He had gone gladly back across the ocean and they had at once given him work in the training of student officers. He gave no thought to the commission which might have been his for the asking. He was not looking for the high adventure of war as these boys and men strained toward it. He was heartily sick of war and all that went with it. He had come back to help raise the posse which would put the ramping Beast in pound. When that should be done, and he knew that it would be done quickly and properly, his work would be finished. But first he would see Augusta.
He had submitted to his loss of Augusta much as a maimed man submits to the loss of a member. He could undoubtedly live on without Augusta. But it is years before a man, who has, for instance, lost a right arm, can remember that the arm is no longer there. He was forever turning to her mentally, and in every crowded street he saw the sweet girlish figure of Augusta just slipping from sight away from him. He had submitted passively to the decree of fate, or whatever it was that had taken her from him, but the living delight of her presence never left him. It was not memory, nor, in any sense, imagination. It was a fact. In those wonderful months which they had had together, Augusta had not merely lived with him. She had so lived herself intohis life that she had become an indefinable, but vital, part of the being that was called Jimmy Wardwell. Without her this Wardwell did not exist.
It was out of this feeling of Augusta's persisting presence with him that there grew up in him a conviction.
Sometimes it seemed mere impudence. Again it seemed entirely reasonable—reasonable and possible only, of course, in connection with Augusta.
He remembered the night when he had lain out alone in a shell hole at Messines. He was wounded in the chest and there was no hope of help coming to him. He could feel the life running out of him, as one after another of the conscious and unconscious grips of life slipped away from him. He was dying, so it was plain. But even as he was coming to that point where he finally surrendered consciousness, he was aware of a force of life within him which was not being dimmed. That part of him which he had come to think of as being of Augusta, that much of him was still living and untouched by death. It was not that he dreamed Augusta there with him. Nor did his groping senses conjure up for him a vision of her. She was there, in him, a living partof him, which did not and would not die.